The hope that celebrities hold for us

Why do we, as human beings, tend to obsess over certain people?  Artists, writers, singers, movie stars, celebrities of all shapes and colors....  Why do we covet the letters, journals, photos, diaries, and grocery lists of distinguished individuals?  Why do we  feel it so important to understand, to know everything about them, as if that individual, rather than ourselves, has the key to the meaning of life?  

It's not merely that, through whatever medium in which they have distinguished themselves, they express life better than the rest of us can, or that they achieved great things.  We seem to believe that they actually know things that the rest of us don't know.  But don't we love their work, in part, because we see the truth of our own reality reflected in it?  And yes, there are certainly things that we can learn from them, as there are things that we can learn from all human beings, but that doesn't explain our fascination with the individual: all the things we long to know about every banal aspect of their everyday lives.  How everything suddenly becomes exciting when it involves a "star"--as Woody Allen so adeptly mocked in To Rome with Love, in which Leopoldo (a totally normal man) wakes up one day to discover that he has become a celebrity for no reason, and finds his life suddenly inundated with reporters who film him brushing his teeth, or demand to know all the details of what he ate for breakfast.  You also see it in the novel The Bird of Night by Susan Hill, about the life and love of a great poet gone mad, in which young academics are so desperate to get their hands on Francis Croft's personal "papers"--not just to better understand and interpret his poetry, but so they can affirm their own connection with him, the man himself ("I know that I have an affinity of some kind with him, I feel a closeness," said the young, freckled man with long fingers like seaweed).  Along the same lines, you can see videos from the 60's in which teenage girls talk with perfect seriousness about how John Lennon is their soul mate and they "just know" that they're meant to be together. 

We seem to be looking for answers in the lives of these famous people, but maybe all we're looking for, after all, is proof that we're not alone--that there is someone else out there who thinks and feels like you do, someone who can express the trials and treasures of existence better than you can, someone who is esteemed and admired, and who therefore vindicates your own existence--since you consider yourself akin to them in spirit.

So we continue to associate ourselves with celebrities, to obsess over them, finding in their glory the kind of glory that we expect or want for ourselves.  To be recognized--that's all most people want.  To be seen as we are, or as we see ourselves--or, barring that, to be seen at least as something of consequence.  Not just another blip on the radar of human existence, not just another ant crawling among the 7 billion.  The hope that we invest in people who have accomplished much is the hope that we are not alone, that we can be understood, and that we can understand this world we've been born into--and that a little bit of their greatness, the part of them that will live on after they have died, is also part of us.  

But when it comes to understanding life, and understanding ourselves, maybe we'd be better off if we spent less time looking to them--believing they have all the answers--and more time looking into ourselves.  All lives are reflected into each other, after all, and though it's true that the experience of every human being is unique, the only way you will ever understand life is if you understand your own experience of it.  The only way that you can avoid being alone is if you can communicate and share that experience with other people.   And, if you can communicate it in a way that resonates with other people and inspires them in turn, then you've discovered some of your own greatness.  


Sources of inspiration for this post:

The Bird of Night by Susan Hill

To Rome with Love by Woody Allen

Perusing the Daily Mail the other day and being absolutely astounded at the minute reporting on totally insignificant things

Waukegan Teachers on Strike

My dad and other Waukegan school district teachers have been on strike for the entire month of October--the schools have been closed throughout this time.  There are a whole lot of reasons for this, including the fact that they are some of the lowest paid teachers in the state, while their administrators (including the superintendent) are some of the highest paid in the state, and the teachers' pay has been frozen for the last few years, even though the school currently has thousands of dollars in surplus.  The school board simply will not bend and give the teachers fair pay and fair contracts.  The teachers also have no health insurance while they're on strike.  It's getting to the point where this is on national news, and Governor Quinn has sent the Illinois Minister of Education to personally intervene. 

I'm just writing about this because much of the news coverage I've seen seems to be biased in favor of the administration, making it sound like it's the teachers' fault that the students have all been out of school for a month.  They held a board meeting recently, in which the school board gave up and adjourned after only 13 minutes, because the crowd was so angry when the board announced that the meeting would be limited to an hour.  Listen to their reaction when the board announced that the audience would only be given 45 minutes to speak, while the first 15 minutes of that precious hour would be given to the leader of a vehemently anti-teacher faction for a "special presentation." 
Waukegan board meeting Full Video Oct 28, 2014 (min 3:36)

Before long the entire audience was standing with their backs to the school board, chanting "We support our teachers!"  The article on this in the Daily Herald made it sound like the failure of the meeting was all the audience's fault because they simply wouldn't settle down. 

