Projects in Ordinary Time

Commencement was yesterday at Bluebell, and after the official events and running around for friends most of the day, I had a late dinner with Aznable, his girlfriend, parents, and four other alums who had come back for the weekend. Most people were going separate ways afterwards, but I brought one of the alums back to campus, where she was crashing for the night before leaving this morning. As we drove through, many of the buildings dark and shuttered, I realized it was the first time in over three weeks, between the frenzy of last classes, exams, and Senior Week, that Bluebell was actually quiet. The warm night air sailing past the open car windows had no noise of parties, laughter, friendly shouts across the quad, sounds of frisbees and footballs being thrown. I remarked on this to my passenger and we sat silent, listening, as the car continued to wind its way up the main drag. Later, I continued what's now a three-year personal tradition, and went to the library alone, up onto the outer terrace overlooking the main administrative building and original two dorms the College started with. With some amaretto and a celebratory cigar I sat there, thinking about the past year and listening to the muted campus, as it finally released its breath after a very long winter and barely-arrived spring, its faculty and administrators off somewhere and happy for another year's successful end, its students gone for the summer, graduates scattering for ports unknown. I drank to Bluebell, the Class of 2011, and my friends.

My mood from last night has continued into today, largely because of the weather. It's overcast here, and damp but not yet rainy, temperatures in the upper 60s but feeling ten degrees colder because of the breeze, a stiff but fresh air belonging to spring, finally spring, on the downward slope of May. I had a meeting across campus this afternoon, and the place is still quiet, under clouds, less empty than resting. Walking there and back was a calmly satisfying experience, a reminder of the love I have for this school and its people, the ones who have four years here and the ones who have longer.

Part of why I love Bluebell is also part of why I love being Catholic: each has a liturgical year, filled with special celebrations and feasts, times of trial and remembrance, times of joy. And ordinary times, times not particularly noteworthy, when there can be a soft, cloudy spring day, a break in the action, to spend at ease and be grateful for opportunities completed, and begin the delicious process of forming opportunities to come. Though I'm always working on some little project or other during the academic year, it's during the summers that I focus on them, always multiple at a time, spending an afternoon on X and an evening on Y. It's a time of fewer demands from the College and a chance to look more inward, puttering about with things that are only meaningful to me and, therefore, can be explored to whatever extent in whatever way I choose. A day like today, where I codified my summer projects, is a fun day. Though, it's nowhere near summer in anything but the calendar, so maybe it'd be more accurate to call them my projects in ordinary time. And here's what I've got.

1 - I want them off my shelf. A while ago I shared my system, part choice and part chance, to determine books I read. Well, the double-edged sword of working in a library is that I always find more books I want to read. Last fall and winter, I basically let my bookshelves collect dust while I worked on my library books, either reading what I had checked out, or deciding it wasn't crucial enough and returning it to the library. In February I realized I wanted to read down the books on my own shelves, some of them picked up at used bookstores years ago. In the usual system, when one book is read its spot is filled immediately, so in my solution of choice and chance there's always 26 books swirling around. So I picked a new slate of 26, mostly comprised of books which had been on my shelves for years, and as I read them, didn't replace them. Between February and now I've read 10 of the 26, but I'd like to step up the pace and finish the remaining 16 this summer.

2 - "I found out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin, to keep me from flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin. Get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters." That's one of my favorite quotes from Portal, a nifty, challenging, hilarious first-person puzzle game released a few years ago which I knew about through friends and finally played last month. You wake up in a lab facility, alone, with a friendly but unseen computer encouraging you through various obstacle course mazes, with a "portal gun" which shoots portals you or other objects can teleport through, into different areas of each maze. Every "floor" in the facility, called the enrichment center, is a puzzle to get to the floor's exit elevator. You have nothing to help you but the gun, an occasional "Companion Cube" which is mute, unlimited time, and the laws of physics. And the computer, which starts out by promising you cake, turns out to be trying to kill you in each puzzle, with the final reward being a pit of fire. Avoiding that, you then have to make your way through the mechanical rooms and other labs of the facility, while the computer continually mocks, insults, pleads with, guilt-trips, and threatens you. When you find it, a piece of itself falls off, and there's a stationary incinerator there, so of course you go destroy the piece, since the computer is trying to destroy you. And then there's the above quote, which gives you five minutes to figure out how to fully defeat the computer before you die of neurotoxin. Highly enjoyable. And all this is to say: the sequel just came out, and I'll be playing that this summer.

