Sunday, December 21, 2008

Wait, Sarah!

Forgot to mention this gem last night. So it took hours for me to convince Aaron to stay in his little bed last night, and just when I thought he'd fallen asleep, he poked his head around the corner. I said, "Aaron, I'll snuggle with you but you HAVE to be in bed first, okay?" and he said, "Wait, Sarah! I have to tell you about Baby Jesus!"

This kid just kills me. How can I send him to bed when it's four days till Christmas and he wants to talk about Baby Jesus?

Monday, December 1, 2008

I'm well equipped for the world, I'm not delicate.

Then I lay in the sun on the floor of the terrace. A full hour of deep contentment—followed by unease and restlessness. I feel something nagging at me, boring into me. I can’t go on living like a plant; I need to move, I have to act, start doing something. I feel as though I’ve been dealt a good hand of cards but don’t know whether I’ll be able to play them. And who am I playing with? The worst thing of all at the moment is our being so cut off.

. . .

On the one hand, things are looking pretty good for me. I’m healthy and refreshed. Nothing has harmed me physically. I feel extremely well armed for life, as if I had webbed feet for the mud, as if my fiber were especially supple and strong. I’m well equipped for the world, I’m not delicate. On the other hand, there are multiple minuses. I don’t know what in the world I should do. No one really needs me; I’m simply floating around, waiting, with neither goal nor task in sight. ... Still, the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.




A WOMAN IN BERLIN. ANONYMOUS.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

I need to stop nodding off in Brit Lit... it's dangerous.

TA: So, let’s go to... Sarah for the definition of “sublime” as given by the Professor in class…

Me: Wow. This is sad. I have... um... Sublime. The Prof contrasted its power to move the subject with beauty’s power to charm… that’s a quote from Immanuel Kant… and then I just have some dirty lyrics from the, uh, from Monty Python’s, um, philosopher drinking song… You know… Immanuel Kant was a real…uh, philosopher.”

Come on, you know the song…
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could drink you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietszche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist;
Socrates himself was permanently pissed…

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

This side of November fourth.

I don’t think I really believe it yet. Last night I know I couldn’t grasp it and this morning it’s still just beyond my reach.

A friend and I drove through downtown Madison just before midnight last night. Wisconsin went 56% for Mr. Obama (our county nearly 75%!), and the whole city was lit up, the streets alive with excitement and noisy with cheers and car horns. And I sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled all the way down and I don’t think I ever fully appreciated all the possibility in the world until last night.

There is still a lot to be nervous about this morning. The problems that face our nation did not dissolve with Obama’s victory. Don’t change “Yes We Can” to “Yes We Did” just yet. This is just the beginning. We have been given the opportunity to begin, to give of ourselves and our time for good and worthwhile causes, to rehabilitate our country at home and in the eyes of the world, to do, in the words of the New York Times, “those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world… to identify all of the ways that Americans’ basic rights and fundamental values have been violated and rein that dark work back in… Mr. Obama inherits a terrible legacy.”

Garrison Keillor wrote this morning that Barack Obama has been “elevated to sainthood and now [is] expected to walk on water and turn it into wine. Meanwhile, everything he said about the national mess is utterly true and a lot more.”

So it won’t be easy. This victory alone is not the change we seek — it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you. If we put down our signs and close our front doors and our hearts now, what will come of this historic moment? Keep us mobilized in the service of hope and the greater good, Obama. Give us meaningful work and we will do it.



My favorite passage from Barack Obama’s speech came near the end:

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends... Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." And, to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president, too.

And this made us all laugh: Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. XD.


I am so excited for the next four years to begin.

Monday, October 20, 2008

But the really right answer is: What if he is?

"I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be president?"

Finally, someone said it. Thank you, Mr. Powell.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Tonight the sun goes down.

Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past--this would hardly have been remarkable. But we have become stidently insistent--in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities--that the past has nothing of interest to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. Writing in the nineties and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by this perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking to actively forget rather than to remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.

[...]

Americans have forgotten the meaning of war. In part this is, perhaps, because the impact of war in the twentieth century, though global in reach, was not everywhere the same. For most of continental Europe and much of Asia, the twentieth century, at least until the 1970s, was a time of virtually unbroken war: continental war, colonial war, civil war. War in the last century signified occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and mass murder. Countries that lost wars often lost population, territory, security and independence. But even those countries that emerged formally victorious had similar experiences and usually remembered war much as the losers did. [...] Compared with the other major twentieth-century combatants, the U.S. lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties. As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced country that still glorifies and exalts the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. America's politicians and statesmen surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; its commentators mock and scorn countries that hesitate to engage themselves in armed conflict. It is this differential recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the U.S. and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their contrasting responses to international affairs today.


/ / / / /


"I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great and widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world."



