If I wanted to, I could write paragraph after paragraph of the same old tired complaint about work, but what's the good in that? It's nothing you haven't heard before, and it wasn't all that riveting the first hundred and five times. On the other hand, work problems are sucking the life right out of me this week, so what else is there?

Since I forgot to reorganize my Netflix rental queue, I'm facing a weekend of whatever lame movies they had lying around when I sent back A Walk to Remember and reported The Rookie lost in the mail (lost from here to there, after I watched it and sent it back).

Now that I've watched Monsoon Wedding twice, I'm sending it back tomorrow. I can't watch it again until the semi-permanent lump in my throat subsides. The tear ducts have been drained, so maybe it's just as well that something called Orange County is due in the mail tomorrow. That can't possibly be another tearjerker, can it? Also incoming: Big Trouble, from the Dave Barry book. More laughs than tears, I hope.

In case you couldn't tell, I really, really, really liked Monsoon Wedding. I liked it even more the second time through, with director Mira Nair's commentary. She explains some of the Indian cultural references that give the movie, shot and set in Delhi, its context. She's a director who loves her actors, and it comes across in their performances.

This is such a richly textured film that twice isn't enough, but I'll wait to rent it again. Or maybe I'll buy it some day, as I did with Gosford Park because I kept seeing more truth and beauty in that picture every time I watched it. I kept that one from Netflix for a couple of weeks, then bought a copy as soon as I returned it. Well, it was on sale, so.

Anyway, that was better than another whine about work, right? And I can't tell you what I'm reading because it's something I've read before, a novel written for children that's being released in movie form in two weeks. It's a sequel to a film that I liked a lot last year, and it has wizards and stuff in it, but I'm embarrassed to tell you what it is. It doesn't have the word "Ring" in the title, though, if you were wondering.

Now that I've voted, I really want the election to be over. We still have four more days of recorded phone calls, attack ads, preference polls and whirlwind campaign tours by the president, who has suddenly decided South Dakota is one of his favorite states. For some reason the Republican party really wants me to get out and vote, and they've had their machine call me several times to tell me so. I've tried to get my machine to take their machine's calls.

It's not as if it'll all be over Tuesday, though, just because that's election day. It could take a month to declare winners, the way it did two years ago. There could be a Senate runoff in Louisiana, and that wouldn't happen until December 7. So just because it's over doesn't mean it's over.