Thomas has recently discovered television commercials. While I was afraid in the past that he would start craving the toys and food he saw on TV, in fact it's much worse. He appears to be susceptible to everything he sees advertised.
Thomas: "Mommy, mommy! Can we get that?"
Me: "You want to get a 30-year mortgage with a low down payment?"
Thomas, bringing me a book, "Mommy, can you read this to me? I don't know my language."
Thomas, showing us his hand, "Hey, look what I smell like!"
Me: "Thomas, what's wrong?"
Thomas: "Mommy, I'm pretending to be a king who's crying because he got married."
Thomas is helping me with dinner.
Me: "Thomas, you're doing a good job."
Thomas: "I'm doing a great job, Mommy."
Monday, July 23, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Harry Potter and the Humongous Hype
This is not a Harry Potter-bashing post. My copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pre-ordered around Jan., came Saturday and I've already finished it, so count me among his fans. Still, as Marc Antony, via Shakespeare, once intoned, "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", even as his speech goes on to remind the Romans why Julius wasn't such a bad bloke after all. What kind of bloke is Harry? Why does the whole planet seem to care so very much?
Tolkien, like Rowlings, was also once vaulted into an instant spotlight, but even he had to have a specific movement and time--the drug-addled sixties--to explain his sudden popularity. Rowlings barely had time to blow her nose before her first novel started disappearing off bookstore shelves in droves. Potter also has Frodo beat on another score: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has sold more copies alone than all three Lord of the Rings books combined, and Tolkien has been hanging around a lot longer than "the boy wizard". I know these stats won't exactly shock anyone--the Harry Potter Hype Machine has been in full bore since the first book rounded up kids and adults alike into one big cult of four-eyed magic mania--but can anyone explain them? Modern Library's list of 100 Greatest Novels isn't short for science fiction/fantasy writers--it has Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, even Ayn Rand--but J.K. Rowlings fails to make it. And that's not just the Board's list, that's the Reader's list, too. TIME Magazine's list is similarly Potter-less. So why are these tales of a scar-faced, wand-waving adolescent squashing all but a handful of religious tomes as the best-selling books of all time?
Greater minds than mine have attempted this question and it's probably better suited to some comparative lit's Ph.D. thesis, but I can't help but wonder. On the face of it, Rowlings' writing is solid, but hardly splashy and she slides a bit in the later books, probably because no editor dared touch them. She occasionally attempts to use a simile or metaphor when she's actually describing the real appearance of something--in this book she says the ground-up shards of a mirror were "like glittering dust". She overuses a pet plot device--having Harry overhear details crucial to his mission from unsuspecting antagonists--all too often, culminating in the near constant mindmeld Harry shares with Voldemort that endangers Harry only once, but ever afterwards gives him an easy, constant update on Mr. Name Unspoken's whereabouts and activities. She also can't resist the "all is revealed" moment, either, where characters get together to rehash in clunky exposition what's happened and how it all fits together, especially the cliched bad guy "monologue" ending--"Before I kill you, Harry, here's how I did everything prior to this point!"
But wordcraft is not enough to sustain a book--and its lack isn't enough to condemn one, either. The book I finished prior to picking up Harry Potter was a much more literary sci-fi called Life by Gwyneth Jones. Jones' writing slaps Rowlings sideways. It is beautiful, poised, provocative, and requires careful attention. Her characters are sharply and poignantly drawn. The plot is driven less by adventure than by, well, life as her title indicates and it has some uncomfortable and challenging things to say about gender in a modern world. Still, a few weeks out of it and it's mostly slipped my mind. Nate and I had a similar reaction to a movie called The Fountain which we saw because Nate is a big fan of director Darren Aronofsky. The Fountain also has a lot of very pretty packaging--it's a very visual arresting film. But we were strangely unmoved at the end, despite the fact that characters spend most of the film wracked with grief. "Bloodless" is how I described it to Nate and he agreed. We simply didn't care what happened to these people.
And on that score, I think Harry Potter gets a punch back in at its more literary counterparts. Even if many of Rowlings' peripheral characters are more caricature than real (the Dursleys in particular come to mind), Harry, Ron and Hermione, a classic heroic triumvirate, have enough personality for all of them. Through seven books, they've grown up and the magical wonder of the first book is appropriately mirrored in the grief of the seventh book as they (and we) see the things we found so amazing in childhood take on deeper and darker meaning when viewed from adulthood. Rowlings isn't afraid to let them fully experience adolescence, either, even in front of a backdrop--evil maniac torturing and killing his way to triumph--that seems too serious for explorations of young crushes, hormonal-induced depression, and--for Ron--suddenly discovering your childhood girl friend has breasts. In the final book, the three of them are finally of majority and they strike out on their own together, trying to do what they think is right without the reassuring guidance of better-informed adults. The thing they realize is that adults are not especially well-informed either. Every decision is wrought with peril, and often, regret. Courage has been described as not the absence of fear, but going forward despite fear. Rowlings proves that courage is really the going forward despite doubt. Because of these things, the characters endure, grow large in the mind of the reader. We want them to win. We wish we could help them--we read voraciously alongside them as if we could.
