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May 31, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
All across America, women are writing the same blog entry about the premiere of “Sex in the City.” It starts with, “All across America, women and their girlfriends dressed up for a girl’s night out.” Much of the content of these entries will be similar, but only one will say that somewhere in Charlotte, a lone Orioles fan had to set her DVR to record a tied game in the seventh inning against the Boston Red Sox so that she could attend the “Sex in the City” event with her girlfriends. Hopefully, you’ve guessed that that lone Orioles fan was me.
A big fan of the series when it was on, I’ve been looking forward to the movie ever since the last episode aired. Last night, as my girlfriends and I did what many women did, dressed up, consumed cocktails, and eagerly attended the movie, I felt like I was witnessing a part of history. I’ve never been part of the frenzy of any other movie opening, never purchased tickets in advance or slept on a sidewalk to save my place in line, so this was a unique taste of what I’ve seen some of my friends do to attend the movie opening of “Star Wars” or some comic book hero, except in a less-geeky, fashionable sort of way. I’m sure in the history of cinema, there has never been such a large gathering of predominately women at a movie. Girlfriends used the movie as an excuse for an evening of bonding. At least seventy percent of the women I saw were dressed up, and some made an extravagant night of it by renting a limo, two of which were lined up in front of the theatre.
We envy and admire the characters from “Sex in the City.” We all want girlfriends who are close to us like those characters are to each other, friends who are supportive and available no matter what is happening in our lives, or more importantly, in theirs. Those of us who don’t live in New York City live in a world of urban sprawl where we’re spread out from our family and friends, further exacerbating the problem of how to have regular social interaction in our already time-crunched society. In our busy world, it’s hard to find time to get together once a month, let alone once a week. Even if we could allocate an hour a week or every day, we’re not set up so that we’re able to just pop down to the coffee shop a mile down the road. Any outing to gather our favorite people involves distance and requires at least a portion of an evening unless we all happen to live in the same neighborhood.
Another thing that’s unique about the characters in “Sex in the City” is that they each represent a different experience of being a woman, each with her own sensibilities, ranging the spectrum of cynical to innocent, liberal to traditonal, and yet despite their differences are still able to connect and appreciate each other for who they are. Don’t we all want accepting friends like that, who can tolerate our differences instead of pulling out the magnifying glass and focusing on what they perceive as our flaws.
“Which one are you?” one of our girlfriends asked last night. We all claimed to be Charlotte. Either it’s who we think we are inside or who we most want to be. Only one of us admitted to being wholly Samantha, though again, wished she were more Charlotte. I, myself, have identified with all the characters at one time or another, each representing how I’ve felt or acted during different chapters in my life, the distinction of which I will leave for your imagination.
I have mixed feelings about the movie. I can’t explain why, but perhaps it was because it was a different experience watching the four women on the big screen than in the intimacy of my living room. Watching a movie in a theatre has its own charms and some of what I loved best about being at the premiere was sharing in a few moments that one can only have as part of a theatre audience. I love noting how an audience responds to different scenes, particularly this one in which the audience was uniquely, almost entirely female. At a couple of scenes that must have typified a male perspective, we could hear the distinctly deep laugh from any of the five men in the audience.
Nothing was better than hearing the start of the theme music at the beginning of the movie. During the series, each week those cheerful notes signaled the beginning of forty minutes of some of my favorite television ever. Like hearing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” or a certain part of “The National Anthem,” like any music that takes us instantly back to special moments in our lives, the theme music to “Sex in the City” elicits a subtle feeling of happiness in me, an “Oooo.” I’m obviously not alone in this because as soon as the theme music started, the entire theatre audience applauded enthusiastically. We also applauded at the end, in appreciation of a long-awaited movie and at a few “You tell ‘em girl” scenes in between. Those are the moments you can’t have in the privacy of your living room, the feeling that you’re part of a shared cultural experience.
All the actresses were gorgeous, as usual, but most especially Sarah Jessica Parker who is beautiful with an enviable muscular body despite what some may say in the most uncharitable and unkind magazine, to whom I won’t give further credit by naming. The plot of the movie managed to remain light, largely humorous throughout despite the adversity that follows a few characters for the duration. Though I enjoyed it, the movie somehow lacked the poignancy of the series. I was expecting at least one scene to move me the way the series did, something akin to my favorite scene from the entire six seasons when Harry finds Charlotte at synagogue and proposes. Perhaps I’ll think differently when I watch the movie again on DVD, in the quiet of my home without other distractions.
