killing the American Dream?

You know, sometimes I think that even though the loud-mouthed conservative population in America may lead us to believe that our nation is one of people full of faith, we've become quite a faithless nation.

"No survey data can reveal the hurts inflicted by our wasteful, immoral wars foisted upon us by deceitful leaders exploiting our anxieties and gullibility. That only 2 percent may place them among our biggest national worries at the moment is a sign of sublimation rather than their discounting. As for the loss of faith in our institutions -- private and public -- from financial kleptomania and the compromised actions of government, it has become free floating. A constant presence that aggravates every fear and uncertainty." (Brenner)

Maybe we've finally killed the "American Dream." That whole highschool-career-family, white picket fence thing was all well and good for the conservative, high-moral Americans of the 1940s and '50s. I know the dissent of the 1960s was rooted and began in the '50s, but generally speaking, I think Americans had faith in the paradigm of delayed gratification by which they existed: get a job, pay your dues, and reap your consumerist suburbia dream reward later.

But now, in a post-9/11, mid-recession, Wikileak'd "information age," that paradigm is changed. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that today's 18-35 year olds no longer have faith in the promise of delayed gratification -- in the promise of the American Dream. We like fast food, smart phones, and the internet: we like NOW. Boomer parents have given their children everything, including a sense of entitlement. But I'm beginning to think that our desire for instant gratification may not be solely the result of us being spoiled silly.

Maybe we want what we want right now because we don't have faith that the future holds anything for us. Maybe we feel like we deserve everything we can get out of life this minute because we can't trust our flawed institutions and chaotic world, and we can't believe that the best is yet to come. Maybe we've realized that our parents were disillusioned and the American Dream doesn't exist. Maybe we're finally killing it. Or maybe we really are just spoiled, spoon-fed brats.

Regardless, I think we need to accept that the old model is in need of an upgrade. I think the dominant ideology is slowly beginning to gravitate away from the old idea of the American Dream, and I think this is a good thing. Perhaps popular culture has taken to cultivating a sense of nostalgia for the 1950s because it's realizing that the old paradigm no longer applies. Yet, in the same way I think no one really knows what will formally succeed postmodernism, I can't say I really have any idea where post-American Dream social thought will go. But I'm pretty eager to see it happen.

Cultural Identity?

I never really thought about my cultural identity until I came to college and was kind of forced to think about it in class. It's interesting, I suppose--fairly unique, in a way. I was born in Korea. Lived with a foster family until I was adopted at four months old by a white middle class couple living in suburban New Jersey. Same for my sister, who is three and a half years younger than I am. She was seven months when she arrived.

We grew up in a predominantly white town. Culturally, we are white. Alec Baldwin's character on 30 Rock tells a white man on the show that, "Socioeconomically speaking, you're more like an inner city Latina." Well, socioeconomically speaking, my sister and I are white. White-washed, Twinkies, what have you. I mentioned this in a rant about a year ago, actually. I never really thought about this until college though.

Here, I do meet other Asians who have this presupposition that I can identify with them as an Asian girl. Except, only on the surface am I an Asian girl. Nearly all of my friends in elementary and secondary school were white. I can think of maybe six or seven total that weren't. Most of them came from Asian families that still held some of their cultural values beyond assimilation. I have no Asian cultural background at all. This doesn't bother me. I am what I am. But what I am is not what people assume. Which I enjoy, on some level. But on others, it's frustrating. It's another inherent contradiction. Just last night, I stopped by my friend's apartment. Before I'd gotten there, she'd told a friend of hers who didn't know me that I was coming. Later, he told me that he'd been surprised to see that I'm Asian because my name is so Irish.

I'll get back to this later. I for real need to sleep.

Equus and yet more theater musings.

Yep, got stage seating for the day before Spring Awakening closes. I couldn't help it. I got the email as I was sitting at my desk about to do some work, and so I got first pick over the seats. The timing was perfect. I couldn't pass it up. So worth it. I'm so excited.

I went to see Equus yesterday. Well, the day before, now. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was truly excellent. Weird, but excellent. I was deeply disappointed that the theater was half empty. Granted, it was a matinee the day after Christmas, and it was a pretty dark, eerie play. But still. It must be so demoralizing to perform for such a weak crowd.

I picked up the play today when I was at the library; I want to look it over again. I dozed off during a slower part in the first act, and either way, it was a little confusing: the set was extremely bare, and there were several parts that were supposed to be flashbacks, so it wasn't the easiest to follow. Plus, Richard Griffiths's character, Dr. Martin Dysert, went off on a lot of long asides to the audience, which was kind of obnoxious. But of course, he was brilliant, so it didn't matter.

The story is, Dysert is a child psychologist in a hospital in England. The magistrate frequently sends hims headcases who are sentenced to psych treatment instead of prison. He's dissatisfied with his life--he's been working there for 9 years, helping kids isn't fulfilling him, and his marriage stalled a long time ago. At the beginning of the show, the magistrate comes to him believing he's the only one who can help her latest case, who she just managed to get off of the jail charges--Alan Strang, who has blinded six horses with a spike.

At first, Alan refuses to speak, and responds only with jingles from commercials. Dysert slowly manipulates him into speaking, and it both fascinated and terrified by the boy, who was raised by an atheistic father and deeply religious mother, and has somewhat transferred his worship of Jesus to a horse figure, Equus. He works during the week in an appliance shop, but through a girl named Katie, he has gotten a job at a nearby stable on the weekends. Horses have always fascinated him, and he loves working with them, but he refuses to ride them. Instead, once every three weeks, he sneaks into the stable and takes out one in particular--Nugget--and rides nude through the fields, screaming his passion. Dysert is torn between pity and sympathy: while he recognizes that Alan is miserable, he envies the passion, the worship he feels, that is absent from his life. He also realizes that if he "cures" the boy, it is quite likely that the boy will fall into an inescapable numbness. He points out to the magistrate: the boy is ardently worshipful, full of spirit and a vivid (though, yes, agonizing) liveliness, yet he's the one who's "insane"?

In the end, Dysert gives Alan a placebo, getting him to tell the full story at last. The boy tells how he found himself attracted to Katie, and though he tried to and wanted to make love to her, he couldn't, when she took him to the stable, because all he felt was horseflesh. All he could feel, see, smell, was horse, and he could do nothing because Equus was watching him. Dysert makes empty promises to the boy, swearing that he will make the nightmares end and help him, knowing that he can't deliver. The play closes with Dysert covering Alan with a blanket and letting him sleep.

