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Monthly archives for February 2010
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On Being Lost, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Quantum Mechanics
Not all who wander are lost, or so it’s been said. I think I’ve even got a fridge magnet somewhere endorsing that view, but—all due respect to Mr. Tolkien—I’ve decided it’s a bunch of BS.I mean, it’s an appealing thought … reassuring. I’m not lost. I know where I’m going. I’m not lost. I’m in control. And being in control, or thinking we are, seems to be a modern-day obsession.
When I was about six or seven, I went through a phase of believing in—and being very afraid of—ghosts. To help soothe my fears at night, I would look into the darkest corner of my room and whisper “I don’t believe in you. You can’t hurt me.” It was my mantra. And, as self-help mantras often do, it betrayed what in my heart of hearts I feared to be true. In that way, it was more of an incantation or a prayer, and Tolkien’s verse seems to have the same wishful-thinking quality to it.
It’s not that I’m judging the poor, wandering souls of the world. I say that all who wander are lost because, more and more, I think everyone is lost. Which is not to say I think everyone’s in a nihilistic tailspin, but, like it or not, we don’t know everything—can’t possibly know everything. Or, in other words, we’re limited. Mostly, we don’t like it … not one bit, and neither do the inhabitants of Lost. (Someday when I have more time, I’ll re-watch all the episodes and count just how many times someone utters a variation on “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!!!!”)
Every last one of the characters is searching for something. Some are looking in all the wrong places, maybe, following a path to disappointment and despair. Some don’t show much enthusiasm or persistence. They don’t necessarily even know why they’re feeling around in the dark, but they’re all at least dimly aware they are lost. Jack would deny it and Charlie would feign confusion, but deep down they’re afraid of ghosts and they know it. Even Kate can’t resist seeking the thing she won’t allow herself to want … to be known or, you might say, to be found.
Each character’s a rich combination of idiosyncracy and archetype—universal enough to be engaging and unique enough to be believable. When I watch the show, I find my own unwelcome sense of lost-ness projected onto them. Why else would I have such strong opinions on why Juliet deserved her fate and how John ruined everything? Why should I forgive Jack’s hubris but condemn Sawyer for his pragmatism? It speaks of things in me, which I see reflected in them.
Is it sad to be so invested in a TV show? Perhaps. But every week I’m offered a peek behind the curtain of human nature in all its confounding glory. That’s what we demand of Art and Literature and, ahem, Film. Once in a great while, you find it on television, too … M*A*S*H, Six Feet Under, Homicide: Life on the Street, BSG, to name a few.
So, maybe all who wander are lost, maybe not. To my mind, the real tragedy is that not all who are lost find their way to wandering. Being alive to being alive takes a foolish courage, something the characters on Lost have in spades. It’s why I love them, one and all.
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Good Morning, Sunshine
That’s how my mom usually woke me up when I was little … Good morning, sunshine! … or sometimes with singing.
You’d think having a morning not unlike a woodland scene from a Disney movie would be a kid’s dream, but I am not a morning person and never was. (Apparently, I had to be roused even on Christmas.)
And yet, here I am … at 5:15 in the ayem, making a stab at writing a post. Commitment. That’s what it’s all about. Also, there’s no I in TEAM. No … something about sweat or perspiration or pain … I forget now.
After a day of working with words for work, the coming home and writing is quite a challenge. My new thing is to get up early and write a little before my life force has been sapped by a thankless world. The results may be terse, surly, difficult to follow, or all of the above.
Forewarned is forearmed.
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That Thing You Love
This is how you use stereotypical gender roles to sell shit.
(via Salon)
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Small Women
I’ve been told the process of blogging can be obscure and shrouded in mystery. Well, here’s your inside pass:
That is exactly what blogging looks like. Exactly.
Oh, my. I’m afraid I may have wasted your time with this one. However, I did spare you the series in which I fashioned a burka from my hair. Don’t say I think only of myself.
In other news, I finally got around to seeing Julie & Julia, which I’d been wanting to see for a while. I thought the movie might be galvanizing or inspirational or something, as a blogger. Instead, it only made me acutely aware that, in spite of my burgeoning Buddhist sympathies, I am still more than capable of envy. Also, pettiness. I could go on, but you get the idea … I’m an ugly soul with a heart of pitch and never, ever prone to hyperbole.
I’m not sure why I even looked to a movie for inspiration to write in the first place. I should have been reading Little Women … or watching the movie, at the very least.
Fictionalized blogging superstars aside, it’s taking a little getting used to … writing again. For the most part, it’s like riding a bike, except—as illustrated above—much more sedentary. The sea legs they are on order, though. I’ll let you know when they arrive.
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Shorts: You Read My (Fucking) Mind
As is my custom, I completely denied the existence of the Super Bowl this year. I care nothing whatsoever about or for professional sports, and I can’t really see the sense in watching a program simply to see the commercials I otherwise go to great lengths to avoid.
