You Say You Want a Resolution

Unlike with “regular” New Year’s, Rosh Hashanah really isn’t about making resolutions; in all honesty, that’s more on what Yom Kippur is focused (well, that and not thinking about how many more !#$%ing hours there are until you can eat).  However, I think that I will reserve the Day of Atonement for actually asking forgiveness from the people I’ve wronged (myself included); today I want to think ahead to how I can make 2010-2011/ 5771 a better year.

1)      Act, don’t just think. I am the queen of talking the talk without walking the walk. I say I am going to do something (i.e. answer emails or put away my laundry or stop messaging that person who clearly doesn’t care if s/he ever hears from me again), I know full well I will feel better if I do it, I recognize I have the capacity to do it…and yet I do nothing.  There’s a reason that one of the major pillars of Alcoholics Anonymous is the recognition of your problem as the first step, but without that second step… I’m still drinking, as it were. I know that whenever I come across these moments of action vs. inaction, there is a split-second where I haven’t yet decided what to do (or not do); I need to turn as many of those moments as possible into the opportunity to act.  Now, I know there will be times when I am too tired or something more attractive or fun is available to do (or when I’ve got a case of the “dumb and uglies” and will make stupid reaching-out mistakes), but if for the most part I make the decision to follow through on my better impulses and turn them into actual acts… I will feel better.

2)      Be more honest with and true to myself. I know this is going to sound funny coming from someone who is so very opinionated, but a lot of the time I have no idea what I actually think or feel. I have gotten into the really, really bad habit of realigning my thoughts and feelings to support my actions (see above) rather than vice versa. So when a situation arises that doesn’t jibe with my manufactured emotions, it creates an unhealthy state of psychological imbalance in me. But then, rather than recognizing that that imbalance comes from emotional dissonance, I shift my emotions/thoughts further and try to find an even more improbable way of justifying my actions. There is nothing at all that is good about this, and I need to work on recognizing when I am doing it before I go too far down that path. Blogging actually helps a lot; really, any formalized opportunity to codify and organize my thoughts makes it virtually impossible to engage in the kind of ridiculously circular thinking/feeling that I do when I get on the “justification carousel.” So as difficult as it is going to be, I am going to work very hard to dig deeper and see how I really feel and what I really think before I act. This is going to be particularly challenging because you all know that I generally think/work at a breakneck pace and this will definitely slow that down. However, I think what I lose in speed will easily be offset by gains in integrity of thought and feeling and comfort with the actions I take and decisions I make.

3)      Read more.  For all of my pontificating about how much I love to read, how overjoyed I am to have rediscovered books blah blah blah…when push comes to shove, I will still watch “That 70s Show” because it’s on after the 9:00PM news rather than turning off the TV and picking up a book. I do this more often than I am willing to admit to. While it’s tempting to assign myself a certain length of time each day that I must read (along the lines of what we teachers do for our students), I am willing to cut myself a little slack here and say that since I recognize this is a problem, since I’m working on #s 1 & 2 above, and since following through on this WILL make me happier… I can go freestyle at first. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just have to be more of a hardass with myself.

4)      Find something to do. I know many of you who read this would give your left arms to be financially able to afford not to work and do whatever you wanted with your time, which is more or less the position in which I currently find myself. Financial burden aside (not really something I care to discuss in public), I am bored out of mind. Whenever I say this, some well-meaning friend or family member comes to my “aid” with a list of all of the things I could be doing, and while I appreciate it…thanks, but no thanks. I know full well there are myriad things I could be doing instead of sitting on my ass watching “The Price is Right” (or even reading); they’re just not what I want to be doing! And I’m sorry if it makes me sound spoiled, but I don’t want to be doing something – anything! – just to keep busy; that’s worse than not being able to make good use of my free time! I need to be teaching, end of story. It’s my passion, it’s what feeds my soul; other than being Kyra and Max’s mom, it is the single thing that makes me the happiest day in and day out. Unfortunately, just saying that I want to be teaching isn’t going to bring me a job; neither is sending out a score of resumes to schools letting them know I can sub, apparently. So I am going to need to bite the bullet and compromise my lofty ideals and either go back to low-paying test prep tutoring or look at jobs which will require a longer, less pleasant commute or look at other sorts of teaching (like working in our local youth center helping with homework or applying for a job at the cooking school down the street).  To paraphrase Ashleigh, “It’s time to suck it up.”

5)      Be positive and believe in the power of my dreams: I haven’t read The Secret, and I find the current nearly cult-like devotion to the concept of the Law of Attraction to be a bit…unsettling. But when I step off my high horse, I realize that there is a good reason for this massive following: it works. When you hone in on what you want, when you focus the full force of your positive energies on asking the universe to help provide you with it and, perhaps most importantly, when you are not only willing to work for what you want but open to believing that you genuinely deserve it…well, that combination is virtually unbeatable. Next step: figuring out what I want (oddly enough, that’s a lot harder for me than any of the other steps I’ve enumerated).