I had had my doubts about seeing Daniel Radcliffe as Alan. I know there had been a lot of talk about "Harry Potter" being naked on stage, but honestly? After the first few minutes, I forgot it was him. He was quite good--very intense, and clearly dedicated to the role. Alan must be such a draining character to play eight times a week, and twice on Wednesdays and Sundays. So emotionally taxing. And uncomfortable. I think I'd be very uncomfortable, becoming Alan Strang eight times a week for six months. It was uncomfortable enough, watching him. And the horses! They were played by people wearing creepy giant wire head-pieces, and horseshoe-shaped, elevated foot-pieces--they weren't really shoes as much as platforms. Their six stalls were the major set pieces, along with a square platform with four rectangular blocks and a circular brick walkway on it. The lighting was dim, and served to create a lot of the setting--rearranging the blocks and changing the lighting signified a different or multiple scene and time. It was definitely one of the most interesting pieces of ever seen, and even though it was extremely strange, creepy, and unsettling, it was satisfying.

That sounds odd, but it's true. I enjoyed the second act more, particularly Dysert's musings to himself and to the magistrate about which was better: his own responsible, satisfactory life in which he "helped" children, or Alan's life--tortured and painful, but passionate and emotional. I completely sympathize with him. The magistrate argued with him, that there's more than one way to feel passion, and Alan's way lacks maturity and also is extremely difficult--like the way Nick Ray "refused to mature if that meant feeling less." Dysert wishes he hadn't done that, in a way. The magistrate's is the Bridge of San Luis Rey argument--the "passion" exhibited by Alan is self-interest; it exists for itself. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. Well, I know how I feel about it--I sympathize with Dysert. But my brain tells me the magistrate is right. I'm not sure if I want to feel that way though.

Equus just reaffirmed my latest thought that perhaps theater work is for me. I don't know though. It also reminded me of Albee's declaration that all playwrights should be experimenting and pushing limits, because I definitely feel that Peter Shaffer did that with this. Though I like the notion that art is for everyone, pieces like Equus is definitely not the kind of thing that would be popular, but I like that: it takes an open mind and a certain sensibility and taste to enjoy and appreciate Equus.

I was also reminded of an interview I read with Matt Doyle. (I swear I'm not a creeper/fanatic. I just happen to agree and react to a lot of what I've read about him. And I happen to have read this recently, so it's fresh in my mind.) A Spring Awakening Fan Club member asked him, "When you lived in London, were there any West End show [sic] you saw that you wished would come over to the US?" He responded:

I saw a lot of theatre when I lived in London. I'm not sure if I want anything to come to Broadway from the West End. And I don't really think Broadway shows should go to the West End. They are two completely different worlds. Broadway is a much more commercial theatre world that runs off of the big budget musicals and London is a much more open place for theatre that has a lot of funding for straight plays and classical theatre. I love both worlds for what they are. However I do wish there was more classical theatre in New York! It's a shame how little there is.

Ugh. Of course American theater is much more commercial and big budget; it's American. Art and commerce are inherently linked here; more now than ever before. I fully appreciate that and all, but at the same time, part of me wishes it wasn't true. Jeremy Piven walked out of Speed-the-Plow the other night, and audiences were [rightly] furious. He's being replaced, I heard, by another big name--William H. Macy, a Mamet veteran. Big names are practically essential for straight plays these days. Equus ran in London before moving to Broadway, taking Griffiths and Radcliffe with it, and I feel like without those two names--especially the latter--it never would have made it. The half empty theater proved it. Broadway is so expensive now--regular orchestra or front mezzanine seats run around $125 now--and I almost feel bad going to see Spring Awakening again when there are a ton of others I want to see, and I have no money. It's rough, and because of the economy, Broadway is taking a huge hit.

So many huge shows are closing in a few weeks: Hairspray, Spamalot, Spring Awakening, Gypsy, Grease. I just saw a NY Times article that said both Equus and August: Osage County have been running with 54% attendance, which is positively criminal; Avenue Q, with 69%. Rent closed in September, and hyped shows American Buffalo and A Tale of Two Cities were barely open before shutting down. It's horrible, and largely because of the economy. Family-oriented shows are still open--the Disney stuff is still going strong, and Shrek just opened. Guys and Dolls is set for another revival, along with West Side Story and Hair, and they'll probably do well for a while with big names and their status as classics, but what about everything else? The Roundabout has a huge slate of plays that sound great set to open this season, and I hope they all do. But who knows. It's the shows that don't have the most popular appeal and potential for commercial success that are taking the biggest hit, and I hate that.

That comment above, about how Broadway is so much more commercial than the West End, is doubtlessly true, and between that and these economic problems--it's crippling theater, and other artistic mediums as well, I'm sure. Theater, though--Broadway is so much less accessible to the general public, and has a much smaller audience than other mediums, which is a shame. Sure, the film industry and music industries will suffer, but theater--half of Broadway is closing, it seems, and it hurts to think about that. It's like that Billy Joel song, "Miami 2017"--"I've seen the lights go out on Broadway."

I'm going to move to Europe.

I have more to write about (including another Matt Doyle thing, haha), but I'll do it another time. It's 3:06 and I'm beat, and I didn't mean to write this much, at all. The whole Broadway situation is just breaking my heart, and I couldn't help a bit of a tangent. Silly blog posts should really not be this damn long. Haha.

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Now playing: The Decemberists - The Crane Wife 3

"I am a permanent transient..."

Yesterday I finished my honors paper on The Zoo Story / Peter & Jerry and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Notes toward a definition of tragedy). I can't say I'm particularly satisfied with the last 1/3 of it, the part on The Goat, because I rushed. And I'm not happy about it because I really did want to do this right. I realized at the end of the semester that I should have made my paper on Sundance for American Independent Cinema my honors paper, but of course, how was I to know that that was the better idea at the beginning of the semester when I had to hand in my contract? I labored over my Sundance paper. By which I really just mean that I took the time to revise it and refine it until I was fully satisfied. I rarely do that. I didn't do that with Edward Albee and I should have. I just ran out of time.

I think I'm going to do it anyway. Part of the reason I ran out of time is I got caught up when I was doing research. I kept finding this awesome material and trying to fit it into my outline. Fitting it into the outline wasn't the trouble, because it related nicely. The trouble was having to write a longer paper than I anticipated once I added all the stuff I wanted to add to the outline.

My thesis was that Edward Albee's plays are as socially relevant now as they first were in 1958 when he began writing. I realized that even though The Zoo Story, his first play and the first Albee I ever read, and the only I've seen performed, is my first love, I might now love The Goat better. It makes sense though: The Zoo Story was written in the context of the 1950s and it was utterly explosive.

"[Albee's theme] is the enormous and usually insuperable difficulty that human beings find in communicating with each other. More precisely, it is about the maddening effect that the enforced loneliness of the human condition has on the person who is cursed (for in our society it is undoubtedly a curse) with an infinite capacity for love."

