THIS CRANBERRY LIFE

As you may be able to tell, I’ve finally re-entered all the entries of my blog (and backed them up), and over the next few weeks I’ll be trying to figure out what to do with the site. Until then, feel free to rummage through all these old posts.

Just a heads-up, tomorrow I’ll be visiting my sister until Saturday, so I probably won’t be updating until then. Have a great Thanksgiving.

In many ways, Law & Order: Criminal Intent has similarities to other television police dramas. Its one significant difference is that for the last ten minutes of the show, the show’s star character delves into the psychology of the person who commits the crime of the story. The show’s writers clearly have an understanding of criminal profiling and psychology, which is wonderful to see after fifty years of “catch the bad guy.”

The episodes sympathize with so-called “criminals”, and despite their always being carted off to jail at the story’s conclusion, we get a clear view understanding that there is no such thing as a criminal or low-life or bad guy, only human beings with problems, some of them quite serious of course. Or at least if not sympathize, show a clear understanding of human behavior.

I think I really like the show because in the end there is no good guy or bad guy. Really, all there is is understanding. Sometimes even the people who perpetrate the crimes don’t seem to understand themselves, but it is the main character who figures everything out, and puts in the effort to not only be a good investigator but also a good human being. It reminds me of all the times in the past I’ve said, “I don’t care if you agree with me, but I want you to understand me.”

Sadly, with the show’s move to the USA Network, the quality has drastically dropped to the point where it is just another police drama.

Although the movie was released in 2001, I just watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It is really refreshing to see independent films every so often. I used to watch more, but got tired of them, and then stuck basically with fun Hollywood stuff. The story began as a stage play in 1998, and the film was written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. The character is loosely based on Mitchell himself, but regardless of character or writer, I cannot help but feel inadequate and boring compared to them both.

What I see is a person who has done a lot in life, who has led an interesting life, is straightforward and headstrong, and accomplished a great deal in life. And they sure seem to be doing what they want. These are all things I don’t feel I have. I find it hard sometimes to remember that people like Mitchell have been in the entertainment business for a long time, and as people themselves, have been entertaining even longer. And this entertainment appears as a form of reality, which is exactly what it is not. It’s easy to get sucked into thinking that a fictional situation, even based in reality, is reality.

Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe it’s irrelevant whether or not they literally have done all these things or live life as portrayed. I wonder if it’s simply a message for us to live our lives the best we can and the best we know how. I do a lot of comparing of my life to others, which I know is not the most constructive way to do things. I heard once that a child’s innocence is lost when they change from simply enjoying the creating of a sandcastle on the beach, to comparing it to the other child’s sandcastle nearby. I’ve certainly tried not to compare as best as I can, but other times nothing else enters my mind. It’s hard breaking old habits, and I think habits of the way we look at life may be among the hardest to break.

Earlier today, some people in chat (at urnotalone.com) were talking about their parents, and as usual, I had to mention my own. A couple of people had mentioned how their parent(s) had abused them, and I said that although I myself wasn’t abused, I was emotionally abandoned. Incredibly to me, one of the people had mentioned that they still talk to the parent in question who had abused them, and I said I wasn’t able to do that myself.

Every so often the topic comes up and I realize how much work I have to do about how I feel about my own parents. I have tried a little bit to resolve the differences, but I’ve never felt they cared about the past enough to want to resolve it either. So far I’ve just gotten to a point where I’m pissed off and angry at them still.

Whenever we have to leave the cats overnight or even for a few days, I worry about them. I don’t really worry so much whether or not they have enough food or water, but sometimes I worry that they think we abandoned them. They’ve been on their own a couple of days here and there so any trip we go on, I know they’ll be okay. I guess I’m worrying about how they’ll feel.

I’ve seen a dog who get very down and depressed every day his owner goes out. It is always plainly obvious. I tried to pet and reassure him everything’s okay, and I don’t feel too badly because it’s only a short period of time. If our cats feel this way when we go out on long trips, I wonder if they feel as depressed as that dog, and the thought that they might feel that for days just tears me up inside. I try to avoid thinking about it altogether because it would just be too hard knowing that I made them feel that bad, and my logical side is able to win out for the most part.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’ll able to feel better about the cats until I can feel better about my parents. At least the cats know I care about them 99% of the time.

I think by now most people have seen Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 Spielberg film about a unit of soldiers going through the French countryside looking for a soldier from another unit. Throughout the film, an ongoing joke among the men is that they don’t know the profession of their leader Capt. Miller at home. Finally he reveals that he is a teacher, to the surprise of his men.

The way I interpret these scenes is that Miller’s men don’t view him as someone who could be a teacher, not the way they’ve known him - only in battle, and successful. Someone can be very ordinary and unheroic in everyday life, since life is pretty boring by comparison anyway, and yet can be a solid leader. He looks at the job of soldier in a very straightforward way, in that if something has to be done, be smart about it, and do it. And I think that is the most important factor in being a leader - taking action.

