Chess, Mind games, and Infidelity

I'm in one of those hopelessly romantic moods lately.  They come upon me every now and then--wistful romantic yearnings for the passion that my life so distinctly lacks.  Silly moods.

So inspired, I was on the brink of watching Hugh Jackman in Someone Like You.  He has that great scene where he says everything you ever wished a guy would say to you while looking like...Hugh Jackman.  Plus he's delightfully cocky and annoying throughout the rest of the film.  But I decided to give Netflix one last try before committing... (though it has really disappointed me lately with its "Suggestions for you" ideas)

possibly the most adorable picture of
Hugh Jackman ever taken.  Possibly.

I already had Netflix open from where I was searching, quite fruitlessly, earlier today for something good to watch.  By pure luck, when I opened the tab, there was a movie I swear wasn't there before.  I'd never heard of it before, but it had Kevin Kline who I adore.  It was called Queen to Play, and appeared to be in French.  Kevin Kline speaking French?  I am intrigued...tell me more...

yet another entry into the grand tradition
of really wretched movie posters...

Brief synopsis: a French housewife (Helene) is living a drab life working two cleaning jobs, one at a hotel for a demanding boss, the other for a reclusive widowed professor (Kroger played, of course, by Kevin Kline).  She has an average husband (not amazing, but not a jerk) and a typical teenage daughter.  One day at the hotel she sees a couple on the balcony playing an impressively romantic game of chess.  She becomes intrigued with the game, quickly progressing into full on obsession after she buys an electronic set supposedly for her husband.  But the real turning point in her life is when she boldly asks the professor to teach her how to play.  The rest of the movie details the way her new-found passion changes her life.  Her relationships with her husband and daughter are effected, not to mention her job, and most of all, her relationship with herself.

Certainly the movie is crafted as one of those "self-discovery" movies where a repressed woman learns to love and believe in herself.  Sure.  It served that function perfectly satisfactorily.  This is my beef with those movies though; typically for the woman to "find" herself, she has to have some sort of affair with some random man.  What kind of self discovery is that?  The discovery that you lack integrity?  That is a shitty discovery (pardon my vulgarity, but it is the appropriate word) and if that was what you were out to discover, you should have stayed repressed.  Thus, I generally loathe those movies.  (This is where I go on a rant about the movies Serendipity and The Wedding Planner and any other movies based on the idea of infidelity and the fact that when you really really love someone it's ok to cheat on the person you're married to and also happen to only kind of love.  Hmph!)

Alas, this movie pretty much falls into the same family.

but...

About halfway through the movie I almost turned it off.  There was a definite sexual tension developing between Helene and Kroger.  Thus far Kroger has been a disinterested teacher, impressed against his will by her dedication and talent.  But one day they get caught up playing and discover that the day has passed them by and it is well past Helene's usual time of departure.  No big deal...except instead of going home Helene decides to stay and they have a drink.  They sit...they talk...they stop talking...and still she stays, just staring levelly at him.  Eventually you see him start getting ideas.  You really can't blame him.  She just keeps staring at him.  Just as he's about to say something, however, she gets up.  A moment later she is standing in front of a picture of his wife and he joins her.  He reaches up and touches a strand of hair and asks if she changed it.  Yes she has...and she'd better go home now.  Yes, yes she probably should...

That is usually the point where I start getting annoyed and turn the movie off.  I really don't tolerate unfaithfulness.  But I found myself in an interesting predicament.  Not only did I want to see how it all ended, but I really wasn't sure how it would.  So I kept watching.

Just so you know, the only person Helene has sex with during the movie is her husband (and lest you worry, you don't see much...the movie is rated PG).  That being said, I still would definitely say Helene cheats on her husband.  But I was fascinated with the nature of her infidelity--she has an affair of the mind, rather than one of the body.

The idea of cheating is definitely overt.  Her husband gets suspicious and follows her at one point, expecting to see her and Kroger in the midst of an embrace and is bewildered to see them sit down at the chess board.  He confronts her later and declares he'd almost rather she was having an affair.  It is clear that what is being seduced is not her flesh, but her mind.  The two of them, Kroger and Helene, are both excited by the stimulation the other gives to their mind.  Kroger several times refers to the rest of the world as idiots, pointedly excluding her from this condemnation.  Helene tries to share the game with her husband but he simply can't understand it, so as she says to Kroger, she doesn't know who else but him to play with.  And she must play.

This mental attraction is the temptation for Helene.  Her husband clearly offers her no such stimulation.  Thus, the sexual tension between her and Kroger really only serves to reinforce the connection which already has developed between their minds.  This is really brought home first in Helene's chess tournament.  Neither Kroger nor her husband come (her husband actually waits anxiously outside, terrified that she'll make a fool of herself or that his presence will "throw her off"), but it is Kroger she searches for, and then Kroger she sees in her mind's eye as she plays.  The viewer sees him at home, seemingly playing the game with her, and she sees him across the table from her giving her advice.  Truly, these two have become one.  She never even misses her husband.

In the end they do consummate their relationship.  But in following with it's very nature, it is not a physical union, but a mental one. Of course.  At the end of the movie she is at Kroger's house for the last time, telling him about her plans to go and compete at a tournament in Paris.  He is sitting in a chair and she is sitting on the arm.  Their talk turns to principles he's taught her, and then they play a "blind game", that is they play without a board or pieces, simply imagining the game and speaking their moves.  It was, without a doubt, one of the most intimate scenes I've ever seen in my life.  When the scene abruptly cuts to a shot of her kissing him and walking away, it seems natural that the sexual tension between them is now relaxed.  They've already come together, so their physical relationship, again secondary to the mental, would be much easier.

no pictures of their kiss, so I figured I'd go back to
Hugh Jackman...cause everyone likes seeing him kiss

As I said, I was fascinated with this depiction of infidelity.  Why?  Because it is a kind you rarely hear about but one which is just as dangerous.  And if, somehow, I were ever to be unfaithful, it would be like this.  The fact is, when you get married your spouse becomes your partner not just physically (and by that I mean with money, division of labor, and any other physical needs besides just sex), but mentally and emotionally as well.  Really, all of these different elements work together.  I was talking to a married friend the other day about the way physical intimacy reinforced her emotional intimacy with her husband in a way that conversation never could.  But it goes in reverse.  If all you have is a physical relationship and no emotional or mental investment then you will find yourself with no relationship at all.

