Simple Pleasures, April 2011 Edition

On Friday I caught up with some good friends over dinner.  We live in two different towns, so we rendezvous-ed at a big shopping center halfway between them.  The dining options were somewhat limited, and we picked a mass-market Asian fusion kind of place.  The food was not unpleasant, but really sub-par as far as Asian food goes.  I had a dish with tofu and broccoli, and the tofu was just as it would be if you opened a package of smooth tofu and cut it into pieces--bland and slippery, not crispy or flavorful like it often is at Chinese restaurants.  The sauce was thin and not particularly flavorful either.  Nevertheless, the whole experience was very pleasant because I was there with friends and the weather was great.  We got to be silly just like we always are when we hang out, and we got to catch up on what's been going on in each other's lives.  After dinner we had planned to see a movie, but nothing that was playing looked too good, so we just wandered through a bookstore instead.  The evening was a prime example of the power of simple pleasures to bring joy.

Old Monster Movies

It's the witching hour.  You're on the couch with the curtains pulled tight against the dark, windy night outside.  The lights are off and the living room is illuminated only by the gray-blue, phosphorescent flickerings on the TV screen.  If there's popcorn involved, you've hit the jackpot.  I like some new monster movies, but the old ones are much more gratifying.  They often start slowly, so slowly you forget you're waiting for some horrible creature to appear.  And just when you're relaxed, even a little bored, spooky things start happening.  Because special effects were in their infancy and budgets were low, directors back then had to imply scary things more often than showing them.  Much of fear is what's in our minds anyway, so some old movies end up being genuinely creepy without showing a single evisceration.  And the music is lush and symphonic, lending extra drama to the proceedings. On top of all that, there's the wonderfully gratifying sensation of getting away with something--probably a holdover from the days when you snuck out of bed and turned on the TV with the sound real low to watch things like this when your parents thought you were sleeping.