As soon as I recovered from some exhaustion last week, I decided to dance with the Aztecs at Hollywood Forever for the extravagant Dia de Los Muertos celebration.

Not sure what I was thinking, but it was ridiculously fun for the five minutes it took to wear me the heck out. Here’s proof:

Photo courtesy of the fabulous Lisa Morton.

And there’s more photographic proof of the fun that was had on my Flickr account.

We arrived sometime around 4:30 but didn’t actually step inside the cemetery for another hour and a half because parking was incredibly bad. But we knew that would happen. As we suspected, if you didn’t get there before 6:00pm, you were doomed to sit outside stuck in line for strange aeons.

I had never been to the festival before, so it was an extraordinary treat to see the altars erected to flappers, Dr. Seuss, the Saint of Homeless Pets, Frida and others, with the random Darth Vader helmet inserted as needed. I marveled at the similarities between the afterlife beliefs of Mexican and Asian cultures, the feeding of the dead being very important.

When we got home, exhausted and fed, I read the delicious short story, “The Night Face Up,” by Julio Cortázar to Lord Arux before we went to sleep. I just had to have one last bite of Aztec goodness.

Then yesterday we watched Donnie Darko for the first time ever. It was the Director’s Cut, so we have no idea what the original was like. I can totally see why it has such rabid fans from an artistic level alone, but I’m not one of them, alas. It almost worked. We talked about it quite a bit afterward and decided that the movie only made sense if Frank had not called Donnie out of his bed. If Donnie had been left alone and was sleep walking as usual, meeting Frank outside for the first time as a result of that wandering, it would make perfect sense that Frank would later have to convince him to go back to bed to undo everything. But the way the film and voice over were cut in this version, it seems like it’s Frank who drags Donnie out of bed that night, which makes no damned sense on Frank’s behalf whatsoever.

Last night was fired because of insomnia. I hope tonight to sleep like los muertos.