Clearly, then, it is vital to remember that not only must you keep your physical lusts in check, but also your mental ones.  However.  Even more important, I would say, is this: every bit as appealing as sex is mental stimulation, possibly even more so.  Thus, it is far better, I think, to find someone with whom you can share that intellectual bond to begin with rather than fight the seduction of an extramarital bond with someone else afterward.

Really that is one of my greatest fear as I look for a husband.  I'm terrified that one day, five, ten, or twenty years from now, I'll realize that I'm terribly terribly bored.  In fact, I have to stop myself getting interested in guys who are clearly far more work than anyone should ever wish for themselves just because I think they have the potential to hold my attention long term as I try to deal with them.  That is not a healthy attitude and I'm trying to stop it.

And with that I shall leave you.  Again, I've not really come to any conclusions, just meandered about pondering aloud on things.  The joy of a blog I guess.  As for the movie, I must confess that upon infidelity though it was based, I somehow ended up liking it.  I would suggest it to anyone who enjoys foreign films.  If you are one of those people, go look it up on Netflix...

More Pad Thai and Dog Hair...

...but not together.

Not that it is particularly helpful, but in my ongoing quest for the best Thai food in Provo, I decided to try a Thai restaurant down here in Phoenix.  I'm down visiting my dad, and my step-mom is out of town, so it's been dinner out every night.  I figured, why waste a great opportunity for Thai food, right?  So I looked up the best Thai restaurants in Chandler (the suburb where my dad actually lives) and found The Mint Thai Cafe (be warned, the site plays a little blurb of music when you click on it).  It was not the number one rated Thai restaurant, that one was too far away.  But it was a pretty well rated one.  Plus, my dad said he'd been there before and thought it was good.  So away we went.

It was...fine.  I mean, the food was good.  I got my traditional Pad Thai and dad got something called "Siamese Twins" (I find the hyper Asian stereotyped names these places come up with to be vaguely insulting...to pretty much everyone involved) that involved bamboo shoots and coconut and green beans.  I advised him to get this dish  based on the existence of green beans which, as everyone knows, are the world's greatest vegetable.  I couldn't try much of his because it was spicy and I'm a complete pansy when it comes to hot food.  But what I tasted in my one bite before my tongue started writhing was very good.  Mark up another win for green beans.

My Pad Thai was also pretty good.  The flavor of the sauce was quite nice, though I find I prefer my Pad Thai a little juicier than most people make it.  These guys went quite dry, even more than usual.  But there was plenty of chicken and even egg, which I do appreciate since it adds a bit of variety to a dish that can get a little monotonous.  When I asked for my side of lime the woman brought me a dish of lemon slices.  Apparently the only lime they had wasn't looking too fresh and she didn't want to give it to me.  I appreciate that I guess.  The waitress herself was a little eccentric, but pretty good I think.  All in all, I found The Mint Thai Cafe to be satisfactory.  Decent food, decent service, decent prices.  Probably, if I ever get Thai food down here again I'll try a different place.  But if you ever need a place to have dinner and you're craving Thai, you could do much worse than eat there.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

this is what I found when I did an image search for dog hair...
not really want I wanted, but too dang cute to pass up

Visiting my dad is quite an endeavor.  You see, my dad and my step-mom own five dogs (plus my cat, which he's now trying to tell me belongs to my step-brother...pshaw...).  Cristy has a thing for Corgis, so they have four of them, plus an older, giant German Shepherd.  All of the dogs are pretty good tempered and since they're corgis it's not as if they can really jump up on your nice clean shirt.  However, all five of them are indoor dogs, all with permission to exist on the furniture.  This all means that at any given moment, pretty much every surface in the house has dog hair on it.  I find the ubiquity of dog hair in this place to be...somewhat trying.  I don't want to go to church and spend the first 20 minutes trying to pick all the hair off my skirt.  

I have found my intense dislike of doghair generally translates into a dislike of the dogs which produce it.  Any time my dad's dogs try to insinuate themselves into my affections I push them callously away.  See, that's one thing I don't like about dogs.  They try too hard to get you to love them.  Everyone knows you shouldn't be desperate for friends...  Cats, on the other hand, do a very good job of exuding the "Yes, I know you're responsible for my daily food and water, but don't let that fool you into thinking I wouldn't eat you if you died..." (this is a fact.  house cats will eat the body of their deceased owner if they run out of food...).  The point is that dogs, unlike cats, are just desperate for you to love them.  Hence, the moment I sit down on the couch at least one of the dogs will jump up next to me and lay his head in my lap and look up at me appealingly as if to ask me "Now really...how can you say no to real, legitimate puppy eyes???"  

I have managed to rebuff these efforts now for several years, but this year I find myself faltering a little.  One of the dogs is quite old and goes by the name of Jax.  He doesn't force himself on me, he just comes and quietly sits nearby just in case I should decided to pat his head.  He has taken, on this visit, to sleeping in my bedroom, not on the bed, just in a corner.  To be honest, I feel like I'm being courted by someone who is keenly aware of the sort of courtship I would not be able to resist.  I feel weak that I'm succumbing to his charms.  But at the same time...it's just a dog.  Everyone loves dogs (or at least cats or birds...whatever you have as a pet).  It does not reflect poorly on me because I happen to also like dogs.  After all, I love my kitty unabashedly.  So I guess I'll grudgingly accept Jax as my friend...

SPATULAs, Pad Thai, and Adverbials

So, I suppose I should write an update on ye olde SPATULA.  I know you all can't actually see them, but I want you to know that there are actually two posts lurking about in my Blogger Closet that were meant to be SPATULA updates.  I just never finished them.  I do that a lot.  I think there are some 20 ish posts I have here published on my blog, but there are about 45 total posts in the closet.  I should go through and clean that place out.  It's getting musty and I'm pretty sure there are spiders...

hands down...most awesome spatula on earth.

