meaning in the moving design

I'm a huge fan of This American Life. I download the podcast almost every week, hoarding them for those long line-ups, layovers and other periods of travel tedium (the stuff no one talks about when they romanticize being 'on the road'- the waiting). Still, as much as I love TAL, lately it's been falling a little flat for me. There will be a good act, followed by a boring bit, and sometimes I don't even make it to the end. This, coming from someone who used to treat TAL as a bedtime story, who would curl up every night in bed and listen with warm and geeky anticipation...*

So, with 3 hours to kill in the Manila airport, I'm glad I picked a good one today. The episode is called Human Resources, and it is really bloody interesting/funny/thought-provoking from beginning to end. In a nutshell: where NYC teachers go when they've been bad, gentrification and displacement, and chimpanzee retirement homes.

This American Life is the way that public radio should be: interesting, well-produced and FREE. I try to donate when i can to keep it that way.


Ok, and to tangent (or to follow this thinly shared theme of gentrification), I also saw a really great film recently called Home, by Swiss director Ursula Meier. The film centers around a family who've built a house in the idyllic fields at the edge of an abandoned highway. Their carefree lives are upended when news hits that the highway will finally be opened. The cars and traffic become an unnerving source of noise and pollution, driving the family to take increasingly drastic measures to preserve their home and way of life.
Home weilds the displacement metaphor like a blunt object, and the series of blows it deals, as the family goes from coping with positive thinking and tight smiles to trying not to completely lose their shit, are crushing and emotionally raw. It helps that it's also amazingly well-acted, especially by Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher) as the mother and Kacey Mottet Klein, who plays little Julien. I feel a little out of the loop- I'd heard nothing about this film and only chanced upon it when a friend invited me out. It was a really pleasant surprise and exceptionally well done for a first-time feature. I says "Check it out, yo."


*I know, I know. There are other great radio shows deserving of praise. Radio Diaries is awesome, radiolab's ok, and DNTO for some down home canadianness. But... I don't know, I think it's Ira Glass' voice. It's so matter-of-fact. Most radio personalities tend to come off sounding a little too theatrical, literary, contrived. Ira's voice is totally the secret to TAL's success. I'm convinced that new contributors secretly have to attend Ira training, where they learn to imitate and perfect his style of pause and nuance. And I swear that at least one of their producers was hired purely on account of the fact that he sounds just like him...

I've had a pretty ambivalent relationship with rituals all my life. In that I don't particularly like them, but sometimes I need them. They can be a nice, powerful anchoring energy... or just a really fuckin heavy anchor.

I've spent a big chunk of my life bouncing between several different jobs, contracts, and countries. And while I've managed to retain the same friends for the past some years, I've got lots of little groups of them to move between. So. What does ritual mean to me? Lately, I've been thinking about the rare rare times in my life when "ritual" has worked. When a constant felt comforting and not stagnating...

Ok, there was the invaluable ritual of going to tai chi twice a week, which gave me two much-need weekly excuses to leave my house in the dead of winter and socialize. I would say this same ritual helped me through a fair bit of depression as well. Um... sushi? Does sushi count? How about brunch??

Truth told, the only time I think it's actually worked was in Cambodia. Against all odds, I managed not only to spend 3 months doing the same thing every bloody day, but I managed to love it, like really feel connected to the ritual. Partly, I think, because I was was so proud of myself for not going rights nuts and succumbing to sheer and utter boredom. Which, to this day, absolutely blows my mind. I was in a remote village with no electricity, no running water, no TV, no pool table, no lights, no books... no distractions. There was one "mountain" (really just a hill) a scooter ride away, but basically, it was never-ending rice fields in all four directions, and not much to explore, with no means to explore it even if there was. My life was scheduled by the hour. The same thing every day:

Wake Up
Make a meal
Eat a meal
Teach
Make a meal
Eat a Meal
Teach
Teach again
Make a meal
Eat a meal
Light a candle/Watch the bugs/Chat/Chain smoke cigarettes and have an occasional joint
Go to Bed

EVERY DAY. Like the only variations were laundry day and getting invited to a neighbour's house for dinner. And I LOVED IT.

Yes, there are obvious factors. I'd been on the road for a long time before I got to Cambodia; I was tired and needed a place to lay my head. But the other major factor was the people. Frank, Anke, Babsie and I were a tight little unit and became incredibly close by circumstance. We never fought, were never awkward or uncomfortable with each other (except for that one time we got too stoned...) and just managed to pool our best qualities for the others to draw on. The people in the village were an endless source of amusement and entertainment, sometimes frustrating and sometimes just the most beautiful revelation.

I've always likened my time in Cambodia to the dizzy syndrome You remember, as kids, how we'd spin ourselves around and then stop and watch the world keep tumbling? I imagined myself as this kid who'd spun herself round and round and round for over a year, bouncing from one country to the next, and then, suddenly, I stopped. And the coolest thing happened- the world kept spinning. I was doing the same thing every day, but suddenly, experiences were finding me. Every big and little thing became totally interesting; every experience a lesson that I could draw on.

I'm sitting here thinking of all this because, yeah, I guess it just depends on the ritual. This 9-6 one, for example, kind of bites. I don't understand how people can breathe life into it, make it fresh, reinvent it. I don't understand how people can watch all their daylight hours slip by through a window (and btw, I don't even have a window) for 10 years and not realize that there are much better things out there to waste their time and energy on. And the thing is, I LIKE my job, so I can't even begin to understand the people who are putting up with this that don't. I guess I should admire their... stamina.

So what is ritual to me? Ritual is the Jedi mind trick of making some place old look new again. Ritual is revisiting myself every couple of years, watching younger and older versions of me spar and dance. Ritual is using the tools I've crafted over my lifetime to learn something new every day. Ritual can't be the same, it has to be different. However subtle the movement, it has to move.

... I think that's my subtle way of saying I need a vacation.

Well, that scary 3.0 precipice is officially at my back- I braced, I jumped, I survived. I even managed to come out of it feeling pretty emotionally unscathed... which, yeah, surprises me too, but there you have it.

It's all just kind of amusing, actually. On Thursday (my actual birthday) I kept staring at my shoe- which is so ripped up that, at a certain angle, you can actually see more sock than shoe- and thinking "... I'm 30." I actually couldn't wipe the smug look off my face all day. 30 is so the new 19.

I like to think of myself in terms of age, because I consider myself to be a bit of an ambivalent creature in this respect, in the best possible way- professionally mature and socially immature (but in the most endearing way, of course). Like, I'm young, I'm so so so young. And this is just a personality thing. Things like squid and ninjas and zombies and tarsiers and hopping vampires will always be funny to me. BUT- I also have my shit together. I'm responsible, I'm smart, I work hard, I know how to deal with people... In other words, I can play all the adult games... but still be ridiculous. Still be thirsty and curious. Still (hopefully) have the energy and blind ballsiness to run out and get slapped around by life every once in a while. I don't think I ever want to lose that. I don't ever want to be too afraid to try. Too lazy, well... that's another story.

This actually feels like forced reflection. I honestly don't feel anything about 3.0... which is kind of hilarious because I remember spouting such somber words of wisdom about turning 21. And now at 30, I'm suddenly struggling to feel neurotic about it, because it's so expected that I should feel neurotic, and because it's so me to be neurotic... But yeah, nothing. My inner dialogue is going a little something like this:

- We're 30.
- Oh no! What does that mean??
- [long silence] It doesn't mean anything.
- ...oh

Maybe it's one of those things that creeps up on you.