Thursday, February 28, 2013
Captain EO
A friend's post recently reminded me of this, which was at Disneyland back in the late 80's and 90's. Yes! It's a slapdash pastiche of Star Wars and "Thriller!", with a bonus happy ending where creepy robots with scary hoses turn into hose-less non-creepy robots , bad guys turn into eighties dudes with big hair, cluttered, shadowy electronic poles morph into Greek columns, and the whole dark garage-y place suddenly becomes an outdoor technicolor paradise. And--what the what--Angelica Huston is in this thing, too--and Francis Ford Coppola directed it? Weird.
Michael Jackson was just so amazing. Wow. Even ripping off his Thriller/Bad self.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Simple Things Part 2
Friday, February 15, 2013
So Here We Are
I've been living in the DC area for 8 1/2 years now. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE! Even writing that sentence is making me want to hyperventilate from the knowledge of how much time has passed and how the years have slipped away from me. And I've been thinking--how strange that this is my life. It's a good one in many ways, but so completely different from what I would have imagined I'd be doing at this point. In some ways, reality seems like an illusion--it's somehow alienating to realize what it is in contrast to what I imagined it would be.
This leads me to considering how I got here, and marveling at how seemingly inconsequential events have proceeded to change the course of my life. Flashback to the end of my undergraduate career: I finished a degree in something that I loved but didn't feel compelled to pursue in graduate school and felt utterly lost. I putzed around for a year and a half or so doing random jobs like substitute teaching and camp counselor until I found an online advertisement for a month-long TESOL certification course in Prague. And I thought--you know what? I've done some teaching as an undergraduate, at church, and as a substitute. And I kind of like it. I know I love travel, and people say Prague is pretty cool. Hm--maybe?
I prayed. And while I don't usually get concrete answers to prayers--more like a sensation of warmth and comfort--this time, it seemed like what I heard was something along the lines of: "If you want to do this, fine. Do it. Do SOMETHING, for pity's sake!" So I made plans to go. Everything seemed fine until the night before I was supposed to leave, when I was suddenly overwhelmed with panic. I'm not normally a big crier, but I think I cried myself to sleep that night.
But I went, and while it was very hard and lonely for a time, it ended up being, in many ways, one of the most joyful experiences of my life. I met so many generous and interesting people, the most unexpected and yet most exhilarating things would happen--some day I'll have to chronicle the tale of my friend's camera left on a train, which ended in the world's most odd train yard and warehouse--I learned a new language, I discovered how to be alone and take pleasure in it, I learned to step outside of the familiar and see it for its own inherent strangeness and appreciate the beauty in what initially seemed strange. I met a missionary at church who mentioned a graduate program in TESOL she was planning to enter at Georgetown University when she returned from her mission. Which got me to thinking--maybe this is the next step? And when I did some independent research, I discovered--yes! This is what I want--this program. And while visiting the Georgetown campus right before applying one winter day, I actually bumped into her. We exchanged emails, we became roommates, I completed the program, I decided to stick around, I got a job teaching ESOL at a local high school.
So here I am, nearly 11 1/2 years after seeing that original advertisement for a TESOL certification program in Prague. Where will I be in 11 1/2 more? Yikes.
This leads me to considering how I got here, and marveling at how seemingly inconsequential events have proceeded to change the course of my life. Flashback to the end of my undergraduate career: I finished a degree in something that I loved but didn't feel compelled to pursue in graduate school and felt utterly lost. I putzed around for a year and a half or so doing random jobs like substitute teaching and camp counselor until I found an online advertisement for a month-long TESOL certification course in Prague. And I thought--you know what? I've done some teaching as an undergraduate, at church, and as a substitute. And I kind of like it. I know I love travel, and people say Prague is pretty cool. Hm--maybe?
I prayed. And while I don't usually get concrete answers to prayers--more like a sensation of warmth and comfort--this time, it seemed like what I heard was something along the lines of: "If you want to do this, fine. Do it. Do SOMETHING, for pity's sake!" So I made plans to go. Everything seemed fine until the night before I was supposed to leave, when I was suddenly overwhelmed with panic. I'm not normally a big crier, but I think I cried myself to sleep that night.
But I went, and while it was very hard and lonely for a time, it ended up being, in many ways, one of the most joyful experiences of my life. I met so many generous and interesting people, the most unexpected and yet most exhilarating things would happen--some day I'll have to chronicle the tale of my friend's camera left on a train, which ended in the world's most odd train yard and warehouse--I learned a new language, I discovered how to be alone and take pleasure in it, I learned to step outside of the familiar and see it for its own inherent strangeness and appreciate the beauty in what initially seemed strange. I met a missionary at church who mentioned a graduate program in TESOL she was planning to enter at Georgetown University when she returned from her mission. Which got me to thinking--maybe this is the next step? And when I did some independent research, I discovered--yes! This is what I want--this program. And while visiting the Georgetown campus right before applying one winter day, I actually bumped into her. We exchanged emails, we became roommates, I completed the program, I decided to stick around, I got a job teaching ESOL at a local high school.
So here I am, nearly 11 1/2 years after seeing that original advertisement for a TESOL certification program in Prague. Where will I be in 11 1/2 more? Yikes.
