Life After (stupid) People

There is a new show on The History Channel that I absolutely can't stand. It's called Life After People. It's based off of a two hour special that aired last year that was pretty successful. I have to admit, I watched the special and a couple of the show's episodes because I like the ideas it explores. The show seeks to investigate how long the remains of human civilization will last without humans to preserve them and how human-made landscapes with morph over time. It examines how and why structures and materials deteriorate and decay. As Spock would so aptly put it, “Fascinating.”

My beef is with the show's tone.

The music, shots, narrator and graphics are meant to portray a world without humans as creepy. It seeks to unsettle its viewers with the idea that the elements are really far more powerful than anything humans can create. Okay, maybe it's just me, but I think that portraying nature as invading and sinister is just plain wrong. Get over it folks; the Earth was here before Us and it will be here after Us. Perhaps the most horrifying example of this show trying to scare people was in a segment about Hashima, Japan, an abandoned mining city that stands of an example of “life after people.” The showed a shot of a rusted jungle gym with the distorted sound of children laughing, as if the very souls of the children who used to play there still haunt it, as if Mother Nature killed them. (Note: The mining company actually relocated all the residents of Hashima, so those kids all went on living somewhere else in Japan. In fact, they even had one of the former residents, who grew up in Hashima, on the show.)

There's also the fact that some of the stuff they talk about on the show is obvious. Just in case you didn't know, without people to replace light bulbs and run power grids, Times Square will be dark! (cue spooky radio frequency sounds).

This show has successfully shown that nature is out to get Us. It's just another great example of how people can take a great idea, chew it up, digest it, and crap it onto television.

déjà vu

This feels like déjà vu. It’s certainly been a while since I last posted, but with winter break on the horizon, I feel you have a good month worth of posting to look forward to.

I had a similar, very odd feeling of déjà vu this morning as I ate my breakfast. As I was eating a clementine and watching the beginning of After the Wedding (a film I need to finish watching tonight before its due back tomorrow), I had the strangest feeling of being back in Bristol. I realized that this is because what I was doing (eating a breakfast of clementines and watching a movie) was ma routine for most of my time there. Before I began my day, I usually had enough time to watch movie or a few episodes of a television show. It was a pretty sweet deal. I got to catch up on a ton of movies I’d mean meaning to watch. They were mostly classics. I’m glad to say my cinematic references expanded quite a bit.

Right now, as I finish my 7th round of college exams, (7/8th of my undergraduate degree completed!), I’m realizing probably won’t get to loaf around like that again for a very long time. So, in spite of appearing like a bit of a lazy bones recluse for five months, I’m looking at that time as fuel for the years of work ahead of me until I reach retirement or become a professional writer, whichever comes first. I’m aiming for writing picture books for children. Writing. Not illustrating. I’ll leave that to someone with more talent and time of their hands.

"What's a motto with you?"

The illustrious Tim Gunn of television’s Project Runway has a certain catch phrase that serves a sort of motto for the designers on the show as well as everyone at my school: Make it work.

Don’t have enough sequins to cover a model's boobs?
Make it work.
Need to write a 20 page paper in 24 hours?
Make it work.
Your meal plan only covers 14 meals per week yet you find yourself hungry a third time each day?
Make it work.
Ran out of all your toiletries? At the same time?
Make it work.

This phrase, really, can be applied to all realms of life but tends to work particularly well when applied to situations of high stress. When you have no idea what to do, this motto tells you exactly what to do in three simple words. For certain situations, however, I’ve created a new phrase: Make it happen.

Want some ice-cream?
Make it happen.
Need a sweater-like-item for the cold?
Make it happen.
Think you might look good with bangs?
Make it happen.
Wishing for a reason to dance?
Make it happen.

It seems like I so often forget that I have the power to make things happen. My hope is that with this new little catch phrase I can regain the sense of control I've lost in my life. I'd like to get some of that control back. I intend to Make It Happen.

Chévere: *

A few moments ago I viewed something truly amazing.

While watching Mythbusters (one of the best shows on television) on TLC, a channel aired in English, I saw a commercial in Spanish. The commercial was a car commercial for Infinity and, more importantly, there was nothing distinctly Latino about it. It was not “targeting” a consumer group with a gimmick in any way other than the language in which it was spoken. The man in the commercial wasn't driving to a quinceañera or through el barrio. It was the same commercial that would have been used in English. The only difference was the voice over.

I don't know if airing this commercial on TLC was an accident but I'd like to hope it wasn't. If it wasn't, infinity is presuming that people who speak Spanish watch English speaking channels. It takes note not of a non-English speaking population in the United States, but of a bilingual one, an ever growing one that will soon, I believe, make our nation virtually a bilingual one. With actors like James Roday, one of the stars of Psych, (whose real name is James Rodriguez), coming forward as Latino is a good example of the growing importance of a Latino presence in media.

This excites me for two reasons. 1) Way to go Infinity for not using a gimmick. Those “cultural gimmicks” are the reason I couldn't stand some of the earlier McDonalds “I'm lovin' it” adds, as they clearly and specifically targeted an “urban” audience (read: black/ African-American) or “general” audience (read: white). 2) Infinity and TLC recognize that language is not a barrier; it's a bridge.

