Program maxims

I've been involved with the 12 step world for 11 years now.  There are some maxims that I've learned, particularly with respect to dealing with overwhelmingly stressful situations.  Here is some of that

• Keep saying the serenity prayer, like a mantra.
• Write down everything that is on your plate on a piece of paper and put the piece of paper in your God box (do you have a god box?) to symbolize giving this over to God
• Resign from being God. You cannot solve all these problems.  It's just too much.  As much as you want to solve every problem, you cannot.  You are a mortal, human woman.  There are only 24 hours in a day.
• Make self-care a priority.  If you do not take care of your body and your soul, you will become increasingly useless -- major health crises are probably coming much sooner than you realize.  Your mind and body are going to give out on you.  Self-care includes program, yes.
• Focus always on the next right thing rather than the many, many things that need doing.  Focusing on everything at once is overwhelming.
• Pray for creative solutions.  Pray for less ambitious, realistic goals. Pray for proper prioritization.  Avoid saying "I am trying to..." Instead, say "I'm praying for guidance on how to proceed." After praying or putting something in your God box, wait for an intuition/a solution/a vision of your next step.
• Write gratitude lists.
• Set boundaries. Your children, inter alia, have to realize that you are overloaded and need help, not more burdens.
• Make time to play

Bedwetting -- happy ending? No.

I got this casting notice

Sigh.

One of my sons did have a bed wetting issue up to age five or six.  He was a very sound sleeper.  He was also having sleep apnea due to enlarged tonsils and adenoids and his soft palate intersecting his pharynx.  He had the tonsils removed.  He had the adenoids removed twice. He outgrew the structural issues with his soft palate after high school, but continued to have some apnea even when 17.

When he was five or six we got one of those alarms that you put in the diaper or pull up.  He slept through it, but it woke my husband (now ex) and me up.  So we would rush in and carry him to the toilet and make him sit on it.  Eventually, after much lost sleep on our part, he did learn to get up on his own.

When this bed wetting issue arose, we read articles stating that bed wetters tend to have serious depression later in life.

Well, guess what. He has serious depression later in life.  No he isn't just fine.  He doesn't have an exciting story about his occupation, hobby, or skill.  He has a depressing story of mental illness.  Even though we worked so hard to get him to use the toilet, it didn't resolve the underlying problem, whatever that is.

Movie Review: The Revenant

Movie Review
The Revenant

I should know better than to listen to professionals in the entertainment industry when they recommend a movie.

Uggh.

I had a casting director recommend “Birdman” to me a year ago.  I really hated it.

Then, today, I had the director of an acting school recommend “The Revenant.”  I didn’t realize until afterwards that this movie actually has the same director as “Birdman.” If I had realized that, I would have been more careful.

The thing is, with these professionals, they are looking with highly critical eyes at the details of the execution of the movie.  How is the acting? How is the camera work?  How is the editing?  They often particularly judge the quality of acting by the authenticity of scenes where the performer is suffering.  Ugh.

If those things are excellent, they like the movie.

They aren’t really looking at things like: Is this a fun movie?  Is it going to depress the viewer?

Now, with this movie, “The Revenant,” the execution is great.  All those technical details are just lovely.

Does technical quality make this a movie I want to see?

NO!!

The movie is all about murdering, raping, bleeding, groaning, gasping, spitting, suffering, crawling through the snow — and it’s winter — and it’s a very, very long movie, by current standards.  It’s two and a half hours of extreme, overwhelming suffering, by filthy, miserable, tortured people. 

Moreover, the acting roles are predominantly male.  Women are there to be murdered, raped, or otherwise exploited.  There is one female character who appears rather frequently as a ghost/memory — but, again, only because she is the wife of the protagonist.  Otherwise this is another of those male movies.

Moreover, I like to think of wilderness as beautiful and spiritual.  In this movie, it becomes an instrument of torture.  It makes me so happy to be inside, in a safe place — not being mauled by a bear, falling off a cliff, escaping by floating through icy waters. 

I have to feel, too, that this things is improbable.  The protagonist survives the unsurvivable. 

Then, at one point, he smiles.  I think this is the one technical flaw of the movie.  When he smiles, it’s suddenly a movie star smile — the million dollar smile of Leonardo DiCaprio.  That’s the one part of the movie that seems technically flawed.  Otherwise, DICaprio is a brilliant actor.

Anyway, if you liked “Birdman,” which I didn’t, you might like this one.

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Addendum:

It was interesting that the protagonist and one of the antagonists were both motivated by wrongs done to their children.

Movie review: The Force Awakens

So I went to see the new Star Wars, “The Force Awakens,” with my son.

I thought there were some interesting points. They brought back some of the original characters.  They brought in some new characters.  Some of the plot appeared to be a bit recycled as well, unfortunately.

For me, it was a sequel, part of a series.  I’m expecting to keep watching it.  I’m expecting to find out what is going on.  I expected to be left hanging at the end.

OK, so the villain was not depicted as really intimidating.  He has childish temper tantrums.  He looks like Severus Snape — kind of pouty.  He does battle with a guy who has never held a light saber before and does not instantly slaughter him. Still, I’m expecting this villain to be more intimidating later.  He’s not ripe yet.

My son was much more harsh. 

He said he had seen some Star Trek movies directed by J. J. Abrams.  He said “J. J. Abrams just doesn’t know how to do big. This is Star Wars.  It’s supposed to be big.”  I was impressed that my son was following this director and knew who he was. 

It made me think about Tom Hooper, who directed “The Danish Girl.”  He was certainly capable of making even ordinary scenes quite visually impressive — though there were other issues with that work.  I wondered if it would have been more visually impressive with Hooper.

