Subtle Messages?

It seems like lately life has been conspiring to send me certain messages. Or maybe it's just that I'm more able to synthesize them because of the amount of writing I'm doing. Or possibly it has to do with my increasing training in lit crit, which has caused me to start seeing patterns and meaning in almost everything. Or maybe it's that I'm feeling a lot more in tune with the Spirit lately. Whatever combination of these it is, I certainly got one straight message in the past few days: don't waste your life simply enduring, waiting to do what you want to do.

Some of the factors leading up to this realization:

• Our discussion Thursday at CS Lewis Society. Somehow, we got off on the topic of going and living in a primitive hunt in the planter box inside the HFAC, and maybe living off farming and fishing in the JFSB courtyard. You scoff, but the real point to me was that mankind always thinks that it wants to go back in time because it seems so much simpler, that there might be more time for real life in that era. But in reality, in almost all times, men have found ways to fill their lives with dull tasks that seem necessary but don't really mean anything. But there is also hope, because in all times, we can also find a way to get past all the unimportant things and feel in touch with God, ourselves, and joy. The key is not to go back in time, live in a hut in the HFAC, or to throw out your computer/TV: that only treats the symptom. The real problem is wasting time--letting it slide by us without caring how we've used it. The solution is simple. It's simply to think about how you are spending your time, and eliminate those things that don't bring you closer to the person you want to be. The key is to truly long to become what you should be--and then to do what you can to move yourself there. The very longing to become something, the passion that it stirs up within us, makes the road worth traveling, regardless of whether we reach its end.
• Reading Joni's first blog entry. Welcome to the blogosphere dear Lilymaid. But really, her comment about realizing she wasn't a bookworm anymore really struck me. I had exactly the same realization at the beginning of this summer as I started reading Ben's blog. I looked at all the books he was reading and things he was doing, and I thought, what I am doing with my life? In elementary and middle school, I used to plow through two to three books a week. I loved reading and learning and doing. But since I let the busy-ness and pressure of high school and college take over, I hadn't made time for those things that I once enjoyed. Even worse, I had started to hate reading because it was so associated with the stress of classes. Which is why I've been so insistant on reading this summer, even during Spring term when I felt like I was going to collapse. I needed to remember why I used to love it. And now I do.
• Seeing You Can't Take it With You at Hale. (Arg! Someone remind me whether play titles are supposed to be in quotes or italics.) In addition to a hilarious printer character who sort of reminded me of Ben, the message of the play was right on target. It's about a romance between the daughter of a family of eccentric, poor playwrights, dancers, and firework-makers and the son of a wealthy Wall Street banker. Predictably, when the two families collide chaos ensues. But the message was that even though the artistic family was poor, strange, and disorganized, at least they went out and did what they wanted to do, whereas the businessman spent six to eight hours a day doing things he found boring, just for the pursuit of money that he could spend in his one hour of free time. There was one especially moving part where the father of the eccentric family talked about the idealistic dreams and plans we all make in college, pointing out that only a few lucky ones get to say they did even half of what they planned. It made me so sad, to think of all the people out there wasting their lives working for "that which cannot satisfy."
• A radio commercial. Yup. While driving home from the play, I heard a commercial for some auto repair place. The guy said, "I spend eight hours at the office fixing transmissions, and then I go home and do exactly the same thing. I work on cars in my garage. After [some-odd] years, my work and my hobby are still the same." That's the kind of life I want for me, and especially for my husband--I've seen the effect of a hated job on a man and consequently on his family. Everyone has something that they would love to do; why don't we all stop aspiring to be doctors and lawyers just because we will make money, and go out and do the thing we love?
  

I'm resolved to either start loving everything I do, or just getting rid of it. And that's really the thing: to be able to love everything you do, mundane, intellectual, or otherwise. Cooking, homework, reading, spending time with friends, cleaning your house--all should be things we bask and glory in. Down with the separation between work and leisure! I am determined to love it all.

The Left-Overs

Time to clean out the fridge where I store my unused blog post ideas. Alright, here it goes.

So I went and saw the rest of Much Ado about Nothing on Saturday. My family even came down from the SLC and saw it with me. No rain this time, but there were fireworks. But the actors took it all in stride: the firecrackers hit during the first scene with Dogberry, who simply looked shocked and said "Excuse me." Classic. The cast members did a very good job, turning a new light on an old play. I especially liked Claudio's delivery of "Another Hero!" in the final scene. Simply hilarious! Changing the place names to American ones was a little odd though. It simply doesn't work with the play, since there are no independent lords fighting wars against each other at any point in our history (so far as I know). But, all things considered, I will definitely go see Cyrano de Bergerac when they do it next week at the Botany Pond (6:30 pm, Th, F, or Sa, if you care to join me).

The lost post from the other day, the one that got bumped off by Brittany McComb, was supposed to be on how our personal perspective affects our happiness. I volunteered as a Y group leader this year--which I find ironic, since I went to only two events during my own freshman orientation. One of these two events was the showing of the Iranian film Color of Paradise. I forgot how completely amazing that movie is, and it made a lot more sense the second time around. If you haven't seen it, try to find it, or just sneak into the showing for the freshman next NSO.