And this seems as good a place as any to end this post. Whether or not you are celebrating Rosh Hashanah today, I hope that you can take some time to think about how you can improve your life.  If you’re reading this there is no question in my mind that you deserve the best you – and life! – can give yourself, and if you’re willing to believe that and work for it… it will happen. 

Read the Book! See the Movie (or not)!

 So last night I was lucky enough to catch “The Time Traveler’s Wife” on HBO…okay, I think I actually own the DVD but it’s still in the wrapping like so many of my DVDs.  This film- and the book on which it’s based- fall under the umbrella of my second-favorite genre: improbable romances (my first-favorite is religious horror. I am a girl of diverse tastes; what can I say?). What I mean by this self-created subcategory is romances that contain an element of magic, a little extra “unicorns and fairy dust” (thank you Ben Nadel for this definition) if you will. Alice Hoffman, my favorite author, always infuses her books with a perfect balance of love and the practical supernatural.  Her characters have some sort of romantic misfortune but always overcome it with the aid of their own determination and mystical powers. It is the ultimate expression of “love conquers all.”

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife also embraces this ideal. The main characters, Clare and Henry, are destined to be together but Henry’s affliction – he has a genetic disorder which causes him to travel through time with no warning or control- separates them both physically and emotionally on a regular basis. It’s hard to talk about the book chronologically since it skips around through the course of their lives (much like Henry himself does), but they more or less meet for the first time when adult Henry shows up in the field behind child Clare’s house. Of course, at this point he is aware that they will fall in love and be married, but Clare is but an innocent accomplice to his erratic life’s journey.

The film actually addresses this issue far better (one of the very few things it does do better) when adult Clare calls her now-husband to task for knowingly shaping the course of her life and removing all free will.  But a little deeper consideration- and Clare’s own heartfelt recanting on Henry’s deathbed- brings this into question: since we don’t actually have a clear picture of when time begins and ends for Henry and Clare, are they both just pawns in the Universe’s perverse chess game? This is never actually answered and, in fact, it really becomes much less of an important issue when weighed against the core of this tale: there is no question that Clare and Henry love each other, no matter when it began and what the reason.  This is, after all, a love story, and that is what really matters.

As my cousin Nancy pointed out, with a few exceptions no movie ever really does justice to the book on which it is based, and the film version of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is not one of those. However, there are several things at which it excels. I can’t imagine how difficult it was to condense into 90 minutes a 500-plus page book which spans 85 years, and the writer and director did a pretty good job of adapting the pivotal moments from the book which allow us to see why Henry and Clare love each other, how difficult is their struggle, and why we should care about what happens to them (something I often find lacking in modern romances). But the real hero of the film is the Director of Photography, Florian Ballhaus. His cinematography is absolutely, stunningly beautiful and, more so than any other aspect of the celluloid adaptation, brings to life Niffenegger’s gorgeously tragic world. There is one scene in particular where we see the course of Clare and Henry’s life as their daughter, Abra, grows up; the camera moves from room to room in their dream house and follows the main characters around while they age the five years we know will pass before Henry dies. It is an amazing visual representation of something of which all of us, particularly those of us watching our own aging mirrored in the maturation of our offspring, are painfully aware: time passes far too quickly when life is good.

And this is exactly how I felt when the book ended, but I cannot say the same for the movie which left me exclaiming, “Really?!? *That* is the best you could do?!”  The book has a wonderful, all-loose-ends neatly, peacefully bowed completion. Clare, having lived for nearly five decades after Henry’s death, is rewarded for her life of patience and belief: Henry comes for her (though he has been reappearing to Abra throughout these years), and it is implied that both of their journeys are now at a mutual, joyous end. But in the movie, after Henry’s death, Henry and Clare are reunited in the field where so many of their early meetings took place. In a horribly clichéd moment, after Henry inevitably fades into time, Abra and Clare fold up his clothes (in what is a neat concession to reality, Henry always arrives in time naked) and stroll off into the fading sun discussing how Henry will always be there with them. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I am at a complete loss as to why they couldn’t have filmed the book’s vastly superior ending; if any of you have both read the book and seen the movie, maybe you have an answer?

I want to leave you with some recommendations and a request for same. Here are my favorite improbable romances in both book and movie form. If you can think of any that I might have missed and should read/see, lay it on me! Oh, and by the way, I came up with my rating system:

The novel The Time Traveler’s Wife makes my cup runneth over; the movie of the same name leaves my glass half empty.