Anyway.  SPATULA.  So, Dr. Parry was fabulous and worked so well with me the entire time we were getting my project proposal ready.  He never shook his head and said "What was I thinking?  Clearly you're not cut out to do projects with the adults..." and for that I was grateful.  In the end I did manage to get my proposal finished and submitted on time.   I settled on the immensely clever and creative title of " Not the Hero We Deserved, But the Hero We Needed." Because when in doubt, just rip off a quote from your source material.  Except that I really like that speech Inspector Gordon gives there at the end of that movie.  As for the project itself, I'm supposed to be doing research right now.  The thing is, they don't actually tell us if we've gotten the grant till February.  Not that I really need the money to do this project, really.  Which is why I'm supposed to be doing research right now regardless.  I guess if I ever really need to write a paper for one of my classes I'll really get into that research.  Dr. Parry said if I find anything interesting he'd love to talk about it with me.  Bless him.  

~  ~  ~

So I've decided that I'm embarking on a quest.  I want to find the best Thai food in the Provo/Salt Lake area.  Which is to say, I want to find the best Pad Thai in the area.  I always get the Pad Thai, which seems like the best way to evaluate the relative quality of each different place I go.  On that note, today after class I decided to go and try the Thai place I looked at every day on my way to Vivint.  It's called Spicy Thai and it's on University Ave. next door to Magleby's Fresh (whatever the heck that is...they advertise their breadsticks, which was odd enough I almost went in after my meal and requested to try them).  I'm sorry to say that I was not hugely impressed.  I got the impression that it was one of those "Dudes in the office need lunch" kind of places, specializing in fast, not horrible, "Thai" food (quotes being important indicators of the quality of the food).  

My plate did not look this good...

In following with a place that caters to people on timed lunch breaks, the food came very fast.  I'm all for eating expeditiously, but when my food gets to me too fast I'm likely to assume that it was just siting there somewhat like a hamburger from McDonald's, soaking up the rays of a luscious heat lamp.  I took that picture straight off their menu, but I'm afraid that my meal didn't look even that good.  And the food itself was...fine.  Bland and fine.  I am oddly picky about the texture of my noodles, and theirs were quite good, fully cooked, but firm rather than mushy.  But the sauce tasted like the same sauce I could buy at Target.  Nothing special at all.  I traditionally get a dish of lime to squeeze over my Pad Thai, but once I got my food I never really saw my waitress till I was nearly done, so no lime for me.  Which is a pity, because that little zing would have been really helpful.  I splurged and got a brownie and ice cream for dessert.  It was chewy and sort of fudgey, but the taste was odd.  It tasted like they used butter flavored Crisco actually.  Not my favorite.  Either use butter or use Crisco people.  Don't try to use both.  The price for the Pad Thai was pretty reasonable, however the brownie was not.  Overall rating would be 2.5 stars (who decided stars was a good way to rate restaurants?  makes no sense to me...).  Probably not a place I'll be going back to.

~  ~  ~

This semester marks my first steps on the road to editorship.  I am taking Elang 223, Intro to Linguistics with Professor Oaks.  I love Prof. Oaks.  He is hilarious.  Today in class he said "Verbs are the dungeon masters of the sentence."  The other day he was talking about back formations, which is when people assume that someone who "edits" must be an "editor".  The word didn't exist till people just started saying it.  Tangentially, this is the basis of my favorite joke in Clue, when Col. Mustard asks Wadsworth what he does and Wadsworth says "I'm the butler...I buttle."  Anyway.  Prof. Oaks is telling us about back formations and he mentions that there is currently one coming into existence right now.  "Ush" as a back formed verb from "usher" is starting to be more and more common in popular usage.  As he is telling us to pay attention and listen for "ush" he suddenly exclaims "See?!  There are so many reasons not to give up on life!" 

Anyway, the point was not, actually, to talk about how ridiculous my professor is, but rather to explain that I think I am really going to love my editing minor.  I have loved everything in this class.  Today we talked about some of the basic parts of speech.  This is the stuff I thought I'd hate.  I always loathed grammar when I was in high school.  But that is one thing I can say unequivocally in favor of my two years in Russian class.  I took from that class a new-found love of grammar.  It's like a logic puzzle, trying to trace out the parts of speech.  In Russian it's all about word endings, but in English it's about syntax.  I'm signed up for two more linguistics classes next semester and I'm very excited for them.  One of them is a straight up grammar class, and the other is...oh gosh, I don't remember how he explained it to me, but I know that it was what he suggested when I asked him if there was a class just about morphology.  

And lastly I will leave you with this gem.  A great song and a great video.  Please enjoy!

A shiny new SPATULA...

I have officially embarked on a new and exciting adventure known as "the Studious Project of Academic Ambition".  I will refer to it as SPATULA for short (SPATULA, as I'm sure you're aware, isn't actually an accurate acronym but I've always wanted to have a reason to use SPATULA as an acronym in my life and since this SPATULA is something I made up anyway I figure I can call it whatever I want).  The SPATULA is my first attempt at entering the world of grown up student-dom.  Cause real-life college students work on projects with professors to mentor them, and semi-important people to look at them after, or so I've heard, and I have made it through 5 years of college without ever doing such a thing.  I haven't ever even applied for an internship, let alone been accepted and done an internship.

So what the SPATULA actually is an ORCA project.  I have no idea what ORCA stands for, aside from a smallish black and white whale.  But what it means is money to do something you want to do.  Yeah.  An ORCA project is where a student goes to a professor that she likes and says "hey, so I've always wanted to write this ridiculously massive blog post that no one would ever take the time to read about comic book movies and Jane Austen characters and cartoon anti-heroes and how they are all examples of the conflict between duty and inclination in the heroic figure.  But since nobody would read that as a blog post I thought maybe I should turn it into an official research paper instead.  Do you want to help me with that?" and he says "That sounds like a great idea!  Let's do it!" and then we sit in his office and talk a little bit more about my idea and he says "You have a lot of really good ideas here, but there are about 5,000 of them and you should probably limit them down to 1, or 5 at most so why don't you go home and try to do that."

