Holly Reviews a Movie

We went to see Disney's "A Christmas Carol" yesterday. I loved it! It made me feel all Christmassy, which is no small feat. Rather than give away some of the pleasant surprises by describing it all, I'll tell you why I liked it.

First, the animation was amazing. OK, I don't know diddly about animation or computers or special effects, and usually they wash over me and I don't pay much attention, but I'm pretty sure the animation was amazing. It was amazing to the point where I'll go back on my word slightly and give away one thing: When they close up on Scrooge's face, you can see the pores and hair on his nose. There were other highly effective moments, but I want you to experience them for yourself so I'll keep my mouth shut.

Second, it managed to affect me. A story I've seen and read countless times, and it had me laughing and crying at all the right moments. Part of that may be because the movie and I met at the right time and place; I find that's the way with books and movies. But I found myself taking a step forward in my attitude toward the poor. As with everything else, my feelings are always shifting on that subject, and I'm coming out of a season where I've felt a need to steel myself against guilt and legalism and the feeling that I'm obligated to carry the pains of the world around on my shoulders. This meant that stories like this felt like kind of a guilt trip. But as I get used to not feeling guilty, I have more room to care about people without it overwhelming me. It was nice to watch a moralistic story and not come away feeling like a jerk, or at least like someone else was trying to get me to feel like one. I also have more understanding of Scrooge with each passing year; time, loneliness, disappointment, and fear really wear on a soul.

What I liked best, though, was the combined feeling of longing and hope with which I left the theater. I think that's what felt Christmassy about it. I wanted what I saw on the screen: beauty, snow, love, joy, contentment, snow, meaning, and snow. It's not the same excitement I had as a kid; it's grown up now, and there's always a sense that Christmas will never live up to what I hope it will be, if only because I still have so far to go in my own ability to enjoy moments for what they are. But that hope-longing combo -- that feels like prayer. I've been learning a bunch about how broad the definition of prayer can be. I used to think it had to be verbal; now I don't think that at all. I once read a great line in a book about how a dying woman's suffering was worship "because she willed it to be so." I think that's all it takes, a turning in your heart with whatever else you're doing, choosing to direct it towards God; it doesn't have to be a constant striving to make everything "sacred." Fasting and dancing can be praying with your body. Singing, even secular songs. Cleaning my room. If prayer is communicating with God, then surely the choices are at least as wide as our options for communicating with people.

I came away from the movie with the usual awareness of all the things I want and still don't have, but was excited to daydream about them and bring them to God and enjoy the process of asking and expecting.

Yep. Got all that from a cartoon.

Places I Want to Live

A castle
Underwater
The North Pole (not the real one -- the one with reindeer and candy-cane lamp posts)
A log cabin
A gingerbread house
One year each in --
Norway
Sweden
Netherlands
Italy
Russia
Japan
France
Hong Kong
Spain or Portugal
South America
Montreal
India
Africa (sub-Saharan)
North Africa
New York
Chicago
St. Louis
Australia
Salzburg
Heidelburg
Antarctica
Mongolia
Hong Kong
...and I'd like to get a decent handle on the languages of each while I live there.
Alaska
Scotland
A modernized cave
In my own little red house where I can rake leaves and chop wood and have a fireplace and have people over.

Oh, THAT'S why the vegetables tasted raw.

Because they WERE.

Why is My Butt Still Attached?

I love Fall. I love Winter. I love it when the weather gets cool, then cold. I love Thanksgiving and Christmas and a birthday in December. I love decorations and music and presents and time off work and special food and visiting family and catching up on sleep and then stockpiling more sleep for later. I love the threat of freezing my butt off so that I need slippers and blankets and yummy hot drinks every evening when I come home.

So why is it so warm outside that I barely need a light jacket, and am sweating after 15 minutes of walking? I certainly don't wish any suffering on people who have no choice about being on the street, or even upon those wusses who complain when it gets below 70 degrees (and you know who you are, you wusses!), but I'd really like it to get cold. This kind of warmth is nice in September or even October, but this late in the game it just feels wrong. At some point when I was a kid, we must have gotten our first snowfall on Nov. 11, because from that point on I've had that date in my head as the perfect date for the snow to start. But apart from one wondrous day in mid-October, we ain't had nothin'.

Let it snow (please!), let is snow (please!), let it snow (pleeeeeeeeeeeeease)!

Priorities

On Friday, I did something I almost never do: lost track of time. At the end of the workday, too! I looked at the clock on my computer and it was only 4 minutes till the shuttle left from work to the T station that gets me closest to home. I scrambled to pack up my things, dress for outdoors, and began running down the hall. Then screeeeeeeeech! I realized that, in my now-locked desk drawer, was a giant cookie. I had to go back.

