Literally Literary

It wasn’t that long ago I went to the movies almost every Saturday afternoon. In recent times, though, that behavior has all but disappeared as the product from Hollywood seems to be more and more drivel-of-the-mindless-type all the time. Until Friday (two days ago), the last movie I saw in a theatre was sometime early last summer before I moved south.

But when I was in Eugene on Friday, I decided it was time, again, to take in a first-run film…so I went to see Stranger Than Fiction on its opening day. This was a rather odd choice of a movie for me, as anything with Will Ferrell in it is bound to be rather juvenile, isn’t it? I mean, after all: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby ? Give me a break!

Despite these thoughts, though, I had seen the movie trailer and it seemed oddly intriguing. Also, it had other interesting cast members such as Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, actors that generally appeal to me. So, given that I was in the mall right across the street from the theatre, I said, what the heck…

This movie tells the story of Harold Crick (Ferrell), a single guy, who (rather like me, I’m afraid) “lived a life of solitude. He would walk home alone; he would eat alone. When others’ minds would fantasize about their upcoming day, Harold just counted brush strokes…” (well, no, I don’t count strokes as I brush my teeth, thank you very much).

The passage, in quotes above, is from the voice (Emma Thompson’s) that Harold begins to hear in his head one morning while he is brushing, a voice that narrates the events of his life as they happen, a voice that speaks, according to Harold, “about [him], accurately, and with a better vocabulary…”

The incessant voice is quite annoying, and it was heading in the direction of totally immobilizing him (as it was the only way to stop the running narration). That is, until one day, the voice observes, “little did he [Harold] know that events had been set in motion that would lead to his imminent death” … an observation that, naturally, tips Harold over the edge. He’s going to die? Imminently ??

Having already sought help from a psychiatrist (played by Linda Hunt) – who simply wants to medicate him – Harold then decides to seek assistance of another type, this time literary help in the form of literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). The dominant questions become, after Jules finally decides to pursue the investigation:

• is Harold’s life a comedy or tragedy? and

• what are the possibilities, among living authors, for the identity of the narrator’s voice?

Naturally, as it turns out, Harold is the character in a novel being written by the Emma Thompson character, author Kay Eiffel. And it is Eiffel who must figure out a way to kill off Harold, as all the heroes in all her books always die in the end.

Along the way, however, in a totally romantic-comedy manner (and coincident with the decision that his life is a tragedy), Harold has an incredible thing happen to him. He meets bakery-shop owner Ana Pascal (deliciously portrayed by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and begins to think about her all the time. Although love has (apparently) never been a part of his life before, it becomes a dominant element now.

Despite all this, Eiffel continues to struggle mightily with just the right way to end Harold’s life. As die he, inevitably, must.

As Roger Ebert points out in his review of the film, the question of how (or even whether) to kill off Harold “is the engine for the moral tale.” Ebert continues…

How rare to find a pensive film about the responsibilities we have to art. If Eiffel’s novel would be a masterpiece with Harold’s death, does he have a right to live? On the other hand, does she have the right to kill him off for her work?

I suggest you go see Stranger Than Fiction and wrestle with the issues raised. I don’t think you’ll regret the time you spend engaged in your pondering mode.

A New Season

We’re just two days shy of the third anniversary of Governor Kulongoski’s announcement (on November 13, 2003) that he was asking for the resignations of several members of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education (OSBHE). Also part of his action was to express a desire that former Governor Neil Goldschmidt be appointed to the OSBHE and installed as its president.

That Fall day in 2003 was one that not only changed the lives of the Board members involved, but mine as well; as a staff person in the Oregon University System Chancellor’s Office, the OSBHE was my direct employer. On that fateful Thursday, I was attending the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in Portland, and I heard the news, first, as a “rumor.” Somebody mentioned to me that the Governor had “fired the Board of Higher Ed,” which, of course, was unbelievable; no chief executive in our state had ever done such a thing since the department of higher education had been established in the late 1920s. I knew all of the Board members quite well, and there had been absolutely no behavior on their part that could, or should, have led to such a wholesale action by the Governor. The Board members were, all, dedicated public servants, doing the best job they could for higher education in the State.

However, as the course of the day wore on, the information became increasingly more clear. I went to my room in the Hilton late that afternoon, watched the early edition of the evening news on KGW, and discovered the rumor was actually fact. There were a couple of main topics with my dinner companions that night: speculation about what this action would mean for Oregon higher education, and a rather wild story about a recent internet dating experience of mine. We entertained ourselves quite well over that meal, as I recall, with lively conversation on both topics.

Of course, the next few months brought about many changes for the higher education landscape here. New Board members were appointed, and the Governor got his wish by having Goldschmidt elected as the president. However, the Portland media broke the story, a mere few weeks later, that the former Governor had had a sexual relationship with a 14-year old girl during the time he had been mayor of Portland years ago. Amid huge headlines, he resigned in disgrace and Kulongoski himself assumed the role of Board president for a couple of months. The Oregon University System Chancellor resigned, after less than two years on the job, upon assessing the political environment and reading the handwriting on the wall regarding his future. The Board, at the direction of the Governor, started a process (billed as a study to examine the “structure and function” of the Chancellor’s Office) which ultimately resulted in the elimination of the Office of Academic Affairs (and the jobs of the Vice Chancellor and several staff, including me).

My life has really not been the same since that day in November 2003. I was thrown completely off-balance and have been struggling to regain it ever since. I have gone on countless interview trips, and had two “interim” positions at Oregon community colleges, of course, but have had neither predictability nor stability in my life. As the current calendar year begins to fade away, the new job search season begins again for me. I hope to secure a permanent position in higher education (somewhere!) by next June 30.

