Stop the World...I Want to Get Off

I'm resenting work so much right now. Not so much my actual work, but just the fact of work. There's always a low level of job-related discontent bubbling within me, but knowing that I'm going back to school this fall is making it exponentially worse. Especially now that I've got my class schedule set and a lease signed for my apartment. I've mentally quit my current job and having to physically come in and work is annoying the crap out of me.

Part of it is that the job isn't challenging me, it isn't in an area that interests me greatly, and overall, it simply isn't the right job for me longterm. (I do love the people I work with, though, which goes a long way toward keeping me content.) But a lot it is just that I am a very selfish person and I resent that fact that I have to give eight hours of my day (more like 9.5 by the time you include drive time) to this company, instead of spending them doing things I want to do for myself. And that they're the best, most alert, most mentally acute hours of the day...I think of more things that I want to write about, that I want to research, that I want to learn to do, between 9am and noon than any other time of the day. By the time I get through the afternoon at work, fight the traffic to get home, and fix myself something to eat, I'm too tired to do any of the things that I was so excited about in the morning, but couldn't do because I was at work.

Working a second-shift job wouldn't help, though, I don't think...I don't want to give up my evenings, either. Evenings are when TV shows are on, they're when my online friends get online, they're when my RL friends are free to go to movies or hang out and play Xbox.

I know, I know. Welcome to The Real World, to Adulthood, to Having Responsibilities. You know what? You can have it. I like my fake world in which I have the freedom to work when I want to work, as long as the work gets done by whatever necessary deadline. The freedom to work an hour here, an hour there, and do whatever in between. (I know jobs like this exist, but they always seem to involve a lot of self-marketing and stuff that I hate even more than being tied to a desk 8 hours a day.) I don't really have a short attention span, but I do like to shift between interests a lot, and that's something I haven't been able to do anywhere but school. I LOVED undergrad because I could go from a class in psychology straight to one in art history, then jump over to Old Testament, and down to biology. I actually didn't like biology that much, but I did like the variety it added to my life. People don't always understand that when I say I'm bored, it's really because I'm missing that variety, not because I don't have enough to occupy my time.

I'm a little afraid that grad school won't be as great as I'm hoping it is, because it's more focused and I won't have as much opportunity to take classes outside my discipline. (This was a major factor in the decision to only pursue an M.A., not a Ph.D.--as much as I love English literature, I don't know that I can see myself spending five or six or seven years studying it and only it.) I'm also afraid that grad school is only a delaying mechanism, and that two years from now, I'm going to be exactly where I am now, with the same discontentment and resentment.

But I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it.


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• work
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A whole new world

Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:

I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who know may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place you encounter always the same density of material to be told. - p.109

Right before I wrote this passage down, I flipped through the little notebook where I write down particularly resonant passages from whatever I'm reading, and the one just before this one is from Virginia Woolf: "When one so exposes [the genius and integrity of a great novel] and sees it come to life, one exclaims in rapture, 'But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!'" That's somewhat how I feel about the Calvino quote. I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that draws me to certain books (or movies, even--throughout this post when I write "read," I also mean "watch a movie" or "watch a TV show"). A few people I know have recently stopped watching Lost because not much is happening...this was particuarly leveled at the recent Hurley-cenric episode, which the person I was speaking with thought was superfluous, because essentially nothing happened to advance the plot. I, on the other hand, really enjoyed the Hurley episode, and am more interested in Lost right now that I have been for a while. (I'll admit that part of my love for it was the resemblence it bore to "Normal Again," one of my favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, in which Buffy gets injected with a drug which makes her think she's actually in a mental institution, and the whole vampire slaying thing and all her friends, her entire world in fact, are hallucinations...and the episode leaves the possibility open that the mental institution reality is actually the correct one.)

Back to the point. The Calvino passage points a little bit to why that I liked the Hurley episode despite the fact that, admittedly, the plot wasn't furthered really at all. I've known for a long time that I don't read primarily for the event...in fact, I care so little for the actual outcome of novels that I can reread mysteries because I will completely forget who committed the crime. I read more for the characters, but even that's not completely it. Then I thought, well, maybe I read for the world that the author creates. This is much closer to the truth, and explains why I enjoy books like Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next series so much, despite the undistinguished characters and gaping plotholes. Yet it isn't a sense of "place" that I want, because as C.S. Lewis points out in An Experiment in Criticism, some books that I quite enjoy, like The Three Musketeers have almost no sense of place. We know it's set in the court of France and a little bit in England only because the narrator tells us so, not because the physical setting invades the prose, as does Crime and Punishment's Petersburg or Faulkner's South.

But Calvino has just nailed pretty much on the head what most makes me enjoy a book (or movie or TV show): the sense that the characters and the world have many more stories that they could tell. The world of Lost will always be rich because there is more to it than just the island; there's more to find out than just what happens next in real time; there are all the back stories of each character and how they intersect (or do they intersect? Are the stories we see reliable?), there are the stories of The Others, who they are and were and what they want, the story of the island itself and the Dharma Initiative. I don't want to rush along the main plotline, because I want to hear as many of these other stories as I can, and yet always know that there are even more that I will never hear. I want to find out what happens to the survivors, but ultimately I like the process of finding out more than actually finding out. (Back to the rereading mysteries thing: I love the detecting work and the process of solving the mystery, but the resolution is almost always a letdown.)

