Longest Name Ever

I did two great things today: I met up with Karissa, an old friend from college, and I saw Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (a title which I will only type in its entirety once). Both were excellent ways to spend a day.

Karissa is one of the greatest free spirits I know. We met up with her at a cafe called Zeitgeist (!) just off of Pioneer Square. The trip there was Liz's first time on the Seattle bus, so she got to see how that worked. We spent a great couple of hours with Karissa catching up, telling each other what we're up to and how we feel about it. She's working for a nonprofit in New Orleans and living in the French Quarter. She gets to work from home and is doing great things with money from the Big Tobacco settlement. She seemed very happy, although she said that she doesn't plan to do it forever, which doesn't surprise me one bit.

We had a great time catching up. The cafe was nice, too - their bathroom was amazingly clean for a cafe. And they had little lumps of brown sugar (to flavor the coffee, of course, but I popped a couple of them whole).

After that, Liz and I headed back to Bellevue and met up with Brook and Wendi and Chad for Master. It deserves every good review it's received. Crowe does a great job acting, and the entire film plays like a meticulously crafted History Channel piece on Naval life and an English captain rather than a standard Hollywood action movie (the wooden ship's don't explode when hit by cannonballs!) I read that the studio invested quite a bit of money in the film ($130 million) in the hope that it would be like "another Gladiator." Thank God it isn't - it is so much better, it actually makes Gladiator (which I thought was OK, but didn't particularly care for) look a lot worse. I would highly recommend seeing this film - it's worth a full-price ticket.

Afterwards, the five of us wandered to a nearby mall with the most international and eclectic food court I've ever seen. I passed up a killer Russian place and a very good Mexican place for a very good barbeque place.

Tonight I'm going to either read, play a video game, or write. It will probably end up being a little bit of all three. Not a bad evening. I've had a raging headache all day, so anything to take my mind off of it would be nice.

What I'm reading: Love in the Time of Cholera - Garbriel Garcia Marquez
What's playing: Time - The Alan Parsons Project
Movie: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World