There is a scene near the end of Living Out Loud where it becomes clear that Judith (played wonderfully by Holly Hunter) has finally, at last, forgiven herself. It's a late-night, dreamlike dénouement for a woman whose life hasn't even remotely turned out the way she might have wanted…but who has finally decided that she's going to take that life and make it her own.

Before I forget, I did at least want to weigh in once again on my February 12 entry Oscar, the little punk. I finally got around to seeing In The Bedroom, and what I saw merits some restatement.

So, Andrew asks, what did I think of the Oscar nominations? I think my overwhelming feeling was a complete and utter lack of surprise. I saw a lot of choices that could only be described as "safe." We rant about this every year, he and I, and for once I thought I'd be brave and daring and post my initial commentary today, before all the ad campaigns kick in to try to sway opinions. I'll feel a bit better about my choices after I get to see a couple more movies, but I'm going to talk about all this in my usual pseudo-knowledgeable way. Hey, I pay enough in movie rental fees to finance a low-budget film or two; with that and a tiny dose of misplaced chutzpah, you too can be a movie critic! Enjoy.

Andrew, last year: "Oh, you should come up here for this! You'd love every minute of it. You could come stay with us, and we'd love to have you visit. Why don't you try to arrange to come up here?" In the end, I didn't do it, and had good reasons for not doing so, but I spent the rest of 2001 doing two things: kicking myself for not going, and promising myself that I would go in 2002.

The event: Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival. Location: Champaign, Illinois. Date: late April, 2002.In 2001, I was too ill to attend. Realistically, I knew that I was capable of driving to Illinois, but that once I got there, I would be too exhausted to actually attend the event. So I bowed to the dry, spinsterish voice of reason, and stayed home.

We were too young to rent this particular movie, but we looked old for our age, and we knew that if we just didn't giggle or make spectacles of ourselves, we'd be fine.

It helped that we had Kerri's mother's movie-rental card, which would allow us to rent anything in the store. We had wandered around the store, browsing the stacks of movies for rent. We didn't have anything in particular we wanted to see, but it was Saturday, and we wanted to watch something.For some reason, approximately 90% of all movie titles start with the letters R, S, or T, and that's where we spent hmost of our browsing time. We'd hold up movies to each other, soliciting opinions, but they'd all be struck down for one reason or another.

We spotted it then, hidden in plain view; a simple, black box. Kerri looked at me quizzically and said words that were such incredible understatements that I'm surprised the world didn't cave in on us right then and there:

So it's a rainy, quiet Saturday afternoon (the kind that makes you want to spend your day indoors, reading or coding) and I've brought my latest little project (hello, boredelf!) up as far as I can without getting Gareth to change some file privs for me.

I eventually wandered out to the mailbox, to see if anything interesting had arrived with today's fresh infusion of junk mail. That's one thing that can be said about Netflix: I check the mail more regularly now than I did a month or so ago. Sure enough, there was a DVD from them, waiting patiently for me to claim it.It was Insomnia, a movie that's been on my 'see-it' list for quite some time now.