And what Rowlings might lack in wordcraft, she more than makes up for in storycraft. I read the first book several years ago and dismissed it as so much fantasy fluff. It wasn't until after the first two movies had come out that I decided to try them again and from there, I read books two through six in a few months' rush (rather dumbly, I didn't wait until all seven books were out, so I was forced into the position of waiting restlessly for its debut, after having rolled my eyes at all the hype and giddiness that accompanied earlier books to stores). Small nuggets in the first few books that had seemed out of place, or too easily come by grew with meaning in each following book. By the seventh book, a carefully laid heroic arc for Harry becomes shockingly clear, building on these little dropped hints across what now amounts to thousands of pages. It reminded me, not favorably, of some other fantasy series I have read where the writers start out clever and smashing in the first few books and then you realize by the third or fourth book that they shoved all their great ideas in early and are petering out now (Robert Jordan, anyone?). Rowlings seems to have infinite patience. Something laid without adequate explanation in the first book might not reappear until book six or seven and to find it again is like a treasure hunt, like discovering on Antique Roadshow that ugly old painting of grandma's is actually worth $30,000. How she managed to keep track of it all should be made required study by all writing students.
Some people have complained that her later books have too much filler surrounding the center action. Maybe so, but the Tolkien that everyone admires suffers the same complaint on re-inspection--clearly the man was more interested in the literary and historical aspects of his own novels than the driving plot (Frodo's destruction of the ring comes very early in the last book and comes off as anti-climatic. Tolkien really needed an editor like Peter Jackson). It's hard to blame Rowlings that she has grown to such mammoth proportions as a writer that editors are loath to harass too much change out of her (would you complain to your money cow that her milk is too creamy?) Tolkien's "filler" was a lot of droning place descriptions and non-sequitor singing. Rowlings maybe spends too much time worrying what Harry is thinking about in between the moments where he's actually doing something. She is invested in him. So apparently are millions of other people.
I'm pretty sad to see Harry go. The seventh book is the best of the series, invested with real emotion and a well-executed bang-out ending--if anyone was worried. It's been a little disappointing for me to emerge back into the real world, where the chance to participate in an epic battle against evil is pretty slim. Here's hoping that some bright young writer is just waiting in the wings to emerge as the next grand storyteller and give us all a reason to stay home on Saturday nights, curled up with a good book.
Sidebar: While reading Harry, I was thinking of the idea of being the protagonist in my own story--how absorbed I am in my own concerns and how narcissistically my own world seems to revolve around those concerns, as if other people are the bit players in my drama. In Harry's world, several characters make the ultimate sacrifice and their deaths get varying levels of attention, but hey, this is Harry's story and Harry triumphs, so it's all for the best, right? I'd be interested in hearing what people think about being the bit player--would you be okay with being a footnote on the way to glory, fighting your tiny square of the fight, if a Harry Potter-like hero needed your minuscule help to accomplish his/her goal? I'm not talking about soldiers in an army, necessarily, but ordinary people who hear the news, decide for themselves what they think they ought to do, and suffer the consequences of those actions, maybe without much acknowledgement either. What do you think?
Tolkien, like Rowlings, was also once vaulted into an instant spotlight, but even he had to have a specific movement and time--the drug-addled sixties--to explain his sudden popularity. Rowlings barely had time to blow her nose before her first novel started disappearing off bookstore shelves in droves. Potter also has Frodo beat on another score: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has sold more copies alone than all three Lord of the Rings books combined, and Tolkien has been hanging around a lot longer than "the boy wizard". I know these stats won't exactly shock anyone--the Harry Potter Hype Machine has been in full bore since the first book rounded up kids and adults alike into one big cult of four-eyed magic mania--but can anyone explain them? Modern Library's list of 100 Greatest Novels isn't short for science fiction/fantasy writers--it has Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, even Ayn Rand--but J.K. Rowlings fails to make it. And that's not just the Board's list, that's the Reader's list, too. TIME Magazine's list is similarly Potter-less. So why are these tales of a scar-faced, wand-waving adolescent squashing all but a handful of religious tomes as the best-selling books of all time?
Greater minds than mine have attempted this question and it's probably better suited to some comparative lit's Ph.D. thesis, but I can't help but wonder. On the face of it, Rowlings' writing is solid, but hardly splashy and she slides a bit in the later books, probably because no editor dared touch them. She occasionally attempts to use a simile or metaphor when she's actually describing the real appearance of something--in this book she says the ground-up shards of a mirror were "like glittering dust". She overuses a pet plot device--having Harry overhear details crucial to his mission from unsuspecting antagonists--all too often, culminating in the near constant mindmeld Harry shares with Voldemort that endangers Harry only once, but ever afterwards gives him an easy, constant update on Mr. Name Unspoken's whereabouts and activities. She also can't resist the "all is revealed" moment, either, where characters get together to rehash in clunky exposition what's happened and how it all fits together, especially the cliched bad guy "monologue" ending--"Before I kill you, Harry, here's how I did everything prior to this point!"
