The Road Untaken and the Talk Not Given - musings on spousal selection

A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak in church.  I went through this process of writing out my whole talk, and then at 9 pm Saturday night I decided I wanted to talk about something else.  I mentioned this whilst I was speaking and a couple of my friends told me they wanted me to post my un-given talk on my blog.  So, here it is, more or less, adapted to secular blog instead of theological oration.

I want to talk to you guys about one of my favorite books.  I've written about it before on this blog, in my list of the five books everyone should read, but specifically every girl should read before she turns 20.  I'm rather proud of the fact that that is in my list of top 10 most popular posts, btw.  Anyway, I'm talking of Little Women.  I would like to assume that, as readers of my blog, you have of course, already read Little Women after I recommended it before, or you have already read it on your own because you have superlative taste.  But if neither of those things are true, I shall give a brief and incredibly inadequate summary for you.  Little Women, published in 1868 by Louisa May Alcott, tells the story of Jo March and her 3 sisters as they transition from young girls to women.  Jo, the penultimate child, is the classic tomboy bucking against the restrictions of gentility and societal expectations.  Early into the story she befriends Teddy Lawrence, the boy next door, and he is quickly adopted into the family as a brother.

Ah, wee baby Christian Bale...you did a pretty good job I guess

At this point I supposed I should warn of upcoming spoilers, but guys....the book has been out for 150+ years, not to mention made into at least one major film.  So I feel like you should probably get over it.

So anyway, Jo and Teddy grow up as best friends, sharing the same sense of humor, the same interests, and enjoying the same activities. And as they get older, Teddy starts trying to lay the ground work to take his relationship with Jo to the next level.

Here's the thing guys.  I just finished this book for the first time in many many years, only this time I listened to it as an audiobook.  I don't know if it was the woman reading the book or just my frame of mind this particular go through but for the first time I found I kind of had a thing for Teddy.  I never appreciated how funny and sassy he is before.  But I realized something else, too.  I've conducted 20-odd years of thorough study on this via film and TV and I can tell you definitively....Jo and Teddy are legit made for each other.  They are the text book definition of chemistry.  At least by modern romantic standards.  Think about it.  Isn't that what ever rom com tells you to look for?

Your perfect match.

I love puns so much

Love, and consequently marriage, is about finding that perfect match.  In practical terms that looks like someone who will validate you.  It's like "You watch the Great British Baking Show? OMG, I, too, watch the Great British Baking Show!!   At last I can stop feeling weird and just watch and love the Great British Baking Show with someone....which is all I really ever wanted."

In contemporary society, where long-term monogamous relationships are approved of at all, they are marketed as the ultimate bff validating relationship.  Your spouse is that person who will always be on your side, who likes what you like, and who reassures you of your place in the world because they occupy it with you......But guys.  Jo doesn't marry Teddy.

Teddy goes off to college and when he comes home he asks Jo to marry him.  He, like me this time through, believes in the idea of a perfect match.  But Jo says no.  She breaks his heart.  She breaks his heart because she understands that there is another way of loving and another way to choose a spouse.

Instead of a perfect match Jo wants a perfect complement.

eheheheheheh

She knows this because it is the marriage she has watched her whole life--that of her parents.  Early on Jo's mother talks to her about her hasty temper, explaining that it will cause her so much grief if she doesn't learn to control it.  Young Jo bemoans how impossible it is to remember and her mother makes a confession.  She, too, struggles to control her temper.  But her greatest strength in her efforts is her husband.  He knows her struggle and when she needs help he gives her a small sign to remind her of what she wants.  .

This was another aspect of the book I'd never really appreciated before.  Essentially it was a portrait of a much less common type of relationship, even back then, but it gave a whole different idea of what a marriage could be.  One person loving the other enough to patiently help them when it was needed, and the other person loving enough to humble themselves and accept that help.  In this sort of marriage the goal is not to comfortably validate you, but gently and lovingly push you towards progression and improvement.  In this marriage two people join together to share the work of becoming the best people they can possibly be.

I don't think it is a coincidence that the modern idea of love is the philosophy of matching and validation.  It is easier.  It asks so much less of us.  A complementary relationship takes work.  It requires humility and love and dedication.  But if you put in that effort you will have a partner who is as invested in helping you attain perfection as they are in achieving it themselves.  Can you imagine any greater or more valuable asset in our progression as individuals?

I do not love these actors as these characters, but what can you do?

Jo does eventually find her compliment in a really lovely gentleman named Professor Baehr.  He possesses the strengths she lacks and she provides for his deficiencies.  They form a partnership that is stronger together than  either of them were on their own.  And almost it is enough to help me overlook the creepiness of a 40+ year old man courting a 22 year old girl.  Almost.

Anne Shirley is my role model

Over the last week I've been rereading the Anne books.  Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and I've just started Anne of the Island.  In one of the most popular posts on my blog I list 5 books I believe every girl should read before she is 20 (I neglected to elaborate in that post that I actually think every human should read those books even if they've already passed the age of 20 and/or male).  But despite my advice, I realized the other day that I hadn't revisited Anne in years and years.

Returning to Avonlea has been a surprisingly fraught experience.  Of course it has been in many ways delightful.  Anne is very much a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the very best sense possible (particularly in that she is also a fully developed character) and stepping into her world is  like living the experience of the sad sappy guy in the typical MPDG movie.  You see the world anew through Anne's big, beautiful eyes and you remember how lovely it is.  You feel optimistic not only about the world, but about your potential within it.

And yet, that very optimism became a bit of a double edged sword for me.  This is the first time I have visited Anne, I believe, since before I graduated high school.  The last time I read these words I was not yet 20 myself:

[Miss Stacy] said we couldn't be too careful what habits we formed and what ideals we acquired in our teens, because by the time we were twenty our characters would be developed and the foundation laid for our whole future life.  And she said if the foundation was shaky we could never build anything really worth while on it.

I'm 28 now, and I confess that, though I hadn't put those words to it, essentially I worry if my foundation is shaky.  I struggle a lot these days with a feeling of pragmatic worthlessness.  Which is to say, sure I have the intrinsic value that all humans on this earth share, but beyond that my life adds very little to the world.  And I mean that very literally.  I produce nothing.  I give nothing.  I accomplish nothing from one day to the next.

Reading this beautiful story about a beautiful girl who walks through the world actively trying to enrich it in every way she can has made me sad.  Because at 16 Anne Shirley is more of a woman than I am at nearly twice that age. I grew up reading these books about these great women and I wanted to be one of them too.  But I am so far from being an Anne or a Jo or an Elnora.  It is difficult for me to believe I'm even on the path to become like them.   Honestly I'm not sure I can be, at this point.  So while I have loved visiting Anne and Marilla and reacquainting myself with their wholesome, beautiful outlook on life I find myself feeling...hypocritical and disappointed.

One of my coping strategies in life is to remind myself that I have plenty of time left and if I am not perfect today, I still have tomorrow and many days thereafter to work on it.  And that is true.  But 17 year old Anne is reminding me that time is also precious and once it is past I cannot get it back.  And I am regretting that I have spent 28 years accomplishing so little.

Therapeutical Musings

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I mentioned in an earlier post that I've started going to a therapist.   I've now been to see Alan 3 times. Each time has been unique, and at any given moment my mind might have changed about how I feel about the endeavor overall.  But if you all would indulge me, I’d like to share some of my thoughts about it.