Last night was as much about female bonding as it was about seeing the movie. We counted only five men walking out of our viewing that ended at 1:30 a.m. I will certainly be making more of an effort to bond with one of the women in our group. She casually mentioned that one of the Bunko friends from her neighborhood is the sister of Jason Lewis. Guess where I hope to be hanging out come the holidays when families gather together from across the country. Maybe someone from Hollywood will be my ticket to a dinner with Cal and Brooks. I can hope, can’t I?
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May 28, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
My plane touched down at 5:38 a.m. in Charlotte. After spending a week in the Arizona desert surrounded by cacti, I have never loved Charlotte and the lush climate of the East, humidity and all, more than I do now. For the last hour, the rains have been pouring forth from the heavens with great determination and speed, rushing to the ground as if in a competition. The wind is bending the tall tree branches until they scrape repeatedly back and forth across my cubicle window. The gray skies have darkened the day like an early winter evening.
Passing over one dry river bed after another in the West, and still recovering from our own drought in the Southeast, the rain, always a welcome sight these days, is even more treasured, for in each precious drop there is nourishment. No living thing survives without water. Water is life. In our space exploration, it’s what we seek first when we hope to find other potential current or former celestial life.
For the few minutes I was home this morning before heading to work, I peered out my bathroom window at the weeping cherry I planted some four years ago at a mere three feet tall. At the end of last summer it stood tall in the middle with a few weeping offshoots, nearing perhaps twelve feet in height. It now towers over the deck, having gained at least another foot during our wet Spring. Today, I would swear it’s grown another two feet since I last gazed at it, using each rain in an attempt to wrest more share of the sun hoarded by the tall oak that shadows it and the entire right-most portion of our garden.
The peach tree planted with only meager hopes that it might live to supply edible fruit one day, it too is thriving in our wet Spring. Last year, its branches too weak to hold much weight, bore only one peach (whose pit I saved as a momento of our first peach). Today, the strong branches are weighty with many round blossoms. We watch them with anticipation, the tree clinging to and nurturing each one, growing it’s circumference little by little. like a mother grows a baby, letting it expand according to nature’s clock protected in her womb. Soon, we hope, we will have free peaches, sweet and delicious as they only are when allowed to ripen to maturity on the tree, enough to accompany a meal, enough for pies, enough for the wildlife. The Yoshino Cherries in the front garden, which I assumed to be only ornamental, are likewise ripening to bear free, fresh, untainted fruit.
Last year, there was not enough water. We lost rhodendrons. We lost hydrageas. We lost hundreds of dollars of hostas. This year, the rains return and with them, the life that cannot exist without them. The rain is magnificent and we so blessed by the frequency and relative dependability with which it comes.
Posted in Gratitude | Print | 1 Comment »
May 22, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
“Look, in my opinion the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what-have-you, the right person is still going to think the sun shines out of your ass.” ~Juno
Here’s hoping that your Friday is full of people who think the sun shines out of your tushy.
Posted in Quotes, Movies | Print | 1 Comment »
May 19, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you. ~Barbara Sher
It’s wonderfully comforting to feel in control, to feel smart, to feel like you know what you’re doing, but by learning to be comfortable with not knowing, with feeling awkward, with “looking stupid” you can learn so much more. Go ahead! Ask questions! Look stupid! Don’t care what other people think. In the end, you’ll look so much smarter, and gain respect as someone with a desire to grow than you would by letting your ego stand in the way of accomplishing what you want. You owe it to yourself.
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May 18, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
If Freakonomics has one central theme, it’s about information, how one statistician uses statistics to examine every day sorts of questions, finding patterns and teasing out the truth about what influences outcomes and what doesn’t.
Freakonomics discusses one of the most important inventions that leveled the marketplace for consumers: the Internet. As the market is largely driven by an uneven distribution of knowledge, when consumers are informed about choices, about competing products, about how an industry works, about profit margins, the power dynamic shifts.
“Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect…Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not…Just as Stetson Kennedy accomplished what no journalist, do-gooder, or prosecutor could: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.”
The Internet has proven particularly fruitful for situations in which face-to-face encounter with an expert might actuarly exacerbate the problem of asymmetrical information–situations in which an expert uses his informational advantage to make us feel stupid or rushed or cheap or ignoble…
Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them…
Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear. Fear that your children will find you dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack if you do not have angioplasty surgery. Fear that a cheap casket will expose your grandmother to a terrible underground fate. Feat that a $25,000 car will crumple like a a toy in an accident, whereas a $50,000 car will wrap your loved ones in a cocoon of impregnable steel. The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but hte principle is the same.”
Here’s some more information that Freakonomics provides:
The authors of Freakonomics answer more interesting questions about our society:
I’ll leave the rest of the book a mystery for you to discover.
