Be Not Idle

Wow, what a great movie! I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum. 

The first section of the movie had almost no dialogue. I’d read a review that said that children would be bored with the slow pace at the beginning,  but all I can say is: That critic has forgotten that children are mesmerized by such “boring” things as a waterbug skating in a puddle, cat’s tails curling, and sunbeams reflected from the face of Dad’s watch.  Wall-E’s everyday life was fascinating.

I was stunned by the beautiful expression of  the relationship between the robots Wall-E and EVE. He wanted to share all his treasures with her. Even when she went into a dormant state, he continued caring for and sharing his life with her. He bashfully fixated on the eternal question that burns in a lover’s heart: Will she consent to hold my hand? (It was a more diverting subplot than the typical “When can I kiss her?” or “How do I get her into bed?”)

His devotion spurs him to follow her into space when she is retrieved by her makers. Upon reaching the spaceship where humans live, Wall-E continues his pursuit of Eve, but this relationship makes him see and interact with others. His interactions with humans, in particular, shake them from their complacency.

Complacency and consumerism are, of course, part of the “message” of the movie. After leaving the junk-covered and uninhabitable Earth, humans have taken to a spa-like setting in Space. Their bodies have atrophied and their attention is completely focused on trivialities. For me, the point was hammered home by two images. First, the video histories consisted of real people and photos of real objects – a jarring contrast with the unreal animated humans. Second, ads displayed for the ship’s populace featured svelte models standing upright, but the inhabitants were unaware that they looked nothing like those people. 

The breakthrough was when the Captain looked at the portaits of his predecessors and truly SAW the degradation of humanity that led to… him.  That’s a sad moment, but one of the joys of the movie occurs when the humans step outside their comfort zones. The Captain forsakes bedtime to learn history. Mary and John go from obliviousness, to interacting with each other, and at last to looking out for others.

Warning: unavoidable spoilage ahead.

1) Having the villain be a robot was BRILLIANT.  I fully expected a run-of-the-mill corporate executive to be secretly pulling the strings. Instead, the ship’s steering wheel is literally staying on course, despite the Captain’s reasonable assertions that returning to Earth is the TRUE Directive.

The relationship between the Captain and his “reliable” assistant forms a perfect contrast with Wall-E and Eve’s relationship. Eve sets aside her prime directive in order to help Wall-E when he’s damaged. However, he  insists on helping her fulfill her mission rather than being fixed.  It’s not exactly  ”The Gift of the Magi” in Space, but hits the main challenge of a relationship: knowing when to sacrifice one’s own Directive needs for the other’s.

2) Disney movies often end with a pseudo-resurrection, in which one character is assumed dead but miraculously survives. For example, there are Snow White, Aladin, Beauty and the Beast, the excruciatingly-mutilated rendition of The Black Cauldron, etcetera ad nauseum. Even Pixar’s Finding Nemo had two such scenes.

However, this time there was a heart-wrenching twist: EVE literally restores and refurbishes Wall-E, only to have him reboot as a quirk-less automaton. I admit to getting a lump in my throat at the scene. It captured the essence of those losses that hurt as much as death: losing a loved one to a change of feeling or to deteriorating mental faculties.  

 3) Finally, I’d read critiques that called the ending “bleak” or “dark”. Like every Pixar movie, you have to pay attention to the images as the credits roll. After all the videos and hi-tech imagery of the spaceship, the end of the story is told in heiroglyphs and mosaics: The ”defective” robots helping the humans rediscover life on Earth, children planting seeds that eventually overgrown the abandoned ship, a boy fishing from a clean lake, etc. It’s a happy ending.  

 Here’s a link to an interview with writer-director Andrew Stanton, including how his faith affected his story, including insights on the characters:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/andrewsta nton.html

Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders & says, “Oh, sh**. She’s UP!”

I should have read it before I went to the first day of my summer college class, when I was confronted with how common anti-religious rudeness is and how it takes strength to deal with it in a charitable way. (More on that later.)

