Last night Sarah and I watched Living in Oblivion. It was another recommendation from my mom as a follow-up from the recommendation for The Station Agent. I noticed that what tied the two movies together is the use of the dwarf actor Peter Dinklage in each of them. I have never been someone to notice when and where dwarf actors appear but it was odd to watch back to back movies with dwarf actors. I wasn't a big fan of Living in Oblivion. My problem with it was that I felt it abused my suspension of disbelief. Either what I am watching is real or it isn't. It is the oldest cop-out in the book to have a story where any reality the viewer believes is suddenly wiped out when a character awakes. In this movie they did it twice. My english teacher in AP English in tenth grade made me promise to never write fiction where I betray the reader's trust. She was very strict. The redeeming nature of the it was the murphy's law experience of making a movie where they just can't get through a single scene without something going wrong.

I had some Murphy's law with my computer today. In the morning the Internet wasn't working right so I decided to reboot it. But then when it awoke and I saw it once again it had rebooted to a blue BIOS screen. So I did what most people would do. I rebooted it again. This time it took a while but it awoke to complain that it couldn't display certain applications in 16 bit graphics mode and the monitor was showing a whopping 640X480 display of my desktop. So I was aghast and figured the problem had something to do with borrowing Jeremy's super-slim Cornea CT1810 18 inch monitor to make room on my desk for trinkets in place of my death-star 19 inch Viewsonic cathode ray tube monitor. So I spent about an hour researching how drivers, monitors, and files like CT1810.ini. It is supposed to load the driver for the monitor and fix things but it didn't. I got so frustrated with the apparatus that I had to grab and chug a beer before returning to the problem. I finally went to NVidia's site and downloaded the latest driver for my graphics card figuring that whatever was wrong was either the OS, the graphics card, or the monitor driver. I'm as useless as a fish with a bicycle trying to fix something wrong with the OS but I can install drivers if there is an accept and a next button. So I installed the new driver and now I can get lots of resolution but my hunch is that high resolution doesn't mean I'm not looking at the world in 16 bit color.

The part that Peter Dinklage has in Living in Oblivion is a dwarf in a dream sequence that they are looking to film. He blows-up at the director because he thinks that it is wrong to hire a dwarf to make something a dream sequence and that it is stupid. It's true. A real dream isn't a dream because there is a dwarf in it. My dreams are completely believable. I had dream the other night where I was propositioned by a woman and I said no because I was worried I would get caught by the police. The strange thing is that in my dreams I have no understanding at all that the dream is false. My innate suspension of disbelief keeps me believing that everything in the dream is consistent and real until I awake and realize it was a dream. I fear consequences in dreams and lately my dreams have been that anxiety kind that are filled with consequences and actions that can't be completed. I needed to make a meeting in Paris but my clothes were scattered about on the escalator in the airport in Las Vegas and I didn't know where my passport and drivers license was. Panic set in.

Making products and companies is a different kind of dream from the sleeping dreams. In the meeting that I had today with Chris, Peter, and Robert O. we were talking about some big ideas while devouring breakfast at the Marriot in Newton and imagining what direction we could take a media company. It was really exciting to me and I could see some very strong potential to build a big business using some simple ideas and doing it before anyone else thought to do it. I could see us becoming very successful and running a media empire as we were describing our strategy. Maybe I was sleeping, imagined the meeting, and just awoke now. I wouldn't do that. Not without dwarves.