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May 17, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
In the mid-1940’s, frustrated with growing bigotry, Stetson Kennedy set out on a mission to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy, posing as a fellow racist, joined the Klan with hopes that, in figuring out how they operated, he might find a way to destroy them. He largely succeeded and is attributed with making the Klan impotent and preventing a post-war Klan revival.
One person can make a difference, and in the case of Kennedy, a remarkable one in changing the course of history and the fate of a nation.
Creating positive change takes courage, imagination, and determination, and what we’ve learned from Kennedy, is to be undaunted by the size of the job. While the mission for change may seem insurmountable, and we too small to tackle it, we must remember all the examples of history that have proven how much difference one person can make. How often the whistle-blower, the sole individual with courage to speak up among a sea of participants who further enabled that which they knew to be wrong, that one intrepid person of integrity and character, unraveled a tangled plot of deliberate, intentional, and destructive misconduct. Conversely, one self-serving individual, one man consumed with pursuing the desires of his inflated ego unchecked causes irreparable damage.
Information and disclosure are the tools that protect us. Often the answer to change can be as “simple” as revealing that which the power structure wants to remain hidden, that which happens behind closed doors, or as in the case of the Klan, the cowardly and ugly that lay hidden beneath their bed linens.
The Klan’s source of power came from their secrecy. When Stetson revealed the Klan’s secret codes and passwords, he removed all their allure and power. We have too many examples from recent years showing us the harm that is done by secret societies. Politics, Enrons in the stock market, a war, the pharmaceutical industry, sub-prime loans. Too many examples of a few profiting at the cost of many. We should regard authority with the same eye as the hippies of the 60s. It is not disrespectful to question. It is disrespectful and, yes, immoral, for those in positions of authority to introduce red herrings that cut-off dialogue with distracting arguments about patriotism. (We are fools for falling for it.) Those who have nothing to hide are not afraid of discussions and disclosure.
Even in our personal lives, we see the negative effects of secrecy. Our employers threaten disciplinary action if we disclose our salary to a coworker. Who profits? We, as employees? No, we stab in the dark when we timidly ask for a raise, not knowing how much the person in the next cube with a similar, or inferior, skill set is making. The lack of information about salary ranges leaves us on shaky ground, never knowing for sure if we’re being fairly compensated. Our employer is completely at his own discretion to make things equitable, with a whole arsenal of rationalizations about shareholders and “the good of the company” to allay any self-doubt, protected as he is from ever owning up to any unfairness, encouraged to give as little as possible.
To some extent our economy is built upon a foundation of secrecy. We have a cultural taboo about speaking too directly about money. We don’t feel comfortable sharing our salary or bank balance. We solve this by consuming lots of things so that we can say through them that we’re doing “okay,” okay always defined as and measured by our material possessions, not by our charitable acts, volunteerism, leisure activities, vacation time, or how happy we are. If we’re keeping up with the Joneses, no one has to know the staggering, crushing debt we’ve accumulated. Sales are made by tightly guarding the amount of profit made on the good or service. Whether it be a negotiation for a car or a consulting service, the person in power is the one who has the most information.
Information and disclosure keep our democracy intact and people safe. As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner state in their book, “Freakonomics,” those who control the flow of information control everything.
Read Levitt and Dubner’s account of Stetson Kennedy here and more about Freakonomics in my next post.
Posted in Ponderings/Musings, Heroes, Books | Print | No Comments »
May 12, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
Tomorrow night, PBS will air the Frontline episode Storm Over Everest created by David Breashears. The film is about the 1996 expedition to Mount Everest that resulted in the death of many climbers, portrayed from a slightly different perspective than Krakauer’s gripping account “Into Thin Air.” If you’ve never read or listened to Krakauer’s book, I highly recommend it. (I borrowed the audio book years ago and listened to it twice it was so good!) The Frontline special promises to be interesting as well. I’m interested to see the interview with Beck Weathers (what a fortuitous name) who was left for dead twice and miraculously awoke and stumbled his way back to camp.
In the way of entertainment, I also want to reiterate what an extraordinary life-improving invention Itunes is. Let’s say you want to find some podcasts on Roman History or human-computer interaction, or even, incredibly enough, learn tennis, it’s ALL there! Even Cal Ripken and Roch Kubatko have podcasts, or rather had, as they don’t seem to work now (nor does the Orioles Report). Of course, there’s all the NPR and PBS podcasts too. Maybe one day all universities will have their lectures podcast. Free learning!
Life is good!