But wordcraft is not enough to sustain a book--and its lack isn't enough to condemn one, either. The book I finished prior to picking up Harry Potter was a much more literary sci-fi called Life by Gwyneth Jones. Jones' writing slaps Rowlings sideways. It is beautiful, poised, provocative, and requires careful attention. Her characters are sharply and poignantly drawn. The plot is driven less by adventure than by, well, life as her title indicates and it has some uncomfortable and challenging things to say about gender in a modern world. Still, a few weeks out of it and it's mostly slipped my mind. Nate and I had a similar reaction to a movie called The Fountain which we saw because Nate is a big fan of director Darren Aronofsky. The Fountain also has a lot of very pretty packaging--it's a very visual arresting film. But we were strangely unmoved at the end, despite the fact that characters spend most of the film wracked with grief. "Bloodless" is how I described it to Nate and he agreed. We simply didn't care what happened to these people.
And on that score, I think Harry Potter gets a punch back in at its more literary counterparts. Even if many of Rowlings' peripheral characters are more caricature than real (the Dursleys in particular come to mind), Harry, Ron and Hermione, a classic heroic triumvirate, have enough personality for all of them. Through seven books, they've grown up and the magical wonder of the first book is appropriately mirrored in the grief of the seventh book as they (and we) see the things we found so amazing in childhood take on deeper and darker meaning when viewed from adulthood. Rowlings isn't afraid to let them fully experience adolescence, either, even in front of a backdrop--evil maniac torturing and killing his way to triumph--that seems too serious for explorations of young crushes, hormonal-induced depression, and--for Ron--suddenly discovering your childhood girl friend has breasts. In the final book, the three of them are finally of majority and they strike out on their own together, trying to do what they think is right without the reassuring guidance of better-informed adults. The thing they realize is that adults are not especially well-informed either. Every decision is wrought with peril, and often, regret. Courage has been described as not the absence of fear, but going forward despite fear. Rowlings proves that courage is really the going forward despite doubt. Because of these things, the characters endure, grow large in the mind of the reader. We want them to win. We wish we could help them--we read voraciously alongside them as if we could.
And what Rowlings might lack in wordcraft, she more than makes up for in storycraft. I read the first book several years ago and dismissed it as so much fantasy fluff. It wasn't until after the first two movies had come out that I decided to try them again and from there, I read books two through six in a few months' rush (rather dumbly, I didn't wait until all seven books were out, so I was forced into the position of waiting restlessly for its debut, after having rolled my eyes at all the hype and giddiness that accompanied earlier books to stores). Small nuggets in the first few books that had seemed out of place, or too easily come by grew with meaning in each following book. By the seventh book, a carefully laid heroic arc for Harry becomes shockingly clear, building on these little dropped hints across what now amounts to thousands of pages. It reminded me, not favorably, of some other fantasy series I have read where the writers start out clever and smashing in the first few books and then you realize by the third or fourth book that they shoved all their great ideas in early and are petering out now (Robert Jordan, anyone?). Rowlings seems to have infinite patience. Something laid without adequate explanation in the first book might not reappear until book six or seven and to find it again is like a treasure hunt, like discovering on Antique Roadshow that ugly old painting of grandma's is actually worth $30,000. How she managed to keep track of it all should be made required study by all writing students.
Some people have complained that her later books have too much filler surrounding the center action. Maybe so, but the Tolkien that everyone admires suffers the same complaint on re-inspection--clearly the man was more interested in the literary and historical aspects of his own novels than the driving plot (Frodo's destruction of the ring comes very early in the last book and comes off as anti-climatic. Tolkien really needed an editor like Peter Jackson). It's hard to blame Rowlings that she has grown to such mammoth proportions as a writer that editors are loath to harass too much change out of her (would you complain to your money cow that her milk is too creamy?) Tolkien's "filler" was a lot of droning place descriptions and non-sequitor singing. Rowlings maybe spends too much time worrying what Harry is thinking about in between the moments where he's actually doing something. She is invested in him. So apparently are millions of other people.
I'm pretty sad to see Harry go. The seventh book is the best of the series, invested with real emotion and a well-executed bang-out ending--if anyone was worried. It's been a little disappointing for me to emerge back into the real world, where the chance to participate in an epic battle against evil is pretty slim. Here's hoping that some bright young writer is just waiting in the wings to emerge as the next grand storyteller and give us all a reason to stay home on Saturday nights, curled up with a good book.
