Just leave the URL!

Posted on by

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
In Sturgis, some jokesters had to remind everyone of that simple fact on April fools day:

“An April Fools joke has seven young men in Sturgis explaining a punchline that the police say was no laughing matter. They put up signs that read “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US, YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME.” ”

I think it’s funny, personally. But maybe they should not have chosen that particular part to quote…”You have no chance to survive” does sound ominous in these times.

Of course, if they’d only put up the URL, the whole thing could have been avoided.

LINK your posts, man!

_6 Degrees of Separation_

Posted on by

It is apparently easier to be charming and literate than people think. The con artist, if that’s what he really is, in this production put on the whole thing like a glove.

He burst into the lives of Upper Middle Class families and charmed them by pulling down their guards. He had learned the details of their lives and learned the little touchpoints that made him seem deep.

Culture and class is apparently very shallow, if it can be picked up so quickly.

Paul the hero was gay, too. He seemed like a bottom, one who derives his own pleasure from subservience. He wanted to do things for the people he conned. He made Flan and Weeza dinner, and even insisted on cleaning up after.

“Such a nice boy!”

The play checked assumptions, a check like in hockey. It challenged the notion of superiority that the middle class folks had about themselves.

It also brought up the issue of what the children and the parents had to say about each other. That wasn’t really resolved, but it was interesting to bring it up.

I like Paul. I like how he turns into a ghost and floats through the walls of people’s lives.

I think that the folks who were conned should have had a better sense of humor about it. What were they really harmed, anyway? Only their self-delusions had been stolen. You’d think that Flan, being an art dealer would have appreciated the new perspective on his life.

But he didn’t.

this one’s for me

Posted on by

As a kid, nothing seemed out of my reach.

There weren’t any challenges.
Well, there was one. I wanted to be able to run 5 miles. My legs didn’t carry me that far. But I wished they did.

Everything else was not a matter of “Am I able?” but a matter of “Am I allowed?”

So little was allowed. Music was suspect, Movies were suspect. Books were kind of suspect. Education, friends, people I might meet, life goals, all these things were suspect.

They might get in the way of “God’s will for my life.”

God didn’t want me to learn at a secular school. God didn’t want me to watch movies that Jesus wouldn’t watch. God’s will was not for me to saturate myself with “worldly” music or expose myself to the influence of non-christian friends.

Eating, talking on the phone, what clothes i wore and where I visited were all to be weighed in the scale of “What would be the Christian thing to do?”

The christian thing to do seemed to be to always be telling my non-christian friends to become christian.

But, as it happened, I wasn’t supposed to have non-christian friends.

This situation left me with a lot of time on my hands.

I read a lot. I had no guidance, really, so I just galloped after whatever caught my interest. Lots of austen, dickens. The entire shelf labeled “Young Adult” at the library. I discovered I liked those best.

But I had no one to talk to about what I read.

There was no challenge, really.

When I moved to Russia, I knew nothing. NO one expected me to know anything. I learned Russian when I was there, but that was the extent of the challenge.

THe trip was an exercise in gathering impressions.

It wasn’t until I moved back to the states, and got married that I started to really try to challenge myself.

I finally ran 5 miles. It wasn’t that hard. I just kept at it.

Then we moved to California. The bay area.

HERE, at last, the bar was raised.

People knew things. There was a challenge in the air. People my age had jobs, and careers. they had interests and specialties. Intellectual pursuits.

whoa. What the heck is this? I felt incredibly inadequate. My little bits of stuff, my little interests and areas of knowledge were pathetic!

it took me quite a while to rise to the challenge. I felt so frustrated, because I knew that i was capable, I just hadn’t actually DONE any of these things yet.

My self-evaluation left me really lacking. I had to compensate.

I started to. I got some stuff happening. I wasn’t at the top, but I got in the game. I got some self-respect, I got going.

By the time I left, I felt pretty good about myself. I felt like I was making progress. I had something to show.

Now i live in LA.
I feel back at the bottom. Whoa. There is so much going on here. I have so much I want to be doing, want to have DONE already. There is a rushing torrent of creativity going through this town, I want to be swimming in the middle of it.

