Hips: more important than I thought!

Ever heard that Monty Python song: "I've got two legs from my hips to the ground and, when I move them they walk around and, when I lift them they climb the stairs and, when I shave them they ain't got hairs"

(I know the commas aren't in the grammatically correct place, but that's where the pauses in the lyrics are and I don't like using slashes)

Anyway, I just love that silly song. And it kinda sums up how much I've though about what hips do: a cradle from which my legs dangle while I walk around. Oh, yeh, and offer me a source of occasional confused frustration when I'm in yoga and I can't get as deep into some of the poses as I'd really like.

So if you've seen the posts I've put out in the last few days, you know that I managed to tweak my hip - not enough to send me to the doctor or anything, but enough to wince every time I engaged it and hey, hip joints, they're not just for walking.

Want to get up from a chair, not like a 150-year-old lady? Working hip joints are good for that.

Like to cross the legs occasionally? Hip joints!

Like to sleep on your side (and I do)? Hip joints!

And this is at the purely mundane level, to say nothing of all the other lovely physical activities a person might like to engage in. It's not like, say, spraining a wrist when you can wrap it up and put it aside and not use it for a while.

So, lesson to self: love your friggin' hips. Be gentle to them; they'll work better that way, and you'll get where you're trying to reach if you just exercise a little patience.

Grumpy cows, crazy Finns, & music

In conversation this morning the observation was made that American milk is sweeter than Finnish milk. Remember the commercials, I said, "that's because it comes from California cows, and our cows are happy!" (Watch, for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRx8FHLLypw if the whole California happy cow phenomenon is meaningless for you). Thinking on it a moment longer, I continued, "Whereas your Finnish cows are grumpy - and why wouldn't they be, all cooped up in barns all winter, cold and dark. I think that explains the prevalence of sour milk in your country! It all makes sense now! Sweet milk: happy California cows. Sour milk: grumpy Finnish cows."

I was joking around, of course, and I think everyone knew that. Well, not entirely. I mean, it's not as though our milk is injected with high fructose corn syrup (but watch out for developments!). The taste is at least in part a function of what the cows ingest, so with different diets then sure, the milk is gonna taste different. Maybe they eat high fructose corn syrup?

The joking also plugs into the whole stereotype of the Finn being dark and morose, a fairly popular image that yields other things like the comic I cut out and put on our refrigerator that says "Jarkko's Finnish Pub: Sadness hour 5:00-7:00." Or the joke: a Swede and a Finn were at a bar. They both got shots and the Swede said "skol!" and the Finn said nothing. They got another round of shots. The Swede said "skol!" and the Finn said nothing. Another round, again the Swede says "skol!" and the Finn says nothing. Fourth round, the Swede says "skol!" and the Finn says, "are you here to drink, or to talk?"

And I think the moody, morose stereotype IS embodied by some Finns - I think some do it sort of reflexively/humorously, some maybe have it as innate, maybe some as an unconscious absorption of a cultural theme - I don't know! Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a psychiatrist or sociologist. All I can say is that I just adore the Finns I feel I've gotten to know who at first I might have thought were quiet and moody, but I learned have the biggest hearts and best senses of humor, ever.

But there was this other fellow, a Finnish colleague of Göran's, who came over for dinner. He embodied the grumpy type and I don't think he was kidding around about it at all. I'll never forget him because he was so proud that Lordi - a Finnish heavy-metal group - had won the Eurosong competition, so we were watching their music videos. (If you think you'd like to get a glimpse, I suggest: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=15872716). And any mention of Swedes or Sweden would send him off into "Ach! Those damned Swedes, so fucking cheerful!" If you can hear those words in your head as being a bit ponderously uttered in a Finnish accent, it's all the better. I thought it was freaking hilarious, especially because he seemed so serious about it! I was finding every reason I could to use "Sweden" or "Swede" in a sentence, just to see if it would get him going. It never failed. Crazy Finns!

