Happy New Year

I'm uncomfortable with 2007. I wasn't quite comfortable with 2006, and it's already 2007. I've always wondered at how time seems to speed up as you get older. I think it's because you have a greater sense of past time. A year doesn't seem like such a long time when you've lived through 25 or 30 of them already. And a day? Pshaw. I can waste a day surfing the freaking time-sucking Internet.

I don't like complainers, so I'm going to stop now.

I just wrote an e-mail to my advisor in graduate school. I'm getting my dissertation going again. I haven't completed a proposal, partly because I haven't found my niche. I've got my subject, for the most part - Faulkner. But I'm not sure what I'm going to say about him yet. I don't know what to say about him that hasn't been said already.

It's funny how the way that you spend your time says things about you. I have this time off right now, and instead of doing things that will help me be a better teacher, I've been watching movies on cable. I did read a book, or most of a book, and I sat down and made some sketchy plans yesterday. But that's about it. I mean, I'm spending the time doing things that are just . . . stupid. What value do stupid movies really offer? I suppose it's an experience that I can share with other people. I suppose it's something that might someday allow me to talk to someone that I might not have anything else in common with. But what are the chances of that being the case? What are the chances that this movie, right now, will be useful? I suppose it has helped me explain myself or explain something to myself in the past. There was a movie that furnished an example of a particular philosophical problem. Stupid movies can often be smart by accident. Of course, I'm having trouble thinking of an example right now.

Oh, here's one. The movie Dave. It was altogether a silly and improbable movie about a man who coincidentally looks exactly like the president, and who is recruited to double for him in a public setting. Something happens to the president, and some unscrupulous advisors decide to make him play the president while they make all of the real decisions. He becomes a kind of puppet, because they know that the awkward truth - that the president had a stroke while having sex with a mistress - might catapult them out of power. The movie milks this situation for some funny scenarios, like Dave throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, and so on. And the pundits are the best part of the movie - the celebrity cameos and such.

What I like about this movie is how it seems to ask a question - what if we stopped trying to make government so complicated that no one understands it, and instead decided to keep it simple and just get things done?

The other question it asks is a bit more sinister: what kind of person succeeds, in this system, in becoming president? What attributes does this process reward? I don't think that the people who made this movie created it to answer or even to ask these questions, but that doesn't matter much. I like to wonder about these things, and I enjoy this movie because it encourages me to think about things in new ways. Isn't that the point of watching movies? Perhaps that's the point of watching foreign films. So that we can see what other people consider normal, or abnormal, or what other people think about the world, about life, and about how things are. Because maybe we can change our own reality - question our own values - better if we can see them from the outside.