Lisa and I watched Life is Beautiful tonight, and I can say simply that I’ve never seen a film that has had such a powerful effect on me. Benigni has a combination of comedic genius and emotional depth that just wiped me out. I’ve never cried like that at the end of a film before, and it still is getting to me hours later. That’s a lot to say for a couple hours of sitting (or lying, as the case may be) in front of the TV.
Come to think of it, I’ve cried very little since I was probably twelve or so. In those first years of my life, I cried about everything (and usually over really small, spilled milk sort of things). Just ask my mother. Maybe I’m starting to catch up now, get my level of tears up to normal after a dry spell to balance out the floods of my formative years.
There have been many instances lately where I’ll be reading the news, and I’ll start thinking about what’s going on around us, and I start to feel it coming. That’s good, because it’s an indication that maybe I’m believing it’s real; but it’s also bad because—well, because it is real. I’m not one of these people who thinks that a life without pain is a life unlived; I wouldn’t mind seeing a lot less of it. Here’s to that hope.
Another good, but rather unrelated, thing from today. The wonderful people at Hostbaby have been treating me (and their other customers) right. This site is now hosted on a more secure, faster OpenBSD server with some nifty admin tools in the backend. They moved my site to it with few hitches. Those hitches that did come up (like missing the Berkeley DB that is required to generate this journal entries) were resolved in a courteous and timely fashion. I couldn’t be happier. My site is apparently the most cgi-heavy they serve, giving them the most trouble during the move, and they still are nice to me. It just doesn’t get much better than that.