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.

I Understand about Indecision

So, I got a response from my improv director and, long story short, she's encouraging me to stick it out through the term. She sees me as on the verge of a breakthrough.

I don't think I made it clear to her that I was only planning on taking a break, not quitting forever. Still, I wasn't expecting encouragement, and it's thrown me into confusion again.

I'm still leaning toward letting this be my last night for a while. Because I like the idea of not having to worry about it. Six more weeks of rehearsals and shows sounds long.

I don't need anyone else's blessing to quit. But as Mr. Bingley said in Pride and Prejudice, "I should like it all the same."

I'm inclined to trust that my breakthrough will still be there, waiting for me, whenever I decide to come back.

Lord, help me to make a good decision.

Get While the Gettin's Good

I quit!

This is a good thing.

I almost never quit things. I see my commitments through to the end. The bitter end. This often means sticking with things much longer than I should, just to make sure they're extra dead, and there's absolutely no joy left to be found in them.

I'd like to avoid doing that with improv. So rather than ride out this term of performing teams for another two months like I'd originally planned, I emailed my coach today to tell her that I'd like Tuesday to be my last show. Now I just need to hear back from her.

I don't know if I'll stay away from improv forever. But it's not fun anymore, and I want to have positive associations with it, so I think it's best to leave before I run it completely into the ground. My prayer now is that Tuesday will go well, like the grad show did, and I can go out with a bang.

Art Is Everywhere

There was cat hair stuck to the toilet this morning. No idea how it got there. Don't care to know. Then I looked out the window at the changing leaves. Suddenly I was inspired. Wrote a little song about it like to hear it? here it go:

The tree are getting pretty
Trees trees trees
I'm allergic to a kitty
Sneeze sneeze sneeze

That last part, about being allergic? It's not even true! Fiction! How's that for creativity? In your face, Art!

I bet Art likes it when you throw things in its face.

Famous People Who Are Nice, According to a FedEx Driver I Met in My Early-Level Improv Classes, Who Has Delivered to Said Famous People

Steve Carrell

Four of the five members of Aerosmith

My parents

... normally call me on Sundays. But tonight they were late, so I called and my mom answered. She sounded funny. Did I wake her up? Had she been crying?

"Oh, hi honey!" she said, "not that we forgot you..."

"Except we did." That was my dad's voice in the background.

"Did you really?" I asked.

"Rick and Christa came over."

Ah, OK. Old friends visiting from out of town. That funny sound in Mom's voice wasn't sleep or tears. It was alcohol. They had friends over and had a lot to drink and forgot they had a kid. So I said it was OK and they didn't have to talk and they could go back to the friends and the drinking and she said, "OK."

"I'm not missing any limbs and haven't gone to the emergency room."

"OK."

I know they love me and all, but it's hard to compete with a refrigerated box of wine.

Guess I'm Not the Only One, Then

Back in August, at one of my improv classes, I admitted to having seen the Hannah Montana Movie. My coach looks at me and says, "Did you cry?"

How did he know? He doesn't know about my blog. I didn't mention it on Facebook. This is so weird! I was almost scared. How did he know? How did he know???

I stared at him blankly, wondering by what kind of witchery he'd come by this knowledge.

"I know other people who've seen it, and they said they cried."

Oh.

I was at the grocery store

...and was having trouble finding the salami. And I thought, Where did they hide it?

Cuteness

... is Nature's defense mechanism for the incontinent and whiny.

Perhaps I'll live to be 100, in which case I'm right on track.

I've spent the better part of my life being impatient for things I don't have yet. This may be typical for people in their teens and twenties -- we think we should get the career and the money and the relationship, and then our adulthood will be established and we can spend the next sixty years living it out.

But I'm pushing 35 now, and these things are still in my future, if they're in the cards for me at all. Sometimes, I get antsy as hell. But being antsy doesn't really help. And at least in the career department, I've already been there, done that as far as picking one goal and focusing all my energies on it (music, in case you weren't paying attention for the preceding 334 posts). I'm now trying to learn how to function without a detailed plan, without prematurely committing to any one endeavor. My plan for the present is to not have a plan.

And it's hard to stick to! It takes a kind of discipline not to fall into my previously established forms of discipline. This is part of what I'm running into with improv. At this point, having graduated from this theater's training center and being on student performing teams, I find myself around plenty of other people who take the pursuit seriously. They're trained actors or stand-up comedians and on track to do improv professionally. I can see who the most gifted performers are, and look up to them and want to be a part of them like they're the cool kids at school.

In each activity you pursue, you're likely to encounter people who have made that their world. Not that they have no other interests; but we each have some "core worlds" we're a part of. Now that you're involved in this activity, do you want it to become one of your handful of core worlds, or do you want to hang on the periphery? You can only be a part of so many things, and you can be seriously dedicated to even fewer.

My family, my roommates, and my church are three core worlds for me. Music used to be one. Work, tellingly, is not -- though I spend a lot of time and mental energy there, it does not hold my heart. I could choose to become ever more a part of the improv world, and let that be my primary creative outlet. And it could be fine. But I haven't done all the exploring I need to do, so in spite of my creative serial monogamy, I think I need to tear myself away and dabble in a few other worlds. Yeah, there's the desire to have my evenings and weekends free and curl up with a candle and a book at home. But there's also the desire to do Shakespeare and dance and sing in musicals.