- George Wellworth (theater scholar)

Albee addresses this through a single character, the outcast Jerry, in The Zoo Story. The beauty of The Goat is that he addresses this difficulty to communicate and the curse of the "infinite capacity to love" through three of his four characters--a husband, a wife, and their son. The fourth character is the husband and wife's supposed best friend who serves to represent conventional society and their disdain for deviance from their standards. In the same way that a thirty-year-old Albee wrote The Zoo Story within the context of his times and the society of the '50s, a seventy-something Albee--a much more mature and controlled writer by this point--wrote The Goat to reflect society today. And as a member (or outcast?) of that society, I feel like I can appreciate it that much more because it's a world I know--not one I've read about or imagined.

(Note: Quick summary. The Zoo Story is a one-act about two men, Peter and Jerry. Peter is your typical 1950s middle class guy living the American Dream. Jerry is a social outcast living in a terrible boarding house with no family and friends, who cannot get even a dog to love him. Spurned by the world around him, Jerry finds Peter sitting on a park bench one day and tries to talk to him about his isolation. Peter, like everyone else, doesn't understand, so Jerry picks a fight with him, and as Peter holds a knife, Jerry impales himself with it. Jerry's ended his own life, but completely unraveled Peter's, breaking down the pretense everything he thought he knew.

Albee later added another one-act before The Zoo Story, called Homelife, in which Peter is in his apartment with his wife Ann, who tries talking to him about how, even though they have a great, smooth life, she could use a little excitement and chaos--a little imperfection. The main goal is to flesh out Peter's character and set him up for The Zoo Story, but it's nice on its own, too.

The Goat is the story of another man with a seemingly perfect life, Martin Gray. He has a perfect marriage with a woman he loves, Stevie, and a good son, Billy. He's just won what is basically the Nobel Prize of architecture, he's been commissioned to design a $200 billion city, and it's his 50th birthday. However, he is having an affair with a goat with whom he is in love. He tells his best friend Ross in confidence, but Ross tells Stevie, and the rest of the play explores how Stevie deals with the fact that her husband accepts that he is in love with and having sex with a goat, how she deals with the fact that he doesn't understand how this has ruined her life, how Martin deals with himself, and how Billy--a seventeen-year-old gay boy--deals with all of it.)

It's not that other writers don't address how restrained polite society creates feelings of rejection and loss in those who deviate from the norm. But what I love so much about Albee is that he does it with a great appreciation for the ridiculous. It's why so many classify him as "absurdist," even though he rejects that label (he's not a label kind of guy) and, strictly speaking, his plays are much more hopeful than the "more nihilist European absurdist playwrights." Regardless, his plays certainly have absurdist qualities, and it's my kind of humor exactly. The irony and wit, the ridiculousness and absurdity that doesn't take itself too seriously, yet serves to size up the seriousness of a situation--Albee's plays are incredibly balanced in these terms, and I love it.

One critics observes a common thematic thread (well, I guess it's more of a motif) running through several of Albee's play: "the chasm between people, [and] their inability to connect except through pain." When you realize he's been writing about the disconnect between people for fifty full years now, it's daunting. In a sense, it's quite true though. I think a lot of times I've connected with people through my pain, theirs, or mutual pain. And I mean "pain" broadly. Shared frustration with other people. General feelings of loss. Nothing earth-shattering, but still. I wonder why that is. We're the most open and vulnerable when in pain? We need companionship most when we're in pain? It attracts us. It humanizes others. I suppose that try as we might to believe otherwise, in the end we can't survive completely on our own.

You really can see how Albee grew as a writer between The Zoo Story and The Goat. As brilliant as The Zoo Story is, you can see what I'm sure many would condemn as "youthful" indulgence in it--Jerry's what is it, 5 page monologue? The play is hardly 45 pages long. The Goat is much more controlled in tone, and its thematic content is like a mature version of its predecessor, and it is, truly, a tragedy. Albee takes an absurd situation, and that is the "fact" of the play, the foundation; then out of the reactions to the situation, he carefully constructs this this gorgeous family tragedy. He uses what is considered to be an inhumane act to examine the humanity, addressing a host of related themes and ideas: the American dream, marital relations, parent/child relations, a loss of identity in middle age, the way an adolescent searches for identity, the desire to be understood, the way love hurts more than hate, the way it can overcome seemingly unforgivable acts--and the way, sometimes, it seems like love is not enough to overcome.

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Now playing: The Decemberists - O Valencia!

Jack Kerouac: "the originator of blue-collar cool"

First. Follow-up to that last post:

Check this out. Look at the photo caption, and the second paragraph. That's the Civic vs. the 13er. Right there.

On a completely separate note, I was leafing through an old GQ from last year - GQ's 50 Most Stylish Men of the Last 50 Years, I believe it was. Lots of great pictures in that - so classy. I pulled two pages from it and stuck them on my bulletin board. The first was a series of photos of Cary Grant, arguably the most stylish of them all. The other featured a wonderful picture and bit on Paul Newman, praising the simplicity of his wardrobe choices, and on the other half, Jack Kerouac. This is what they said about him:

Flower power was all well and good, but Jack Kerouac often wondered aloud how the Beats could’ve given birth to such Technicolor bravura. Kerouac’s look was broken but unbowed—as he once said: “ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.” And yet his aesthetic is everywhere today: That Brooklyn hipster rocking overalls under his Carhartt jacket while reading Hart Crane? That kid in San Francisco sporting scuffed oxfords and a frayed collar, with Madame Bovary stuffed in his back pocket? They’re paying unwitting tribute to the man who exploded the 1950s world of straight-white pretensions, rejecting the notion that class was synonymous with value. An uneven artist perhaps, and a troubled one to be sure, but unequivocally a man: the originator of blue-collar cool.

Kerouac and his fellow Beats floated around the cusp of the G.I. Generation and the Silent Generation, by Strauss and Howe's definitions. Though technically a G.I., Kerouac belongs with Ginsberg and Cassidy in the Silent Generation of artists that came of age in the G.I.'s "get it done" world.

I love that description of Kerouac. It's so true. That description, in particular, reminds me of a particular turn of phrase in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Dick Diver is talking to Rosemary about a WWI trench and battlefield they are exploring.

'All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,' Dick mourned persistently. 'Isn't that true, Rosemary?'
'I don't know,' she answered with a grave face. 'You know everything.'

In my mind, that is what Kerouac did: he blew up the beautiful lovely safe world with a great gust of high explosive love--in the best way possible. He was only one of many to do so, but still. He coined the term "Beat" in reference to Neal Cassady, but people today remember him as the frontman of that generation.

