Roger O Green

Happiness runs in a circular motion

“Time. I can always get more money, but I have only so much time.”

Dustbury, among others, has responded to the Happiness Project’s Want To Know Yourself Better? Ask Yourself These Questions.

If something is forbidden, do you want it less or more?

I suppose it depends on WHY it’s forbidden. If I think the reasoning is stupid and arbitrary, then I’ll want it more. If I understand the rationale for the prohibition, I’ll want it less. The way the world is, that would be a slight “more.”

Is there an area of your life where you feel out of control? Especially in control?

There are two ways I look at this. In my personal life, I have an eight-year-old, and that dictates a lot of my life. In the world, there are things (war, environmental catastrophes) being done, sometimes in my name, and it appears than I have absolutely nothing to do about it.

On the other hand, personally, I do love doing certain things the same way: my glasses go on the same place on my dresser every night; this is not obsessive behavior; this is the fact that I won’t FIND my glasses if I don’t put them in the same place every night.

What I do have some control over in the world is writing about it all.

If you unexpectedly had a completely free afternoon, what would you do with that time?

See a movie if there is a movie I want to see. Otherwise, read, with a baseball game on in the background.

Are you comfortable or uncomfortable in a disorderly environment?

This was Dustbury’s response: “Whose disorder is it? If it’s mine, it’s not too disorderly, and I usually know where to find things. If it’s someone else’s, I will complain, loudly.” Sounds about right.

How much time do you spend looking for things you can’t find?

Depends on what it is and the time available. But it does explain why I have a backup pair of glasses and a backup house key.

Are you motivated by competition?

Only in games. In fact, people who know me only from work or church have been startled by how competitive I am in hearts or backgammon. But in most settings, I am quite cooperative; I think it’s what drew me to librarianship.

Do you find it easier to do things for other people than to do things for yourself?

Goodness, yes. It’s much easier to help clean up someone else’s stuff than my own. I’d rather help move someone else than moving myself; no emotional ties.

Do you work constantly? or think you should be working?

I believe that the more I work, the more work there will be. At the library, I press more when we get past a week’s turnaround. I am in charge of my work blog, and I’ve been known to blog those posts at home when I have time. In any case, procrastination is not so bad!

Do you embrace rules or flout rules?

I seldom embrace rules, although I’ve developed my own over time. Dumb rules are just begging to be broken. But, of course, there is the cost/benefit thing going.

Do you work well under pressure?

Not especially, and external pressure is even worse than internal.

What would your perfect day look like?

It would involve exercise, such as racquetball. Time to read, time to write. A good meal or two made by someone else, at least one in a restaurant. And a massage.

How much TV do you watch in a week (include computer time spent watching videos, movies, YouTube)?

Maybe 10 hours. The shows I watch in the winter are replaced by baseball in the summer.

Are you a morning person or a night person?

It’s a curse from my wife that I’ve become a morning person because when I met her, I DEFINITELY was a night owl.

What’s more satisfying to you: saving time or saving money?

Dustbury: “Time. I can always get more money, but I have only so much time.”

Do you like to be in the spotlight?

Dustbury: “Not especially. I appreciate being looked in on once in a while — if I didn’t, I’d never have had an online presence at all — but being the center of attention is not something to which I aspire.” Also, I am rather shy. About 70% of the people I know personally would say this is a bunch of hooey – a few of them have done so – but it is true, nonetheless.

Is your life “on hold” in any aspect? Until you finish your thesis, get married, lose weight?

Dustbury: “I’m almost sixty years old. It’s too late to have anything ‘on hold.'”

What would you do if you had more energy?

I’d tackle those damn housecleaning projects, sorting stuff in the attic, and the like.

If you suddenly had an extra room in your house, what would you do with it?

The Daughter’s room is rather small, so her stuff creeps into the guest room and even the living room. The extra room would be her room with room for all her dolls and games.

What people and activities energize you? Make you feel depleted?

Ken Levine did this piece called Actors: How to give notes to writers. One can give criticism/suggestions in positive ways or in ways in which you want to rip someone’s face off. So some “helpful” people energize, because they are actually helpful, while others just enervate.