So you go home and spend a week trying to figure out how to pick one idea out of all those ideas that is your favorite.  And after a week of thinking you go back to talk to your professor and the only progress you've made is actually the exact opposite of progress in that you've actually thought of more ideas instead of weeding some out.  So you tell your professor all the ideas you've added, and you talk for a little while and then somehow magically during your conversation you realize that you actually have found that one unified idea you want to discuss.  So then you go back home and for another week you research whether or not anyone has already written the paper that you want to write.  If they haven't, congratulations you get to tread brand new pointless academic soil.  If they have, well, rethink your idea or do it again but better.  Then, after you've done that research you take that beautiful nugget of an idea and write up a proposal that sounds really awesome.  You mention how your idea is so fabulous that you actually need two professors to mentor you.  And you really really want to write this paper.  So much that you're volunteering to write a completely superfluous research paper in the midst of your semester of required papers and other homeworks.  And then you take that proposal to a bunch of professors and try to inspire their enthusiasm with yours so that they say "Oh my gosh, we think that is a truly fantastic idea!  So fantastic do we find this idea that we want to give you some moneys to put take this idea and write that research paper.  Here, take this $1500 dollars that we have lying around and go and write your paper!"

And after they give you your $1500 dollars you...go and do your project.  You do real research and really start digging into your ideas and write the research paper you've been wanting to write.  I don't actually know how long you have to do this project, nor do I know how particular they are in the way you use your newly acquired funds in the pursuit of the final product.  These are mysteries, however, that I assume I will penetrate very soon.  Because I have officially embarked on my SPATULA.  I have completed the first half of that paragraph up there.  I've spoken to my professor and we've discussed my idea.  And as of today, we somehow managed to find that core idea at the heart of it all that I really wanted to focus on.  Are you ready for this?  The core idea of my SPATULA will be the following:

Utilizing the exaggerated nature of the comic book superhero persona I will examine the definition of Heroism and the conflict between the heroic persona and the individual will.  

Pretty cool, eh?  Can you believe that I construct sentences like that for fun? 

I'm going to be focusing on three main references for my project.  Superman, Batman, and V (from V for Vendetta).  I think that they represent three clear points on the spectrum of the hero.  But that is all I'll say about them lest I start boring you all with the subject that was too boring to be a blog post (see, it was too boring to be a blog post, but writing about how it was too boring to be a blog post was not...huh).  

And that, my friends, is my SPATULA (do you all still remember that SPATULA actually stands for Scholastic Project of Academic Ambition?).  Sitting here on my bead trying to think of something to do on yet another plan-less Friday night, the best possible idea I could come up with was to write a blog post about it.  Having done so, I shall endeavor to keep the world apprised of my progress.  It's possible this will be an extremely short saga, if I either don't get my proposal completed by October 28 (the proposal deadline) or I do but the board decides that it isn't worth funding.  Although, even if they don't, it isn't like this is a project that really requires all that much money.  I could just continue on with it even if they don't approve it.  I think that I shall.  This idea has actually been fermenting in my brain for about three years and I figure, if it has that kind of staying power, then it deserves to finally come to maturation.  

So, my friends, here I shall leave you.  Here on the very brink of a SPATULA, as I endeavor to take my adolescent existence and force it into an adult one.  We'll see how this works out...

A Minor Rant

Today I went to the photography class I have been looking forward too all summer.  I thought I registered for it last winter, but turns out I was mistaken.  I emailed the professor a few weeks ago but I never heard back.  So today I ditched the class I'm actually registered for and crashed this one, full of naive hope that I could add.  Sill, silly girl

You see, art classes are not for the general masses  Oh no!  They are exclusively reserved for Art People.  I was informed today by a man named Val that his first priority is his Visual Art students--they're the ones he's paid to teach--so they are his first priority for adding.

Now, don't mistake me.  I understand the need to restrict some classes and require pre-req's and so on.  But here are my two problems with Val's attitude.  First, he's only paid to teach VA students?  Excuse me?  So, if somehow he got a classroom full of Non-Art People they would expect him to teach for free?  Any Non-Art Person who sneaks in is just getting slip-shod volunteer time?  Hmmm...And second, if this is a VA majors only class then mark it as such.  But don't say it's an open enrollment class and then tell the commoners that they're only allowed if there's enough room.  No.  Open classes are first come first served., and if I care enought to get to class 20 minutes early just so I can add the class and your Art Person shows up 5 minutes late...or on Tuesday...well, who do you think is more interested in your class?

Which leads me to my last point.  As I say, I completely understand limiting your upper level classes to actual students in the major.  But introductory, 100 level classes exist specifically to introduce people to a discipline. The classes are already severely limited by size, why do you need to limit them further? Oh wait, it's only the art department that does that.  Unless you're in the program already there is simply no way you can take any kind of art class.

This policy is frustrating to me on so many levels.  Primarily, what if you simply don't know that you could or should major in art?  When your access to those classes is limited you aredenied the opportunity of making an informed decision.  But even more important, to me at least, are the people who know that they aren't going to be artists, but maybe want to develop a talent anyway.  Isn't that supposed to be something we'r encouraged to do?  So why is the Art Department so set on preventing it?

So how do we fix this problem?  First, and easiest, don't list your class as open enrollment if it really isn't.  "We let in non-majors if we need to fill desks" does not qualify as open enrollment.  Then, having created a closed enrollment class, make one that's legitimately open--even just a section of one.  Give Non-Art People a chance to be a little bit arty and see if maybe they're good at it.  It's only one section of one class after all...

Parenting

Admittedly, I’m only 24, unmarried, and childless.  I haven’t exactly been deployed in the trenches.  On the other hand, I would say I’ve been a solid member of the medical teams who take care of those in the trenches.  That is to say, I have spent the last four years of my life working in the service industry.  Most of those four years were spent in a well-known retail store working either at the register or behind the returns desk (do you like my attempt at anonymity for my former employer?).  Then, about 3 weeks ago I abandoned the world of retail to come work in a customer support call center for fairly sizable national security company.  What that amounts to is a lot of experience dealing with unhappy people of all ages.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two sorts of disgruntled customer.  There is the passive and then there is the aggressive.  The Passive Customer is someone who is ready to bend over backwards to make sure that you, the person who has, by proxy at least, screwed them over, don’t get offended.  They apologize for the inconvenience of bringing their problem to your attention.  They don’t insist on anything.  They don’t argue with anything you tell them.   I had a woman call me the other day who was mistakenly charged $150 more than she was supposed to and she actually told me that it was ok, not to worry about it, these things happen.  One hundred and fifty dollars she was willing to throw away because she didn’t want to be unpleasant or make a scene!  I could have kissed that woman.  Needless to say, I went all out for this lady to make sure that, whether she insisted on it or not, we did not rip her off.  I got her problem taken care of and there was much rejoicing throughout the land.  For a Passive Customer, that is to say someone who is Nice, I’m willing to go to the ends of the earth. 

why doesn't this guy work in my office?
I bet he gives great customer support

The second type is not so pleasant.  This is the Aggressive Customer.  This is the guy who calls you already worked into a rage and all you have to do is tell him your name and sound happy and he lets loose a string of profanity that makes the polyester carpeting around you wilt.  This is the woman who holds you personally responsible for, not only the problem she’s having right now, but also for your failure to be  intimately acquainted with every single other misfortune in her life which entitles her to special treatment, right now, from you, in the resolution of her issue.  These are the people who believe whole-heartedly in the philosophy “If I haven’t yet gotten what I want, I just need to yell louder.”  When I get these customers I find that, somehow, loopholes in the system which I may or may not have exploited happily just moments before have mysteriously closed—indeed, even regular channels to solutions become strangely clogged and difficult to navigate.

