Something you don’t ever want to hear a doctor say: “I’m just going to remove the top few layers of cells.” Not when the doctor is an optometrist and it’s a few layers of cells from the surface of your eye she’s talking about. I had something in my eye all weekend and nothing I did would get rid of it, so I went to the optometrist today. She stained my eyeball yellow and looked at it from every which way, found the place where something might have been and then told me her plan. I’m not as sensitive about my eyes as I once was—I can now actually administer eye drops whereas that used to be an impossibility, but I’m still squeamish about them and I’d never be able to wear contact lenses because I don’t think I’d ever get them out, assuming I got them in to begin with. However, this process wasn’t as horrific as it sounded and it was over fast. Eye drops thrice daily for the next three days, then back for a checkup. An interesting factoid: she told me that eyes are very sensitive to pain but they aren’t able to localize it, so it might feel like the discomfort is moving around.
Crazy weather around here. We had a brisk and fallish long weekend, then it was back up to the seventies today with a decent rainstorm or two. Then it’s back down to the thirties tomorrow night.
For some reason or other, many of the evening programs in the early part of this week are reruns. All the CBS comedies tonight, plus House. No Castle, either. An NCIS rerun tomorrow night. No CSI or The Mentalist or Criminal Minds. And they’re apparently running a hi-def version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. How do you make a nearly 40 year old cartoon high definition without going back to the drawing board?
I’m past the halfway point of Against All Things Ending (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3). I forget from one book to the next how frustrating these characters can be. The only ones who aren’t paralyzed by self-loathing are buffoons (eg. The Ardent, and even he gets mawkish). Situations that could be improved by a few casual words, aren’t. And yet I still enjoy the books.
We finished off our weekend movie marathon with The Green Zone, in which Jason Bourne…well, not exactly, but almost…tries to figure out why all the intelligence they’ve been provided about the location of WMDs in Iraq is bad. Matt Damon’s character, Miller, and his team end up risking their lives to search abandon factories and toilet warehouses, always coming up empty. It’s unusual in a modern film for the CIA to be the voice of sanity and reason, but that’s how it works out in this film. Loved the safe full of money. Here’s $1 million. Go get the guy to talk. The WSJ reporter was a little underutilized, but we get to see a bit of her plight, having been duped into being a White House mouthpiece, buying into the pretext for the war. Greg Kinnear is good as the smarmy Pentagon chief who’s trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug, but the star of the film is Freddy, the Iraqi who reports a meeting of wanted men to Miller and gets caught up in something big. His anger is tangible, especially when Miller tries to brush him off with the promise of a financial reward. “You think I want money? Everything you want for this country, I want a hundred times more,” he says. It’s a complex story, and I’m sure it doesn’t appeal to people with some political affiliations, but we enjoyed it.
I think Brook will go down in history as the contestant on The Amazing Race who had the best time ever during the race. This week in Hong Kong she was leading two other women contestants in a dance routine in front of a roomful of onlookers while their partners performed a roadblock. She took the tame karaoke that was going on in the background and almost turned it into burlesque. I hope her team at least makes it to the final three. I couldn’t believe that the punk rockers were spared by a non-elimination round. They deserved to go, or at least he did after acting like a wuss on the parakeet challenge. Of all the endurance things they’ve had to do, this one was pretty easy, if tedious. But he just wimped out on his partner. A six hour penalty instead of searching some more? Gimme a break.
We’re getting down to brass tacks on Dexter, and it’s hard to imagine how this is all going to pan out. He’s got more people watching him than ever before, and now Liddy has a DVD of him and Lumen in the pre-game show to an execution. And Jordan and Dexter know exactly who each other is, exchanging veiled threats as Dexter swabs Jordan for DNA. Who would have guessed that Jordan was the fat teenager? But he’s still a master manipulator, continuing to exert power over his first victim two decades later. “You made me what I am today,” he tells her, and that shouldn’t be taken as a compliment.
Deb is of the opinion that no one could go through what the barrel women endured and have a life again. There’s no coming back. And yet Lumen seemed to bounce back pretty well. There were a couple of well constructed moments during the episode, I thought. The seduction: Dexter putting Lumen’s necklace around her neck in Alex’s living room. His and her matching gloves. Lumen showing up in her black stealth outfit instead of a little black dress, and her entrance rendered Dexter momentarily speechless. Lumen admiring his knives. “One of these days you’re going to have to teach me how to do that,” she says as she watches him pick a lock. And I thought the misdirection that resulted from Lumen showing Dexter (and us) a possible killing chamber turned out nicely when Deb and Quinn entered Alex’s house. Pairs survive better in the wild, Dexter muses.
A few commentators I read today expressed concern that we still don’t know how Lumen ended up in Jordan’s grasp, and that there might still be a gotcha moment coming with regard to that. That never occurred to me at all, and I don’t know where they’re coming from, to be honest. And it looks like they may be laying the ground work for Deb to figure out Dexter’s secret. A few times now she has expressed sympathies that are similar to his. This week, after being forced to watch all those DVDs that appalled even Dexter, she identifies herself as the kind of person who might be eliminating these killers.
When Alex tries to put the blame of Jordan for making him do things that he would never otherwise have done, Lumen almost leaps at him. “No. You made me do things I never would have done. Ever. Ever.” When it came time for her to do the deed, she didn’t hesitate. Being too short, she climbed up on the bench and plunged the knife into Alex’s chest. Murder is an aphrodisiac—who knew? I found myself wondering if Liddy was still watching, the sleazeball. “With Lumen I’m someone different. In her eyes I’m not a monster at all.”
