Wednesday, March 25, 2009

A Movie Trailer Life

A part of me has always wanted to be that person who gets to make movie trailers for a living. No, no... I'm getting this wrong. The truth is, I entertained quite fleetingly the notion of wanting to do this for a living, but then I realized that to be the person to make the trailer would be a let-down. Because the film always is, in some ways, never quite as good as an amazingly-well-made trailer would have you think it can be. The truth is, I've always wanted my life to be a movie trailer life: to be full of expectation, hope, and longing, the distinct thrill of something incredible just out of reach, the huge potential of it all.

I just saw the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, which was pretty much the reason I ever bothered to learn to read in the first place. My kindergarten teacher read it to us in class and we got to create our own Wild Things out of construction paper and yarn (I still have mine!), and I went home and begged my mom to read it to me over and over again, but she got sick of it, and since nobody would read it to me anymore I had to figure it out for myself. So I did. So the whole reading thing started with the Wild Things. A total tangent, sorry, but true.

But maybe it's not so off mark. Because watching the movie trailer for WtWTA tonight, I was especially excited because it evoked in me the same feeling I got when I was a five-year-old first reading the book. It was a hugely liberating thing for that kid to think that bedroom walls didn't have to block you in... to realize that the world is big, and scary, but also thrilling and alive, and that I could be a part of that, even though I was just a little kid. Max was a dork in a wolf suit, after all, and he managed to be King!

Of course there's that part of us that always longs for home, too. For the still-warm supper as a reminder that we are loved, wild thing behavior and all. So maybe that's why our lives can't be movie trailer lives. We have to live out the story to its logical conclusion. We have to eventually return to a level of normal, stasis once more. But there are still so many days I feel it- days when I'm sick of waking up and going to the same boring job, or when I'm frustrated at myself for falling so short of the hopes I had, or when I'm just weary of this world and wish my walls would turn into trees and that I could sail "through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to Where the Wild Things Are." It's then that I feel it like an ache or a tug, this longing for a movie trailer life.


Monday, March 16, 2009

Soundtrack of My Life

A meme:

Create the Soundtrack of your life:
1. Open your iTunes library and set it to Shuffle.
2. Press play
3. Write the title of the song playing next to the first question (that song is your "Opening Credits")
4. Every time you go to a new question hit the next button TWICE 5. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool. Feel embarrassed like us all.

Opening Credits
 = "Sound Check (Gravity) [Mix]” by Gorillaz. Pretty cool opening… kind of haunting. Interesting conflict: “Gravity… never let me go.” “Aw, don’t pull me down.”

Waking Up
 = ”Leeds United (Lounge Version)” by Amanda Palmer. Appropriately upbeat. Good get up and go music.

First Day at School
 = “Yellow Star” by Donavan. What? Weird. Althought this might fit: “With all our cruelty and all our jealousy we find it difficult to just live and let live”

Falling In Love
 = “It’s Summertime” by The Flaming Lips. I could see myself slow dancing with someone to this.

Losing Virginity
 = “Hallelujah” covered by Jason Castro. Beautiful, and quite appropriate.

Fight Song = 
"Get Up” by Superchick. PERFECT!!! “If I get up I might fall back down again. We get up anyway…”

Breaking Up
 = "Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner)” by Radiohead. Appropriately tense. Plus the parenthetical name is pretty accurate. “I don’t know what I feel…”

Prom
 = “Need” by the Benjamin Gate. “I long to be close to you, so close I disappear into you.” Umm… I was never that needy, and besides, I went to prom stag!

Mental Breakdown = 
"I am the Walrus” by Bono & Secret Machine. LOL! Yeah, I can see this fitting.

Driving
 = "Anywhere Is” by Enya. Also appropriate. “I go there and lose my way” (yeah, she’s obviously driven with me.)

Flashback
 = "Sally’s Song” by Catherine O’Hara from the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. Haunting, contemplative. It kinda fits.

