I was just sitting here thinking about how tech week for the civic theater’s latest has kind of really drained me, and my iPod comes up with this:

I am tired
I am drained
I don’t sleep for days
Immersed in the drama
Strapped to your stage
–”The Ledge”, Tapping the Vein

Heh.  Somewhat more literal interpretation than intended, I think, and the rest of the song doesn’t apply at all, but still. 

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(Interesting note:  Apparently Mom doesn’t remember catching me taking money from her purse, and Dad doesn’t remember me hitting Andrew.  Go figure.)

What did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was very young, in first or second grade, I have very vague memories of wanting to be a librarian. Even then I was absolutely enchanted with books. I figured a librarian must have the best job in the world, because they got to spend all day with books. I think at the time I thought that they could just read all day, and maybe even that they lived in the library and could read all night too. I know better now, of course, but librarians are still my heroes. But it’s not the job for me.

I went for quite a while without thinking about the subject. Then sometime in middle school (I think), I decided I wanted to be a daycare worker when I grew up. I really liked kids, and taking care of them, and if you’d asked me then I would have said I was good with them. (Was I? I dunno, maybe.)  So I took a bunch of Home Ec classes my first year of high school, thinking that I should brush up on the domestic stuff for this I guess. (Oddly enough, I did not take the Child Development course, though.)  But then…

I also, purely by chance, got stuck in a computer literacy course. (Which was a joke, for me. I’d been using DOS and Windows since the ripe old age of five and writing simple programs in BASIC for probably as long. Granted that this class covered Apple II’s, but we’d done more in that department at my old school the previous year than this class covered.) Some kind of switch flipped in my brain: “Hey, I’m good at this! And it’s kinda fun! Maybe I could do this instead!” Which led to six semesters of Computer Applications classes, including the final one in which I basically supervised the development of the school’s Web page, and two years of C++ programming. And, well, the rest is history.

In retrospect, I think that certain changes in my life can be traced to that point. When I left behind the domestic dream and stepped into the world of modern computing, that was about the same time that I really got away from the funk that had pervaded the previous years. It was like… The stuff that had really been holding me down had stopped, but I was still kind of stuck in that frame of mind. I don’t know whether there’s any causal relationship between the career choice change and the attitude change, or whether they were both products of increasing maturity and self-awareness, or what. But I think there’s some kind of correlation, whether causal or not.

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I had almost forgotten another one of the worst things I did.  I think because it’s just become such a basic part of me that I hadn’t thought to list it.

Once–just once–I got so irritated and so frustrated with Andrew that I hit him.  I must have been somewhere between fourth and seventh grade, given the setting I remember, and he would have been between kindergarten and third.  I’m not really sure exactly when it happened.  I think I was trying to play the piano and he kept interfering, and eventually it reached the point where I was just so pissed off that I reached out and slapped him across the face.

The wrath of Heaven descended in the form of my father.  We used to get yelled at quite a bit, but I think this was about as angry as I’ve seen him.  Or so I remember it, anyway.  Our household had a strict “no physical violence against humans or pets” policy; as I said, Dad yelled a lot, but if he hit anything it was always, always, the wall or a door or something similarly inanimate and unlikely to take serious damage.  I think neither Andrew nor I had realized exactly how strict that policy was until that moment.

I don’t think either of us ever tried to hit the other again.

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(As mentioned, taking these out of order.)

Did you get into trouble as a child? What was the worst thing you did?

I think I was a depressingly well-behaved child. Not that I didn’t get into trouble; I did. But it was usually small crap. Didn’t clean my room, argued too loudly with Andrew, that kind of thing. The worst I ever did… I can only think of a couple of things, and they’re really pretty pitiful.