I didn't think I could go back, find the key in my purse, lock everything again, and make the shuttle. So I went back and took my time, took a different shuttle to a different station, and probably added 20 minutes to my commute. 20 minutes out of my evening wasn't such a high price to pay for a giant cookie, when you consider that my big plan for the evening was to eat the cookie.

It was a GIANT cookie.

Genetics is Funny

It's kind of amazing how a kid can look like both parents at the same time. I suppose I'm that kid, really; I look like whichever parent I'm standing next to. But right now I'm thinking about my nephew, who's 20 months old and looks different every time I see pictures. I don't know how he looks like both my brother and his wife at once. Different expressions accentuate different similarities, though.

When smiling, he's pretty much his mom.

He looks most like his dad when he's confused.

Hulk Mad!

Everything is annoying me! Flaky friends ("friends"). Malfunctioning technology paired with an overwhelming workload at a job I mostly appreciate for its light workload. A video where it looked like people had important things to say but I'm not sure because the "background" music was as loud as the people talking and I was so distracted I missed most of what they said.

Hulk practice being thankful now:
--That 2-week headache seems to have finally gone away. Also, I don't know if they were part of the solution, but Ben-Gay and Head-On feel really cool and I would use them just for fun.
--My roommate brought home Trader Joe's chewy chocolate chip cookies last night and I combined them with peanut butter, extra chocolate chips, and little milk to keep it from sealing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Very, very yummy. Must repeat if possible.
--I get to watch improv tonight without the pressure of having to perform.
--I'm allowed to be angry, and the people who love me best are the ones who'll encourage it and won't be all shocked and offended that I'm human and don't appreciate being crapped on.
--There's still candy in my desk from when coworkers had leftovers after Halloween and brought them to the office. I was not shy about relieving them of their burden.
-- Getting kinda excited about upcoming holidays. Hulk like holidays.

Hulk blog done now.

It's Not a Toomuh

Although, heck, for all I know it could be.

I get headaches all the time. Have ever since I was a kid. In elementary school, they thought maybe I had a milk allergy, though I don't remember going without dairy, so that, to my knowledge, remains an untested theory. When I was about 12 or 13, I remember going to a hospital and getting some kind of scan (CAT? HORSE?), and I'm pretty sure they didn't find anything but the usual innards. I had a week-long headache when I was about 15, and a doctor prescribed me some mega-strengh ibuprofen that didn't work. And then, a few years ago, my primary care physician recommended Excedrin Migraine, which usually works but leaves me very jittery (and usually pretty happy).

Folks have suggested that I might be under- or over-hydrated. And that I get my eyes checked. These aren't bad ideas, and I might look into that eye thing. It might not kill me to see a specialist, either; there have got to be a hundred reasons why I should get my head examined. If there's something genuinely wrong, by all means, let's figure it out.

But heck if I can find a pattern. Apart from this and the inconvenient-but-not-life-threatening issue I sometimes get surgery for, I'm obnoxiously healthy. Headaches just appear to be my body's response to anything that's even slighty off, physically or emotionally. Tension, cold, hunger, tiredness, stress, oversleep, wrong food, wrong drink, tight turtleneck, heavy backpack, bad-shaped pillow -- here comes a headache.

My dad had headaches as a kid, too. I don't know if he still gets them. I should ask. Dad, do you still get them? Did anyone ever figure out what was wrong with you ;-)? Is this part of that melancholy-perfectionist thing you and I share? Can we send it back? Do your model trains help?

Maybe I need toy trains. Or a Spirograph. Remember Spirograph? That was neat.

Plaid Poncho Vindication!

I've been wearing my plaid poncho again. Some of you may remember this from a post a couple years back, wherein I was told that it was the most hideous article of clothing anyone ever dared to place on a human body. OK, slight exaggeration. But the response was negative, and folks hadn't even seen it!

Well, obviously I can take neither hints nor direct commands, because it still dwells in my closet and I still put it on. And I get compliments on it, I tell you!

What's more: I saw Jackie wearing one (albeit with a different tartan pattern) on a rerun of "That '70s Show." And she's meant to be stylish, isn't she? Well, then.

If you catch me outside over the next couple weeks, you may see it for yourself. And perhaps you'll raise your assessment from "Unthinkable!" to "Meh."

Don't be a hater.

Quittin' Time

Ben's comment on my last post made me realize that many people probably only have a partial picture of my recent improv experience, and it might be helpful if I explain this whole quitting deal a bit further. (Ben, I hope you didn't think I was ignoring your comment -- I just thought the questions deserved some attention and it took a few days before I found the time to sit down and type this all out.) For reference, here's Ben's comment, which I imagine sums up the questions most people would have:

As a fan, I'm concerned. ;)

Seriously, I didn't realize improv wasn't fun any more. Why is that? Is it possible that there's a way to make it fun again?

You're so good at it, and it seemed to give you more joy than anything I've ever seen you do; I guess I don't understand why you're considering quitting.