Posted in Brain Candy | Print | 1 Comment »
May 12, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
“Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out… and then it was nice. It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou. There was always a million sparkles on the water… like that mountain lake. It was so clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other. And then in the desert, when the sun comes up, I couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the earth began. It’s so beautiful.” ~ Forrest Gump
I wish the weekends would last forever. Alas (or should I say, “Blimey!”), it’s Monday again.
I wonder where Desert O is now and what he’s seeing on the Appalachian Trail. I hope he wasn’t adversely affected by the strong winds that blew through here yesterday. I suppose the rest of us who aren’t on the AT should try to make peace with the fact that today’s scenery consists of cubicle walls, not trails, trees, and chirping birds.
Hope your Monday is full of happiness, despite it’s Mondayness.
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May 7, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
“The more you recognize and express gratitude for the things you have, the more things you will have to express gratitude for.” ~ Zig Ziglar
We notice what we focus on and we seek evidence to support our beliefs. If we (unconsciously) ask ourselves, “what’s wrong with people and the world,” we’ll search for examples to answer the question. Similarly, if we ask ourselves, “What’s great about life? What should I be grateful for?” we find very different answers.
There is much, too much, that needs fixing in the world, but while we keep an eye toward making conditions better for all the world’s inhabitants, we can also remember all the blessings for which we should feel joyous. We become accustomed to our circumstances and environment. What we live every day seems normal and blends into the background of our consciousness.
Much of practicing gratitude is considering our world without that which we love. Sometimes we become automatons and need an external reminder, an event that forces us to look outside of our inner world and routine. Through comparison to others, we are jolted out of sleepiness and staleness, and are reminded of our fortune and all that we treasure.
While downward comparisons can serve to open our eyes, we must use caution in measuring our lives by the conditions of others as we run the risk of setting our expectations inappropriately. We may feel more grateful for our small home after seeing a homeless person, but considerably less so when we visit the grander home of a colleague or friend. To experience gratitude, we must manage the delicate balance between acknowledging that there are always those who are doing “better” and those who are doing “worse.” We must assign the appropriate value to our circumstances, focusing on what we love most in our lives and not obsessing about what’s missing, particularly when we have contrived something “missing” that would never really serve us anyway.
As we make gratitude a conscious practice and habit, we need downward comparisons less as a reference point. We find gratitude intrinsically; that is, we notice what we love in isolation of other markers or references.
There is another challenge is practicing gratitude: to make it a habit in a way that keeps the experience fresh and conscious, but without making us complacent or lazy about what we have and where we are. Being grateful does not excuse us from being social activists. Being grateful does not negate our continued struggle to improve ourselves and the world around us.
At the risk of becoming like the Alec Baldwin character from an episode of “Friends,” not necessarily in any order, here is my very short and incomplete gratitude list for today:
What’s your list?
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May 6, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.” - John Foster Dulles
What problems do you have right now that you don’t want next year? Brainstorm some reasons why the problem exists, and how to take action. Be as imaginative as you can with possible solutions, allowing even the most far-fetched possibilities to be added to your list. Next, pick the solution apart. Create a list of at least 20 small steps you can take to gradually implement the solution and move forward toward what you really want. Finally, pick a day on the calendar as the start date for each step.
The smaller you can break down the action steps, not only will moving forward feel less overwhelming, but you will be more likely to experience success. Each success invigorates us and leads to further success.
Sometimes our problems seem too big to conquer. My violin teacher has a wonderful strategy for helping students struggling with a piece of music that serves as a smart analogy for approaching other issues in our lives. She cuts a hole in a piece of paper the size of one measure. Then she places the paper over the sheet of music and asks her student, “Can you play those four notes?” The student nods, “Oh yes, of course, I can play those four notes” and proceeds to play the only four notes visible on the page of music. Then my teacher moves the piece of paper to expose four different notes, continuing with the exercise until the student has internalized the strategy.
If we take on the whole project at once, focusing on the end result, we can obsess about the many interim steps we have to take in between. Instead, we must understand that everything is easier if we can break it down into smaller parts. We begin with the end in mind, but make a map, and focus only on the immediate tasks to get us there.
A piece of music is a series of four notes played together. Similarly, our lives are just a series of steps we take every day. Sometimes we can only take a couple of steps at a time until we have mastered them. Sometimes a couple of steps are the only thing we have the time or emotional energy for. The smaller the steps, the less difficult it is to start each one. Eventually, we add another step, and then another until we reach our goal.
As toddlers we learned to run by first learning to walk. We learned to walk by taking tiny shaky steps a little at a time. Everything we’ve learned to do, everything we practice became a habit through repetition.
Change your habits. Live deliberately. Create the life you want tomorrow through simple planning and action today.
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