{"id":4873,"date":"2020-01-06T07:19:45","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T06:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4873"},"modified":"2020-03-09T07:23:24","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T06:23:24","slug":"sick-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4873","title":{"rendered":"Sick Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Yes I know. And no I’m not suggesting that. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Christmas is a time of tradition. For what would Christmas be without opening gifts under the tree, a holiday Christmas party, or watching Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me (and probably you) Christmas has become a series of\nother traditions that are outside the usual. But are rather more minuscule and\nalmost seemingly insignificant. So opening gifts and a family party brings\nalong a cheesesteak and a visit and a night of drinking to my brother and\nsister\u2019s house. Having saved all of my shopping for the consumerist haven of\nLanghorne, my mother and I will go shopping on the 23rd<\/sup>. I will\nfeign exhaustion in the mall at some point, but will be overall enamored with\nit, knowing that I have no engagements other than wearing pajamas, eating a homecooked\nmeal, and watching football with my dad. Our $10-20 bets on the holiday time college\nfootball explosion is another major tradition and is, outside of familial gossip,\nprobably the number one topic of our conversations over Christmas.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We watch in the living room, the kitchen, or his bedroom.\nSit there doing trivia games and making lists of movies and books and countries\nwe\u2019d like to visit. When the game was getting too good or too bad, Dad always\nloses interest and suggests a few minutes of a movie or a show. I normally say\nno because the movies he suggests he is enormously familiar with and I am not. Nevertheless,\nI would come back from getting a bottle of water or from using the bathroom and\ncome in as Alan Alda is flirting with Ellen Burstyn with a piece of steak or as\nJudy Dench is mired in the middle of a mindbogglingly boring conversation in As\nTime Goes By<\/em>. A number of choices were made that I couldn\u2019t understand. Who\non earth would choose the original The Thing from Another World <\/em>over\nJohn Carpenter\u2019s 1982 remake? Insanity. I chalked it up to nostalgia and the\nneed for comfort movies when you\u2019re sick.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

When he had picked me up at the airport, my dad was clearly\nsick with a cold, speaking in a voice you might hear from a frog in a kids\u2019\nanimated film that takes place in New England. Absurdly deep and somehow both nasally\nand croaky. He seemed to like this effect and spoke at length about everything he\ncould to everyone he could. He\u2019d pick up the phone, dial, say someone\u2019s name,\nand then talk. A few seconds later, obviously in response to the question, he\u2019d\nsay: \u201cYeah, I came down with a chest cold this weekend. No, It\u2019s fine\u2026.\u201d And then\nthe Frog of Vermont would go on to say, \u201cso what about Wentz and the Eagles?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kitchen table and the coffee table in the living room\nbecame a cemetery of tissues and I would peer at these white sheets with their fluorescent\ngreen patterns and just know they were coming for me. And I was right. About a\nweek after spending six hours a day two feet away from the great frog of Vermont,\nI got a tickle in my throat and a dull thud in the back of my neck. All efforts\nto maintain the cold with vitamin C, green tea, and booze were unsuccessful and\nI was soon speaking like Frog\u2019s friend Luther, the aged yet happy and deep-voiced\ntoad who lived on the other side of the pond. And so for a week we sat in dirty\nsweaters croaking back and forth like animated kids\u2019 film characters. When I\u2019d\ngo off to sleep on my couch, I\u2019d put on one of the Harry Potter films. After a\nfew days I realized that these were my sick movies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sunday after returning from Prague I holed up on the couch\nand turned on Netflix. It was dark outside at 2 pm and somehow both raining and\nsnowing. I decided it was a day to spend on the couch with tea and sick movies.\nI went to classics and then began a day of 80s movies to which I knew every\nline. Ghostbusters<\/em>. The Goonies<\/em>. Twins<\/em>. Raiders of the Lost\nArk<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burke mostly went along with these, but as she is a child of\n90s movies I could understand the occasional consternation. How could you\nchoose The Goonies<\/em> over Jurassic Park<\/em>? I blew my nose, stuffed\nthe toilet paper into the pockets of my cardigan and told her these were my\nsick movies. She nodded understanding and as a far more empathetic creature\nthan I, she probably actually does understand. That or she\u2019s making her own\nlist of 90s movies to watch next weekend, when she has caught my cold and is croaking\nlike Frog and Toad\u2019s friend Turtle, who has lived for years on the south side\nof this Vermont pond. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes I know. And no I’m not suggesting that. Christmas is a time of tradition. For what would Christmas be without opening gifts under the tree, a holiday Christmas party, or watching Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer? For me (and probably you) Christmas has become a series of other traditions that are outside the usual. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/frog-and-toad.jpg?fit=900%2C507&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-1gB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4875,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4873\/revisions\/4875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}