This morning, while putting off my paper for another few hours, I watched “Walk the Line,” which arrived from Netflix a few days ago.

I was most pleasantly surprised. I didn’t think I’d like it, but I felt compelled to watch it because of Reese Witherspoon. I like her - I respect her. She’s young and female and capable and looks younger than she is… and named her production company “Type A Productions,” after her type A personality. Sounds a little like someone I see when looking in the mirror. That, and I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I am reminiscent of her in general, and specifically of her character of Tracy Flick in “Election.”

So. Yeah. I liked the movie. It wasn’t the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, but it was far from the worst. It was engaging and interesting and well-paced, which is more than I can say for a lot of things I’ve seen lately. I don’t want that to sound like half-assed disparaging praise because it was actually quite good. Witherspoon deserved her Oscar, and Joaquin Phoenix deserved his nominations - and possibly the Oscar, if Phillip Seymour Hoffman hadn’t been his main competition.

Speaking of which, I read “In Cold Blood” on Thursday. Now THAT, my friends, was some good reading. Not high art, but a well-told, finely wrought story. The question of what’s true and what’s been artfully managed by Truman Capote remains in my head, but it was quite interesting to read, even the poorly written misspelled portions that are reprints of letters to and from the murderers before and after committing this crime. I recommend it highly. Added bonus - Vintage didn’t print a movie tie-in cover. It’s the regular cover with a sticker on it that says “tie-in to the major motion picture” and has a picture of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Capote on the sticker. I promptly removed it from the book cover, but pasted it into a little notebook I carry with me all the time because it’s a pretty cool little decal.

I finished that on the train ride home Thursday and started a new book I picked up… it’s called “Tibet, Tibet” by a gentleman called Patrick French. It’s his narrative of travels and living in Tibet over the course of something like 5 years. I’ve only just started it, but it’s caught me up on a lot of Tibetan history already… and actually has the story of the man who set himself on fire in peaceful protest during the Chinese visit to Tibet in the early 90s. He was a friend of the author’s. He died soon after setting himself on fire, but not before the Dalai Lama came to visit him and spoke with him in his hospital bed.

Anyway, I finished paper #1 and sent that off to my group partner and our group leader. I am starting the second paper and am waiting for 31 pages of metadata element outlines to print from the Dublin Core website. And that’s Dublin, Ohio, not Dublin, Ireland.

Why am I printing the 31 pages of info? Isn’t that totally antithetical to the idea of the Internet and paper-free information? Well, yeah. But this is stuff I’m going to be referring to constantly tonight and tomorrow, and I can shove it in my binder of readings for this class, make notes on it, and have it for posterity. As it stands, I can’t make notes on the Internet and have them there when I come back to visit… thought that would be a COOL-ASS thing to have, open-source developers of the world. A plug-in/extension allowing users to personally annotate web pages. Number 1, it would help you remember if you’d already been somewhere and what you thought of it then, and secondly, for students and researchers, it would be a great way of containing all information electronically instead of having to duplicate research on paper to make notes and observations.

Ok. Well, I might be able to get this second paper finished tonight and then have tomorrow stress-free and lovely, but the excuse of having a paper to write is so nice. I can finish the paper and pretend that I am still working on it tomorrow, and guarantee myself some peace and quiet. Hrm.

That remains to be seen.