Real Fake

First of all, this is pretty cool:

Moss Makes a Lush, No-Care Lawn

I wonder if the environmental benefits extend beyond water conservation?


Anyway, on to the matter at hand. I'm pretty active in theatre and I enjoy it a lot. Currently, I'm about to wrap up a production geared towards children about a girl who comes to a Magic Academy, discovers she has magical powers, and helps a prince-turned-giant-falcon to save the kingdom from an evil wizard and his abominable wolfen servant. It was written by two graduating seniors this year, and directed by another senior, and while it may sound like Harry Potter, it's actually inspired by a few Russian folk tales.

I play the part of the foster father figure for this girl, and my character is a wily gardener with (what I hope passes for) a Scottish dialect. The script calls for a man in his 70s, and since I'm really not remotely that old, I wear a lot of aging makeup. For instance:




I guess this is as good a time as any to show you all what I loot like. And what I'll look like in 50 years. :P

Since this is a children's show, we're told to rush off the stage after curtain call so we can get to the lobby to greet the children that come. I stay in character of course, because the kids and their parents seem to get a kick out of it. People my age, however, I can lump into two pretty distinct groups. The first is made of my fellow theatre folks, who are all familiar with being on a stage, wearing makeup, and assuming a role for the sake on an audience. When they come out to greet me, it's usually with a lot of excitement and this sort of knowing, wondrous attitude that lets me know that they understand that I'm inside the character, and they're hanging out with me, who is acting.

The other group of people my age, though, are those who are completely unfamiliar with "theatre people," or who see theatre a lot but have never done it, or any range of people inbetween. Their reactions vary, but generally it's a sort of uncomfortable, congratulatory distance. Yeah, they want to tell me that I did a good job, but they also can't help but let me know about how creeped out they are by my makeup and character. "You're not old," they say, "so it's creepy to see you as such a believable old guy."

My character Gasper is a lovable guy! It bothers me when people say I'm creepy! I can usually brush it off, but deep down it makes me really excited for the end of the show, because I won't have to "creep out" people anymore. Since I'm a theatre person myself, I can't really understand the perspective of these people. With some of them I even dropped out of character to let them know that it's still me, I'm just acting, but that usually seems to creep them out even more. One of my friends actually ran away from me because she couldn't handle it, and a few weren't able to talk to me. Even my girlfriend keeps a gentle distance!

I look at acting as a way to tell a story to people, to relate on common ground between the audience and me. It's sort of therapeutic, and it's definitely tied pretty closely with my studies of philosophy (which is another post for another day). So when the audience seems to be creeped out by my acting, it's just kind of frustrating.

Portents of Doom?

I had a dream last night. My parents and I were in a room that was disproportionately small, and we were cramped to find a place to stand or sit around this table at which I think we were doing some sort of craft.

I don't remember much about the dream, but the over-arching theme was one of argument and anger. I remember my Mom mentioned some sort of criticism of me, and (as only my mom is capable) stirred me into quite a frenzy. For a little background, I love my parents and my parents love me, but we happen to have different views on a lot of subjects. My Mom is the more vocal of my parents, and she tends to draw hasty correlations between different occurrences. For instance, I remember a time in high school when my Mom and I were arguing about gay marriage. Eventually, it got to the point where my Mom was saying things like "you don't understand what gay marriage would do to the American way of life! Just like you don't understand why you should try to get good grades and just like you don't understand why it's a horrible thing to quit a sports team!"

When my Mom and I argue, we tend to cover a lot of ground, but it really bothers me when my Mom tries to tie a few of my (seemingly) unrelated weaknesses together in an attempt to get a leg up in the argument. I remember losing my temper a little in that particular argument, but usually I can keep my cool even if my mom does thing like that.

That was not the case in my dream. In real life I recently told my parents that I'm not a Christian, and they occasionally drop little "come back to Christianity!" ploys in our conversation. I want to mention right now that they're by now means intrusive, they're just trying to help me figure out what they consider to be the Truth, and part of me admires them for that. In the dream, though, my Mom just barely mentioned something about Christianity, and I absolutely exploded. I don't remember anything about the conversation other than the incredible anger I felt. At one point it got so bad that my Mom had to leave the tiny room, and my Dad and I shared an awkward silence.

I woke up feeling pretty bad about the whole thing. I almost called her this morning to apologize, but then I realized it wasn't real.

Indexed

I've stumbled upon this really cool blog called Indexed. Self-described, it's "a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math."



Some of them are funny, some of them are serious, and some of them area little lewd, but they all make you stop to think for a little while. Check it out!

What? Something like Decisiveness?!?!

So throughout most of my adolescent life, I've been content to be the "objective" guy in conversations. Especially when it comes to religion, I can't seem to find anything that makes me feel some connection with the supposed "ultimate reality," or godhead. I can respect others that follow religions for the right reasons, but I just don't feel it myself.

Lately though, I've been feeling a change in the wind. My Confucianism class is definitely not about religious Confucianism (ancestor worship and all that jazz), but I feel (and I'm equivocating a little bit here) something almost religious about it. It's almost effortless for me to grab onto the teachings; I feel like I'm actually connected to the philosophy on some primal level, and that's a pretty powerful feeling for me.

