Synaxis TV

I think that’s what Unitarian Universalism is.

It took me a while to get a clear sense of what this movie was about.

My immediate sense after watching it was focused on its treatment of mental illness and its relationship to genius, as well as the fact that it was set in Chicago with lots of shots of the University of Chicago. So at first I thought the movie was about trying to change opinions about mental illness with my critique being that we only care about mental illness when the people who are mentally ill happen to be geniuses as well. But that interpretation didn’t stick.

Instead I came to focus on the relationship between the main character and her father. The presence of mental illness was just a backdrop for the trope of a child caring for their parents, in this situation focusing more on how you come to terms with the flagging glory of a parent who was once recognized to be great by many more than yourself.

So I suppose I did enjoy the movie after all, even though finding the core of the movie does not inspire any great thoughts on my behalf. But it does leave me one question. What happened to the mother?

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The other day I experienced a random confluence of Mexican phenomena.

I had already gotten a diet Coke with lime, the inclusion of lime being something I associate with Mexican tastes. Then I got a chorizo taco at a local authentic Mexican restaurant (albeit, because I was too late for a sausage egg and cheese biscuit at McDonalds). This, of course, all took place while I was listening to Oye Mi Canto, a popular reggaeton song. But the best part was when I got home. I turned on the TV (a rarity in itself) and they happened to be showing Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico!

Today was very social. Bev called and we had lunch at Basil Thai (I’m addicted). She was really sad about her dog having run away.

I rested and did some reading for 505, with some shuttling of CarolynJ, then stopped by Arby’s on the way to Thinking Scripture. One of the good points that came up there was the version of Christianity you get when you focus on Jesus instead of Paul, and how Paul’s relationship to the world resonated with the gnostics.

After that I went and got a dipped cone at Dairy Queen with Suzanne, where we talked about the art of teaching and being a devil’s advocate to get the students motivated to talk.

Then I went home and back out to the Bistro with Katja, Leslie, Tom, James, and Heatherly. I found out that Icelanders eat rotted shark, which inspired me to talk about eating baby goat in Mexico. The most interesting thing that came up, however, was the conflict that some might experience teaching anthropology if they didn’t believe in evolution.

I wrapped up the evening by patching some things up with CarolynJ and putting words into her mouth.

More diagnostics, with less to write this time (the questions were on race and (separate question) the importance of evolutionary concepts and approaches). For lunch I went over to the union with Sabrina and Yuliya, where I found out that Yuliya thought that Suzanne was married. I told Suzanne when we got back to Stone and she thought it was funny, but we had an even bigger laugh when we found out that Kris thought she was married too.

In 505 we discussed the great piece by Gupta and Ferguson on space, and talked about the difficulties of existing in borderlines where two cultures meet.

Back at home I caught up on some of my feeds and got some rest, then went to see Proof with Hubert and Mark. They were both pretty stoked about the idea of turning our Sunday excursions to IHOP into a book club.

I was late to diagnostics because I thought I’d have time to stop by McDonalds, but they still turned out ok. After they were done I went to lunch with Sabria, Leslie, and Katja at Hookah, where we talked about the futility of trying to do good in the world, inspired by Born Into Brothels. In 605 Myrdene ended up showing us the movie, given the state that the folks who had taken diagnostics were in. Then for dinner I went to Basil Thai with Heatherly, James, and Carolyn, where I had some great yellow chicken curry and Heatherly told us a story about being a little girl in Japan and people laughing at her trying to eat a big piece of sushi. I went home and rested some then did a little more work on diagnostics after CarolynJ came over and we had a couple of conversations — she had some trouble leaving.

UU #10 was a very Spong influenced sermon on the bible. At IHOP afterwards with Mark, Hubert, and Alan, Mark talked his parents’ response to a gay poem he wrote titled “Fabulous,” I talked about my mom responding to my freedom rings (“Does that mean you’re advertising?!”), Alan talked about his first experience with MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” and Prussian Blue came up again.

After lunch I worked on the units of analysis question for diagnostics and made some personal headway in thinking about my own work, re-encountering the interpretive community, and the interaction between texts and readers as poetry. Later, after a stop at the library, I went to CarolynJ’s and worked on my answers.

Jeremiah: you are so fucking smart it’s unreal

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Since I have recently become convinced that I have ADHD I have been looking at a lot of books on organization. I just found this one while I was browsing at Barnes and Noble, and while it does have some good elements, I wouldn’t recommend it, at least not until you’ve read and processed Getting Things Done by David Allen.

The best thing to pull away from this book is that you should have the kingergarden approach to organizing your spaces. You should see each space as a particular zone where you perform a specific set of tasks and organize the space around those tasks.

There are some other helpful tips for streamlining in the book, but I found the extensive chapters on so many different and varied spaces to be overkill. I would much rather take a certain guideline and run with it, but the detail might be helpful for some.

One thing I also liked (especially now), and something I would also like to see in Getting Things Done, was that Morgenstern talked about the connection between organizational difficulties and ADHD/OCD. Seeing this connection has been very helpful for me and it was only through a random sequence of events that I was able to come across this, albeit through GTD related material.

This was one of the most morally complex movies I have ever seen.

Unfortunately, I can’t really explain that without giving crucial elements of the movie away, but I can say that I felt like David Cronenberg successfully fulfilled in this film what Clint Eastwood was trying to do with Mystic River with regards to violence in Hollywood.

This film didn’t have the ludicrous violence most are used to seeing where people just disappear after they are shot. Instead, the people in this movie shot each other at close range and when they did parts of their faces got blown off — and Cronenberg showed it to you.

I’ve argued before that part of the reason that conservatives are so against sex in film and not violence is that the sex is closer to the real than the symbolic whereas violence is typically presented in a symbolic form that is utterly imaginary (yes, I see the room for critique, but please consider traditional representations of the two). What made this film so troubling was just how real the violence was and if more films looked like this then I think there might be just as much concern about violence in the media as there is about sex (which is not to say that violence in the media is uncontroversial).

As a side note, there was an interesting sexual element to this film, and it really made me wonder about Cronenberg’s project, in a sense of intrigue rather than critique. Basically, there is a scene where the main couple in the film (who are adults with children (why do I feel compelled to say that?)) start to ’69′. On the one hand it makes me think that Cronenberg had some of my concerns in mind when he directed the film. But on the other hand it makes me wonder how long it has been since something that is often only joked about in public (but that we all do or have done) has appeared in a (relatively) mainstream film (there were lots of normal folk there) as a serious act between two individuals who were in love (and now I’m troubled that it feels like I need the media’s approval).