Sidebar: While reading Harry, I was thinking of the idea of being the protagonist in my own story--how absorbed I am in my own concerns and how narcissistically my own world seems to revolve around those concerns, as if other people are the bit players in my drama. In Harry's world, several characters make the ultimate sacrifice and their deaths get varying levels of attention, but hey, this is Harry's story and Harry triumphs, so it's all for the best, right? I'd be interested in hearing what people think about being the bit player--would you be okay with being a footnote on the way to glory, fighting your tiny square of the fight, if a Harry Potter-like hero needed your minuscule help to accomplish his/her goal? I'm not talking about soldiers in an army, necessarily, but ordinary people who hear the news, decide for themselves what they think they ought to do, and suffer the consequences of those actions, maybe without much acknowledgement either. What do you think?
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Wedding Throwdown: Mormons vs. Those Other Guys
So much has been written about the American Wedding that I'm not sure I've got anything of substance to add. Still, there's something about attending a wedding that makes a person want to psychoanalyze the state of American life and its unions in particular. Yesterday, Nate and I attended the wedding of Nate's cousin, Laila. Nate's uncle, Brian, is the freewheeler of his family, having defied his more traditional father's wishes on more than one occasion: he went to Harvard instead of MIT, majored in English instead of a "man's field" like engineering, he plays the sitar professionally and is married to Shubha, the only professional female surbahar player in the U.S. Laila is his adopted daughter with his first wife, Sandra, and their only child at all, so naturally the event of her marriage needed to be a grand affair.
And grand it was. I wore adult shoes (3-inch heels), ate adult food (caviar and expensive imported cheeses), had adult conversations ("Oh yes, Princeton is a lovely little town"), and did some very unadult dancing (I shook it to "Mony Mony", but declined to do the macarena). On separate occasions, Nate and I each got hit on (his bailed when she found out he was married, mine already knew I was married and waited until Nate had left to break out his line). I declined to have my champagne glass filled several times until an exasperated waiter went ahead and filled it anyway (when I tried to tell him no while he was filling it, he just leered at me).
I've had the privilege of attending the nuptial ceremonies of several major religions: Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Mormon (both in and out of the temple) and I've concluded that the Mormons are the most efficient. Most of the time, while the officiator might make a little five to ten minute speech about why marriage is a good thing, it's still just a quick "Do you?" and "Do you?" affair. All these recitations of poems, singing of singers, ceremonial hand-wrapping and/or glass crushing, etc., these don't make it into the Mormon wedding. As a Mormon, therefore, you can feel a bit cheated. That's why the Utah "Wedding Breakfast" was invented, to smash all that stuff back in. In fact, while the Mormon wedding is the most efficient, the Mormon wedding day is usually the longest. Most Mormons get married in the morning, then there's a wedding breakfast, afternoon pictures at the marriage site and at the reception site, and at least one wedding reception in the evening. Mormons can't get over the need to be efficient, though, so unlike the demure sit-down $100-a-head dinner of most wedding receptions, Mormons invite everyone they know (and everyone else they know) to bring a present, walk quickly through a receiving line of bride, groom, and close relatives, then sit at a table for another ten minutes eating mints and drinking sprite mixed with sherbet before feeling compelled to go home in order to free up their seat for someone else. The efficiency level increases as the servers are usually young women from your ward, the platers are relief society members, and the reception site is most likely to be the cultural hall of your ward building, with the receiving line posted under a rented trellis by the basketball hoop.
I suspect it's because with most Mormon families having a multitude of children and with a large population of young adults getting home from their missions all the same time, the procession of weddings in a town with a high Mormon population can get to be a little overwhelming. There are always wedding reception invitations on my parents' countertop whenever we visit them in Utah and the lucky couples are usually the child of someone my parents knew from something, however briefly. "Who's this, Mom?" "Oh, that's the daughter of the woman I stood next to in line at the supermarket." Knowing you only have to go for a few minutes to say hello, then devour your mints and take off enables you to attend four or five weddings in a week. Of course, the gift-giving can get a little prohibitive, but only family and close friends are expected to give actual presents. The 500+ additional reception invitees can usually drop a few bucks in a collective fund for the bride and groom to buy themselves a nice couch. The system is well-established.
Nate and I took the Mormon wedding efficiency one step further by squashing the wedding breakfast and reception into a single event (we ate breakfast with family and friends upstairs at our reception hall, then went downstairs afterwards to start greeting additional guests). We gave our poor photographer a bit of a heart attack, since there was so set picture-taking time--he was forced to follow us around at our reception (efficiency decrease: we didn't have a receiving line), waiting until we stopped talking to people, then dragging us out to snap as many pictures as he could before we escaped again. The whole thing was over by two in the afternoon. Frankly, most of it is a wonderful blur. Two events stick out in my mind: 1) seeing Nate for the first time after our temple ceremony, flanked by his brothers and decked out in his Scottish finest (Nate's ancestors on his mother's side are Stewart Scots). My heart nearly popped out of my chest, and 2) Nate pulling a sword out of his belt for me to cut the cake (and getting to lick the frosting off the sword tip to the appreciative yells of the crowd).
