A little non-billable time never hurt anyone ...

So I'm at work, after three sick days and a federal holiday, and there's nothing to do. I mean nothing. Called up the Guy Who Finds Things For People To Do, and he said many of us had been calling him, and he'd try and see if anyone needed a hand, and he'd get back to us. So I'm basically pulling down my hourly rate for straightening my desk and paying the bills. And going to lunch. Woo-hoo.

I took the sick days because I have been feeling Not At All Well. I haven't been sleeping much or well; I finally concluded that I'm making myself sick with worry over the continued non-arrival of my grad school acceptance letters (why, yes, it's still only the middle of February), and sternly instructed myself to Stop That This Instant. Took something to settle my stomach, took something to put me to sleep, and slept for eight hours.

On the subject of Inexplicable Conservatism, emrinalexander said it all, and said it well: Preach it, sister.

Speaking of Inexplicable Conservatism ...

This was going to be a comment on maliwane's post, but then it got long so I moved it.

I have always loved, loved, loved The Crucible -- for all its high drama and extreme Millerian lack of subtlety. There's them what prefers Death of a Salesman, but that's a whole different kind of play for me. The agony in Salesman is quiet and excruciating; in Crucible it's unstoppable and terrifying.

It is always profoundly satisfying to me when Elizabeth, bless her, gets the attention she deserves. She has some of the by-god best stuff in the whole play, but way way WAY too many directors see it as a play about John and Abigail and give Elizabeth short shrift. A damn shame, that.

The film with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder (and Joan Allen as Elizabeth! [g]) pissed me off, frankly, because I've been raised to disapprove when film versions of plays aren't faithful to the original. I'm less resistant to changes from novels to movies, because prose and film are different media -- but live theatre and film are far less different, and I therefore expect more correspondence. I know it's not rational. I know there have been excellent film versions that differed from the live versions. Cabaret is the logical extreme example of this -- but really, the movie is so different from the stage version they're really almost two different things by the same name. (Almost. Not quite.) But I don't like it.

Ordinarily it wouldn't be so frustrating -- I'd just disapprove and move on, or file it under "interesting choice" and move on, or whatever. (It's a nice touch to have Donalbain go meet the witches on the heath, Mr. Polanski, but the thing about Shakespearean tragedies is that they resolve at the end. That's what makes them more emotionally bearable than the Greeks. The closure. The next-cycle-begins thing is dramatically effective, but it ain't right. On the other hand, Messrs. Zeffirelli and Luhrman did interesting things with their respective Romeo and Juliets -- Romeo passing Friar John on the road, Juliet waking up and seeing Romeo just after he's swallowed the poison -- of which I heartily approve.) But what compounds the trouble with The Crucible is that it was Miller himself who did the messing-around with it. Grr. Arrgh.

Straight up --

So I always get these cards in the mail along with all those advertisements. I'm sure you get them too. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children puts pictures of kids on them along with the adult they were last seen with in hopes of getting tips on their locations. In bold type across the bottom of the thing, it tells me "Over 110 children featured have been safely recovered."

Setting aside for the moment the fact that "over 110" is a figure that is both uncomfortably precise (it pretty much tells me "between 111 and 120") and distressingly low (given how many of these things come through my box -- don't get me wrong, any missing child found is a fantastic thing, but this can't be an encouraging percentage), today's card hit me right between the eyes.

On the left is a picture of a pleasant-looking young man. On the right is a picture of a guy who looks so much like him it can only be his father. The left-hand picture has been age-progressed, so the missing kid is a little older now than he was when he disappeared. Glance down at the details. The missing child is 17. He's been missing since 1987.

Fox does a double-take. They give the vital stats, the height and weight of this kid at the age of two, as if that'll have any bearing on what he looks like now.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years this guy's been missing. So basically they're looking for a blond, blue-eyed seventeen-year-old who probably has no earthly idea his father kidnapped him all those years ago. Does anybody seriously think they'll find him? If he happens to get one of these cards in his mailbox and recognize his own age-progressed face on it, will he call the number and say No, I'm not missing at all, and that's not my name?

This is very unhappiness-making ...