SIFF 2013 Day 8
ShortsFest Opening Night! A slightly odd mix but it was a good time. Getting excited about some good films coming up over the long weekend.
Less excited about the lingering weed stench that Folklife is about to bring to the neighborhood.
SIFF 2013 Day 7
Another day off. 12 hour work day (between two jobs) means no time for movies.
SIFF 2013 Day 6
Taking the day off! I’ve got a long day of work and lots of television to catch up on at home. My SIFF experience will resume tomorrow.
SIFF 2013 Day 5
Today’s agenda:
What Masie Knew - 4:30pm at Uptown.
Making it to the movie today depends entirely on how much I get done in the next few hours at work.
Taking the rest of the evening off to see Temple Grandin at Town Hall.
SIFF 2013 Day 4
Today’s agenda:
Secret Fest - 11am at Egyptian
Our Nixon - 1:30pm at Harvard Exit (if we can make it post-Secret)
Stories We Tell - 5pm at Uptown
Stories We Tell might be my most anticipated film of the festival. Pretty excited.
SIFF 2013 Day 3
Today’s agenda:
A Band Called Death - 3pm at Uptown
Furever - 6pm at Uptown
The East - 9pm at Uptown
Most importantly, the day will end with the arrival of my long lost wanderer of a friend.
SIFF 2013 Day 2
Today’s agenda:
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks - 6pm at Uptown
Frances Ha - 9:45pm at Pac Place
But before any movies, my first haircut in something like 6 months. Looking forward to that maybe more than anything.
This one goes out to the one I love…
Six years is long enough time for a relationship to be awesome and messy. Long enough to include good times and bad.
To celebrate Opening Night of my 7th Seattle International Film Festival, I wrote a love letter of sorts to the organization that stole my heart in 2007 and holds it still.
—-
It was a random encounter. I’d call it fate if I believed in that.
I saw an ad in The Stranger. (A dubious start, I know.) I was interested and thought I’d reach out.
For me, it was love at first sight. That immediate, overwhelming, life-consuming passion.
You were it. I knew.
(I’d never known before.)
They say you should take things slow. I’ve never known how to do that. I gave you all that I could, right away. A mistake? No way.
For the first few years, I was in grad school and that limited how much I could commit. But let’s be real, you were always the priority.
After that, I had to move away. We tried long distance. An open relationship, of sorts. None of them held a candle to you.
I traveled to be here as much as I could. We both seemed ready to take it to the next level. It got more serious, even from afar.
After awhile, long distance wasn’t enough for me anymore. Life circumstances arranged themselves so I could come back.
This time, I decided I wanted to give you everything. I worked really hard. I was ready and I told you so.
It didn’t go as I planned.
A little over a year ago, you broke my heart. It hurt. I cried. I fought it but there wasn’t much I could do. So I tried to prove myself to you. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life.
I don’t know what we are now. But I’m still here
I’ve met my best friends because of you. I’ve had the greatest experiences of my life because of you.
I’m here and I’m in this for the long run.
Things change. They are changing and they will change some more. But I’m not going anywhere.
I believe in you - what you do and what you are.
For as long as you let me, I will be part of it.
I still don’t understand instagram. #help #youusehashtagsoninstagramright? #imconfused
FitBit Zip - Day 1
2k steps in just a few hours. Still can’t get this thing to smile at me. Guess I should go walk more…
We can learn from Sandy Hook on more topics than just guns
I briefly fell down a Sandy Hook hoax/conspiracy youtube hole and may have lost all hope for humanity.
Facebook revealed to me this morning the existence of multiple videos attempting to assert that the Sandy Hook shooting didn’t happen, is a huge cover-up, and/or was engineered by the government as a way to “take our guns.”
These videos demonstrate that the people making them have zero understanding of the varied human response to trauma. For example, the assertion that a person making a smiling impression on their face at one point while doing an interview about a loved one dying is obviously evidence that they are a professional actor and the whole thing is fake. Nor are they familiar with the data on the frequent unreliability of eyewitnesses, which results in the claim that, after experiencing a horribly traumatic event, a school staff member changed inconsequential details of her story from one interview to the next so clearly she is a liar and the shooting never happened.
More importantly, these conspiracy-driven mashups of Sandy Hook-related stories and interviews have lead me to the conclusion that the 24-hour news cycle is destroying us individually and as a country. The intent of these videos is to edit together news coverage in a way that makes us believe (“reveals” to us) that the Sandy Hook shooting is all a hoax or conspiracy. The fact that they have so much footage to pull from is a sickening display of what results when hundreds of cameras are pointed at trauma survivors for weeks at a time. Even when ignoring the ridiculous conspiracy parts of these videos, I found myself disgusted from watching interview after interview of newly-traumatized people eulogizing their friends, family, and neighbors for the world to see.
My father died suddenly and unexpectedly from heart complications when I was 9 years old. Because we had moved so far away from the rest of our family, we had two funerals for him. One in the city where we lived, for church and work friends, and one where he was from, for family. As an adult I understand the choice to do it this way in order to give everyone who loved him the opportunity to pay tribute and say goodbye. As a kid, it was traumatic. Going to a parent’s funeral is a terrible, terrible thing. Doing it twice within a week is nearly unbearable. I can’t even imagine the experience of the adults and kids of Newtown. People’s whose loss has been violent and on such a large scale, who are then asked to tell the story to strangers. And then do it again. Who re-live the experience and the emotions in front of a camera. And then do it again. What’s the result? Hours of footage of people, whose memories and emotions are still being mediated by the physiological and psychological shock response, responding to questions about the event.
As a nation, we wanted to know what was happening. We wanted details in our quest to comprehend how and why a tragedy like this could occur. We were seeking the healing that comes from turning the irrational and unexplained into something we can at least pretend to understand, even when that “understanding” is really just knowing a long list of facts. But when we shove cameras in the faces of children minutes, hours, or days after an event like this, we are doing them a shameful disservice. When our quest for knowledge is on the backs of parents who just lost their children, we should be ashamed.
“Though we can navigate fairly fluidly through social groups, there will always be people in each that we hold onto tighter, that we find a more profound connection with. These people mirror something in ourselves that we long to feel fully, to bring to the forefront. It seems that to end things with a friend means ending things with a certain part of yourself, or at least a person you once were.”
“Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain. It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.”
My job shouldn’t include the risk of encountering a mass shooting of kindergarteners. It shouldn’t include the risk of being murdered while at work. But it does. I shouldn’t have to worry about whether all my students will return to their families each day or whether today is a day that some will never go home. But I do. “School shooting,” as a term, has worked it’s way into our shared language. They are words that, incomprehensibly, go together. They go together because the United States of America is a place where people take guns into schools and kill children. We don’t hear terms like “hospital shooting” or “sports stadium shooting.” Not because people have never been murdered in those locations but because it doesn’t happen with a frequency that requires a name for it. I don’t know how but we’ve got to make this stop.