I wouldn't presume to say which wedding style is better: Mormon efficiency vs. Everyone Else opulence. The opulence, frankly, is more fun and when yours is the only immediate wedding in town, you get a little more attention for it. The party is louder and goes longer--and the food is far better. There are first dances and toasts (Mormon weddings, lacking alcohol, also lack the drunken friend salutes that make most weddings so entertaining), multiple courses and wedding singers. The Catholics in particular get to have an entire worship event, audience participation included, to go along with the wedding itself. The length of the ritual begins to wind itself tightly with power, culminating in the well-known recitation of vows that, by their very familiarity, seems to unleash a collective feeling of spiritual joy. There is something wonderful to be said about spending half a day really feting someone you love as they start into a completely new chapter of their life, combining your collective good wishes into a foundation for their marriage which will largely have to continue without your help.
Mormon efficiency is a cultural thing--in Utah, we have made efficiency into a worship art. However, Mormon wedding efficiency has its own unique origin, tied to the same reason most Mormon engagements are so short:
We're anxious to get to the hotel.
And grand it was. I wore adult shoes (3-inch heels), ate adult food (caviar and expensive imported cheeses), had adult conversations ("Oh yes, Princeton is a lovely little town"), and did some very unadult dancing (I shook it to "Mony Mony", but declined to do the macarena). On separate occasions, Nate and I each got hit on (his bailed when she found out he was married, mine already knew I was married and waited until Nate had left to break out his line). I declined to have my champagne glass filled several times until an exasperated waiter went ahead and filled it anyway (when I tried to tell him no while he was filling it, he just leered at me).
I've had the privilege of attending the nuptial ceremonies of several major religions: Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Mormon (both in and out of the temple) and I've concluded that the Mormons are the most efficient. Most of the time, while the officiator might make a little five to ten minute speech about why marriage is a good thing, it's still just a quick "Do you?" and "Do you?" affair. All these recitations of poems, singing of singers, ceremonial hand-wrapping and/or glass crushing, etc., these don't make it into the Mormon wedding. As a Mormon, therefore, you can feel a bit cheated. That's why the Utah "Wedding Breakfast" was invented, to smash all that stuff back in. In fact, while the Mormon wedding is the most efficient, the Mormon wedding day is usually the longest. Most Mormons get married in the morning, then there's a wedding breakfast, afternoon pictures at the marriage site and at the reception site, and at least one wedding reception in the evening. Mormons can't get over the need to be efficient, though, so unlike the demure sit-down $100-a-head dinner of most wedding receptions, Mormons invite everyone they know (and everyone else they know) to bring a present, walk quickly through a receiving line of bride, groom, and close relatives, then sit at a table for another ten minutes eating mints and drinking sprite mixed with sherbet before feeling compelled to go home in order to free up their seat for someone else. The efficiency level increases as the servers are usually young women from your ward, the platers are relief society members, and the reception site is most likely to be the cultural hall of your ward building, with the receiving line posted under a rented trellis by the basketball hoop.
I suspect it's because with most Mormon families having a multitude of children and with a large population of young adults getting home from their missions all the same time, the procession of weddings in a town with a high Mormon population can get to be a little overwhelming. There are always wedding reception invitations on my parents' countertop whenever we visit them in Utah and the lucky couples are usually the child of someone my parents knew from something, however briefly. "Who's this, Mom?" "Oh, that's the daughter of the woman I stood next to in line at the supermarket." Knowing you only have to go for a few minutes to say hello, then devour your mints and take off enables you to attend four or five weddings in a week. Of course, the gift-giving can get a little prohibitive, but only family and close friends are expected to give actual presents. The 500+ additional reception invitees can usually drop a few bucks in a collective fund for the bride and groom to buy themselves a nice couch. The system is well-established.
Nate and I took the Mormon wedding efficiency one step further by squashing the wedding breakfast and reception into a single event (we ate breakfast with family and friends upstairs at our reception hall, then went downstairs afterwards to start greeting additional guests). We gave our poor photographer a bit of a heart attack, since there was so set picture-taking time--he was forced to follow us around at our reception (efficiency decrease: we didn't have a receiving line), waiting until we stopped talking to people, then dragging us out to snap as many pictures as he could before we escaped again. The whole thing was over by two in the afternoon. Frankly, most of it is a wonderful blur. Two events stick out in my mind: 1) seeing Nate for the first time after our temple ceremony, flanked by his brothers and decked out in his Scottish finest (Nate's ancestors on his mother's side are Stewart Scots). My heart nearly popped out of my chest, and 2) Nate pulling a sword out of his belt for me to cut the cake (and getting to lick the frosting off the sword tip to the appreciative yells of the crowd).
