Terri

Some movies take their time. They're confident, in a blithe sort of way. I'd picked this one up one time in the video store, but ended up watching something else. Super-8 I think. Last week we were in the store again and this one was in the for sale bin for $5. It was going to cost that much to rent it, so I bought it. Yesterday we watched it.

If you're looking for a "misfits and weird teachers in school" sort of movie, you might pick this one up. Being of that ilk myself, I was intrigued. I haven't seen "Bad Teacher" yet, but I'm skittish about movies whose titles tell me what they're going to be about. "Terri" was cryptic enough, indie enough, unassuming enough. Which is pretty much the way the movie unfolded.

Terri (Wysocki) lives without parents, together with an aging uncle that he often acts as parent for himself. Set in a mildly-in-decline-middle-American town Terri walks through a small wood to get to his high school. Overweight in a not entirely unhealthy sort of way, he wears pajamas to school and like beans on toast. At school vice principal Fitzgerald (O'Reilly) looks out for his sort. He sounds and looks creepy in a way, but you should try to keep those feelings at bey. He takes an interest in Terri and, despite each of them confronting the obvious problems of the imbalance in this relationship, it goes well. Which is what the film is about - unexpected answers to obvious questions.

Though the story centres on Terri's navigation of high school, it turns on his good deed for classmate Heather Miles (Olivia Crocicchia). About to be expelled for allowing Dirty Zach (yes, yes indeed) do something nasty to her in Home Ec class (there were witnesses, Terri was the first), Terri tells Fitzgerald that she hadn't wanted it - that she'd been coerced into it. A few days later, when Terri and Heather and scalp-picking weirdo Chad (Bridger Zadina) are in Terri's back shed indulging in expensive whisky and some of his uncle's medication, Chad asks her why she let Dirty Zach do what he did, in Home Ec. Heather's answer becomes the movie's ballast: "It feels good to be wanted."

If you're looking for an air-tight sense of moral direction, steer yourself through your own rough times by offering this gift to others. Fitzgerald verges on being too familiar, immature, and rash, but he understands this mighty truth, and he lives by it. The film ends with Terri seeing this above all, and reciprocating. It's all good, as the kids say. Don't just tolerate people, accept them and go out of your way to want them. A reasonable suggestion.

The good thing about curling

It isn't about winning so much as sitting with your opponents after the game, having drinks and trading stories. The world's just a better place after the Wednesday night game.

Ride report
I confess it, I heard the wind howling this morning, and it was really cold for the first time this winter, and I jammed. I drove the truck. I'll ride tomorrow, I promise. Pinky swear.

A long day

Some days, even when you get a lot done, you have to look hard for the rewarding moments. Here's an attempt at a list:

- drama "show-don't-tell" exercise results in an "a-ha moment" for someone working on a script (downside? - there were a lot of empty stares and misdirection that resulted from said exercise) - sometimes you win a little, and lose a lot

- with two weeks remaining in the semester it appears that one student's interest in visual and 3D creation may be turned into an interesting response to a novel or two (downside? - there are only two weeks left in the semester! Why does it have to take this long to find things that work? Longer story: I've found this student wandering about in the art room (across the hall from mine) during my class numerous times. I've too often taken the "you should be in my room" approach, rather than asking whether he'd like to make something in order to show what he's thinking - Duh!)

- during rehearsal the kids try a few different voicings of their parts, enjoy themselves, and realize that even if this isn't how the thing ends up, it's good to try it in many different ways (downside? - there's not much time until we have to have a play ready)

- helped (I hope!) to assuage a parent's concern about a child with significant health issues (IBS plus) that will be travelling on the Europe trip I'm leading - it's worth taking the chance I say, after all I'm married to someone with these sorts of problems I say (downside? - it's hard convincing a parent with the words, "don't worry, it'll be okay" when you're talking about their kid)

Actually, it wasn't such a bad day. Downsides included.


Ride report
in:      0'C wind 15ks W
out:    4'C wind 25ks NW
      

Can a holiday be too long?

Yes. Yes it can. Here's what it sounded like in the hallowed hallways of my workplace today:

Conversation 1

I'm in the staffroom preparing coffee.

Colleague 1: "Have a good holiday?"

Me: "Yes. It was very good, but maybe getting just a bit too long."

C1: "Really? It could have been longer for me. It felt like I was just getting going."

Me: "Not for me really. I was in the city on Tuesday and then played poker with the boys when we got home (I lost) and when I woke up in the morning I just felt bad. Lethargic. I couldn't figure out what to do."

C1: "Not me really, although I know what you mean."

Me: (with my coffee now poured and ready to go) "Well, I'll see ya later. Have a good one!"

Conversation 2

We're in the hallway outside the office.

Colleague 2: "Good time away?"

Me: "Yes. It was good. All the kids were around and it just felt right. By the end though, I knew something  needed to change."

