But enough about the movies.

Lately I've been feeling kind of trifurcated. Worse, quartered. My life seems to run in three or four parallel courses, so removed from one another as to feel like alternative universes. There's my home life, my work life at the library, my teaching life at The Greek Institute, and my much-neglected creative life. And never the four shall meet. Which leaves me about six hours a day for each alter ego. Work takes more than its share, because in the United States we actually have to work to get paid (bastards! I'll show them!), clocking in at about eight hours each day plus transit time. So already one of the mirror worlds is going to get shorted. Sleep is the second-largest draw, and recent attempts at upping my caffeine intake like my coffeehouse managing days of old - four shots of espresso and a splash of chocolate milk? Sure, why not! - have resulted only in a need for even more shut-eye. Teaching itself is a great joy, but grading homework and preparing the next lessons are extremely tedious and time-consuming endeavors, all the more so when you already allegedly do something else to make a living. And time with my wife is non-negotiable. Guess which me gets the crumbs of minutes and seconds scattered randomly throughout the week? Yep, Mr. Creativity. It's bad enough trying to get my inner artist to say something that isn't crap, period, but try getting him to perform on command. Grumble grumble grumble.

Is it just me, or is the blog not a very interesting medium?

Call me old-fashioned, but I long for the days of goofy-ass webpages with their homespun look, embarrassing photos, and random links. The thought that we're moving into an online world where the rule will be endless columns of spew (no matter how excellently formatted) is not a very appetizing one. I know, I know, the blog is the future, man, and the rest of us dinosaurs who look to "more traditional" online content providers will soon be shown the error of our ways, and in those final hours when all the bloggers have been taken up in the Rapture and we poor fools are left to suffer The Years Of The Beast, we'll sure be sorry, won't we? Sorry, I don't buy it. The blog is a cute little gimmick, but it's 99% hype and 1% paradigm-shift.

Speaking of 99% hype, I saw Attack Of The Clones. George Lucas has managed to pull the ultimate Jedi Mind Trick, with a final forty-five minutes so dizzyingly action-packed and exciting that you completely forget the fact that the first hour and a half was a load of garbage. Sadly, the opinions I've solicited about this film have confirmed for me what was only a suspicion before - that there has been a Great Schism between Those Who Like The New Star Wars Movies and Those Who Don't, which is clearly not going to be bridged by any future film coming out of the Skywalker Ranch. When The Phantom Menace began the retroactive abortion of our collective childhood in 1999, I as well as many others comforted myself with a few soothing mantras:

George just needs his timing back. Empire was the best of the Original Trilogy, so the next movie will be the best of the new series. Maybe he'll listen to the fans and hire someone to write his dialogue for Attack Of The Clones. Maybe I was just a cynical bastard and not in the proper "childlike" frame of mind for The Phantom Menace, and the next film will somehow recapture the magic for me if I just let go of my critical habits and approach the movie like a kid.

I was still mumbling these platitudes to myself as I munched on my popcorn and waited for the magical moment to arrive, but alas, it wasn't really worth the wait, in the end. Sure, there are some wonderful action sequences, and the battle scenes are enjoyable in and of themselves, but you don't want to walk out of a Star Wars movie thinking that there should have been more whizzes and bangs to distract you from the fact that the plot is a joke, the dialogue abominable, the acting criminally bad (George Lucas should be tried in the Hague for wasting both Samuel L. Jackson and Natalie Portman not one but two movies in the row!), and the attempts at humor so god-awful that you actually find yourself laughing at the film, not with it.

And yet there are those out there who are lapping this stuff up, and begging for more. If it were just the so-called "fanboys", I would understand, but there are good people out there who like this movie. Intelligent people. People whose opinions on things I would otherwise respect. De gustibus non disputandum, they say, and yet I feel that's taking the easy way out on this one. It's a bad movie, and I don't think taste has anything to do with it. If this puts me on the other side of the Great Schism, well then so be it - I'll just have to remember to avoid all talk of religion, politics, and Star Wars the next time I'm having dinner with friends!

Breaking news! Six out of six fanboy reviewers "loved" Attack Of The Clones!

Wow. What are the odds?

(Going to see it tonight. Might have to have a drink or two beforehand...)

Just saw the new Spider Man flick, and on the way home it struck me - it seems an immutable law of the universe that whenever a super-hero is born, a super-villain must also come into existence (though not always through the actions of the super-hero). Poor Spidey can't use his newfound powers to help the little guy exclusively. No, he has to waste most of his time fighting people as enhanced as he is. I wonder if this isn't some sort of cosmological lesson, that just like tiny particles of matter can pop out of empty space as long as an equal amount of antimatter particles appear as well, super-heroes and super-villains are inextricably linked. So would that mean that if we lived in a world without heroes, we also wouldn't have any villains? But wouldn't that world just be a whole lot of nothing then? Going to have to sleep on this one.

Absent anything else meaningful to say, I thought I'd blog a review of a book I'm chewing my way through right now:

David Young, The Modern Olympics: a struggle for revival (1996)

If the figure-skating antics of Salt Lake City 2002 have still got you down, find a copy of this little gem and rekindle your Olympic fever all over again. David Young - a professor of ancient Greek by trade - has put together an extremely well-researched investigation into the origins of the modern games, particularly the emergence of parallel grass roots Olympic movements in England and Greece decades prior to 1896. By uniting contemporary Olympic scholarship with a reading knowledge of Modern Greek, Young is able to venture into sources never considered by Western scholars and then draw conclusions which turn a lot of conventional wisdom about the rebirth of the Olympic games on its head. The most cherished of the myths surrounding the modern Olympic movement is that it was the brainchild of one man alone, a Frenchman by the name of Pierre de Coubertin. Although it is clear that without Coubertin's efforts such a revival may have never taken place, Young demonstrates that he drew his inspiration from a host of predecessors who have remained mostly nameless and uncredited until only recently. Considering that the first Olympics of the modern era took place in Athens, and the next Summer games are to return to that city in 2004, The Modern Olympics is a great way to get into the spirit of things and remember why we gather every four years in the first place (and no, it's not because Coca-Cola wants us to).