I am not there yet. The bar just took a big jump.

I want to be part of it. But I don’t want to lose myself, either.

I have to take it slow, but I have some serious ground to cover.

I guess I just have to keep at it. A little every day.

Learning german

Posted on by

“Haven’t you been studying german? Can’t you tell me anything in German?”

“Ummm….I can tell you where the German Dictionary is…”

“You’re supposed to be learning to speak German!”

“Uh…I’m gonna do that tonight..”

“Well, you have to be able to speak it if you want to go there!”

“Um..yeah…Ja! Ja! I can speak it…

“OH sure…Nien!”

“Ja ja!

“Achtung!”

“Gesundheit!”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

Posted on by

When I first heard the French called “Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys” it made me laugh. I wonder if that little epithet is widely known in France though?

Who knows? It’s hard for anyone to have perspective on themselves.

But this article is from the Moscow Times. It gave me a little perspective on how others view America:

“It was believed that the Americans were afraid of close hand-to-hand encounters, they would not tolerate the inevitable casualties, and that in the final analysis they were cowards who relied on technical superiority”

Basically, the Russians were convinced that Americans were ultra-sanitized technowusses.

It’s interesting to see that the same article goes on to say that the Russians were wrong:

“The worst possible outcome of the war in Iraq for the Russian military is a swift allied victory with relatively low casualties. Already many in Russia are beginning to ask why our forces are so ineffective compared to the Brits and Americans; and why the two battles to take Grozny in 1995 and 2000 each took more than a month to complete, with more that 5,000 Russian soldiers killed and tens of thousands wounded in both engagements, given that Grozny is one tenth the size of Baghdad.”

Interesting. The Russians mocked America for not wanting to get it’s hands dirty. I imagine some kind of mental equation, the Russians seeing a direct corellation to how dirty the hands are to the likelihood of winning the war.

As it turns out, the Hands-dirtying may have nothing whatsoever to do with winning a war. But Russia doesn’t want to admit that:

“The Russian media is generally avoiding the hard questions and serving up anti-American propaganda instead. It is alleged that the U.S. government is “concealing casualties” (like its Russian counterpart), and that hundreds if not thousands of U.S. soldiers have already been killed. Maybe this deceit will become the main semi-official excuse for disregarding the allied victory.”

Very Interesting.

Thanks to Jamie for bringing this article to my attention.

_You are Worthless_

Posted on by

This is the best self-help book I have ever read. No matter how sorry for myself I feel, this book snaps me out of it.

There are sections about your love life, your pets, your friend and yourself. And they say it all, right out there.

Things like:
No one really likes you.

If your pet were bigger than you, it would consider you prey.

Your significant other will never be as attracted to you as they are to a person they saw on TV once.

I’m sure a psychologist could use many multi-syllabic words to explain why, but the simple fact is, I love this book.

I grab it whenever I am overcome with too much angst or self-pity. It truly works.

“M. Butterfly”

Posted on by

Hwang is a genius. That is all I have to say. This play is so insightful, cuts so close to the bone. It pulls away veils for anyone that encounters it.

I first read it in book form, and I was in love with it immediately. I was really lucky, because right after I read it, I was able to hear David Henry Hwang speak.

He seems so genuine and open. He wrote this play, but he is also kind of impressed with how it turned out. Often artists are humbled by their muse.

The basic story is a true one, of a French diplomat who carries on an affair with a Chinese person for 20 years. Whoops! The Chinese person was a man, not a woman, and even more whoops, a spy.

Gallimard, the Frenchman, was tried for treason.

Hwang takes this story and unfolds it like an accordion. There is so much to it, and he pulls it apart so nicely.

I remember him saying, during the Q&A period, that he himself had a lot of empathy for all the characters in his play. He said he understood the Asian perspective, but he was a man as well, and he understood the desire to objectify women.