REAPPRAISALS. TONY JUDT.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

It will wear off.

“Richard didn’t warn us you’d be this young,” said the woman.

Her husband said, “It will wear off,” and his wife laughed.

I considered the word ‘warn’: was I that dangerous? Only in the way that sheep are, I suppose. So dumb they jeopardize themselves, and get stuck on cliffs or cornered by wolves, and some custodian has to risk his neck to get them out of trouble.


MARGARET ATWOOD. THE BLIND ASSASSIN.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Keeping up with the three-year-old busy body.

Yesterday, I worked six-and-a-half hours and babysat six-and-a-half hours and had a very small taste of what it might be like to be a working mom… for twelve hours. I hope one inherits a wealth of energy, etc., somewhere along the path to motherhood, because I came home one tired 21-year-old.

We...
- Looked for “Lightning McQueen lookalikes” (that is, snazzy red sports cars).
- Constructed a terrific fort out of pillows, blankets, and cushions.
- Drew sidewalk rainbows out of chalk.
- Read lots of books about trucks and airplanes.
- Walked twice around the subdivision – well, I walked and Aaron sat in his little red wagon and took great pleasure in dropping things out of it so that I had to stop and gather them up.
- Pretended to be asleep so that Aaron could leap out from under the bed and scare me. He did manage to surprise me the last time—by dumping an entire cup of ice-water on me!
- Reenacted, in great detail, that one scene from Monster’s Inc. where the monster comes back to the factory with a child’s sock on his shoulder…
- Turned me off hot dogs forever, as if The Jungle had not already done the job properly. A.B.C. hot dogs are far grosser than hot dogs fresh out of the package. Yuck.
- Found it impossible to be mad at Aaron for his few less than adorable habits. He sits on my lap, and showers me with kisses, and tells me he loves me, and gives great hugs. That cancels out all offenses. Even ones involving food that's already been chewed.
- Watched the first half of The Little Mermaid. Every time Scuttle the seagull made an appearance, Aaron tipped over giggling.
- Allowed Aaron to mend my “injured” knee with a plastic scalpel and scotch tape.
- Ate strawberry popsicles outside on the grass, because that house is near immaculate with a lot of near-white carpeting, and I am taking no chances.

I only managed to convince Aaron to hole up in his room for the night by presenting him with a fragile (invisible) egg. I instructed him to lay on top of it to keep it warm, but added that he had to lie very, very still and be very, very quiet. I don’t expect this to work again, but last night it did!

Friday, August 15, 2008

Look, I can draw big penis!

There is a gigantic pink penis right outside the church's front doors, and I didn't draw it, but it's my fault. I gave Aaron chalk, and while I was drawing friendly sharks and schools of purple fish, Aaron was drawing what I thought were eels, until he said, "Look! I can draw big penis!" It had better rain before church tomorrow morning...!

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The hurricanes are on the run.

A few brief quotes lifted from Al Gore's The Assault on Reason:

● “In order to conquer our fear and walk boldly forward on the path that lies before us, we have to insist on a higher level of honesty in America’s political discourse. When we make big mistakes in America, it is usually because the people have not been given an honest accounting of the choices before us. It also is usually because too many leaders in both parties who knew better did not have the courage to do better.”

● “As a world community, we must prove that we are wise enough to control what we have been smart enough to create.”

● “The truth is that American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what I called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas. It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in believing that something has gone fundamentally wrong.” / “This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, when he visited CNN’s Crossfire: There should be a distinction between news and entertainment. It really matters. The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.”

● “Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reason are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason.” / “It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. In spite of the dangers they confronted, they faithfully protected our freedoms. It is up to us to do the same. […] Yet something is palpably different today. Why in the early years of the twenty-first century are we so much more vulnerable to the politics of fear? There have always been leaders willing to fan public anxieties in order to present themselves as protectors of the fearful. Demagogues have always promised security in return for the surrender of freedom. Why do we seem to be responding differently today? […] The single most surprising new element in America’s national conversation is the prominence and intensity of constant fear. Moreover, there is an uncharacteristic and persistent confusion about the sources of that fear; we seem to be having unusual difficulty in distinguishing between illusory threats and legitimate ones. […] How could our nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics? A free press is supposed to function as our democracy’s immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” So what happened? Why does our immune system no longer operate as it once did? […] The public sphere is simply no longer as open to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals as it was when America was founded.”