After such an embarrassing meeting, hopefully the board will give in soon and offer the teachers a decent pay raise, but who knows when that'll happen.  In the meantime, my dad and all the other teachers are out there picketing every single day. 

Oh, and incidentally, teachers make some pretty awesome picketing signs:

 

Little did he know, the other guy had no insurance either... 

Learn more on their facebook page: Waukegan Teachers-Parents United

West Coast Road Trip - Eugene & Portland

On the way up to Portland, Liz and I stopped in Eugene for an evening to visit my friend Sarah.  She and her boyfriend took us out to dinner at Sizzle Pie, a pizza place with grungy decor and surprisingly delicious and creative pizzas.  We sat at the picnic tables outside to eat our food, across the street from a pile of hippies on  a public bench who serenaded all of downtown Eugene with numerous songs played on the same two chords over and over again, including the angriest version of "You Are My Sunshine" that I've ever heard.  (After a while the police came over, along with a couple of grumpy old men, and the impromptu hippie band was disbanded).

DESTINATION #4

Portland was surprising--and not in the ways that I expected.  Anyone who's ever seen Portlandia has images of a hippie-hipster (hippiester) Mecca that's all about green living, radically ridiculous ideas about art and life, and people with weird hair cuts.  But Portland had a surprisingly industrial look.  We were couchsurfing at someone's apartment in the downtown area (right by the river), and we were surrounded on all sides by Steampunk-esque metal bridges, elevated highways, construction projects, and not-quite-sky-scrapers.  You can hear the trains booming and blaring all night.

Our first day there was quite lazy.  We didn't sleep very well (...trains...), so we didn't get up till noon-ish, and, after a little internet research, decided to get brunch at a place called Mother's Bistro and Bar.  Doesn't sound like anything special, right?  Imagine Sherlock-style wallpaper (and furniture upholstered to match), glass chandeliers, mirrors, sleek black cabinets, and waiters who sing along with the music while they dash around taking everyone's orders by memory.  On second thought, I'll spare you the imagining--here are some pictures.  

The Spectrum of Sound: English vs. Korean Consonants

When I started studying the Korean alphabet, I found many charts that neatly lined up each Korean letter with its English equivalent.  ㄷ= D, ㅌ = T, and so on.  It seemed pretty straightforward.  However, there were certain letters that seemed confusing at first.  For instance, ㄱ = G/K, and ㄹ = R/L.  These Korean letters were described as being “in between” their two English equivalents.  ㄹ is neither an R nor an L sound, but somewhere in between: a sound that simply doesn’t exist in English.  I found this to be one of the hardest things about Korean—learning to hear and pronounce totally new sounds from scratch.  However, I soon realized that this state of being “in between” didn’t apply only to a couple of letters in the Korean alphabet; in fact, it applied to most Korean letters.  Looking at the Korean alphabet as a series of equivalents to the English alphabet really doesn’t work.  I had to change my whole frame of reference in order to pronounce Korean correctly.  That’s when I really started thinking about language sounds as being part of a sliding spectrum. 

Really, all sounds are part of a sliding spectrum.  This is a very familiar idea to musicians, but one which, for some reason, is almost never mentioned in language classes.  For instance, there might be only 88 keys on a piano, but really there are an infinite number of possible pitches within that range.  In Western music, we have chosen to break up the spectrum into half steps and whole steps to form scales, but there is also space between the notes.  A violin can slide between B and B-flat for instance, covering all the pitches in between.  Those unused pitches still exist, even though Western music is not designed to include them. 

The same idea applies to pronunciation and the sounds that make up languages. 

In Korean, for instance, the letter ㅂis often equated with the English letter B.  This isn’t really accurate though.  There is a whole spectrum of sounds that human beings can make with their lips, and ㅂand B actually fall in slightly different places on that spectrum.

Here is my chart showing where letters in the English and Korean alphabets really are in relation to each other.  Each spectrum is divided according to which part of the mouth you use to make these sounds.* 

*I could use linguistic terms for these, like bilabial and aspirated, but I’d rather put this in laymen’s terms.