I wouldn't presume to say which wedding style is better: Mormon efficiency vs. Everyone Else opulence. The opulence, frankly, is more fun and when yours is the only immediate wedding in town, you get a little more attention for it. The party is louder and goes longer--and the food is far better. There are first dances and toasts (Mormon weddings, lacking alcohol, also lack the drunken friend salutes that make most weddings so entertaining), multiple courses and wedding singers. The Catholics in particular get to have an entire worship event, audience participation included, to go along with the wedding itself. The length of the ritual begins to wind itself tightly with power, culminating in the well-known recitation of vows that, by their very familiarity, seems to unleash a collective feeling of spiritual joy. There is something wonderful to be said about spending half a day really feting someone you love as they start into a completely new chapter of their life, combining your collective good wishes into a foundation for their marriage which will largely have to continue without your help.
Mormon efficiency is a cultural thing--in Utah, we have made efficiency into a worship art. However, Mormon wedding efficiency has its own unique origin, tied to the same reason most Mormon engagements are so short:
We're anxious to get to the hotel.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
A Candle (or five) for a Man
As I mentioned earlier, my sister Alyssa is here with us until Sunday. Roughly three years ago Alys was visiting me when we were first living in New York. We headed down to 5th Avenue south of Central Park to see the notorious stores: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany's, Bergdorf Goodman, etc. Right across the street from Saks is the very famous St. Patrick's Cathedral which Wikipedia lists as the "largest decorated Neo-Gothic-style Catholic cathedral in North America". It's an absolutely stunning church, and has millions of visitors a year. Inside there are stations for various saints where a petitioner can pay a dollar and light a candle. Those three years ago, Alys, who was having fairly dismal luck on the dating scene (One of her dates refused a piece of gum she offered because, as he put it, "Ah, I'd just swaller it."), lit a candle to St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, and put out her hopes for a decent man to come along.
Well, maybe because we're Mormons and not Catholics (in which case, our actions yesterday may not have helped much), or maybe St. Andrew has a sense of humor, but about six months later my sister met a certain Scottish-descended laddie with whom she began a long and pretty ineffectual romance. Fed-up with the whole thing, she told me before she came out that she had just one wish: that we could return to St. Patrick's and light a different candle to a different saint in the hopes that maybe someone else could get the job done a little better.
I made a video diary of our quest, but unfortunately, the audio appears to be screwed up on a few of the files. I am working on the problem and as soon as I can post all of them, I will. Until then, here are the working ones:
In the end, we spent six dollars (St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes got two dollars) and lit five candles. Slease, I hope you get good one this time. :)
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Music and memories
It feels like we're living in an unprecedented age of being able to revisit our youth through music we used to love. I had a few tapes as a kid, though most of my music tastes ran to the stuff my older brother and sister listened to when they were teenagers and I was impressionable and also desperate to impress. Of course, I used to say I loved '80's music, but I have to admit that I only loved a very narrow segment of it--i.e. whatever was in their tape decks.
At the same time, I had my own private music, stuff no one knew I liked, songs I listened to mostly alone as a kid (a lot of my childhood was spent hiding the things I liked for fear of ridicule or reprisal. My older siblings were--and are--pretty blunt in expressing their views and being the least mature in a lot of ways made my preferences easy targets). Not surprisingly, as an adolescent girl--even as my older brother was introducing me to Pink Floyd's The Wall--I really went for easy listening love songs of the Richard Marx's variety. I thought George Michael had the best voice and there were several Phil Collins songs on my private top ten list of GREATEST SONGS EVER. I didn't have the money to buy my own music and I didn't want to ask someone in my family to sport me the cash (ridicule thing again), so most of the time I listened to the radio fanatically in the hopes that every now and again I could catch a favorite and get it secondhand onto my own tape recorder.
Of course, I grew up, music changed, I changed, old tapes got lost, new ones got made (some even from boyfriends) and I forgot--unintentionally or deliberately--a lot of those private songs that seemed to have so much meaning to me only a few short years ago. In college, I acquired a whole new host of music tastes, mostly through the music collection of my roommate (having never bought music, I just wasn't in the habit and I couldn't stand to waste money on an album before I had heard it through completely and knew I would actually like it). Lots of angry women and their guitars, mostly. Then again, there were still the private songs, a list of which I was starting to keep on my lab computer (I ran a computer lab in the basement of the science building and had staked out a private computer for myself). In the early days of file sharing and mp3's, people on our local network were making music compilations and sharing them over their Apples. My friend Rachel and I spent a lot of late nights in that lab, playing music and doing roley-chair ballet.
