Yesterday I exercised for the second day, and hurt myself horribly. The NordicTrack must have originally been a torture device; it would be located between the Iron Maiden and that table where they stretch your arms and legs out, and feared much more than either of the other devices. I had to give my poor legs a chance to heal today.

Yesterday evening Eric and I watched “About Schmidt,” which is really quite a depressing movie. It’s about the Real Life of one man who wakes up one day and realizes, too late (or, perhaps, too early), that he’s wasted his life. He, as I suspect many people would, does nothing to change it. Here’s part of what IMDB user The Movie Buff had to say about the movie (some spoilers):

“I was very disappointed in this movie. Jack was good but the movie was not. It wasnt (sic) a story worth telling. A guys wife dies so he goes on a road trip to see his daughter’s wedding? Nothing meaningful happened on the road trip and nothing meaningful happened at the wedding. You know as much about the lead character when the movie starts as you do at the end.”

It hurts to have the human condition examined so frankly. [It’s almost physically painful; I really wanted to turn my head away from the screen on a number of occasions—and there were a few key moments where I did shut the image out, but those were mostly due to some less-than-pleasant nudity.] The point of the movie isn’t the story, as The Movie Buff seems to think; in this movie you can see the parts of your self, and your life, that you normally turn away from. The point of the movie is really only to ask a couple questions: what is the purpose of your life? When you die, will you be remembered? What good will you have done? What, in the end, did you do?

My parents hated the movie—I somewhat suspect because it strikes closer to home than they care to think—and I’d bet that 99.44% of college students out there wouldn’t care for it, either. I mean, sure, Warren R. Schmidt lived his life and then found out too late that he hadn’t made a difference; that’s not going to happen to me, though!

Ha ha.

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t have any good answers to these questions, though I’ve thought about them some in the past. Being agnostic means that I don’t have any texts to reference, and so the best I’ve been able to gather is that each person must find his or her own purpose, own cause, own source of happiness. It’s annoyingly relativistic and open-ended. As I joked to Eric, that belief, and the fact that I haven’t really found a good direction for myself, is one of the reasons I listen to Evangelion music so frequently. (Ironically enough, I’m looking towards becoming an actuary; in the movie this was Schmidt’s profession before he retired.)

Today was much quieter. I slept in late, and poked around the internet some. [Outside of leaked specifications of the new G5 towers (hopefully) to be released on Monday, little is new in the Mac scene. In the anime scene, the Fanime con is going down this weekend. Thankfully, no new shows that I care about have been announced as licensed, though Pioneer’s panel is being held tomorrow…] I also poked around for a decent ICQ clone for the Mac, eventually settling on Fire, and took a nap. It’s been a wonderfully laid-back day.

Marin and I watched some more episodes of Magical Project S this evening. I’m pretty underwhelmed, so far; the show has been episodic and has way too few instances of real humor. It’s supposed to be a parody of the traditional magical girl shows found in anime; the only difference I’ve seen, so far, is that Sasami doesn’t want to be a magical girl. That, on its own, isn’t enough to sustain a 26-episode series.

It was particularly funny, however unintentionally, to see Magical Girl Pretty Sammy sell out in episode five. [Keep in mind that she only became a magical girl in episode one.] Sasami’s mom’s CD shop didn’t have enough business, you see, so they held Pretty Sammy’s idol debut on the roof of the store.

No, Sasami can’t sing.