When I was in fifth-through-seventh grade, I had a friend named Suzie who lived just a few minutes away by bicycle. I was a latchkey kid at that point, coming home all by myself after school. “All by myself” is key here; I wasn’t supposed to have any friends over, and I wasn’t supposed to go out anywhere. But Suzie was so close! So often she would sneak over, then leave just before my parents got home and come back when they were there. Or very rarely I’d ride my bike over to her house, but I think I actually got permission for that when I did it. We got caught once or twice when Mom came home earlier than expected, or when we lost track of time. I tried to tell Mom that Suzie had only JUST shown up just then, but I somehow doubt she bought it. I put this in the “worst” category not so much for the disobedience as for the deception.

I had a problem with keeping food in my room for years and years. I wasn’t supposed to. I did anyway. Some of it I just plain wasn’t supposed to have in the first place; I used to buy lots and lots of candy, soda and olives (and other things, but especially those three) and have them on hand in my room for when I wanted to snack while I was reading or something. Problem was, I knew that if I threw out the cans, wrappers, jars, etc., Mom and Dad would see them and know I’d had the stuff, and I’d probably get into trouble. So I didn’t throw it out. I stuffed it into plastic bags and threw it in the closet. Which, yeah, is about as gross as it sounds. At one point there was a chipmunk living in there, I kid you not. Andrew can testify to that.

And then there was the stealing. I used to sneak into my parents’ bedroom from time to time and slip a couple of bucks out of Mom’s purse, usually mostly to fund the aforementioned forbidden food. Eventually I screwed up and took my own lunch money, which got me caught and I didn’t do it again. Not that Mom would have known which of us took the money if somebody (not me) hadn’t written a confession note and signed my name to it; she did the “I’m taking a walk, and as long as the money’s back when I get back I won’t ask questions” thing.

So. Some kids do the vandalism and the drugs and the sex and stuff. Me, I lied about how long a friend had been over, hid trash, and stole a couple of bucks. Whee.

OK, OK. I know Andrew’s thinking this one, so I’ll mention it, but I still maintain that I am innocencent in the matter. When we were very young (I would have been 4 or 5, he just barely old enough to toddle), as I’ve mentioned, we lived on family farmland. This included a chicken coop. Which included a rooster. Andrew claims that I taunted the rooster in his presence and then ran off and left him to be pecked. I still maintain that I didn’t taunt it, and being so young myself, it didn’t occur to me that he couldn’t run the same way I could. Or wouldn’t do so. We’ll probably continue to argue this one until one of us dies, hopefully of old age.

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OK, so…  People sometimes have their bodies frozen after they die so that in the future when medical technology is better they can be unfrozen, cured of whatever killed them, and go on to live full and eventful future-lives, right?

But…  Wouldn’t it be difficult to revive a body that was already dead when it was frozen?  I mean, maybe science will discover a cure for cancer or something, but I’m guessing that there will never be a “cure” for death.  (Leaving aside, for the moment, the thoughts about whether it’s a good idea to try to cure death anyway.)  If your body’s too broken down to function at a level that will keep you alive, then it’s still going to be that broken when you’re unfrozen.  Right?  I mean, sure, you could try to fix the body before fully reviving them, but…  Seems like it would be awfully hard to perform surgery on frozen tissue, or get frozen veins to carry medication to the cells that need it.  And if you unfreeze the body for any length of time before trying full resuscitation, well, if you could keep it viable it wouldn’t have been dead in the first place.

But maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about.  Or maybe I just think too much.

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What is your earliest memory?

We’ll start with the easy question. Well, sort of easy. When I get back before about age five or so, I lose track a little bit of what memory happened when. That was before we moved the first time, and before I was in school. They all involve a little blonde girl running around on the grounds of a big white farmhouse. I don’t have any good indicators to tell me which year was which. I therefore present to you a short selection.

The only one that I’m sure of the timeframe on is when Andrew was born. I don’t remember Mom being pregnant, I don’t remember when the pair of them came from the hospital or when I first held him (although I’ve seen pictures of the latter). I don’t remember staying at… whichever grandparents’ house… while Mom was giving birth. But I do remember going to the hospital to see my new baby brother for the first time. I remember standing up on a little platform in front of the nursery window, built at just the right height so that a new big sister could look in and see her baby brother. I think I remember Mom being brought out in a wheelchair to see Dad and me. She was wearing a blue bathrobe, I think. The memory starts to fuzz and fade; I don’t remember much even about that moment. But it’s there.

