Three sentence movie reviews: Star Trek (J.J. Abrams)

I admit that I got this movie from the library and watched the whole thing (for the third time) just so I could evaluate the acting skills of Chris Hemsworth (a.k.a. Thor) which are on display only for about five minutes.  But it’s a really good film, and it was a happy way to spend the evening.  I can report with confidence that Chris Hemsworth’s five minutes of acting were done quite well and that I may have a sudden and confusing “thing” for him.

Three sentence movie reviews: Death at a funeral

I took a chance* that this movie would not have poop in it and brought it over to watch with my mom on Mother’s Day.  Alas, there was a poop scene, but there was enough funny in this movie to overlook it, at least for me.  I’ve never heard an actor with such excellent comic timing while reading a eulogy.

*possible web site to be developed:  movies reviewed for poop content.

Sam Adams Political Cartoon

Just as the election of Bill Clinton my Senior year of high school (he was the first president I voted for!) and the eight years of politics that followed shaped me, so did the election of Sam Adams.  Before Sam Adams was elected I described him as “a politician for the right reasons.”  Not long after he was sworn in I, along with the rest of Portland, found out that I was wrong and that Sam Adams was a politician to feed his ego more than anything else.  Four years of a mayor with no political clout followed, which was a great disappointment, not to mention a complete waste of time.  This political cartoon by Jack Ohman will probably not be funny to anyone not familiar with Adam’s political career, but it manages to sum up the last four years in a nutshell.  I laughed reading it, but it was a laugh full of dark humor.
 
 
 
 