Well, I'm an adult now and my CD collection is still pretty lacking (I hate to buy CD's. I really really do). My music collection on the other hand has exploded out, thanks to iTunes (I did a bit of the "free" music sharing back in the day when that was the only option, but you get tired of the sneaking, the bad recordings, the unreliability of downloads and all that). Like I said, you lose old tapes, and then later, old CD's, and you forget. There is a wake of old songs behind us, a musical coming of age history and until now, it was primarily lost, even to us. But just today, I downloaded Savage Garden's To the Moon and Back, a pretty silly song with too much synthesizer and yet listening to it over again, I was back in the computer lab, dancing around with Rachel and the roley-chairs. Here is my history, for 99 cents a piece at a time. Some things I downloaded and eventually erased again--like Billy Joel who was a big part of my childhood, but whose music just hasn't translated well into my current tastes and most of Ani DiFranco who is a very talented songwriter, but I left angry feminist angst at Bryn Mawr. Other songs, however, are wriggling back into my collection, if for no other reason than I like to remember being a little girl, sitting on the edge of my bed with a tape recorder, waiting, just waiting for that song to come on the radio. Yeah, I bought Richard Marx's Hold Onto the Nights. Just because romance didn't turn out to be what I thought it was, doesn't mean I can't remember, and enjoy, my old romanticized version of it.
I love finding my musical past on iTunes. Here's one of the ways I'm finding my musical future: http://www.pandora.com/
At the same time, I had my own private music, stuff no one knew I liked, songs I listened to mostly alone as a kid (a lot of my childhood was spent hiding the things I liked for fear of ridicule or reprisal. My older siblings were--and are--pretty blunt in expressing their views and being the least mature in a lot of ways made my preferences easy targets). Not surprisingly, as an adolescent girl--even as my older brother was introducing me to Pink Floyd's The Wall--I really went for easy listening love songs of the Richard Marx's variety. I thought George Michael had the best voice and there were several Phil Collins songs on my private top ten list of GREATEST SONGS EVER. I didn't have the money to buy my own music and I didn't want to ask someone in my family to sport me the cash (ridicule thing again), so most of the time I listened to the radio fanatically in the hopes that every now and again I could catch a favorite and get it secondhand onto my own tape recorder.
Of course, I grew up, music changed, I changed, old tapes got lost, new ones got made (some even from boyfriends) and I forgot--unintentionally or deliberately--a lot of those private songs that seemed to have so much meaning to me only a few short years ago. In college, I acquired a whole new host of music tastes, mostly through the music collection of my roommate (having never bought music, I just wasn't in the habit and I couldn't stand to waste money on an album before I had heard it through completely and knew I would actually like it). Lots of angry women and their guitars, mostly. Then again, there were still the private songs, a list of which I was starting to keep on my lab computer (I ran a computer lab in the basement of the science building and had staked out a private computer for myself). In the early days of file sharing and mp3's, people on our local network were making music compilations and sharing them over their Apples. My friend Rachel and I spent a lot of late nights in that lab, playing music and doing roley-chair ballet.
Well, I'm an adult now and my CD collection is still pretty lacking (I hate to buy CD's. I really really do). My music collection on the other hand has exploded out, thanks to iTunes (I did a bit of the "free" music sharing back in the day when that was the only option, but you get tired of the sneaking, the bad recordings, the unreliability of downloads and all that). Like I said, you lose old tapes, and then later, old CD's, and you forget. There is a wake of old songs behind us, a musical coming of age history and until now, it was primarily lost, even to us. But just today, I downloaded Savage Garden's To the Moon and Back, a pretty silly song with too much synthesizer and yet listening to it over again, I was back in the computer lab, dancing around with Rachel and the roley-chairs. Here is my history, for 99 cents a piece at a time. Some things I downloaded and eventually erased again--like Billy Joel who was a big part of my childhood, but whose music just hasn't translated well into my current tastes and most of Ani DiFranco who is a very talented songwriter, but I left angry feminist angst at Bryn Mawr. Other songs, however, are wriggling back into my collection, if for no other reason than I like to remember being a little girl, sitting on the edge of my bed with a tape recorder, waiting, just waiting for that song to come on the radio. Yeah, I bought Richard Marx's Hold Onto the Nights. Just because romance didn't turn out to be what I thought it was, doesn't mean I can't remember, and enjoy, my old romanticized version of it.
I love finding my musical past on iTunes. Here's one of the ways I'm finding my musical future: http://www.pandora.com/
Adventures with Blair and Family
This summer, instead of heading back to Utah, we're hosting a phalanx of family members. The first to arrive were Blair and family. Thomas was practically hysterical waiting for his cousins to get here. I've decided we probably should have given him a sibling a little earlier in his life so he could have someone to really play with all the time. That seems to be what this particular child needs. Every time we climbed in the car to go anywhere, he would ask, "Where are my cousins?"
"They're in the car behind us."
"Are they coming with us?"
"Yes. They're just following us in their car."
Stopping at a light: "Where are my cousins? Don't go, Daddy! My cousins are not behind us!"
"Thomas! Yes they are!" And so on.
Anyway, we enjoyed many an adventure for a relatively short weekend. On Sat. we headed back into New York to eat some authentic NYC pizza, climb the Empire State Building, and take the ferry down to the Statue of Liberty. Even Sethie got in on the pizza eating action. At the ESB, there was a skywriter, but even after much staring at the message, we still couldn't decipher it (It was degrading quickly). I'm posting it here. Let me know if you can tell what it says, cuz I sure can't.