With all of these spectrums, the middle sound is actually the gentlest.  The farther to the right or left a letter is, the more tension you put into the lips, throat, or tongue in order to produce it.  For example, ㅉ is a harder, over-emphasized version of J, while ㅊ is like an over-emphasized CH.  The ㅈ in the middle is a very gentle blend of the J and CH sounds. 

Really, the difference between all these sounds is rather slight, so at first, you might have trouble distinguishing between the sounds of ㅉ, J, and ㅈ, for example; but with time and practice you can learn to hear the difference. 

Then, of course, there is also the aforementioned R & L spectrum:

A lot of English-speakers find it hard to believe that there’s much similarity between the R and L sounds—I know I did, at first.  But for the Korean ㄹ, just try to imagine it as a very short, gently rolled R.  It’s not quite like the rolled R’s that you find in Spanish or Italian, but the tongue motion is very similar.  You just roll it once, instead of sustaining the roll like you would in Spanish. 

And lastly, there are all these consonants, which really do have English equivalents:

M = ㅁ

N = ㄴ

NG = ㅇ

S = ㅅ

H = ㅎ

I could talk about Korean vowels, but I think that might be a post for another time.  ^_^  Anyways, I hope that if you're studying Korean, or teaching English in Korea, you'll find this article helpful!  

West Coast Road Trip - Visalia & San Francisco

After leaving LA, my sister and I drove north through thick, rolling hills that looked like they were covered in dark, yellow velvet.  We were headed to the small town of Visalia to visit my friends Alex and Catharine.  When we arrived in the evening, we had a wonderful dinner complete with homemade sangria.  ^_^

The next day we all went downtown to Brewbaker's bar & restaurant to see the final match of the FIFA World Cup: Germany vs. Argentina.  Now, I'm not a soccer person at all.  I played for about three years when I was in elementary school, but I never followed professional soccer.  I've gotta say though, this was really fun--especially since Catharine's brother is a big soccer fan and he was there to get us up to speed on everything that was going on.  It's always so much more fun doing anything when you have an enthusiast present.  :-)

It was a relatively short visit, and later that afternoon we drove on to...

DESTINATION #3

San Francisco: a suburban city, with rows of delicately painted, life-sized doll houses lining street after street, and a seemingly endless parade of dog-owners who don't believe in using leashes.  It was both self-consciously chic and deliberately squalid.  Fancy boutiques share the same block as tie-dyed tattoo parlors; young hippie-hobos and their half-starved dogs walk right by ladies in expensive, skanky fripperie; scruffy bikers without shoes coast down the street, yoga mats strapped to their backs.  SF can be surreal in the extreme.

West Coast Road Trip - LA

DESTINATION #2

From Las Vegas, Liz and I drove straight on to LA where we shifted gears from being tourists to being visitors.  (Hence the relative lack of pictures in this post).  We have a number of cousins and friends out there, and my friend Whitney was kind enough to let us stay at her apartment even though she and her husband would be out of town for most of our stay.  It was a hot day, so we enjoyed a swim in the pool outside where I did my typical Gemini thing by constantly swimming around, doing underwater flips, climbing out and then dive-bombing back in, and my sister did her typical Taurus thing by clinging to the side of the pool and lounging like a starfish.  

Whitney and Daniel had to finish packing for their trip, but that didn't stop me and Whitney from staying up late chatting.  She and her husband left early the next morning, but Liz and I slept in.  Then met up with an old friend of mine for lunch, where she told us all about her latest relationship drama.

This friend has more relationship drama in her life than anyone else I know, and I'm pretty sure it's not because of her personality--it's because she's gay.  She'd just broken up with yet another girlfriend who comes from a severely homophobic family.  My friend is out of the closet but the other girl was not, and the two of them had been dating secretly for almost a year.  My friend later started to think that this girl was cheating on her with a guy they both knew, and as the evidence for this piled up, she eventually ended the relationship.   This is the second time that she's gone through this exact sequence of events.  The last time, her ex-girlfriend ended up getting pregnant by, and later marrying, the guy in question.  

Now, I don't know if those girls just started dating a guy on the side because they actually wanted to, or because they were just desperate to cover up their own homosexuality; but either way, my friend's life would be a lot simpler if she could openly date anyone she wanted--without worrying about their family disowning them when they find out.  Not to mention that her girlfriend wouldn't be able to get away with two-timing so easily if everyone knew that she was already in a relationship with my friend.  It just goes to show that, even though my friend is out of the closet and everyone in her life is very accepting of it, she's still deeply affected by other people's homophobia--even the homophobia of people she's never met. 