Book recommendations: Anything by Alice Hoffman, but Practical Magic and Here on Earth in particular; anything by Richard Matheson; Like Water for Chocolate (even better than the movie, believe it or not!)…

Movie recommendations: “What Dreams May Come,” “Chances Are,” “Made in Heaven,” “City of Angels,” “Starman,” “13 Going on 30,” and “Kate and Leopold.” There are many, many more but these are the ones that came to mind first.

Growing Down to Myself

I am growing down. Not like my favorite character from The Phantom Tollbooth, Alec the little boy who started off at the height he would eventually be and got “taller” as his feet got closer to the ground… although now that I think about it, I wonder if it was somewhat prescient of me to fall in love with such a minor character when I was so young. No, by “growing down” I mean that I can feel myself actually returning to a younger version of myself in many regards.

I have rediscovered my passionate love of reading, for one. I know this is going to be hard for many of you to believe, but I was actually a really lonely, kind of socially awkward kid and teenager. I loved people, much as I do now, but that “heart on my sleeve” thing that you all find so endearing now led to me being emotionally butchered to the point where I eventually just started sort of keeping to myself a lot. I would still occasionally sit on the curb at the end of the cul-de-sac where we lived and just wait for someone to notice me, to come play with me… but, of course, that kind of odd behavior was exactly the sort of thing that drove the neighborhood kids away (at best). So I read. Constantly. I had my nose buried in a book at all hours of the day, and I would often find- as I do again now- that coming out of that deeply engaged state of reading, of exiting the world of whatever novel I was immersed in, was a bit like resurfacing when you’ve worked to touch the bottom of the pool and need to get up quickly since you’re almost out of air. But there’s a difference now. When I was younger, I would definitely lose myself in the books, in the stories, in the characters whose lives were all figured out and neatly packaged between the pages. Now, I find that I am taking these aspects of the stories into myself and finding where they fit in with who I am and who I am becoming. Through Clare, the tragic heroine of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I see my capacity to believe in love even in the face of insurmountable odds. Elv, one of Alice Hoffman’s Story Sisters, is- like I was- able to find through becoming a mother a depth of sanity and groundedness she’d never even believed she could embrace. Even in my sporadic rereading of The Fountainhead I see in Howard Roarke’s fiery passion for architecture and perfection my own soul-deep love of teaching.

And writing. Oh my G’d, how I loved to write when I was a kid! I think until I started blogging again, I really had forgotten how wonderful it feels to let out of your head and your heart the thoughts and ideas and dreams that just swirl around endlessly. The first thing I remember enjoying writing were our weekly Spelling stories in third grade. I know, right? It’s hard to imagine loving such a pedestrian, tedious assignment. But I made it my own: I took the spelling words and easily and, I have to say, pretty effectively crafted them into tales of fun and adventure involving my classmates. My class had 16 or so kids in it, we had 20 words per week (give or take), and I delighted in making sure that each classmate and each word got the full attention s/he/it deserved.  It was kind of a turning point for me, in a way; my classmates, eager for their 15 seconds of fame, would badger me about what was going to happen that week, what adventures would we go on. In this way, I gained a modicum of greater social acceptance and an early notion that perhaps the way I could get people to love me was just to pay attention to them and recognize them for who they were (Not such a tall task for a girl who really was (and is) genuinely fascinated with those who surround her). But spelling stories became a thing of the past as we moved through school, and I took to writing stories about whomever I fancied myself in love with at the time. I will never forget the summer when I had to leave the theater arts program I so adored in order to – horror of horrors!- be dragged kicking and screaming to Mexico with my family (I think this was after my sophomore year of high school, but I’m having some trouble recalling the time line). I defiantly sat in my hotel room and wrote and wrote and poured out the longing in my teenaged heart (hmm… I’m thinking this was probably about Bill Wright, or Mr. Wrong as my girlfriends so aptly called him)…until I got back, went to camp, and fell for some other guy and dumped my original protagonist for this newcomer. The writing was good for me; the writing itself…probably not so much.

So I now find myself again embracing these two aspects of the younger Wendy and reclaiming the thoughtful, dreamy, hopeful quality with which reading and writing imbued me at an early age. But it is now combined with the wisdom and experiences of the life I’ve lived, and this gives me a perspective which my youth simply did not allow. As an adult, I am able to contemplate, to filter, to accept that which is worth pulling in and keeping close and to politely let go of that which belongs just to the book I’m reading or the words I’m crafting. As I said in an email to a friend last night, “...not quite sure what to make of myself these days, but I think I like who I am becoming." It seems trite, but I truly believe these words are valid: Life is a journey, not a destination. Here's to the journey to becoming me.