TYSG: The Value of Humor

Hey guys,

We spent this weekend out of town with family and friends.  It was in many ways a really nice few days, spent with people I love in enjoyable conversation often punctuated with outbursts of laughter.

The occasion that drew us together was the memorial service for my grandfather, who died the week before my wedding.  My grandfather was a hard-working man and a veteran, very skilled at fixing and building and crafting and always eager to tell a carefully selected roster of war stories so often repeated they were the oral history equivalent of a comfortable and worn pair of shoes.  He also, as I mentioned when I spoke of him to our wedding guests, loved to make people smile.

The pastor leading his memorial drove this point home when he told a joke my grandfather had made him promise to tell on the occasion of his remembrance.  After the service concluded, we went to restaurant where we had an admittedly pretty tame Irish wake for him, which he had often stated he wanted when he died.  We aren't Irish, but he seemed to like the tradition for its rejection of sorrow in favor of a joyful celebration of life.

I found myself struck by how apparently heritable a predilection for humor can be.  My family contains some of the funniest people I know.  I studied humor in my dissertation for christsakes.  As I've gradually re-started my clinical career after my post-internship hiatus, I've reconnected with laughter as a therapeutic tool for building relationships and showing my clients they are valued and enjoyed.

On that note, in spite of the purpose of this weekend, writing a TYSG installment seems out of place at the moment.  I actually really like my new job and appear to have before me the opportunity to adjust to simply enjoying my work--something surprisingly difficult after several years of at best complicated professional experiences.  But in honor of my grandfather, I wanted to extoll the virtues of laughter and humor, both as ways of marking happy moments but especially as a way to survive when things are hard.

I quoted Abraham Lincoln in my dissertation.  He said, "I laugh because I must not cry."  It's a beautiful statement, but I may like a quote chosen by our wedding photographer to accompany our wedding pictures even better:

“Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.”

~Seán O'Casey

When life feels untenable, humor lets us take a step away from our suffering and instead laugh in its face.  It is a resounding refusal to be defeated in spite of life's occasional darkness.  In times of sadness, it is therefore so important to have at our disposal things that make us laugh.  So, I offer to you some of my favorite hilarious things:

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

As this show enters its tenth season, it has retained a shockingly high level of quality.  I got about three episodes into the first season and realized a) I was a terrible person for laughing so hard at these terrible people and the terrible things they did, and b) this show is so goddamned good at making me laugh.  I've been re-watching the early episodes as a way to pace myself before I blow through all the new episodes that just got posted on Netflix, and it's all glorious.

Drunk History

My brother recommended this show to me, possibly because he wants to kill me.  I have very quickly learned that I cannot watch this show while eating or drinking, because I will aspirate whatever I'm consuming and either choke or get a very bad lung infection.  I often laugh so hard I can't breathe watching this shit.  Also the casts are amazing.  Insider's note: The lady historians are by far the best.

The Adam Carolla Show*

DON'T JUDGE ME JUST TRY IT.  Or consider this: Yes, many people, perhaps understandably, think Carolla is an asshole based on the sound bites that occasionally get him mentioned in the news.  I am not an apologist, I'm just telling the truth--those are often bullshit.  I listen to this guy every day and think he is not only genuinely one of the funniest comedians alive today, he is one of the most intelligent and nuanced social commentators I've ever heard.  And that's not just because I've been listening to him since I was in high school.

Jonathan Coulton

I was introduced to Coulton by some dear friends on a road trip a few months ago.  I really enjoy his bizarre and nerdy musical humor, which shines particularly brightly in the example in the video above. Although you can also check out this one and this one.  Or this one.

I hope the funny things brighten your day!

{Heart}



* = Adam Carolla has a history of expressing racism and sexism.  I no longer support his work.

A Halloween Sampler for All Souls: 2014 Edition!

Hallooooooooooooo!

It's time for a follow-up edition of the Halloween Sampler, in which I peruse the movies I've seen over the year in order to offer recommendations for your spooky holiday enjoyment!

This is also the second year in a row that Husband and I have carved jack-o'-lanterns while watching an old scary movie.  I highly recommend this tradition, because older movies often set the mood without being so frightening that they are unpleasant.

Also the pumpkins turned out pretty sweet!

To recap from last year, in addition to my typical 1 - 5 rating system, I will include a bonus scary/intense rating system which ranges from ! = not at all scary to !!!!! = so scary!

Super awesome fact: all of this year's selections are available to stream on Netflix, so there are basically no boundaries between you and hours of terrifying entertainment!

Without further ado!

"The Awakening" (2011)

Rating: 3.5  Scary Rating: !!!!

