What's for Dinner?

Spaghetti...

Not really, actually, as I rest into the easy part of my first day back at work; I am eating Pizza Primo leftover from last night. Naturally, after the back breaking efforts it took to clean my room enough so that Matt Neitz could move back in, we had to eat. Maybe part nostalgia or just straight up hunger, Matt was generous enough to treat he, Neil Brown and I a pizza.

Fast forward to around three fifty today: my feet are sore (the toes forgot what socks and sneakers felt like) from being back to work. It felt great, to be running around campus dealing with the miscellanea required to send Alumni Weekend off without a hitch: deliver laptops and projectors to the Handcock House (that one made me feel like a spy) or mustering the rationality to give Jimmy John's subs a second chance (so glad I did) to rearranging tables in the campus center in such a way as to accommodate the geriatric class of 1944 (1 confirmed guest!). Long story short, it was tough, hard work, but I'm stoked to be back at it. Nice to not use my brain during the day.

Like I said, I'm in the office, and I mentioned something about spaghetti. Not the dinner kind, no friends, that's all down the hatch and digesting; the spag I refer to is a film genre: spaghetti Western. (que soundtrack).



As in, during the ridiculously challenging finals week my sophomore year of college presented me with, I picked up "A Fistfull of Dollars" from the library. Why not, right? After all, I've been playing that new game from the makers of "Grand Theft Auto" set in the wild West. And I seem to remember the title track being on a mix CD Uncle Bill made for Dad that I ripped and obsessed over, and again, seem to remember, enjoying the tune.

So I'm seven or eight minutes into the movie and I CANNOT get over how good it is. Like, in all cheese and campy film ways, this movie screams retro. My favorite little "tic" that my favorite 60s and 70s movies have is the archaic audio tracks that pick up in great detail the footfalls and noises of movement (like the little boy in the beginning of the movie scrambling up into a window, or Scout running around in a ham suit in "To Kill a Mockingbird").

So I'm going to finish "A Fistfull of Dollars" enjoying the white noise behind Clint Eastwood being a generally good moraled scoundrel and trying to draw comparisons between the spaghetti western genre and anything Quentin Tarintino has made. Who knows, I might even reflect on how similar I am to the rouge Man With No Name: exploring the violent desert of Westerville, or at least the violently deserted Otterbein.

Speaking of noise, shamefully using Pandora's service, I forgot my iPod in Garst, and am surprisingly pleased with the Ra Ra Riot channel. Hits like "Oxford Comma," "Float On," or "Naive."