Later that evening, Liz and I went to see our cousins Christina and Colleen.  We ate out at M Street Kitchen in Santa Monica (which is an excellent place), and we swapped family stories about our parents, mostly about when the five Duffy siblings were little hoodlums growing up in the 60's, before they became Respectable People.   My personal favorite story, one of which I was previously unaware, involves the time when they apparently all got high and wallpapered their entire basement in tin foil.  (My father denies having been a part of this.)

West Coast Road Trip - VEGAS

PROLOGUE

For some months, my sister and I had been planning to embark on a 5-week, 4,000-mile road trip along the west coast of the United States and Canada.  Due to money restraints (and because we wanted this to be a Real American Road Trip) we decided to be reasonably ridiculous and drive the entire way.  So, on July 6th, 2014, in a beat-up Toyota Corolla named Wong Foo with 150,000 miles on it, we set out from home at the crack of dawn.  The first day of our trip was not terribly exciting because it involved a 15-hour stint from from Chicago to Denver, CO.  On the second day, however, we came to the deserts of eastern Utah, which have some of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen.  

You can just barely see me standing on top!

DESTINATION #1

 

When Liz and I first arrived in Vegas, it was late at night and the city was spread out before us, lit up like a circuit board.  One of the first things we saw as we drove in were three billboards: one for diamonds, one for plastic surgery, and one for a divorce & custody lawyer.  Vegas mores in a nutshell.  
I think my sister summed it up best when she said that the entire point of Vegas is to take everything wrong with America, super-size it, glitz it up, and display it proudly.  Example: the Heart Attack Grill, a restaurant that advertises having the fattiest foods in the world.  (People over 350 lbs eat free!)

"Finding your home" - Thoughts on Art, Dreams, and Creation: part 2

TED - Elizabeth Gilbert: Success, failure and the drive to keep creating 

I just watched this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love), and I thought it was a really nice follow-up to my previous post.  I love the way she describes following your creative passion as "finding your home" and "finding where you rightfully live."  It implies so much more about what it really means to follow your passion. 

"Following" implies a state of constant motion, pursuing, and it also implies something that is separate from yourself. 

"Finding your home," on the other hand, implies stability, constancy, and something that is innately part of yourself.  It implies that your passion and your identity as defined by your actions is something that you build and maintain throughout your life--not something that you have to chase around from place to place.  I think perhaps this is where true inner strength comes from: knowing where your creative home is.  If you maintain this foundation, this bed-rock, it can keep you "safe from the random hurricanes of outcome"--both good and bad.  Outcome is always half-random, and if you define yourself and your worth based on the external happenings of the moment--such as how other people react to you or your work--then how can you really know who you are? 

She ends her talk with a beautiful summary of her philosophy.  I'm glad that she specifically mentions addiction and infatuation--as the dark, tainted sides of love and passion, I think it's important to address them. 

"I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there is something in this world that you love more than you love yourself--something worthy, by the way.  So addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live, right?  The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most and then build your house right on top of it, and don't budge from it."

"It is better to dream your life than to live it" - Thoughts on Art, Dreams, and Creation

"Ambition intoxicates more than fame; desire makes all things blossom, and possession makes them whither away; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even though living it is still dreaming it, albeit less mysteriously and less clearly, in a dark, heavy dream, like the dream diffused though the dim awareness of ruminating beasts.  Shakespeare's plays are more beautiful when viewed in a study than when put on in the theater.  The poets who have created imperishable women in love have often only ever known humdrum servant girls from taverns, while the most envied voluptuaries are unable to grasp fully the life they lead, or rather the life that leads them.   

I knew a young boy of ten, of sickly disposition and precocious imagination, who had developed a purely cerebral love for an older girl. He would stay at his window for hours on end to see her walk by, wept if he didn't see her, wept even more if he did.  He spent moments with her that were very few and far between.  He stopped sleeping and eating.  One day, he threw himself out of his window.  People thought at first that despair at never getting close to his lady friend had filled him with the resolve to die.  They learnt that, on the contrary, he had just had a long conversation with her: she had been extremely nice to him.  Then people supposed that he had renounced the insipid days he still had to live, after this intoxication that he might never be able to experience again.  Frequent remarks he had previously made to one of his friends finally led people to deduce that he was filled with disappointment every time he saw the sovereign lady of his dreams; but as soon as she had left, his fertile imagination restored all her power to the absent girl, and he would start to long her her again.  After that final interview in which he had, in his already active and inventive fantasy, raised his lady friend to the high perfection of which her own nature was capable, and been filled with despair when he compared that imperfect perfection to the absolute perfection on which he lived and from which he was dying, he threw himself out of the window.  Subsequently, having been reduced to idiocy, he lived for a long time, since his fall had left him with no memory of his soul, his mind, or of the words of his lady friend, whom he now met without seeing her.  In spite of supplications and threats, she married him, and died several years later, without having managed to make him recognize her.  

