A Different Set of Stories

I am increasingly intolerant of human generated noise. It doesn't seem to matter if it is mechanically generated noise, speech, or whatever. I'm in a constant struggle between physical comfort with my windows open or psychological comfort with my windows shut. I've taken notice of this issue more strongly over the last year.

I don't want to be a room where people are inconversation I'm not part of (and sometimes, even if I a part). I don't want to be a room where there is someone who is loud. That covers the granddaughter and her mother. I don't want to hear traffic noise or aircraft noise. We get many small planes and a lot of helocopters near our house. We also get noise from military jets.

I am more tolerant of background "white" noise. I find I can tune it out fairly easily if it's not too loud and more or less perdictable.

What I've noticed most recently is that I do not want to be in stores with loud background music. The grocery stores are usually okay but retail clothing stores are horrible. And it is worse when the music being played is an endless loop of the same 15 songs. Welcome to the last six weeks of the year.

Had my pre-op appointment yesterday. My new doctor (The Navy shifts doctors around) said he finally had enough time to review my history at ophthalmology for the last 10ish years. My Fuchs has not progressed in all that time. And the cataracts haven't changed one bit in that time either. So, no surgery. Works for me. I did get a new prescription, "so I got that going for me. Which is nice."

Well. Two movies this weekend. Was not disappointed.

Gattaca was recommended in a reddit thread of "underrated movies." It was made for $36M and grossed (in theaters) $13M. Oops. It was nominated for several awards from various organizations. It won a few. For a movie released in 1997, it had the feel of science fiction from 30 years earlier, but I tend to think that was on purpose. The science was pretty good by today's standards and very good by our understanding of DNA in the late 90s. My biggest issue with the film was is pacing. It was deliberate and plodding for most of the running length. I suspect this explains the box office dollars.

Story line is good. A relatively fresh look at what the future could look like. Obviously, this kind of future has been written about hundreds of times with many variations of genetic manipulation, but this one spent its time talking about the future of individuals if their particular set of genes isn't perfect. The ramifications of having our sequence known is a problem medical ethicists are struggling with today. We are at the bleeding edge of genetic manipulation which is also raising concerns on some corners.

A fabulous cast. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law, Ernest Borgnine, and Alan Arkin are the ones who stand out for me. And I really like them all in general.

It is a tiny bit preachy. There were moments in the film when I rolled my eyes at the directness of moralizing.

Still. We gave it a three and reddit was right. It is underrated by a long shot.

The other movie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was on our list because of Maggie Smith. I love to watch her and I hadn't seen anything of her where she wasn't playing an old lady. Here she is playing a woman in her 40s. And playing the part beautifully. She won an Oscar for this movie and well she should. A few other actors stand out, too. I can't say who without alerting a new viewer to watch particular characters. The story unfolds a bit predictably but has wonderful moments of "not what it seems." Some characters are very well played but are stereotypes for Maggie Smith to play against. It really is her movie from beginning to end.

This movie came out in 1969 but was based on a book from 1961. The world changed dramatically in that decade! It was also a play in the UK and on Broadway. Won awards in both places. It really is a very, very good story. We old folks will find a connection with movie that folks born after 1970 probably won't find. Even though it is set in Edinburgh in the 1930s, it is unmistakably a product of the 1960s.

It is a prize fight between rationalism and romanticism with all sides stuck in their view about what is proper. Jean Brodie at one ridiculous end of the spectrum and the head mistress at the other end. I found myself shifting back and forth from those points of view -- somewhere in the middle being pulled back and forth like a rag doll between two dogs. I never cheered for the Head Mistress, but I did want to put breaks on Brodie for most of the movie.

This got a solid 4 (mostly because movies of the 60s don't deserve better. :). I recommend it highly and it is a must see movie for Maggie Smith fans.

(or something like that. I can't be bothered to look up the real title.) It must have been filmed n 3D. We think that because it looked like every 3D parody I've ever seen. The story was okay-ish. The acting was satisfactory. The special effects were dull. And Walt and Frank would have cried about this movie.

The best thing about it was the black and white start as a tribute to the "real" OZ movie. ;)

It gets a weak 2 out of 5. We did watch to the end. Maybe it was just too hot to move my arm to the remote control.

Easy to see why it won best original screenplay. There are only a few plots in all of story telling. The trick is to make the tired material new and interesting. The tired material, in this case, is a love story.

Surprise! It is not a love story based entirely on sexual attraction! How cool is that!

