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It's funny how little time it takes a Monday morning to devour an aura of warm fuzz. Even though this weekend featured a hurricane, a long day's worth of travel to and from Connecticut for In-Law Family Time, a bad cold that kept me from enjoying Friday night's festivities at a fancy lawyer's house in Larchmont (complete with lobster bisque!), and several Serious Conversations, it still left me feeling well-balanced and happy. You know, temporarily.

Still, it's good to keep perspective. At least I'm not a sex worker who's just been told by someone in a position of authority that gang rape at gunpoint = merely "theft of services."

And at least exciting movies will be coming out soon. I haven't seen anything I've been crazy about this year. Ratatouille, Michael Clayton, and Knocked Up were all entertaining in their various ways, but I want to be rocked like I was by Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth. Who will rock me? Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd? The cast is promising; the trailer, less so. Philip Seymour Hoffman as brought to me by Tamara Jenkins? She was supposed to be my honors examiner, you know. Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter? One of the many Bob Dylanses? Or the animated Marjane Satrapi? After the recent NYT Mag interview with her wherein she declaimed, "I'm not a feminist; I'm a humanist," and then went on to extoll the pleasures of smoking, I'm disappointed with the IRL version, but I can hold out hope for celluloid.