Let's face it, Mythbusters is awesome, no matter what language you speak. But then, this could have all been an accident.

*Chévere: old-school Newyorican** word for cool, fantastic

** Newyorican: a New Yorker of Puertorrican decent.

"...a dimension not only of sight and sound..."

It’s less than 24 hours before the 4th of July and that can only mean one thing: Twilight Zone marathon! For certain holiday weekends, the SciFi channel gives a 48 hour marathon of the complete series of The Twilight Zone, a.k.a. one of the greatest shows ever made. Rod Sterling, creator and primary writer for the series, (a guy who had some serious cerebral traffic), was in every way a genius writer and director. Each episode displays absolute mastery of writing, filming and acting. In less than twenty minutes a complete story unravels, with characters that have depth, plots that twist but close. The stories are simple but have no less of an effect on the mind; after every first viewing of an episode your brain will explode.
Sterling not only produced entertaining television full of horror, thrill and mystery, most of the episodes are also direct social commentaries on the 1960’s. The Twilight Zone is a place the viewer enters and leaves at the start and end of each episode. It serves as an imagined literal and figurative space to discuss many of the issues affecting Americans and the Western world of 1959-1964. The Cold War, space race, roles of men and women, capitalism, religion, the institution of the family and many other issues are constantly challenged and examined from many different angles. We enter the Twilight Zone with a warning, a dare. This challenge, like the eerie quality of each episode, is meant to carry on after the 20 minutes of the show have ended. These challenges and reevaluations are really what the 1960’s were all about.

"Feudal Japan... ninjas and shit."

There is this AMAZING show my father and I stumbled across while channel surfing. It’s called Ninja Warrior. It’s a Japanese game show that is being aired in the U.S. on G4, one of the 1,001 shows on satellite cable. I’ve never gotten worked up about any sort of game show yet this show had me whooping and hollering at the television like my energy could actually help the underdog homeroom teacher clear the rope jump. I think I’ve just found a new favorite show. Take a look.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=R4NbSvBkxgQ

I get it from somewhere

Are my parents funny? Yes, they really amuse me. Case in point:My father regularly, almost religiously, falls asleep in front of the television. I, as the young and agile one, am summoned by my mother to go downstairs and wake him. Some time ago I was sitting with my mom upstairs when she told me to do this. Being the lazy genius that I am, I picked up my cell phone and called my dad to tell him to wake up. It truly was perfect as 1) it usually takes five minutes plus to actually wake him with just my voice, and 2) we can call each other for free. It made sense. My mother turned to me as I did this and gave me a look of confusion and disgust. “What?” I asked. She just shook her head in shame. “What kind of a mother have I been?” she rhetorically asked.
Cut to three months later:
I’m sitting with my mother again when she says, “We should wake your dad up.” Whenever she says ‘We’ she usually means ‘you, daughter’, so I expected I would have to do my usual duty. Not a moment passed before she picked up her cell phone and dialed my father. I turned to her, my stoicism silently demanding an answer. When I received none, I pointed out how she’d called me lazy for doing the same thing a few months earlier. “When you’re right you’re right,” she told me. She and my dad agreed that it was easier to wake up to the ringing of his cell phone than anyone spending ten minutes coaxing him to consciousness and reasoning with him to just go to bed.
So, yes, my parents are hilarious.

Done is Good

I took my last exam of the term today. I'd been waiting three weeks (since my penultimate exam) to take the damn thing. Normally once I finish an exam I'm filled with this gigantic, thrilling sensation of relief and joy. I didn't even have it in me to feel all that pleased. Over the past three weeks, the prospect of this exam has been slowly draining my life force out of me like a terminal illness. Then, some time near midnight it dawned on me: I was done. The relief was delayed but it finally came. I celebrated with two cups of Sainsbury's tiramisu and a marathon of Wonderfalls.

When something is done, when it ends, you never know how to feel about it. Sometimes you think you know how you should feel and sometimes you do feel that way but more often than not, we surprise ourselves. Presumably, when something ends, you're coming out of a liminal state. The word “liminal” comes from the Greek word for “threshold”, the space of an archway between two rooms. In a rite of passage, it's the transition from one part of your life to another. Coming out of that state of liminalty can be disorienting or even frightening. Yet, once this period comes to an end, something new is positioned to begin.

Somewhere between my second cup of tiramisu and the last episode of Wonderfalls, a small bit of the universe revealed itself to me. It may seem obvious, but I realized things are ending every single moment. That sentence, it just ended. There, it happened again! Spacetime itself is a series of points that propel those who exist in it forward along a line, ending our stay at one moment in time and moving us to the next. Even spacetime has an end (in theory) which (in theory) is directly followed by a new universe composed of a new spacetime formed from the mass of the one that preceded it.

All things come to an end; a life, a relationship, a school term. The end is not the end, though. To recognize that is pretty useful. Family is always family. Love never dies. Academia will always suck at your soul. Once something is over, however, you're able to understand it from the outside looking in, reflect on it, feel relief. Granted, you're probably about to be thrown into something just as big as whatever you just came out of but for a few moments, at least, the universe might open itself to you long enough to get some insight on whatever existence is about to throw at you.

That was heavy. Now you all know why I don't smoke pot; my mind would undoubtedly EXPLODE.