I just heard John Lithgow and B.D. Wong play these parts. Lithgow gave a gorgeous performance, and that confirmed my opinion of his genius. But I hadn’t heard of Wong before. He was SO GOOD. The rold of the mistress is a very demanding role. Wow. He was good.

This play is really necessary for everyone to encounter. It will make you check your assumptions.

His Girl Friday

Posted on by

This movie was FAST! they didn’t stop for a minute.

The girl reporter, what they would have called it then in the 40s, was romanticizing a regular housewife life. She had picked up some dumb cluck man and was going to settle down with him.

But she had to separate herself from the ex-husband/editor/boss that still seemed to think he was in her life.

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant have so much chemistry, the dumb cluck has no credibility at all.

I love the heroine. She is in so much control. She is instantly in charge of every change in the situation, and works it all out to her favor.

A lot of classic movie irritate me, because the females are so beautiful and behave so impossibly. But this woman not only does things that I might do, she does them better than I would.

Bend it like Beckham

Posted on by

How does an Indian female, just finishing up high school (or whatever they call it in England), get away from her parent’s expectations and play soccer?

This movie was so great! A chick flick about sports. And it had a killer soundtrack. There was the fights over a boy, the struggle with parents, the shopping and clothes that made your eyes pop (Indian clothing is really elaborate).

There was a lot of pressure on Jess, the Indian heroine, to follow the traditional roles for females in her family. Her interest in boys seems to be mostly as opponents or teammates on the playing field. Some of the other Indian girls, including her sister, are much more interested in boys. Jess’s mother keeps wanting to teach her how to cook a full Indian dinner.

I loved the wedding scenes, when Jess’s sister finally does get married. Oh man! I am now filled with a desire to buy my own sari.

The other female lead, Juliet, shows that it’s not just Indian traditions that want the stereotypical female roles for the daughters in the family. Juliet’s mother is very distraught at her daughter’s preference for sports rather than lacy underthings.

Women are still struggling for recognition in the sports world. Somehow, it seems to be more complicated for us. Bend it Like Beckham adresses a lot of those problems with humor and honesty.

COLOR HUNGER

Posted on by

This morning, I woke up and I had to wear something colorful. The need was so intense, I could not ignore it.

Even though I was swept along on this wave of lust for bright color, I was confused by it. This has never happened before. It easy enough to recognize that–there is nothing in my closet that could fulfill the need.

Recently, I’ve stepped away from all-black-all-the-time to embrace colors such as beige or muted greens. Blue, there is a little navy or discreet blue in there.

As a teenager, I was very enamoured of the deepness of black. Black was so all-ecompassing. Black was simple, black was stark. This was the era of neon colors, so I had a few pieces of Red or Electric blue. But I loved to wear black and the other colors, becuase it set off the contrast. It was another kind of starkness.

Living in the San Fracisco area encouraged the my love of black. Black pooled in my drawers, and sulked in my closet. I laughed about it being difficult to find a particular item of clothing, because the black all blended together.

I learned to avoid cotton dyed black. It faded. Wool, or other fabrics held the deepness of the color better.

So where has this lust for color today come from?

It has been coming slowly, I recognize that. I’ve been lingering over the patterns and flower shades on the sales racks. Not quite taking the plunge, but thinking about it.

Why now?

Am I the pawn of fashion’s will? Have the designers dictated that Colors are now the thing, and I pant after them like Pavlov’s dogs?
Am I being influenced by this palm-tree and porsche city? The flowers growing year round, the huge billboards shouting for my attention with bright splashes? The dabs of mandatory paint on the feminine toes everywhere through sandals?Or, to be Alanis about it, had I finally come to a healthy place where I was comfortable with complications in my clothing? Maybe the huge numbers of people in my new city were intimidating, and I wanted to stand out.

These thoughts sifted through the cracks of my consciousness as I single-mindedly shopped for the brightest, loudest piece of color I could fasten to my body.

I wanted something that would announce my prescence boldly without me saying a word. I wanted to stand out and make heads turn.

I found the most amazing little red dress, with purple and orange and hot pink palm leaves in a pattern all over it.

And I really don’t care. I love it.