My first visit I had no idea what to expect.  The Bishop told me to go so that we could determine whether or not I have anxiety and, if so, get me some medication to fix the problem.  I was pretty sure I didn't have clinical anxiety, but why not check.  I then proceeded to have one of the worst, most anxious and stressed out weeks of my entire life just a little while before going in for my appointment.  It was really superlatively awful, but it sort of primed me to think that maybe I DO have prescription-level anxiety issues.  So I went in incredibly nervous about so many things.  Alan was very nice, but nevertheless, I left feeling absolutely emotionally disheveled.  I felt as though I'd just spent an hour having someone poke and pick at me and try to break me down into my constituent bits and I absolutely hated it.  Full disclosure: I sat in my car and cried for several minutes afterward, and spent the entire drive down to work fighting to regain my composure.

I tried to figure out what made that first visit so stressful and unpleasant and I came up with a few ideas.  I kept fixating on this one moment as I was leaving when Alan patted me on the shoulder and said “you did great”.  The sort of thing you say to someone who is clearly on the verge of melting down (which, annoyingly, was basically what I did as soon as I left his office).  He had said it because he could tell I was barely holding it together.  But why was I barely holding it together?  Why had I been so nervous?  I decided that I shouldn’t be nervous.  I decided that I should take charge on my next visit.  I wasn’t a person who struggles to hold it together.  I’m not a person who cries in my car.  He hadn’t really seen the real me.  So next time I was going to go in there and make it very very clear who the real me is, and let him know that I’m really a normal, well-adjusted human.  And that is exactly what I did.  I told him I was fine, things were fine, the world was fine, and his time would probably be much better used helping people with actual real problems.  And at the end of the visit he basically told me “If you actually want to work on anything then I’m more than willing.  But if you don’t then why come in again?” 

That was a very good question and I thought about it for the two weeks till my next appointment.  And the more I thought the less I knew.  On the one hand, I am by no means so arrogant as to think that I am the one person on earth who wouldn’t benefit from going to therapy.  And I certainly do have my fair share of issues I’d like to figure out.  On the other hand, I was having a really hard time understanding how talking to a random guy I’d met twice before in my life was going to help me.  What was he going to tell me that I hadn’t already thought of?  In spite of these doubts, I decided to go back for my third visit.  And in deciding I also decided to commit to opening myself up more like my first visit.  I just saw an episode of Blue Bloods where Frank goes to see a therapist and after several attempts the therapist says “Frank, you’re a very intelligent man and I have no doubt you’d be able to successfully evade my questions all day.”  In my case, it proved nothing to sidestep questions, and refusing to be at all vulnerable would shut me out from any kind of growth.  So I committed to letting myself be at least a little vulnerable. 

And I did.  I went back for my third visit this week.  I talked through many of my concerns and doubts about continuing to come.  Alan was able to explain to me more clearly the format he adopts in his sessions.  He believes that there is value in simply experiencing emotions with someone, and then understanding the whys and hows of those emotions and growing from them.  Very very foreign approach to me.  But I figured that if I was going to try then I had to trust him.  And perhaps his style, so very very different from mine, will be good for me. 

Alan’s format is, rather than to ask specific questions or address “assignments” from before, to have me simply tell him about my life and my concerns and what has been bothering me.  I was kind of shocked by how hard that ended up being for me.  Some of my friends, like Matt or Kara or Caleb, know that I can definitely vent when someone or something is annoying.  But to simply start talking to a relative stranger about all the negative things that I had thought and felt for the previous two weeks?  It was unexpectedly formidable.  And even though I’m trying to trust Alan and his system, I am still having a hard time reconciling myself to the idea.  To me, it feels like I am indulging in the worst aspects of my nature.  The parts of me that I should be working to change.  If I give voice to them then that is giving them that much more legitimacy. 

When I brought this up to Alan he had some explanation, but he also said that I don’t have to worry because he knows I’m a good person and nothing I say is going to make him think differently.  When he said it I had one of those uncomfortable moments of realization that yes, in fact, I am exactly like every single other human out there.  Everyone worries about making themselves look bad.  You don’t share your secrets with strangers because you don’t trust that stranger to judge you rightly.  So Alan was giving me the assurance that I didn’t need to have that worry; that he was going to judge me rightly.

But on the other hand, that didn’t feel like the whole problem.  I understand that this is Alan’s job and that he knows how to listen to people without judgment. 

But what about me?

If I start telling someone else all my struggles and all my emotions then how can I continue believing that I am a good person?

You know that feeling that they say we all get, that we are pretending in a world full of people who actually have it together?  That voice, telling you that you are a pretender, it is the voice I am so afraid of.  It is the constant conscience who will not be silenced.  The one who evaluates everything you are and finds it wanting.  The one that hears other people praising you and whispers “but they don’t really know…” 

All of the things that Alan wants me to share, they are the fodder for that voice.  If I keep them locked up and never allow them the life of another person’s hearing then I can keep the voice quiet enough to ignore most of the time.  I can go on believing myself to be strong and intelligent and sensible and together.  Yes, I have this endless litany in my head of all the ways that is not true, but I never speak them, I never let them out.  I never dignify them with acknowledgement.  I am terrified that if I do I won’t be able to ignore them anymore. 

I’m not worried that Alan will think I’m a bad person, I’m worried that I’ll finally believe that I am. 

No one wants to think that there is something wrong with them.  We all want to be well-adjusted, fully functioning human adults.  But ultimately I don’t think there is any person so normal and so happy and so sensible that if you look closely enough you won’t find that they are a little bit broken somewhere.  I know this.  So I guess talking to a therapist is supposed to reconcile me to it in myself.  They say the first step is admitting you have a problem…

The philosophical ramifications of external versus internal perception

Tonight I was told, for about the zillionth time, that I am intimidating.  In this instance the description was used as a compliment, but that hasn't always been the case.  I have been told by a relatively large number of roommates that they found me intimidating, even to the point of frightening, for months of living together.  Bishops, friends, and people I hardly know have all described me this way.

This phenomenon is fascinating to me in a very weird way.  I do not feel intimidating.  I do not think of my self as even slightly scary.  On the contrary, I think of myself as the person being intimidated and the person who is afraid.  I spend my life oscillating gently between anxiety and awkward confusion.

My friend tonight tied my aura of intimidation to my utter lack of bothers given, my confidence in my self and my own decisions, and even the way I carry myself.  Bless his heart.  I guess that does imply that I'm not losing my eternal battle with my posture quite as badly as I thought I was.  But aside from that, the rest of his explanation is a pretty constant theme from others I've spoken to.  People tell me I brook no nonsense and put up with no bullshit.  They tell me I'm confident.  So many people tell me this.

I, on the other hand, feel like I am a person who will accept rather a lot of both nonsense and bullshit.  I mean, I like to say that I don't put up with it, but it is one of those "say it and maybe it will come true" situations.  And confident?  I question pretty much every decision I ever make.  Endlessly.  It is exhausting.

So who do I believe?

That I have these feelings is significant.  I create myself, and my thoughts and feelings are the molecules I use for that creation.  I can't exactly experience life any way but the way I experience it...if that statement wasn't so recursive as to implode on itself.  Basically, to see myself as a particular kind of person is to be that kind of person.  

But at the same time, I must distrust my own opinion of myself.  I've talked about my struggles with self-image and confidence and self-love.  I know that I am a sufferer of mental dysmorphic disorder (which is a thing I just made up) wherein the image I see in my mental mirror is not necessarily accurate to the truth.  I'd like to think that there is an intrinsic me that is independent of my awareness and opinion of it.  But are the opinions of the people around me the way to discover that immutable part?  Does the constancy of the feedback lend it credibility?  I suppose it must, at least to some extent.  

