accomplished

I forgot to blog about New Year's Resolutions yet this year. This is terrible of me, I mean, what is this blog without the New Year's Resolution post? This year I have already accomplished my resolution. Most resolutions are stupid because they have no ending, or at least they aren't seen as having an ending. If someone resolves to work out more, and in the first few weeks they work out an hour a day, which is more than they did in the whole month of December from the previous year, then they really have accomplished their goal, but, silly people, they still feel kind of bad when they stop after those first few weeks. That's what's wrong with most resolutions. This year, I resolved to finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I had been reading on and off since October. And I did, a week into the new year. So now I have this feeling of accomplishment boosting my ego for the whole year. I can say, well, it's been a pretty slow year, but I did accomplish my resolution. I Rule. Oh, and it was good, by the way, you should read it.

books on shelves

I'm realizing that I need a way to sign off emails to professors and non-intimate friends. I used to use "Peace" but that sounds cliche, but really besides that all I have is "Love" and that just doesn't work most of the time. Closing words are almost like signatures, people choose one and go with it for all their professional correspondence. There are the "Regards" people, the "Best" people, the "Take Care" people. How does one choose one of these words to represent herself? They all seem to throw off the whole tone of my email. They come right at the end and they say "oh yeah, I don't know you very well and I'm trying to sound acceptable while keeping my distance." And I know that's a perfectly appropriate thing to say in an email to a professor. I just hate formality.

And along the same lines of presenting myself, I put all my books and CDs and DVDs on shelves yesterday in my livingroom. I like having them on shelves. I just wish there was some way to introduce myself to people solely through the books I have on shelves. "Hello, this is me: Harry Potter, Madeleine L'Engle, Anne Lamott, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Robin McKinley, Edmund Spenser, E. Nesbit, Susan Cooper, St. George and the Dragon, Edith Hamilton . . ." I hate having to explain myself, casually dropping allusions, as if wanting to have the same tastes as someone else was something to be ashamed of. On the other hand, if I only had friends with the same tastes as me that would be stupid. I need my friends to say crazy things like "the new Justin Timberlake album is amazing" so I can become who God wants me to be. I don't know if that makes sense, but it makes sense in my head.

technology and magic

Ah, my time in the great Midwest is drawing to a close. These past few days I've been working on some stuff for my research assistantship this coming semester, so the time's gone by pretty fast. I've mainly been finding info to add to a bibliography my prof sent me--finding page numbers and first names of authors and stuff. It's like a scavenger hunt with me and Google on a team. We are winning.

I've also been reading lots of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (and there's lots of it to read) and watching Ralph Bakshi films. We watched the interview of him on the Wizards DVD, that man is crazy and hilarious. He was convinced that Wizards was a great family film. I'm not so sure. He really doesn't like Disney, either. He explained that he released Wizards to kind of show Disney how it's done, since they kept putting out such "sop." And we also learned about rotoscoping, which is that super cool technique of animating over real film. Bakshi uses a lot of stock footage in his films. In Wizards it's the Nazi footage, in Lord of the Rings it's some Russian film footage. The first feature film to use rotoscoping all the way through is Waking Life, and the technique is also used in those Charles Schwab commercials that have been on lately, like that one of the woman riding the ski lift.

This week, also, Mom started a blog. I helped. Check it out, it's all pretty on blogspot.

make it through this year

I was going to make lists of my top movies and albums and books from this year, but then I realized I haven't heard/seen/read enough to really do them justice. I haven't seen The Queen. I haven't heard the new Belle and Sebastian. But here are some lists that roughly represent 2006 for me. Lists are really the best way to express a period of time, anyway.

First, movies:
1. The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry
2. The Departed by Martin Scorsese
3. Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola
4. A Prairie Home Companion by Robert Altman
5. Little Miss Sunshine by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Top five books I read this year:
1. Possession by A. S. Byatt
2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
3. Watership Down by Richard Adams
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
5. Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner

My Five Top Albums of 2006:
1. The Crane Wife by The Decemberists
2. Ys by Joanna Newsom
3. Bottoms of Barrels by Tilly and the Wall
4. Rabbit Fur Coat by Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
5. Cannibal Sea by Essex Green

The thing is, though, what really expresses my year is The Mountain Goats. I started listening to their song No Children in January, then I got We Shall All Be Healed in Febuary and The Sunset Tree in March. I heard Tallahassee in its entirety while driving to Little Rock in May. I started listening to Sweden a lot when I started grad school. Then I got Get Lonely in September and All Hail West Texas in October. I went to see them twice in November, bringing everything to a brilliant climax. The Mountain Goats weren't even on my last.fm charts at the beginning of the year and they hit the top by the end. Hooray for judging the year by lists.

what I'm trying to say

Sometimes I listen to people talk to each other and the way they miss each other and purposely say things that are impossible to pin down and never exactly what they mean forms a kind of rhythm. It's really pretty and one of the reasons it's so pretty is that it is always hovering on the brink of utter collapse of communication and descent into pointless argument. So so often this happens in conversations "but I thought you meant . . ." If we could just hold on to our individual interpretations and not seek after some real truth, how pretty our conversations would be. Like art. Urinals can be art, but usually art is less . . . utilitarian.

