trusting authors and being rewarded

I am an easy reader, a trusting reader.  When I start a book, I have a shining, innate belief in the skill of the author.  Every dangling bit will be addressed  somehow in the end.  This question I have, or this line of dialogue that just doesn't make sense in the world of the story: these are here for a reason.  I trust the author!  It is really gratifying when that trust is rewarded.  And pretty rare.

I've been reading this series for a while, and there were these moments of jarring incongruousness, flashes of something that just didn't fit, moments of unanticipated tenderness that really threw me for a loop in the midst of this incredibly dark and intensely brutal story.  And this time I had the gratifying experience of watching things play out in accordance with those observations I had made.  I was thrilled.  It wasn't the twist I was anticipating, but it was a twist (two actually, by golly, and they were doozies! 

Of course, I immediately went back and re-read everything in the light of each new set of revelations (not a time-consuming task since we're early in the prologue, still, apparently), and it was really glorious.  There are still lots of questions (so many questions), but I feel like I can trust this author to sensibly address them in the future. 

Not that I'm expecting perfection.  I can fully trust an author right up until they totally bungle the ending and still feel pleased with the overall experience (if exasperated that the ending funked).  I am not looking for the perfect book, the flawless author.  Or maybe I am, and that quest is what keeps me reading the varying degrees of successfully-told stories around me.   Maybe I should say I don't demand perfection all the time, but I love it when I see it.  So I keep looking for it and finding brilliant flashes of it, and that is why I keep reading.

What I mean when I post something on Facebook

What I mean when I post something on Facebook: I found this interesting.

What I don't mean

• I totally agree with everything about this.
• You will totally agree with everything about this, and it will not require any critical thought.
• Your friends from your church will totally agree with everything about this, and it will not require any critical thought.
• This didn't offend me at all.
• This won't offend you at all.
• This won't offend any of your friends from church at all. 

Anyone have any other things to add to the list from your own experiences?  

(I'm just cranky about how many things I don't share because I know I'd get another late-night call from my mother because she doesn't like the title of the picture I shared.)

Ender's Game Movie coming your way

They are making an Ender's Game movie.  It's coming out in my birth month, making this about the 5th year in a row that I will get a very interesting birthday treat.  The filmmakers in one article I read assured the readers that the creators are going to be sure the movie faithfully contains all the brutality readers have come to love the book for.  I must admit that this really took me aback because I don't love Ender's Game for the brutality.  Maybe this is because I am a Girl, but I doubt it.  Anyone who's in it for the brutality would get bored by all the other things I love about it like the characters and the bright flashes of humor and beauty and the moral quandries.  The brutality was horrific and startling and pretty much soul-crushing because of the way the story was told and the knowledge we had that Ender didn't.

Obviously this movie is not going to contain all of Ender's Game. They're very up-front about the fact that very little of the content comes from the book.  You would need a full TV series-length work to try to produce the book.  (One of the reasons I always wanted it to be made into an anime series.)  And the movie is also going to contain aspects of Ender's Shadow.  Somehow.  This seems like a bad idea to me because if you're going to hack out people's favorite scenes and truncate the timelines for one movie, trying to cram in another book's worth of character development will be difficult.  (Which is why I wish they'd done the Lord of the Rings thing and filmed two movies at the same time, but they are not made of money, and they have to realize that the chances of the fanboys hating on this until it dies young and in debt are pretty much guaranteed.)  I'm interested to see what kind of hybrid monster this becomes.

I am setting my expectations on Tank.  If my expectations are low enough, I can usually enjoy almost anything.  But the CGI in the promo poster makes me think I may need a new sublevel for low expectations . . .  I set my expectations low, but I pray that they make something powerful and coherent, dark and bitter but ultimately not devoid of hope.

What are your thoughts about the movie?  And what made you like the book?

The day before the layoff

Phrase of the day: "The rain falls on the righteous and the wicked."  This was meant to be a thing about blessings, I think, since rain was scarce in that place at that time, and it makes things grow and keeps things alive.  In the Midwest, we act like it's a negative: sometimes it pours when you don't have an umbrella, and the rain that's soaking you doesn't care if you're good or bad: it just falls.  And that's the thing.  Whether you look at this as something about blessings or curses, things happen to people, and you don't get to control them.  This is life in a fallen world.

