Bug Land

[setsuled]

It's bug season here in Kashihara, Japan. Every year I see bugs I'd never seen before. The fellow above flew in through my bathroom window while I was taking a shower and fell off my towel when I got out to dry off. He was about the size of my thumb. I wanted to shoo him out the window but he flew into the wet space under my bathtub. Days later, I found him on the window sill in a state Miracle Max would describe as "mostly dead". I nudged him outside but I don't think he had a long and fruitful life beyond that. Sorry, fella.

At the junior high schools where I work, all the students periodically have to clean the school. At the school I currently work at, music is played throughout the school, always the Star Wars and Indiana Jones themes. When the Indiana Jones theme was playing, I asked one student pushing a broom if she knew the song. She said yes, that she'd gone to see the new movie on the weekend.

"Did you like it?" I asked.

She had a pained expression and said it was, "So so." I think she felt bad for me since many people here assume I'm an Indiana Jones superfan because I wear fedoras. Well, I appreciated her sympathy. I kind of wish the film had at least been a noble failure, though. I wish I could have thought, "Oh, maybe she'll appreciate it when she's older." I think, as bad as people are saying the movie is now, future reassessments will find that it's even worse.

I saw a quote from Phoebe Waller-Bridge where she said she modelled her performance as Helena on Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. I could have dug that, Indiana Jones and the con woman who struggles with her attraction to him. But they couldn't have her be attracted to him so maybe that's one reason it feels so muddled. People say she's Kathleen Kennedy's self-insert character, another brunette like the new ones in the Star Wars movies. As someone who feels ownership of the character because she was Spielberg's assistant going back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, maybe the muddle of her own feelings further weakened the character--is she mother, daughter, or lover? Mostly she leans towards mother, especially at the end. It occurred to me that knocking Indy out to force him to go home and continue his life seems kind of like how Annie Wilkes in Misery would positively portray her own actions.