Do I want to be intimidating?  My friend told me it was a good thing, and I do strive to live my life accountable to no one but myself--successfully or not.  But shouldn't I be able to do that without frightening people?  

Another friend once told me that he would rather intimidate people than risk not being taken seriously.  I'll admit, there is a certain gratification in knowing that people so far from seeing your insecurities, see the reverse.  But I'm not sure that I agree with my friend.  That is, I certainly wish to be taken seriously, but I don't think that intimidation is the only or even the best way to achieve that goal.  And while I do like to believe in that immutable core of the self existing independently of the conscious and reasoning mind--which sometimes perceives inaccurately--somehow I also believe that that core is capable of change and growth.  Or at least, I can change the way I express it.  

The Benefits of Debate

Guys, today was an exhausting day for me on facebook.

I expressed opinions.

Ironically, what I'm left thinking about is not at all the original opinion, but how I feel about the experience of hosting internet debate on my internet words.

you know what I like to do? Express my opinions on hot button topics, inciting endless debate, and then completely disengage. At least I attempt to moderate and have pretty dependably civil friends....

but very secretly deep down I fantasize about a world where just once I can say "this is what I think" on facebook and have everyone say "huh, that's interesting" and NOTHING else. Just once. 

That's the last thing I posted on facebook, and it is very very true.

But it was also so untrue that here I am writing this blog post at midnight when I really really ought to be going to sleep.

This is how I tried to explain it to Matt a little while ago:

 Matt:  Facebook should make a way for you do disable comments on a status

kind of like how some articles can do that

 me:  I think that very often

but on the other hand

once I think that

I then judge myself viciously for being one of those people who wants to simply exist in a vacuum where the only words you hear are people saying "oh yes!  you're so right!" and no one ever challenges your beliefs on anything

deep-down-core-beliefs-me thinks that it is really superlatively awesome that I have so many people with contrasting opinions in my life because that way I get to hear both sides. but superfluous-lazy-me sits on top of deep-down-core-me and says "but debates are harrrrrrdddddd!"

And really that's it.  I get exhausted by these things.  But then when I complain in my head about all the feedback I'm getting (when all I wanted to do was spit my opinion out into the void with no repercussions) I remember how I need this feedback because I don't want to be one of those dogmatic blindered people who can only hear what they want to hear.

So...thank you all.  Thanks for helping me to be more deep-down-core-beliefs-me instead of superfluous-lazy-me.

Arithmetical Theologic Pedagogy

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong.  No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. -Terry Pratchett

Tonight I went to institute.  First time probably this year.  The lesson was essentially about getting your priorities sorted.  It was based on this conference talk about refocusing on the spiritual rather than the temporal.  The teacher took the idea a different direction, focusing instead on media consumption.

Overall the lesson was fine.  But I had a problem with one of her final statements.  She said she hoped that we all felt a little chastised by the lesson.  She referenced some quote about how if we aren't repenting every day then we aren't doing our best so we should all remember that and bring our A-game.  Aside from her use of the phrase "bring your A-game" pretty certainly placing her forever beyond my social circle, I was more annoyed with her stated hope that her lesson had made us all feel chastised.

Contrast that sentiment with the lesson I got on Sunday.  Relief Society was mercifully changed into a combined special meeting with our Stake President, who had been invited by our bishop to share with us a compressed version of his bishop training program.  Fun fact:  in real life our stake president works as an addiction counselor.  I really really appreciated everything he had to say, but what is relevant to this post is when he said that the best and, indeed, only way to fight darkness is not to try to remove the darkness, but to add light.  Though he is not the first person to characterize things in such a way, he still struck a chord with me.  I realized that darkness is an absence and you cannot remove an absence.  All you can do is fill it.

Which brings me back to what bothered me about our institute teacher's chastisement comment.  At first I thought I was annoyed because she was telling me I need to repent.  But that wasn't quite right, because she's right, I DO need to repent of many things. I am all too aware of that fact.  Rather, it was her blatant negative angle.  She hoped, not that her lesson had inspired me to do better, but that it had chastised me for not doing well enough.  It felt to me that she was attempting to remove the darkness rather than add light.

I have had this debate with some of my friends and I understand that some people respond well to negative motivation.  So I suppose what she said was a perfectly legitimate sentiment to express because it was effective for some members of the class.  But I have to wonder...while negative motivation works for some people, I would imagine that positive motivation works for all people.  Is that incorrect?

Telling me that I should feel bad for not "bringing my A-game" implies that my failure with whatever principle you're talking about is based on complaisance and laziness.  For every simple principle that one person writes off as a theological gimme, there is another person for whom it stands as an insurmountable obstacle.  For that person it is at best insulting and at worst actively damaging to tell them that their failures are due to laziness.  We all have our darkness, even if it isn't all in the same place for each of us.  That is, after all, the entire point of our lives.  The darkness may have got there first, but we strive to bring in the light to overcome it.  To fill it up.

So this is my friendly reminder to myself and to you and to that institute teacher who will never read this blog post.  This is me reminding us all to use positive motivation.

Let's add more light.

Prompt 14: A TV Show You're Currently Addicted To

I have discovered a very odd tendency lately in my TV viewing.  I have this habit of getting into a show and then just suddenly I stop watching.  I think it started with Being Human (the BBC version).  I watched the entire first season of that show in one sad and unproductive day and I was totally involved.  And then season two started and my dear sweet Russell Tovey suddenly started behaving like an absolute dick.  Pardon my vulgar language, but that is really the only way to describe it.  I stopped watching right there.  One episode in to the second season.  Since then I have stopped watching quite a few shows.  I've started and stopped watching Buffy quite a few times, I've stopped watching Supernatural, I stopped watching Bones, and I stopped watching Luther.  

This is not the same thing as just sort of phasing out with the knowledge you'll come back and finish eventually.  That is what has happened with House and with Star Trek: TNG.  I know I'll come back to TNG eventually, when I'm in the mood for it again.  And admittedly, I suspect I'll come back to the others too.  I imagine that one day I'll come back to Supernatural and get beyond season 5.  In fact, right this very moment I'm trying to come back to Once Upon A Time, a show that Matt and I watched together during its first season and absolutely adored.  Then season 2 happened and I made it about half way through before I stopped.  

There are two sides to this, I think.  The first is something I've talked about before a couple times, and that is my inability to maintain healthy levels of attachment to fictional characters.  I get way too involved and I've found that the only way to deal with that is to just cut myself off from the show.  When I start to care too much about Spike or the Doctor or Sherlock I simply stop watching as a sort of splash of cold water to the face: these people and these stories aren't real and you need to stop caring.  It is how I deal with the betrayals that come with network TV where plotlines and character developments happen that only make sense if your decisions are entirely built around gaining and keeping viewers rather than writing and maintaining a good story.  Hence my decision to stop watching Being Human when George completely breaks from character.  It's how I deal with extreme tension (*spoiler*Luther getting framed for the murder of his ex wife falls into this category) that I don't want to have in my life.  This, btw, is part of why I'm immune to spoilers.  Fun fact about me: I frequently go onto wikipedia/IMDb and read the synopsis of whatever show that I'm watching so that I know what is coming and I don't have to have anxiety about it.  This is the only way I can make it through stressful stories fairly often, and even then it sometimes isn't enough.  Especially when the stressful story starts verging onto the mangling of the story/character for the sake of drama. 