The week before the layoff: Tuesday

I wonder if this is the last Tuesday I will take this route to work past the half-dead, half-alive tree and the marsh.  Will this be the last Tuesday I do work at this desk surrounded by this three-sided view of clouds watching this plant shiver as heavy machinery moves the floor?  Will this be the last Tuesday I go to this store and then that store and get gas at this gas station and then go home? 

I pray it will be the last Tuesday I ever have to do research on hip surgery (while contemplating potential job and insurance loss). 

Will tomorrow be the day that everything falls apart for me like it did for my cube-neighbor today?  He was one of our managers, an irreplaceable expert.  But they did tell us that this lay-off had nothing to do with how good we are.  It is a thing of cold, hard numbers, HR and finance, not our bosses or those who work with us and give us performance bonuses. 

Now I wish again that I had maintained my goal of only achieving expectations.  Who knew that exceeding them would have the consequence of making me more attractive to a cut based on numbers?

The joy of movie adaptations

Sometimes I wonder why Hollywood even bothers to adapt books into movies.  They must make a profit off of it, or they wouldn't keep doing it, but it seems to generate ungodly amounts of ill will among the target audience. 

Anyone who has read a decent-length novel knows that fitting everything from the book into a visual format would take the kind of time that usually requires a miniseries or a full length series (with multiple seasons).  As a result, they should know that if the adaptation is only going to get 2 hours of screen time, a majority of the details of the book are going to be missing, yet most readers of the book take these missing details very personally and throw a huge fit every time and seem incapable of judging the film on its own merits, coherence, and success.  Their ardent and vocal disappointment at not seeing the entire contents of the book transferred comprehensively to the screen is sort of understandable but also a little immature and maybe kind of silly. 

Understandable because everybody has a favorite scene they wanted to see and because the things that make the book successful are usually related to internal access and extended character development impossible to do on-screen in a couple hours.

Silly because, well, if you set your expectations way too high, it's your own fault when reality doesn't live up to them.  I generally find it more pleasant to have very low expectations and be pleasantly surprised most of the time.

How have you fared with movie adaptations of  books you haven't read and those you have?  Any winners?

My Life Is Not a Musical

I saw Billy Elliot the Musical the other day, and all the trees look like dancers.  I love that about ballet.

I loved the movie Billy Elliot.  I wanted to see the musical version of it the last time I was in England, but I was roped to a high maintenance, mentally unstable, young roommate for the duration of our tour there, so I had to see what she wanted, which was not Billy Elliot.  I wish I weren't so nice.  I was therefore pleasantly surprised when it came to my area.  But then I faced a dilemma, which is the fact that I loathe musicals.

I wasn't always like this.  I actually acted in a lot of musicals up through high school.  I still regularly have lyrics and music I sang nearly 20 years ago get stuck in my head.  So why can I hardly stand to watch musicals?  I guess it's because they make things feel so trivial.  On a positive note, musicals are about words and movement, and there were moments with a lot of angry words and violence and dancing in the movie.

Billy Elliot was so dark and nuanced and political that I was pretty sure turning it into a musical would destroy it because of the nature of the genre-beast.  Musicals like to take the most powerful/poignant/emotional moments and dwell on them.  To death.  In a movie like Billy Elliot, the strength lay in the lack of over-dramatizing, in the careful restraint from any descent into sentimentality, in those quick moments of awesome beauty in an otherwise, cold, angry, brutal, awkward, real, grounded and gritty world.  Another strength was the reserve and inarticulateness of the characters.  These are not things that scream "great musical" to me.

It's a good thing there was some outstanding acting going on.  Stealing the show was a grandmother who I don't think was actually even in the original.  She was amazing.  The woman who becomes Billy's teacher was pretty great, too.  The music was very good, and some of the dancing was well done.  The fusion of a lot of different styles really worked in the numbers that weren't too exaggerated in typical musical style.  Billy's actor that day was pretty good, too.  His dancing-acting was incredible; his acting-acting was not quite as good, but he was trying to speak in an unfamiliar accent in a language that was not his first, so, you know, I'm going to cut him some slack.  That's a tough role to play for anyone, and he mostly pulled it off, even the copious swear words.  (Yeah, it wouldn't be what it was if they didn't leave those in there. :)

I enjoyed it, and I cried at the end because it turned out to be the last performance, and that always choked me up in my theater days. 