Baby Bro came over and cleaned my gutters (he’s taller and brought a longer ladder). He also took down a few low-hanging branches which I later took to the yardwaste collection center. I didn’t know that I didn’t have to separate the leaves and branches. The attendant had a chuckle at my hard work, but at least he educated me!

BB also brought over the second Futurama movie. It wasn’t nearly as funny (or focused) as the first one. The title was a clue that it was going to be a somewhat vulgar view of love and belonging, but BB didn’t know the saying “the beast with two backs” so it flew past him. The two best lines had us literally having to press the “review” button because we missed some of the dialogue afterwards, since we were laughing too hard. My favorite line is the “scientific” explanation by Professor Farnsworth: “Electromatter is Matter’s badass grandma.” And Bender’s speech at the end, explaining why he “rescued” his friends from a universe of bliss, was the very antithesis of 1 Corinthians 13:4, thus making it funnier than it would have been.

We went to bed past midnight and I, of course, managed to wake up less than 6 hours later. A thunderstorm was moving through, which isn’t that unusual. But I heard the rainwater rushing through the now-clear gutters and woke up enough to be completely awake.

I finished reading Danny Gospel and intend to post a review of it shortly, along with parallels between it and Odd Hours, by another author.

But first I must finish some writing of my own. I think I know why I was “blocked” while writing during the school year. When I write, I become completely consumed and lose track of time. I wrote for 12.5 hours a few days ago when I wasn’t using my alarm clock to curtail my writing session. I took a few breaks here and there, but I estimate that I was writing for 6 hours straight at the end.

The worst part is that I was working on character’s backstories, most of which won’t appear in the novel. But I had half-formed ideas about who the adults were, so off I went. One of my journalism teachers used to tell me that I was a good writer but tended to write “the history of dirt” (instead of sticking to the subject of worm-farming, for example). As a result, the editors had to prune deeply because my articles ran too long for newspapers. Unfortunately, I never freelanced for magazines, because they tend to like longer stories.

But I digress.

The Clamster (aka Kasia) and her readers were talking about the consequences of consecutive rainy days in the urban landscape, and I was filled with nostalgia. A kind of “Thank God that’s past!” sort of nostalgia, to be sure, but it’s nostalgia nonetheless.

 I used to live in Warren, first by myself and then with the Baby Brother (and older brother, and friend M’e, and BB’s buddy Rob, and any other pal who needed to crash on the davenport for a few weeks or months**).  Days of heavy rain meant the storm sewers would overflow onto the road. If it didn’t happen on the commute to Troy, it happened before the commute home.

 On two non-consecutive years, I drove my car through an enormous puddle and stalled it until the engine compartment dried out. When it rained heavily for a few days, ants would come up from cracks in the slab, trying to escape the water. Once I woke up to a sound like irregular dripping from the bathroom. It wasn’t water but hundreds of winged ants flying and then falling back into the bathtub.   Come to think of it, that was just before the mouse moved in and the Baby Brother moved out, like a mini-Pestilence drama.

Now I live in a floodplain, but only because FEMA decided to extend it after I bought my house. My neighbours and I won’t buy the insurance because FEMA doesn’t pay unless over 50% of the house is underwater. The only way for that to naturally happen would mean the St. Clair River had flooded miles (or km) of inland Ontario and Michigan and overwhelmed the islands.

UNnaturally it would mean that when the Channel 4 chopper came over the area, they’d find me and my neighbors pumping water INSIDE our towering walls of sandbags to make the FEMA percentage requirements.

Seriously, the wetlands are intact here, so there are seldom standing puddles. The only downside is the high humidity near the marsh and the state park, as opposed to surrounding areas.  But that’s okay. I haven’t had to water my lawn yet and, so far, the mushrooms are minimal.

 **crash on the davenport = sleep on a fold-bed in a full-size sofa or couch) Sometimes my colloquialisms are indecipherable without footnotes!

Memo to everyone: Neither dogs nor cats are children.  As lovable as they may be, taking them to work will not teach them to apply themselves more in (obedience) school so they can follow in the footsteps of their Old Man (or Old Lady, as the case may be).  To do that, you will need to “engineer” your pet a la the Underpeople in Cordwainer Smith’s excellent stories. 

