Driver's License

As of this previous Thursday, the 29th of November (I think), I passed my driver's test in the morning and received my license. That is all.

The First Day of Fall, Harry Potter, and A New Blog Proposal

The main reason that I am writing this post for you, ladies and gentlemen, is because yesterday, the 18th of October, 2012, a Thursday, was a most fateful day in the universe. The first thing that made it fateful was that it was the first day of fall (I started a tradition many years back that it is not officially fall until I have caught a falling leaf). I was sitting at lunch, waiting for my hodge-podge of friends to join me at my table (it was not really until this year that I could claim a hodge-podge of lunch friends, but as it is, I've managed to draw together a wonderfully dysfunctional motley group). To pass the time, I was watching the leaves fall from the tree that is in the little courtyard right in front of the entrace to the building. I was willing one of the leaves to fly in my direction, but they weren't cooperating, so I turned the other way to see if any of my friends were coming - only to see a leaf coming right at my face. Mildly injuring myself and dropping my backpack, I thrust my palms to my face and managed to trap the leaf between them, and had thus fulfilled the first-day-of-fall requirements. The caught leaf is currently residing in mylunch box.
The other fateful thing about yesterday was that Hopey and I managed to knock out the last twenty pages of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone last night and we'll be watching the movie tomorrow, hopefully. Then, we'll be plunging right into the second one, and so on.
My new blog proposal is this: I have made a lot of ridiculous etch-a-sketch pictures, but people seem to like them all right (to give you an idea, a manager at Mayberry approached me today as I dined with my mother and asked me if I had my etch-a-sketch because he had seen me at it months ago when I stopped in there and he was intrigued). So, I'm considering starting a blog based entirely off of the etch-a-sketch drawings, posting them and such. We'll have to see how that goes.

Summarization of Recent Events, Dream, and Response to Psychology of Horror Discussion

OK, I've got some ground to cover today, or so it seems - again, it has been a neglectfully long time since I last posted, and also since I wrote anything creative of consequence, so bear with me, dear readers - I am hobbling back into the writing world with crutches and numb legs.
Today is the fourth day since the end of school, which was on Thursday and which also marked my last day of exams - the exam was precalculus. In a wild come-back victory, I managed to maintain my scraped A for this quarter while also pulling up my cumulative year-round grade to an A, to a 95.somethingsomething to be exact, and so that will be the only grade that colleges will see - which is an almighty relief after some of the stress that has plagued me this year over my interim B's.
I'm back on the employment warpath, and my efforts are being triangulated toward Mayberry, where I'd really like to work, and Harris Teeter, where the hiring manager was really nice.
Apart from that, my mom and I are just going to hang out for the next few days until my dad is finished with one of his classes (his exam is on Thursday, I think) - I'm going to have Stormy over, and we're not going to watch "Chicago," (that is, if I have any say in it).
Speaking of movies, I finished my third Fabrice Luchini film as part of my campaign to practice watching French films without subtitles over the summer in order to improve my hearing comprehension skills. Why am I targeting films which cast M. Luchini? Partially because he seems to be cast by alternative-style directors, which is sort of interesting to see in other cultures - also partially because I found him to be a very charming and skilled actor in the relatively-recent film "Paris," and, particularly in some of his earlier films, I find him to be rather handsome. However, in "La Discrete," which is the one that I finished last night, they cast him into this awful role: His girlfriend breaks up with him at a train station and he decides to take revenge on all women (the idea is given to him by his publisher) by picking a girl at random, making her fall in love with him, and then ditching her ruthlessly (and publishing a diary-form account of it, to add insult to injury). Whereas a Hollywood film of this sort would have a happy, gloopy ending, where they eventually fall in love and he discards his plans to live with the victimized girl, this director didn't have any such ending in mind. Suffice it to say that it is not a feel-good movie. But the more I reflect on it, the more I think that it was well-done for what it was - the director took an absurd situation and had it played out in the most realistic way possible - no gloopy endings in reality (not saying there aren't happy ones, but there's no gloop, ladies and gentlemen).
Next, my dream last night was not of great consequence, but I've taken to chronicling them as I've found that the more I record them, the more of them I have, and the more vivid and interesting they are. It may have been of greater consequence had I written about it earlier this morning when it was still pretty fresh in my mind, but alas! - that is not what I did. In any case, the dream was definitely influenced, I believe, by my increased absorption of film recently, and it included a jumble of a lot of stuff. For example, I was watching part of "Mean Girls" last night with Heather, and one of the characters, Janice, manifested in my dream (she's the artsy one who was dressed like a goth stereotype) - in the dream, she was waking up and singing - I was watching in the third person, and I remember being tremendously affected by her joy. That was all of that part of the dream. In the next part, I was at some film festival out in a hilly, reddish landscape (I can't really describe it much better than this because these are the only attributes I remember - perhaps it was reddish because the sun was either setting or rising the whole time?). There were different tents where people were camping and also where movies were being shown, all grouped together on the hilltops. An actress who had played the antagonist in one of the thriller/mystery films when she was younger was attending (I don't know if it was a real film or a fake one, but I don't remember the title in any case). In the dream I recall seeing her arrive, walking to where some of us were congregated outside of the tents - she must have been famous enough for me to recognize her instantly, because I was immediately filled with a mixed sense of intimidation (remembering her role, I suppose) and admiration (remember how well she had played her role). It seemed like she was one of the special guests who would be introducing the films before they were played. I spoke to her while we were waiting for the tent to be opened and found that she was very easy to talk to (which I didn't expect, for some reason, from a celebrity) - she was a few years older than me and had a soft, rather childish voice. Eventually one of the wizened directors opened the flap of the tent and beckoned everyone inside, where it was cool and dark and blessedly air-conditioned. At one point of the dream, I was looking around the tent for a boy who may or may not have been my boyfriend/husband...it got fuzzy after a while, and then I woke up.
Now, to comment back on the last post I made, where I was speculating about that universal quality that good horror directors tap into: my dad supplied a really insightful answer the other day when he was driving me to the seniors' graduation ceremony (where I would be functioning as a junior marshal). Somehow R. L. Stine came up (the Goosebumps author) and my dad asked me if I had ever tried to write a horror story - I told him that I had when I was little, because I was more into that sort of thing back then, but had not for a long while because writing a good horror story is quite difficult, if you've never tried it before - and he said that I should, now that my writing skills are somewhat more honed than they were when I was 6 and 7. To which I replied that I had indeed been sort of sitting on the idea because I had been contemplating the universal quality of horror that directors and authors tap into to produce good work.
He was then curious about the conclusion that I had come to, and I responded rather lamely that I thought that the fundamental fear that people grappled with was the concept of something behaving in a way that it should not, or something having different characteristics than it should. He nodded, and then explained the thing much more eloquently using Kabbalistic principles (the Kabbala or Cabala refers to "a system of esoteric theosophy and theurgy developed by rabbis, reaching its peak about the 12th and 13th centuries, and influencing certain medieval and Renaissance Christian thinkers. It was based on a mystical method of interpreting Scripture by which initiates claimed to penetrate sacred mysteries. Among its central doctrines are, all creation is an emanation from the Deity and the soul exists from eternity," according to dictionary.com). Like the definition says, this branch of theology is noted for believing that creation occurred in emanations - I think that there are ten of them. In any case, and he didn't explain this fully so I had to guess the middle part, my dad started referring to these emanations as "husks" of God, which leads me to believe that the Kabbalists viewed these emanations as expansions of holy light that were somewhat retracted upon the Fall of man, which would leave creation as a sort of husk without the holy light that had filled it. My father then hypothesized that, according to these principles, any "husk" or incomplete version of a thing can be viewed as "bad" or frightening now because it is associated with the husk of creation caused by the Fall of man. This is why a skeleton is frightening on a fundamental level, or a corpse, because it is the husk of a human being. Ghosts are also husks of human beings, and I think that the husk idea can be further applied to masks or any other thing which hides something, or seems to hide something, since it is an empty, storage husk in relation to whatever it is hiding. For example, the dark is a husk that hides whatever horror a child imagines to dwell in it. The fear of spiders is a husk for some deeper fear that was pushed off on spiders (this is a theory explored by the Psychologist Scott Peck in one of his books). As for the fear of death, I don't think that one can get any more direct than that, and so I don't think that that fits into the husk theory - it sits by itself in the realm of homicide films, along with the fundamental fear of pain. 
So, why are the "Exorcist" girl's gymnastic feats so frightening to people? I think that it is because the way that she descends the stairs is very inhuman (which is sort of obvious because she's possessed by a demon at the time) - in fact, if you look up the stunt on youtube, it is famously described as a "spider walk." So, not only does she function in this scene as the husk of a little girl who's been inhabited by a demon (she has that going for her almost the whole movie), she also has these spider characteristics (or a spider husk which is hiding her little girl characteristics) associated with her, and given that spiders are things that a lot of people are afraid of, it is an effective image to plaster over a little girl and frighten people with. If you've watched any zombie movies, or really, any ghost movies where the ghosts are moving fast or crawling for whatever reason, the modern filmmakers are fond of making them move with these jerking movements that immediately evoke the image of a spider. This really disappoints my mother, because she is a zombie-film puritan and she thinks that zombies should only be allowed to walk with their arms outstretched, moaning, "Brains...." As for me, I could care less - live and let unlive, whatever they say. 
And on that terrible joke, I've run out of steam.

Boondoggles, Containment, Balrogs, Tom-Catting, Bizarre Dream, and the Psychology of Horror

Oh my! I was just meditating on the fact that it has been quite a while since I last blogged, which is a pity because my old entries have become something like a photo album for me...whenever I forget exactly how something happened, I go back through all my old blog entries to see if I wrote about it (which I usually did, because I used to be a very diligent blogger) and that's how I remember.
In any case, I will use the abridged list in the title to describe the important things that have come to pass this week.
The word of the week is: Boondoggle, a noun which means, "work of little or no value done merely to keep or look busy." It is the word of the week because Mr. Koschak has used it every day without fail to describe the antics of the physics students, who went on a trip to Carowinds today, missing the first day of the practice AP test. "If you are going on the Physics Boondoggle," he's been telling us at the beginning of each class, "then make sure that you get here early on Thursday to get the first part of the test done." I didn't believe that it was a real word at first, but it is, in fact, in the dictionary, hence the conviction that it should be included in this entry and be used forever more from here on out. The English language surprises me with treats like this every now and then.
Believe it or not, Balrogs and Communist containment go together today. A Balrog, for those who have neither seen nor read The Fellowship of the Ring, is a fire demon of the ancient world (in the context of Tolkien's books). "Containment" is the strategy that was pursued during the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower with regard to Communism - that is, these administrations sought to keep Communism from spreading to other countries - from this foreign policy, we see developments like the Marshall Plan and others. In any case, we were reviewing the 1950's and 1960's the other day in AP US History, and I was thinking about containment, and I had one of those moments where something quite random but thought-provoking occured to me - and it will probably sound ridiculous if I go to explain why I found it amusing here or anywhere else. But I'm going to explain it anyway. So I was sitting there and meditating on the epic degree to which Americans observed the containment and brinkmanship policies as the noble battle of democracy against oppressive communism. And it occured to me that, had "The Fellowship of the Ring" been a movie during that period, the show-down between Gandalf and the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dum would be a good representation of how Americans imagined containment. Standing on the Bridge between the Balrog (Communism) and the rest of the fellowship (not-yet-communist countries), Gandalf (the US) informs him, "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" And, true to his word, the Balrog is not able to pass - BUT THEN, both of them are pulled down into the pit of the Mines of Moria, fighting even as they fall. This, my friends, occured to me as a beautifully-ridiculous symbol of the concept of mutually-assured destruction, with both sides going down closer to DOOM as they fight (or as they obtain more weapons). I thought it was a neat, history-related epiphany in any case, and one which would have made nice Red Scare propaganda at the time.

Anywho, moving on to our next topic, which is Tom-catting. My readers mustn't take offense by my inclusion of this, which is purely for fun and sport. If you've read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, then you'll know that at the beginning of the story, the teenage boy Al Joad is off "tomcattin' around the country," which essentially means he's going around visiting and getting to know (both words in several contexts) his lady friends before the family has to uproot and move west. The little boy in me giggled when I read it, but since then, my mother and I have found the word to be very useful, and we have adapted the meaning of the word for our purposes. If it is given that a "tomcat" is a male, then "tomcatting" for us is the proposed act (always in jest) of going out to look for "tomcats." Because we aren't actually planning to find men wherever we're going, we use it for the most innappropriate situations and derive joy from it - for example, my mom might say, "Kalyn and I are going bowling while you're at school today," and I might reply, "Cool, well keep your eyes peeled, the bowling alley might yield tomcatting results." Today, as we were waiting for my bus 419 outside Reynolds, we were discussing our dinner and movie plans for tonight.
"We're going to go tomcatting tonight!" she announced excitedly.
"I know...I do hope we finally have some success." I said in jest.
"Well, I'll be sure to find us some tomcats while Kalyn and I are out shopping - as with rings, it's always easier to tomcat when you are already accompanied by other tomcats." (she was commenting on the phenomenon in which a married person, often a man, is shamelessly flirted with and tomcatted in public by women who do not seem to notice his ring...the real problem is that he has made himself sparkly in donning the jewelry, and is mistaken for a vampire. I'm convinced that this is the reason).
Next, I had the first memorable dream last night that I've had in quite a while - some of them have seemed to be memorable, but the speed with which I rush about in the mornings prevents me from taking the time to internalize the memory of most of these dreams, so the one this morning was special in that regard. In all other regards, it was quite strange. In the dream, my dad, Heather, Holden, Hope, and I were staying in this nice little mountain house - it was not one of the one high-up and secluded ones on the mountain, but it was in a suburb near the foot of the mountain - there were other quaint, yet fancy houses sitting around it. The community was set up like Boone in that there were isolated houses on the mountain but a glittering golden criss-crossing of city-lights in the valley. It was a booming semi-urban area with bluegrass concerts and lots of art.
In the dream, my dad and I took a trip to a nearby coffee-esque shop that was next to a bowling alley. We were to meet a friend of ours there, who will be named Leon for the purpose of the post. Leon's character is a nervous one, but a kind one as well - he was happy to see us and he beckoned us to join him at his corner table. He and my father spoke together for a while about the mountains and the regional football team while I day-dreamed. The blond-haired waiter came by and told me that next door, at the bowling alley, they were selling the most amazing watermelon flavored drinks and that I just had to try one. I vaguely agreed with him and he wandered away.
When I returned my attention to the table, I noticed that my dad had left, and so I asked Leon where he had gone - to which he replied that he had gone home to be with the baby, and that my dad had asked him to tell me that the taxi was still waiting outside for me, and I was to embark in it at 10:30 in order to get home before it was too late. I agreed and then was overcome with a wave of sadness, loneliness, and sleepiness. I leaned onto Leon's shoulder in a half-asleep manner and he patted me on the back awkwardly as I asked his jaw in near-proximity whether he had ever tried the watermelon drinks next door. He said that he had not, and that he didn't believe that I would be able to either, because he thought that they were sold at a bar.
"A bar in a bowling alley?" I asked incredulously, standing up after what seemed like hours. "That's ridiculous. I'm going to head over there to get a drink before they run out." I paid him a somewhat irritated "goodbye" before storming out and dashing next door. It was mostly darkness in there with neon lights, and much to my chagrin, the majority of the neon lights shone over a bar to the left-hand side of the building. Pink and green neon lights twined together to advertise the limited-time-only watermelon drink, which apparently had alcohol in it anyway. Disheartened, I left and entered the taxi, realizing with a wave of guilt that it was way past 10:30.
"I'm so sorry you've been sitting here all this -" I began to apologize, but the taxi driver, who was the sweet lady who drives bus 419 in real life, waved my apology away.
"You're here now, that's what matters," she turned around as another passenger entered on the far side. "Where to, Ms. Breece?" I looked over and Bennie Breece from the choir was entering the taxi on the other side - she was wearing the bunny ears that she had worn to our Holy Saturday rehearsal before Easter.
"Hey Bennie!" I said, glad after the watermelon drink catastrophe to see her.
"Hey!" she replied to me, and then she told the taxi driver that she was just going home. After plugging in both of our coordinates on her GPS system, we were driven home at what seemed curiously to be a breakneck speed if one watched the little dot on the GPS screen, but what felt much slower if you wrenched your eyes from it and simply looked out the window. That was the end of the dream.
Finally, we've had discussions the past couple days on the psychology of horror films. What is it that makes the scariest ones so scary? That's what I've been discussing with my mom, and she says that it all depends on what the individual finds to be scary. For example, ghost movies don't scare her, but zombie ones and homicide ones do. I personally don't find zombie movies to be scary (usually), and if both are done well, the ghost movies stick more in my brain after watching them than the homicide ones. This might say something about my fear of someone breaking into the house - I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized that I am far more afraid of waking up with a stranger staring at me or forcing my door than the sort of harm that might be inflicted on me after the fact. While I dread either occurence, it is the first one that occassionally occurs in nightmares relating to break-ins. This fear of something appearing that doesn't belong carries over to the sorts of movies that chill me - the ones in which a door is opened to reveal something that wasn't there initially, films in which a mirrored medicine-cabinet door is closed to reveal a person behind you, films in which computers or televisions (familiar materials) function differently to facilitate haunting. We just watched a movie from the 1980's that seemed to set a precedent for many of the half-way decent horror movies that started off the 2000s - it was called "Ghost Story" and it played off of exactly the sort of fear that I just described. They use these shots of her (the ghost's) face to accomplish it...for example, at the beginning of the movie, she is lying face-down on a bed and speaking mysteriously (though in quite a normal timbre) to a fellow sitting next to her who does not yet realize that she is dead. When he gets frustrated and tries to flip her over, he finds that her face is like that of a skeleton and he backs away and accidentally falls out of the window. This happens twice more near the beginning of the movie, and then as her character before the start of the movie is developed, the actress flips her hair over her face or is pictured facing a window and then turning - and each time the audience tenses up, expecting to see what they were not prepared to see at first - but it doesn't come. Everyone exhales and waits for the next part where the music sounds spooky again.
Putting that aside, I think that there must be some sort of universal element of fear that successful horror movies tap into - just as there is a universal element of comedy that directors appeal to when making comedy films. For example, whenever I ask anyone who has seen "The Exorcist" what they think is the scariest part of the movie, I receive one answer without fail: the part where the possessed girl climbs backward down the stairs on her hands. Now, why should this display of gymnastics inspire such communal fear in a population of movie-goers? It's really difficult to say; I don't think I have an answer for it. If you have any ideas, feel free to comment! Good night!

"Fate"

Just got back about an hour ago from watching Beethoven's Symphony 5, nicknamed "Fate" because of the supposed caption for the first movement: "Thus Fate knocks at the door." Amazing. Now, I suppose it can be said that I have 2 down, 7 to go (as far as seeing all of the Beethoven symphonies live in concert before I die, which I fully intend to do, along with my bucket-list goal of cultivating a hedge maze). My dad and I were two rows from the front and on the left side of the auditorium, right beneath the violinists....It was pretty incredible. A nice memorial speech was given in honor of Mr. Simonel before any of the music was played....Saoirse and Kiki were both present at the concert, and I spoke to Kiki during the intermission. There was a horn soloist from the Canadian Brass who came to play Strauss' first concerto for horn. He was really awesome as well, but there was nothing quite equivalent to the build-up between the third and fourth movements of the fifth symphony...I hope I dream of it.