Rewind

Phil asked me what brought that last post to mind, seeing as how it's been a while since it came up. I started reading Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky recently, hence the title of the post, and there was a quote in there that had something to do with it. Also, I've been reading a running dialogue on the TV series The Wire, including some of the people who make it, and a quote by creator David Simon has come up more than once. "(T)his season is to take argument with those who feel that if you're born without privilege, but make the right set of choices, that you will be spared. To do away with that bit of national mythology." The season centers around middle schoolers slowly being sucked into drugs and violence by their inner city Baltimore surroundings.

Naturally, that sentiment is a lot easier to come by when you're writing about inner city African-Americans, but being a white man, Simon has caught some flak for his take on the subject. Whether or not you feel it's warranted depends on if you believe in the universality of human experience, which most artists, including myself, take for granted. There is no human experience that is completely foreign to me, because I am human.

Reading Dostoevsky

Some time ago, my roommate brought up the idea that maybe it's a mistake for parents to tell their children they can grow up to be anything they want, because when they grow up and realize this isn't true, they become disillusioned and (I would add) maybe even resentful. Would it be better if your folks skipped the optimism and let their kids decide for themselves what was possible and, by extension, not possible in their futures?

Most if not all people reach that conclusion on their own eventually, and at least superficially this seems a profoundly anti-American idea. After all, our media is full of stories where people overcome the circumstances of their upbringing to succeed in the world and grow rich and/or famous in the process. Movies are made about their lives to inspire the parents of the next generation to continue the cycle.

But what about the (vast) majority of people who don't? What if those same people who strive would strive regardless of what they're encouraged to believe as kids, and those who settle for a decent life quietly lived staring up at them would be happier as adults without ever having the possibility dangled in front of them, just out of reach in a future that will never come? Would we be better off both as individuals and a country without the expectations?

Well, I can't quite believe that.

While it's true there was plenty of innovation and economy prior to the very idea of America, much of it was relatively anonymous or to the credit of the aristocracy at the time, and it's more than luck that drives America to still be the dream for countless people all over the world. The promise of America lies in its ideas, foremost among them that you can do what you set your mind to do. Whether that involves working a farm or starting a media empire, we believe the opportunity is there, even despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

And if we as a people ever stop believing that could be us on the TV screens or in the White House, America is likely to become a far darker place, because the impulses and moods kept in check by that hope have been decidedly uglier since at least Vietnam. Fear, paranoia, and a will to dominate are dangerous in any country, but as armed as the U.S. has been and will remain, woe to the country that eclipses us in the future. We're going to need to hold onto our ideas and ideals because they're the most effective weapon we have against our own darker natures.

Day trippin'

I managed to come down with the worst sore throat of my life by the time we left Pedernales on Saturday, although I didn't realize it until I woke up around midnight. I got about eight hours of sleep total over the weekend, given the whole sleeping on the ground thing.

I think I realize now why it had been so long since I'd been camping - I don't enjoy it very much.

Seeing the falls was really cool and hanging out with friends was fun, but I think I prefer the idea of day trips ending in a nice, soft bed at night. It was definitely worth seeing, though.

Speaking of worth seeing, if you skipped The Prestige a few weeks ago, definitely check it out. This is one creepy, mind-bending, suspense movie, reminiscent of Memento. It's based on a novel, but is at no time less than compelling watching. And the ending is a kick in the gut, even if you see it coming.

Pedernales camping.

Getting animated

I saw Flushed Away after work today, Aardman's new computer-animated film. It retained all the wit and inventiveness of the claymation films in the move to the new medium, a feat in and of itself. It's also one of the best films I've seen this year. I envy kids growing up now the quality of their animated entertainment. I watched cartoons growing up, but the only thing that really holds up to adult viewing is Batman: The Animated Series on the television side, and some of the Disney movies. (I'm referring to what was originally released while I was a kid, not the classics.) Between Pixar, Aardman, Miyazaki, and Dreamworks, there have been more great animated movies released in the last five to ten years than in all of my childhood combined. This is undoubtedly the reason I'm still such a fan of the medium that I go see them in the theater by myself, as I did tonight.

I'm going camping this weekend for the first time in almost ten years, so I had to go buy a tent. I went to Wal-Mart looking for just a couple things, including the tent. Both the air filter and the headlamp bulb I needed for my car were out of stock, the only models of each that they didn't have. I told the woman helping me there must be a lot of Eclipse owners shopping there lately.

Journals

I was just reading a review of a book I'll likely never read that referenced a scene in which the narrator refers to a room of his house where one wall is concealed floor-to-ceiling with journals, some of which are written in huckleberry juice. This immediately made me think of Fight Club, when Edward Norton is reading stacks of old books and magazines rotting away in a house with leaky ceilings and sporadic electricity. But I also wondered, how long would it take to read all that stuff?

When you consider how long it takes you to write a page versus read one, it's pretty clear you could do it up until a certain point in your life, even if you wrote in your journal everyday. The serial killers and mentally ill you read about may even write all day everyday to accumulate their libraries. But there would eventually come a time in everyone's life when it will become impossible to read everything you had written up to that point in the remaining life left to you.