Lord of the Rings is perhaps the best example of a detailed world. Even without knowing that Tolkein actually did create and write dozens of other stories and histories of Middle Earth that aren't told in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the books carry a weightiness that can only be attributed to the density of available stories that may or may not ever be told. That richness is, more than anything else, what will completely entrall me. For the exact opposite of this, try something like Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, which I read this month and has taken its place at the pinnacle of a pantheon I like to call "Worst.Books.Ever." More on this in my month-end recap, which I'll post sometime this year. (March's is almost finished, I swear!) Digital Fortress has characters which interact only with each other. There are no characters introduced AT ALL which are not integral to the plot. The main character mentions several times that she and her fiance were planning to go on a vacation on the Smoky Mountains until work got in the way, but you don't get any sense that the Smoky Mountains exist outside of her mentioning them--you don't even feel like she really wants to go there, because she is so focused on her job and the plot at hand that there's no room in her character for anything else. It's a sterile environment, with static and confined characters. There are other stories hinted at occasionally...the lawbreaking hacker life of one of the cryptographers, the youth of a bitter young Japanese programmer...but they are only brought up for their immediate relevance to the main plot, and then dropped completely. There's no sense that anything else ever happened to these people other than what we are told in the book. Not good for me. Not good at all.

Give me depth, give me breadth, give me complexity, give me density, give me imagination, give me richness, give me possibility.

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• books

There's a somebody I'm longing to see...

American Idol was made for me tonight. I love the classics, yes I do. And this group seems amazingly adept at them. Even Chris did a fine job with "What a Wonderful World" (one of my favorite songs)...I was concerned about his being able to find a song that fit him.

But I am having so much love for Katharine right now. She's been my favorite mostly from the beginning (with Lisa, Paris, and Chris being close behind...Elliott has crept up to be my second favorite now), and she continues to wow me even when I'm expecting her to be awesome. I want to buy her CD now. Seriously. I'll be driving in the car and think "I want to listen to some Katharine McPhee."

Not much else going on. My parents and I are going down to Waco Thursday through Sunday to check out apartments, meet with professors, etc. I'm really looking forward to not working for a couple of days. Working is overrated. Okay, maybe it's not. But still. Banks have a good many holidays, which spoil you for March and April, which don't have ANY.

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• american-idol
• television
• katharine-mcphee

Sophie Scholl

Movie recommendation:

Sophie Scholl: The Last Days

My parents and I went to see this last Saturday, and we all came away very impressed. Sophie Scholl was a 21-year-old student in Munich in the early 1940s, and she and her brother were arrested in 1943 for distributing leaflets that detailed the failure of the Nazi army on the Russian front and the inability of Germany to win the war due to Hitler's poor leadership. A large portion of the movie is taken up with Sophie's interrogation by a Nazi police investigator, and even though it's basically the two of them talking, it's absolutely riveting. Sophie's strength of character and steadfastness in her beliefs stymie the otherwise formidable investigator, and by the end it's clear that although they will always be on opposite sides of the Nazi question, he has gained a grudging respect for her.

Julia Jentsch is incredible as Sophie, imbuing her with a quiet intensity that carries the movie along. The film itself is full of this quiet intensity...it hits all the necessary points, but doesn't belabour any of them. There are no anvils here. It's made clear that Sophie is a Christian, and she prays several times throughout the film. She knows the Nazis are perpetuating heinous acts against humanity, against the Jews in particular, and she doesn't shy away from telling the investigator exactly what she thinks about that. But it's also clear that her problems with Hitler are not only humanitarian, but also political...this girl is no bleeding heart, but clear-headed and able to see that Hitler is bad not only for Jews and other "undesirables", but for Germany itself and the German people in general. This is a point of view that I don't think has been terribly well-represented, certainly not in film.

The film is German with subtitles, but don't let that scare you away. I know a lot of people who avoid foreign films like the plague, and I don't understand why. a) American films are foreign in most of the world, and yet most of the world watches them. Why not reciprocate, see what they have to offer us in return? It's the easiest way to experience another culture. b) You don't avoid reading The Three Musketeers or Crime and Punishment because they weren't written in English, and you don't think of them as weird second-class citizens because they weren't written by Americans; why is film any different? c) It's an excellent bet that a foreign film seen in the US is going to be good. Why? Because we only import like 5% of any given country's film output. Guess which 5% they're going to send us? This is why movie critics often seem to like foreign films...they're sending us their Schindler's Lists and their American Beautys. They're not sending us their Madea's Family Reunions and their BloodRaynes. So forget this silly foreign-film aversion and go see some.

Start with Sophie Scholl. It's playing at Plaza Frontenac right now, but they don't keep them for more than a few weeks, so hurry. It's not rated, but there's nothing objectionable in it for children, though they might get antsy because it is a rather talky film.

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• film