Good thing he can't stab me through the phone...

But what does this have to do with parenting, you ask?  Well now we get into my time as a cashier.  I’ve often said that there is a special place in Hell reserved for whoever it was that decided that it is a good idea to put a big stand full of candy and toys right next to the cash register.  I mean, I understand it from a commercial angle, but as a decent human being, not to mention the woman who gets to stand in front of it all day and witness any and all scenes, I find it to be a horrid idea.  But it has allowed me to witness numberless examples of good and bad parenting.  I have seen some wonderful examples—children screaming with a volume and power that would make Pavarotti jealous and their mothers stand firm.  Tantrums that include the loss of fine and gross motor control, hurled accusations of hatred, and physical attacks are all weathered with that particular expression that is sacred to the enduring parent.  I’ve seen mothers pass through this maelstrom and come out the other side victorious (in the sense that they drag their still-screaming child out the door without having purchased him or her a single thing). 

Alas, this is not typical.  Far more often I see a sad collapse of the parental fortress of discipline.  There are certainly reasons—embarrassment, exhaustion, or inattentiveness—but the end result is the same.  The parent tells the child “no”, the child takes extreme offense to this remark and makes his displeasure known, the parent ignores the child’s display of temper for approximately 7 seconds, and finally she snatches the item from her child’s hand, thrusts it at me and says, as though I’m supposed to collude in this failure of parenting, “can you just scan this please?”.  Actually, that is the better option.  What is far more infuriating is the mother who wearily says “Johnny, I said no.  I’m not going to tell you again,” four or five times.  I don’t even believe her.  Of course, Johnny has been through this ritual before.  He knows that he just has to hold out a little longer and his mother’s already anemic will-power will crumble before him.  It’s almost a game, one which he knows he can win if only he endures.

  Of course, all of this is really none of my business, isn’t it?  After all, aside from those 20 minutes of screaming at the register, it is really only the mother who suffers from her lack of discipline, right?  Wrong.  The purpose of parenting is helping this small, inexperienced creature develop into a functioning member of society—in brief, the mother of today is creating before my very eyes the Customer with whom I must deal tomorrow.  Therefore, I have a deep and vested interest in what sort of person she is turning out.  It’s true; most people develop at least a patina of self control and maturity that carries them successfully through their basic daily interactions.  But it is the way we deal with contradictions of our will that truly exemplifies our maturity.  Scratch the surface, tell them they can’t have something they want, and for too many people you will watch that façade crumble.  You are confronted with, not a sane and rational adult, but essentially a screaming 3 year old.  Suddenly some random girl answering a phone or processing a return is forced to take up the job this man’s mother or father never finished.  Somehow I must confront a lifetime of training that has conditioned this woman to believe with every fibre of her soul that, like her mother, I will crumble and give her what she wants if only she keeps screaming long enough and loud enough.

In the end, there is nothing I can do but take up the burden of neglected parenthood and struggle with it as best I can.  Me, the unmarried, childless, 24 year old who isn’t supposed to know anything at all about what it is to be a parent.  Not only that but I am expected to do a better job of it than this man’s own mother.  She had the luxury of giving in or even losing her temper.  I do not.  After all, I’m just a cashier.  I’m just the girl answering the phone.  It is my job to take whatever abuse is given me and smile and respond politely.  That’s what they pay me to do.  

What no one ever mentioned was that
Mona Lisa actually worked in customer service

The Dangers of Over-Attachment and Other Lessons Learned Through Obsessive TV Binges

On the off chance that there is anyone on earth who reads this blog of mine and somehow hasn't seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or Doctor Who, I must warn you that a.) there be massive spoilers ahead and b.) you may have no idea what is going on for a while...I'm sorry.

I went to a dance on Friday and I met a very nice guy who, in the course of our dance, asked me "Do you keep a blog?  If you go home and write about the dance tonight on your blog, what are you going to write?"  This question made me smile.  While I do write nauseatingly detailed accounts of the dances I attend, as well as every other possible event (or non-event) in my life, the fact is that I save that sort of thing for the private blog I think of as my journal.  Here on my public blog I write dry, uninteresting, philosophical flights of whimsy.  I suppose, ultimately, that neither of those two options are particularly ideal for a public blog, now I think about it.  And yet, here I am, about to embark on just such a flight as I ponder the human appetite for melancholy and tragedy.

The problem is that it is late and I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yeah.  That.  

See, here's the thing.  I have this problem where, when I get sucked into a TV show, I get far too attached to the characters.  Another good example of this would be the Doctor and Rose:

This is what happens.  I start watching a show.  Maybe, like with Doctor Who, I fall utterly in love with it.  Maybe, like with Buffy, I am only half-heartedly interested.  But in both cases there is one or two characters that I get attached too.  Very attached.  And then heartless, evil writers take that character (Angel, Rose) and brutally tear them from the show and my soul.

Sure, in the case of Buffy, Angel comes back.  But I'll tell you what doesn't happen to Angel.  He doesn't ever get to live happily ever after with the girl.  And Rose?  Sure, she might have 10.5, but no matter what you tell me, he isn't the original, and she's stuck in a bloody alternate reality.  And even if she has 10.5, 10 doesn't have her.  So it's still a wash.

