Spent yesterday downtown, poking around the stores, hoping to spend my Christmas money before it turned into groceries. Thought I might buy a shirt, but all the shirts looked the same, either distressed or ruffled. Wandered into a box store and picked up three DVDs -- Pasolini's Il Decameron, Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer (I didn't know James Salter wrote the script) and Distict 9, which, given its protagonist's transformation, made it an unhappier version of Avatar.

While walking back to my car I had one of those moments where what stuck was not what Bernstein remembered in Citizen Kane (while boarding the Staten Island Ferry), but a couple in their early-thirties crossing the street towards me, he in a car coat and she of bronze. As I neared them, she turned from the man and said, in a voice that sounded like a kettle about to boil, and to no one in particular, "I'm feeling like I won't go to yoga today."