And darn it, all this exploring takes time! Yargh! I thought I'd have my ducks in a row ten years ago, but ducks are stubborn. And lines are probably overrated anyway. So here I am, almost old enough to be president (we all know the age requirement was the only thing standing in my way, right?), and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do without prematurely putting down creative roots. (Oh my gosh, do you know what this means? I'm sowing my wild oats, artistically! Who knew I had wild oats?) I'm almost as old as Mozart was when he died, and I've barely begun to show the world what I have to offer. Heck, I hardly know what I have to offer. Yet this is a process that can't be rushed, like pregnancy or reaching your adult height. So as tempted as I am to settle into something so that I can say, "This is what I do, and this is my plan to become successful at it," I know that I did that once before. I'm having to unlearn it!

I'm trying to remember that taking my time is how this process will work best for me.

It's just that it feels so much like waiting.

"Just a Joke"

It sounds like an excuse, doesn't it? "Hey, it's just a joke! Lighten up!" Like the sort of thing you'd hear from a group of bullies, or from somebody who'd just insulted you and doesn't want to deal with the consequences of being called out as a jerk.

But I've found myself thinking it a lot. And I wonder if often it's true: Some things really are just jokes, and we don't need to get so ruffled about them.

This is an issue for me, both in public and private. In public, as you all know, I do improv comedy. Full of jokes. And nothing is sacred. I've dived right into subjects that some might find offensive, and others have dived into subjects that make me uneasy. But I'm finding more and more freedom in being unafraid as a performer, and also in being harder to offend as an audience member.

On a personal level, my sense of humor has gotten me pretty misunderstood. A few people have assumed that because I state something in a humorous way, I must not be taking a situation seriously. (On the contrary, I find that humor is often an acknowledgement of the seriousness of a situation, because that's when levity is most needed.) Or they have experienced jokes as taunts and mocking, and assume that must be how I'm using them, too. When I first encountered this, I was shocked. My experience was that humor was a form of inclusion; you joke around with people you like. Any teasing is done with affection, and requires a kind of intimacy. And it's indicative of trust -- you trust that the other person meant well, and they trust you to take it all in good fun.

I learned the hard way that not everyone functions on this level. I've been accused of having terrible motives behind the things I say. It was incredibly hurtful to have people I thought of as friends take one of the traits I felt I wielded most skillfully -- humor -- and tell me that they saw it as a destructive weapon. I spent a long, agonizing time looking inward to see if what they said about me was true, and eventually came to the conclusion that it was not. In my need to understand how they could have misjudged me so drastically and so aggressively, I came up with analogies.

One is that of a high school varsity baseball team. Imagine them throwing the ball fast and hitting it hard. Then imagine a 9-year-old on the field. If the teenagers include him in the game, it's a compliment, an indication that they see him as an equal. But if he's not used to that kind of game, freaks out a bit, and gets hit with the ball a few times, he's not going to have any fun. His pain is real. But it would be wrong for him and his mom to declare that the other ball players are terrible people, that they meant to hurt her son, and baseballs are weapons that should be banned from our schools. I felt like one of those ball players. I tossed jokes to my friends, they had no idea how to handle what was coming their way, and in return for a baseball I got accusations thrown at me. Where this metaphor breaks down: I never expected them to play at my level. I was always careful. But it wasn't enough, which made it even more surprising and difficult when even my slow pitches were mistaken for grenades.

From what I've observed, "taking a joke" is largely a matter of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Are we going to assume we know another person's motives, and further assume that those motives are bad? Or are we going to acknowledge that we all bring our own shit to the table, and perhaps our reactions have more to do with our shit than they do with the joke-teller? I'll even give an example by fessing up to shit of my own: I have a big nose. I know I have a big nose. So if, in an improv sketch, somebody in character decided to make fun of my character's appearance and called me a fat, scuzzy-haired, big-nosed stink-bag, I wouldn't react to the "fat," "scuzzy-haired," "stinky" bits, but I might feel a twinge at the "big-nosed" bit. But I'd be wrong to assume that the other actor meant anything by it, or that they even think I have a big nose. It's my issue. I could even approach it optimistically and hope that they consider that insult to be as fictional as the other three.

That last point is important, because the way I and many people I know use humor is to tell others that things are OK. You don't make fun of something if you think it's a real problem. Which means that, if somebody makes a joke about something that feels scary or sensitive to you, you can take it as a sign that it might not be as bad as you think. But to do this, you again need to give that person the benefit of the doubt.

This applies to public situations, too. There are some performers we come to trust, and we can take jokes from them that we might not take from an unknown. But we can choose to give the benefit of the doubt, even when unknown performers are involved. It'll stop us from making unfair accusations about people we don't know, and it will keep us from getting our feelings hurt so often. Less pain all around.

I think, in our culture, we have a tendency to take offense and express outrage because it shows that we care, and that we have standards. But from my vantage point, it seems like that's just a large-scale way of making ourselves look good by making others look -- and feel -- bad.

It's a lot more fun to be free to laugh.