Illiterate

I was a history major in college, which is a great major if
you want to be interested in your subject and do well in trivia games for the rest of your life.  It’s not a good major for actually working in
your field.  After graduating, I went off
in the world and was astounded at the amount of Americans I encountered who don’t
know basic US History, let alone European History, let alone World
History.  I’ll never forget the time some
coworkers and I were listening to the song “All That Jazz” from the musical Chicago.  There’s a line in the song where the singer
says, “I bet you Lucky Lindy never flew so high.”  This flummoxed my coworkers.
“Who the heck is Lucky Lindy?” one of them asked the
other.  She shrugged.
“Charles Lindbergh.” I called over.
“Who?” they both said in chorus.
“Charles Lindbergh.” I repeated, to confused stares.  “You know, the guy who was the first man to
fly a plane solo across the Atlantic?” 
Nothing.  I switched to tabloid
media history.  “The guy whose son was
kidnapped from his bedroom, was missing for a while and eventually found
dead?”  Nothing.  I could have gone on about his support for
fascism during WWII, or his wife the poet, but clearly they had never heard of
the man.
Encounters like this are not rare in our country.  In fact, about every five years, someone
publishes a newspaper article and or book about the massive gaps, or complete illiteracy in
the historical realm.  I find American’s
disinterest in history odd as I see history as made up of interesting stories
and stories are the things that we consume in the form of TV shows and movies,
but that’s a topic for another day.
Because lately, I’ve been getting the creeping sensation
that I too, am illiterate. 
It started with the Vlogbrothers Crash Course.  The Vlogbrothers make weekly videos about
whatever interests them.  Last fall, they
started a new series of ten-minute videos with John taking Western Civ and Hank
teaching Biology.  I was ready to watch,
glad to review Western Civ—a course I took in high school and college—and shore
up my biology, a class I avoided both for the dissection of frog and for the
finger prick blood type lesson.
It was interesting to note my differing reactions to each
subject.  With the history course I nodded along. “Yep.  Yep. Oh,
interesting, I had no idea. Yep.”  If the
history course was a review, the biology course was wandering far into the
unknown.  “Huh?  What? 
Wait, what was that word? ” Aside
from the “historic scientist” segments, I didn’t follow much. I’d like to say
that I buckled down,  watched the videos
again, memorized the vocabulary and finally learned all that biology I’d
missed.  But I didn’t.  I just stopped watching.  Without the base of knowledge, I couldn’t
find the topic interesting.  And since
there was no grade attached to the outcome, I didn’t bother to acquire the
basic knowledge to know if I enjoyed the subject.
My realization about illiteracy continued with a letter to
the editor about composting.  Portland
had recently adopted a residential composting system which delighted me and
made a lot of people very angry.  One of
the reasons cited by the city for the adoption of the food composting system is that food
waste thrown away with other trash makes methane.  A letter writer pointed out that the food
waste either made methane with the regular garbage or while being composted, so why do we
have to go through trouble of composting? 
I think that he’s wrong, that food waste composted makes something other
than methane, but I don’t have any idea of going about finding the answer.  Except perhaps the handy google search:  “Does food composting make methane?” [post first draft note:  I googled that phrase and found this article.  It did not answer my question. Ask Ashley had a better answer.]
So I’m a bit dumb in science.  I see this as a bad thing, because it has
closed off careers to me. For instance, there was a brief period of interest in becoming a
civil engineer, but a quick look at the coursework squelched that.  There is a lot of soil science involved with
being a civil engineer.  But this lack of knowledge means I walk through the world not understanding things.  I’ve arranged my life so science is not a
part of it, but am I missing something? 
Do smart science people pity me the way I do people who don’t know the
great stories of history?
I feel like I was exposed to science as a child.  There was a period of intense interest in
Chemistry, mostly fueled by the coveting of a chemistry set I was too young to
have.  When I came of age, (10) I did perform
experiments with the set, but my enthusiasm waned in proportion to how dirty
the test tubes became (there was no test tube brush included with the set*) and
I wandered off. I also checked out books from the library of the “kids explore
science” variety and I did some exploring. 
But it didn’t seem to translate into interest in science as a
subject.  I preferred reading about young
scientists in my biography series about great young Americans.
The other thing that has happened to me is that science seems a
bit made up.  Because I don’t understand
it, I survived my five science classes in Junior High and High School by
memorizing things, nodding along as teachers explained things the same way I do when crazy people are talking to me.  Then they were
promptly forgotten.  So when I encounter
science today it seems rather magical.  I
can see why some people who did understand science back in the day used their knowledge to
perform “magic” for the masses.  I would
be nearly as amazed.
I will say that the subject of Geology seems very real to
me, as I can see it around me. But the science subject that does seem real to me is
also the topic I find the most incredibly boring topic in the universe.  I would rather look at actuary tables than
discuss Geology.  Except for a brief
visit to Yellowstone with someone who had taken a course in the Geology of
Yellowstone, any time someone brings up Geology I get a trapped, panicked
feeling and pray for them to stop talking quickly.
So what will happen with my science illiteracy?  I’m guessing not much will change.  I’m an adult and adults are good at paying
bills and saving for the future and having a better idea of who they are then
when they were 15, but learning new things from scratch is not a big thing
about being an adult.  Plus, most grown
up desire to learn about new things comes from interest, like say, learning to
play the stand-up bass at 50 when you’ve been thinking about it since you were
13, or taking riding lessons so you can finally have that pony.  Because science doesn’t interest me, I doubt
the status quo will change for me.  I
find this troubling, but not enough to do anything about it.
*The lack of a test tube brush frustrated me.  The instructions referred to one, but I was
supposed to procure one for myself. 
Where the heck is a ten-year-old supposed to find a test tube
brush?  And how is she to afford one once
she finds them?  The lack of access to a
test tube brush made the object grow in my mind to something rather fantastic.
When I took chemistry in high school** and encountered my first test tube brush
I felt a great letdown.  This little thing
was all it was?  And why did I never have
one?
**Admittedly, the whole of high school science may have
gotten off on the wrong foot simply because I refused to take Biology as a
sophomore as all sophomores did at my school and vaulted myself straight into
Junior-level Chemistry.  As a sophomore,
I was still developing high school study skills, which most of my classmates
had already probably mastered.  So when
we had to memorize the entire periodic table early on, I flailed and faltered
and it was downhill from there.

Update Satyricon space

So back in July 2011, I posted about the demolition of the building which was the home to Satyricon.  I’ve been watching the progress of the new building and today  it struck me as a very building-like, embryonic building, so I took a picture.  There were two guys in the top floor window, second from left, but one had wandered off by the time I got out my camera.