Kerouac was utterly brilliant. Born to Canadian parents, he grew up speaking French, became fluent in English, and I believe was well versed in German as well. He spent his school years reading every American, British, French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit classic he could get his hands on, reading translations only of the latter two. He went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, only to break his leg during the first game his freshman year. He ended up dropping out, I think, and then came his first of two stints in the Navy. It was after that that he met Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the others. Cassidy was his real inspiration, though; Dean in On the Road (which, I'll admit, I haven't read) is fashioned after him. It was for him that Kerouac came up with his 30 Essentials for the Belief and Technique of Spontaneous Prose, which he employs in some of his later works. Even just his journals are amazing. He changed the way people thought about writing. The scope of his influence in general--I can't even begin to imagine how many people, how many artists of all kinds he and his work have affected over the years.

Kerouac's poetry drips with the sounds of jazz and blues, and his fascination with Buddhism comes out often. Much of his work is informed by his travels around the country, and all of it was essentially taboo when he was writing in the 1950s and '60s. That was a period when most post-war G.I.'s and Silents were trying to raise straight-laced Boomer babies. It was that era I mentioned in a previous post when men were trying to maintain their wartime masculinity yet succeed in the corporate world, and women were trying desperately hard to fit the model of the perfect, feminine wife. Sloan Wilson, Betty Friedan--they both wrote in opposition, but Kerouac and the Beats--they lived it. They rejected the values society chose for them, taking a darker, seedier route instead. Even though the lifestyle and culture they chose is not one I'd chose for myself, I can't help admire the way they did their own thing when conformity was a demand that, seemingly, most Americans surrendered to.

That's the other thing that's great about that GQ piece--at the end of each section, they include a style tip related to the person they wrote about. At the end of the Kerouac segment, they wrote:

Personal style isn't about buying the trendiest labels or most expensive suits. It's about establishing a look that's all yours and sticking with it.

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Now playing: She & Him - Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?

"I've never been in love...it all feels more like fiction to me."

Will: Emily, will you, uh, marry me?
April: No.
Will: Goddd.
April: What do you mean, “Will you, uh, marry me?”?! I haven’t seen you in weeks. You don’t look happy or excited about the prospect of our marriage. You’re asking me to give up my . . . my freedom, my joie de vivre, for an institution that fails as often as it succeeds? And why should I marry you, anyway? I mean, why do you want to marry me? Besides some bourgeois desire to fulfill an ideal that society embeds in us from an early age to promote a consumer capitalist agenda.
Will: Oh! Ohhh my god.
April: You should have got on your knee.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it seems so easy to fall into the trappings of social norms, because they set the status quo on so many things that we don't even think about. Like, as April points out, marriage.

[Long excerpt coming up]

Celine: I was thinking, for me it’s better I don’t romanticize things as much any more. I was suffering so much all the time. I still have lots of dreams, but they’re not in regard to my love life. It doesn’t make me sad; it’s just the way it is.
Jesse: Is that why you’re in a relationship with someone who’s never around?
Celine: [laughing] Yes, obviously I can’t deal with the day-to-day life of a relationship. [seriously] Yeah, we, you know, have this exciting time together, and then he leaves, and I miss him, but at least I’m not dying inside. When somebody is always around me, I’m like, suffocating.
Jesse: No wait, you just said that you need to love, and to be loved.
Celine: Yeah, but when I do, it quickly makes me nauseous! It’s a disaster. I mean, I’m really happy only when I’m on my own. Even being alone—it’s better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely. It’s not so easy for me to be all romantic. …I’ve just had too many . . . blah relationships. They were mean, they cared for me, but there was no real connection or excitement. At least, not from my side.
Jesse: I’m—I’m sorry, is it really that bad? It’s not, right?
Celine: You know, it’s not even that. I was fine. Until I read your fucking book. It stirred shit up, you know? It reminded me of how genuinely romantic I was, how I had so much hope in things, and now, now it’s like, I don’t believe in anything that relates to love, I don’t feel things for people any more. In a way, I put all my romanticism into that one night and I was never able to feel all this again...
Jesse: I—I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that.
Celine: You know what, reality and love are almost contradictory for me. It’s funny. Every single of my ex’s, they are now married. Men go out with me, we break up, and then they get married. And later they call me to thank me for teaching them what love is, and that I taught them to care and respect women—
Jesse: I think I’m one of those guys.
Celine: —You know, I want to kill them! Why didn’t they ask me to marry them! I would have said no, but then at least they could have asked! But it’s my fault, I know it’s my fault, because I never felt it was the right man, never. But what does it mean, “the right man”? The “love of your life”? The concept is absurd, that we can only be complete with another person is evil, right?!

Also, the more I watch Before Sunset - well, first of all, the more I realize it's absolutely brilliant, especially when paired with Before Sunrise, then you realize Jesse and Celine as characters and performances are that much more beautifully, beautifully subtle and nuanced and real and detailed and perfect than when the movie stands alone - but really, the more I watch it, the more I identify with Celine. Take out the ultra-liberal activism and I'm basically her. But it always makes me think that marriage is just an institution that makes you take something irrational and impermanent and constantly changing, and force it into a mold of practicality and pragmatism and sensibility. It just doesn't work like that in my mind. Yet I think there's this constant pressure on most people I know to want to marry. Beyond that, even - in high school, we're practically forced to take the SAT's and apply to college, and it's implied to us that it's impossible to succeed otherwise. From there, we have to choose a degree. One line of study. Then we graduate and we have to get jobs. But not just a job - we have to choose a career, a practical line of work to which we can devote ourselves and from which we can make a comfortable living. And obviously after that we have to get married and start a family. Because that's the thing to do. It's like the whole '80s yuppie thing only evolved, so it doesn't necessarily mean a life of luxury but one of financial success, if only on a middle class level.

And my problem with that is that not everyone wants the same thing. In fact, most people don't want the same thing. Or else, they really don't want the same thing but they think they do because they've been tricked and trapped into it. But really, this whole life doesn't apply to everyone. It's one of the things I like about St. Elmo's Fire. Kevin starts off as this crazy cynic about love and marriage, even though he changes by the end, and Lesley accuses Alec of not wanting to get married, but of wanting to be able to send out a Christmas card with a picture of them on it, and Billy ends up realizing that the "after college life" isn't for him and he has to stop trying to be Alec. They all start off with these ideas of how life is supposed to be and they eventually realize that they just have to do their own thing. Well, to some extent.