More Amazements

I’ve written previously about holding a 6-hour-old infant in my arms in January of 2004. I’d never experienced anything quite like that before. That little one is almost three years old now, and I had an opportunity to spend just a little bit more time around her yesterday. What a delightful person little Gracie is! Especially great were the hug and kiss I got when I departed her grandmother’s house. Wow.

Prime Time Wisdom

The popular TV show Grey’s Anatomy is filmed in Seattle, and maybe its Pacific Northwest roots are part of the appeal for me. (This season the show made a move to 9:00 p.m. on Thursdays, so it is on ABC an hour before ER airs at 10:00 p.m. on NBC; I tape them both and watch them on the weekend). Aside from its obvious (and frequent) quirkiness, the show has real and touching moments that occasionally tend to unearth some truths about life and relationships.
 
Last Thursday’s Sometimes a Fantasy really caught my attention. Most episodes are filled with several different story lines, with some, not uncommonly, continuing from week-to-week. And the story of Izzie’s loss resumed this time. She had fallen in love with a heart-transplant patient who had asked her to marry him. However, shortly after he popped the question (and after Izzie had made an ethically-questionable call about his care), he died. Izzie’s story was juxtaposed with one about Megan, a young girl who came to the emergency room with multiple injuries. Although she was bruised, beaten, scarred and had stapled a wound on her arm with an office stapler, she claimed to feel no pain. The ultimate diagnosis for her was “chronic insensitivity to pain.” (Who knew there was such a thing!?)

So, he we had: Megan, dramatically physically damaged, who claimed to “feel no pain.” And Izzie, who stood immobilized outside the hospital, unable to motivate herself to return to work, when asked where it hurt, said “everywhere .”

The array of possible human experiences always tends to amaze me. In this dramatization, one person feels immense, debilitating, chronic, paralyzing pain, and the other, none at all.

During the operation on Megan, the surgeon observes that “everybody wants a life without pain. What does it get you? She needs to be on a poster somewhere to remind people that pain’s there for a reason.”

I know, I know. This is a TV show. But the writing this week seemed incredibly good…and provided a degree of wisdom than one typically does not encounter during prime time.

Of course, these observations extend my previous commentaries. You know that I think about pain a lot ; and an episode of a medical drama focusing on the topic is bound to attract my attention and dwell in my thoughts. Six days ago, in an attempt to address my chronic myofascial pain issues (including my long-standing chronic lower-back pain), I allowed a doctor to inject me 19 times with small amounts of Marcaine in my first major attempt at trigger-point injection therapy. Although I experienced some short-term relief that day, by the evening I was back to “normal.” And, as my back pain has been the predominant factor in my existence the last couple weeks, I drove to Eugene to see my chiropractor on Friday.

If “pain’s there for a reason,” I ask, “what is it ?”

I struggle with this question.

More About Pain

A recent article in Time magazine addresses The Mystery of Pain. (Of course, we’re talking physical pain here, although, I believe, emotional and psychic wounds can lead to just as much distress as physical ailments do.) This piece was of interest to me because physical pain has been an ongoing nemesis in my life…for almost all my life. For the timespan of most of my twenties (about seven and a half years), for example, I experienced daily, often-times debilitating, headaches. And, it was during these years that I began to cope with periodic lower-back pain as well. I ultimately interpreted both of these physical conditions as reactions to the overwhelming stress in my life at the time, namely finding myself in a marriage that was the completely wrong place for me to be. When I left that relationship at about age 30, I was able to turn around the crippling nature of these physical conditions, get myself off the medication (Valium) I was using to cope, and make some progress in the areas of physical health and emotional growth. (The obvious smack-in-the-face exception is the fact that I moved directly from being addicted to Valium to a lifestyle of alcohol use and abuse, and that subsequently took a few more years to overcome.)

There have been some small portions of my life where I have lived relatively head- and back-ache free, but those times seem rather a dim memory. I continue to cope, the best I can, with daily pains in these parts of my body, and succeed pretty well most of the time. They have become, simply, conditions I have learned to live with.

But, I have aged. And I’ve not acquired the ability to get rid of chronic conditions, but, rather, seem to be an unwilling “collector.” I am not one of the people identified in the Time article who has a deteriorating body and is asymptomatic. Nope. When something is “off” with my system, I feel it, often times, it seems, with a higher degree of intensity when compared to others. I have recently written, for example, about my diagnosis of Chronic Myofascial Pain. This is a condition that dominates my awareness in terms of the feelings (or lack thereof) in my lower extremities all-day, every-day. I’ve apparently not yet made significant-enough progress in my learning curve about this condition, given that my attempts at self-treatment have yielded virtually no change. The bottom line is: I live with these chronic pain conditions everyday AND try to be as functional a human being I possibly can at the same time. I find this pretty challenging.

The writer for Time asks “why does the same problem hurt one person and not the next?” Good question! I often wonder this myself. He suggests that we consider three factors: the “pain-inflammation connection;” “neural blockades;” & “depression and hormones.” Although I’m sure that the inflammation connection is a large part of my physical stuff, the relationship of depression to pain, of course, intrigues me. That has to be part of my dynamic as well, given my propensity to perpetually struggle with my emotional health. I’m convinced, in fact, that if I could find the right something (drug? herb? sleep potion?) to help me with chronic depression, then these other ailments would not loom as large for me as they currently do.

The article concludes with the statement that “today pain remains a tantalizing mystery.” (Duh. You think?) For now, we are advised to “cheer up, pop an Advil, keep working, go to the gym, eat something and buy your spouse a present.”

Ohmygod. I certainly feel reassured about handling my pain now. Thanks, Time.