Category: Commentary

Traverse City Film Festival

Lindsey and I went to only two movies during the Traverse City Film Festival this year. The first was Bypass, which is a Spanish romantic comedy drama. In short, a young man becomes embroiled in a difficult emotional dilemma between his pregnant girlfriend and his childhood friend with a heart condition. He pretends to Love the friend as a means of comforting her in her last days. The problem arises when she miraculously recovers and he is forced to juggle the two women.

The second was Mistaken for Strangers, in which the younger brother of the National’s front man follows him on tour. It was a funny and touching story about two different artistic brothers getting to know each other later in life.

I’ve learned to very carefully select movies at film festivals. If you don’t, it can be quite disappointing. We did well this year, and I’m looking forward to next year.

Daily Routines of John Grisham and Ben Franklin

For a long time now, I have been interested in the daily routines of successful people. Here are two of my favories:

Author John Grisham’s routine, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 5, 2008:

When he first started writing, Grisham says, he had “these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important.”

“The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I’d jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week.”

His goal: to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, sometimes an hour; ofttimes he would write for two hours before he had to turn to his job as a lawyer, which he never especially enjoyed. In the Mississippi Legislature, there were “enormous amounts of wasted time” that would give him the opportunity to write.

“So I was very disciplined about it,” he says, then quickly concedes he doesn’t have such discipline now: “I don’t have to.”

Ben Franklin’s routine, source unknown:

Ben Franklin Daily Routine

Poking Fun at Alpha Parents

Here is an excerpt from an articled titled, “Why You’re Never Failing as a Mother,” from the website/blog Pregnant Chicken.

You are in the trenches when you have a baby. To the untrained eye it seems pretty straightforward and easy – you feed them, you bathe them, you pick them up when they cry – but it’s more than that. It’s perpetual motion with a generous layer of guilt and self-doubt spread on top, and that takes its toll.

Feeling like you also need to keep on top of scrapbooking, weight loss, up-cycled onesies, handprints, crock pot meals, car seat recalls, sleeping patterns, poo consistency, pro-biotic supplements, swimming lessons, electromagnetic fields in your home and television exposure, is like trying to knit on a rollercoaster – it’s [omitted swearword] hard.

We live in a time when we can [G]oogle everything, share ideas, and expose our children to amazing opportunities, but anyone that implies that they have it figured out is either drunk or lying (or both) so don’t be too hard on yourself.

Your job is to provide your child with food, shelter, encouragement and love, and that doesn’t have to be solely provided by you either – feel free to outsource because they didn’t just pull that “it takes a village” proverb out of the air.

In a similar tone, I’ll point you to a recent poem I read in the New Yorker magazine titled, “Goodnight Nanny-Cam,” which is parody of the book, Goodnight Moon.

Timeframes

From a speech titled, “10 Timeframes,” given by Paul Ford to MFA graduates. (LINK) This is an excerpt of the second of his ten timeframes

You know that decades are a recent invention? Decades are hardly a century old. Not the concept of having ten years of course, but the concept of the decade as a sort of major cultural unit, like when I say “the 90s” and you think of flannel shirts and grunge music and great R&B music, or when I say “the 80s” and you think of people with big hair using floppy disks. You need a lot of change for a decade to be a meaningful demarcation. Back in the 1600s they didn’t really talk about centuries as much either. It was all about the life of the king, the reign (of King James and so forth), or the era.

And then they invent clocks and clocks get cheaper and cheaper. Clocks are an amazing experience, right? Two hands, and a bell. This sense of relentless forward motion and they go in only one direction. Imagine doing user testing on clocks.

You say, “You’re a farmer—tell me about a normal day.”

And the farmer says, “Normally I wake up then depending on the month I might plant or reap the harvest.”

And you say, “How do you know what to plant?”

And the farmer says, “I’ve got this poem that we’ve been using for generations, so like, in June I mow my corn, in August I harvest my wheat with a sickle, stuff like that.”

And you’re trying to build understanding, you say, “That poem sounds really useful. But I’d like to talk about a new approach to time. What if I could divide every single day into 24 big parts called hours, and each of those into 60 little parts called minutes? So now instead of having just a whole day, you have 1,440 little pieces of time and you can arrange them and do whatever you want. What is your reaction to that?”

And I think the farmer would probably be polite but I’m guessing he’d be thinking, “Clock? That’s the single stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Everything is an Adventure

Here begins my collection of parenting snippets from other people, sources, etc. I won’t call them tips or advice. That’s too constraining.

My dad used to say everything was an “adventure.” He’d be going to the grocery store, for example, and he’d ask us, “Want to go on an adventure?” We pile into the car, excited to try some cheese samples and listen to the radio while driving. That one word made everything feel thrilling.

From A CUP OF JO.

Closing Doors

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” ~ David Lynch

I am not convinced that I will ever understand all of the rules by which I live. Although, it is important to remember that “understand” is not the same as “agree with” or “acknowledge.” Depending on the situation, not acknowledging the rules leads to imprisonment. Stabbing. Shooting. Driving drunk. While in many other endeavors, choosing not to acknowledge the rules is rewarded. Scientific discovery! New methods of communication! Less wrinkles! Longer drive!

Let’s look at the definitions of “imagination”:

  1. the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality
  2. creative ability
  3. ability to confront and deal with a problem
  4. the thinking or active mind
  5. a creation of the mind; especially, an idealized or poetic creation
  6. fanciful or empty assumption

The tension in the quote results from two false assumptions made by adults:

  1. That they understand the rules; and
  2. That increased imagination is unnecessary to better understand those same rules which they falsely assume they understand.

It is a necessary chore of life to force myself to question nearly everything, which is another way of saying that I (and you!) should always live life the way I want to live it while acknowledging the rules that need to be acknowledged, deciding for myself which rules are are worth agreeing with and following based on the consequences of not following those rules and my personal beliefs, which rules deserve further study for me to better understand them, and, in turn, lead a fuller and more purposeful life. And while slogging through the life’s muddy pool of rules, I must always actively remember to use my imagination to imagine the possibilities that fall outside life’s staid prescriptions.