It's funny because I just got back from my Theater & Society class, in which we're watching a bunch of documentaries on the 1950s. Today's was called "Let's Play House" and it was about how after World War II, there was this huge marriage and consequently baby boom, and the consequences. Men felt their masculinity was being threatened when they had to go back to civilian life and enter the corporate world - thus Sloan Wilson's book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Women, on the other hand, were feeling pressured to find a husband - after the war, the numbers said that 1 in 7 women would have to be single because of the death toll. So, they were pushed into this lifestyle of hyper-femininity in which they couldn't work, had to be housewives and mothers, and had to literally fit this physical mold of the American woman. She had to be the June Cleaver figure. And then all these men were unhappy because their lives were dull and corporate life was dissatisfying, and all these women were unhappy because they weren't allowed to do anything but cook and clean and basically not have a personality. Everything in the media was supporting this - movies, books, magazines - until a few people broke out and rebelled, like Wilson, and Betty Friedan (who wrote The Feminine Mystique).

In comparison, we have so much freedom today, so much choice, yet I feel like the current is still carrying us towards these unfulfilling lifestyles that society mandates are what we should want. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wanting that whole packaged lifestyle, either, though, even though it very much sounds like I am, haha. The more I think about it, it's just not for me. While it's liberating to realize what you want is not what everyone else wants, it's also daunting, because in a way, you're preconditioned to fail. Or preconditioned to succeed, I'm not sure which. I mean, you're setting out to do what no one else wants you to be able to do. That's what I meant. What is that quote?

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

And also, I'm really not totally condemning marriage here or anything. Because in the society we live in, it does make sense. I just don't think it makes sense for humans in general, haha. And I'm not bashing love here, either. It's just...a mystery to me. Which sounds painfully obvious and stupid, but I mean it in a beyond-the-cliched-ways way. Because to me, love is different to everyone. And in some people, I think it's buried deeper than in others.

Jesse: We’re just living in a pretense of a marriage, responsibility, and all these ideas of how people are supposed to live.…and, and I know that there’s something wrong, and I know that I can’t keep living like this, and I think, there’s gotta be more to love than commitment, but then I think that I might have given up on the whole idea of romantic love...

Oh yeah. Romance. That's another thing. One of those Interview segments quoted Pop artist Ronnie Cutrone as saying that Andy Warhol taught him that, "All romantic love is an illusion." I never thought of it like that. All romance in general, though, I think is an illusion. It's all in how you choose (whether consciously or unconsciously) how to perceive things. Romance and cynicism are both just filters. They're films through which you see the world. So it makes sense that romantic love would be an illusion. It's just how you're choosing to see love. Not that I have a problem with that. Romance makes life palatable and easier to digest. That can become problematic, but in general, that rosiness is nice. Romance, in a way, is hope. And while part of me hates hope - because hope, like expectation, often leads to severe disappointment - a character one movie or another that I was watching in a class the other day pointed out, "We all hope. It's what keeps us alive." I think that was during one of the John Cassavetes movies that I didn't really like. Faces maybe. But I digress. Except not really because I think I was done.

No I wasn't. I was about to say that I might have misinterpreted the way Cutrone meant "romantic love", but it still made me think of it the way I did. If he meant "romantic love" not as, being "in love" with romance, but just as, being "in love" in general (did that make ANY sense? Yikes, I need to sleep), then I'm not sure I agree. But like I was saying before, I think it's different for everyone. For some people it's harder to fall in love than for others. "Here's what I know. There are some people who fall in love over and over. And there are others who can only seem to do it once." Haha, that was from the fourth Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book. But I like it. And I like that it says "seems," because I don't think that it's humanly possible for anyone to fall in love only once. I think it's possible to go your whole life being in love with only one person - but that's just because there's no way you'll ever meet all the people you could fall in love with. And then there are those people who are perfectly capable of falling in love with each other but they don't let themselves. But that's something else entirely.

It's like that Jane Austen Book Club bit:

"A person's no more sane falling out of love than falling into it, I guess..."
"What do we know about it, you and I?" Allegra asked. "We're not the sort who fall out of love, are we?"

Oh, and it reminds me of Persuasion. Anne and Capt. Wentworth both try to love other people. They try to resign themselves to the idea of loving another. What is it, eight years, that pass? Anne firmly believes that it's easier for men to fall out of love than women, that they are better at forgetting, and that women suffer more, but then Capt. Wentworth writes her that wonderful, wonderful letter completely contradicting her. "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant." Oh, that's also like in Before Sunset. Nine years pass and Celine pretends to have forgotten because Jesse waltzes in all romantic and married and she thinks he's moved on, so she has that breakdown in the car, but then he reveals that he hasn't, and that he's still suffering just as much, if not more, than she is. Most amazing scene in the whole movie.

Ack, think I wrote enough? Too much overlap right now. None of this even makes sense any more. Sorry about that.

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Now playing: Feist - So Sorry

Hugh Laurie by Emma Thompson

Interview, part 3. Hugh Laurie = Dr. House. Emma Thompson = brilliant British actress - aside from the Harry Potter movies and Nanny McPhee, she's done Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually, Stranger Than Fiction, and just out now, Brideshead Revisited. Plus a bunch of older things and period pieces. She wrote the screenplays for Nanny MacPhee and Sense and Sensibility as well as acted in them, too. She and Hugh Laurie are old friends - went to Cambridge and were active in the drama program there. It's funny - I think she may have said more than Hugh Laurie in interviewing him. Hehe.

ET: When we've talked about the U.S. in the past, one of the things that has certainly drawn our fire has been the tendency toward sentimentality.
HL: Yes.
ET: Yet it doesn't seem to haunt "House." Have you come across it? Because it is definitely there, don't you feel, in the U.S.?
HL: I do feel it there. But then, one of the interesting things about doing "House" is that an audience of Americans who might, as we suppose, turn toward the sentimental, have actually embraced someone so starkly and brutally cynical. Although, of course, the show is actually conceived by Canadians.
ET: But see, I think underneath that American sentimentality, there definitely is a much, much more realistic attitude to people.
HL: Yes.
ET: I do. I think, funnily enough, there is, as it were, an opposite reaction in England in the sense that we all look cynical and sort of reserved, and in fact, I don't think that we are. I think we're softer, in a sense.
HL: I think there is much in what you say. We have had some various peculiar fevers of sentimentality.
...
ET: Now, do you think you would describe yourself as a misanthropist or a misanthrope?
HL: No. I don't think so. I have misanthropic days--or half-days. I can get into a sort of muttering, curmudgeonly state. But no, I don't think I am overall. Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.

I think it's interesting how the general mood and tone of people reflects their cultural values and ultimately, their culture. In America, what do we have? Commercialism. But we also have this odd sort of unrealistic sentimentality that they mention, and this nostalgia, almost, for times when that sentimentality was more real than it is now. Now it's sort of affected, or a way to escape the coldness that is now reality. It's romance, versus reality. Whereas, according to these two, it's the other way around in Britain - coldness and reservedness on the surface, but really they have lots of warmth and sentimentality and this old-world, romantic, quality. At least, that's what it seems they're getting at. I suppose if you think about it, the Brontes had those great, epic romances, and the novels that came before that - the Gothic romances, like Ann Radcliffe's novels, must be somewhat sentimental, and I'm sure there's others. Then stuff after that too. Funny how things change and how sentimentality comes in waves and all that.

