1998

The movie You've Got Mail is one that I watch at least some part of most times I see it listed on TV, even though I own a copy of it (on VCR tape) that I hardly ever think about watching and even though it's only a so-so movie, with lots of lines that make me cringe in their clunkiness, and it pales so much in comparison with the movie it's a remake of, the exquisite Shop Around the Corner.   However... it will always have a place in my heart, because at the time it was being filmed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I lived exactly there, and I remember standing on a street corner on Broadway watching Meg Ryan and Nora Ephron and a huge amount of crew and equipment taking over a Starbucks.  (Grammar Nerd Aside: why is there no apostrophe in that name?)  When I watch the movie, I see a snapshot of that time in my life (although the movie makes the neighborhood look as idealized as any small town in a movie), recognize corners and restaurants and shops, know where things were created just for the movie (neither bookstore in the movie was really there, for instance).

And what I notice now, watching bits of the movie again, is that suddenly the year 1998, when the movie came out and when I met Jerry, the year before I put my apartment on West 73rd Street at Amsterdam Avenue on the market and moved to Illinois, feels like a long time ago.  I mean, it was: 12 years is a quarter of my life.  But it also feels like a long time ago in terms of who I was then, and who I've been over those 12 years and all I've experienced in that time, and who I am now.  (Hell, June of last year, as I keep saying, feels like a million years ago in terms of who I was then and who I am now.)

Nothing profound about this realization (and hard to write coherently when I'm half-listening to the dialogue of the movie).  Just... a realization.  My life in New York now seems as unreal as the Upper West Side of You've Got Mail does.  And it is, indeed, just as long ago.

Current life developments:  I've lost a couple of pounds (ten pounds to unrealistic goal, six pounds to realistic goal), and I've worked out three times since Tuesday.  Had a haircut yesterday, and, oh, yeah, a year and a half after I had problems with the reading part of my progressive trifocal glasses and decided, in a burst of sheer brilliance, or sheer something, that my eyes must have been improving and I must not have needed glasses at all (because I seemed to read better without the lenses), I had an eye exam and found out, no, I do need glasses... just a stronger prescription in the reading part.  I can still drive without glasses, but things are clearer with glasses again, and reading is now so much easier now that I have the right prescription.