Incredible

I went to my first-ever 3D movie today and came away thoroughly gobsmacked. Avatar was mostly what I had heard—cutting-edge special effects wrapped around the hero myth of the outsider who joins up with the natives and reveals to the rest of us the basic human qualities even the "different" among us have. So the story, as I had heard, wasn't new, and some of the contrasts—the gentle forest dwellers with bows and arrows fighting the futuristic armored war machine (which may turn out to be an inaccurate model, anyway)—were somewhat over the top, even though the forest dwellers won.

Film critic Roger Ebert said he "felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977" when he saw Avatar, and I certainly could relate to that. I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling of sitting in that Star Wars theater and hearing the fighters zoom in overhead from behind; I think the sound (including the music) in  Star Wars engaged me as much as anything.

But watching Avatar helped me see why my own kids were so nonplussed by Star Wars when it made a return trip to the theaters a few years ago: Star Wars was too big a movie, in many ways, to be appreciated on a small screen, even with the huge televisions that are now part and parcel to many homes, but it was too mundane for my teenagers, who were born after the first Star Wars hit the screens.

I have to agree with Soldier Son that 3D may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread; he said he's gotten nauseated at 3D flicks (although I think he's only seen them on "home theaters"), and a couple of times today I peeled off the goofy glasses to relax my eyes. That worked okay for scenes that were in closed spaces so 3D wasn't really necessary; I sort of had a Wizard-of-Oz sense that I needed the 3D in Oz (Pandora in Avatar), but not back in Kansas (which was black and white in the Oz movie. I didn't know that until I was an adult; I must have watched the annual rerun of Wizard for 15 years when I was growing up, but nobody I knew even owned a color TV, so I never thought of Oz as being any more colorful than I Love Lucy. I knew Lucy was a redhead, but my mental picture of her never, ever made it out of black and white).

Still, I was glad the theater was dark as I sat gawking at the special effects in Avatar. When the 3D was at its best, I felt as if parts of the image were floating out of the screen and over the rows of viewers in front of me or that I could see deep into the forest or the layers of a world constituted partly of "floating mountains," huge chunks of rock suspended in space. That was amazing.

I also have to admit I marveled at the imaginations of the designers (was that all from the director, or did the other artists have voices in it, too?) of both the imagined planet Pandora and the machinery of future warfare. Pandora seemed to be stuck in a sort of dinosaur age (the closest thing I saw to what I'd consider a mammal looked a lot like seals to me) with plants that I could imagine being predecessors or progeny of plants we have on earth.

I appreciated the need to retain enough familiarity to be recognizable by a determinedly earth-bound audience, but isn't it odd that we might envision every other universe to be so much like our own? I heard a talk yesterday about the "dangers" of having only "one story"—one perception of ourselves and stereotypes of "others"—and I saw today how that plays out in our films: the Na'vi (people of Pandora) were much like our stereotypes of peaceful American Indians (even shooting bows and arrows much like theirs), and the corporate/military machine was clearly a fast-forward of today's civilization into the future. I almost giggled out loud at how much some of the robot warriors reminded me of the robot my kids and my brother built out of the Construx kit the grandparents gave them for Christmas one year.

I'm skeptical of thinking that even English-speaking Americans fit into that picture; I have so many fears for a nation that seems not to want to face a future that is bound to be different from its past, partly because of our own breakneck speed of invention and reinvention and partly because of the changing world around us that begs for different responses than in the past. We are already seeing warfare change; the military machinery that shouted power and victory in World War II didn't work in Vietnam, and it doesn't work in Iraq or Afghanistan. While we pour resources into failing wars, China and India pour theirs into infrastructure and cyberspace; imagining that bigger, better, meaner machines will dominate our future seems really out of step to me. And imagining that America will maintain its dominance for more than a few years—in the movie, more than a century—seems highly unlikely to me.

I don't think we're going to lose our might because of war; I think we're going to lose it because of economics and politics. And I think a lot of what I saw in Avatar was a message—fuzzed over, but maybe there—that military might isn't the right answer. In Pandora (an ironic name if ever there was one), the answer was the way I felt a decade or so ago when I believed that the world respected America, when I was glad we had survived for four decades without a "real" war and for a couple without a losing "conflict," and I thought I would see my babies grow up in times of peace.

But now Soldier Son has been to a real, ugly, expensive war once, and he's back in training to be a part of the tail end of that war and another that have been the feature of all three kids' adult lives. We aren't winning these wars; I don't think we can because I don't think they are wars of people being killed until their leaders give up. I think it's time for us to ditch the hubris of the Bush administration, to accept the fact that some people are heartless haters, and to win our enemies over by making their hateful ways losing ways, not by making their hateful fringe into martyrs. It absolutely galls me that Bush was so incensed by the deaths of 3,000 innocents on our soil that he cheerfully sent 5,000 of our own to theirs to die and thousands more to be injured, all in the name of hubris. And I don't believe that hubris can ever win.

In fact, I hated seeing the war scene in Avatar, not because I hated seeing people (on both sides) dispatched to their deaths but because I think there has to have been another way. Maybe 2154 (they year Ebert says the film is set) isn't far enough into the future; maybe we will need more time to learn to "beat [our] swords into plowshares" and "not study war no more." I think the current administration understands that, but I think our political system is too broken to let it work. I have hope, but it is fading—not because of what Obama has or hasn't done but because of the power of political idiots who are passing out the Kool-Aid.

One thing I did see in Avatar that I glommed onto was a scene in which a creature died and the leading lady (a Na'vi) explained that its soul would go on although its body would become a part of "the people" (for dinner, I presume). In a similar, earlier scene, she had said it was a shame to kill any creature; I don't remember the words exactly, but the point was that they are all part of the brotherhood of life.