C2: "Really? Actually, that's true. You do sort of get in each other's hair after a while."

Me: "Yeah, but it wasn't that really. It was more that by the middle of last week I knew that I'd have to get back to work, and that nearly paralyzed me. I actually came here to get started on stuff, just to make today easier." 

C2: "Yeah, that's probably a good idea, but I didn't mind staying away."

Me: (with my hands full and needing to get to first class) "Well, I gotta get to class. Have a good day!"

Conversation 3

In the hallway outside my classroom.

Colleague 3: "How were your holidays?"

Me: "You know, they were good. The kids were home, they're great, you know, and it's so different now that they're all away during their semester, and then they come back. It's like we can really appreciate one another. But once they were gone I kind of lost focus."

C3: "Aw. That's kinda sweet."

Me: "Yeah, I know, but it's ridiculous too. When they're around I can work on my own projects - you know, write, or tinker, or go for a bike ride ..."

C3: "Wasn't the weather great?!"

Me: "Amazing! I rode my bike more this break than I think I ever have before. It was fantastic. But I work better when there's a bit of a hum in the house. You know? Not loud, but there's activity."

C3: "Yeah, I can see that. It's like the work of others inspires you or something."

Me: "I think that's true. Like the vibe each of us creates gets better when we're in a good place with each other!"

C3: "Yeah, that is true. It works that way in my classes - the ones with a few good workers will slowly become the ones with more good workers. Good work is contagious."

Me: "And when you take that work hum away, it's hard to focus again ..."

C3: "And then you've got to think about going back."

Me: "Right. So either make the holidays a bit shorter, or way, way, longer - you know so I can really get into a good rhythm without thinking about having to go back."

The bell rings. Kids appear. 

Me: "Well, have a good one eh?!"

C3: "Yeah, you too."

Ride report

in:      1'C wind 15ks W

out:    3'C wind 10ks W

IN (5)

There were indeed moist-looking rust-coloured stains running along the junctions of the asymmetric arrays of ceiling tiles. Not that Carson wanted to pay attention to this. He'd had some experience with plumbing in his past. In fact he'd re-plumbed the kitchen and bath of a house he and Petra had bought as a fixer-upper. How long ago was that? But he had no intention of letting on that he might know something about it, or be able to make sense of whatever it was the lurked above the sullied facade of white. He'd never been employed in any capacity as a maintenance man, still it crossed his mind that he may blogged about solving a plumbing problem, or worse he could have answered a question posed by one of his family members on Facebook. Surely that wasn't what they'd called him out for. They must have prospects more skilled, more apt, than he was to do this kind of thing. He'd been a marginally successful teacher in a middle-school - Grade five. Of course he'd been only too willing to give it up in favour of lying on a divan, porting IN, and allowing the dictates of his own conscious desires to take control. Had he betrayed himself? There had been the odd moments when he'd imagined buying an old house or some other interesting building, in some still secluded corner, even a desolate wilderness outpost away from the continual streams of noise in which everyone else seemed to find comfort, fix it up and live as a romantic on his own Walden pond.

"You're thinking it, aren't you?" says m-Carmel.

"Pardon? Thinking? What?" 

"You've slowed up, but I can still sense residuals of your INthink. You're thinking about those stains aren't you, and plumbing, and what's caused the problem, and maybe even a little bit about getting your hands on something that needs fixing."

"What?"

"We knew you would. Well I knew it. I called it. Most of the DIKCs didn't think so. They thought that we had to go with someone who had been one in unINlife, but I said that you didn't want someone who was jaded. Who had gone IN to get out of whatever they had been doing. You'd want someone who had been interested in it, but didn't do it for a living. For money. That would never work. They'd never do it without some demanding some kind of this or that for their troubles."

"Wait. What? What are you talking about?"

"Hey, don't worry about it! It's going to work out just fine. Once you see the options and the setup we've got to offer. You're going to like this I think. Maybe it was only twenty-eight days, but I was pretty confident of my call."

"I thought that I, that I was the one who wanted, you know, OUT."

M-Carmel turns to him now and touches him for the first time. She takes hold of him with both hands just above the elbows and, at arms length looks Carson in the eye. "You need to believe meon this. You did make the call for unIN, but when you come out your options are narrowed to what MCDIKC thinks is most expedient. They'll lay out the options. I'll be there of course to steady you, and offer clarifications, but you're going to have to make a decision that's kind of irrevocable."

"So I'm OUT, but I can't just leave and start again?"

"It's just a few steps to the unIN debriefing lounge. We'll sit there and relax. You'll have something to drink, something to eat, and I'll lay it all out for you. That'll help I think. It'll be all right, you'll see. Maybe I said too much too soon."

IN (4)

"Follow me" says m-Carmel, who surprises Carson when she ushers him out of the room into what he expects to be blinding sunlight and heat coming off of the patio. In fact she leads him along a grid of hallways

making more lefts and rights than he can track.