Friday, February 8, 2013
Disappointment, Deception, and Despair
Ha! Got your attention, didn't I? But don't worry--this is not as dark as the title makes it out to be. (Truthfully, I have been a little bit heartsick lately, albeit nothing too serious, as I'm functioning at nearly 100% and I can put on a brave face most of the time. I find it's hard to indulge in too much self-pity while in my current job, where I find out students have been abused, work 40 hours a week + attending high school full-time, have serious health problems [I just found out one has MS--words fail me, so I won't even try], and are routinely fighting the depression and alienation that are incidental to relocating to a foreign country, school culture, and language. Who am I kidding with my minuscule problems? In any case, I know myself well enough to recognize that I'll likely always find something to be angsty about--it's one of my neuroses).
Back to the topic of the title--I was thinking about disappointment today and ruminating on its causes. Remember childhood? It seemed rife with disappointment, perhaps because imagination was so limitless. I remember being utterly disappointed when I saw a photograph of the Beatles. I'd heard my stepfather rave about them, but then I discovered this black and white photo (remember how disappointing black and white always seemed--in photos, movies, whatever?) and I was shocked at the utter banality of these four totally normal-looking guys. They weren't even dressed as beetles or anything! There were lots of little moments like that, and disappointment is unpleasant and even sometimes painful. At some point, the soar of anticipation and the likely ensuing dip in mood became too much, and like most adults, I gave way to checking my expectations. I was recently thinking about the French word for disappointment, which is actually déception--a fittingly misleading false cognate--and how disappointment indeed invokes some kind of deception, be it self-inflicted, inadvertent, or intentional. So perhaps tempering one's expectations is not necessarily a sign of jaded bitterness, but an antidote to the deception of false hope?
And so I thought, perhaps I'm the smart one here, intentionally blunting my hopes. I'm reminded of Emily Dickinson's " 'Hope' is the thing with feathers", which besides touting the hardiness of hope, is still ambiguous to me--hope as a "thing with feathers" strikes me as somewhat sinister, even as something that can "keep so many warm." But if the opposite of hope is despair (French proves useful again, as the opposition in the two terms is obvious with "hope"--espoir-- and "dispair" --désespoir [I encountered this second term for the first time in this sculpture--now I'm indulging in a moment of nostalgia as I recall my trip to France as a sheltered nineteen-year-old---the experience was one of those rare moments that was utterly undisappointing]--then perhaps quenching hope is indeed dangerous, or at least if carried out to an extreme degree.
But then, I don't think I agree with the deceptively (ha!) straightforward French etymology of those terms: despair is not the absence of hope, but the overwhelming of hope with disappointment--it is a surfeit of hope, a hope that excruciatingly and repeatedly exceeds reality, in contrast to a lack or shortage of hope, that causes despair. I'm butchering and oversimplifying and doing all kinds of unholy and undeserved things to a complex topic, but isn't the lack of desire--or by extension hope for a state beyond the present--somewhere at the root of the serenity of Buddhism and other eastern philosophies, where it is nothing like despair, but instead a step to nirvana?
So perhaps, as I talk myself through this, the solution for my current, silly, inconsequential disappointment, is to stop wishing for things to be different. To stop hoping, in a manner of speaking, because I seek for satisfaction in the present. I know it's no easy task--that blasted bird is hardy indeed.
Back to the topic of the title--I was thinking about disappointment today and ruminating on its causes. Remember childhood? It seemed rife with disappointment, perhaps because imagination was so limitless. I remember being utterly disappointed when I saw a photograph of the Beatles. I'd heard my stepfather rave about them, but then I discovered this black and white photo (remember how disappointing black and white always seemed--in photos, movies, whatever?) and I was shocked at the utter banality of these four totally normal-looking guys. They weren't even dressed as beetles or anything! There were lots of little moments like that, and disappointment is unpleasant and even sometimes painful. At some point, the soar of anticipation and the likely ensuing dip in mood became too much, and like most adults, I gave way to checking my expectations. I was recently thinking about the French word for disappointment, which is actually déception--a fittingly misleading false cognate--and how disappointment indeed invokes some kind of deception, be it self-inflicted, inadvertent, or intentional. So perhaps tempering one's expectations is not necessarily a sign of jaded bitterness, but an antidote to the deception of false hope?
And so I thought, perhaps I'm the smart one here, intentionally blunting my hopes. I'm reminded of Emily Dickinson's " 'Hope' is the thing with feathers", which besides touting the hardiness of hope, is still ambiguous to me--hope as a "thing with feathers" strikes me as somewhat sinister, even as something that can "keep so many warm." But if the opposite of hope is despair (French proves useful again, as the opposition in the two terms is obvious with "hope"--espoir-- and "dispair" --désespoir [I encountered this second term for the first time in this sculpture--now I'm indulging in a moment of nostalgia as I recall my trip to France as a sheltered nineteen-year-old---the experience was one of those rare moments that was utterly undisappointing]--then perhaps quenching hope is indeed dangerous, or at least if carried out to an extreme degree.
But then, I don't think I agree with the deceptively (ha!) straightforward French etymology of those terms: despair is not the absence of hope, but the overwhelming of hope with disappointment--it is a surfeit of hope, a hope that excruciatingly and repeatedly exceeds reality, in contrast to a lack or shortage of hope, that causes despair. I'm butchering and oversimplifying and doing all kinds of unholy and undeserved things to a complex topic, but isn't the lack of desire--or by extension hope for a state beyond the present--somewhere at the root of the serenity of Buddhism and other eastern philosophies, where it is nothing like despair, but instead a step to nirvana?
So perhaps, as I talk myself through this, the solution for my current, silly, inconsequential disappointment, is to stop wishing for things to be different. To stop hoping, in a manner of speaking, because I seek for satisfaction in the present. I know it's no easy task--that blasted bird is hardy indeed.
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