The earlier scene might support Darling Daughter's vegetarian ideology; the later one fits more with my calm at having her brother go off to war: I know he could die, but I also believe in my very fiber that if his body dies, his soul and spirit will live on. I know that sounds corny, especially when I freely admit that I am religiously, if anything, a deist; I'm not willing to say I believe in resurrection, I'm not willing to profess that Jesus is the only way to God, and I'm not willing to be part of an order that seems to me to profess hubris above all, even though I know some lovely Christians who don't fit that description at all. My head says it's stupid to think my own Mother and Daddy are somehow still present, still with me, still watching out for me; my heart says it's absolutely true. I won't go around arguing the illogic of your religion with you if you don't argue the illogic of my philosophy with me.

And that whole range of thinking was spurred by this amazing adventure into special effects in film-making. I'm not sure whether DD is really going to stay in that industry; her heart may lead her another way, maybe in the coming months. But I do have to say that it's an amazing one, and even if the plot was worn and corny, I found the thing incredible.

Family time in the modern era, with boys

I love working a good jigsaw puzzle now and then; when we were kids, my brothers and sisters and I spent lots of hours with a big puzzle spread out on a card table, and for several years now, our family gatherings have featured at least the sisters (including the sister-in-law) seated around a puzzle while we chat about events since we last gathered.

This year I had found a silly puzzle titled "One Hundred Chickens and a Worm" that was mostly white with line drawings of mostly white chickens (and a few reds and blacks and purples), mostly dressed hysterically: one was a stripper, one was Bat Chicken, a couple appeared to be the Blues Brothers, one was reading a newspaper—you get the idea. Working it together made us sound as if we'd already escaped from the home: "I'm working on this Cat-in-the-Hat chicken; do you have any of these red stripes over there?"

After I had gotten the chicken puzzle home, I read on the box that the series included 100 frogs and a fly—perfect for the sister who likes frogs, I thought, and 100 dogs and a cat, and 100 cats and a bird. My local Wally Worlds didn't seem to carry the frog puzzle, but I bought the dogs for Darling Daughter and considered getting the cats for Number One Son.

DDr got away after Christmas without opening the dog puzzle, but I had had fun with the chickens and thought the dogs—which came in a much wider variety of colors—would be fun for me, since right now I outnumber her in dog maintenance by two to one.

I opened the box and took a tip from my sister, who had used made color copies of the box so all four of us could have one when we worked on the chickens together. (Amazing how technology has taken over even low-tech jigsaw puzzles; when I made my copies, I enlarged them to the size of a page so I could see details better!) Instead of fishing out all the border first, I sorted the pieces by color and started assembling dogs from the smallest pile first. Before the evening was out, I had assembled several green dogs, a few blue ones, and most of the pinks. NOS drifted by the table a couple of times on his way in and out of the kitchen and commented that he just didn't have the patience for jigsaw puzzles.

By the time I gave up for the evening (on grounds that I had to work the next day), I had done maybe half the puzzle and finished most of the border around it. The next evening, I started in again as soon as I got home from work, and when NOS came in a couple of hours later, the puzzle was really taking shape. Like the rest of my family, he couldn't resist, so he picked up a piece or two and tapped them into place, and then he was hooked on multicolor dogs, too.

Shortly after NOS started to work with me, Soldier Son called from his post in Georgia, where he is working through whatever training retreads former reservists into full-time duty. He didn't sound wonderful (hauling a 45-pound pack on his back in freezing weather has never been his idea of fun, and I think he was coming down with a cold), but he said something that got his brother's attention. I tried unsuccessfully to switch the phone to its speaker setting, but I gave up and handed the phone over to NOS.

I really thought NOS would give up and walk away to carry on the conversation with his brother, but I realized a few minutes later that I was glad he didn't. When my marriage broke up and NOS moved away from home with his dad and then again in a huff because my rules didn't suit his image of how he was allowed to behave, our "family time" pretty much fell apart. SS and DD and I found our opportunities to have "family time" without him, but "family time" with him has been sparse for the past 10 years, to put it mildly.

But this week, it seemed to be back, and I'm glad of that. I was sorry it couldn't be a face-to-face time when he and his brother and sister could all clown around together, but I was glad I got to feel as if his brother and I mattered to him in a way that let him relax and be comfortable just chatting and playing with us. I know he had tried to get there with his brother before SS left for Georgia, but somehow they never really seemed to "click."

It took the telephone to make it happen, but it was a nice little "family time" moment to share.

A binary kind of day

One of my friends noted yesterday that we've had a few days this year (and we'll have a few more) that are binary—that is, they are written with only the digits 1 and 0. Of course, what they "mean" in binary code isn't the same as we see in good ol' decimal numbers. Today, for example, is 1/11, which written as 111 would be equal to one hundred eleven in decimal code, but in binary it represents seven (although I always wonder whether it would be read "one hundred eleven" or "one hundred and onety one" or something). We'll get a few more of these this year, come October and November, and then we'll reprise them next year.

Part of the reason I started thinking about this today is that I had to get the car inspected. Okay, I should have done it last month, but I was busy hating my job at the time, and I just didn't get out of the house to get a car inspected. So I did it today.

While I was in the showroom of the dealership where I bought my car, I laughed when I saw that the inspection sticker on one of the cars had my birthday on it: 11 11 (another good old binary number). And then when my car came out of the shop, it also had a binary number on it—this month next year: 1 11.

Or today's date, depending on which way you look at it.