"What's happening?" he says as he tires and stumbles, catching a foot on the carpet.

M-Carmel turns to help him up. "Sorry," she says. "You've been slipping between IN and OUT too often. The stats are against you now, and since you haven't been able to go completely IN we thought you'd be okay just walking out of the room."


"How long has it been?" he says.

"Twenty-eight days. Not long really. Your situation presents the classic anomalous pattern of an m-designate. That is, you want IN consciously, but you're unable to maintain it. We're still understanding this process. All we have to go on, really, are patterns."

"So you mean that's it for me?" says Carson.

"Well, it's pretty clear to us. We can usually tell after a month."

"That a person will go IN?"

"Yes. After a month the patterns are clear. It may vary from one to three months before one goes INpermanent, but your patterns have been clear. If we hadn't been quite so busy I'd have taken you out yesterday, but you weren't in real distress until today."


"So this is it then," he says. "It's not going to work for me."

"Doesn't look like it."

"And I'm not the only one, I suppose."

"I know, I know," says m-Carmel with some exasperation. "We all hope that going IN is going to, you know, save the world from conflict. That's what a lot of MCDIKC people say in public.They remind us that it will be like Facebook or Twitter in 2011 - cause a permanent springtime for humanity - absolutely change things. But ..." she gestures with both hands now, pointing off into the distance, "now we have this."

Carson follows her hands, but cannot get a grip on what she means. What her speech reminds him of, though are the ecstatic online messages of the various experts. One pre-eminent theologian turned cultural activist delivered the first online speech to reach over one billion views. She said things like "IN would answer the problems of ethnic and religious strife, she said, because it would move humans toward one another." Or, "Once we were all IN we'd recognize the commonness of each others consciousness and that would finally move us into spiritual oneness." She spoke of how social networking had only been a whiff of the in-touchness that IN offered. "We are heading toward the ultimate metaphysics of being and knowing one another," she concluded. "We will overcome the constraints of the body. We will detoxify the earthly environment by removing our bodies from it, and placing them into everlasting pods of holy-oneness. I will be IN you and you will be IN me!"

"What's this? says Carson, facing m-Carmel.


"This," she says with a smile, looking up at a stained ceiling tile, "is either a leaky roof or a plumbing problem. Nobody knows for sure, because nobody knows where to look."

IN (3)

When someone OUTs and starts to cry the minders appear in a relative instant. In no less than thirty seconds (guaranteed) a minder appears in whatever form the OUTer has most often projected under sexual arousal. Carson's minder enters twenty-one point seven seconds after the aural sensors detect a second sob. This information, combined with the data triangulation of the visual sensor image of his posture, his stored-data-profile, and the length of Carson's current OUTmoment leads to this med-long length response time. The minder-centre (MC) data-inference-kinetics-control (DIKC) or MCDIKC must, of necessity, pro-rate its data - a sort of triage of urgency. Urgent-minder-action (UMA) is determined as necessary based on MCDIKC data triangulation, with priority based on an aggregate DIKC score. For those who are IN it is comforting to know that within thirty seconds of OUT-distress, a fantasy-generated-minder (f-gen) will appear, suited to take you back IN in whatever you'd like, or is most expedient.

Thus Carson cannot help but turn to m-Carmel when he sees the auburn-haired voluptuous female approximately his height and age enter. Through his tears he recognizes her, his f-gen, wearing a loose-fitting shift that one might have seen inmates or staff at a mid-twentieth century asylum for the troubled. Assessing Carson's situation as less than urgent, m-Carmel sashays around the perimeter of the room before reaching him, now seated on his INdivan. She runs her fingers along it and sits on it before turning her gaze up toward Carson who cannot take his eyes from her. By the time she seats herself he involuntarily steps toward her too and seats himself beside her. "I think I need something," he says. "Help, I think. You can help?"

IN (2)

Carson remembers Christmas, but he can't determine whether it's a placed-mem, a group-mem, or a bona-fide self-mem. To be honest he's not sure if lately he's been coming OUT more or going IN. The hard thing about all this was discerning self-mem from group-mem, and just now when he looks out over the silken tan-red sand and verdant leaves of the palms outside the window he imagines the sand as snow and the trees decorated in lights, and the ring of carols, faint in the air as if sung by a troupe of church choir devotees out spreading good cheer a wave of nostalgia buckles his knees.

Anticipation. The word itself flits across his mind-screen. He doesn't know how else to say it. What was that sense that was both desire and withholding? Need? Not quite so malevolent, yet still a kind of necessity. Does he remember sitting in a chair, in a car, in a church pew, waiting for the call to run to a place where what - what would it be? What does he desire? What does he need that he cannot not have? At least not when he wants it. What was this twist in the gut called hope that he now, he realizes, feels?