So anyway, grumpy Finnish cows - why shouldn't they exist? Can you prove they don't? And I'll bet at least some of them complain, in Finnish-cow-language, about the damned perky Swedish cows, or those fucking happy California cows and their damned sweet milk! Or so it goes in my imagination.

But here's something my imagination wouldn't have come up with: a line of beauty care products under the mood "Grumpy Cow" - I found it when I was googling for an image of a grumpy cow and found images of bottles of lotion and bath gel instead - crazy Brits! See: http://www.cowshedonline.com/grumpy_cow/grumpy_cow_uplifting_bath_shower_gel-c84635p84665.html

Later, as I was driving into the office, with it being all sunny and warm I had the windows down in the car and the sheet music for my bluegrass jam at 11:30 in the backseat started flying around, and that made me think of the song "Dust in the Wind," but with music in the wind instead of dust.. All we are is music in the wind - that sounds much less deathy and less inert than dirt in the wind! It sounds even a little beautiful, as the air is that through which music is made and carried. The wind in the chimes. Through a flute. Throbbing through the air from the vibrating strings of a bass. Our voices in song. Our voices also as we speak is melodic. Is it too bizarre to think of ourselves as music, too, in a way? Conceptualize our shared space as being - not inhabited by physical bodies - but inhabited by ourselves as something like point-sources of sound instead. And if we are, in some sense, music - what song are YOU playing? What song would you rather be playing? Are they the same thing?

Our Bond metric needs your help!

In the pleasant fuzzy warmness following brunch mimosas, I was hanging with Dan and discussing our movie-viewing options and was veering into a Star Trek direction. He has the entire run of the TV series, and all the films! And he shared with me a product of his having too much time on his hands when he was unemployed and job hunting a few years ago: a Star Trek metric: an amazing, maybe even slightly insanely detailed spreadsheet of the different shows in rows, lined up against columns of categories of endemic (or at least seemingly endemic) Star-Trekish phenomena.

You know, things like the number of characters wearing a red shirt, and the number red-shirted deaths; the number of people being transported and the number of transporter malfunctions (subdivided between malfunctions attributable to the ship’s equipment, and malfunctions due to the interference of an alien lifeforce). Whether an alien encounter was hostile or friendly, and if hostile, then whether that led to the death of a crewmember. Spock's saying "that's illogical." Scotty's claim that "they're breaking up."

It went on and on; the level of detail and the logical structure of his categories blew my mind and I about wept from laughing so hard from the joy at this thoroughly geeky accounting. Some of the things we think must have happened a lot because they seem SO typical, didn't happen as often as you'd think. It was pretty awesome.

Dan ALSO has all the James Bond movies. And I am a huge Bond junkie. So I suggested that we work up a metric for them. Ignoring whatever movie it was we had finally chosen to watch, we came up with some categories. What follows is the fruit of out initial intellectual labor:

Quintessential utterances:
“Oh, James!”
“Bond, James Bond”
“Shaken, not stirred”

Gadgets:
Being killed by an unusual object (villain-gadget?)
Gadget count (how many gadgets Q lends to Bond)
Number of gadgets Bond actually uses
Method by which Bond kills another (employing gadget: Y/N)
{Calculate gadget usefulness}
On a somewhat related note:
Bond gives Q a hard time
Bond goofs around with gadgets in Q’s lab he doesn’t understand

Non-fatal phenomena:
An assistant spy to Bond does a dumb-assed thing
Bond plays a game of chance/gambles (with villain: Y/N)
Villain has physical deformity
Moneypenny goes all mooney-eyed over Bond
Occurrence of sexual harassment
Character has a suggestive name
Villain attempts to kill Bond in a slow, overly complicated and ineffective way
Occurrence of super-human hand strength
Occurrence of bizarre physics
For instance: car tires squeal/burn rubber upon peculiar surfaces (sand/dirt road, etc.)

