sigmastolen | (no subject)

So! Since I'm stuck here, I took my brother to see District 9. It was very powerful. I liked it a lot. I think my brother cried, actually, which was very surprising. I also appreciated that, in a movie set in South Africa, the most sympathetic character (not the main character, please note) was not the white man, but the alien. One thing that bothered me a lot, though, was the use of subtitles. I understand subtitling the non-English languages in the film (the aliens' clicking, various African languages that I didn't recognise), but they also subtitled some characters who were speaking accented (and not the accent of South African English), but perfectly intelligible English -- these were black characters exclusively. I was not cool with that.

Anyway, it is time for stories! Tonight: The Catastrophe of Lunch.
There are a lot of layers to this, but the main part starts with the restaurant. When I got to my parents' house this morning (to drop off the basil plant mum and I were going to re-pot), I phoned ahead and got a recording that informed me they neither quoted wait times or made reservations. After swearing about what a load of bullshit that was, I went to pick up S from his house (more-or-less on the way to this restaurant that M wanted to eat at) and we drove to the place to see what was up in person. While we're on our way, M & her bf D call because they are out of church and are we waiting at the restaurant? No, we are nearly there, though. It turns out that there is a 1.5 hour wait, which M was expecting and had hoped that S and I would get there about an hour earlier than we actually did, so that we could get a table at a reasonable time (which I frankly thought was rather a lot to expect of me, when I was not expecting to be in charge of organizing lunch in the first place). We changed our plans to a rather less ritzy restaurant that S and I would have to backtrack to, but M & D were probably almost at, since they had started driving to the first restaurant. So when I pull out of the parking lot, I become aware of my car making a disturbing flappy/helicopter noise. I pull into the parking lot of a shopping center around the corner to check it out -- my front left tire is flat. Which is, honestly, just typical. The tire is brand-new, my car was in the shop less than a week ago, and I have no idea how it happened. So I call AAA and they send a guy to put my spare on (because I don't know how and S claims he's really bad at it and it's just as well we waited for the professional because my spare was almost totally flat and he had to inflate it from a tank of air on his tow truck; it definitely would have been un-driveable without, we couldn't have even gone to a gas station to inflate it from their air) and help comes quite quickly, actually, within fifteen minutes. It takes about ten more for him to put on the spare and in this time I've called mum, and M&D who are sounding kind of grumpy (from hunger presumably), and A has decided she can't come to lunch because she has prior commitments and not enough time to spare before them. When my car is finally temporarily serviceable again, S and I head to Restaurant 2.0, and it takes forever to get there because I have to drive uncomfortably slowly on the spare. We finally arrive an hour after we had originally hoped to be sitting down at Restaurant 1.0, but then the four of us proceed to have quite a pleasant lunch. And a long lunch. It's about two hours later again when we finally leave, and it takes me another 45 minutes to drop off S and get myself home. At home, mum has been calling tire repair places, but it only occurred to her half an hour ago and everything is closed because it is late Sunday afternoon. So then we repotted my basil, and I had a small tantrum about how I wanted to be back at my apartment because I had stuff to do today (including practising and laundry), and then I took a nap uncomfortably sprawled on a bench in the family room, and then there was dinner and then in an attempt to make the best of being stranded, I took my 16-year-old brother to see an R-rated movie. Good times.
Anyway, the new plan is to take my car to get the tire fixed first thing tomorrow, because the tire was brand new and my da couldn't even find the hole in it, and I will with luck be able to get to my apartment in time to shower, change, and go to work. I remain dissatisfied with this situation. I especially am upset about not being able to practise. And I miss my computer. And I was feeling a little bit nauseated during the movie and I don't know if it was because of a character being sick, or if I'm ill, or what. >:(