Yes, yes, I know that “Take Your Dog to Work Day” was originally conceived as a way to encourage people to adopt unwanted animals. But really, I think it would be counterproductive. When I worked in Cubicle Land(tm), the last thing I’d want was a pet after comforting my co-worker crying because our manager’s dog had killed and eaten hers.

This segues nicely to a clip on WUSA (Channel 9 in Washington DC). The blonde babe in the sunglasses is my cousin Anne. She loves her dogs (or “brown dogz” as she calls them) but knows they’re not kids.

http://www.wusa9.com/video/default.aspx?aid=62191&storyid=73 037

There was an interesting, albeit depressing, conversation over lunch.

An involved, caring mother says that if her son wants to have sex, she and her husband are going to make sure he is “safe”. In other words, they’re going to make sure he has condoms. He’s not even 16, the legal age of consent. 

Since her husband Mr. Safety scoffs at ”religious ideals” (aka sexual morality), I did the only thing I could do. I asked Mrs. Safety if they had mentioned their decision regarding condoms to the parents of the boy’s friends, especially his female friends.  She seemed a bit flabbergasted, so I remarked that the oldest of the three girls he hangs out with isn’t even 14. 

“He’s not going to sleep with a 13-year-old!” she said.

“Why not?’ I asked. “She has a crush on him and he likes her.” I didn’t mention that one 12-year-old girl could pass as a high school student. I think I’d given her food for thought; no need to choke her by feeding her too fast.

I’ve never understood the mentality of “They’re gonna do it anyway.” Having been a teenager once and teaching teenagers now, I have been privvy to many a teen’s conversation.  When a kid says ”My mom/dad/grandparent can’t stop me from XYZ”, it’s either an empty brag OR a sign that the adults have more problems than caring what the kid does.  Mostly kids know their boundaries because their parents clearly mark them. 

 ”My dad says I can’t get a tattoo until I get a job and pay for it myself,” says one.

“My aunt told me that the Social Security check is MY money,” says another, “but my mom said she decides what to do with it because she knew what Dad would have wanted.”

I’ve noticed that when it comes to money, parents have all sorts of ways to put their feet down. For example, people used to say that the best way to prevent drunken driving was to serve their kids alcohol at home.  If their friends wanted a drink, they had to stay overnight. But now people no longer serve minors at their children’s graduation parties. 

Why? Legal repercussions. A kid has a drink at their house and then goes elsewhere, gets hammered, and ends up dead behind the wheel. The liability is going to land on the doorstep of EVERYONE who served the kid.  

But people take a different tact when one of the criteria is their kids’ bodies. “It’s his body; it’s his choice” seems to be the guiding principal.

But it’s malarky. If that were the crux of the matter – whose body – then adults wouldn’t waste so much time keeping their kids from alcohol and drugs. What about suicide prevention? I mean, some kids suffer from depression and continue to do so into their adult lives. If they want to committ suicide, they’re going to find a way. The best thing we adults can do is make sure they know the best way to kill themselves, so they don’t botch it or leave a messy corpse. Right?

No, it’s not just proprietary rights to a body. It’s about safety. The Modern Golden Rule is “People have a right to do what they want, as long as they don’t impinge on anyone else’s rights.”  In some cases, “hurt” is used instead of “impinge”.

In either case, I tend to laugh at that. Even the best of teenagers seldom have an idea how their behaviour affects their future, let alone other people. I know that I never thought much about it until I had my ears pierced. My mom was against it, but said I could do it when I turned 16. (I forgot about it, but she reminded me after my birthday.)

Mom was completely flabbergasted when she had to sign a waiver because I wasn’t 18. ”If you wanted to have an abortion,” she said, “I wouldn’t even be consulted. But if you pass out and hit your head while getting your ears pierced, I have to take agree to pay your medical bills.” 