Take Christianity. I was raised in a Christian household in a Christian town, so it's been a big part of my life. I can't count the number of times I tried to be a "good Christian," but it never seemed to work out for me. Yeah, for a time I could look at the world through a Christian lens, but there was always this notion that there was me, and there was the Christian lens, and I was adopting that lens to see the world for a little while, but there was nothing inherent about the way I was seeing. Buddhism was more intuitive for me than Christianity, but there was still a disconnect, and a forcing on my part that kept me fundamentally separated.

Confucianism is different. Every day, I find myself more and more captivated by the ideas of learning, reflecting, ritual, appropriateness, reciprocity, and harmony and I seem to stumble upon moments of each all the time without really trying. It's like--instead of trying on different conceptual glasses to see if they fit--I'm looking at the world through my own eyes, and I'm only just learning that the name of my eyes is Confucianism.

I'm definitely not to the point where I'll be changing my Facebook religious status (:P), but I have a healthy respect for the teachings of Confucius.

Agh!

So Mark had a post about Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a little while ago, and in it he mentioned that it's a crazy hard experiment to try and perceive sight without the category of space. No matter how much I try, I don't think I've ever experienced the notion of sight without space, at least not for more than a split second, and usually not on purpose. It's almost like once in a blue moon there's this sort of short-circuit that makes me see things without depth for a split second.

One of those moments happened when I was walking down a set of stairs today. What a thriller!

Sorry ahead of time.

Mark and maybe Panza may be the only two people who read this blog that will understand what I'm talking about, and I'd like to apologize for that ahead of time. This sprung into my head from a conversation in my Philosophy of Religion class, and I want desperately for it to exist somewhere other than just my head.

It seems to me that the nature of hermeneutics suggest that every type of expression--whether it be science, philosophy, poetry, art, or anything else--is inherently symbolic. At first glance, we most often operate from the assumption that language we use is univocal: that is, every word we use corresponds with some object that is real and that truly encapsulates the idea that we're trying to express. One of the purest forms of this is a mathematical equation, like 1+1=2. We know the symbol "1," that it corresponds with the idea of singularity, and we know that two singularities are combined, it results in a plurality as indicated by the symbol "2." (Interestingly, try to look at the symbols "1" and "2" without corresponding them to numbers.)

The problem hermeneutics brings to this univocal view of language is that hermeneutics is supposed to help the user arrive at deeper understanding of a text through repeated reading, like continually churning the ingredients of a soup to get the mix just right. When we read a text, we bring to it our previous experiences, and when we approach it again, we bring our previous understanding of the text, along with any other experiences we've had in the intervening time, which have been shaped (even if only a little) by our initial reading of the text. We can do this again and again to constantly refresh the meaning of a text in our minds.

If language is univocal, then how is this possible? If the goal of language is to perfectly correspond with an idea or concept, then how could reading something more than once be of any use? Reading it the first time would supply the reader with all the information necessary for understanding, and yet our experience in real life shows us how infrequently this is the case.

One of the best examples I can think of about this whole thing is the school system I've been exposed to throughout my life. When I have to write a paper for class, I'm expected to read through the material to discover it's meaning, then analyze that meaning in light of the other meanings I've accumulated throughout my life. I show this by citing other sources, and usually the more outside information I use as evidence for or against the initial material, the more completely I've done my job.

This can't possibly be univocal, because so many different people will have as many (or more) different opinions about the material. If language is univocal and each word points to one thing, then there's no way a text could have more than one meaning. Poetry is an easy example of a text with a multitude of interpretations, but it seems that there's "wiggle room" in everything I've read. At the very least, the fact that different people respond differently to a text (even if it says only one thing) seems evidence enough that the text is symoblic: maybe only for the individuals reading the text, but symbolic nonetheless.

It seems really intuitive to me that it's not a stretch to say that all language is symbolic, but in this world where we live side-by-side with the ghost of positivism, it seems that many of my classmates couldn't wrap their heads around it.

Raindrops

It's the kind of weather where you can't really tell that it's raining if you aren't in a moving vehicle. A tiny pinprick of moisture hits the windshield, surrounded by other drops of different size, though none of them are very large.

These other drops are all moving, some fast, some slow. Though they each have their own way of doing it, all of them are moving toward the edge of the windshield, and then: who knows? Not even I, as a watcher, can tell. Sometimes two drops come together to make one larger drop, sometimes many drops conglomerate into one big drop, barreling towards the edge faster than the others.

The paths cut by the drops can be seen by a wandering eye, or by looking at the trail of tiny droplets left behind by larger drops. They flow over a smooth surface, but take strange, erratic courses, sometimes following the trail left by drops that have gone before, sometimes falling into grooves of residue left behind by the windshield wipers. What causes them to move? Is it the wind outside? or the speed of the car? or the will of the drops themselves, yearning for some existence other than that of a windshield bead?

And are these drops aware? Do they looked at each other--going different directions and different speeds--and laugh or argue at another's folly? Do they suppose they in turn are being watched by another being altogether, guiding the vehicle that is the earth they tred? Do they wonder about the capabilities, the thoughts of this other being?

Do they know that I'm asking questions, too?