Cultural Perspective

K and I watched a fascinating movie the other night called “The Lives of Others”, it’s a German film that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. And holy crap was that a great movie. It’s about a Stasi (state police) officer in East Berlin in the 1980s who is conducting surveillance on a playwright and author, and his girlfriend, and how he becomes emotionally involved in their lives. I was telling a German guy that I work with about it, and he said that he’d seen the movie and thought it was excellent, and then kind of sadly said “yah…the Germans are very thorough about everything we decide to do. Sometimes this is a very bad thing…”, and then he mentioned the Holocaust, the actions of the Stasi, etc.. I thought that it was an understatement, perhaps attributable to a loss for words, perhaps attributable to English as his second language, but it made me think about the uneasy peace that most of us have to strike with our own country’s histories. Because the Germans weren’t the first, or sadly, the last, to perpetrate genocide – just ask the Native Americans. Or the Rwandans.

I can acknowledge that my country has done, and continues to do, some terrible things here and abroad. Things that I find to be unconscionable and profoundly disturbing. Does this mean that I’m ashamed of where I’m from? No…no, it doesn’t. Does it mean that I’m proud of our actions? No…doesn’t always mean that, either. It means that I disagree with actions taken by my government, presumably on my behalf (in that larger, I-am-part-of-the-American-public sense), and that I want I want that to change, although I often haven’t the slightest clue as to where to start. But why do I bother to talk about it or think enough to disagree with it in the first place? It’s because I care about my country and I think we can do better. It’s for this exact reason that I hope for better - because I know we’re capable of it. If I didn’t care about my country and where I’m from, presumably I wouldn’t care what my government did. But then I also probably wouldn’t call it “my government”, either. There’s been a notion in recent years that disagreeing with the government is considered unpatriotic – that it’s something undertaken by people wanting to undermine America. I think that’s an insult to thinking people, and that if you do care about your country, you have a moral and ethical obligation to speak up when you see it doing something that you feel is wrong. Because squelching dissent and smothering people’s ability to express themselves is something that this country has always supposed to have been against. It’s what separates our country from what we claim to strive against.

In any event, it was a highly thought-provoking movie, and one that I would strongly recommend. A fascinating and humanizing look at life in East Berlin in 1985, and well worth the 2 hours.

C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!!!

So. Flippin. Impatient.

I have some potentially very good news, but I’m hesitant to get too into it, because I don’t have anything official yet. But there could be some exciting transitions coming up for me – yay!!! K has also started a new assignment, which will be a cool opportunity for him to learn new stuff and meet new folks. I’m really happy for him that his last assignment was also a good opportunity for him to grow and it seems like the path he’s been on since the summer has been a good one. As for me…well, I’m working on it!

We realized at the end of last weekend that if we all made it to our every-other-week small group for church this past Monday, we would have spent four nights in a row hanging out with the C’s. Which we did. So Tuesday night rolled around, and part of me thought “hey…where did they go?”

The answer was clearly “home to play Guitar Hero III”. We were introduced to this game by them this past week, and although I generally loathe video games in all forms, I have to admit, it was pretty fun. Mrs. C has been practicing and is a formidable opponent; Dr. C actually plays the guitar and is very musically gifted (as evidenced by his kick-butt take on Jimmy Hendrix’s rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in church yesterday); K dabbles in guitar and is also very musically gifted as a drummer; then you have me – I know what kind of music I like, and I like to think that I can carry a tune (debatable – but I sound amazing in my car). But to actually play an instrument is completely beyond my skill set – I “played” the flute in fourth grade, but never learned to read music. And I didn’t want to practice. Probably because I never learned to read music. So basically, I spent a year playing at playing the flute. And then my band teacher busted me one day, and shortly thereafter, I abandoned my career as a flutist. Fortunately, my parents had only rented my instrument for the year instead of dumping cash into what turned out to be a truly pointless endeavor.

I didn’t suck horribly at Guitar Hero, which was a pleasant surprise to me! But I can follow a song if someone tells me what color button to push at what time – this doesn’t mean that I have any undiscovered musical gifts. (Maybe...)

K’s new assignment has him getting to work even earlier than before, so I rolled up into my office around 7:30 this morning. This is when a lot of people I work with are just getting up. Needless to say, it’s pretty quiet at that hour. I’d like to say that I used it effectively to be a whirlwind of productivity, but I don’t – I catch up on e-mail and Scrabulous for a little while. I mean, yes, I do work – I still have a job to do after all. But when it’s 7:30 in the morning and I’ve been up for a couple hours already, my brain does protest a little. K and I have both noticed that basically every time we sit down these days, one or both of us falls asleep. I think this may be a sign of sleep deprivation but hey – I’m no doctor.

However, we did manage to stay awake for an entire movie last night - very impressive, since I’d been trying to watch the SAME episode of “Simon and Simon” (they had a tie-in with Magnum, P.I. at one point, apparently) and fell asleep three times before making it through. So this is progress, yes?