Saw "Out Of Sight" with "A" today - we met at the cinema. She thought some of the characters' behaviors were unbelievable. I found certain of the cinematic effects interesting (the many short freeze-frames, the snow) as well as the views of Detroit. Then she followed me back to my place, where she saw the interior of a Rasch-flat for the first time. Later, she left.

Readers of this journal may have noticed I maintain several long-term friendships with school chums. I don't like losing people, and so this week-end I managed to reconnect with a girlfriend from my college days (the original, actually). We've had no contact for perhaps seventeen years, so now there's much email. Intrigued by this journal business, E looked at Eno's A Year With Swollen Appendices and bounced back with:

"Funny thing - I flipped through it and on page 80..."

16 March:

Idea for a novel: `Biography of someone who didn't know they were being watched', in which the author follows and secretly documents the life of a complete stranger from birth. For fifty years.

Good call, E! In other Truman news, here's some key verbiage from a month-old San Francisco Chronicle column I just read:

All of us have some Truman in our lives, only we've created the artifice ourselves.
To paraphrase the commercials, we're not TV characters, but we play them in real life.
...I'm too much influenced by media images. I think "The Truman Show" is drawing huge audiences because it strikes a chord in us. We know we're all trying to figure out where out real lives stop and artifices begins.

But unlike Truman, our fear isn't that we'll discover that everyone in our lives is just acting, but that we are. <1>