We – or perhaps just I – became obsessed with coming up with a way to calculate the effects on one’s life expectancy upon being around James Bond. Where is the fatality radius? Is the situation worse for you if you’re a woman than if you’re a man, and worse still if you have sex with him? (And if you’re a woman, is it a foregone conclusion that you’ll sleep with Bond if you meet him?) Thus comes the following categories:

Male character is newly introduced to Bond
Female character is newly introduced to Bond
Woman sleeps with Bond
Character is killed by Bond
Character is killed by non-Bond
“Collateral damage” (don’t actually meet or sleep with Bond, but die in his general vicinity anyway due to being caught in the cross fire or a bomb going off, etc.)
Ratios:
Character meets Bond/character killed by Bond
Character meets Bond/character is killed by non-Bond
Woman meets Bond/woman sleeps with Bond
Woman sleeps with Bond/woman killed by Bond
Woman sleeps with Bond/woman killed by non-Bond

As I’ve said, this is the first draft; ambiguities remain to be worked out and there assuredly are plenty of categories we haven’t thought of yet. Any suggestions? This scientific study welcomes your input!

Note to self: practice makes perfect!

That's what they say. And even if it doesn't make perfect, it can't help but make better.

But I'm a really bad practicer. Maybe part of it is impatience: being the smart person that I am, I expect things to come to me immediately, all at once (as though I'm one of the characters in "The Matrix" who simply needs to be plugged into a loading program!). And part of it is probably boredom - doing the same thing over, and over, and over drives me up the wall. Another self-imposed difficulty is that I make practicing out to be a bigger deal than it really is. I imagine practicing anything is a task that will take at least 45 minutes to an hour of my time, and it's entirely too easy to blow that off in the currents of busy, busy days.

Yet without practice and the development and improvement it brings, the consequences looks more undesirable: stagnation, or emptiness. Stagnation, because failure to improve means one stays ever in the same place. Emptiness, because perhaps to avoid staying in the same place one might jump ever from one thing to the next, without taking the time to absorb and embody what's valuable.

Perhaps the first step is to seriously admit my humility and own it authentically. I don't put this first because I think it's most important, but because it answers my first reluctance to practice being that I think (or rather: wishfully think!) I should be smart enough to not need it. Okay, I know I'm no Einstein, but three things have made me even more conscious that I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer: learning guitar, learning Kuk Sool, and learning yoga. I might be able to describe what the fingering for a chord looks like, or the steps in a form, or the alignment for a warrior 2. But getting the right parts of my body to properly go where they're supposed to is another thing entirely! And although in my cerebral university days I'd have dismissed it, these days I'd say the body's ability to perform well is a kind of knowing. My snobbish intellectualism has gotten its comeuppance, and without flagellating myself, I should just own up to the fact that it takes more work for me to learn than I would like to admit, and get on with it.

I'll go to the last problem area next, because I think in mulling it over there lies as least a partial response to my middle problem area. I set myself up for failure to practice because I make it out to be a big deal: as though I have to practice for an hour or two, and with too many other things to do, there's no way I can practice, too. And I've gotten an answer to this difficulty from my Kuk Sool and yoga teachers, and I've heard it come out from interviews I've listened to with writers and musicians, and maybe I've not trusted them or taken it seriously enough (ooo - maybe this even taps into my over-estimating my intelligence! I just love connections!). And the answer is: practice just a little bit. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes. Maybe I won't work through everything I'd ideally like, but it's better than nothing.

And not "it's better than nothing" in the sense that it's practically like doing nothing, but just a little bit more. That's a defeatist way of looking at it, where if better than nothing is so infinitesimal, then it's not really worth doing. But I think it was Julianne who I heard (or overheard? Hmm, suddenly the whole word-coupling to make for catching the phenomenon of "overhearing" strikes me as peculiar. Is there underhearing?) one evening say that the little bit a person practices for 5 minutes per day, can have a beneficial effect elsewhere. For example, a person might work on forward bends to loosen up the hamstrings, and she might later find she can do a better triangle because the loosened hamstrings let her pivot down further in the hip joint. (apologies to Julianne in case she reads this and I'm erroneously connecting together different asanas!) So: pick something about the activity in question - guitar, writing, a new language, whatever - that you like, and commit to practicing it for just 5 minutes. It might grow into more, but it doesn't have to, and even if it's five minutes, it is important.