(I suddenly just lost all desire to write anything, and now am off to sleep. Hehe. Still to come: Marc Jacobs, and remembering Andy Warhol...)

Chris Noth by Ron Galotti

Sooo. Interview magazine is my latest obsession. Well, not obsession...preoccupation? I just read, finally, the June/July one celebrating Andy Warhol's 80th birthday (aside from, ya know, the fact that he's dead) and it was great. It had a lot I want to jot down notes about so I'm going to break it up. There was this short interview of Chris Noth (Mr. Big on Sex and the City) by the guy who inspired his SatC character, Ron Galotti. He's a former magazine publisher that once had a relationship with Candace Bushnell, the creator of SatC and the real-life Carrie Bradshaw. They had a lot to say on New York City, and I liked it.

RG: I miss on occasion, being smart, which New York provides--you know, that sensibility. But with the exclusion of that, I would say nothing else.
CN: Well, yeah. New York is pretty much commercialized to the point of no return...I came here as an actor in '78. It's a city for me to work in. But the excitement of New York was the varied and diverse eccentrics who were able to live there, and the different neighborhoods and the different kinds of places that they created. That's all been washed out...It's very suburban. The art scene really left, except in patches. It's all about a sort of a corporate sensibility, and it's squeezed out room for any other kind of sensibility--money talks, bullshit walks, I guess...I mean, I think we all have those stories of struggling in New York. But the fact of the matter is, we were able to do that. The city provided a cushion, so to speak, where we could struggle.
RG: Oh, no. None of us can do that anymore. Too expensive.
CN: What does that mean when you say that, though? That means that only certain kinds of people can be in the city. People pooh-pooh the idea that everything changes. But if you get so rarefied that you can't live in the city unless you're making a quarter-million dollars a year, then what does that mean?
RG: I don't think a quarter of a million is going to cut it!
CN: Hell. Shit.
...
RG: When I was a kid, we hitchhiked all over.
CN: Oh, Jesus Christ. I'd hitchhike to the Berkshires, across the country. It was a way of life... So when you say, "Well, you can't hitchhike anymore," what does that mean? It means it's a fearful environment where no one can trust to pick up a stranger, or a stranger can't trust to get in a car. I remember girls used to hitchhike. There's a great chapter [in On the Road] of Kerouac hitching south and west, and hopping trains, and experiencing life in America, and opening himself up to finding answers. That search I find lacking. That openness. Right now, we've got ourselves stuck in one thing, which is to make money as fast as we can--because it's hard to live in this world without it. Let's face it.

It's funny, because I was reading an article in Newsweek the other day by a recent college grad who lives with three or four other girls in the city, and she says it's completely feasible - you just have to realize that 1) you can't have that glamorous, high lifestyle that people kind of associate with living in New York, and 2) 80% of your paycheck is going to go to your rent. But, it's not impossible. I like that these guys, though, point out that it's not as easy as it once was, and even though it's possible, it's not the same. They make it seem like there's no room for that exploration, for residing in the city while searching and creating and experiencing. Unfortunately, I'm inclined to think they're right.

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Now playing: Aimee Mann - Save Me

The world could use a few more cowboys.

I really enjoy the image of the cowboy as an Americanized version of the knight, and the chivalrous ideas it conjures. Well, a twisted, roughed-up version of chivalry. And honor.

The American cowboy is kind of archaic nowadays - not too many of 'em around. It's a shame. The world could use a few more cowboys.

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Now playing: Paula Cole - Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

(I thought it was appropriate. Hehe.)

Hypermasculinity and the American Male.

This is a long, twisted way of getting to my point, but it made sense in my head.

So in my intro to international studies course a while back, we spent a week or two on studying gender roles in various cultures. We saw a video on it that was actually quite good. The first part showed these women in the back country of Albania called "sworn virgins," who take an oath to abandon all feminine practices and are then allowed to adopt the male's societal responsibilities and such. The practice has mostly died out, but there are still a few in the countryside, in the more traditional parts of Albania. It mostly occurs in families where, for example, there are two parents who are sick or unable to work or care for themselves, and no sons, just one or more daughters. It wasn't uncommon for one of these daughters to become a sworn virgin in order to care for the farm or take a job to support her parents and herself. But, she wasn't allowed to do this unless she became a sworn virgin, which also means she could never marry or have children.

The second part of the video showed an American man going to Thailand or some other southeast Asian country for a sex-change operation. He was completely changed into a woman. The only thing that changed, though, was the equipment - he had already altered his voice and appearance with hormones, and he dressed like a woman too. I believe he referred to himself as a "transgender."

The third part showed this caste of women in India, the "Untouchables," "pariahs." They're pretty much social outcasts. There is something with gender roles in that too, but I can't remember what at the moment.

In America, what do we have? Hypermasculinity. I read an article for 20th Century American Foreign Policy called "Techno-Muscularity and the Boy Eternal," in which the writer proposes that the failure of the Vietnam War prompted the veterans who returned to be condemned as losers, in part because of the lack of support for them from women and from their fathers who protested the war. This was the first generation of men to go to war and return without the luster of victory, but instead with the shadow of doubt, protest, and anger chasing them. Consequently, the writer of this article, says men in Hollywood films of the '80s were frequently "techno-muscular" symbols, like Arnold Schwarzenegger - adult male characters that either acted like children or acted like a child's idea of what it meant to be a man.

Now, 20 years later, it feels like - to me at least - that our society and culture have moved one step further to hypermasculinity. Google the term, and the definitions that result both call it "a psychological term for the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior, such as an emphasis on strength, aggression, body hair, odor and virility." Somehow, we've started putting an unbelievable amount of importance in these qualities that are more superficial than they are anything else. I understand the desire in men to achieve a certain degree of masculinity - well, as far as I can possibly understand it, I guess - but in the grand scheme of things, isn't it irrelevant? It would be less frustrating, except countless images in American culture emphasize the appeal of hypermasculinity in today's male. It's become a tool of marketers and salespeople, and it's one of the many things I hate in mass media.

"What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."
- Susan Sontag

The true value of a man - of any person, really - is not in these characteristics so much as it is in their character and actions. I randomly just remembered a part in Little Men, a follow-up to Little Women, in which the father of one of the boys dies. His nephew, after his funeral, proclaims that their other two uncles are the wisest and jolliest of the three, but Uncle John was the best. After that, one of the uncles talks for a while about why he was such a great man. (This is long, so skip it if you want.)