I was crushed after I watched the season 2 finale of Doctor Who.  I am absolutely not kidding.  For two weeks I walked around thinking about Rose and the Doctor almost constantly and felt depressed and despondent.  That was a few years ago.  Then, two nights ago I watched Angel lose his soul and break Buffy's heart, and I thought that was the worst Whedon could dish out to me.  Then tonight I watched him regain it back, just in time for Buffy to realize she had her Angel back...and then stab him to death.

Here's the thing--I hate Joss Whedon.  And Russell T. Davies too.  I hate these men.  I hate them for writing these characters, these two people who share a passionate, soul-mate-esque connection, and then writing them be brutally rent apart.  I'm not exaggerating.  I feel the sort of anger, bitterness, and resentment that should be reserved for cheating ex-fiances or beloved athletes who are caught using performance enhancers.  Extreme?  Maybe.  But you read the bit about me getting obsessively over-attached to these characters, right?

It was just tonight that I watched Angel die.  I fired off an irate text to a friend cursing the heavens and Joss Whedon for the cruelty of it all.  She texted me back, sympathetic, but insisting that I couldn't really hate Joss Whedon and his genius.  Oh but I can...

But I did have to stop and think.  Because I really did love Wash, but when he died I didn't hate Joss Whedon like I do now.  And Wash was actually the dead sort of dead that stays dead and doesn't come back next season and get his own hit spin-off.  Not to mention, I didn't hate Baz Luhrmann when Satine died in Christian's arms.  I didn't hate the writers of V for Vendetta when V died in Evie's arms.  Or any of the other people responsible for all of the other tragic stories I've watched, heard, and read through my life.  On the contrary, I've always had a strange love of melancholy.  Really, I've always preferred stories flavored with tragedy rather than comedy.

This is not unique to me.  The beauty of sadness is a western tradition.  From Oedipus Rex to Romeo and Juliet, to Titanic, western society has always had an obsession with pain and suffering and love being lost.

Interestingly, this is something rather unique to Western culture.  In traditional Chinese and Japanese stories the endings are almost exclusively happy.  Certainly there are terrible things that the hero or heroine go through, but in the end they triumph; they don't die, or go mad, or lose the most important thing in their life.  This begs the question, is our cultural obsession with tragedy something we've somehow learned/conditioned within society or is it actually part of the human condition itself?  After all, with the westernization of their society, tragedy is starting to creep into the stories being told in East (at least, that is what I've been told by people who would know).  Are we all, then, obsessed with tragedy?

What is it exactly that draws us to sad things?  In ancient Greece the first drama was tragic.  To be precise, Greek drama was born as a vehicle to achieve catharsis.  They would put on productions of these tragic plays, Oedipus, Antigone, or Achilles, where the protagonist was always subject to one tragic flaw.  No matter how noble he (or she) was, this tragic flaw would doom him to destruction.  He couldn't escape his fate and he would die, often in horrible circumstances.  The audience would watch his destruction; they would pity him and be horrified by the depth of his fall.  That was the catharsis.  The entire purpose of the play was to inspire those emotions of pity and horror in the audience, and thereby purge them, if only for a time.

I could believe that the draw of tragedy is the cathartic experience.  It is the vicarious experience of some of the most intense emotions human beings are capable of; still real, yet removed to a safe distance.  It wasn't actually your lover who was killed, but you watched her lover get killed and you imagined you were her, how you would feel, and you wept.  Except...why would you want to experience that?  Why would you seek it out?

I don't think it is simply the experience of the emotions; it is that there seems to be something beautiful in them, in the feeling of them.  We seek out these opportunities to feel the most painful emotions we posses because there appears to be some intrinsic worth in doing so.  What is it?  Think of that scene in Stranger Than Fiction, when  Doctor Hilbert has read Harold's death and he tells him he has to die.  Unfortunately, I can't find the exact quote right now, but he says something along the lines of "Everyone dies eventually Harold.  A heart attack in your bathtub in twenty years, you choke on a piece of chicken tomorrow, everyone dies.  But I guarantee, however you go, it won't be as poetic, as beautiful, or as full of meaning as what she has written for you."  While Dustin Hoffman has some insensitive moments written for laughs, this is not one of them.  Nor do we write it off as a skewed opinion from an out-of-touch professor as we do some of his other callous lines.  When Dr. Hilbert says it we mourn for Harold and his newly discovered life but we accept it.

The thing is, all people suffer.  But some people suffer with dignity and others suffer without.  Suffering without it is something to which we are all susceptible, and which we all fear.  People who cannot endure are succumbing to a weakness we all could possess.  I think that is what draws us to tragedy and that is where the cathartic experience comes in; we can't condemn the people who cannot rise to the challenge because we might not either.  But the stories of triumph are an inspiration.  They offer us a hope of what we might be. Suffering with dignity requires depth of character and maturity of mind.  People who endure something tragic are exemplifying the best of human abilities.  The beauty of sadness is in the exchange between what is and what could have been.  Pain brings out the best and worst of a person.  It is poignant and melancholy and beautiful to see failure and imagine the success that could have been.  It is inspiring, uplifting, and excruciating to see a strong bright soul punished over and over and refuse to break.  We watch and film and write and read and hear and tell these stories over and over again to see what humans are capable of.  What we think they're capable of, and what we think they aren't.  We explore the consequences at the boundaries of the human spirit and search for inspiration and consolation.

Which, I guess, leaves us at a good place to come back to where I started all of this.  My heartbreak over two fictional characters from TV shows.  I'd be hard pressed to come up with any real distinction between Rose and Angel and the rest of the tragic pantheon.  I can't rationally prove why the ending of their stories made me literally, actively angry at their writers, where other tragic stories convert me to near worship of the genius of their creators.  No rational reason.  But irrationally...I love them.  For some reason I identify and connect with their stories.  Embarrassing as it is to admit, you could easily make the argument that I no longer experience their tragedies as external performance events I sympathize with, but rather as personal losses of my own.  It isn't just the Doctor losing Rose, I lost her too.  Not only Buffy was powerless to save Angel, so was I.  And then the show goes on.  The Doctor flies away to find a new companion.  Buffy goes on to find a new vampiric lover.  Life, essentially, goes on.  Next week, same time same channel, the story continues with new characters.  In the fictional world of the story the Doctor or Buffy might have had time to mourn, but I didn't.  And if I am this crushed over fictional characters, then what hope is there for me in the real world with real loss?  Perhaps this is the root of my anger at Whedon and Davies.  They force me to admit that I may not be quite as strong as I would like to think I am.