And lastly, my obstacle in thinking that practice is repetitive and boring. Here, I again think I'm totally setting myself up for failure to practice. Who says practice is boring? Whose practice is it, anyway? If I'm in charge of it, and if it's boring, then isn't that my own damned fault?! Of course it is. And it's not as repetitive as my lazy self would make it out to be. No two times of working through a song are the same, and (hopefully) as my ability, say, to finger and fret improve, each iteration of a song is an opportunity to be better at what I like to do. Every book I read in my area of research makes me more well-grounded, and better able to draw connections. For every five minutes (or 55) of struggling to write a paragraph of text, I have something there to work from the next time I sit down to try and create something new. And improving at what one likes is to do isn't boring - odds are quite good that if I give myself at least a mandatory five minutes, that I'll find I'm enjoying myself so much it can easily grow into more.

So here's to at least 5 minutes of practicing pigeon per day!

The new "Alice"

I saw last night, and enjoyed it tremendously! That might have been made easier since I went in without any strong pre-conceived notions of what a Tim Burton movie was supposed to be like. It's my understanding that this film is not up to his usual weirdness. Which isn't to say it wasn't weird; there was plenty of that, I reckon it was just toned down. And the music was a bit on the loud side on occasion - but not always, so that when the volume did soar, to my ear, it was like "oh, there's music, too." For the most part, I didn't notice it at all. And sure, there were a few Disney-esque moments that, like the voluminous music, came across like something shoved in rather than as a natural unfolding of the storyline. But I found so much to enjoy that those intrusive moments were easy to forget.

First, the costuming. I positively salivated the entire film over it. There was a moment where the sound was of this fabulous soft, rich rustling of massive quantities of silk that was just perfect for the action. I loved Alice's deconstructed dresses, and how the film managed to make them work even as she changed in height. I adored the attention to detail in the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter. There was so much to take in, I'd see it again on the big screen just to be able to look at it all again.

Second, I quite liked the older Alice. Although the movie was not as dark as it could have been, her age did open the door to more overt and palatable sexual innuendo than if she were, say, 6. This Alice was apparently old enough to be married off, yet she possessed an ingénue that made it easy to believe she was much, much younger, and so the innuendo, to my mind, was able to carry a bit of a perv factor appropriate to this piece of work.

Third, the monkeys. I'll say no more.

Fourth, I enjoyed the meta-factor as the film explicitly encoded in itself the awareness that it was not a re-do of the classic "Alice." There were elements that were classic, and there were definitely elements that were not, and I think the job was well-done to not try and reinvent the wheel here but clearly revisit it and make a creative extension.

Fifth, the Red and White Queens. Helena Bonham Carter channeled the Red Queen's instability and insecurities fabulously! But Anne Hathaway as the White Queen is no Glenda; she's a very freaky girl, too, so don't let the airy voice and twirling movement distract you.

Did I mention the monkeys?

Sixth - look, I'm all the way down here before I even think to mention Johnny Depp. He certainly is the right kind of dude to play the Mad Hatter, and the scene around the tea table was terrifically insane. And I think it's some kind of tribute to the direction in the film that Depp's performance didn't runneth over everything else in his vicinity.

Finally, there was a certain kind of existential theme that I think I just might have to put off thinking about until I see the film again and have a chance to process it more. I do recall it coming across very interestingly a couple of times, but between being enchanted by the costuming and amused by the monkeys, well, it was all just a lot to take in.

So I look forward to watching it again, even without the 3-D hoo-de-doos.