 

Three sentence movie reviews: Glee season 2 disk 2

Season two is pretty uneven, which was the word on the street before we even started watching this.  Matt even stopped watching for an episode or two before being sucked in again. This DVD will always have a warm spot in my heart for having the episode where Rachel writes a song about her hairband.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Avengers

I was a bit worried that there were too many characters for the plot, but it all came together nicely.  This was a funny and engrossing film, so much so that I was caught up and actually said, “God DAMN you Joss Whedon” rather loudly at a critical juncture.  And people like me, who always stay to the bitter end of the credits, do appreciate a reward at the end.

The past and my own future.

Saturday night, looking for something to do while watching a
four-hour version of Hamlet, I set to combing through my boxes of memorabilia,
shuffling through old bus passes and identification cards, sorting through
pictures, stacking letters, and dipping into and quickly flipping past the
pages of the journals and planners of my twenties.  I got a lot done.  The photos were shifted to a drawer, the
journals and planners tucked away in a different part of the house and the
letters relocated to one box.  Hamlet was
good too.  I found it engrossing in
places, though nowhere near as engrossing as I found my own past.
Saturday night I was astounded—though really shouldn’t have
been—to discover that the same two problems that come up repeatedly for me
today were front and center in the journals of my previous decade.  I also thought about a great many people that
wander through my synapses only in passing, and only now and then.  After sorting my past, I retreated to the
computer, where I teased out information about those same people. The
information I found astounded and excited me: a previous coworker runs a successful business overseas, a sister of a former friend is a florist, a
not-surprising, (but-still-incredible-to-me) number of my former classmates are
ecstatic about their children, and a person I always assumed to be gay is apparently
not.
On Sunday, I thought about all these people, imagining
myself in some of their places.  I worked
hard to stay in my own present, a skill I’ve been building for some time now,
with still no mastery in sight.  But my
mind zoomed around to various points in the past, to what I imagine other’s
futures are, and refused to settle anywhere near my own present.
On Monday, I hit a high. 
I was in a fabulous mood because I was
not in my twenties any longer.
 
Though I still have far to go to be the person I strive to be, I had
seen a massive amount of evidence of how far I had come.  The two recurring problems?  They are clearly a part of me and something
to be happily integrated and not a point of weakness.  I felt ecstatic and light and liberated and
happier than I had been in a long time. 
Some part of my conscious nudged me that this wasn’t a good place either
and I had better pull back, but I was unable and unwilling to leave that
feeling.
Monday night I awoke and stayed awake for hours, thinking
about connections between people, the present, the departed and the long gone
and mostly forgotten.  I wanted to sleep,
to be rested for my day, but sleep eluded me as people from my past wandered
through my brain.
Tuesday I crashed. 
Groggy from lack of sleep, I woke up to my own, ordinary life.  A life that seemed less shimmering and
satisfying than the one I lived only the day before.  Thoughts of my past began to fade and my
present loomed before me, the same as it ever was.  I was exhausted.  I stumbled home from work and into bed,
desperate for rest and oblivion.  I
didn’t sleep very long, but I awoke feeling better and unsure what to do with
this episode.  Essay writing time called
and so I sat down and wrote.
Over the past few months I have experienced this cycle to
lesser degrees again and again.  I fixate
on something for a day or two and it becomes a way to ignore my present.  I think I have engaged in this
pattern for years, with the object generally being a book I can’t stop
reading.  I seem to struggle with the
monotony of day-to-day life.  The daily
shower, the finding of food, the keeping house, the daily grind of the
job.  I want to make these things
rituals, but I push them away, again and again. 
I chide the boyfriend for constantly living in the future or the past,
but I am guilty of escaping from my own present.
I’ve come a long way from the rampant poor choices of my
early adulthood.  I’ve managed to build a
solid relationship, a community of people, a steady income and a home I
love.  But I probably need to pay
attention to the times I still seek to escape all of these things.  This is what I learned this weekend.