That got me to thinking (and I’ve rarely stopped since). If I’d gotten a raging ear infection, my my parents would have been expected to foot my ambulance and hospital bill. Even without a waiver, my parents would have been stuck with the bills if I had an abortion and started hemorrhaging. If I’d done any number of stupid things in my teen years – and beyond – my family would have given me long-term care or a funeral. (Or both.) They’ve have shouldered the burden of my consequences, because that’s what families do.

Mr. And Mrs. Safety believe that giving their son condoms will help him (and them) live consequence-free. Seemingly they hadn’t given a thought to the fact that other parents don’t want their daughters to be used as a training ground for their son. Nor have they considered whether his best buddies are ready for sexual peer pressure. (One of them definitely is NOT. He’s more interested in bikes and blowing up things with firecrackers than in girls.)

I didn’t say any of this to Mrs. Safety. I didn’t have to. One of the other ladies at the luncheon commented that even if kids are “going to do it anyway” – whatever IT is – they should have to work hard to do it and with the full understanding that they’re doing it despite their parents’ disapproval and better judgement.

“That’s the whole point of being a rebellious teenager,” she said. “You’ve got to look back and realize how wise your parents were.”

I made it. And, strangely enough, this is the FIRST year that I’ve been home by 5 pm, grades in, exams filed, and supplies put away. 

Three teachers retired, which has meant that two of my favourite hall-mates are leaving. Ruth gave me a Christmas tree for my classroom (yes, no one’s ever made a fuss about Christmas decorations in this public school) and let me rummage through her “garage sale” tables. I snagged a Michigan pennant from Mr. S. 

I won’t be teaching English next year, which is a blessing. There’s nothing quite like a literature lover trying to convince sophomores that Shakespeare is great and John Proctor wasn’t a stupid guy for choosing to die for the truth.  I try not to think about the writing aspect. I try to comfort myself that at least my students will be able to express their fact-challenged opinions with better grammar. 

I am going back on Monday to grab some books and start preparing lesson plans for next year. I’ll be teaching a brand-new class, plus revamping my current Spanish classes. I’m excited about it, actually.  

Like many other Midwesterners, I lost electricity when weekend storms rumbled with trees and powerlines.  The power went out Sunday afternoon. It was restored briefly on Tuesday – long enough to do a load of laundry - then went out until early Wednesday morning. 

A power-outage is a great reminder that most material goods aren’t that important. My TV and PC became to large paperweights. The furniture formed an obstacle course.  Everything else impeded the hunt for bare basics: an emergency radio, the crank-powered lantern, and a can-opener to break into dinner.  

The things I missed the most were the fridge, the washer, and the dryer.  Going to bed early was no heartache. I read and wrote while there was natural light, then I fell asleep. The weather’s been unusually warm, so I was comfortable. 

I’ve had problems lately with appliances, so I’ve come to appreciate basic devices.  I had a cordless phone/answering machine combination. It hadn’t been holding a charge, so I bought a new battery.  No use. Sometimes it charged; sometimes it went dead.  I went to a resale shop and bought a phone for $5. Its a plastic relic with huge buttons, including two mysteriously labeled “FLASH” and “AUTO”.  I suspect it was an office phone, since it has a speakerphone option and a hold button. The latter plays a deafening electronic rendition of Fur Elise. But it works, even when the power’s out. (More on that below.) I also dragged out the cheap answering machine that I couldn’t GIVE away two years ago. When I got home this evening, I had a message from a high school pal – in other words, it works perfectly.

Thank God for Mr. Bell and his amazing invention.

When my washer died a clicking death, I ended up washing one load of clothes in the bathtub. I used a washboard and a small paddle. Afterwards, I felt tremendous admiration for my grandmothers. It took a lot of upperbody strength to wash and wring a single load of schoolteacher clothes. Those ladies washed work clothes for farmers and miners! 

I told my friend Karen that I needed a new washer, and we discussed local retailers. Within a few hours of our conversation, she called me back. Her family friends had recently moved and were selling a dryer (circa ‘89) for $50. Daniel and Tim were kind enough to handle the delivery and installation (including finagling space for it in dinky utility closet).

 Why doesn’t anyone offer a Nobel Peace Prize to Whirlpool factory workers?