This sort of carries over from the previous post about PostSecret, about seeing what you’re made of when pressured. It has to do with making your life have meaning. I guess all in all I find that too much of my life is passing me by, with little action, so I’d best do something about it if I want to be happier.

Okay, maybe “screwing up” is kind of a negative term. What I do, however, is keep myself from being constructive. Did you ever talk to someone, then maybe you got angry or upset, and maybe a bit of a dispute, then later you feel stupid but you still don’t want to resolve anything? That’s where I am now. It’s like you hear people say sometimes, if someone wants to feel bad, then they will feel bad, and that’s where I am now.

Many times it’s fairly easy to resolve. Just screw up the courage and apologize for your part in the dispute. I’ve done it before many times, though fewer times than I’d have liked. I’ve made a lot of progress though. I’ve been in a lot fewer arguments and tiffs, and I’ve apologized a lot too. Sometimes I’m just not up to the challenge though. I do feel bad about not resolving the issue, but I am also worrying a little less about it.

Sometimes I start to wonder why I’m like this, why I still find it hard to resolve these issues, but these days I don’t worry about it too much. “Understanding is a delaying tactic”, I read, and I believe it. All I really care about is my feelings, and empathy for the other person. And the pain from the past that was brought up in the first place.

Anyway, this isn’t very well composed, so if you know who you are, sorry..

This is for you cat people out there. I’m lucky to know not only one of my best friends Kristy, but also her two cats.

Mr Fuzz is a black and white “mask and mantle” cat. He was born of a cat who was rescued but no longer lives with him, and subsequently has spent his whole life with Kristy. His personality is cute as the dickens despite his slightly heavy twelve pound frame. He’s really curious and gets into pretty much everything. His favorite hobby is to knock things off a table or counter one item at a time, enjoying the loud noise each item makes as it hits the floor. You can pick him up pretty much whenever you want but is at best indifferent about being pet, though he likes being scratched in the jowls.

Miss Kitty is a black and white tuxedo cat, with a white bib, white front toes, white boots on the back, and the tiniest touch of white fuzz on her upper lip. She was rescued from a hard life on the streets and possibly as a result of this, is very skittish, though friendly when she feels safe. She’s really cute the rare times she plays with something, and never pick her up because she doesn’t like it. She loves being pet or scratched or brushed pretty much any time if you can catch her for the fifteen minutes during the day she’s actually awake.

The two of them together is another matter entirely. Mr Fuzz either harasses or plays with Miss Kitty depending on how you look at it. A typical situation is that Fuzz will walk by Kitty within about six to twelve inches, at which point Kitty hisses and bats at Fuzz, who ignores the entire display. At times he will chase or jump on Kitty, which could be interpreted as trying to have fun or as harassing Kitty, since she hisses and growls and runs away the whole time. By the way, he outweighs her by about 50%.

I remember when I first visited Kristy, we went on a trip for the weekend which means the cats were left alone. They would not be getting their daily canned cat food and would have only the dry stuff to sustain them. There would be no humans around. I thought their lives were upset to some degree. I also wondered if they thought we might be gone forever or not, or if they would even miss us. I thought that they might, but I wasn’t sure. In any case, I felt like I was abandoning them, even after only knowing them a brief time, I was wondering if that’s what they felt. It was all I could do to remind myself that they had gone through this many times before, since Kristy had been on previous trips before.

I still found it painful though. These little animals who were so easy to love, were so friendly to me, and now I was leaving them. I worried about them several times over the weekend, and was even wondering if that degree of concern was enough or was I insensitive. Of course, we got back and they were happy to see us, and within a few minutes, everything was as it had been, and they were no worse for wear.

Still, the whole incident made me wonder about the feeling of abandonment I had. I still think about it today.

In the 1995 film Strange Days, a technology exists for a person to tap into their cerebral cortex to record and play back their experiences. The main character, Lenny, uses this as a means of escapism much like a drug to re-experience the good times of his life when he was with his former girlfriend. At one point his best friend Lornette “Mace” Mason crushes some of his disks, where his memories are stored and tells him:

I worry about myself, and for society in general sometimes. There seem to be so many examples of people reliving past memories and feelings, possibly at the expense of the present. I watch old movies repeatedly as the years go by, and I listened to old music. Though I do get new movies and music now, I sometimes wonder if I pay too much attention to the old stuff.

When I was a kid, I used to watch tv every single day, for probably anywhere from four to eight hours a day. “It’s Monday, M*A*S*H is on tonight” and “it’s Friday, Miami Vice night” came weekly. Until about ten years ago, I only used to listen to music I grew up with. I did this because the past held the years of my life that were most care-free and worthwhile when I could escape my feelings, while as I got older, and less able to deal with the world around me, I kept slipping back to those older memories, and emotions.