We went home and watched the phantom menace again.  This was a bit of a challenge.  it’s on VHS tape.  I haven’t actually used my VCR in about 10 years or so.  The picture kept migrating off screen — like we used to get with poor broadcast signal — with the top half of the picture on the bottom of the screen and the bottom half on the top half of the screen, and a dark line between.

Still, I had to agree that the older movie was more captivating. 

The music was certainly much more dramatic.  We called those older movies space opera.  The music seemed subdued by comparison in the recent movie.

George Lucas spent more time scanning the space craft, slowly, so that you could really appreciate their size or craftsmanship. 

My son pointed out that when they destroyed a planet in the original Star Wars, they built up to it and
 had Princess Leia being really upset while watching it.  Here they just destroyed planets willy, nilly with no reaction by anyone.  Just fireworks. It seemed more fake than in the original movie.

Actually, when I think about it, I didn’t think this woman who is essentially the main character, was acting all that well. 

My son wished they had hired Idris Elba to do the villain’s voice in the new Star Wars movie, because he thought Elba would have been able to do a real villain voice.  I asked my son, who has a nice, full, bass-baritone voice, how he would have done the villain voice.  He’s actually quite a good actor, though he’d never do it for an audience.  He said he wouldn’t try to imitate James Earl Jones, because he wouldn’t be able to do it as well. Instead, he demonstrated with a hoarse, hissing whisper, which certainly could have been effective.

Also, he pointed out, and I guess he was right, that when they used the force, it wasn’t as credible as it was in the earlier movies.  This was partly due to the sound effects.

Still, I wonder, if it had been really grandiose and pompous, like the originals, would we accept that now?  Doesn't it make sense that these are people who are kind of muddling through?  Not sure.

Anyway, I really thought Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher did well — much their old selves.  The big surprise was Mark Hamill.  Somehow he was suddenly the Luke Skywalker of that first, old movie (“New Hope”) — just loaded with charisma and presence that he hadn’t had in the later movies.

Of the newer performers, I was most impressed with John Boyega.  I thought he was great throughout.

Adam Driver I'm reserving judgment on.  Like my son said, he doesn't have that kind of charisma like the original Darth Vader, but maybe he's not supposed to.

Yeah, ok, I guess I have to concede my son’s point that if the original movie had been like this one I probably wouldn’t have been as excited about the series.  I’m not sure that’s the point, though.  My son said he wouldn’t necessarily want to see the sequel of this one.  I think I would.

Anyway, we went on Christmas day & it wasn’t very crowded, which was nice.  And we saw it in 3D.  I expected the 3D to make it more exciting, but it didn’t seem to.

Terrorism and the USA

I'm thinking about the news stories out of Paris.

I'm remembering

1) this blog I wrote in August: Iran: Bitter Harvest

2) estimates of 500k dead from our second invasion of Iraq: civilian casualties in Iraq

3) estimates of 500k CHILDREN dead in Iraq due to the economic boycott we led between the Iraq wars: Economic sanctions kill children

4) all these public shootings that are purely domestic: domestic shootings rise

How dare we accuse others of being terrorists?  How dare we?

We talk about stopping terrorism?  How about stopping our own horrible behavior that gives rise to terrorism?

On dealing with death

These are some comments I wrote recently to a sponsee relating to dealing with death.

For me, it's part of the disease to always focus on the negative and never the positive.

I like the Hindu trinity: Brahma; Vishnu; Shiva -- it's a cycle: create, sustain, destroy/transform, respectively.  When I first heard about it, I thought that Shiva, the destroyer/transformer, must be a bad guy -- like our Satan.  I was quite surprised to discover that Hindus regard him as a loving God -- the cosmic declutterer. 

Once I attended a seminar at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the earth sciences, graduate campus of Columbia University.  I heard a presentation about disaster hotspots: places where natural disasters are closely located to population centers.  These disasters include floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and storms. The worst disaster hotspot in the world was in the Ganges valley of India. 

It made sense to me then how they had to include Shiva in their trinity.

In the western tradition, we always refer to HP as "creator."  That's incomplete.

We're still in a time in our world when more people are being born than are dying, though.

Another interesting thing that I heard was when I attended a seminar on fear at a local yoga ashram.  The speaker said that fear is often associated with fear of loss.  Then she said, "if we truly believe that we are part of a universal whole, than we must believe that nothing is ever truly lost," or something to that effect.  I may be distressed because things are redistributed somewhere where I personally cannot access them, but that is a selfish distress.

For instance, in physics we learn that time is a dimension, just like the physical dimensions of our visible world.  We humans have not learned to travel in time.  Presumably, tho, an omniscient HP can do so.  Therefore, people who seem lost to us do not seem lost to HP.  It's just that we personally cannot access them according to our current perspective.

I find these thoughts helpful in dealing with loss.

@wsj article about alliance against the Islamic State

9/28/15 There was an article on the front page of @wsj, talking about an alliance between Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria to fight the Islamic State militants.

The POV for the article was that somehow this was reducing USA influence in the Middle East and therefore hurting us.

Hello?

Why aren't we cheering? Don't we want the Islamic State militants eliminated?  Aren't they the wicked terrorists?  Isn't it great that this diverse group is assembling to accomplish just exactly what we're hoping for? 

Why do we have to make everything be about us -- about our giant egos getting bent out of shape?

Why does every article about China or Russia in the mainstream USA media have to be with the "see no good, hear no good, speak no good" framework?  Can't we stop this negative knee jerk reaction and notice when these people are doing something good?  Are we so simple minded that we can see no nuance, no complexity, no evolution? 

@wsj should be ashamed of itself for arousing people into fear and hostility over this.