I'm a little out of sorts today. Penelope (my cat, for those of you keeping score at home) is spending the night at the vet. Nothing too serious--she's constipated, apparently--but as you might imagine, just seeing enough of a behaviour change to warrant my taking her to the vet in the first place was pretty upsetting to me. Having her stay overnight... The house just feels completely empty when she isn't here. Hopefully, things will get moving overnight, and she'll be able to come home tomorrow. We'll see.

Also, yesterday was the going away party for a librarian friend of mine. (This would be professional friend, rather than social friend, but still...) This is a woman I have a lot of respect and admiration for, who served as something as a role model for me. Twice in recent memory, I was feeling pretty frustrated at work, and talking to her managed to get me through that. I should look at her leaving as a positive thing--it's not one less librarian I know here, it's one more library branch manager I know in Oregon, and it increases the circle of my professional contacts, blah blah blah--but it isn't the same. But that's all selfishness, really. It's sad for me that she's leaving Las Vegas, but it's to be the branch manager of a library in Oregon, which is a great career move for her, and they're really lucky to have her. And I'm lucky for the chance to get to know her, so I am grateful for that.

Watched Lost in Translation last night. Like Punch Drunk Love, I can see this being the sort of movie that people would either love or hate. It stars an actor--Bill Murray--who brings so much baggage just by being in a movie, it's rare to hear it judged on its own merits. This one, for example, always seems to be described as the change of pace Murray film, or his art-house movie, or whatever. Me, I loved it. I'm not a big fan of the traditional relationship movie, but I do enjoy these sorts of brief encounter films, (see also Before Sunrise; not sure the sequel to that one even turned up in local theaters). It is nice to see Murray playing a different sort of role, and he does a great job. Which is no surprise; being a fine comic actor means you have to be a fine actor, and it's not really his fault that he rarely gets a chance to play anything else.

And it should come as no surprise that I'm completely in love with Scarlett Johanssen at this point. (Heck, I bought Perfect Score, for crying out loud.) We can only hope, with the delays, she'll still be in Mission: Impossible 3.

I was also impressed with the use of Tokyo as a character. Just like with shows like Boomtown and movies like Heat, there should be a reason for setting a story in a particular city. You shouldn't just be able to say it's LA and shoot everything in Toronto or New Zealand and get away with it. And if a story is going to be set in a specific city, then the story needs to justify why it chose this setting, and not some other one. With Lost in Translation, the characters needed to be in a foreign environment, one that is flashy and high-tech and somewhat impersonal, in order to draw them together to make the personal connection that forms the core of the movie.

And I don't feel like writing any more, because I just stepped away from the computer and walked down the upstairs hall. Out of habit, my eyes automatically glanced to all the places Penelope usually sleeps, and when I realized what I was doing, I remembered that she wasn't there, and won't be here all night. And that's pretty upsetting. This will actually be the first time in a number of years that I've been in my own home at night without her, and I'm not happy about that at all. And I'm doubly not happy because she's out for health-related reasons. So I'm going to stop writing now.