Life is like this girl.  We dream of it, and we love what we have dreamt up.  We must not try to live it: we throw ourselves, like that boy, into a state of stupidity--but not all at once: everything in life deteriorates by imperceptible degrees.  Within ten years, we do not recognise our dreams, we deny them, we live, like an ox, for the grass we graze on moment by moment.  And from our marriage with death, who knows if we will arise as conscious, immortal beings?"

~Marcel Proust

(from Pleasures and Days: Nostalgia - Daydreams Under Changing Skies, part 6)

I see so much of myself in Proust.  Not always the best parts of me, but real parts of me none-the-less.  Like Proust, I'm a perpetual dreamer, highly introspective, and I often prefer the company of the characters in my head to that of real people.  What I find interesting, is that in spite of this common tendency, Proust and I seem to have very different opinions about how it affects our lives.  While I am constantly pushing myself to spend less time alone, to go out among real people and have real life experiences, Proust extols the world of dreams.  Numerous times throughout Pleasures and Days, he claims the imagination's superiority over travel, over conversation, over performances and concerts, over all of life's experiences--just as here, he claims the superiority of imagined love over real love.  Or perhaps he thinks that there is no real love: at least, not the kind that fills your heart and soul and transforms your entire world for as long as it lasts.  On the other hand, I know from experience that, although imagination is a wonderful thing, you can easily waste away inside of it; and although great adventures and romances, and moments deliciously charged with significance, are possible at any given moment in your mind, living off of them is like eating shadows.  It can never compare with the taste of meaningful connections with real people, and the challenging and heart-filling experiences of real life.  The problem is that the latter are exponentially harder to come by.  But trying to live off dreams alone is a one-way ticket to depression.  Your mind will wither away and became stagnant--stupid--one that no longer grows, or changes, or learns, one that ceases to observe the infinite glories and banalities of life.   Daydreams, when exploited in excess, are like drugs; it's easy to take a shot of them for a quick-fix, but it's no substitute for real-life joys.  

But I'm sure, though Proust claims the imagination's superiority over all and advocates total seclusion as a means of letting your mind flourish, he clearly spent his fair share of time in the real world.  How else could he have written all these poignant vignettes at the age of 25, creating human portraits that can pack the significance and subtlety of an entire life into 10 pages?  He knew real life, and he understood it better than most.  What's so hard for someone like Proust, though, is that having an imagination is so vivid and so wonderful makes it impossible for life to compare with the extraordinary things you create in your head.  As Scott Adams once pointed out: "Imagination has a way of breeding disappointment."  

Character Study: Zuko

Let me preface this by saying that this post is about Last Airbender, the TV show, not the movie, and there are plenty of spoilers.  If you haven't seen the show yet, but you want to, I recommend skipping this whole post.  

Zuko

from Avatar: The Last Airbender

created by Bryan Konietzko & Michael Dante DiMartino

Prince Zuko is hands-down my favorite character in Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it didn't occur to me until recently to ask myself, why?  When I try to describe the development of his character, he comes across sounding like a totally generic Underdog Hero.  The defining trait of his personality is that he never gives up.  He is in many ways less talented and less clever than the other main characters, and he loses badly, over and over again, but he keeps fighting no matter what.  Of course, you admire him for that--but hasn't that story already been done to death?  How many movies can you think of where you're meant to root for the underdog as they fight their way to the top through blood, sweat, and tears?  Million Dollar Baby, Rudy, Sea Biscuit, Rocky, Hidalgo, Slum-Dog Millionaire, the Star Wars trilogy...even a movie like Legally Blonde fits the underdog story trajectory.   Pretty much any sports movie, a lot of martial arts movies, and any movie where the nerdy, unpopular kid becomes a hero and gets the girl falls into this category.