Other things I remember from that time period… Car adventures with Dad. Seeing him bring a bottle of Coca-cola out to the car when we were going someplace and, in a child’s overly literal way, scolding him about “drinking and driving”. Riding in the passenger seat, coming down the long gravel lane, telling Dad about the invisible house full of invisible people (including my invisible friend, of course, who was somehow also my stepcousin Kori, or maybe her sister Traci) which stood beside the barn, and speculating about whether if they tried to eat it would look like the food was just floating around and no one was moving it (or some such thing, I don’t recall exactly). Dad’s response was to take his hands off the wheel and drive with his knees, wondering whimsically if it looked like no one was driving the car.

Oh, and then there was the time he left me in the car when he went into the license branch to do something. The car was a stick shift, a little green Toyota. I’d seen Daddy driving and wondered what this thing sticking up from the floor did. I reached out to make the same kind of motions with it I’d seen him making–why, I’m still not sure. I actually managed to put the car in neutral… while it was sitting on a slight incline. Fortunately, the car hit a fence and stopped before it went into traffic or anything, but I think it scared both of us to death.

There’s also a few sort of vague recollections from times around the house. Sitting in the living room with my then-best-friend and calling her “Beth”, and her replying that her name was E-LIZ-a-beth (each syllable separate and distinct). Blowing bubbles using the ring from a Mason jar and homemade soap solution. I can’t remember whether that was with Aunt Tina or Aunt Julie. Standing in the kitchen while Mom peeled apples–she would give me the peels, and I would eat them. I seem to recall pretending they were sticks of gum (and liking them much better than actual gum).

And then there’s one that’s so incredibly vague that I think it may well be the earliest. It’s so vague I’m almost not sure that I’m not remembering a dream. I… kind of, sort of, maybe remember Mom’s maternal grandmother, Mom-mom, who died when I was still very young. Or–not really her, but being at her house. Sort of. Mostly what I remember is a candy dish. It had things in it that were about the size and shape of M&M’s, but they were brown and green, and mint-flavored. I think they had simple, stylized images of chess pieces printed on them? Rooks particularly. Or maybe there was just a chessboard around. I forget which; everything is very fuzzy.

Well. I didn’t realize I had so much to say about it.

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I remember once, a long time ago it seems like, I was feeling out of touch with myself. I didn’t know what I thought or believed or wanted, and I didn’t know how to fix that. I came across the idea of “getting to know yourself”, and I thought initially that it sounded like a good idea. But I didn’t know how to do it. I talk to myself all the time, don’t we all, but it’s never that kind of talk. And that kind of talk seemed stilted and weird and useless to me.

Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago. I was looking through the StoryCorps site and wanted to see what their question generator did. But of course I’m not interviewing anyone, really, so I can’t answer some of its questions. Then it occurred to me… why not interview myself? Cheesy, yes. Effective, maybe. I don’t feel as out of touch as I did way back then, but it’s never a bad idea to do a little self-exploration. So I think I’ll do that. Depending on how the answers turn out, perhaps I’ll post them here. (Some may wind up just being a little more personal than I want to get here.) If I do post answers here, I may or may not go in order… Some of these are easier to answer than others.

At the very least, here’s the list:

1. What is your earliest memory?
2. How would you describe yourself as a child? Were you happy?
3. Do you have any siblings? What were they like growing up?
4. Did you get into trouble as a child? What was the worst thing you did?
5. How has your life been different than what you’d imagined?
6. What is your best memory of childhood? Worst?
7. What did you want to be when you grew up?
8. Did you enjoy school?
9. What kind of student were you?
10. Are you still friends with anyone from that time in your life?
11. Was there a time when you didn’t like me?
12. When in life have you felt most alone?
13. How would you describe yourself now?
14. What are you proudest of in your life?
15. What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?
16. How would you like to be remembered?