This year's conventional modern horror offering!  I love a good haunted house and scary child ghost story, and this delivers perfectly nicely.  It is not thoroughly terrifying (caveat: this might be a reflection of the fact that I watched it on a sunny afternoon), but it is also not annoyingly predictable, dumb, or cliché, all of which totally ruin perfectly nice scary movies for me.  Also I found the lady main character interesting.

Bonus: baby Bran!

Double bonus: also McNulty!

So basically if you're not down for the basic premise, you should definitely be down for all the HBO cameos!

"Apollo 18" (2011)

Rating: 2  Scary Rating: !!

This year's scary offering... in space!!  "Apollo 18" is shot pseudo-documentary style with all "found footage," which is a fun approach in general but especially for a scary movie (see also: "Blair Witch Project" (1999), which we all mock now but was legit innovative at the time).  The film tracks the failed, mysterious Apollo 18 mission to the Moon.  There are some taught moments that exploit the claustrophobia and isolation of space decently well, but the payoff is ultimately pretty dumb.  So if you're looking for a SciFi-y mild thriller that will more likely make you laugh at the end than give you bad dreams, this is your pick!

"The Conversation" (1974)

Rating: 4  Scary Rating: !!!

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, this movie is a creepy, intense psychological thriller made, perhaps surprisingly, only more alarming by its datedness.  If it was possible to monitor people without their knowledge this deftly in the '70s, it's pretty frightening to imagine what's possible now.  But beyond the Big Brother paranoia-instilling factor, the film tracks the mental unravelling of a man whose life is gradually destroyed by the conflict between his craft and his conscience.  Really cool!

Minor trivia: if you are a regular This American Life listener, you will most assuredly recognize a recurrent musical refrain in this film.

"Best Worst Movie" (2009)

Rating: 3  Scary Rating: !

This film isn't so much a scary movie in its own right, but is instead a documentary exploring the surprisingly enthusiastic cult resurgence of what looks like seriously the worst movie ever, possibly rivaling this guy.  Seriously.  It's perfectly enjoyable largely because tracking down the cast and crew is a fascinating examination of the wildly different paths people traveled after briefly, serendipitously (if such a positive word can be used?) coming together for one bizarre little project.

Although, very much like "Wicker Man" (2006) from last year's sampler, this film is a bit frightening simply because the movie that is its subject matter did, in fact, get made, with the presumed consent of many many people.

"House on Haunted Hill" (1959)

Rating: 2  Scary Rating: !!!

This was our pumpkin-carving classic horror movie selection this year, and it definitely did not disappoint.  First of all: Vincent Price, and that gloriously skeevy creepy voice of his.  Second: multiple references to hysteria and abundant misogyny!  Finally: some genuinely chilly moments to embellish an otherwise classic helping of strangely quaint, melodramatic, but still dark Vincent Price-y-ness.  Definitely a fun watch!

I hope you all enjoy an excellent Halloween tailored precisely to your desired level of spookiness!  Thank you for reading!

{Heart}

Micro Post

Salut!

Oh so many things have happened this month.

Most importantly: Fiancé is not Fiancé anymore.  Fiancé is now Husband.

It's a pretty momentous transition.

Also during this most excellent of months, I turned 30.

I continued to not start my new job, and instead finished wedding planning and did other stuff, like exploring my neighborhood a little more and reading for fun.  And slowly but surely kind of cleaning my apartment.

I received my limited permit so I can actually practice psychology once I start my new job mid-October.

I saw the musical version of my favorite movie ever, and it was AMAZING.

And also, last although most definitely not least, I watched SEVENTEEN movies.

SEVENTEEN.

Oh yes.

Sometimes, in the last few weeks, I found myself worrying that I'd let my desperately-needed vacation get overrun by wedding planning and other potentially stressful things.  Upon considering that marvelous sum of films, I feel reassured that I did actually set aside a decent chunk of time for fun, too.

More on that soon!

{Heart}

For Realsies: Donezo!!

Hihi!

OMG GUYS I'M DONE.  Graduate school is OVERRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I'm now two weeks into a post-internship epic-length vacation before I start a postdoctoral fellowship (translation: graduate school victory lap to wrap up requirements for licensure in my state) in October.

THAT'S RIGHT.  Like over a month from now!

Basically, in summation, things have worked out gloriously such that I a) have a new job lined up and locked down, but also b) get sufficient time off to recover from the last five years and be a worthwhile human by the time that job starts.

Also I can get married AND go on my honeymoon before I start my fellowship.

Guysssssss.  I'm so happy!!!