And the other part is my simple desire for stories to have ends.  One of my favorite aspects of British television is that they do not sacrifice story arcs on the altar of numbers.  Which is to say that if a show was written to have three seasons and then end, it ends after three seasons no matter how many people were watching it.  There are, of course exceptions to this *cough*doctorwho*cough*, but in general, they allow good things to end whilst they're good rather than flogging them along far beyond endurance simply to make as much money as possible.  A good example of this being the US and British versions of the Office.  This is why I stopped watching Supernatural at the end of season 5.  It was such a solid end to the story.  I'm sure that the rest of the seasons have plenty of amusing parts, but I wanted to respect that ending.  Of course, rarely do I have such a solid and clearly final ending to latch on to.  But even so, there are times when I feel like that story has ended and I have neither the desire nor the energy to carry on (see Doctor Who, the David Tenant years).  

All of this is to say that it is hard for me to give you a show I'm currently addicted to because the shows which best seem to fulfill that criteria are also the shows I am most likely to stop watching, often right at the climactic moments. If you follow me on facebook at all you know that I have cherished a deep love of Fox's The Blacklist (James Spader!!!!!) all winter.  I thought that it had ended for the summer several weeks ago, but when Matt just told me that there were actually 3 or 4 more episodes for me to watch I was not excited.  I had been ready to stop and now you want me to go back and reinvest before next winter?  Ugh!  I know they're gonna do something awful to me...  You could not get more obsessed with Doctor Who than I was (that's a lie, you totally could...) but it has literally been years and I still have no desire to dive into the Matt Smith years.  I was literally on my bed screaming (which, if you know me, is not how I react to movies and TV at all) and yet I probably won't watch the third episode of Sherlock till season 4 comes out...if then.

So I guess in the end, the only real answer to this question has to be Gilmore Girls.  The show of my heart.  The show that will never get old, no matter how many times I watch it.  The show that always soothes my anxieties and is always the right thing to watch no matter the mood.  Gilmore Girls is the show I will always be addicted to, no matter what other shows come and go from moment to moment.  And I think that is the best possible end to this long and rambly post.  

Next up is prompt 15: Something I Don't Leave The House Without

Divergent diverges not very far at all...

Guys, how long has it been since I wrote a movie review?  Since The Great Gatsby I think. Wow, that's a long time.  Probably because I hardly ever see movies in the theatre anymore.  But I did last night.  Saw Divergent with my good friend Mike.  We were both inspired to see the film after we read this article about the "rape scene" in the film (in the interest of accuracy, it's not exactly a rape scene).  Aside from that article and one other, I literally knew nothing about either the books or the movie--nothing about the plot or the themes or the characters.

So I came to the movie as an almost entirely clean slate.  And the overall reaction?  It was pretty good.  But it had a lot more potential than it actually fulfilled.

Quick summary (there be spoilers ahead), for those who want it:  Post the traditional "devastating war" society has once again withdrawn behind a great big wall that shields them from the mysterious "other side."  To maintain peace after said war society was divided into five "factions" which each are built around a specific characteristic: Amity (they're nice), Abnegation (they're selfless), Erudite (the smarties), Candor (totes honest), and Dauntless (brave).  Each faction is in charge of certain aspects of life that suits their strengths.  At 16, after taking a test which supposedly tells you in which faction you belong, you then get to decide which you will belong to for the rest of your life notakebacksforever.  Enter Beatrice "Triss" Prior, born Abnegation, but super conflicted cause she just doesn't naturally let people take advantage of her.  This is reinforced when she takes the test and, instead of neatly fitting into one faction or another, qualifies for three: abnegation, erudite, and dauntless.  This is known as being "divergent" and is apparently real bad.  At the ceremony she makes the difficult decision to abandon her family and join Dauntless (faction over blood so she's basically leaving them behind forever).  Having joined Dauntless she enters into a rigorous training program because the Dauntless are the police force.  Smaller and weaker than nearly everyone else, she struggles to keep up during the first, physical phase of testing.  But in phase two, focusing on mental training, she suddenly shoots ahead of everyone.  It is here her "divergent" qualities emerge as she is able to deal with the mental testing far too easily.  But this is also dangerous, because the better she does in the tests the more evident it becomes that she is divergent....and oh my gosh, the bad guys (Erudites...because everyone knows that heroes are strong and villains are smart) are hunting down divergents cause they're dangerous...because reasons.  Obligatory Love Interest (hereafter known as Eyebrows and Lips because his real name is equally stupid) teaches her how to beat the tests like a true dauntless, however, and she manages to pass her final test undetected and graduate from initiate to official Dauntless.  Just in time for the climactic fulfillment of the evil Erudite plan...which is to drug all the Dauntless into mindless drones who will obey the Erudite's orders to go massacre the Abnegations...because no one can stand those selfless bastards anyway.  But handy!  When you're divergent you're also magically immune to the drone drug!  So Triss and Eyebrows and Lips (who is a sort of...intentionally cultivated divergent?  it's not clear) break away, shoot some people, get captured, Eyebrows and Lips is taken away by Darkest Timeline Kate (Winslet), but Triss is saved by Action Hero Ashley (Judd), also known as her mother who turns out was born a dauntless.  There's fighting and Triss rescues Eyebrows and Lips and together they save the day and then run away with a few friends outside the wall into exile to await the sequel where they'll, no doubt, lead a rebellion/revolution. (end of spoilers)

Shailene Woodley plays the main character, Beatrice (shortened to Triss early in the film).  Ms. Woodley also played Alex King in 2011's The Descendants, which you may know as a movie that I absolutely adore.  This was the only other thing I knew about the movie and I'll admit that it was a big draw.  She had done an incredibly good job as the struggling but ultimately good daughter in The Descendants and really impressed me.  And she did an equally good job in Divergent.  Triss could very easily be ruined in the translation to the big screen, becoming one dimensional and irritating--an especially alarming possibility since the entire basis for the character is that she specifically isn't one particular thing but many).  But Shailene really managed to create a complex character who is both brave AND self-sacrificing AND intelligent.  And even more impressively, she did so in a way that made her believable.  This was augmented by giving her believable physical abilities--namely, she, a tiny little girl who has never hit anyone in her life, is pretty consistently owned in every physical fight she gets into.  Let's all take a moment to celebrate the non-existence of any "waif-fu" in this movie.  By the end she does manage to hold her own for at least a few minutes before being laid waste but that feels more like a realistic development of her abilities due to hard work over time.

Shailene is supported by a nice cast of surrounding characters.  Eyebrows and Lips seems a little too beautiful (hence his name here) but puts in a pretty solid performance for a generic character.  But my favorites were Triss's friends.  They gave great performances and their relationships felt realistic and grounded.  I particularly liked Zoe Kravitz (yes, Lenny's daughter) who looks like a cross between her daddy and Kerry Washington.  She delivered her "candor" lines believably and she and Triss worked off each other nicely.

And as the original article I linked to discusses, the movie is definitely an impressive effort at bringing a real "strong female character" to the screen.  Triss's bodily autonomy is zealously defended.  She is independent and able to enforce her own decisions.  She manages to be a fighter without being completely cold and emotionless, which seems to be a very common trend in characterizing "strong" women.  And while she retains a great deal of selflessness, a solid argument can be made that it is the product of her upbringing rather than her gender.  Overall there are some really worthy ideas that they're tucking into the film.

But guys...there's some issues.  The premise itself seems pretty deeply flawed to me, and then the specific plot was kind of arbitrary.  Apparently the Abnegations run the government because they're selfless, but the Erudites want to seize control because...they want the power I assume?  But that's never stated, instead you have Darkest Timeline Kate, apparently the architect of this plan, asserting that she believes in her cause--indeed, she is willing to die for it.  But...what is her cause?  Because being willing to die for power doesn't quite make sense.  So what is she so passionate about?  I mean, she says several times that Abnegations are going to destroy the peace...but she never explains how.  There's just a whole bunch of sort of implied accusations and nothing concrete.  It was frustrating.