Have you seen any good musicals or plays lately?

When the storyline diverges

Did you ever read Dune by Frank Herbert?  It's kind of a sci-fi classic, but I never finished it.  I got stuck in the part where the main character started to see all these diverging futures, and it made him a little insane.  I can kind of understand that because I'm dealing with no more than three, and it's wearing me out.

In one most likely future, I stay here with my current job but purchase a decent condo or townhome to move into when my lease expires this summer.  (Other variations involve extending my lease 3-6 months and going after the perfect short sale home and possibly getting a roommate or subletting from someone else/moving in as someone else's roommate while looking for that short sale home, thus necessitating two moves in the space of a year, which is . . . problematic.)

In the other future, I get a job elsewhere, and I have to purchase a condo or townhome in another state to move into this summer at the same time as I start the new job.  House hunting from afar is . . . difficult.

The timing is bad/good because I think I'll likely end up moving at the same time either way, so there will definitely be packing, and I can get a head start on that.  See?  I can be positive!

The closer I get to the divergence, the more I feel like I'm living two lives.  I have to put all my eggs in both baskets because there will be serious repercussions and difficulties if I neglect one or the other.  I thought I was having enough trouble trying to fully commit to one life.

Well, Paul (if that was your name) I think with your tons of future vision diverging paths, you were entitled to a little bit of insanity.

corporate personas and other stories we tell people about ourselves

I read a bunch of business books and interviewing books before taking my first corporate job last year, and they were fascinating.  One in particular talked about creating a corporate persona.  When you start working at a company, it doesn't matter what your work reputation was before; now you have the chance to remake yourself and control people's initial perceptions about you!

I laughed because it reminded me of junior high and then college.  Whenever you start some place new, you get the chance to reinvent yourself.  You have baggage, but the new people you meet don't know about it, and when you're with them, you can, to some extent, create a new you with them.  (You just can't ever let them see you interacting with your family. :)

Maybe you were a slob who was always late, but in your new job, you can dress neatly and be on time, and everyone will assume you have always been so.  Sometimes, that baggage gives you so much drag that you can't stop it and change how people perceive you where you are.  Sometimes you have to go where nobody knows your name, so you can become a you more like the you you aspire to be rather than the you who's dragging you down. Eventually, you may grow into that person.  Yeah, deep.

I was pretty deliberate about my corporate persona, in that I didn't really build one.  I tried to do the opposite, actually, and bring my non-businesslike qualities to the fore.  I played the book-nerdy, slightly goofy, plushie-loving, non-threatening, a tad spacey, non-ambitious role I created, and it has served me well so far.  I have avoided the pitfall of appearing driven, dedicated, and focused because that's not who I am able to be anymore.  I could play it for a time, but I don't have the energy to keep that mask on for long.  I wouldn't want to set false expectations at the beginning.  Better to be more who I am; less weight on the mask, that way.  Competent but hardly exceptional.  That's what I aimed for.

How about you?  Have you ever reinvented yourself (corporate persona or new school or anything)?  What did you change about how people perceived you and why?

No books for me

All I've been reading lately has been student assignments.  I want to be reading The Left Hand of Darkness, which I found at a used bookstore and am looking at for a course I'm helping a professor prep.  A course I should be helping my professor prep.  I would be helping if I weren't so buried.  (I would much rather be prepping it!!!!!)

If you can't tell, I'm pretty down about this class taking over my life so unexpectedly, which is weird, since I usually set my expectations so low that anything other than a disaster seems rather pleasant.  My expectations about the teaching resources that would be provided for me for this class were set too high.  The class is a huge, time-consuming disaster for me.  See what happens when you don't set your expectations low enough!  :)

The essay about science fiction in the introduction of my copy of The Left Hand of Darkness was so elegant and clear and simple and LeGuin that it was excellent.  It was especially stunning after the essays I've been grading lately.  Who knows?  Some day, one of my students could be writing as beautifully as LeGuin.  I wish I could help them all improve without killing myself in the process, but that is another example of an expectation that will probably only hurt me.

This too shall pass.  There will always be books to look forward to.  So for now, onward.