"Let me tell you a little about John Brooke, and you will see why men honor him, and why he was satisfied to be good rather than rich or famous. He simply did his duty in all things, and did it so cheerfully, so faithfully, that it kept him patient and brave, and happy through poverty and loneliness and years of hard work. He was a good son, and gave up his own plans to stay and live with his mother while she needed him. He was a good friend, and taught Laurie much beside his Greek and Latin, did it unconsciously, perhaps, by showing him an example of an upright man. He was a faithful servant, and made himself so valuable to those who employed him that they will find it hard to fill his place. He was a good husband and father, so tender, wise, and thoughtful, that Laurie and I learned much of him, and only knew how well he loved his family, when we discovered all he had done for them, unsuspected and unassisted."

Mr. Bhaer stopped a minute, and the boys sat like statues in the moonlight until he went on again, in a subdued, but earnest voice: "As he lay dying, I said to him, `Have no care for Meg and the little ones; I will see that they never want.` Then he smiled and pressed my hand, and answered, in his cheerful way, `No need of that; I have cared for them.` And so he had, for when we looked among his papers, all was in order, not a debt remained; and safely put away was enough to keep Meg comfortable and independent. Then we knew why he had lived so plainly, denied himself so many pleasures, except that of charity, and worked so hard that I fear he shortened his good life. He never asked help for himself, though often for others, but bore his own burden and worked out his own task bravely and quietly. No one can say a word of complaint against him, so just and generous and kind was he; and now, when he is gone, all find so much to love and praise and honor, that I am proud to have been his friend, and would rather leave my children the legacy he leaves his than the largest fortune ever made. Yes! Simple, generous goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us. Remember that, my boys; and if you want to earn respect and confidence and love follow in the footsteps of John Brooke."

I was just reminded of that. Really, though, this is just stemming from my frustration with the way society impresses the false idea upon its boys that they need to be absurdly masculine in order to be "men," to the point that it affects who they really are.

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Now playing: John Mayer - Clarity

Detective Philip Marlowe

"Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious."

That is from the New York Times Book Review for The Big Sleep, as quoted on the back of the Vintage paperback edition I have of it for my Crime: Fiction & Film class. We read it this week, and quite frankly, it was awesome. Though his work was traditionally dismissed as trashy "pulp" mystery stories, it really is great genre stuff. The style fascinated me. On the one hand, it was dry and plain, but it was so rich in detail and description - the figurative language and imagery were great. And come on: murder, porn, blackmail, kidnapping - all in one book! The guy definitely can plot.

Our protagonist and narrator, private investigator Philip Marlowe, is a fantastic character. On the surface, he's the stereotypical hardboiled P.I.: he's a hard, thick-skinned wiseass who speaks in similes and isn't afraid of bending a few laws to protect his client. His disregard for the law, though, is born of his years working for the LAPD and witnessing the corruption first hand. He's kind of gutsy, and sticks to his principles. And yes, he actually has principles: he's got his own idea of what it means to be honorable and noble that defies contemporary society's dictums. Though he's pretty misogynistic, it's almost understandable - Chandler paints his female characters in such a negative light, you almost don't want Marlowe to treat them as ladies, though he does anyway. And while he never states it outright, we discussed in class how Marlowe seems to consider himself a knight of sorts. He's very Rick Blaine. And a bit old Western cowboy.

In an essay about realist crime stories, Chandler concludes with what he thinks a realist detective should be:

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in the world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am not quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

"He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

"The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."

- Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

I think I'd like to meet Philip Marlowe. I liked the NY Times reviewer's choice of adjectives, and liked even more that he chose to lump them under the title of "American hero". Marlowe really is a very American hero. He's smart and strong, sensitive but not soft, cynical yet hopeful. He's honorable effortlessly, and he has a certain disregard for authority that the rebellious side of Americans has always admired. In his narration, there is a lack of pretentiousness (that again, haha), a plainness that is appealing to Americans, who don't have formal social classes. Like Chandler says, he's a common man who walks among common people. And, perhaps most notably, Marlowe is independent - and very much alone, in an almost romantic way. That, I think, is one of the most brilliant aspects of the novel: that it manages to capture so many traits and ideas that are considered to be very American, and that are respected by Americans.

On a side note, I also thought it was really interesting how Chandler used animal imagery and comparisons nearly every time a woman showed up, especially with this one crazy and promiscuous girl, Carmen. It reminded me of how Albee's plays tend to come back to the idea of the animal side of human nature. But, while Albee doesn't distinguish between the animal nature in men from the animal in women, Chandler does, and he uses it to degrade women. I just thought it was interesting how they both use the idea, just to different ends.

That is all.

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Now playing: Chris Ayer - Fade

The Russian Spirit

If there's one thing I love about my courses here, it's how interdisciplinary they are. Half the stuff I learn in one class ends up being relevant in another one. It gets redundant and frustrating some times, but overall, it makes it more interesting.

Like last year. So much of the stuff my crazy liberal Social Issues professor brought up was explored (more rationally and less extremely) in my Intro to International Studies the next semester. Some random topics from my Intro to American Studies class came back in my Immigration to America class, and things from there are coming back in my 20th Century American Foreign Policy class now. As are bits about Russian culture from my Literature and Film class. And in that class, stories from my freshman seminar last year (though we didn't do much of anything there) are being used again, and we're also watching a film that relates to my Technology and Culture in America class. And stuff I learned from the Smiths comes back in everything.

Anyway, in Literature and Film the other day, we watched this Russian film called The Barber of Siberia. It was fantastic, mostly. There was one specific part about the ending that I hated, but other than that, it was great. Compelling plot, good acting, sufficient cinematography and technical stuff. 3 hours long, but you don't even notice. It's the story of this American woman, Jane, who goes to Russia in 1885 to help her father, an inventor who's created a machine called "The Barber of Siberia" that will chop down trees at an amazing rate. He needs the Tsar's help to get the funding to complete it, and Jane is to help him get a meeting with the Tsar by going through one of the generals, Radlov, who happens to be the head of the military academy in Moscow. While there, one of the young cadets, Tolstoy (no relation to the writer) falls in love with her. Most of the movie is about the destructive nature of his love for and relationship with Jane, highlighting the cultural differences between the American woman and all the Russians she meets. It balances comedy, drama, and romance, with a bit of tragedy thrown in. It's really great. Definitely see it if you can ever get your hands on a copy; it's kind of hard to find it with English subtitles, apparently.