I can't tell you how grateful and relieved I am that things worked out this way and that I'm finally done.  The shock of it all, both the assault of the last five years and the bizarre fact that it was, in fact, finite, is still wearing off.  Gradually, that shock is being replaced by a sense of calm, wholeness, relief, and satisfaction.  I finally have my degree, as a result of five years of the hardest work I've ever done.  I have the thing, and it can't be taken away from me.

Part of the shock comes from the fact that I had gotten so focused on simply getting through internship that I hadn't stepped back to reflect on the fact that it wasn't just internship that would end this month, but graduate school in its entirety.

I didn't fully get this fact until I got home on my final day of internship, and Fiancé said, "You're done!"  I said, "I know, I thought this year would never end!"  Then he said, "No, you're done.  It's all done!" and finally, it actually dawned on me.

No more constant slog over hurdle after hurdle, jockeying for training positions that are underpaid and overworked.  Less and less of people who don't know me calling deciding how my life is going to look or where I'm going to live or what kind of work I'm going to do.  More functioning as the independent, capable professional that I've been becoming for years, and being recognized as such.

Finally, as I'm about to close my third decade of life, I have my life back.

Maybe that sounds overly dramatic and self-victimizing.  That's a self-criticism I've struggled with a lot.  On one hand, I've never forgotten that I chose this path for myself, and so in no small way I've been the one to blame when things have been hard.  I could have quit.  I could have put up more of a fight when I didn't like how things were going.  I could have chosen a different degree or an altogether different discipline.  I'm responsible for my choices.  I'm an adult, and this is what I chose.

But then, there's also no way I could have known how hard this would be at the outset.  The question of whether I would have gone to grad school if I had been properly informed of the hardships it would present doesn't feel wholly answerable yet.  The emotional, physical, and financial toll earning my PhD has taken on me is gargantuan.  It is also orders of magnitude greater than I anticipated.  So much of it was harder than it needed to be just because of unexpected turns of events or other people's decisions that I couldn't have hoped to influence--things over which I genuinely had no control and yet whose consequences I had to negotiate.

It's precisely these aspects of graduate school that at times made it particularly hard for me.  I'm ferociously independent, opinionated, and--although in a generally productive way--oppositional.  I am mistrustful of authority and therefore get really uncomfortable when people and institutions have pretty universal say-so over what happens to me.  I have a decent anxious streak, but that tends to manifest itself less as a desire to quietly, obediently, and inoffensively please others and more as a drive to meet my own generally ruthless and uncompromising expectations.  Unbeknownst to me before I enrolled, I am by these and probably other standards not an ideal graduate student, especially in clinical psychology.

Trouble is, I'm also prideful, particularly about many of the traits I just listed.  So meaningful efforts to bend to better accommodate the personality demands of my program were generally off the menu.  These things made my road a little tougher than it was already going to be.

But I guess the upshot of pride and stubbornness is that, now that I'm finally done, I feel at least a little gratified that I didn't completely lose all sense of myself--that I held onto these questionable virtues.  Recently a Radiohead lyric has been coming back and back to me: For a minute there, I lost myself.

As I find my ground again and have some room to breathe, I'm coming back into contact with aspects of my personality and life that got buried for a while.  Graduate school only really allowed for this little sliver of my identity to get expressed.  As my program progressed, the room for other parts of myself to have a voice got more and more compressed until it felt like they were squeezed into oblivion.

But they weren't.  They were just sleeping for a while.  I'm really sad I lost those things for a time--my love of photography, reading for fun, doing new things, laughing, talking about Buddhism and my favorite movie and the Socratic dialogue it's based on--but they're still here.  They always were.  It's not so easy to stamp out a whole human being.  I really should have remembered that anyway, but it's nice to have the reminder nonetheless.

For not the first time, I'm grateful to have this space, this blog, as an expectation that not all of me could get blotted out by the one little clinical psych part of my life.  I didn't always allocate much space to reflecting on and sharing the films I've seen, but I saw them.  They're there, just like all the other things that matter to me in addition to my vocation.  Maybe I'll be better about the sharing and reflecting as I move forward.

That's one thing I hope to stay in touch with for the next year and the years to follow: Now that graduate school is over, the responsibility for my life feeling good falls ever more to me.  That's a lot of responsibility, but perhaps not surprisingly, I'm really glad it's mine again.

{Heart}

Snap Judgment: "Snowpiercer"

Hello chickadees!

This has been an immensely busy time and so many great things are happening!  My wedding is a scant two months away, and my internship is rapidly coming to a close.  AND.  I HAVE A JOB.  Which is really spectacular, in oh so many ways.

But time is of the essence!  So instead of going into more detail about these very positive life developments, I would like to break my altogether too long hiatus from writing about movies.  I therefore present to you: my second snap judgment!