Now don't get me wrong, plenty of these movies are good, and there's a reason why the underdog trope shows up so often; it's exciting and we love it.  But very often when I recognize this trope, I still enjoy the story, but I'm not completely on the edge of my seat because I know how it's going to end.  With Zuko, I was more than on the edge of my seat--I was practically jumping out of my chair at times.  I felt Zuko's losses and triumphs more acutely than those of any other character in the show.

So what makes Zuko's story different?

In most stories, the underdog starts with nothing--usually poor, with no connections, few or no friends, and sub-par skills, or at least a sub-par reputation--and then, because he bravely (or foolishly) refuses to give up in the face of impossible odds, he eventually fights his way to the top and wins the love and admiration of the audience and the recognition and respect of the other characters.  To some extent, Zuko is like this.  At the beginning of Avatar, Zuko appears as the banished prince of the Fire Nation, mutilated and disowned by his father, cared for only by his uncle Iroh and the crew of his ship; and his fire-bending skills, though good, never measure up to the extraordinary bending talents of all the other characters around him.

However, what makes Zuko's situation different, and more tragic, is that he didn't come from nothing.  He was born with everything: the son and heir of the most powerful king in the world.  His banishment happened at the age of 13, when he was more than old enough to remember the life he had before, and old enough to feel some of his responsibilities as an adult, but not mature enough to deal with...anything, really.  His father also gave him (what was clearly intended to be) false hope, by telling Zuko that he could regain his honor and return home if he captured the Avatar--who at that time had not been seen for 100 years.  Zuko, being 13, was naive enough to believe that he could do this, and he spent the next few years of his life sailing around the world on this impossible mission.

Another thing that makes Zuko's story more complex, and more unusual, is that it's not just the story of an underdog.  It's also the story of a character who struggles with his own inner demons and eventually transitions from being a villain to being a good guy.  Granted, even at the beginning, you know that Zuko is not the most evil of evil characters--he doesn't kill or hurt anyone without cause, for instance--but he is one of the main villains of season 1, and the protagonists spend much of their time either fighting him or fleeing from him.

Zuko can be pretty scary when he wants to be.  

Interestingly, the other main villain of season 1 is the Fire Nation Commander Zhao, who serves as an excellent foil for Zuko.  Both he and Zuko are in a race to capture to the Avatar, but their morals are clearly quite different.  For example, in episode 3, Zuko challenges Zhao to a duel and beats him, fair and square, but chooses to spare Zhao's life.  Zhao responds by attacking Zuko as soon as the prince turns his back.  Uncle Iroh intervenes, subdues Zhao, and then calmly walks away, leaving Zhao with the scathing observation that, "Even in exile, my nephew has more honor than you."

Although Zuko clearly has redeeming qualities from the very beginning, his transformation from evil to good is very slow.  Zuko is not a very wise person, even for his age; he's impetuous, highly emotional, and tends to see everything in black and white.  Above all, he's been so obsessed for so long with restoring his birth-right and winning his father's love that he finds it hard to look at the world through any other lens.  Zuko gets smacked in the face with hard life lessons over and over again, and his uncle's constant benign influence and good advice seem to mostly bounce off him with no effect.  This can be very frustrating to watch.  But, that being said, changing yourself is hard--and I love that the creators of Avatar took the time to show this in all its anti-glory.

When your most fundamental beliefs are being challenged by everything you see around you, you can't accept it so easily.  There is a cost to letting go of the ideas you were raised with.  You can't simply change sides, at the drop of a hat, in a war that you've always believed was just.  You can't simply abandon your family, whom you've always wanted to love and be loved by in return, even when their inherent evil is so obvious to everyone else.  We see Zuko, scarred and humiliated, pay the price for changing himself, his worldview, and his values.  He moves--three steps forward, two steps back--towards becoming "the beautiful prince" that he has the potential to be. 

One of the most brilliant master-strokes of the entire show is in season 3, when Zuko finally has everything he wanted: his father accepted him back, his honor is restored, and he's being hailed as a hero throughout the Fire Nation--but then he chooses to give it all up.  This  is the most difficult and the most intriguing part of Zuko's journey, because now the conflict is purely internal.  All external enemies and obstacles have been removed, everything he wanted is his, and yet he still feels this deep contradiction, this wrongness within himself.  He has nowhere else to turn, no one else at whom he can direct his rage; the only thing he can do to cure himself is turn inward and truly confront his own demons. 

And he does. 

That's what makes Zuko amazing.  Most people in that situation would bury themselves in pleasures and power, and drown out those nettling barbs of conscience with thoughts of self-righteousness, egoism, and desperate self-justification.  Not Zuko. 