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IMDb Link

I cannot say everything I want to about this movie, because it’s only been out… what, a week? And I refuse to spoil it for you.

Speaking in general terms, though, I urge you to see it. It’s well worth the price of admission, even at an evening show. The Wachowski brothers have redeemed themselves after the horrors that were the second and third Matrix films. V is a stunning piece of work–not without its flaws of course, but the overall quality overshadows those small stumbling blocks.

You would think that the mask would make things… difficult. It removes from the equation entirely the subtle facial expressions, the looks and glances, that could be considered the finer points of acting. Indeed, I’ve seen some critics say that they found Hugo Weaving’s performance boring, and I think this probably contributes. I disagree, myself. I thought that Weaving more than accomplished the task of acting well using only voice and body language. It’s difficult to make a man in a grinning mask elegant, deadly, sympathetic and tragic all at once, but Weaving did it. And without ever once making me want to interject, “…Mr. Anderson.”

One final disjointed thought and I’ll leave it… The obvious political commentary. I’ve also seen comments about how it’s ballsy to put this kind of thing out there, what with the current situation in America and all. I think, actually, that there’s very little that necessarily has to be specific to our current state of affairs. Most of it is about what happens when governments get too controlling and too invasive–really, it reminds me a lot of 1984 in those respects. It’s a timeless cautionary tale that way. What is particularly relevant, though, is the way our anti-hero V is referred to as a terrorist. And, really, when you look at the situation… He is a terrorist. It’s an interesting attempt to give a sort of “in the other guy’s shoes” perspective on terrorism. Not to the point of suggesting that any recent terrorist acts were necessarily justified or right, I think; I don’t want to sound like this movie’s made me reconsider whether 9/11 was a bad thing here, because that’s totally not the case. But it does kind of shake up your perspective on the subject in a broader sense.

Okay, I lied, one more thing. I’d think it would be obvious from the previews and the rating (R) that this isn’t a children’s movie. Our experience was that it seems that wasn’t obvious enough for some people. Someone brought an entire brood of small children to the showing we attended–which started at 10pm, no less. Dude, it starts out with a hanging and shortly progresses to near-rape, and that’s just the first couple of scenes. In some places this is a pretty graphic movie. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because it’s a comic book movie it’s kid-safe. Pay attention to the rating; it’s there for a reason. *insert eye rollage here*

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My newfound fascination with NPR has led to another discovery by the name of StoryCorps. Excerpts from their work is sometimes featured on “This American Life”, and I saw some of it around the NPR Web site too, so I finally went to take a closer look.

The concept is simple: Record conversations. StoryCorps has two mobile units (east and west) and two permanent booths (both in NYC: one in Lower Manhattan with a preference toward 9/11 stories, and one in Grand Central Station). Each unit is essentially a small recording studio. People who wish to record something, usually an interview, make an appointment for a one-hour session which results in about 40 minutes of actual recorded material. They sit down and… talk. There’s a facilitator available, but the point is largely to capture the conversation between the participants themselves. At the end, the participants get a copy of their conversation and a copy is placed in the Library of Congress. The only fee is a requested $10 donation (to cover the CD, I believe). There’s also the option of making your own recording, if you don’t live near one of the booths or on the path of either mobile unit, although your recording doesn’t become a part of their archive this way. Or if you’ve got a little more cash to spare you can rent a StoryKit, which is sort of a booth-in-a-box and does result in your recording being added to the archive.

The idea is to record people’s stories. There are all kinds of stories going on all around us, all the time, and we’re largely unaware of them because they’re not interesting or “important” enough to make it to the news. Those stories are valuable in lots of ways; they are a part of the human experience, they help us understand each other, they give us warnings and pointers and tips about life. Talking about them can even change the people doing the talking, bringing them closer together or giving them a better understanding of each other or sometimes even providing healing. StoryCorps seeks to preserve these stories.