Additionally, it was painfully predictable.  I don't know how many times I leaned over to Mike and called exactly what was going to happen in the next moment.  I am, however, sort of lenient with predictability in films because the opposite problem--twists simply for the sake of twists--is infinitely more grating to me.

I did find the idea interesting.  Telling people what they are and then shutting them into societies built around that one trait so that they never try to develop any further aspects of themselves has some really interesting potential.  But I'm not sure that they followed through on the full possibilities of it.  They touched on it a bit with Eyebrows and Lips when he says that he wants to be more than just one thing.  But perhaps that further development will happen in the second story?

I think that in the end my biggest complaint is somewhat more meta than just this one film.  It is a complaint about the way YA books are adapted into movies, over and over again.  Let's look at some trailers.  First, here's the trailer for this movie:

How about The Hunger Games

The Host

Do you notice how all of these kind of feel the same?  Let's try one that's a little more fantasy

Those are all pretty recent, let's look at one that is sci fi and based on a pretty classic book

Huh...it somehow still looks...just the same.

Now lets look at a trailer that was just released for one of the greatest YA books ever written, The Giver

.....


....

....

wow.  Exactly the same.

Now, if any of you have read The Giver, and I sincerely hope you all have, you know that if ever there was a book that did not fit in the "heroic action adventure" category this is it.  The Giver is about reason and emotion and decision making and many fantastic things...but it is definitely not about action.  And if anyone had, for some reason, called me up and asked me if I had any ideas about how to make a movie of The Giver I could have given you plenty.  Creative and different ideas that would work with or maybe even enhance the natural strengths of the story.  I'm not being arrogant here, I'm pretty sure that any fan of the book could do the same if they tried for 10 seconds.  But what do we get here?  Perhaps the most egregious example of the same movie that they've now been making for years, with an almost insulting effort at ill-deserved legitimacy in the casting of some big names (but really Meryl...it actually hurts me that you're in this).  Say what you want about the source material being similar (I won't argue that there's a disturbing lack of innovative creativity in contemporary YA lit), if The Giver is being steamrolled flat into the same exact movie as the rest then it is clear that the source material has only the very most cosmetic influence on the actual move.  As my brother said "we based this movie on the title of a popular book."

And that was my biggest complain about Divergent.  Instead of trying to make a complex interesting movie that excels in different or unusual ways, they made the only kind of movie they think you can make--pretty people fighting in exciting action scenes.  And sure, the book may be a generic entry into the Hunger-Games-inspired dystopian YA genre (I'll let you know once I've finished reading it).  But the thing is, and this is the most frustrating part, you can still see the echoes of interesting and unique ideas; however they're like over cooked vegetables...recognizable as something that once had nutritional value, but now just a soggy mess.  

But as I said, that is more of a meta criticism leveled at Hollywood in general.  If I set aside that overarching annoyance I can say that I liked this movie more than I expected to.  I went in fully prepared to enjoy myself MST3K style, but ended up appreciating the movie for its merits rather than its mockable potential.  So maybe go see it...but I support you if you decide to wait for it to hit the dollar theatre.

In Defense of Earnestness

How long has it been since I wrote a blog post likening dancing and life?  Too long, I think.  So I think I'll just fix that right now.

So I have this friend Spencer who is known throughout our local dance community for his rather...flamboyant dance style.  Words like "infamous" or "melodramatic" might be used to describe it.  And certainly Spencer's dancing does have more drama than anyone else in our scene--involving a lot more sweeping hands and passionate embraces than you'll see anywhere else.  And much as we love Spencer, I don't think that there is anyone that hasn't made at least one good-humored joke about, or attempted over-dramatic parody of, his style, myself included.

But say you're a person like me who gets the occasional song obsession.  You know, where you hear a song and it feels like it had to have been written specifically for you at just this moment in your life.  You listen to it over and over and when you even try to listen to something else it just feels wrong.  Well, maybe you don't know that feeling.  But it's a common enough experience in my life.  And I just happen to be in the midst of another iteration of it right now.  With this song:


In the midst of my obsession comes ULX, and I get to play my current favorite song during one of the dances.  Dancing a favorite song is serious business because you want someone who will do your song justice.  Who do I want to dance with?

The answer is Spencer.

Why would I want to dance with the drama queen of our scene?  Isn't he just going to turn my song into a big joke?

The thing about watching Spencer dance is that that is exactly what you're doing--you're watching him.  You're not dancing with him.  And from that outside perspective it is hard to take him seriously when every dance looks like the same.  There's the hands.......there's cheek to cheek connection......there's sharp turns......yep, it's all there...  It's one thing if you see someone who dances "normally" most of the time dancing like that.  Clearly they're having some serious connection and something intense is happening.  But when every dance is like that?  Well they can't all be serious and intense right?  No one has serious intense passionate dances every time they dance.  So he must just be putting it on...

Now I can't know for sure because I'm not in Spencer's brain.  But if ever there was a person who really was having (or at least trying to have) the intense passionate dance every time he dances, it is Spencer.  Or, to put it another way, he is willing to commit himself 100% to any given dance and to feel it with no fear of looking stupid or...melodramatic.  He is earnestly passionate in his dancing.

And that is why I wanted to dance Favorite Song with him.  Because when I dance with Spencer I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience dancing.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in your dancing that elevates your movement beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the dance you wanted to have to your favorite song (and anyone who has ever experienced "expectation vs. reality" disappointment will, if they take a moment to think about it, understand how significant that actually is).

Now, I want you to reread that last paragraph, but replace all the dancing words with relationship words:

And that is why I wanted to date him.  Because when I'm with him I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience in a relationship.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in the relationship that elevates your emotional vulnerability beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the relationship you wanted to have with your significant other.

It works pretty well, doesn't it.  Try it with anything at all that involves any sort of relationship with two people and I suspect it will still work equally well.  Because the core of why I love dancing with Spencer doesn't actually have anything to do with his specific dancing.  It's about who Spencer is as a person, which is a person who is earnest without fear of judgement.

 Earnest.

When you hear that word you probably think of the delightful Oscar Wilde play "The Importance of Being Earnest".  You should.  It's a great play (the movie with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett is also great).  But that play is actually a satire about the lack of earnestness (earnesty?) conveyed by people of the time.

Because western society has actually been suffering a drought of earnesty (I'm gonna go ahead and use it cause the OED says it's a word...albeit one that hasn't been used since the 1500's) that has gradually been intensifying since around the turn of the last century.  In the wake of the first and then the second Great War society was faced with a crisis of philosophy, culture, and identity.  Faith came under fire as people wondered how any god they had ever heard of could have let these atrocities happen.  Institutions and authority that had previously been inviolable were questioned.  And the continuing progression of time and events has only reinforced the trend.  Looking at all the "isms," from Modernism to Post-Modernism, including absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism, you can see the decay of western society's moral convictions.  That is not to say that morality was lost; rather the infrastructure of morality was lost.  We didn't stop believing that there was a "right" and a "wrong" (well, sort of...) but we lost our conviction that we understood what they were or who made that decision.  I've said before that World War II is a war that could never happen in today's Western World.  We lack the conviction for it.