We talked about it in class today. I mentioned how the film rather subtly comments upon the cultural differences all throughout the film. At one point, the week before Lent begins, Jane is at a carnival celebrating; at the week's end, it will be a day of forgiveness - everyone, full of good will, shall beg everyone else's pardon. She notes how extreme the Russians are: at the carnival, she witnesses a giant fistfight, where dozens of men are beating each other up, knowing that at the end of the week they will all forgive each other. She says how they can't do anything in a small way: it's always one extreme or another; all or nothing. Though she observes this in retrospect, (spoiler alert! haha) it's her lack of understanding just how much this notion pervades the Russian spirit that leads to her downfall - as well as everyone else's.

A lot of the other people in class hated her for ruining other people's lives - for not giving up her business transaction. I didn't like her for it, but I understood why she did it - or, I suppose, the writer had her do it. My Russian professor said the same thing - that she understands her, and therefore doesn't hate her. We also talked, though, about how Jane is intended to be a symbol of Western culture, and a criticism of it, too. I found it really interesting that everyone hated the person that symbolized the American state of mind, and everyone loved the young, naive Russian cadet.

When I noted Jane's observation of the Russian tendency to go to extremes, Professor Ivushkina told us that this is very true, that that's how things in her country are. She pointed out, every time there's a revolution, their government is completely eradicated and they start over from scratch - they can't do anything partially, or half-heartedly. This idea is also common throughout Russian literature, she told us.

She also said, but not condescendingly, that there's no way that we can fully understand the Russian spirit - that passion, the intensity that drives them, or the camaraderie that is still incredibly important to them in a way that has gone out of vogue in America. There, still, friends put everyone else before themselves; and they're just very warm people in general. My other professor, who visited Russia for the first time in 25 years last summer, told us how she experienced this first hand - she would meet people on the streets, and start talking to them, and after only a few minutes, they would be asking her what she's passionate about, what is important to her, and other questions that people here rarely ask those close to them, let alone people they've just met. Here, she said, people will ask you what you do - not what you love, what's important to you.

Not everyone there is like that, of course, but it was still interesting. It's a shame people here aren't more like that. At least, in that they talk about that stuff. I think I'd go crazy if everyone I knew always went to extremes like the people in that movie did. In a way, though, it was beautiful. In a way, it was right.

I'll get to my other point later.

"Though justice be thy plea, consider this:

...That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy..."
- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Being raised Christian in America is an interesting paradox.

Aside from being taught that God is just, Christians are taught that He is merciful, and they should be merciful as well.

Americans live under a government with a powerful justice system. Wrong-doers are punished, as they should be - as is fair.

Mercy, though - mercy isn't fair. Mercy is absolving wrong-doing wholly, even when it isn't deserved. There is no punishment. No retribution. Just forgiveness, freely given. There is no justice in mercy.

And I don't mean to say that the teaching of mercy is limited only to Christians. Anyone with a strong moral compass may believe in being merciful. Yet even these people, I'm sure, at some time or another desire justice. Not revenge, not pay-back - only justice, fair and simple. Yet how can they desire justice and mercy at the same time? And which road should they take?

Because then, isn't justice sometimes necessary to acceptance, and consequently to receiving closure? Aren't there times when mercy and forgiveness don't result in closure? How do you get it then?

Furthermore, where is the line between forgiving mercifully and forgiving out of, indirectly, fear? Avoidance is a form of fear, and avoiding confrontation thereby a motivation born of fear. True, forgiving someone just to avoid having to confront them isn't true forgiveness and therefore, not true mercy, but for the sake of this thought, how do you determine whether or not you are forgiving someone to be merciful and truly forgive them, or if you're forgiving them merely to end or avoid a conflict?

And after all that...why does it matter?

Yes, this is seriously the kind of stuff I think about when I'm bored or alone. Or sometimes even when I'm not alone. Haha.

A Quick Explanation

So I've realized that I was being terribly one-sided in my discussion of how I wish everyone would just slow the heck down and take the time to appreciate stuff and live more fulfilling lives. Because there are people who don't move at the break-neck pace of the East Coast...rather, Northeast Coast...and who says that they live more fulfilling lives than the rest of us? Everything in the South moves like nothing else exists, like nothing matters - and I find it intolerably slow. Lifestyles in other countries are like this, too - no one's in any thing remotely resembling a "rush," ever. I don't think I could handle that, all the time.

However, the fast pace of life here is only tolerable when it's simply a tool to keep you moving, to prevent idleness, to maintain excitement and interest. When the fast pace gets to be stressful and overwhelming, when it makes you blind to the important things in life, that's when I have a problem with it. And when it never stops, but just keeps getting faster, sucking you in deeper and deeper. That's when it becomes detrimental. I guess as in all things, a balance must be found.

I feel better having explained that to myself.

"Slow down, you crazy child, take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while..."

Everything in our world moves fast.
It forces us to move as fast, if not faster.
It's all about speed - you have to move quickly, just to keep up.
Fast is better, we learn: work fast, drive fast, learn fast, live fast.
Except that's wrong.

"I can't. I can't go on. It goes too fast. We don't have time to look at one another... Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you... Do any human beings realize life while they live it?-- every, every minute?"

Thornton Wilder wrote that in Our Town 70 years ago. And the world's gotten even faster since then.

Life goes by so fast as it is. Why do we want to go even more quickly through it?
How can we enjoy it when we go through at such a velocity, we barely perceive what's happening around us?
We're moving at millions of milles a moment in, out, around our surroundings.
How can we get anything out of it if we can't even slow down enough to see it?

We move slowly when we're little. Or rather, at our own paces.
Then school starts. Pre-school, pre-K, kindergarten.
Elementary school. Middle school. High school.
Push push push push push. Get through fast and efficiently. Do as much as you can in that small period of time so you can keep going.
College. Work work work. Gotta get a job then. Or go on to post-graduate studies. Either way, there'll be a lot of people to impress on the way. After all, you still have to meet a life partner.
Get a job. Get married. Have kids. Now you have a family, and you have to move through their lives at the speed of light, too. You can sleep when you're dead.
Oh wait. At the speed you're going, you're going to be dead by the time you're 50.
But that's what you get for trying to live successfully in such a fast-paced world.
And that's just for society's definition of success. These days, success isn't analogous to greatness. And it isn't analogous to happiness, either.

"At that moment, I knew that success, not greatness, was the only god the world served."

If we could only forget the drive to be successful in our high-speed world.
We'd move through life at a natural pace - at our own natural paces.
We could appreciate the great things about life instead of constantly being weighed down by the negatives.
We could live, and not just exist.

"Slow down, you're movin' too fast -
You gotta to make the moment last.
Just kickin' down the cobblestones,
Lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy...

I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep,
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morningtime drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you, all is groovy..."

Paul Simon wrote that 40 years ago. He was right too.

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Listening to: Billy Joel - Vienna [Live Unreleased Version]