Still, in spite of my strict adherence to non-TV TV-watching, Hulu managed to slip the Dodge “Man’s Last Stand” ad by me. My reaction was somewhat football related, in that it resembled the cry Charlie Brown lets out after Lucy’s punt prank: AAUGH! In other words, I bitterly regretted my decision not to invest in a TV Brick.
While I toyed with the idea of writing a post about my objections—on both pro-woman and pro-man … er, humanist grounds, this parody of the commercial proves that 16 fps × 1:14 is worth ≈ 1000 words.
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Love’s Not
It’s popular nowadays to reject Valentine’s Day as a bane of commercialism or as a vehicle for demanding conformity to societal norms around love. I don’t necessarily disagree with either sentiment, but to imagine that commercialism or pressure to conform are limited to February 14 seems exceedingly naive … dangerous even. (Um, Christmas?!?)
To me, Valentine’s Day is what we make of it. It can be a curse, no doubt. (We’ve all been there, yes?) It can also be a pleasant reminder of what we might do each and every day: love one another.
So, while today may or may not resemble a Judd Apatow movie, we all have someone who loves us and, more importantly, someone who cherishes the love we give.
In that spirit, I offer what is maybe one of the most famous sonnets … nay, one of the most famous love poems of all time, by my boy Willie Shakes.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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Magic Eye
It’s been a long time since I wrote about Alvin and his Sno-Balls, so I’m not sure exactly what reminded me of him … or the mixed-up files of Julie Myerson, which … as the Brits are apparently fond of saying … caused a “furour” last year. (Oh, the Brits and their extra vowels.)
Maybe it’s because I’ve been grappling with the question of what to write about now that I’ve forgone anonymity. Don’t get me wrong … for once, I’m brimming with happenings and topics I want to write about. With my commitment to post regularly and authentically, though, I’m left with few defenses when the truth becomes too truthy. At such times, the ethics around writing become more than conceptual dinner party blather.
Though, to my mind, the former is less egregious than the latter, my exploitation of Alvin and Myerson’s of her kids are two points on a continuum, one that cuts across every form of writing. Case in point, I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway that claimed nearly all his major characters were based on friends, family, colleagues or lovers, some of whom felt deeply betrayed and misrepresented. I mean, if Papa himself couldn’t write without implicating his intimates, is it even possible?
In six or so years of blogging, only one person has complained to me about a breach of trust, related to a series of posts on my old blog called “63 Things I’ve Learned Since …” um … they were about things I’d learned since I got divorced. The non-truncated name for the series was my characterization of the end of my marriage, stated in factual, if somewhat inflammatory terms, and … well, my ex-husband took umbrage.
At the time, I sincerely believed my motives were, if not pure, certainly not sinister. Now, it all seems more nebulous. My stated aim in writing about the muckiness—in that way—was to process and exorcise the bountiful feelings aroused by said muckiness. I guess, more than anything, I hoped that by setting out to write about the things I’d learned, I might actually learn something.
But the cold truth is, a lot of what we describe as things we’ve learned are just stories we tell ourselves to make sense of experience, which doesn’t ever make sense … not entirely. You see, the meaning of it all is only as strong as the stories themselves.
Stuff we’ve learned can be articulated. It may only capture part of the truth, but we can explain it to our friends … write blog posts about it. Stuff we’ve learned is well suited to whiteboards and crib sheets. It’s orderly, this stuff. Factoids. Rules. Theorems. But stuff we learn can be tenuous, vulnerable … to memory loss, flaws in logic, misinformation, insufficient data, to name a few.
On the other hand, there’s the stuff we know. Stuff we know can be talked around and hinted at, but rarely pinned down. It’s what stuff we learn wants to be when it grows up. Stuff we know lives in our art and music and bad high school poetry. While it’s easy to refute and often mocked, stuff we know is unshakable. It’s not beholden to a story. It just is … sometimes in spite of all we’ve learned.
So, where’s the line between being considerate of others and being self-abnegating? How do you know if you’re protecting others in remaining silent or hiding from yourself? What’s the difference between being inconsiderate and passive-aggressive, honest and brutally honest? Or, to make it less hypothetical, if I had it to do over, would I write about what happened with my ex in quite the same way?
It’s an impossible question, of course. They all are. But I wonder all the same.
A novella I wrote begins:
This is the story of my father and my father’s father and all the fathers before that, and so the story of me.
That sentiment still rings true to me, ten years after writing it. To a large extent, I think we are our stories and the stories of those around us … well, the ones we ascribe to them, anyway.
Everyone has their own story, and I’ve yet to find someone who was not the hero of his.
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Name's Kirsten. I'm a splitter of hairs, a hillbilly, a rock horns devotee, an ellipses-lovin' fool, and queen of the conceptual jinx. I'm also a geek and the grateful human of littleblackdog. I do this and that and some of the other … up to and including writing this here blog.
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cheese for dinner by kirsten k. hammann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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