The movie is about a young blind boy looking to belong, his father who feels burdened at having to care for a disabled boy, and the boy's grandmother. Through these three characters, you can see a scale of perspectives on the world. The grandmother chooses to believe that God is good, and consequently takes joy in most things, and takes the disappointments in stride. On the other hand, the father seems to believe God is punishing him for no reason--he has no son who can care for him when he is old, his only boy is blind, he lost his wife--and feels utterly hopeless and lost. The boy is somewhere in between: he knows that his father resents him for not being whole and people in general treat him strangely, but his teachers and grandmother have taught him that God loves him, possibly more, because of his blindness. His struggle to reconcile these two views leads us to find what the grandmother has that makes her life so much more bearable than the father's: she asks God for help, and is mindful of helping others, while the father seeks to find his own way and ignores the needs of his son. It's a very powerful movie and I highly recommend it to everyone. Even better, there aren't any sketchy scenes you'll have to explain to your friends and family!

Speaking of film reminds me of a talk I read for my persuasive writing class by a humanities professor at BYU. He talked about building a literate family--literate in the sense of intellegent and well-read, rather than just competent. I agreed with him on most points, but then he went off for a page or two on how awful film is as a medium. As an example of this, he compared several pop-culture, kitschy movies of the time (Rambo, anyone?) with great literary classics (Dostoyevsky, of all things), and concluded that this proved his point. Well, I personally would say he was comparing apples to oranges: if you want to compare your standard Hollywood film to something written, you'd do best to point yourself to the pulp fiction section rather than the classics. If I compare a thought-provoking film like Color of Paradise or a bizarre mind-warping film like Solyaris to, say, The Baby-Sitters' Club or Dragonriders of Pern, I would reach the conclusion that film is infinitely better at getting a deep message across than the written word. Really people, the medium is not as important as the person crafting it: any medium can be made into something mundane and boring. Same goes for genres. Just because it is sci-fi, doesn't make it garbage. It is up to the artist whether the medium is transformed into the Mona Lisa or the next fluffy pop song on the radio.

Related tangent (oxymoron? redundant?): I still get frustrated that some people can't take an animated film seriously. Just because this medium is used to produce Pokemon doesn't make it worthless. And Hayao Miyazki can prove that any day, if given the chance. But most people seem to come to his films from the mindset that animation can be only Disney or Saturday morning cartoons, and so the films just come across as wrong to them. Really, I think Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are two of the most interesting films I have ever seen. Even My Neighbor Totoro has a perfect balance of innocent fun and thought provoking story.

Alright, that's enough.

A Groundling Experience

The experimental theatre group on campus was performing Much Ado about Nothing, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, for free near the botany pond on campus yesterday. Since none of my friends wanted to go, I picked up my knitting and headed down by myself. Of course, I wasn't expecting any really high quality acting, but all things considered I'd say that the play was definitely worth seeing. The actors weren't particularly wonderful and sometimes forgot their lines (not that I blame them--I don't think I could ever memorize that much), but they had some interesting takes on the characters (Beatrice and Benedick as the geeks? Don Pedro as a strict general?) good BYU spins on the Shakespeare. Maybe it's just because I have been considering the nature of love lately, but I noticed how much the play reads just like a manual of what (not) to do when forming a relationship.

I liked the way they set up Claudio's distress that Don Pedro wooed Hero for himself: it made me realize just how ridiculous/dangerous it is to use second hand messengers in matters of the heart. We've been discussing this in our apartment and decided it's just so much better to be simple and frank (so long as you are careful not to be too intimidating). I also realized how truly insecure Beatrice's character is: she puts up a good offensive front of wit, but underneath I think she is simply worried about the possibility that no desireable man would want to marry a smart girl. I definitely empathize with here . . . but we don't need another rant on my worries about being alone, do we?

But the part that really made my day was the groundling experience. Let me explain: I was late, so I showed up during Benedick's rant about not getting married, which means I unfortunately missed the initial banter between Beatrice and Benedick. All the chairs worth taking were taken, so I ended up sitting on the grass, which I preferred anyway. The play was very all encompassing if you were sitting on the ground. I got to watch the actors rush past me to the mascarade, and have Benedick and Claudio exit past me discussing Hero. It was great!

But even during the initial scenes we could hear thunder in the distance and while Hero and her maid were baiting Beatrice the clouds broke open and started to pour down really hard rain on us. Some people immediately got up and left, but I sort of liked it. I was nice to have the play be part of reality instead of some carefully set apart experience in a dark room. The actors added reactiongs to the thunder, especially when it came at appropriate moments in the script. I felt like a groundling in the 13th century, having paid little (in this case, nothing) to get in and stand (sit on the ground) during the entire play. It was very postmodern experiencing the full force of the play along with the elements--nothing outside the text indeed. It connects a lot with my recent fascination with immersive gaming.

Of course, once it started to hail, they cancelled the second half. They're doing the same play again today at 6:30 pm in the JFSB courtyard. Maybe I'll go instead of hanging around for Stadium of Fire. Oooh! Maybe the fireworks will be timed right and come in during the ending wedding scene!