He takes his final step to self-determination when he confronts his father in a scene that is both touching and powerful.  Zuko finally becomes his own person, free of the negative influences and lies that he was raised with.  And he got there precisely because of his relentless refusal to give up the things he held most dear.  He's an underdog who got to the top, and then had the strength to give it all up for something lonelier and riskier, something purer and infinitely more precious: a chance to destroy the influences that had so corrupted him, and replace them with something better.  He chose to risk everything to try and create a better world, rather than reign over the tortured remains of the world corrupted by his forefathers. 

Zuko's journey is profound, poignant, painful, and awe-inspiring: the prince who became a outcast, the outcast who became a false hero, the false hero who became a revolutionary.  His inner strength is unparalleled, not just because he refused to give up in the face of impossible odds, but because, at the moment of his greatest success, he had the courage to look his darkest self in the face and triumph over him.  For that, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, I applaud you!

Upcoming Referendum on Legislative Maps in Illinois - Nov. 4, 2014!

Remember that article I wrote a few months back, arguing for an end to gerrymandering in Illinois?  Well, turns out there's an organization called Yes for Independent Maps, and they've been collecting signatures to get the issue on the ballot at this November's election!  They needed to collect 300,000 signatures of registered Illinois voters in order to put their proposed amendment on the ballot--and they succeeded!  I managed to get on board just in time to get my own copy of their petition, and I collected signatures and sent them in just under the deadline.  On May 1st, they'll have a celebration breakfast in downtown Chicago, load the petitions on to a semi-truck, and drive them down to Springfield where they will officially submit them.  The state will then cross-check the signatures and addresses on the petitions.  If the total of legitimate signatures is over 300,000, then their will be a referendum on the amendment on Nov. 4, 2014.   The residents of Illinois can vote either yes or no.  

Some brief facts about the campaign:
The Illinois Independent Redistricting Amendment would establish independent commission to draw the electoral maps.   
This commission would consist of 11 non-politicians: four Democrats, four Republicans and three independents.
This amendment would effect redistricting for state legislators only, not federal legislators.  

To see a summary and complete draft of the amendment, click here.  



Other links of interest: 

CLTV Interview with campaign manager, Michael Kolenc.

Chicago Tribune Editorial: A fair legislative map means better Democratic candidates

Miyazaki's "The Wind Rises" - a story of genius fulfilled

SPOILER ALERT: In this post, I talk in great detail about The Wind Rises.  If you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip this post and come back later.  :-)

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Miyazaki's latest and (allegedly) final movie doesn't have much of a plot.  There is no grand climax, and not even much character development.  It's just the story of a boy's life, as he follows his life's ambition to be an aeronautical engineer.  It takes place in Japan, from just a few years before the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, through Japan's ensuing economic collapse, and into World War II.  Although you witness all these disasters in the film, the main character, Jiro, seems oddly detached from them emotionally.  And though the moral question of how the planes that he's creating are being used does come up repeatedly, he never really grapples with the issue in any noticeable way.  Even surrounded by the wreckage of a war that he, in a material way, helped to create, he remains aloof, untouched--forever in his own little world.  

It is easy to describe The Wind Rises in this way, and if you do, it sounds terrible.  But with all this being said, I found this movie to be beautiful, touching, full of life, inspiration, and experiences both sensual and surreal.  I loved it.

Travelogue: Japan (part 3) - Osaka

Next we headed off to Osaka!  More modern that Kyoto, Osaka is still full of plenty of interesting things to see.  We started with a visit to Osaka Castle.

Travelogue: Japan (part 2) - Kyoto & Nara

To start with, here are some more pics I got from Paul of our time in Kyoto.  These are from the performance we saw in the Geisha district of Gion.

Travelogue: Japan (part 1) - Tokyo & Kyoto

I've decided to post a series of my old travelogues from the various countries I've been to.  Here is the first one!  My 11-day trip to Japan in the summer of 2013 with Paul and Elise.  Enjoy!

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Japan was amazing, mysterious, cheesy, kinky, magical, weird, and wonderful.  Pretty much what I would've hoped it to be.  Though I did not see anyone walking around in full otaku costume.  :-P  But there was plenty of other weird clothing to make up for that.  Japan is definitely a land of unique and bizarre fashions.


Also, hilarious signs, logos, and brand names.  Some of my favorites include: