Delight in the Simple Things

Today’s post is derived from a line in the song “Simple Things” by The Renaissance Men. Recently, I’ve decided that true happiness in life comes from finding and appreciating small things. I mentioned to Kristin that this was one of the reasons that she was fun to be around: she finds really small things to get really happy about, like say, chicken pesto. I brought up this idea to my parents on vacation too, noting that my mom gets really excited when there’s a mini coffee pot in her hotel room.

This is not to say that large things – family, friends, weather – shouldn’t excite us, but that small things are more reliable, more consistent, and easier to control. What inevitably happens, though, is that although we don’t always take time to be conscious of our simple things. We just kind of passively enjoy them when they occur. I think that we can say that we definitively know someone when we know their simple things. If you had only $5 to buy something, or an hour or two to spend with someone you loved, do you know what you would buy or do to make them happy?

Some rules for defining simple things:
1. It’s got to be something that’s accessible; something you could make happen almost every day. So it can’t be like Christmas dinner, or that one great night out with all your friends. You can’t be happy only about things that happened in the past.
2. It’s got to be inexpensive (relatively speaking) and not especially time-consuming.
3. It can be a small physical object, or it can be a feeling or an experience, but it must be easily replicated.
4. It should be pretty unique to you. It can’t be something that makes everyone happy (finding your simple things should be a process of self-discovery). It can’t be lame, like “a child’s smile.”
5. These things must give you genuine delight. It doesn’t have to last a whole day, but there should be at least a moment when you are really pleased.
I’m going to try to be conscious of these things over the next few days to see what I come up with. Here are some that I thought of for other people.

LaRue: Petting squirrels, People’s ancestry
JR: Telling stories, doing impressions (or a combination of both)
Emily: Chatting in the EGSA lounge
Jennifer: Feeding people, Coordinating hanging out with food
Kristin: Mochas, babies
Laura: Reminiscing about childhood, bad movies, jalapenos

Dear John Krasinski

Dear John Krasinski,

You make me laugh every week in The Office. Oh, how I love your well-timed eyebrow raises, your joshing dork-charm, your floppy hair. Because you are my TV boyfriend, I have vowed to support you in your career. If (when) we get married, my last name won’t even sound that different.

But John, I cannot support your first major motion picture, License to Wed. Robin Williams? And not dark One Hour Photo Robin Williams, or paternal Good Will Hunting Robin Williams, or even inspirational Dead Poets Society Robin Williams! We’re talking Patch Adams Robin Williams! RV Robin Williams! Dear Lord, John, have you seen Bicentennial Man? Or -- *gasps, dry heaves* -- Flubber???!!!

Now I know Mandy Moore is really pretty. And I know that being in a rom-com will pay the bills and maybe land you a nicer, better part, perhaps a buddy-cop movie, or a Serious Drama. But you’re better than this, John. You deserve better. (Incidentally, I forgot the title and had to look it up on IMDB, which should tell you something. I was also going to re-watch the trailer to get more fodder for this post, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. In fact, I don’t know that I need to. That image of you dancing ridonkulously as well as the terrifying eyes of the fake twin babies will be burned into my consciousness for weeks.) In the future, and for the sake of our relationship, please stay away from the Krapinski.

Luv,
Faith

Wisdom From Rich Mullins

I just finished reading a “devotional biography” of Rich Mullins, a popular Christian music artist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 1997. The book combines quotes from Rich as well as others’ stories about him. I was interested in the book because just before he died, Mullins was considering converting to Catholicism. He was inspired by the work of St. Francis and even started his own semi-monastic order called “The Kid Brothers of St. Frank.” At the height of fame, he gave up touring, gave himself a $24,000 annual salary, donated the rest of his money to charity, and moved to a Native American reservation to teach music to kids. The book gave me a lot to think about, so I’m copying a few choice selections for you below.

Quotes from Rich Mullins:

I hear people say, “Why do you want to go to church? They are all just hypocrites.” I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite because nobody goes to church because they’re perfect. If you’ve got it all together, you don’t need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning.

And this is what liturgy offers that all the razzamatazz of our modern worship can’t touch. You don’t go home from church going, “Oh, I am just moved to tears.” You go home from church going, “Wow, I just took communion, and you know what? If Augustine were alive today he would have had it with me and maybe he is and maybe he did.”

Whatever church you are in you should just stay there. They are all equally messed up.

I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people willing to be the nuts and bolts.

God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharoah’s right hand man in Egypt. What he did give Joseph was eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing people’s affairs, and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was.

Many people believe that if you give e tithe to the church, then God will make you rich. Why? If you tithe, you get rid of ten percent of the root of all evil! You should be giving ninety percent because God can handle money better than we can.

[Speaking of legalism] I think it would be really easy to say, “I think what would really please God is if I don’t dance, I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls who do.” It would be easy to say, “Oh gee I think what will really please God is if I become and evangelist and convert a thousand people.” It’s much more difficult I think for me to become who I am and who He created me to be.

Growing up protestant, I always thought of a monastery as a place where cowards went, people who can’t deal with the world. When you really begin to research some of this stuff, you find that these are some of the bravest people. Anyone who decides to face themselves head-on is a very brave person.

[To a group of Christian writers] Stop thinking of what you’re doing as a ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it messed up or not; whether you flush your toilet or not. Your ministry is the way you love people. You love people when you call your wife and say, “I’m going to be late for dinner,” instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife when you know she’s really tired. If you are a Christian, ministry is just an accident of being alive. I don’t know that you can divide up your life and say, “This is my ministry,” and “This is my other thing,” because the fruits of Christianity affect everybody around us.

Stories about Rich:

One of the most memorable things was Rich’s dedication to spending time with Jesus. One year his Lenten exercise was to stay up one hour after he wanted to go to bed so that he could spend time with Jesus. The disciples, he said, couldn’t stay awake with Jesus when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Rich didn’t do it to be heroic; he just wanted to do something Jesus asked of his friends.

When Rich lived with our family, each morning on his way to school he took a cup of coffee with him. After a month or so, I noticed that there were no mugs in our cupboard. When Rich got home that night, I said that we were missing our mugs. He said, “Oh I think I have some in my truck.” We found at least 20 mugs sitting in the truck. Some were broken, and some were not even ours. For Rich, material possessions were things to be used, not possessed.

[From Rich’s accountant] He said he wanted to live at the average working man’s wage, which at the time was about $24,000 per year. Obviously, his songs were on the radio, and his albums were selling well, so he actually made several times more than that. He told me he did not want to know how much he made because it would make it harder to give away.

More on Borat

On my last post about George Saunders’ take on Borat, Brady (on Facebook) makes the excellent point that it’s unfair to hold up documentaries to traditional journalistic standards, and I couldn’t agree more. This mythic “standard of truth” was what irritated me about the whole James Fry vs. Oprah debacle: Oprah got mad because James Frey was representing as “truth” was Oprah did not believe was truth, but Oprah never bothered to consider the messy meaning of truth, or what it means to tell the truth, or the circumstances under which one is obligated to tell the truth, or the artistic sensibilities of memoir as a valid genre, or the complexities of memory. No. Oprah felt that some “facts” were “wrong” and got on TV and yelled at James Frey. So I agree that Sacha Baron Cohen (creator of Borat) and Michael Moore deserve some slack.

Brady also writes that Borat is really about Borat and his stunts, and maybe that’s whence the big laffs in the movie, but the stick-to-your-ribs sinking feeling that accompanies you out of the movie theater is from the moments where Borat, with his outsider charm, forces the viewer to confront his society. As I asked myself leaving the theater, “I live in a country where people want to kill gays?” This is not information I have to confront every day (straight privilege!), and I originally thought the movie was successful at jarring me into revelations about my culture.