Today I will discuss "Snowpiercer" (2013), which I saw in the beautiful, beloved city where Fiancé and I will get married, which we visited last weekend for wedding planning-y things.

Per my proposal in my first snap judgment, for the sake of actually completing a post every once in a while, I will limit myself to five bullet points.

Snap judgment:  Really cool!!  But also pretty flawed.

• Emotionally and aesthetically, this movie is in excellent company.

Caro and Jeunet's "City of Lost Children"

The aesthetic of "Snowpiercer" reminded me of the glorious, weird, dark, sweet work of genius French filmmaking duo Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, directors of wonderful films like "City of Lost Children" (1995) and "Delicatessen" (1991).

While this film wasn't so whimsical that it included a squeaking bedspring dance sequence, there was definitely a healthy dose of dark, bizarre humor to add some levity to what would otherwise be a crushingly bleak story of post-apocalyptic class warfare in the context of a doomed human race.

I'm always impressed and gratified by directors who don't shy away from zaniness, especially in otherwise incredibly depressing stories.  Imbuing those narratives with splashes of absurd humor offers space for an irrepressible human spirit to shine in the face of immense despair.  Especially in a world in which humans have not only destroyed the planet but have still found ways to horrifically mistreat each other, without that rebellious and defiant humor, this movie might be simply unbearable to watch.

Joon-Ho Bong's "Snowpiercer"

• It's a morality tale without being stupid about it.

Lately, I've been more preoccupied than usual about the incredibly obviously true scientific fact that we are murdering this planet and therefore ourselves via climate change.

I attribute this--bear with me--to my approaching wedding.

Sometimes, when people get married, one of the next things they do is have children.  I anticipate being one of those people.  Generally speaking, I'm really really excited and hopeful to be one of those people.

But what sense does it make to have children if I'm just going to deliver them onto a dying planet?  Especially if it's a planet that's dying because human beings are too stupid and mortality-denying and materialistic and small-minded to stop burning fossil fuels and contributing to horrible animal death and start recycling and building wind farms?

Taking myself out of this issue altogether, it appears increasingly, terrifyingly clear that immediate attention and change on a global level is demanded of humanity if we are to achieve anything meaningful in saving this planet.  And honestly, it might already be too late.  So when I saw the trailer for "Snowpiercer," I winced because minus the part where humans somehow manage to survive global subzero temperatures, the basic premise seems all too plausible and so desperately pressing.

That being said, I never felt like I was being beaten over the head with the imminence of human-caused catastrophic climate change.  This is a film that confronts this all-too-likely future with enough substance that the audience doesn't feel brow-beaten.

"Snowpiercer" therefore feels like a societally important film in that it takes civilization-ending climate change as an in-the-near-future given and makes us look at what horrors could befall us if/when we allow it to happen.  That's a narrative more people need to contemplate, and the fact that this is a generally well-told story will hopefully help facilitate that.

• But is there anything I hate more than crappy dialogue?

During our viewing of the movie, there was some totally unintended audience laughter at what were meant to be very serious moments, and it was because some of the dialogue was just bad.  I fucking hate that.  I HATE IT.

SAY BETTER THINGS.

Any time I feel like I could have fixed a script or written better words, something has seriously gone terribly wrong.  In what is clearly an expensive film with so, so many people working on it, you would think someone would have tweaked some of those terrible yet very important lines.

• Effort necessary to successfully suspend disbelief: significant.

So many questions threaten to bump any discerning viewer out of the story.  Honestly how does a train built now-ish have the technology to run infinitely?  How can it really run over snow-and-ice-covered tracks without any maintenance?  Not to mention why and how would we build train tracks to cross oceans?  Why isn't the train at least double-decker to maximize potential space?  Are you seriously telling me this train has a self-sustaining aquarium car and two, TWO cars devoted to spa care?  Why is there a train car filled with just hooded dudes with axes?  Where do all the rich people sleep and keep their stuff??

I don't understandddddddd

• And yet: it's so pretty!

The visuals are beautiful, striking, and trippy and feel like an acid-laced dream, and if you can suspend your disbelief it's wonderful.  I suggest you try.

The train feels like some mechanized metaphor for society (rich people at the front, poor at the back),

or for a human body (a caboose for bowels, a meat freezer car for a belly, a sauna for lungs),

or for the human mind (although it's mostly id with some superego and almost no ego to speak of),

or or or?

And then, no spoilers, but: the final image is the most striking of all.  It's so quieting, and so heartbreaking.

So with all that in mind I give it a 4, with a strong recommendation that, in spite of its evident imperfection, this film be seen.

{Heart}