But as we lost our conviction and our ability to definitively know things we found a great big gaping hole in our collective world view. And as a society we've come up with plenty of things to fill that hole.  You have the rise of the cult of rationalism--"I believe only in what can be rationally and verifiably proven".  You have the obstinately faithful--"the more archaic you prove my beliefs to be the more desperately I will cling to them".  But most of all I think society has filled the hole with apathy--"It was too hard to decide what was right and what to believe in so instead I simply stopped caring."
*Disclaimer: At this point my brain is seething with counter-arguments, exceptions, tangential points to make, and a million other things...but as this is a blog post, not an academic paper, I'm resolutely going to ignore them all.  I just had to acknowledge that they're there*

Somehow caring about things has become unfashionable.  I can think of no better way to describe this than, somewhat counter-intuitively, to invoke this infamous quote

Nerd culture has become strangely in vogue over the last couple of years as people have, much like the quote above declares, realized that it is a society in which it is still acceptable to care about things.  But I can't help but notice a few things about that.  First...why on earth do we have to be told that it is ok to care about things?  Why do we have to proudly (or not proudly) label ourselves "Nerd" before it is ok to be enthusiastic?  Second, even within the world of nerdly enthusiasm we have adopted a sort of reflexive, self-aware lexicon that allows us to distance ourselves from our enthusiasm.  If you're feeling brave, take a brief trek through the wilds of tumblr, imgur, or reddit fandom communities.  Nerds don't talk about feelings, they talk about their "feels".

You don't get excited, you "squee".

You don't care about a relationship between two characters, you "ship" them.

It's like nerds have to prove that they're aware that they care about these things more than they're necessarily supposed to.  Or like their feelings for their nerd-topic of choice are separate from their real, more reasonable emotions about real life.  And lastly, is the compartmentalizing of enthusiasm to "nerdy" things just another attempt to strip passion, enthusiasm, and conviction from the rest of our lives?  If nerds are the ones who are allowed to be "unironically enthusiastic about stuff", then what about the rest of the world--the ones who don't self-identify as "nerds".  Are they not "allowed" to be passionate?  Or must their enthusiams be cloaked in the ubiquitous coping mechanism of our post-modern world: irony.  Things you can't like openly you can like "ironically".  I can't decide if irony is the bane of modern society or its saving grace...

And now...are you ready for it?  Now I'm going to bring us full circle.  Back to my friend Spencer.  Who dances passionately every single dance.  I described him as being earnest.  Because I think that earnestness is the opposite of apathy.  It is certainly the opposite of irony.  Spencer does not dance ironically, though when we watch him we suspect that he does.  He is earnest.  In his dancing, in his conversation, and in his interactions with life and people.  And though I am a part of this nerdy, ironic, post-modern world of apathy and cynicism, when I dance with Spencer I get to let go of my protective shell of never being too invested in anything and be unabashedly passionate.  Not passionate in a nerdy way, that makes fun of itself as it revels in its feels.  Passionate in a completely authentic and up front way.  A way that we can't help but make fun of when we see it because we can't imagine that such simple, upfront and un-nuanced emotion exists anymore in this world.  That is earnestness.  And even if I make the occasional joke at its expense, and I don't think I'll ever be able to claim that I am a perfectly earnest individual, I have to stand up for earnestness.  Because when I dance earnestly with Spencer I am completely happy.  And I think that has to count for something.

Because learning without creation is pointless

I've been trying to write a story for the last couple of weeks.  On a good day I write about 1,000 words.  Prolific I am not.  It's because, surprisingly enough, I find fiction writing to be exhausting in a way that writing here is not.  Writing on my blog is casual--just me spitting out whatever is rattling around in my head.  Writing a story is different--it needs to be "right".  And finding the right words to explain the right actions in the right way leaves me exhausted after just a scene or two.  Which is ok.  Because there isn't actually a time line on anything and if I it takes me till October of 2015 (which is what the NaNoWriMo website is predicting based off my current rate of writing) then...ok.  Why not?

oh, it's actually November of next year...hooray!

But, it also means that today I just wanted to take a break and do some writing that wasn't quite so difficult for me.  Perhaps later I will write another scene in my story.  But for now, it is the mental equivalent of sweatpants and chocolate time for my brain.

Miley...I think you're doing that wrong...

So let's talk about the usefulness of education.  In my last post I mentioned how I'm adjusting to adult, non-married life.  I talked about my recent interest in researching fairy tales and how I questioned whether or not reading arcane academic articles was a better use of my time than perusing facebook and buzzfeed.  I left it open ended, implying I wasn't completely sure about the answer.

Well, inasmuch as I am capable of being completely sure of anything (I'm not), I will say that I am sure.

With qualifications.

Whether it is my Mormonism or just me, I have to say that educating myself, even about the most obscure and useless of topics is an improvement over entertainment-grazing the internet for babies and kittens (which is not to say that there isn't a place for babies and kittens and gif-fests).  If for no other reason than that the latter requires absolutely nothing from your brain.  And if my primary pass-time is something that I can do equally well when I am literally half asleep, there is something wrong with my pass-time.  Hence, I declare obscure research a winner!

But frankly, it's not actually a huge step up to go from facebook to obscure research.  There's a last step missing.  And that is where my qualifications come in.  (guys.....I'm sorry, but I'm having a really hard time focusing on the rest of my post with that gif repeating above me over and over...)

Ok, refocusing.  What I'm talking about is synthesis.  This is a thing that, ideally, you learned about in high school.  If you didn't learn about it in high school then I am praying that you learned about it in college.  But since I've been a college TA, I know that many many people did not, so I will give a quick summary, though I'm pretty confident that none of you, my 12 lovely readers, are these people.  Anneke, if you're reading this, bear with a non-education major as I try to explain this.  There are different levels of learning, each one implying a certain depth of understanding.  Because understanding is not the same thing as knowing.  Think of it....think of it like acting.  Imagine a scale, and on one end you have Antonio Banderas learning his first Holywood part phonetically because he didn't speak English at the time.  He knew his lines, but he didn't understand them.  All he could do was repeat back exactly what he had memorized.  On the other end of the scale you have, um...someone like Robin Williams or Anthony Hopkins.  These are men who know their lines, know their characters, know the story, understand all those things, and using them, they riff and improvise and actually create more than what is in the script.  This is synthesis, and this is what is necessary to make education worthwhile.

hey look! A little picture about exactly my topic!

It is a hard lesson to learn, especially for those students who made it to college without learning it.  So many kids would email me or approach me in class to ask "Why didn't I get an A?  I covered all the study points."  Even setting aside my feelings on grade inflation, the most basic answer is that simply regurgitating a list of facts is not demonstrative of complete education.  It's Antonio Banderas speaking out sounds whose meanings he couldn't comprehend.  To show me that you actually understand what those facts mean you have to synthesize them into something greater than the constituent parts.  Tell me why those facts were significant.  Tell me why we're studying that story.  Tell me anything, as long as it shows that you've not just memorized the information, but actually digested it and comprehended its significance.  Be Anthony Hopkins disappearing into his character so that you forget that he isn't actually a terrifying madman in real life.  Be Robin Williams riffing so much during the making of Aladdin  that they could have made three movies on his material alone.

Which brings us back to research for research's sake.  It's true, pumping my brain full of facts is better than turning it off entirely and tucking it away in a corner.  But better still than that is taking all those facts and doing something with them.  In my case, right now, I am using my research to write my own version of one of my favorite fairy tales (I hope to adapt more in the future).  Sometimes I write quasi-scholarly analyses of stories or movies or books here on my blog.  Maybe I just tell my boss about how strange the stories are.  Whatever I do, about not just fairy tales but any other topic I research, the point is that once I've put the information in my brain I need to work with it.  If I don't, it might as well not be there in the first place, taking up space.  Because not only does synthesizing your knowledge demonstrate a deeper and more thorough understanding of it...it actually creates that understanding.