Getting Back Together = 
"Freight Train Blues” by Bob Dylan. Happy, clap-your-hands music, despite the title. Kinda weird, but whatever.

Wedding = 
"Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love” by Coldplay. YES!!!!! This is absolutely PERFECT!!! “Lovers till the race is run.”

Birth of Child = 
"I’m Never Gonna Give You Up” by ShineMK. “I was nowhere when I found you, and you came into my world.” Awww…

Final Battle = 
"Murder, He Says” by Tori Amos from the Mona Lisa Smile soundtrack. Looks like someone’s a’goin’ ta DIE!!!

Death Scene = 
"No Jokes – Fact” by hot hot heat. Short, weird, and then suddenly over. Not a bad way to go.

Funeral Song
 = "Rehab” by Amy Winehouse. Unless the “no, no, no” and “won’t go, go, go” are referring to me not wanting to die, then this doesn’t really fit.

End Credits = 
"End of an Era” by Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls. Awww.. this is SO COOL!

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Musings on Entropy

I find it disheartening and distressing when I hear news like this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29623587/?gt1=43001

It happened with VA Tech, it happened with Columbine, it's happening now in Alabama. It happens on a larger scale with men like Omar Al-Bashir. And I hate it.

I hate how easy it is to destroy something. I think this is a fundamental flaw in the universe: the fact that it is easy and immediate to kill, to destroy, to take away, to injure, to break, and that it is often difficult and slow to grow, to build, to repair, to create, to heal, to restore. I know I'm small-minded in this. There are many philosophers who could probably point out that such thinking is not big-picture, and quite flawed.

But I hate it.

I hate the thought that I could so very easily get a gun and just drive around shooting people. Maybe because I was angry, or because I was afraid, or just because I didn't care enough about human life for it to matter to me. But really, why? I doubt this man was someone who could be considered clinically insane. I think he was a normal person like you and me, and that choices he made and lies he chose to believe led him to cause this bloody tragedy.

I guess that's what it comes down to: choices. And even though it's hard, and though the system as a whole is unfairly skewed toward those who seek destruction, I guess we have to keep slogging along in our efforts to do what's right and to spread love and hope. It's frustrating using words when they have bullets, giving books when they take lives, petitioning lawmakers when they take the law into their own hands.

I just have to remember that it's worth it, and that I am not alone.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Sudan

It's a strange situation. On the one hand, it is such a positive step to be able to take legitimate legal action on such an internationally recognized platform against a man who has been the source of so much evil for so long now. On the other hand, you have the immediate consequences of this action... that the seeds that have been planted, the good that was being accomplished on the ground by aid agencies, is being called to a halt.

This is bad in many respects: first, of course, is the obvious - that the needs of people in Darfur and nearby areas are great, and suddenly the resources to help them are going to vanish. But the other part, the part that has me feeling sick to my stomach and very very nervous...the part that makes me feel like I do in a really well-made horror film, when the suspense is all-encompassing and you just KNOW something horrible is going to happen, though you couldn't possibly anticipate what, or when exactly it will happen--that's the feeling I have right now. Because the logic is probably something like this: Send the westerners packing and then we'll be free to wipe them out.

Maybe that's me just being very paranoid and jumping to conclusions, but I don't think so. I think clearing out right now is a big, huge, MASSIVE mistake. I think that the presence of those aid agencies is the one thing that's keeping the violence from breaking out again. Omar Al-Bashir knows better than to take any action while Western workers are around: (a) they'd be witnesses, and (b) any accidental casualty of an aid worker would result in harsh action. Funny how 300,000 people can die and Western politicians waffle on about how horrible that is while doing little about it, but if one American were to be killed over there... boy howdy, it'd be all over the news, people would be in an uproar, and we'd most likely come in with guns blazing!

I am so so so so nervous right now. Blogging has helped a little. Called the State Department already. Off to leave another message.