And this is why Saunders’ argument is so compelling. He contends that Borat appears to be “edgy” and shocking and attention-grabbing and jaw-dropping and an indictment of modern culture. But really all Borat does is make fun of people it’s okay to make fun of : (1) People in power -- middle-class people, white people, Christians and (2) People without a voice – villagers in Kazakhstan. For a movie with a backwards, anti-semitic outsider as a protagonist, its targets are surprisingly politically correct. Saunders further argues that Borat is not trying to Make A Point (as would likely be the case for someone like Michael Moore); instead, he’s trying to make a buck. In this way, the movie isn’t really compelling at all. It’s really rather mundane and somewhat mean-spirited. It’s not that Borat’s facts are wrong, it’s that his motives are impure.

Roger Ebert says that one judges a movie based on how well it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Borat was not marketed as truthful or journalistic, and we can’t hold filmmakers to a standard of Truth if they don’t represent their movies that way. But before we start revering Borat as a piece of cultural criticism, we need to examine what and who is being criticized.

For those who enjoyed Borat . . .

Borat: The Memo

I've been meaning to post a link to this for some time. It's written by one of my favorite writers, George Saunders, for the New Yorker. Saunders writes the piece as though he's an exec producer of Borat, discussing what "extras" should be added for the DVD release. Essentially, he's making the argument that the movie takes cheap shots at easy targets (e.g. "rednecks"), failing to show a fuller picture of the complexities of the people behind the sterotypes. Though I read this several weeks ago (thanks to Steph for recommending it), it's been stuck in my head. I'm very interested to see what other folks think of it.

I want to be little parts of different things

Recently, I’ve been thinking that our society allows for very little nuance or ambiguity in our beliefs. For example, you have to choose a religion. Church-hopping with my parents as a kid and then also with LaRue, I’ve found that I don’t want to commit wholeheartedly to one religion, I want different parts of different religions. I like the community atmosphere of the Orthodox church, the worship music at The Crossing, the communion at the Catholic church. How come I can’t be different percentages of different religions?

This same thing happens with politics. What if you were just given, like ten votes, and you got to distribute those among the candidates? So if you thought Barack Obama’s health care plan was great, but you wanted a woman president, and you’re pro-life, you could put in four votes for Obama, and three for Hilary and three for a Republican candidate (or something like that). This might force people to actually think about the differences between the candidates instead of just voting for someone who agrees with “most” of what they believe. In fact, I think I remember David P telling me about some kind of election reform that was similar to this. David, care to comment?

I hope I don’t seem as though I’m noncommittal. I believe that ideological commitments have many places and purposes. I just think that if people weren’t given the option of pigeonholing their beliefs in one place, they might be forced to think about and articulate those beliefs more clearly.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

Or, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Here at Things Other Things, I’m always trying to be responsive. So I’ve decided to take a moment today to respond to some of the insightful feedback nuggets you nice folks have left for me.

In re: My post on Why TV is better than the Movies, Lesley astutely points out that a major downside of TV is that it gets abruptly canceled. I too have felt the sting of early cancellation! Curse you NBC for taunting me with the potent intellectualism of Studio 60, for once making me believe that America Is Real Smart, and then yanking out the carpet of Sorkin Speak! May your fall lineup rot like Olive Garden leftovers! A pox upon your house, HBO, for delightfully unraveling the mysteries of Carnivale only to tie up so tantalizing few by the end of season two that I was forced to get my fix of Biblical metaphor from *gasp*Network TV. (In fact, reflecting on those two shows in particular, I can see that both seemed to suffer for being too smart. Lesson today is that people hate smart.)

Anyway, I see Lesley’s conundrum, but I don’t think that movies necessarily do a better job of creating satisfying endings. For every Sixth Sense, there’s a The Village. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a movie with some burning unanswered question due to lazy filmmaking. The best examples I can think of are Lost in Translation and The Piano. “What?” you’re sitting there thinking. “What about?” Or “Whatever happened to?” My point is that TV shows often get cancelled and thus never end, but movies do not necessarily have more satisfying or effective closure. Thanks for this comment Lesley, and for being my friend even when I was a nerd in high school.