Synthetic thinking is a..."higher" level of thinking than consumptive.  It takes more work.  In practical terms that means that you just don't really do it without making yourself do it.  And you don't make yourself do it without a reason.  Now that reason may be simply because you enjoy it (that is why I write this blog).  But until I sit down and write a blog post about the importance of College Girl literature I don't actually fully understand that importance.  The bits and pieces of my thoughts are all floating around in my head but I've never taken the time or energy to straighten them all out and organize them and make something of them.  This is actually exactly what is happening when you're talking to someone and you explain something and they get all excited and exclaim "Exactly!  That's exactly what I think, you just put it so much more clearly!"  What they're actually saying is "I had all those bits of idea drifting around in my head, too, but I never sat down and put them all together like you have just done and I can recognize the idea all put together there in your words!"

If only more people understood the principle of synthesis I think the world as a whole would be a much better place.  Synthetic thinking leads to an understanding of and ability to both articulate and support one's own beliefs and ideals rather than a blind defensiveness.  It leads to developments of philosophy and art and science.  And the thing is, everyone is capable of it.  It's not a "smart" vs. "dumb" thing.  If you want to be that reductive you could, I suppose, argue that it is a "disciplined" vs. "indulgent" thing.  But even then, you can't expect someone to discipline their mind in a certain way if they have no understanding of what that way even is.

But maybe I've managed to explain it successfully here.  And maybe someone who didn't quite understand it will read this and then they will  (or maybe not...I'm not so optimistic about my writing/explaining abilities).  And then, just maybe, they will have the discipline to start trying to think this way.  And I suppose that if I can manage to inspire that series of events with my blog for just one person then that will be a good day's work.

Filling the time till I die...

So...post-college life.  As you all know, it kind of snuck up on me (sneaked?  really?  whatever, we're sticking with "snuck" because I'm a rebel).  I haven't had my moment of college closure.  Rather I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the conclusions I've come to are...depressing.  Especially for me specifically (that is, a single Mormon girl getting uncomfortably close to 30).  Growing up Mormon I never questioned that after college I'd be married and making/raising the babies.  But shoot!  I'm out of college and ain't no babies up in here.  And there aren't likely to be any for a while.  Suddenly I am faced with the realization that there is no guarantee that I'm going to get married.  I may not get to have the babies.  Don't worry...I'm still holding at bay the full-on panic of that thought.  But what I am doing is trying to figure out what an adult life is supposed to be full of if it isn't full of family.

The fact is, up till now I've been living my life like a video game (for lack of a better analogy).  I've had all these benchmarks that are like leveling up.  Start primary; level up.  Go to high school: level up.  College; level up.  Just like a video game, the goals have been clearly explained and set in front of me.  But graduating from college was pretty much the last level I could beat on my own.  Like I said, the next level has always been family...but I kind of need a partner for that one.  Which means that, for the first time in my life, while I do have a next level in mind, it has become a much more misty, on the horizon sort of thing rather than a planned, scheduled surety.  And maybe the next level I have in mind isn't even the right one!  Basically, my life has gone from Tetris™ to Myst™.  Lots of wandering around and exploring with only minimal actual game progress.

well, technically this is Riven. It had prettier worlds.  

So here I am, unable to level up, stuck exploring for secondary games and sub-challenges and easter eggs and any clue what I should be doing.  The big one I should be working on is a career.  After all, we Americans are all about our careers, right?  That's what TV tells me.  You all may remember that post a while back flirting with the idea of buying a bookstore.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending) that idea hasn't exactly progressed.  But I have been thinking a bit lately about my current job situation.  As I've said many times before, I absolutely love my job.  But I mentioned that I worry that perhaps part of the reason that I love it is that it is so safe and doesn't challenge me at all.  Honestly, I'm not really sure if there's anything wrong with that.  But I will admit that I'm starting to think maybe I should pull a resume together and at least have my ears open for any opportunities.

But that means that, for the time being, the sub-quest of Job is taken care of.  I have a job, achievement unlocked, plus 250 coins (per month)!  So what else should I do?

Well, the depressing truth is that life doesn't actually have clearly delineated quests, achievements, or levels anymore.  I don't have any more socially dictated benchmarks that can reassure me that my life is progressing.  All I have is an indeterminate length of time that ought to be filled before I die.  My job is to fill that time in the most worthwhile way that I can.

Quick story.  Way back in 2010 when I worked at Target, in a desperate attempt to find some way to keep my mind occupied, one day I started asking every person who came through my line which was their favorite fairytale between Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella, and why.  Sadly, I no longer have the exact results (though I remember them generally).  But I did come up with some really interesting anecdotal data.  At the time I came up with this great idea for a research project built on that data and I was legitimately excited about it (almost as excited as I still am about my epic Batman/V for Vendetta/Sense and Sensibility analysis).  However, all that actually got done was the research about one single fairytale that ended up as this blog post.  And there it ended.

it is absurd trying to find non-Disney images of these stories...

This week, as anyone who follows me on the fbook knows, I returned to my fairytales.  Unfortunately, I have no idea now what my great research project was going to be.  But I decided to go ahead and finish researching the history of the stories anyway.  I think it's fascinating and, who knows?  Maybe in the course of my research I'll remember the overall project?

 But mostly, it just seemed like a better way for me to spend my evenings than they way I have been--either drifting aimlessly in the directionless eddies of facebook and buzzfeed, or turning my brain entirely off on TV binges.  Surely there must be more value in learning than there is in comatose internet browsing....right?

I guess?

That is...yes.  I cannot accept that nearly vegetative clicking is on par with learning; even if that learning is pretty much without use or even reason.  Because that is what my research is.  I don't remember what that project was supposed to be, so as of now I'm just learning about early fairytales for no other reason than that I find them interesting.  And that's the problem.  My Mormon conditioning tells me that information and education are worthwhile for their own sake.  But another part of me keeps whispering that simply taking in information is...kind of a waste.  After all, what really is the difference between three hours of facebook status updates and buzzfeed articles vs three hours of JSTOR and wikipedia articles about 18th century marriage traditions and the literary tradition of the animal bridegroom?  Cause the facebook time is giving me information too.  I'm learning who is pregnant, who is engaged, who is hungry, and who is addicted to instagram.  So why do I feel less like I've "wasted" my evening after the JSTOR articles than the facebook?  Is that feeling justified?  Why?

baha! this came up when I googled "what's the point?"

I'm actually still working on these questions.  Because I feel like answering them will help me with the bigger question of where is my next level up.  Or rather, with no levels left to reach, what exactly am I supposed to be doing now in this game?  How should I be using the time I have?

I would legitimately like to know what you all think...

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

How could I not write a review of The Great Gatsby?  It's Baz Luhrmann for heaven's sake and we all know how much I love him (I love him about five heaps...just in case you didn't know).  It is safe to say that The Great Gatsby is the movie I've been most excited about for the last six months (now that it is out Ender's Game officially takes over that job).  But how could I not be?  Look at this trailer!

Alas....I will say that the trailer is just a shade more satisfying to a certain aspect of my Baz Luhrmann love than the movie.  See, what I've always loved about Baz's movies is their passion.  They don't go in for restraint or subtlety, when Baz does passion it is explosive and vibrant to the point of nausea and I absolutely love it...probably because it is exactly the sort of experience of emotion I am unlikely ever to have in my own life.  And that trailer?  It is positively dripping with classic Baz Luhrmann passion.  The movie?  Surprising as it may seem, I think I could say that it was his most restrained film thus far.  Which is not to say that there isn't plenty of emotion there, nor even plenty of over-the-top visual gluttony.  But those emotions were restrained, veiled, veneered over and divorced from the orgy-like party scenes.  Thematically it is a brilliant move that reinforces the central idea of Luhrmann's adaptation of this specific story....but it did leave me a little bit disappointed in terms of a Baz Luhrmann movie experience.