Energizes: Racquetball; learning new facts; writing what I want to write; getting in touch with people I like with whom I had lost contact; reading.
Enervates: Almost any rote activity, any mechanical task that I cannot master; nostalgia for its own sake; being outside in the midday sun.

Is it hard for you to get rid of things that you no longer need or want?

No. What I need has been shrinking, BTW, and what I want has most definitely diminished as well.

Do you get frustrated easily?

Depends on the task and what is at stake. The aforementioned mechanical ineptness does bother me some. But making a gaffe in a public address, not so much. Rude people are frustrating almost all of the time; many of them drive cars.

On a typical night, what time do you go to bed? How many hours of sleep do you get?

10:30 pm to bed; much past that and I’m sunk for the next day. I get up at sunrise, which, of course, varies with the season. I sleep more in the winter.

If at the end of the year, you had accomplished one thing, what is the one accomplishment that would make the biggest difference to your happiness?

I don’t seem to have a list of things to accomplish, at least those things that if I DON’T finish, my world will end. Perhaps that saves me from disappointment. Too many things arise; I try (and I emphasize, try) to take these things as they come.

Happiness Runs – Donovan
Get Happy – Judy Garland (from SUMMER STOCK, 1950). I learned this song in 1975 being in the play Boys in the Band.

Coming Out stories

Interesting cover story in Entertainment weekly a couple weeks ago By the Way, We’re Gay. The New Art of Coming Out, which was released just before newsman Anderson Cooper’s recent revelation, surprising as sunrise to many. While I understand it intellectually, I always thought it was too bad that gay folks have to endure that process. After all, I didn’t have to go to my parents, palms sweating, and announce, “I AM A….HETEROSEXUAL!” Few people chastise me for promoting the “heterosexual agenda.”

The article noted how far lesbians and gay men have come since Ellen DeGeneres’ pronouncement made the cover of TIME magazine 15 years ago, which pretty much killed her career – until it didn’t. It’s the observation of many, and I totally agree, that her comeback started with one joke. She was hosting the Emmys two months after September 11, 2001, after a couple program reschedulings; she asked the audience, “What would bug a guy from the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?” It was just the right tonic. And now, she’s that dancin’ fool on her own talk show.

A pointed observation in EW: “Over the past decade, the press has become more hostile to, and aggressive about, celebrities who are perceived to be closeted to exactly the same degree it’s become more accommodating to those who come out.”

Conversely, I find more than a few people of my acquaintance who think that when gays, either public figures or private citizens, come out, they are “throwing their sexuality in my face.” Not the intention, just being honest with others, and quite possibly, themselves.

From the last paragraph of the EW piece: “So although the drip-drip-drip steadiness of coming-out news can seem inconsequential, cumulatively the stories serve as the very quiet herald of a major tectonic shift. What was impossible 60 years ago and dangerous 40 years ago and difficult 20 years ago is now becoming no big deal.” Which is as I would like it to be.

Nora Ephron, Andy Griffith, and the sense of loss

Almost inevitably, I would get to know more about the deceased than I could have possibly imagined. Parts of their interesting lives to which I was not privy until it was too late.

I was looking at the situation all wrong. When Nora Ephron died last week, I was thinking about her top movie moments rather than her life. I was evaluating her films: liked Sleepless in Seattle, but You’ve Got Mail, not so much. Enjoyed Heartburn. Julie and Julia: Julia-yes, Julie-eh. Silkwood I enjoyed, but I wouldn’t even watch Bewitched.

Then I read John Blumenthal’s piece on how Nora Ephron took pity on him “as a lowly peon at Esquire magazine. Then she found me a job.” Or Dick Cavett’s Vamping With Nora, when a guest failed to appear on his talk show, and they had to fill 20 minutes. Plus some other pieces I didn’t cite. Or listening to Diane Sawyer talking about her friend on ABC News; I had no idea before she read the story that they even knew each other, but I could just tell, by her delivery.

And it reminded me of going to funerals of people I knew, or, more likely, people I didn’t know but attended the service because I knew a family member. Almost inevitably, I would get to know more about them than I could have possibly imagined. Parts of their interesting lives to which I was not privy until it was too late. And I feel sad, sad in a way I could not have possibly imagined. These people are losing this AMAZING person. I’d SO feel their pain, their sense of loss.