There’s more to their mission than that–I highly suggest reading their “About” page for a more complete idea of what their goals are. It is, however, the part that most interests me. You’ve seen, in my previous post about NPR if nothing else, how interested I am in finding out what makes other people tick. How could I not be enthralled by this concept, which feeds that curiosity so perfectly? I only wish I had time to sit down and listen to all of the ones that sound interesting.

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In my not-so-copious spare time at work, I’ve been exploring NPR’s website. I’ve also been listening to selected programs from NPR with Tim in the car. (Podcasts–gotta love ‘em.) I thought I would share my favourite NPR discoveries with y’all.

This American Life
OK, not actually technically an NPR program–it’s a Public Radio International program. This is one of the podcasts we’re listening to. Each week, a theme is selected, and host Ira Glass leads listeners through three or four short pieces relating to the theme. Sometimes the stories are funny. Sometimes they’re poignant. Sometimes they’re both. Comedy or drama, truth or fiction, they’re all glimpses into the lives and the minds of other people, and that’s something I just thrive on. Often they’re ordinary people: a high school student describing a crush in the Star-Crossed Lovers episode, or an aging man with tinnitus and his daughter with a hearing loss in the Living Without episode. Sometimes they’re not; last week’s episode, entitled “Habeas Schmabeas”, included stories from people who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay. It’s always a fascinating program.

Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
This is the other podcast we’ve been listening to. It’s a news quiz, hosted by Peter Sagal with Carl Kasell as judge and scorekeeper and a rotating three-person panel of authors, writers, comedians, etc. Listeners call in to participate in some parts of the show, while other parts are directed specifically at the panel. While produced for entertainment purposes, it’s actually a good way to keep up with major headlines and minor quirky stories. It’s also always interesting to see how much I can personally answer; often I find that I’m better-informed than I thought I was.

Kitchen Window
Kitchen Window is the first of my three recent discoveries on the Web site. It’s a weekly food column by various authors which seems to mostly be a short essay about a particular food, cooking method, entertaining strategy, etc., followed by a recipe. This week’s topic was cooking with beer and had a recipe for a stout-based beef stew. Next week’s, which just showed up on the RSS feed despite not showing on the site yet and bearing a date of next Wednesday, looks to be a sort of French custard with strawberries in it. That’s two out of two recipes so far that I think I can use already–the soup for dinner or lunch sometime, and the custard for a family potluck sometime–both of which look simple enough to make. It looks like this is going to be a helpful and entertaining column to follow.

This I Believe
The second of my new discoveries. This is another one of those things where I’m liking getting into people’s heads. “This I Believe” was originally a 1950′s radio program which sought to find the human similarities amongst people who held widely varied beliefs. They featured pieces from virtually everyone, from cab drivers and secretaries to Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller. The current series of the same name is based on that program, sort of a revival. Contributors are asked to distill the guiding principles of their lives into a short article. The idea is not to persuade everyone to agree on the same beliefs, but rather to encourage the development of respect for the diversity of beliefs that exist. And… When I say that, I think it will probably bring to mind specifically religious beliefs, but that doesn’t appear to be a point of focus for the series. It seems to cover everything from religion and philosophy to economics to interpersonal relations to private lives to writing to–well, you get the picture. It’s more than entertainment, it’s brain food.

Mixed Signals
The third of my new Web site discoveries. This is “an NPR blog”–although I’ve yet to stumble across another one, so in my head it sticks as “the NPR blog”. Blog host JJ Sutherland passes on stories sent in by readers on what seems to be virtually every topic under the sun. The front page contains, as I’m typing this, a post on the big airstrike in Iraq, some thoughts from the military on bloggers, speculation about sports betting in Vegas, thoughts on McCaine’s viability as a Presidential candidate, musings on Google’s merits, a link to a Bird Flu wiki, a piece about a middle school which decided its students couldn’t handle a seven-year-old’s poetry about living black, the agenda from an NPR news meeting, a warning about excessive use of technology for surveillance of public places, and a human-interest piece about a 101-year-old woman who cares for her 89- and 95-year-old siblings. It’s a really interesting sort of cross-section of short bits about anything and everything, with a little personal touch added to each piece.

Enjoy!

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