Comfy Prison Cells

I was telling one of my wonderful (albeit newer) blogging friends, Mel, that I've been in a bit of a slump lately, avoiding my blog (and just about any social networking). She more or less told me to write something on my blog--ANY LITTLE THING. I don't know what purpose this serves, other than giving my writing slump the middle finger, but I've decided to follow her advice. So here's my feeble attempt to write...any little thing.

Last night I watched God's Not Dead for the first time. Clint recently installed a large roll-up projector screen into our backyard patio, so now we can watch movies outside at night. It's pretty amazing. We've used it twice now, and both times we sat in the spa for the entire two hours, turning into prunes as we enjoyed the show. The first movie was a few weeks ago--The Truman Show. I can't even describe how beautiful I find this movie. The fact that Truman's entire world...his very existence...is nothing but a faux-reality...it's like a heart-warming version of The Matrix. I loved watching the truth--the bigger Truth--slowly dawn on him, and I loved following him as he clumsily plowed his way through all of the giant boulders of grief--disbelief, sadness, anger, defeat, and, at last, freedom.

God's Not Dead was wonderful, too. I haven't looked into any reviews of the movie, and I'm sure the secular world has found many ways of tearing it apart, but I, not being a movie critic who looks for poetry and great acting and cinematic brilliance, found it to be poignant and heart-rending and just damn feel-good from start to finish. This particular scene, featuring a well-to-do business man (with questionable morality) visiting his dementia-inflicted mother, struck me the hardest:

This isn't the first time I've heard an analogy involving a prison cell so comfortable and pleasant that the one imprisoned within never considers leaving. The Truman Show illustrates this point, too, with Truman feeling at peace inside the world fabricated just for him--a most lovely cage--until he is given an urgent reason to search for more. 

Contentment is probably the biggest weapon in the devil's arsenal. Welcome to America--Land of the Free and Home of the Bound.

Today I have spent the entire day outside in the sun. I guess it's autumn in other parts of the country, but here in the desert, we're experiencing summer at its finest. Trinity had a friend over, and Carey (Clint's dad) stopped by for awhile, where we lounged at the patio table, chatting about family and life. I just love Carey, and not only because he scratches my itch for deeper conversation (though that helps). But that's a whole other post. Now everyone has left and I'm still outside, squinting to see the images on my smudged laptop screen, but the sun is sort of glaring at me as it creeps toward the western horizon like it has some sort of score to settle.

Yeah...I think I've lost this battle (my nose is practically touching my screen now, and going inside IS NOT AN OPTION 'cause I"m way too happy out here), so I'll end this post. But hey, I wrote any little thing.

Where were You Ten Years Ago...

There are a lot of questions that start with those words.
          "Where were you when JFK was shot?"
          "Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?"
But there is one big question that still shakes my generation to its core.  "Where were you the morning of September 11, 2001?"  We are once again faced with the irony that most of us can't conjure up an image of five days ago; the errands we ran, the thoughts we were thinking, the emotions we were feeling, and so on.  But when it comes to Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the setting unfurls painstakingly slow in the mind like some horrific scene from a movie, still as thick with color and pungent with details today as it was ten years ago.

Just like your own story, my September 11th narrative is something I could draw out for pages and pages.  But I will spare the reader all of that and just say that Clinton and I, along with the rest of the nation, were rattled that day.  I still remember a cold chill surging through my body when that second plane hit the towers; as the realization washed over America that this shocking tragedy was no accident.  I still remember watching all of the live footage.  With tears streaming down our faces, we watched as victims from the upper stories of the towers threw themselves out the windows, clawing at the air all the way down.  We cried in horror as the first tower collapsed to the ground, engulfing all of the firefighters and other victims within.  And then, with the rest of the nation, we watched in stunned silence as the last tower collapsed, taking with it any remaining hopes for a happy ending.

For Clint and I, the butterfly effect from that day still continues to shape our lives.  When the twin towers were struck, Clint was working for United Airlines.  As most people know, two of the airplanes hijacked were United Airlines jets.  Due to a newly instilled fear of terrorism on airlines, many Americans stopped flying.  This caused the airline industry to nearly collapse.  In October, 2001, United Airlines announced that they were furloughing every single aircraft mechanic who had been there five years or less.  And Clint, of course, was one of them. We lost his income, our medical insurance, the house we were in escrow for, and essentially, our livelihood.  But when you consider what others lost that day, and what the nation lost as a whole, we were definitely the lucky ones.  Irregardless, with no income, we had to leave our townhouse.  On December 19th, 2001, I took my last final for MATC, packed up a U-Haul, and headed back home to California.  I hung tinsel in our U-Haul since we wouldn't have a Christmas tree that year.  Trinity was twenty months old.

Now it is ten years later.  Every anniversary of 9/11, I show my seventh graders a poignant video called "America Remembers."  The first year that I showed the video, my students cried.  Though they were only eight years old in 2001, they still remembered that day.  They remembered the emotional shock wave that seemed to rattle through the entire nation.  They remember our country screeching to a halt.  They remember their parents being glued to the television screen.  They remember the sorrow, the anger, and the fear emanating from the grown-up's eyes.

Then I showed it the next year.  Now my students were only seven years old when 9/11 happened.  They still cried.  They still remembered.  But the memories were a little more blurry.

I showed it the next year.  Students were now six years old when 9/11 happened.  Some of them cried a little.  A few had hazy recollections of that day.

I showed it the next year.  Very few hazy recollections.  One or two teary eyes.  And so it continued.