Jim Carey pulls off another great dramatic performance. Only once did the story dip into a bit of silliness with his 5-year-old self which was a bit hard to forgive, but I managed.

The story is not plausible for a number of what should be obvious reasons, but I don't mind suspending disbelief if I am entertained. After all, I like Star Trek and Star Wars. :)

I gave it a 4 out of five.

Easy review. Didn't finish the movie. 1 out of 5.

BORED OUT OF MY MIND. I suppose a 13 year old (or an adult stuck at that developmental stage) might find the relationship drama interesting, but I can't abide movies that make a central theme of sexual attraction and distraction into stories about "enduring love."

Not all that glitters is gold. But in my life, if I am not exposed often to some serious nuggets, I sink into a dark pit of self-generated beliefs that nothing is gold and that human beings have all the world considerations of a slug. Maybe not that much.

Then I spend a bit of time watching TED Talks or listening/watching RSA talks. While they aren't all bright and shiny, they glitter and throw rainbows of light into the gloom of my despair over the superstitious, ignorant collective of humanity.

I do not think we are will measured by our engineering feats like putting men on the moon or smart phones and the like. Many insects are great at engineering. Rather, I think we are will measured by our ability to philosophize and to create (though we are terrible at execution) that which sustains such enterprises as ending world hunger or putting an end to easily prevented diseases in the parts of the world that even developing.

We don't work at stopping world hunger and the like because of some immediate primate need to protect our particular troop. We do engage in instinctual protectionist behavior under the guise of nationalism or god given directives, but those are not the drives that call us to give of our resources and ourselves when something tragic happens half way around the world or in our own "back yard."

And it isn't the doing of the "good things" that inspire me; it is the thought that goes into understanding ourselves and our place in the world as a member of the collective of life on this cosmic spec.

Without the intellectual bent that a small fraction of our billions engage in -- whether it is in physics (Higgs Boson, anyone), or psychology, or art -- that gives me the warmth of heart that I need to feel like being a human being is a good thing. Otherwise I'm just another primate with a stick looking for a termite mound.

That doesn't meant that any of it is important or has intrinsic worth. Really, who cares what our place is? Eventually we will be a footnote in the cosmic encyclopedia, if we are lucky.

It just gives me a reason to hate everyone. :)

I miss Fred MacMurray. And I want to watch The Absent Minded Professor again.

I posted on facebook for a couple of years. I was mostly bored with it, but still I would check it several times a day just to read cryptic remarks for which there was no context. I realized that it was a habit that I needed to break. I deactivated my account (and will eventually cancel it) a couple of weeks ago.

Several times a day, I find that there is some little tidbit that I want to post. A feeling that I want to share in such a way that it doesn't cause a conversation. A bit of something I just broadcast into the ether.

I am resisting easily enough, but the urge hasn't diminished yet.

I am consistently taken by surprise when I reflect over some relatively short span of my most recent past. I create plans for most of things I intend to do. (When I am resisting making the plan, I know that I really have no intention of doing the things I'm not planning.)

I reflect from time to time on how the plans are going. I do this because I have weak skills in identifying an area of concern while I'm standing in the middle of it. I can see them coming and I can see the deviations from the plan that landed me in the middle of a problem. I rarely see the deviations when I am deviating. I seem to always have a good reason for getting off the road.

When I finally notice that I'm off the road, I have to drag myself through the thickets and briers of my sour mood (it is my major red flag for being off the road). When my mood is sour, I have some horrid default perceptions about humanity. And those perceptions thicken slime of my mood. And I'm off and running on the "why bother, we are all doomed anyway" racetrack of despair.

I'm much faster at getting through the worst of it. Faster does not mean less suffering, though. It just means a few minutes, hours, or, sometimes, days of more intense suffering. I haven't always preferred the "pull the band aid off quickly" approach. And I sometimes what to continue to stand in sewer up to my neck rather than risk even momentarily getting my face in it. It is that dithering that creates the suffering. I know that standing there isn't going to end well, I just keep standing there pretending to weigh the consequences of one or another action.

I say "pretending" because I already know what there is to do and I just resisting doing it while flailing around looking for a worthy reason to not do it. It usually boils down to some version of "I can't fail if I don't try."

Well. What am I suffering about now? What sewer am I standing in? What is the "I don't wanna" running my life today? Well, I know. I can see it clearly (and won't be revealed in a publicly available entry in my journal. Now, the question is this: What do I do about it? I can see no acceptable actions that result in my having what I want. And, it seems, I'm unwilling to be with that.

Sigh. More suffering to do until I'm ready to say "So this is how it is."