I watched this movie last night called Funny Ha Ha. From the beginning to the end it is full of these kinds of conversations, they just hover on the brink of actually being about something important. People are trying to figure out their relations to each other, but they can't come out and say anything because then feelings will actually get involved and spoil everything. And really, this is how most of us talk, mumbling, stuttering, saying what we mean but then taking it back the next moment ("I'm just kidding, just kidding"). The movie wanders with no clear beginning and no clear ending. It's about a girl who recently graduated from college and lives in a suburb of Boston. She's trying to find a job, she's confused about her friends, especially boys, but she doesn't have the words to ask questions. She doesn't seem to really need the answers either. In her post-college world, where everything seems insignificant if not pointless, even the small stuttering conversations are important. She meets her friend several times over coffee to "talk", but apparently making jokes about cows is as significant as discussing why her friend has recently made various life-changing decisions.

Hope gave me a book, which is really a magazine, called A Public Space. There's this essay in it about how the theme in rock music, especially punk, is a life-affirming NO. "These people say NO because they care very deeply about things, otherwise they wouldn't bother. Let's face the big uncomfortable truths, these bands implicitly say. And to do that you have to make a dark noise." The author, Michael Azzerad, complains that music today doesn't have this NO quality. He points out that, unlike during the Vietnam era, when the threat of war affected everyone, "Today there is no unifying fear or enemy. It's long been a commonplace that our culture is growing progressively more fragmented, so much so that no significant bloc of people can agree on what we're supposed to be rebelling against." Then he suggests another explanation "Maybe they don't get as frustrated with the world at large--because they don't have to deal with the world at large." Well sometimes dealing with these little lives, in which musicians apparently only sing about how their "alienated from their artsy girlfriend," is just as hard as dealing with the world at large. One of the "big, uncomfortable truths" of our generation is that we don't know how to connect with our friends and our neighbors, with the boy at the coffee shop and with the best friend's boyfriend. We've graduated from college, where we didn't know what to prepare for, we're out in the world unemployed and alone. Is it wrong to see life struggles in terms of ourselves? Isn't that where we have to start after all? And doesn't alienation from other human beings need a bigger NO than almost anything else? Knowing others--knowing self--knowing God, these are all related. As E. M. Forster says in Howard's End "Only Connect."

And as a further example of what I'm talking about, the title of this entry is from a song by Stars.

to be happy

I'm not sure why, but I really like the Enneagram personality test. I think part of it is that I pronounce it so that it rhymes with "Linneagram." Plus, I like the way it phrases things "I must be perfect and good to be happy." It's nice to know what I need to do to be happy. Too bad it's impossible. So last January when I took the test I was a 1, but now I am a 3. I feel this is a step up. I am now dependent on people rather than ideals. I don't need to be perfect, I just need impress my professors.

type--score--type behavior motivation
3 59 I must be impressive and attractive to be happy.
6 49 I must be secure and safe to be happy.
8 48 I must be strong and in control to be happy.
1 47 I must be perfect and good to be happy.
9 38 I must be peaceful and easy to get along with to be happy.
7 27 I must be high and entertained to be happy.
4 26 I must avoid painful feelings to be happy.
5 19 I must be knowledgable and independent to be happy.
2 18 I must be helpful and caring to be happy.

Main Type	Overall Self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Some explanation: Your main type is which ever behavior you utilize most and/or prefer. Your variant reflects your scoring profile on all nine types: so = social variant (compliant, friendly), sx = sexual variant (assertive, intense), sp = self preservation variant (withdrawn, security seeking). (from www.similarminds.com)

a Minich Family Christmas

And here is William making his Harrison Ford face . . .

We had a happy Christmas, got up a little later than usual because we were all still watching Charlie Brown's Christmas at midnight last night, then we had to leave the milk and cookies for Santa and find the stockings so we could hang them by the chimney with care, so we didn't go to bed until almost one o'clock (when the Ghost of Christmas Past comes).  The gift-giving was a little groggy, but the presents were nice.  I got a big, fuzzy, fraggley blanket and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (which William ordered off ebay from Korea), a Joan Baez CD, because I realized that when I left Tami I no longer had any Joan Baez, and a picture book of intricate illustrations that is signed by the author with "especially by Linnea" written above the signature. My Mom met the nice old man who made the book at a craft exhibition in Omaha, but she could not explain the prepositional oddity.  Christmas in our family consists of eating Christmas dinner, playing with brandy and Christmas pudding for awhile (and maybe eating a few bites of pudding in the process), then watching our Christmas DVDs for the rest of the day.  We got the Cadfael series, Season One.  I was kind of unsure when William told me we had to ask for it for Christmas, but we watched the first episode today and it was really interesting.  Complex, made my brain feel more awake.  And then we watched this, which is way fun, lots of English people playing sultans and sultanas.  Christmas is all about fairy tales and myths and legends.  Then we watched more Black Adder, we're on Season Four now.  Brilliant, brilliant British comedy.  I don't know why I never watched it before: Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Brian Blessed, other less famous funny people.  And that was our Christmas, that, plus drinking lots of tea and napping.

And here's a picture of me and my fuzzy blanket and my crown: