the emma thompson effect

It's a lot like the butterfly effect, but less complicated. This past week we've watched two movies with Emma Thompson in them (Stranger than Fiction and Love Actually, both tremendous and especially well-written. D and I have decided that any movie she chooses is excellent, and will watch them all faithfully. The HP movies, where she plays Professor Trelawney, are not necessarily cinematic brilliance, but they stem from a literary mind, so they're the popcorn movie exceptions. The cast for the HP movies is pretty much a who's-who of British cinema anyhow, whether the kids are good actors or not.

Both of these came out a while back, and everyone I talked to really loved the latter movie and were surprised I hadn't seen it. I love British comedy, Colin Firth is dreamy (though his movie choices are not quite up to Thompson's par), and Hugh Grant is equally charming. Add Alan Rickman (another personal favorite) the badass villain from Serenity, Chewitel Ejiofor, and a bunch more brilliant people and you have a fantastic movie. Even Skeletor--I mean Keira Knightley--makes a creditable appearance in the film.

I usually judge the quality of a movie on whether or not I think about it for days or weeks afterward. If I can just see it and be done, it's not much of a movie. Love actually has been on my mind for a week, and the relationship between Thompson's and Rickman's characters has especially hit me. Initially, it looks like Rickman is an older single man, boss of an ad agency who has an extremely forward secretary who he's just managing to dodge--but not rebuff--advances from. Then another shot shows Emma Thompson asking her husband about a Christmas present and lo and behold, it's Rickman sitting there.

I'm used to being surprised or shocked in my entertainment choices--shows like Lost, Buffy, and Firefly all use those "Nu-UHHHHH!" moments, when everyone screams out "holy CRAP! I thought it was a frat house but it's just a cover for a secret government military research facility??" Stuff like that. Even with this diet of shock and paradigm-shifting, it's difficult for me to think of a more shocking moment than the revelation of Rickman's relationship to Thompson. The movie continues with the slow spiral down into very hurtful actions by Rickman which put his marriage in jeopardy. After being confronted with his betrayal, he says he's a fool, and Thompson says yes, and you've made the life I live foolish as well. It's the perfect way to describe the true nature of unfaithfulness, the fragile agreement that marriages are founded upon and how easily it can be broken.

I would much rather a character in a movie die than to be betrayed or unfaithful to their spouse. It's more horrific than any slasher movie, and hits so much closer to home. It doesn't help if that actor is one who normally plays such loyal, single-minded characters--even Snape is incredibly loyal to the very end, though we don't really see it in the movies so much.

I guess I've thought a lot about this lately because we're coming up on our 10th wedding anniversary (July, but still it's this year), I've recently listened to several sermons on marriage and divorce, and it's also the same time of year that one of our closest friends left his wife and 3 kids. He was our best man at the wedding, and had been someone I looked up to--a Christian, married for quite a while for someone his age, and seemed like he had his heart in the right place. Even when things were going south, it really didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary was going on--every marriage has troubles, I thought, and this is no different. I wish with all my heart that I had been right, I wish that his conscience had not been so decimated, and I wish he had had the balls--or the desire--to ask for help, for anything. Instead, he just bailed. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood is difficult and requires self-sacrifice, he made up some lame philosophical excuses and turned tail and ran. I couldn't believe it. To some degree, I still cannot believe anyone could do such a thing. It's not just a betrayal of his wife and children, which is more than enough treachery, it's a rejection of an entire life of friends, family, God, everything. And everyone has to endure the consequences of that rejection, not just the coward who perpetrated it. It doesn't end, and can't end.

What does Christ-like forgiveness look like in this situation? How can one approach anything close to healing, when the bitterness and anger are still so present four years later, and he shows no sign of even acknowledging his guilt? Once in a while I have dreams about him, most of which involve me either screaming at and punching him or living with some sort of truce that I explain in the dream: "I really hate you but somehow I have to sit next to you in this college auditorium, even though there are tons of empty seats." Recently, my vivid horrific dreams have had one reprieve of sorts; I dreamed that I had forgiven him completely. I wasn't even disgusted at myself for it.

When I have read about forgiveness, many times people have said the key was to try and fathom how much God had to forgive you to accept you as his child. To have a very sober judgment of yourself and your own baseness and treachery, and to remember that God's righteousness is so far above what even the most wonderful people can attain. I feel also that if I deceive myself enough, I could believe that I would never ever do something so low and terrible to people I loved. But I know better than that. I really am capable of doing far worse, though God's grace has restrained the evil in me. Instead of depressing me, somehow that knowledge helps me to look with more grace on other people. I am still angry and bitter with this man, but it feels like I've taken a step to release myself from the grip of the old pain, if that makes any sense. Someone said that forgiveness was setting a prisoner free, and realizing the prisoner was you. Maybe one day I'll talk to him again and not feel like throwing up. Here's hoping.

my favorite flight of the conchords song

My best friend J rocks. She sent me this, and I need to share it with everyone.

Binary solo: 0000100000111 00001111. Robo boogie!

a well-put essay on so-called "talent"

Check this post here that I found through a crochet/knit designer's blog. It's called, "Knitting is not hard," and it addresses the comments people make when they see stuff you make. "You're SOOOO talented! I'm too stupid to learn how to crochet/knit/paint/etc." I'll add the comment I hear, "I can't even draw a stick figure!" Ok, I know what hyperbole is, as I use it ALLLLL the time (see? I don't really use it all the time, but there is some hyperbole right there). But as the author of this article says, I can do these things not because I was coated with magic creativity dust when I entered the world; my supposed talent comes from years of practice, failure, a little bit of facility, and persistence. The desire to do what I am doing is a huge factor as well--once upon a time, I had really good grades and enjoyed Geometry, doing proofs, bisecting triangles and whatnot. I wasn't super-dooper into it though, and didn't pursue the subject outside of my classes (except to make patterns, cut mats, or figure out canvas yardage I'd need, which isn't much more than counting and a few angles). Since my math skills have gone fallow, I am woefully daft when it comes to numbers (evinced two weeks ago, when I arrived at a child's birthday party a DAY LATE. idiot). I don't presume that people who do math well just magically picked it up, but I know that they worked very hard to learn the concepts that allow them to do math with apparent ease. I am flattered, of course, when people enjoy the things that I have made. It's one of the main reasons I do my work. Again, as the author states, it belittles the enormous effort and time put into the skill to call it a talent, as if you either have it or you don't.

When I learned to crochet in elementary school, I clearly remember being supremely frustrated that my yarn kept splitting, how awkward the yarn felt, and how manky the finished product was from all the stops and starts, ripping out, and being squeezed around my sweaty fingers. I stopped crocheting altogether, and didn't start again until twenty years later. After drawing, writing, piano lessons, sculpting, folding origami, painting classes, teaching 600 children how to sew, and knitting, my fingers felt so natural holding the hook and yarn that I cursed aloud: "Why have I been bothering to knit at all!!? This is so much easier, I feel robbed!" I knew that my hands remembered their old skills, however feeble they were, and the intervening years of other fine motor skills just caught up with the old motions. Skill piled up on the foundation of muscle memory, and the rest is history.

Enjoy the work, praise the maker, but don't call it talent.

holy smurf! you're fifty??

Smurfs turn 50 years old this year (which I knew, but didn't know they had a party and didn't invite me! Boo!). I sense some impending smurf-tastic parties of my own needing to be planned. hmmmmm...

*update*--yet another article. The invasion has begun!

what's a girl to do?--warning: a long post--

I read this article today, by Sally Morgenthaler of Christianity Today's website, "Gifted for Leadership: A community of Christian women" and I was feeling disgruntled about it all day. Rather than stew by myself, I have chosen to write a rebuttal of sorts. Lucky you, gentle reader!

Gender roles are a huge hot potato in the evangelical world, in my own life as a Christian, and in most of the churches I've been a part of. N.T. Wright, in a commentary I have on Timothy, refers to the issue as unexploded ordinance that's lying around after a major war, just waiting for a curious kid to come pick up. Here I go, then...KABOOM!

I've covered the spectrum of belief about gender roles during my short life, from the super-pro-choice-we-girls-can-do-anything-right-Barbie view, to what the author would probably call a fundamentalist position. I'm deeply uncomfortable with her definition of gender fundamentalism, as it is just about as abrasive and wrong-headed as the people she saddles with the term.

The author's definition of gender fundamentalism is the belief that women were made solely for the use and pleasure of men. If that was really what is meant by having clearly defined gender roles, then sign me up for NOW. That's not it at all. Women were created by God to be a help-meet, a helper, and one of the only other beings described in this way in the Bible is the Holy Spirit. Not too shabby, to be a helper akin to one person of the Trinity. And as a side note, men need all the help they can get. God knew that, so here we are.

To continue, the Bible continually upholds the dignity and worth of women in cultures altogether hostile to them. Women had as much dignity and status as slaves in the Greco-Roman world, and yet the early church boasted of intelligent, successful and powerful women. They weren't preachers or apostles, but they had every other conceivable position in the church, including teaching Apollos the finer points of the Christian faith. There's a lot more that could be said here, and has been said by better people, so I'll go back to the article (*the links are for Redeemer Presbyterian's series on gender roles, and McLean Bible Church sermons--go to the Da Vinci Code sermons and listen to "Christianity is the best friend a woman ever had." It's great).

The article raises a multitude of questions that require an answer, and inaccuracies that need to be addressed. First, the author's references to Mars Hill Church in Seattle need to be dealt with. According to Ms. Morgenthaler, "women [at Mars Hill] are regularly encouraged to leave education and professional careers behind, embrace homemaking, and do their part to repopulate their godless city with Christians." Not quite. True, the teaching stresses the importance of the married man to provide for his wife and kids, and his wife to take care of their children if they have them. But it isn't so simple as all that. You can't get a sense of the church's position from 20-second sound bytes or little blog entries. I have listened to about half of the sermons available from MHC, each of them at least an hour long, and there's a lot more that is said and explained about this issue than anything a little article can address. Like, if you're going to get married, you better be on the same page as your potential spouse. Duh, or otherwise why get married? Like, if you are married, the man's job is to love and please his wife in every way and vice versa, and that Biblical submission has nothing to do with abuse, denigration or anything less than Christ-like sacrificial behavior to one's wife. I could go on, but the author could more easily gain this insight from listening to the sermons instead. Mark Driscoll is abrasive, can be off-color and sometimes downright rude, but at least he is clear about his position, and has credible scriptural texts to back up the theology (maybe not the jokes and sarcasm though...that's just gravy).

The author goes on to quote Driscoll's criticism of the current state of the church, where he bemoans the pastel walls, sloppy sentimental songs, and girly-man preachers (my paraphrase entirely). He says no wonder there is no innovation, as all the innovative guys are sitting at home watching football. Ms. Mergenthaler's response was this:

"When 64 percent of the conservative church can only innovate in the kitchen, the nursery, and the bedroom, we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve lost our edge. And when the 36 percent remaining spend so much of their time and energy making sure the 64 percent don’t invade their territory, well, what you have is a whole lot of nothing going on. And a culture that looks at us, and just laughs."

First of all, the culture is going to laugh at us whatever we do, unless we look exactly like them, then...wait, many churches already look exactly like the rest of the culture, and we're still laughed at. Moot point.

Secondly, MHC never talks about women "invading" men's territory, and in fact, encourages women to speak up if their husband is doing something boneheaded. Instead of being human doormats, women are asked to be--here's the word again--a helper to her husband, helping him to see that he is being boneheaded and needs to listen to wisdom. I could go on, but it feels like I am dignifying the article's falsehoods too much.

MHC is the only church where I have heard men being called out for cowardice and abandonment of their kids and responsibilities, called out for devaluing women by expecting sex on dates and steamrolling family decisions. It's one of the only places where men are encouraged to protect women and truly cherish them, and where I think men would feel more at home.

And amazingly, there are tons more people joining MHC each year. Is that a coincidence? Let's see...where do we not see growth of the church, but a severe hemorrhaging of membership? In churches where gender roles have lost all meaning, to the point that homosexual behavior is something requiring serious debate. Jettisoning traditional Biblical gender roles has been the crack in the door that ushers in other heresies in the name of progress. People can now "feel called" to be everything from pastors to transgender divorcees working on seminary degrees. No one can argue with the calling of God, especially as God no longer speaks through the Bible, but only directly to the individual who hears what she wants to hear.

So if you get rid of all of these "sexist" gender roles, what do you have left? What's a girl to do? Well, let's have a look at the last 40 years of sexual liberation: exponential divorce rates, a third of the population effectively fatherless (70 percent fatherless in the African-American community), skyrocketing eating disorders and widespread anti-depressant use. Who can blame the current generation for wanting to "rethink what it means to be a female?" From my vantage point, it sucks just as bad as it did before, with the added fear of STD's and condemnation from both feminists and conservative women, no matter what you choose to do.

Articles like Ms. Morgenthaler's belittle the choices of so many women to stay at home and raise their families. They imply that taking care of a household and children were merely things one could do on the side, while important work gets done elsewhere. What would they suggest we do then? Go get a "real job" somewhere, and leave the distasteful job of mothering to others? Be filled with discontent as we wash the 14th soiled outfit for the day, as we are being vastly underutilized for our skill set? Aren't we to learn to be content in all circumstances, and rejoice in sufferings and triumphs alike? Doesn't the kingdom of heaven belong to "the least of these" little children? Aren't I submitting out of love when I clean poopy Batman underwear and do the dishes occasionally? Or do I have to do something more fabulous for it to count in the kingdom of heaven?

Finally, what is wrong with having a college course that teaches women how to be good stewards of their homes and take better care of their children? It's a heck of a lot more practical than "Environmental Relativism and the Resurgence of Post-Kantian Welding," and other total crap one gets at university. If you're going to be forty thousand dollars in debt after graduation, shouldn't you know how to launder that one shirt you can afford to buy? Students today can't rely on their mothers for this information, because their moms were too busy burning their bras and signing no-fault divorce papers to teach them how to take care of practical things like cooking and writing up a budget. Many high schools are no better than babysitting with textbooks, so they certainly aren't going to learn anything useful there. College is the last bastion, then, before you are cruelly dumped into working a thankless job you're overqualified for, to make interest payments on a lifetime of student loans while you live in the basement of your stepmom's house.

I'd choose traditional gender roles any day. At least I can be overqualified for my thankless job in the comfort of my own home.

allsorts

The name of a candy flavor, which fits my post here:the boys, looking cute.

• mac and cheese: an almost-weekly staple, which I make from scratch like my mom showed me, many years ago. I like to add stuff to mine (not my husband's or son's, mind you--they want the unadulterated plain-mk-variety)--a little Grey Poupon, chopped ham and tomatoes, a little teensy bit of nutmeg. After last night, I've found my favorite add-in: spinach in butter sauce. For you food snobs, skip the rest. For people who buy frozen spinach in lite butter sauce and microwave that sucker, take small spoonfuls of the stuff with a dash of nutmeg and mix it thoroughly with your next mac and cheese. It's lovely. Holds the cheese like a dream, and it brings a veggie (however mutilated) into the diet. sigh.
  
• sculpey: learning a lot about it. any hints or tricks you'd like to share? I've got an idea, and I don't know if the material will be strong enough without help.
• great words/phrases: besotted, fistulous withers, High Sierras. I like them. Fistulous Withers would be a great band name.
  
• flight of the conchords: the best comedy show, cute New Zealanders who can sing their hearts out about David Bowie, robots, and "business time." Kindof naughty too, just letting you know. just search it in Youtube.
  
• the wire, season 1: I watched 2 episodes, both really great. Excellent writing, cast, etc. I cannot watch any more though. All I have to do is drive 20 minutes south, and I can be an extra. There's enough to be depressed about already.
  
• lolcats: check this site for some hilarious photos with captions, mostly cats.
  
• flickr photos: I now have a good, easy-to-remember address to access my flickr photos: www.flickr.com/photos/marykatenewcomb/ . I just uploaded some drawings by A, who had a fit of creativity the other day and drew almost all that are pictured. Check the info button for titles etc. He told me what they were, but in many cases I didn't even have to ask. My little prodigy.
• this is mommy holding a smurf. He knows me well.
• a lovely polar bear. Most of his animals have three legs and LOADS of teeth and claws. The eyebrows are usually very expressive.