Today's saga

Once a month, our teaching jobs require us to attend a meeting.  "Require" may be a bit strong.  They pay us to go, and they feed us with a decent spread.  The meetings have been useful, but they are at 5:30 in the afternoon and we finish class at 2:15.

We decided to go see THE BOURNE LEGACY at the Cinemark in Provo.  It began at three, and get this, it ended at 5:30, so we knew at the outset that we would not be able to watch the last fifteen minutes of the movie.

Yeah, sure.

We bought buffalo-sized hotdogs and a diet Coke and sat in the dark with one other couple.  (A full theater in the afternoon is one of the things I miss most about NYC).

The movie begins with Aaron Cross, the Jason Bourne follow-up, climbing mountain peaks and fighting off wolves in Alaska and then nearly being blown up by an American drone, because the CIA wants him and all of his hybridized ilk dead.

I am wearing a back brace, and spanx top and bottom.  In other words, I'm sitting in a rubber suit to keep me upright.  It squeezes the hot dog I've just eaten into a swiney nausea.

There is a nasty killing scene in a neuro-pharmacology lab followed by even more killing in a large Victorian house.  I cannot watch it.  The noise, the fast cutting from scene to scene,  the cynical slaughter gives me a headache.

Where is Matt Damon?  Where is the movie's moral center?

"I hate this movie and I think I'm going to throw up," I say to Tom.

"Let's leave," he says.

One hour into the movie and we're out of there.  I am nauseated to my hair follicles.  I make Tom stop at a Harmon's to get a plastic bag, in case I have to throw up in the car.

I am trussed like a turkey and break into a hot claustrophobia and struggle to remove the back brace which is a complicated three-part job held together with Zeus's velcro and is located under the other rubber stuff I'm wearing.

"How can you stand to wear all of that?" Tom asks.  "Take it off."  He drives through a quiet Orem neighborhood, so I can remove half my underwear without a truck pulling up alongside to see my struggle.

I feel better. We go home by secondary roads.  We get lost in Alpine, a happy accident.   We stop at A&W to rehydrate with a rootbeer float.  It takes two hours plus to get home.

We missed the meeting.