● “Simplicity is always more appealing than complexity, and faith is always more comforting than doubt. Both religious faith and uncomplicated explanations of the world are even more highly valued at a time of great fear. Moreover, during times of great uncertainty and public anxiety, any leader who combines simplistic policies with claims of divine guidance is more likely to escape difficult questions based on glaring logical flaws in his arguments. […] There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, and his lack of curiosity about any new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he is supposed to wrestle with on behalf of the country. Yet Bush’s incuriosity and seeming immunity to doubt is sometimes interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction, even though it is this very inflexibility—this willful refusal even to entertain alternative opinions or conflicting evidence—that poses the most serious danger to our country. By the same token, the simplicity of many of Bush’s pronouncements is often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, when in fact exactly the opposite is true: They often mark his refusal even to consider complexity. And that’s particularly troubling in a world where the challenges American faces are often quite complex and require rigorous, sustained, disciplined analysis.”

● “In 1999, Israel’s highest court was asked to balance the right of individual prisoners against dire threats to the security of its people. Here is what the court declared: ‘This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the rule of law and recognition of an individual’s liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they strengthen its spirit and allow it to overcome its difficulties.”

Friday, August 1, 2008

And I myself felt threatened by the fragility of the distant poles on which I depended.

Read Antoine de Saint-Exupery Wartime Writings 1939 – 1944 this weekend. I recommend it—it’s very thoughtful, very honest writing—but skip the last third if you don’t want to join him in the depths of depression!

I said to myself: ‘I don’t mind being a traveler, I don’t want to be an emigrant. I’ve learned so many things at home that will be useless elsewhere.’ But now these emigrants were taking their address books out of their pockets, the remains of their identity. They still pretended to be someone. They clung obstinately to some semblance of meaning. They said, ‘That is who I am… I come from such and such a town… I am the friend of so and so… Do you know him?’ They went on to tell you the story of a friend, or a mistake, or any other story that could link them to something.AND And so I said to myself, ‘The essential thing is that something should remain of what one has lived for: customs, family celebrations, one’s childhood home. The main thing is to live for one’s return…’ And I myself felt threatened by the fragility of the distant poles on which I depended. And I might well come to know a real desert.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Becoming Jane.

I wanted to like it—if for no other reason than I like Anne Hathaway, adore James McAvoy, and thoroughly enjoy Jane Austen's works. I have no problems with biographies that take a generous approach to the truth. As far as I’m concerned, a well-told story is a well-told story, and a well-acted film is a film worth seeing. Becoming Jane, unfortunately, was neither a well-told story nor a particularly well-acted film.

It comes down to this: Becoming Jane offers the viewer no real foothold into Austen’s world. The film is not visually stunning. The supporting cast just barely showed up for the final taping. That is to say, virtually every member of the supporting cast succeeded in receding into the background of each and every shot, and mastered the art of making oneself wholly forgettable. As for the leads, if this were my first encounter with either Hathaway or McAvoy, I would walk away impressed only by McAvoy’s shirtless physique. The two only rarely manage to fully occupy a scene—there is either too much space, visually and emotionally, or much too little.

This isn’t to say that there are no appealing sentiments expressed. Tom LeFroy and Jane Austen show themselves capable of cleverness and undercut each other in amusing ways early in the film. Their near-kiss in the stairwell, when he’s holding the candlestick, is a very pretty shot indeed. When Tom materializes at the dance, holding her hand, my heart stuttered a little (smooth, Lefroy, very smooth). Tom and Jane's parting is bittersweet (the line, "if our love destroys your family, it will destroy itself" was very powerful), but would have been moreso had I not somehow missed when exactly it was the two went from friendly acquaintances to making out in the forest, each incapable of living without the another. Jane and Cassandra’s conversation near the end, about young women who are “better than their circumstances,” was very well-placed.

Finally, Becoming Jane cannot help but suffer by comparison to the vastly superior Pride & Prejudice, a film it borrows from too heavily at points. Pride & Prejudice, masterfully filmed against a rich backdrop of lived-in homes and wild spaces, enjoyed an unbeatable supporting cast of eclectic, carefully developed, and memorable characters, and soared alongside its commanding, believable leads. In Pride & Prejudice, you did not see inside every room, nor hear every thought voiced. The actors carried the film by Austen’s words and their own actions and expressions. The film flowed seamlessly from beginning to end, where Becoming Jane variously drags its feet and rushes ahead of itself. Pride & Prejudice transports; Becoming Jane merely offers small morsels of mild entertainment.

While not dead on arrival by any means, Becoming Jane lacks feeling, depth, and originality. The film is occasionally warm and witty, but never brave, inventive, reflective or engaging. Ultimately, it contributes very little to the ongoing conversation about Jane Austen’s life and works.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Ladies' man.

At the tender age of two, Aaron is already going all-out to impress girls. I was looking after him in the park this morning and he kept walking over to this little girl and cocking his head to one side and chirping, "HI!" The little girl didn't pay him much attention and her mother smiled sympathetically at Aaron and said, "Oh, Lexi says, 'I'm too shy'" to which Aaron enthusiastically belted out an "I'M TOO SHY, TOO!" Aaron, Aaron, Aaron. You are many, many things, but 'shy' is not one of them.