Of course, I don't want this message to sound like I'm pressuring you not to quit. Just wondering what you're thinking about...

I know this must be what people are thinking, because it involves thinking I'm awesome. That just rings true, doesn't it?

Basically, I was thinking and feeling several things. One of the biggies is something I've been aware of from the beginning, which is my tendency to take things so seriously that the fun gets sucked out of them. This happened with music. It even happened with this blog, which is why 2007 contained a whopping 14 posts; I had only been blogging for a few months when I felt the pressure of having to post almost every day, and I took a year off before returning to a moderate output. At various points throughout my improv experience, I wondered if I should take a break, but I never did. And for the most part, I was glad to have kept going. But eventually the nerves I felt before performances felt more like dread. I was losing the expectation that a show could go well. Rehearsals became something to get through. I was beginning to feel disconnected from the activity, rather than fully engaged; in the past, I had been truly engaged, even when that engagement involved frustration.

Now, this hadn't been going on all that long, and in the midst of it I had the hugely positive experience of the grad show, which I'd thought could have been the home run that knocked me out of my slump. But I'd begun to have negative associations with the activity of improv, and one show wasn't enough to undo that feeling. I'd already determined to take a break after this round of House Teams, but after last weekend's rehearsal, I was wondering if that break should start even sooner. I went home and prayerfully made a list of reasons to stay and reasons to go. My reasons to stay were the same as those that had kept me in situations in the past -- I'd made a commitment, I didn't want to disappoint anyone, there was always the chance that things could get better and I didn't want to miss out. I only had one reason to go: It wasn't fun, and I didn't really expect to get any more joy out of it in the near future. In light of that one reason to go, all the reasons to stay became reasons to go, because they were coming from a motivation that didn't involve authentic joy. For someone like me, who's always tried so hard to do the "right thing" that I hardly even know what I want in a situation, actually paying attention to what I want takes practice. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for practicing just that.

I was thrown when my improv coach gave me encouragement, telling me that she was pushing me harder because she saw me on the verge of a breakthrough. I have talent? Potential? Dang it, those are positive reasons to stay! I wasn't expecting those! Right up until Tuesday's show, I didn't know what I was going to do. But I've been used to letting other people heavily influence my decisions, and I figured it was time for me to make my own, even if that meant trusting my assessment of the situation above everyone else's. So that's what it came down to; I needed to make my own choice, even if it ended up being a bad one. I do feel like I made the right choice regarding improv, but I think that it would be OK even if I hadn't, because at least the choice would have been mine.

I've been learning how intertwined trusting in God and trusting yourself can be. For example, if you're going to trust what God says to you, you have to place some trust in what you think you've heard from God, which means trusting your own ability to hear God! Scary. It can lead to some interesting mistakes, but the motivation is right, and God-ward. I'm also learning that our instincts and desires aren't necessarily the suspicious entities I'd once thought. Perhaps they're like hunger and thirst -- while they can get out of hand, they're essentially good things that we need to pay attention to, and God can steer us by these as well as He can by anything else. So then, if I'm going to let God lead me by my desires, I'm going to have to pay attention to those desires. If I'm going to find joy in God and find God in joy, then I need to pay attention to what is and isn't giving me joy! Perhaps I've said this here before, but it's worth repeating: It's a kind of discipline, not letting myself fall into my old habits of discipline!

And quitting something halfway through?? I never do that! Even if the quitting itself isn't the best idea (though in this case I think it was -- bonus!), it could be good for me just to buck convention that way. It can be easy to assume that it's human nature to always do what's easiest and most self-indulgent, but that's not my problem. My problem is taking the "no pain, no gain" philosophy to the unhelpful extreme of "more pain, more gain." But sometimes more pain is just more pain, and it's a sign that you should stop what you're doing and go make yourself some chocolate milk.

I don't have a plan, which means that I'm not determined to quit improv forever. I feel more like it's a seed, and because I value it (it was SO good for me, I got so much out of it, and I'm so glad I did it), I choose to plant it and step away, trusting that if and when I come back, it'll not only be there waiting for me, but it will have grown bigger and stronger in my absence. In the meantime, I have other things to explore that will only help. Remember that week of physical theater I did in July? When I came back from that, I felt somehow bigger, expanded. Right on the heels of that, I had the most amazing improv class! Somehow, taking creative and emotional risks, even though they were more physical and less comedic, left me much more able to do improv comedy. I expect my various creative explorations to reinforce and support each other this way, like lots of poles resting against each other to make a teepee. I also think it's important for me to keep exploring, and not commit solely to one activity yet. It would be premature.

I have a few ideas about what I can try out next. Perhaps after the new year, I'll try acting classes, or another physical activity like improvisational movement or some kind of dance. Those ideas both excite me.

But like I said, no plan.