I finally got around to seeing the movie version of Charles Frazier's novel "Cold Mountain." I meant to see it in the theatre, but I missed it. The violence in the early part of the movie was very horrific, and I was surprised by how well they depicted the hand to hand combat of fighting during the civil war. I'm thinking they probably got help from the people who do all the civil war reenactment stuff.

It was interesting to see how the novel was adapted into movie form. I liked how the ending was still as powerful as it was in the book, although I do remember thinking that I hated the ending of the book even though I knew that the ending was justified.

It's so poignant how people hold onto to the smallest things to get through the darkest of times. At what point Inman says in the movie that memories of Ada were like a bag of diamonds that he could hold onto and get through the darkness.

So much is made about the great civil war, the war of northern aggression. But like any war, the real victims were the people left behind who had to go on and rebuild and in some cases die trying. I think the Ada character at the end says you make peace with your past, and you try to heal or something like that.

I think it was Anton Chkhov who wrote that you go on because you have to, because there is work, there is always work to do.

Fridays at work are bad days for me. Most people in my group work from home, so it’s very quiet. I never feel like doing anything, even though I have work to do. This is when I wish I still had my own office, so I could just goof off all day. When I’m in a cube farm, I can’t exactly do that.

I have been sleeping well these last nights either, so I’m exhausted. I keep waking up between 4 and 5 am. Usually I sleep right through until my alarm goes off at 6 am, but not this week. I woke up at 4:30 am, managed to go back to sleep and then at 6 am, a crow started cawing loudly outside my window and woke me right up. I’m never sure if it’s good or a bad sign, when crows wake me up in the morning. Crows are my favorite birds, but when talk they sure are noisy. I wonder what they were trying to tell me.

I’ve heard crows cawing in the last three weeks, and I thought it meant that something bad would happen that day. Of course, nothing really bad happened on those days but you never know. At least my crows friends are still alive and not dying off from West Nile virus. The newspaper reports said crows are the first birds to die when West Nile moves into your area. I would be bummed if my crows disappeared. For awhile I thought they had because I stopped seeing them, but since I met the red-haired marina frat boy the crows have come back into my life.

What it all means is a mystery that I have no idea how to solve.

Been thinking about my flingie guy and the nature of love and what it all means and I’m down to one question, how do you know if you’re in love. Love is such a strange thing. I think “the Oracle” from the Matrix movie series said to Neo, “it’s like being in love, you either know it or you don’t”. But what the heck does that mean?

If someone had to told me last month that I was going to be having a rollicking good time with a 6 ft red-haired, 200 pound, not so young anymore, marina frat boy, virgo, with bad time management skills, not the greatest communication skills either, drinks a bit too much and hasn’t given up any of his childish frat boy tendencies, I would have said “NO WAY!”

If someone had told me last month that I would be completely into “public displays of affection”, and be kissing in stores, kissing in restaurants, kissing on the street in broad daylight no less, and kissing while trying to argue, I honestly would have laughed and said, “if I wasn’t into PDA in college, and other annoying things that “couples in love supposedly do”, I’m so not going to be into it at this age.”

And if someone had told me that last month that I would enter into a relationship and not know where it was going or care where it was going, I would have freaked. “Me, Ms. Control Freak, who has to have everything carefully planned with an end game to every action. I think not.”

And yet, I’m doing all these things and having a blast and I’m not feeling like I’m in college either. I’m feeling surprisingly mature, but not old or stuck in a rut. I feel like an adult, which is a somewhat scary but at the same time very comforting thought.

Tuesday August 17, red-headed guy count = 7