This is the sort of heavy-handed passion I'm talking about.  This

is one of my favorite scenes of all time...

But never fear!  If I felt a little disappointed in terms of the blatant emotions of the film it was more than made up for in the casting of it.  I have long argued that Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the best actors we have today and I don't think he's ever given a better performance than as Jay Gatsby.  Of course, we all knew he would.  I don't think I have talked to a single person who didn't share the same moment of "of course!" as soon as they found out he was playing the central character.  Once you think of him as Gatsby there is absolutely no one else who could have played him.  And Leo didn't disappoint.  I am one of the few people who didn't study the book in high school (I studied a grand total of one complete book in my high school, and it wasn't till I made it to AP english my senior year...hooray for The Scarlet Letter!) so the first time I read this book was the end of last summer I think (or possibly it was fall?).  I didn't really connect with Gatsby when I read it.  I didn't understand why Nick would come out of this entire experience and say that the only person he didn't loathe was Gatsby...he seemed to be just as degenerate as the rest of them to me.  No, it wasn't till I watched Leo's twitchy, nervous, and intensely anxious performance that I came to connect with the character of Jay Gatsby.  He was magnificent.  I mean, right down to the smile that I thought couldn't exist as per Nick's description of it:

He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.

And when DiCaprio turns smiling to the audience in his big moment of reveal...smiling right at me so it seemed...suddenly I knew exactly what Nick meant.  But that was just Gatsby.  Though Karissa and I agreed that Tobey Maguire is possibly tied with Michael Cera as the most awkward human on the earth, I think he absolutely nailed Nick Carraway.  He has this knack for hilarious expressions that say 50 times more than any amount of dialogue possibly could.  I read an interview with Maguire about how it was difficult trying to find a way to play Nick that captured his role as outside observer whilst allowing him the space to be a character who actually did things. I think that trick of expression was a major part of that balance.  As he gets drawn into an Epicurean afternoon with Tom and his entourage his face expresses that dissociated observant quality in the midst of his own participation in the whole thing.  And even though Maguire seems to have somehow become ridiculous in pop culture (I still love him and think he is terribly under-utilized) I think he carried his darker more dramatic moments wonderfully.  Carey Mulligan, too, was magnificent.  She caught that breathy, melodramatic way of speaking that you somehow just can't help but associate with flappers.  Even more amazing was how in moments she could appear bored--old and almost haggard.  Carey Mulligan.  Let me remind you what Carey Mulligan looks like

seriously...so damn adorable

She was great.  But then, every single person in the movie was great.  The greatest triumph of this film was its casting.  

Slightly less great were my constant flashbacks to Moulin Rouge.  As Riss and I discussed on the way out, Moulin Rouge was based heavily on La Traviata and the Orpheus myth.  Now, if you were to read either of these stories your first thought would not be "Wow, this is just like The Great Gatsby!".  But the way Luhrmann decided to play the story I was constantly reminded of his earlier film.  First you have a conservative somewhat naive young man who moves into a new environment of excitement and indulgence.  He is caught up in this hedonistic world and is consumed and nearly ruined by it.  He slowly rebuilds himself afterward by growing a stubble and writing it all down.  There is an ephemeral and unattainable beauty who glitters brightest in this world of color and excitement and all men worship her.  Despite all the best efforts of her true love to win her and take her out of the artifice and corruption he fails (though in this case he is the one who dies rather than she).  The party scenes gave off the same frenetic energy as those in the dance hall. This recurring deja vu was mildly irritating, but on the other hand...this is a Baz Luhrmann film.  I can't blame him for returning to the same themes that appealed to him in a previous movie.  After all, Spielberg and Burton and any number of other big directors have been making the same movies for years.  We can't help that certain stories appeal to us.  

But similarities to Moulin Rouge aside, this was a remarkably true adaptation of one of the most famous works of American literature in existence.  One of Baz's trademarks is also the trait that makes his movies so divisive; either you love him or you hate him.  I'm talking about the willing suspension of disbelief.  This is a principle you talk about in humanities classes--it is the implicit request of the author or director or whoever that you the audience member suspend your awareness of how the real world really is and you instead step into this story and accept the rules that exist here.  Most movies cultivate this in their viewers.  They attempt to make it as easy as possible for the audience to invest in and submerge themselves in their fictional world.  Baz, on the other hand, strives actively to reject it.  This is what is so jarring to people who don't love his movies.  The fact that things seem so very insincere and theatrical and just plain contrived.  Isn't he aware of it?  The answer is yes.  Yes he is.  He did it on purpose.  See, the very idea of movies and acting is about playing pretend and building and fantasy between the actors and the audience.  At least, that is what it is to Luhrmann (I'd link you to the interviews with him where he basically explains all this but I don't want to hunt them down).  So he wants his audience to be aware of what is happening.  He is constantly reminding them that this is all a big show, a big game of pretend, in the effort to force them to get involved.  They are watching a grand play and their reactions to it are an important part of the overall production.  I am one of the people who absolutely love this aspect of Luhrmann's movie-making.  And I think that his willingness to acknowledge the falseness, the facade of it all, is what made him possibly the only director who ever possibly could have adapted this specific book--widely deemed "un-filmable"--into a successful movie.  Of all its strengths, the text and Fitzgerald's gorgeous use of the English languages is arguably the greatest the book offers.  And Luhrmann is the one director who is capable of stopping in the middle of the film to just straight up put that text on screen.  Because none of it is real why not acknowledge that the whole thing is coming out of a book?  I thought it was fantastic.

As I said, I didn't study the book in high school.  I just read it on my own last year.  I didn't have anyone forcing me to analyze the symbolism of the book so, while I could see it was there, I didn't really care about it.  Obviously the green light was symbolic and probably there were some others and they probably meant something and it was probably really deep and interesting but I'm not picking up on it right away and I just don't really care.  When I invited Ben to come see the movie with us he confessed he hadn't read the book and he asked "Is it really such a classic?  What is so great about it?" and I'm not going to lie, I told him that to me the reason it is worth reading is solidly the aforementioned elevation of English to true art.  I mean, some of the sentences in that book literally made me catch my breath.  Like, I had to stop and reread them several times just to luxuriate in their craftsmanship.  I told him that was why it was worth reading.  The themes and such were fine, but nothing amazing.  I know.  This is shameful for a literature person like me to admit.  Especially when I follow it up with the confession that watching this movie completely changed my mind.  Suddenly the symbolism and the allegory and the significance of the thematic development was engrossing.  I'll definitely need to watch it several more times to work through it all.  And sure, I feel the appropriate shame that I needed the rather heavy hand of Luhrmann to pick up on these things.  But on the other hand, I'm going to blasphemously argue that this adaptation, true though it was, actually opened up some new and different analytic options.  If nothing else, watching actors color the characters with their own takes on motivations and reactions forces a reevaluation of the characters in this new light.  My point is that watching this adaptation opened up the original text to me and I am ok with that.  

So what is my final opinion?  The Great Gatsby is pure and unadulterated Luhrmann.  If you don't like his style then you're not going to like this movie any more than you've liked any of his other films.  If you do like his style then you won't be disappointed (equally you won't be surprised...he's not really breaking any new ground).  As I've said before, Baz Luhrmann is truly the master of the post-modern pastiche and surrealism.  While Moulin Rouge remains my favorite of Baz's movie thusfar, I still can't wait to add Gatsby to my collection.