3 - The secrets of paganism! Okay, not really. I've posted a few times about World of Warcraft, and my guild is still doing its thing, meeting weekly to run dungeons together. We plan on continuing this summer, but I've decided to work on a side project of my own as well. My very first character in WoW was a druid, a nicely balanced class which, while it couldn't pack the strongest punch in all three roles within a dungeon or raid party (those being the tank, dps, and healer), it could rotate between them as needed and do a decent job in all of them. A tank leads the party, and rushes in front to attack enemies with melee weapons; a dps or caster does spell damage which works by damage per second (hence the acronym) from afar; a healer doesn't attack enemies at all but works at healing the other party members as they get hit. Anyways, my original druid has languished, unplayed, for a few years now, during which WoW has undergone several large changes in how the various classes work. Plus, the most recent expansion pack, Cataclysm, changed the "original" WoW experience of levels 1-60 for all players in huge ways as well (with the total levels now up to 85). So I'd like to relearn how a druid works in the new version of the game, as well as play through a nice chunk of the revised content. I'm going to cash out the gear and money my old druid has, transfer the lump sum to a new druid character, and work at getting her through as much of levels 1-60 as I can during the summer.

4 - Play that funky music, white boy. Growing up in the suburbs of western Massachusetts, there were various genres of music I just wasn't exposed to that much. Over recent years I've tried exploring some of them, and want to make another of those attempts this summer. This March, the Smithsonian Folkways label - and if you ever want to investigate uniquely American music forms and styles, this label is one of your best resources! - put out a 6-CD collection simply called "Jazz." Other than a few random tracks, including the "Maple Leaf Rag," which opens the anthology, I know almost none of the music, and only a scattered handful of the performer names, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. But even with those, I've never really listened to their work, much less the latter 20th Century interpreters and innovators of their tradition. So this summer I'm going to work through the six discs, seeing what I like and trying to understand it, as much as music can be understood. I'm excited but also nervous - I tend to like form equalling content in music, with my prog-rock and folk leanings, both styles completely different in complexity of music, but both resting on an idea of structure providing direction and resolution to music. We'll see what a more free-form, improvisational and inspirational style will conjure in me.

5 - Back onto the poetry bandwagon. I haven't been writing much lately, and by lately I mean the past year and a half. I think I've put together less than 10 poems in that time, several of them still at the draft stage. So I need a kick in the teeth. And there's nothing like exercise to give you pain. I've put together a large handful of random poems I want to use as exercises for myself, as prompts, to either take line x and use it in a new way, or take theme y and riff off it, etc. What results may well not be suitable for actual poems, but it'll get me writing again, just writing something, and that will be better than where I'm at right now. So that's going to be an ongoing project as well. Maybe a certain number a week; I'm wary of saying something like I have to do one a day, as that's a sure backfire for my personality. We'll see how it shakes out.

6 - More rewatching of more movies. Okay, so never say never, right? After last summer's epic 121-movie rewatching project, I was ready to swear off movies for a few years. But here I am again with another rewatching idea. This one was actually planned for summer 2007 and never happened, then got put on the backburner, but I've become excited about doing it now. I want to rewatch movies which weren't, like last year's project, in my top tier category, but rather movies which just missed that top tier for one reason or another OR I'm just curious to see them again. I went so far in 2007 to put together a list of films for consideration, and without looking at that, I put together a new list now, deciding ahead of time only to take movies which appeared on both lists (unless of course it was a movie I'd first seen after 2007). I impressed myself with how few, of the 1,173 movies I've seen since June 1998, I wanted to watch again, of course after removing the 121 I'd already rewatched last summer. Of the remaining ~1,000 movies, only 97 showed up on both the 2007 and 2011 lists. Now, of course I've seen some of those thousand movies a second time over the years, either with friends or just because I'd wanted to. So those weren't included. Still, just under 10% of the available total is, frankly, a relief!

So what movies are these, you ask, this special 10% of almost-awesome films? Most of them are things I watched in college or grad school, around ten or more years ago - there were fewer and fewer as I got into the recent past. Many of them are classics I just don't remember very well and want to look at again, whereas others have had a small spark somehow which has made me remember them all these years as interesting curios. The list includes things like All the President’s Men; On the Waterfront; The Manchurian Candidate; All About Eve; The Bridge on the River Kwai; Say Anything; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Touch of Evil; Sunset Boulevard; The Long Goodbye; Some Like It Hot; The Lion in Winter; Wonder Boys; Metropolitan; The Last Picture Show; Unbreakable; Klute; The Hustler; Less Than Zero; Badlands; Lost in Translation; Kubrick's version of Lolita. And, of course, Smokey and the Bandit. Yes, there's a large handful of just fun movies there too, hokey and snarky and on no one's "best of" lists, like Timeline and Mallrats and So I Married an Axe Murderer; Shoot 'Em Up and School of Rock and the remake of The Italian Job.

I'll also tell you a little secret: if this movie project needs to get extended into the fall, that's fine too. I should have had this attitude last summer, but didn't, and this time around it's not worth putting that kind of pressure on myself as, after all, no one besides me really cares about any of this. Still, I'm looking forward to it, and plan on diving in with what's left of this evening. Catch you on the flip side!