Then I showed it last year.  Not one of them had any memories of September 11th, 2001.

Now, tomorrow, I will show the video to a group of students who were only two years old when September 11th occurred.  I wonder if there will be any tears at all?

In another two years, my students will have not even been born when the events from September 11th transpired.  And from that point on, 9/11 will be nothing more than a historical tidbit found within their social studies textbooks.  It feels strange to watch such an important memory whittle away to almost nothing.

But my generation remembers. And for the sake of the heroes that lost their lives that day, please, let's not ever forget.

Ten years later

Fireworks and Earthquakes

I've been so busy planning for my grandpa's 80th birthday party (and being obsessed with the soul-sucking internet) that I haven't had time to write a decent post. I had a fun, memorable 4th of July, in which my sister describes in more detail than I have the patience to give at the moment. The highlights for me were the beautiful fireworks at Lake Arrowhead, great conversations with blogging friend Damien, the terrible "B"-type volcano disaster flick we watched that night, the delicious breakfast that greeted us the next morning, and the end-of-the-world plan my sister and I sat and concocted on her patio while our hubbies exchanged meaningful glances conveying messages such as "How'd we wind up marrying these lunatics?"

One other memorable incident from the 4th ocurred as a result of bringing Moses with us to Shannon's house. He was *supposed* to be in the yard with Shan's dog and pig (yes, my sister has a pig. In the mountains. Her name is Charlotte. As in "Charlotte's Web," even though Charlotte was actually the spider. They keep calling their pig a dog though. Not sure what else to say about that...). Anyhow, I woke up quite suddenly that morning to Moses sniffing all around me. I couldn't wrap my mind around this fact so early in the morning, but Moses was mysteriously in the house. We learned later that he had pushed his way through two unsecured doors, busted into the house, woke me...who in turn prodded Clint awake with an exclamation of "What the hell is Moses doing in my sister's house?!" That was right before Shannon's two year-old came and collapsed on me with her cup of crackers because she thought I was her mom. So between a 140 lb dog and a toddler suffering from mommy-twin-confusion, I had my hands full that morning. I think Independence Day is slowly evolving into one of my favorite holidays.

The only other thing worth mentioning (and if you live in California, I apologize, because this is getting really old) is we had an earthquake today. It was a very pleasant 5.4. Just big enough to get the chandeliers swinging, but not big enough to cause alarm. I had called my grandma to ask her a few questions concerning my grandpa's upcoming birthday, and I was just leaving her a message when the quake rolled in. I interrupted my message to her with "Uh...Grandma, we're having an earthquake right now..." and, without realizing it, sort of "narrated" the quake for her over her machine as it was happening. She called me back later this evening, laughing at the fact that, even though they couldn't feel the earthquake in Camarillo, she was still able to experience it through my message. Hey, I'm here to serve...and apparently to leave weird messages on people's machines when nature strikes.

Rich Americans--Lucky Us

It's amazing how a book can change your whole perspective on things--at least for a little while (the effect does eventually wear off). I'm reading this book called "The Nazi Officer's Wife," and it is making me appreciate my life so much right now. The main character in the book, Edith, is a Jewish woman trying to get through the difficult period in Germany right before the Holocaust. It is so sad, because Edith starts out with a very happy childhood, and grows up to be a confident young woman. In her late teens she enters into a university to study law, which in of itself is quite an amazing feat for a woman in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But at this point of the story tension begins to build, and the Jews in the story quite rapidly become victims of unimaginable prejudice and discrimination. Little by little, her family begins to lose everything they own, but the worst is when Edith goes to take her final law exam (equivalent to the BAR exam here in the U.S.--sorry, don't know how to spell that acronym). She is so excited and eager...she has worked hard for this moment, has devoted years of her life to her studies and conquered all obstacles, and it is the only thing left for her to do before getting her degree. But when she arrives, the "Aryan" woman behind the counter tells her (with a gleam of sadistic satisfaction in her eyes) that she can not take the test. Because Edith is Jewish, she has officially been kicked out of the university and will never practice law. It is so heart-breaking. You can practically see everything that she has worked her whole life for just slipping through the cracks of her fingers while her eyes pool up with tears. So currently in the novel, Edith, this brilliant young woman who (practically) has a law degree, is forced to do back-breaking labor on fields and in factories in order to keep herself and her family alive. Her life is so miserable, but you don't feel miserable when reading about it. She's a survivor, and her courageous outlook makes it easy to not want to weep in despair for her. Rather, you just want to cheer her on.

So today, when I entered my warm cozy classroom, I just couldn't help but feel so blessed to have the life that I have. I get to work this cushy job where the worst of my problems are seventh graders getting under my skin from time to time. I get to come home to limitless meals and a nice warm bed to sleep in, and security. Poor Edith shivered every night on her cot, and had nothing but diluted cabbage soup and stale bread to eat, and had no idea what dangers tomorrow would bring. What's tragic is that although Edith's story takes place in the past, there are so many people across the globe who live this life of uncertainty on a daily basis...who don't know where their next meal is going to come from and don't know how much closer to death tomorrow will bring them. We are so rich here in America--even poor Americans are rich by the globe's standards. I wish I could remember this every single day, so that I would stop acting spoiled when I want something new, like hardwood floors for my house or new car. I could appreciate what I have so much more if I could just keep other people's circumstances at the fore-front of my mind. But, unfortunately, the perspective I gleaned today will be forgotten tomorrow, and I'll be back to spoiled me again.