The weather outside is delightful. Raining, lightning, but the temps are balmy and the snow is melting away. Love it. Now seem to have an actual cold, which I do not understand, so am about to watch "A Scanner Darkly" and simply chill until Amy and I go out tonight for New Year's. Just doing dinner. I've never really liked News Year's or St. Pat's Day or Cinco de Mayo, etc. It always seemed like amateur night to me. People with no experience with excessive drinking climbing behind the wheel or getting into ill considered brawls.

It doesn't feel like a new year is coming anyway. It feels like we have more to go. The economy changed and we're going to be dealing with it for a long time.

Having said that, I'm hoping to make a list for myself of resolutions for the year. Some of them take.

Vacation

I have begun to wonder if one can read too much. I've had an unprecedented amount of time off over the holidays, and I'm closing in on four Philip K. Dick novels, various non-fiction books, the last couple New Yorkers, the last Atlantic Monthly and, because I am a sworn geek, the last five Detective Comics, which I have resumed now that they have dropped that stupid Batwoman/The Question arc. Please note the incredibly cool T-shirt Amy gave me for Christmas.

In the process, I've grown a beard, look like a slob, have gone to yoga three or four times a week, done tai chi, watched some television, including rewatching the three BBC "Sherlock" episodes and the first four--soon to be six after today--episodes of Breaking Bad. I've eaten great lashings of restaurant food, including some good Indian last night and some very over-hyped Mexican the night before. We went to Christkindlmarket and then saw A Christmas Carol at the Goodman Theatre on Christmas Eve. And we've seen "Black Swan" and "The King's Speech" and "True Grit." I have played XBOX and watched "Layer Cake," one of my favorite crime films.

I've slept too much, nearly thought myself into a coma, never quite shaken a cold, and--to my point about reading too much--found that the lines between fiction and real life can indeed blur around the edges a bit in the wee hours when in the midst of good, paranoid science fiction. I guess if one is willingly surrendering to a fictional dream with enough regularity and intensity, it only makes sense that the book or movie could either follow you into your own dreams or at least take a while to break out of when resuming mundane duties around the house, like taking out the dogs or doing dishes.

I suppose it has been good to completely attenuate for a while, and I have done some good, including hanging out more with Amy, house searching and keeping my appointments to teach ESL. And the yoga will pay dividends for a long time to come. But my point is that I'm ready for this vacation to be over so I can go back to work.

I actually have more than two weeks off now, with the exception of a meeting or two I have to drop in on.

Am unsure what to do with myself other than read too much. We are going to 127 Hours with James Franco today. Should be fun.

Otherwise, I'm hoping to pick up all of my stuff that I've cluttered the house with.

Excitement city. We do hope to run downtown a couple of times this week.

Breaking Bad

During a less than arduous one-credit “science course” in college, I wrote a paper about the Lindbergh kidnapping and its ramifications on forensic evidence. I honestly don't remember if it had any; German carpenter Bruno Hauptmann was convicted of first degree murder of the Lindbergh child based in large part on his possession of several thousand in gold certificates that had been fruitlessly paid in ransom by the family and traced back to him.

What stuck in the back of my mind until the other day was the trial testimony of a carpenter who connected Hauptmann’s carpentry on the makeshift ladder used in the kidnapping. I believe he identified the handiwork with some contempt, citing it as crude or shoddy work and implying that anyone who would kidnap and murder a three-year-old would of course be a poor craftsman, his every gesture symptomatic of being a deviant.

So what happens when a very good man, a man of strong mind and excellent education and indefatigable work ethic, were to apply all of his skills to a criminal activity? That is one of the questions posed by the AMC series Breaking Bad, in which a mild high school chemistry teacher learns he is dying of lung cancer and, in an effort to leave his wife, son and unborn child something, turns to cooking meth.

It's brilliant, full of gut surprises and subtle character pivots. You come to realize that he might have other choices, but he proceeds anyway rather than suffer his family being taken care of by anyone else. It's my new favorite show. AMC has started over from the beginning of the first season (I think there are four seasons now) on Wednesday nights, so I'm only watching two at a time.

Undead

The scariest movie experience I ever had was flipping on the television at 2 a.m. when I was 16 just as Night of the Living Dead came on A&E (this was before A&E was a trash station). Entranced, fixated, frozen, riveted, horrified into stillness, I don't think I blinked for two hours. I've seen scarier movies and better horror movies, but I intersected with this one at just the right time of night with enough caffeine and nicotine in my system to keep me awake and mildly jangled.

I've never seen any of the other Romero movies, though I think I will now that I'm watching AMC's new series The Walking Dead. It is awesome, gory goodness with great actors and thoughtful suspense. And they make it clear that anyone can die at any time. It does owe a lot to shows that kind of drive me nuts (Lost, the new V, Heroes) in terms of disparate ordinary people thrown together in the face of weird times, but the actors in this show make it. Definitely up there as a good solid drama. I am a fan of the 28 Days and 28 Weeks films as well as Shawn of the Dead.

This is a link to a NYTimes article about the zombie phenom.