Oddly, with all the things I read about Nora Ephron, I was feeling the same way. I wish I HAD attended dinner parties with her, as someone had suggested because I’m now convinced she would have been wise and witty and entertaining. And so, I’m surprisingly sad that, at the age of 71, Nora Ephron has died of leukemia.

Mayberry

Whereas, my feeling about Andy Griffith, who died on July 3, was more immediate. My father and Andy were born in the same year, 1926. More than once, I wish my dad were more patient with me, liked Sheriff Andy Taylor was with his son Opie (Ron Howard). Not that he couldn’t be stern – the episode I remember the best is the one in which Opie kills a mother bird with his slingshot and is forced to become her babies’ surrogate mother. And Sheriff Andy believed in due process of the law.

For reasons I cannot clearly explain, I was a big fan of Matlock, with Griffith as a cornpone, but savvy lawyer in a light blue seersucker suit. I enjoyed his performance in the movie Waitress. But perhaps his greatest role was in the movie A Face in the Crowd, as Gordon noted.

Though beloved in his home state of North Carolina, I recall that Griffith took some heat for his support for an Obamacare proposal.

Read Mark Evanier’s remembrance, and check out these interviews with Andy Griffith.

Born on the Fourth of July

On more than one quiz, I’ve seen a question like this:

Does Bulgaria have a Fourth of July?

And of course, the answer is YES, Bulgaria has a July 4, a July 5, a July 6, et al. It’s one of those brain teasers.

Of course, many countries do celebrate a national day of independence. Here’s a list. Interestingly, though, MOST countries celebrate the date that independence was ACHIEVED. The United States, as is its wont, celebrates the day that independence was DECLARED. Those cheeky Americans. The US isn’t the only nation, though; read the Ecuador narrative: “Proclaimed independence from Spain on August 10, 1809, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators of the movement on August 2, 1810. Independence finally occurred on May 24, 1822, at the Battle of Pichincha.” So the Ecuadorans celebrate BOTH days.

Maybe people in the US should celebrate October 19, 1781, The Battle of Yorktown, which, with plenty of help from France, effectively ended the Revolutionary War. Or the Treaty of Paris signed on September 3, 1783, which officially ended the conflict.

Since we do celebrate July 4, though, it’d be a good time to re-read the document that initiated today being deemed birthday number 236.

Y is for Yellow Submarine

The soundtrack to the movie Yellow Submarine was not released until January 1969, some six months after the movie debuted.

Yellow Submarine was a song by The Beatles, with Ringo Starr on the lead vocals. It was issued as a single, coupled with Eleanor Rigby, and released just before it appeared on the Revolver album. It has a peculiar little difference, though, which I remember distinctly; on the single version, during the last verse, the responses start one line earlier, with “life of ease”. Compare the album version with the single version around 1:40.

It became the title song of a 1968 animated United Artists film. The Beatles themselves had little to do with the making of the movie – other actors did the voices of the Beatles characters – though the movie was chock full of songs from the latter half of their career. This is a movie I saw at least four times, once on a day I saw ALL of the Beatles’ movies in one sitting. I even watched it on commercial television (CBS, I think), which is not recommended.

Oddly, the soundtrack to the movie was not released until January 1969, some six months after the movie debuted. The second side of the album was instrumental music arranged by George Martin. Side one starts with the album version of the title song and ends with All You Need Is Love. There were four other songs on that album:

Only a Northern Song
All Together Now
Hey Bulldog
It’s All Too Much.

In 1999, Yellow Submarine – Songtrack was released. It dumps the instrumentals for other Beatles songs used in the film, mostly or all remastered.

Now, The classic 1968 animated feature “Yellow Submarine” showcasing music by the Beatles has been “carefully restored frame-by-frame for a special DVD release May 28, 2012.”

I haven’t seen it in a couple of decades, and it’d be interesting to see how it stands up.
(Note: I had some links to movie segments that are no longer operational; I am willing to bet that you can find similar clips on YouTube from time to time.)

ABC Wednesday – Round 10