This blog is only the fourth journal I have ever kept, following an English class assignment, my travels on my semester abroad, and "Notes from the Road", published here in February 2004. My roommate keeps journals, and when he comes to the end of one, he re-reads what he's written before starting the next one.

Now imagine how much better of a grasp you could have on your own history if you were to read your journals all the way from the beginning to the present. Memory is unreliable, personality is malleable, but the written word doesn't change. Assuming you weren't making things up, and allowing for the fact that you may have consciously or unconsciously held things back when writing, you may discover truths that you were blind to at the time and gain real insight into yourself. Or you may just unearth forgotten memories and the faces of lost friends, like looking through a photo album.

But this is the promise of blogging for me, and probably many others, keeping a record and being able to reflect on it in the future. Sometimes we lose ourselves to our circumstances or surroundings, and this is a new tool available to us to find our way back. It's up to each individual whether or not to let others peek in at the same time, like handing someone your diary, and here's the difference: almost everyone blogs for the world, while reading someone's diary is still an intimate act, and done without permission, a violation. I don't know if that's a sign of the connected world's narcissism or truly a blossoming of openness in expression, but it feels like a good thing to me.

Lovesick

I haven't had many relationships, and they've all been short except one, which probably doesn't count as a relationship since we were living hundreds of miles away from each other for most of it. I don't have the experience of most people my age, and lately I've felt that lack.

One day I woke up and realized I was bald, a bit overweight, and feeling old, and it occurred to me that I might never have the chance to make someone else happy and fall in love. That was a scary moment. In some Asian countries, due to the preference for male babies over girls, there is now a 3-1 ratio, and since very few have the means to leave, there's going to be a large population of men that simply never get a chance to start a family. I read this fact has been identified as a threat to the future security of the world, as men who can't find an outlet for their emotions are more susceptible to manipulation by terrorist recruiters, cults, and the like. While that's thankfully not the case here in the U.S., the fact is the longer you wait, the harder and more uncertain it is when you start seriously looking, at least in my experience.

I spent years as a single guy with no attachments, and someone was recently telling me how studies have shown relationships are harder to maintain for people like me because they're used to getting their way to a large extent, and doing what they please. This makes me fear I may have grown selfish with my time and energy, and while I have tried to meet people and dated some in that same timeframe, I really wish I had made more of an effort now. Part of it was circumstance, probably some of it was arrested development, but I can't deny that it was also lack of interest. I felt like there was no hurry, and while that was true of getting married, say, it wasn't true of learning how to love someone.

Which is a long way of saying, when you do fall in love, you realize what you've been missing, and cherish it all the more, regardless of whatever else may be wrong.

I can already hear the counter-argument from those who fell in love at a young age only to be hurt repeatedly, and it's true I don't know if it's worse or better than the heartbreaks when love fails. But right now, I have to side with the poet who said "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Because the feeling of loving someone is worth having, and holding onto, even when it's not returned. I can only imagine how much better it must be when it is.

Drama

Lately I've been experiencing situations commonly known as "drama". It's a mixed bag, but a few of the good things to come of it are:

1. Loss of appetite = potential weight loss
2. Creativity up = writing again
3. General warm fuzzies in close proximity to object of affection

The bad things include:

1. Sleepless nights
2. Restlessness and difficulty concentrating
3. Extra sensitivity to harmless comments meant to amuse

I'm a very laid-back person under normal circumstances, so this is rather unfamiliar emotional territory for me. I'm lucky to have friends and family to talk to, but I can see how people in other circumstances can have trouble with this kind of thing. I'll try to be more sympathetic in the future.

Golden age

I've been reading that we're living in a golden age of television at the moment, with more popular series that are also high quality than have been on the air in many years. I wouldn't know, since I rarely watch series TV, but there have been a few things that have caught my interest in the last couple years.

Right now, I'm in the middle of watching the second season of Lost on dvd. I watched most of the first season and lost track near the end, so I gave up on it for a while. Then I borrowed season 1 from Jim, and fell in love all over again. When Julia offered to lend me season 2, I jumped on the chance and I'll be done with it in less than a week. It's that good.

But it's not perfect. The first season really suffered from poor music selection at the end of episodes, where some horrific thing or other was usually glossed over in the last minute with a pleasant guitar strum under slo-mo laughing on the beach. I haven't caught as much of that in season 2, thankfully, but there's also the matter of the pregnant pause. In typical Hollywood fashion, no one can say anything just prior to a commercial break that doesn't cause a complete halt in the conversation for at least five seconds of emoting before the cut to black.

Still, I look back on all those afternoons and evenings of my childhood, when I would watch whatever was on for no reason whatsoever, regardless of quality, and I wish they'd been making material like this at the time. Thanks to dvd, I have the opportunity to catch up on other shows like the Shield, the Wire, and Deadwood. Almost makes me want to get cable again.

Scene from my night

"I don't hold your hope against you," I told her as we stood with our arms around each other in the parking lot.
"I'll call you," she replied.

And just like that, she was gone.