I had jury duty this morning. It was my first time, and having heard stories from friends and family I figured I would be sitting in a room most of the morning whiling away my time waiting to be selected or dismissed. Instead, as soon as I arrived at the courthouse and reported to the jury room, I was told I could turn around and go home. There would be no need for my services because it had been canceled.
If I had only known about this earlier, I would have been able to sleep in. It would have been particularly nice since Paul has today off. He asked for it before I ever received my jury summons, and it was just coincidence that they happened to fall on the same day.
Paul had yesterday off too. We took the opportunity to see the Simpsons Movie. It was o.k. Just o.k. The movie itself which seemed like an extra long episode and borrowed some of its better bits from past seasons of television. What surprised me had more to do with the audience. Most of the audience seemed to be made up of children around the age of 10. I realize the film is rated PG-13, but still, I’m pretty certain my parents wouldn’t have allowed me to see it when I was 10, simply because they didn’t want us watching The Simpsons on t.v. when it first made its debut. There were three unsupervised girls who seemed closer to 13, but I found them irritating because they would sing and quote lines that had been in the trailers. But the worst part of being surrounded by 10 year olds while watching the film, was the fact that they all found the gratuitous cartoon violence to be laugh-out-loud funny. It was so lowbrow and always at what I considered the worst and dumbest parts of the movie.
It served as a reminder of why we hardly ever go to the movie theater anymore.