In re: My post on Why I Like Rosie, JR writes that just because someone is loud and obnoxious does not mean they are an effective communicator; therefore, Rosie’s rants on the View don’t actually accomplish anything. I would agree with JR that she’s not making any converts. I would argue that Rosie draws attention to issues that the American public prefers not to think about, and certainly doesn’t wish to discuss in the comfort of a morning talk show. I’m concerned that we live in a society where none of our popular culture reflects the Real World we live in. In our parents’ day, folks like Bob Dylan topped the charts with songs that talked about, for example, the complicated ethics of war and peace: “How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?” I randomly turned on the radio today to hear Fergie pondering the age-old question: “How come every time you come round my London London Bridge wanna go down?” With the exception of maybe Jon Stewart (and even he uses humor), can you think of any popular entertainers who consistently address Dylan’s issues? And this is why although Rosie isn’t a solution, she’s certainly a step in the right direction. However uncouthly, she can (London) bridge the gulf between the Paris Hilton-obsessed public and the troubles of the world it inhabits. Thanks for reading my blog, JR. I hope your London Bridge always goes down (Or something. I don’t actually know what that phrase means. As the Good Book says, “To the pure, all things are pure” Titus 1:15).

In re: My post on my favorite American Idol perfs, Kristin has helpfully alerted me to a circa 2002 Kelly Clarkson performance, which, like Kristin, is pretty fabulous. Watch it immediately! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64S5Rn9mlxs

In re: my post on Ian McEwan’s Saturday Jennifer writes (NOT because she’s procrastinating studying for comps, of course) about McEwan’s simile of the smell of hay drying in August. Jennifer objects that she would actually think something like this, but that hay dries in May, not August. Well, Jennifer, McEwan’s character lives in London, which may affect the time he dries his hay (those zany Brits! Drying hay year round!) Or perhaps he, like most of us, wouldn’t know when hay dries, and this is just another example of McEwan messing up point of view. Jennifer also writes that it is a trademark of modernism to write about the mundane in a grand way. She is correct, and I thought I said that in the post. If I wasn’t clear, what I meant was that McEwan is trying to achieve an effect of postmodernism by writing about the mundane, but his modernist impulses keep overtaking the writing. If you’re going to be pomo, for crying out loud, just be pomo, don’t try to dress it up. I’m saying that the writing feels torn between the two and is the worse for it. And I was going to make the connection not only to Ulysses, but also to Mrs. Dalloway, thankyouverymuch, but then I got tired and remembered I was supposed to be on vacation. Thus, Jennifer, I will allow you to cook me dinner sometime and I will pontificate for you to no end (or at least until dessert).

Thanks for the comments, folks! Please keep writing!

Travels, Anti-Materialism, Contemporary Fiction/Taco Bell, Early Rising

Michelle Williams’ New Haircut. Okay, most importantly: Should I get my hair cut like this?

Travels. Here are the places I’ve been in 2007: Chicago; Puerto Vallarta (Mexico); Osage Beach, MO; St. Louis, MO; Atchison, KS; Louisville, KY; New York City; Tucson, AZ; Columbus, OH; Lawrence, KS; Green Bay, WI; Minocqua, WI

Anti-Materialism. I try to be anti-materialistic. I believe in being happy with the bare minimum because I believe that it is the goal of big companies to convince you that what you’ve got isn’t any good. For example, Apple tries to convince you that your Ipod is old and out-of-date, thus conning you into buying a new one. So I try to be happy with what I’ve got. My cell phone, for example, is pretty ancient. I kept my last laptop for three years. But I seem to keep getting stymied in my anti-materialism by things breaking. I would have happily gone on with my old laptop except that the battery and power cord gave out (which is something, considering both survived the Fire of ’06, plugged in on the power strip right next to the pyromaniacal air conditioner). I can be satisfied with a computer that doesn’t burn DVDs; I cannot be happy with a computer that only stays on for an hour at a time. How is one supposed to be satisfied with what one’s got when it keeps breaking?