Anyway, on we went to the Statue of Liberty. Long ago when I was college student, my friends and I spent our spring break tooling around the east in Rachel's car (hi chica!). We went to D.C. (where we stayed with Blair, actually) and to New York where we climbed the Statue of Liberty. Back in the day, you could wait an interminable amount of time (like 6 $&#*%! hours) and climb an interminable amounts of steps (like 100 $&#*%! thousand) in order to stand in the the tiny crown space and overlook the city. Okay--that last bit sounds kinda grumpy, but it was a pretty cool experience for all that and something you can always bring up (I think I brought it up at least four times this weekend). After 9/11, they closed the Statue of Liberty out of concern, not unreasonably, that it would be the object of a terrorist attack. Much later, they reopened her, but climbing to the crown is forever a relic of the past. Now you can take an elevator to an observation deck about midway up, but that's all. My time in Lady Liberty takes on a new significance.
This time, though, we arrived too late on the island to even go to the observation deck. The 1 train was under repair and after much flailing around trying to get to South Ferry, we ended up on Chambers St. looking for a van taxi to haul the lot of us down to Battery Park. The driver who finally picked us up looked pretty dismayed as we all piled in (he said later he wasn't allowed to pick up so many people at once. Sorry, dude. Maybe you should have mentioned that a little earlier, eh?) and when I told him we were going to Battery Park, he said, "Do you know how to get there?" Um, YOU SIR, are the TAXI DRIVER. Isn't that YOUR JOB to know where to go? We didn't exactly request a backalley warehouse or something. This is BATTERY PARK, at the bottom point of the island. GO SOUTH! Anyway, Blair gave him a nice tip. Blair's a good guy that way (the van driver we got on the way back not only didn't seem to mind all
of us piling into his taxi, but had no problems finding Penn Station. He also got a good tip, but he actually deserved his).Can I just say how I love New York? Every time we leave there I instantly forget how hard the day-to-day living was in the city and all I remember is how amazing and wonderful it was to live in such close proximity to world-renowned sites. I used to say, "If you're bored in New York, it's your own fault." Even the standing around in Battery Park was fun. We got ice cream. We listened to some classy street musicians. We breathed in the scent of the Atlantic Ocean. On Liberty Island, we walked around to the base of the statue and the adults crashed in the shade while the kids chased each other around (and made some little friends--incidentally the same friends showed up at the beach in Belmar, NJ where we went on Mon. Eerie!)
And here's the coolest thing about New York. You're always bound to run into some old friends (Nate and I were commenting to each other how in Salt Lake, if there was some guy in a spidey suit at the park, you'd be calling the police, not lining your kids up to get their picture with him, let alone giving him money).As I mentioned earlier, on Monday we drove 
about 45 min. east to Belmar, NJ, part of the long, sparkling Jersey shore. Admittedly, I have never been a beach person and all those people I've heard go on and on about the allure of the ocean just sounded like crazy people to me (of course, they were from California, so the aura of crazy was on them anyway. Har! Hi Nolan!). But this was a blast. The kids had a great time playing in the water and on the sand, we found little scuttling crabs, we got some much needed sun, and standing there, looking out across the vast ocean, feeling for a moment my pupils dilating and getting a rush in my own smallness, well I think maybe I have an inkling of what they're talking about.
about 45 min. east to Belmar, NJ, part of the long, sparkling Jersey shore. Admittedly, I have never been a beach person and all those people I've heard go on and on about the allure of the ocean just sounded like crazy people to me (of course, they were from California, so the aura of crazy was on them anyway. Har! Hi Nolan!). But this was a blast. The kids had a great time playing in the water and on the sand, we found little scuttling crabs, we got some much needed sun, and standing there, looking out across the vast ocean, feeling for a moment my pupils dilating and getting a rush in my own smallness, well I think maybe I have an inkling of what they're talking about. 
Thomas, especially, seems to destined to be a beach rat. He spent almost our entire time there in the water, despite the fact that it was a chilly 65 degrees and by the time we finally got him out his skin was purplish and he was shaking all over. No matter, he wanted to go back, even though his teeth were chattering so badly he could barely articulate that. He was absolutely
fearless, plunging into wave after wave, even ones that were taller than he was, ones that turned him over and dragged him under. Without Nate there to haul him back up to air, he probably would have happily drowned himself. We've been debating what kind of activities he should be doing this summer--I guess swimming is probably what we ought to be investing our money in.We barbecued in a little park in Belmar and then had to wish Blair and fam farewell. It's so sad--they are moving now to Romania and won't be back this way for several years. It's hard to finally get some family on this side of the country only to lose them again. We miss you already!
More pics and videos of our adventures follow below. Next up on the family adventures list--my sis, Alyssa! (showing up today!)
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