Star Trek has been a big part of my life. I don’t mean I watch old TV shows and go to conventions, but rather since I escaped to it so much over the years and it was always there in one form or another, it is one of the things I run to for a break from my feelings about my life. It is an idealistic and simple world where there are rules and I know what to expect, and it’s no coincidence that these are all things I feel that life can never guarantee for me.

I’m happy to say that I hardly ever listen to the music I knew growing up anymore, and I don’t watch any particular kind of television regularly, though it is often on for background noise. I’ve also found a lot of new and interesting music I’d never heard of before. Unfortunately, I do sometimes find it fairly easy to fall into new movies as a form of escapism today, though not too much, since I’m always loathe to spend two hours of my time in such escapism.

As always, life is a journey and change is usually slow. Perhaps it’s not whether or not I escape too often, but rather it is the fact that I’m afraid to do it, because with escaping comes those past feelings of loneliness and rejection that I was escaping from in the first place. Maybe if I can better remember what Lenny did the end of Strange Days, I might be able to find more value in the story than simply a worthwhile quotation. I wonder if it’s worth rewatching…

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Back in my old Star Trek days, I watched a lot of TNG. I also collected a lot of books and magazines, and I also recorded a lot of TV shows and specials. After TNG ended, I remember watching an interview with Marina Sirtis who played Counselor Troi. In discussing the days while the show was still on the air, she mentioned that she thought that a lot of people must have thought the cast was insular and cliquey, because whenever they all went to various social and business functions together, they all ended up just talking with each other and not mingling too much, whereas the truth was, they just all enjoyed each other’s company that much.

The show ran for seven years, 178 episodes, and then four feature films, a total of roughly fifteen years.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

I got quite obsessed with LotR for the three years or so that the movies were being released. Eventually, I bought them all on DVD and watched them all again, except this time I enjoyed them multiple times. I watched them as films, with each of the three or four commentary tracks, and also watched all the DVD extras.

The Lord of the Rings was an exceptional popular culture event. For the first time, three films were shot back to back to back, and the cast ended up spending over fourteen months together making the movie. They said that consider themselves family and they’ll be friends the rest of their lives because of the experience.

Filming and promotion of the three films spanned over four years.

F*R*I*E*N*D*S

I used to hate Friends. I thought that it was a bunch of hip young Hollywood pretty faces thrown together with mass-appeal concepts to try to create a hit TV show. I remember flipping through the channels one time just in time to hear Chandler say, “Guess what? I had sex last night!” and I thought that it didn’t sound like particularly inspired writing. I think I have an issue with being fed something popular as opposed to discovering and appreciating something for its merits on my own.

Later, in 2001, There was an extra long episode of friends, and to fill in some time, there was a blooper show “Friends: The Stuff You’ve Never Seen”, hosted by Conan O’Brien and featuring the whole cast. What really struck me was what good friends all the cast really is in real life. Despite some cynics wondering if that is really true or not, it seemed obvious to me. After enjoying the show, with the bloopers being great examples of how everyone enjoyed themselves so much making the show, I saw the regular episodes in a new light. I could see not just the mediocre writing, but the actors, the people enjoying performing together, saying the lines together, and having fun together with the characters and stories. I think I heard them say that they would all be real friends for life.

Friends ran for ten years on NBC.

* * * * *I’ve been more or less alone for most of my life. You can count the handful of “friends” I’ve had at any given time but for the most part they were very few, and I was never very good friends with them, evidenced by the fact that today I only talk to three of them anymore, and they are all hundreds of miles away from me (and we all have what I consider serious personal issues). Not that they didn’t act like friends, but it just never seemed like other people’s friendships seemed.

For a long time, even before these three examples, I have wished for friendships like this, but I never knew how anyone ever went about it. I just thought of how great it would be to have so many such close friends around that you know you have a friend for life. I still find that a scary thought for some reason. What made me sad was that it seemed like these were such great people that even though I didn’t really know anything about them, I always thought that even if I had the chance, I wasn’t someone that they would want to be friends with. It seems obvious today that I had a low self-esteem, but back then I thought it was just the luck of the draw - either you were a terrific person or you weren’t.

My life is far better today than it was. I’m happier, I have more friends, and I think that people treat me better than they ever have before. I wouldn’t want to say that that is because I am such a great person, but I think I have learned to act nicer, be more positive, less negatively, and talk to people in a way that was different than in the past, like really caring and connecting better with people better now than before.

It’s a long road, and although I am not at that ideal spot I thought existed, it doesn’t matter nearly as much anymore, I’m happy to be where I am, and a little wiser knowing that there are more ways to have friends than I used to think.