The State of Contemporary Fiction and Taco Bell. I recently read Ian McEwan’s Saturday and I didn’t like it, despite the fact that it’s received rave critical reviews. This book suffered from a problem I see everywhere in contemporary fiction – it elevates the mundane to the majestic with really no purpose except metaphor. The result is descriptions like this one of a squash match (though the close-third person narrator): “Every point is now a drama, a playlet of sudden reversals” (115) and the main character is full of “seriousness and fury” as well as “the incredible urge to win, biological as thirst” (115). And though I’ve never played squash, I read that and think, “Really? You’re in a squash match thinking of phrases like ‘seriousness and fury’?” Because I’ve sat and stared at a blinking cursor for hours and never come up with anything half as poetic as “seriousness and fury.” I’m not even convinced that Ian McEwan himself would think something like that such a situation. Or take his description of a smell” “like warm hay drying in the fields in August.” I get that a character might smell something and think it smells like hay, even drying hay. But the specificity of warm hay? In fields? In August? Now, there’s several problems here, foremost that McEwan isn’t considering his character’s point of view, but what I’m concerned with is the fact of window dressing. McEwan feels the postmodern impulse to represent the mundane (and rejects the modern impulse to be grandiose or epic), but he still wants to write in an epic style. He uses his prose to elevate the mundane. Why? Because people’s lives are boring, but fiction can’t be.

I’m connecting this to Taco Bell, and then I’ll finish my point. Really everything at Taco Bell is some combination of the same ingredients: cheese, meat, shell, lettuce. And yet Taco Bell has like 50 incarnations of these ingredients on their menu to convince you that there’s always something new:, Gordita, Chalupa, that thing that is shaped like a stop sign and you can apparently eat anywhere! They’ve even convinced you of Fourthmeal – a whole extra meal of the day for eating the same damn thing! Anyway, I feel like McEwan’s problem is that he’s really just taking taco parts and marketing them as a Crunchwrap Supreme. I read the above section of his book, and I’m thinking “squash game” and he’s thinking “metaphor for the struggle for male dominance in society as manifested in competitive sports” or something, and no amount of fancy writing is able to convince me otherwise.

“But Faith, isn’t that pretty anti-postmodern of you to say that a squash game is just a squash game? Doesn’t that imply that there’s some kind of Objective Reality out there?”

I guess I’m arguing that McEwans’ primary problem is that he describes everything with such intensity and Significance that it rings false. The premise of Saturday is that it’s one day in the life (one Saturday) of the main character and in order to justify why he’s chosen this Saturday as opposed to any other day, McEwan creates passages like the one above. I’m arguing that if you’re going to write about A Day in the Life, you need to have a really good reason as to why you’ve picked that day.

Early Rising. When I move to Arizona, I want to start getting up earlier. Like 5am early. I’m just noting this here so there’s some means of accountability.

What I Learned in Graduate School (besides stuff about books)