I guess this means I've not yet experienced enough catharsis...

An Unheard Voice

I just watched the movie Easy A.  I have mixed feelings about the movie as a whole.  Half of me loves the sass, the humor, and the independence.  The other half wonders about the morality, the rationale, and the parenting (some of which is awesome and the rest of which is…less so). 

But aside from the particular pros and cons of this movie, there was one particular thing that really bugged stood out to me—something that is merely a reiteration, recycled from a host of previous movies, TV shows, and books.  Here we have, yet again, the seemingly archetypal “Heinous Bitch Christian” (technically, if we want to include literature, this should probably be the “Heinous Bastard Christian” since it could be either male or female).  This is a stock character which is becoming, I’m very sorry to say, ever more ubiquitous in our culture.  It’s an evolution, I think, of the original “Heinous Bitch” in general.  You then got the “Heinous Bitch ‘A’ Student/Do-Gooder” from that, and now, apparently, we’ve moved to the HBC. 

What exactly is an HBC you ask?  Really?  You have to ask?  Ok, well, basically it is any overtly Christian character. ever.  Um…let’s see…there’s Mandy Moore’s character in Saved.  There’s Sarah Jessica Parker in The Family Stone.  There’s any religious character in any Chris Crutcher book ever written (oh, you don’t know who that is?  Only one of my favorite YA authors of life).  And then, of course, there is Amanda Bynes in last night’s Easy A.  Basically, this is the character that is incredibly vocal about his or her status as one of God’s Elect, and makes it his or her mission in life to judge, condemn, and persecute all the rest of the vile sinners in the world.  They are close-minded; they are stubborn; they are usually nonsensical and hypocritical; they are vindictive and persistent and utterly incapable of compromise or common sense. 

Now, I’m not naïve, I know that HBC exists as a stereotype because those people exist in real life.  I know that they are every bit as painful as they sound.  I even appreciate their comedic or dramatic value in a story.  I understand the value of depicting this sort of person both for pure dramatic effect (they function as such a very handy foil for the plucky heroine to exhibit her sass and independent thought) and for didactic value as well.  I read Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes some time in Jr. High I believe, and the character of Mark Brittain caused me to take a very honest look at myself.  I realized that, though I didn’t ever want to be a person like Mark, without realizing it, I had developed some similar traits.  Reading Brittain’s character allowed me to correct myself.

That being said, however, I feel a very strong need to speak out against the sheer universality of this perception.  Yes, those people do exist.  But they are not the only ones out there.  Nor, I am willing to argue, are they even the majority (ok, maybe that is an optimistic statement, but I’m going to make it).  Think about it.  Christians are a group just like any and every other—comprised of a vast variety of people, each distinct and individual from the rest.  Yet somehow, it has become acceptable in today’s media to pigeonhole this entire (extremely large) demographic into an incredibly insulting caricature of itself.  Imagine, for a moment, that we did that with any other demographic.  Imagine if every Mexican you ever saw in a movie was ignorant.  What if every homosexual was a moral degenerate?  What if every black was a criminal?  Every Jew a penny-pinching cheat?  All Muslims terrorists?

Just writing those sentences made me uncomfortable, and for good reason.  While one person may possess any given assortment of faults and virtues, it is patently ridiculous to assign those same faults and virtues in the exact same proportions as a blanket across a group of people linked loosely by two or three arbitrarily selected points of correlation.  People are infinitely varied and unpredictable.  When, truly, has a stereotype really ever explained an entire demographic?  When has it ever been an effective predictor of behavior? 

Ah, you say, we can see your point as far as ethnicity or sexual orientation goes.  But how can you claim that a religion is a loose correlation?  Religion is a framework of beliefs, which consequently, act as a determiner of behavior.  Thus, a large group of people who share a religion would, logically, share behavior.  Therefore it is perfectly justifiable to condemn Christianity as a whole based on the fraction of their population who act out stupidly.  As one Christian is, so must they all be.

There are two answers to this argument, the logical and the theological.  In theory perhaps, yes, every member of a single religion should each behave exactly the same.  In any given set of circumstances any given Jew, Muslim, or Christian should react the exact same as any other given Jew, Christian, or Muslim.  Of course, the moment you make a statement like that you see how practically ridiculous it is.  No two people are precisely the same.  None of them have had the same experiences, think the same way, or are seeking the same things from life.  And those are just differences of individuals, to say nothing of differences between sects, branches, or types (though Baptists, Catholics, and Mormons each qualify as “Christians”, it is silly to imagine that the effects of each on their members are identical…the same for Shiites and Sunnis, or Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews).  Suffice it to say, while at first glance it may appear as though religion ought to be a highly unifying predictor of behavior, clearly it is not. 

And as for those people who use Christianity as a reason to act out stupidly?  I would argue that these people have no idea what Christianity really is, let alone represent it as a whole.  In its deepest, most fundamental core, Christianity is a religion of love.  Christ commanded his followers to serve others and to love one another, even them that despitefully use you.  The people that you see in these movies and books have no understanding of this concept.  They are filled with hate, not love.  And that hypocrisy is not overlooked.  How often is this Christian character caught between their judgments of others and their own failure to live up to their own ideals?  Indeed, hypocrisy seems to be the reigning characteristic of the HBC.  A character who condemns everyone around him or her and then fails spectacularly in exactly the same things. 

Why does the Heinous Bitch Christian exist?  Or rather, why is it the only sort of Christian to exist in the popular media?  Why is it so impossible to create a character who is striving to truly live up to the ideals of Christianity?  A character who loves and respects those around him?  A character who understands that no one, including herself, is perfect.  A character who tries to serve others.  A character who is all of those things, and Christian.  Why does this character not exist?  Why is society quiescent as a vast slice of its population is repeatedly maligned and accused of bigotry, hatred, idiocy, and hypocrisy over and over and over again?  Why are Christians exempt from the same demands of respect that every other demographic is so justly accorded?  Yes, the Heinous Bitch Christian does exist, and will, sadly, always have a place in modern story telling.  But the true Christian exists as well.  And he deserves to have his story told as well.  She deserves a place in society.  They shouldn’t be ignored and judged unfairly simply because they don’t make a scene about it. 

