The window rattled and I wondered if you'd just passed over

It is beautifully sunny outside, but I have slept three hours a night at most this week and consequently feel kind of like dropping dead. This morning spatch and I were awake at what choco_frosh once memorably dubbed the ass-crack of dawn to wait for the handyman who was supposed to fix and/or replace our bathroom door. Go on, guess if he's here yet. Several hours ago I gave up and made myself lunch instead of breakfast. I am about to e-mail the property manager and go for a walk.

I am having trouble feeling that I am not out of time in all ways: that I had time before the world fell apart and I wasted it. I'm sure it would be easier to deal with this feeling if the news were not so constantly apocalyptic. I suspect it would also help if I were in less pain and if the MBTA had not fallen over spectacularly so as to prevent me from seeing my therapist yesterday. I spent the evening with rushthatspeaks and Fox who has just started to identify objects by color and shout about them delightedly (they seem to have blue, green, purple, and pink down cold; they have more difficulty distinguishing red, orange, and yellow, which fascinates me; and they consistently mix up the white and black crayons, possibly because both are wrapped in the same shade of grey paper) and with gaudior when they got home from work. It was low-key and nice. Putting Fox to sleep involved Rush singing them "Scarborough Fair" and me singing "Oy Dortn, Dortn" and then gently closing the door on their heartbreaking wail of "Sing!" Then I got home and saw the news about Israel's nation-state bill, about which I had an instant detonation of feelings ranging from well, this will do wonders for the local anti-Semitism to we are right around the corner from Tisha B'Av, the day of remembering and grieving destruction, exile, dispossession, loss; this is not the way to observe it to that space rock probably never is going to hit Netanyahu. Just the previous night, I had read a recent article on a peace plan that looked like a real idea. I suppose there is no chance of it now. I wrote on Facebook that it is strange to feel betrayed by a country that never was mine, but here we are. I point to this post and I'm waiting to see if David Schraub weighs in.

I rewatched the 1986 LWT A Little Princess last night; it's currently, if a little patchworkily, on YouTube. Unlike the 1987 Hallmark A Secret Garden with the post-WWI frame story that I keep meaning to rewatch to see if I like it as an adult, it was not one of my childhood movies. nineweaving screened it for me just about ten years ago and I loved it. It's the most faithful adaptation I've run into: it does very little in the way of compression except for time and the places where it expands on Burnett are all to the three-dimensionality of the characters. Amelia Shankley who had just played the young Alice in Dennis Potter's Dreamchild (1985) brings some of the same unsentimentality to the role of Sara Crewe, not to mention the thin serious face and heavy dark hair of the novel; her vivid imagination and her half-acting poise are a lifeline, not an occasion for schmaltz. Nigel Havers makes a better-looking Carrisford than the jaundiced Indian gentleman of the book, but I like his interpretation—alcoholism feeding on depression makes him interestingly more Colin-like in his convictions of illness: he's not as sick as he feels he deserves to be—and I like his relationship with Tariq Alibai's Ram Dass, who is not above faking quotations from the Bhagavad Gita to puncture his employer's fretful moods. I have never seen Natalie Abbott in another role, but I love watching her downtrodden Becky become a co-conspirator in Sara's fantasies as opposed to just an audience for them. And the Misses Minchin are Maureen Lipman and Miriam Margolyes and they play off each other as classically as comedians or cartoons, one tall and thin and imperious and the other short and round and apologetic, but they too are three-dimensional and it pays off in their climactic confrontation. Lipman in particular gets a brief, piercing gesture which put me in mind of Peter Cushing or Peter Blythe—with her coldness and her pettiness and her self-justifying spite toward a defenseless child thrown unexpectedly in her face by the foolish, frumpish sister who has always tiptoed so submissively around her, Maria Minchin left alone in her office shuts the door hard behind her, turns to her desk with her usual expression of pinched exasperation, and all in one sudden motion pulls off her gold-rimmed spectacles, the frames crumpled in her hand as her face crumples behind them. Blink and you'll miss it; it works. It left me thinking inchoately about unsympathetic female characters, actual rather than antiheroic. There is a character I love in The Bletchley Circle (2012–14) even though she's present for maybe five minutes and two scenes because I don't usually see her female. This is Anastasia Hille's Angela Barker, a former contact from Electra House: tall, fair, blandly polite, with an impenetrable quizzical look and a plummier accent than any of the Bletchley women; worked for SOE, ran a sideline in the black market, "fiddled" the ration books. She's blackmailable. Jean blackmails her. I have seen that embarrassed genteel façade starting to slip and it is always, always male. I keep meaning to write about Caged (1950) because it is a masterclass in kinds of characters women don't usually play. I should probably see Ocean's 8 (2018) on the same principle.

—Just as I made the decision to send the e-mail, the property manager's husband who is the handyman arrived. Our bathroom door will need replacing, but in the meantime it is no longer sagging dramatically off its hinges in the way that suggests it might just fall on someone like a T. rex devouring a lawyer in Jurassic Park (1993). The brave cats who scrambled when the doorbell rang have been rewarded with treats, even Autolycus who tried to scramble past the handyman into the wide world of the stairwell. I am still going for a walk.