1. I learned that I have a tendency to stress out about things that end up not being a big deal in the end. Last summer I did some journaling because I was so stressed out about things that were going to happen this year. Reflecting on those writings, I realized that really none of it was anything I should have panicked about. This connects to Emily’s extremely well-noted quote on her Facebook page about how graduate school is a time for discovering your neuroses.
2. I am capable of doing many things. This past year I applied to nine PhD programs, was accepted to eight, visited three. I presented at three regional and one national conference. I conducted an intensive ethnography and wrote a master’s thesis about it. I took four graduate-level classes. I taught three classes, and conducted weekly tutorials. I made many new friends and contacts, and I think I had a pretty good social life. I can do more than I think I can. I think I sometimes sell myself short. I am capable of focusing on the Important things. (As a side note related to my earlier post about GTD, I also found that focusing on the important things does not mean that all the other Things go away.)
3. Teaching sustains me and energizes me. (In a similar vein, I learned the truth of Wendy Bishop’s statement that we must see students as “people trying to make sense of their lives.”)
4. I’m good at school. I like the schedule: the rhythm of the week and the cycle of the school year. I like papers and syllabi.
5. It’s important to learn everyone’s name and their story.
6. Questions are more important than answers. Questions lead you somewhere, energize you, and give you purpose and direction. Answers are finite, oversimplified, and stagnant. Seeking a better question is just as important as seeking a better answer. My whole thesis took off once I bothered to sit down and figure out what questions I was asking rather than what my thesis “said.” It’s okay to answer a question with another question.
7. TV is great. I never really watched TV until graduate school. I find TV to be relaxing but not enervating. It’s also a great way to talk to people. The best TV shows can be analyzed on a higher level or just enjoyed for the pleasure of watching.
8. Instead of trying to distinguish yourself by being smarter than everyone else, focus on working harder than everyone else. When I first came to grad school, I thought everyone was smarter than me, but it turns out they had just read more books. They were thus able to make more connections than I was. Being organized and dependable and on top of my game got me really far in grad school. I first learned this when I was tutoring my first semester. Students would say they didn’t like their comp teachers and I would ask why. I was expecting an answer like “She grades too hard” or “She’s boring” but a lot of the time they would say, “She’s really disorganized.” Somehow, being young and female is equated with being incompetent in our society. People don’t expect you to be creative and brilliant every day – they do expect you to be prepared and have a plan every day.
9. People’s writing tends to reflects who they are as a person.
10. Write early, write often, write about everything, even if it’s garbage. Having anything written is always better than having nothing written.
11. Things that might seem like stumbling blocks can actually be great challenges. There are aspects of the MU program that, at the outset, would have been unappealing to me, but in time turned out to be challenges that I am proud of meeting.
12. Never post to a listserve. Ever.
13. The best cure for my own anxiety is to sit down and make a plan for what I’m going to do about the issue for the next couple of months. Then I break it down into a manageable to-do lists. This does WONDERS for my sanity. It also helps to write down exactly what about the thing stresses me out. Typically when I reflect on this, I feel silly. The problem seems smaller.
14. Be here now. I’ve reflected on many times in my graduate school days and thought “Wow that was a fun day, but I was really stressed out about …” I wish that I’d just lived in the moment more.

Things I’m still learning
1. I’m still learning how to ask for help, and how to depend on other people.
2. I’m learning to not be envious of others’ success.
3. I’m learning to make it work, meaning that I’m learning to take things that are garbage and make them beautiful.
4. I’m trying to distinguish between things that need a lot of my time and attention and even stress and things that do not require anxiety.
5. I need to learn to balance teaching with my own work.

More Kinks in My GTD System

Getting Things Done recommends that you simplify, simplify, simplify by focusing on what your big goals are and only doing the tasks that help you accomplish those goals. I recently complained to Jennifer, my shiny new roommate that I had problems knowing what my goals were. Just like the GTD system seemed to be biased towards corporate types, it also seems to be biased towards people who know more than I do what they want out of life. For example:

Faith’s Goal #1: Be a professor. Okay, that sounds like a good goal, except if I really think about it, it’s pretty fuzzy. A professor where? A big university (such as those I’ve attended thus far)? A teaching college? (Jennifer recommends Truman – thanks Jennifer!) Do I want to teach graduate students or undergraduates? And what if I want to be a writing program administrator? Do I want to do administrative work? And maybe I don’t want to be a professor – I’ve also thought about teaching at a private high school or boarding school. What if I end up disenfranchised with the system of higher ed? Also, I was reading this article in Newsweek and it sounds like these schools could be cool places to work. And what is this “professor” identity anyway? What if my goal to be a professor conflicts with a goal to be a teacher or advisor or dean or chair? Or wife, mother, friend, humanitarian, pet owner, American Idol finalist ….

Another kink in the system is that little things don’t go away just because you don’t focus on them. For example, this semester I did a good job of saying to myself that my thesis was absolutely the number one most important thing (in GTD speak, that’s an MIT or Most Important Task). So when I had a free hour or two and I was trying to figure out what to do, I always went to the thesis. This meant that my thesis got done. But that did not, in fact, make other things go away. Papers did not grade themselves. So while it was great that the thesis went well, I was plagued with a lot of loose ends.