So I make a request.  Don’t perpetuate the stereotype.  Make some movies where the ignorant douche bag is unaffiliated with any religion at all.  Just once, try to write a devout Christian character who is not a jerk.  Just give Christianity the respect to recognize that it contains all kinds of people, both good and bad, just like any other large group.  Please.

This is Arastoo Viziri, a character from Fox's "Bones".  He represents the only intelligent conservative religious character I think I've ever seen on TV.  Way to go Bones!

Impulse Control

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I walk up to my 2 o'clock English Reformation class.  I walk the same way every day--out the back of the complex, across the parking lot, up the stairs, around another parking lot, and up the hill to campus.  Once on campus I walk past the Widtsoe  building, around the front of the MARB, up between the Eyering Science and the Kennedy Centres, and finally across the quad to the JFSB.  Somewhere, between the MARB and the JFSB, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I pass this one professor headed to class. He's a short man, I want to say not even five feet, but I'm probably not giving him enough credit.  But even more than his diminutive height, the one thing I notice about this man is his giant, bald head.  This huge, white, shining noggin attached seemingly directly to his shoulders.  There is little or no neck in evidence.

I see this man three times a week, sometimes more as he and I cross paths again returning from our respective classes.  And every time I see him, this great bald-headed man, I am overwhelmed with a desire to reach out and rub his head as I walk by, much as one might do to a statue or handrail one passes every day.  I can't tell you how very difficult it is, faced with this temptation so very often, to keep my hands resolutely in my pockets.  Every time we pass I imagine the expression I could so easily call into being on his face.  I imagine the enjoyment of an impulse, long deferred, at last fulfilled.  And I smile to myself, shove my hands deeper into my pockets, and continue walking.

More music that ought to be listened to

If you are interested in the glorious variety of the human voice I offer you a few more choice examples.

Nina Simone's throaty melancholic voice makes this song all that it is:

I don't think that song will ever stop moving me

Then, in a wonderful example of the difference voice and arrangement can make I give you this cover of Radiohead's "Creep" by Scala, a Belgian girls' choir.  Be warned, its a Radiohead song, so there are a couple uses of the F word.


Then there is this, from the movie Bright Star

the interweaving of voices and tones is certainly as beautiful and intriguing as any instrumental orchestra could ever be.

And speaking of the intermixing of voices, listen to this song on the highest quality you can (I promise it makes a difference) and listen to how beautiful each voice individually is and then how fabulous all of them sound together.  The two tenors singing in harmony, and then that great bass coming in beneath...oh!  I could listen to this song over and over my whole life

The Grand Tradition of Boy Sopranos...

The last two periods of my "The Role Gender in Music and Theatre" class we've discussed Boy Choirs.  Apparently, in early England the boys who sang in these choirs were so in demand that there was a royal writ allowing boys to be pressed into service in the choirs with or without their (or their parents') consent.  And it is an inclination which has remained.  To this day Boy Choirs are still a revered tradition.

What is it about those voices that makes them so appealing.  You can argue that it was simply the archaic attitude toward women that initiated the practice to begin with, but that doesn't really explain it's lingering tenacity.  Once women were allowed to sing in public and particularly in religious ceremonies, why did they continue the tradition of using young boys?

I don't have any particularly "deep thoughts" on this topic.  I just think it is an interesting question.  The appeal of that piercingly high soprano is a real one, I can attest to that.  I am a person who will always choose a bass over a tenor, an alto over a soprano.  And yet, when my uncle played this for me the first time I nearly cried.

But this is a good example.  Here we have both the voice of the adult woman soprano, and the boy.  The thing is...there is a difference.  Listen to this

and then compare it to this

I certainly would never say that the second is not beautiful.  But you can hear the difference.  The woman's voice is thicker, huskier, has vibrato.  It doesn't sound as pure.  That is it, right there I think.  The purity.  These boy choirs sing almost exclusively religious songs.  That piercing, unwavering tone is the closest we can come to how we think that music should sound.  

Or maybe I am way off.  I don't know.  Mostly I just wanted to post these songs because I think they're some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard.  I hope you listen to all of them all the way through.  And on that note, here are a couple of other versions of these same songs.  This one has amazing harmonies

And while I do prefer the boy soprano singing this song, Sissel certainly does a beautiful job of it.

Letter from the Return Desk

Dear Sir or Madam,

I know we've only just met the one time, but I really felt like I had to write you.  I was so impressed with the way, after only a few minutes, you had such amazing insight into me.  You, a complete stranger, saw me differently than my family and all of my friends...

When we first met, you seemed like anyone else.  You brought your daughter's gift in and asked to return it.  I asked you for a receipt and you informed me that your grandson's father gave it to him and he is no longer in the home.  You told me you have cancer.  You told me that you bought it from this very store but that you had a new credit card.  You told me that you already had a blu-ray player and that, having cut open the plastic wrapping, you realized that you didn't want this camera and needed to return it.  You told me you didn't have a receipt.

So I took your video game.  I scanned it in and I told you that, without any proof of purchase, I could take this pan set and give you back $26.99 for it.  I told you that normally these digital picture frames are sold for $40.

And this was when I realized that you weren't like most of the other hundreds of people I'd spoken to that day.  It became very clear that you had some insight into my character that most other people lacked.  First you showed me how poor my math skills are when you informed me that I was ripping you off for $20, when I thought it was just $12.  And that you realized I was ripping you off at all showed me just how shrewd you were.  And when I tried to apologize, an made excuses about how I had no control over the system and there was nothing I could do, you saw right through me.

You knew the truth and you told me exactly what I was.  You told me I was spiteful and malicious.  You told me I was dishonest.  You told me I was ruining your entire family's Christmas.  You told me I was evil.  I'm so impressed at how brave you were, seeing what a terrible person I am, that you could still tell me about it.  If you hadn't come along no one would ever have known what a shady individual I am.  I would have gone on fooling my co-workers and friends and family.  They all think that I'm a pretty decent person.  But you, you who had only just met me, you saw me clearly.

So, sir or madame, I just wanted to write you and congratulate you for your discernment.  I wanted to thank you for your honesty, for not letting tact or any other consideration stop you from saying what needed to be said.  Thank you for understanding that you were the only person with whom I had to deal, the only person who had a problem.  Thank you so much.

sincerely,

The girl at the return desk