Why I Love Old Films

Yes, the acting style is outdated and the kissing is stiff and far too dramatic, but when it comes to class, old films certainly know how to deliver. The dance between the lighting and the grayscale images is choreographed beautifully; the gorgeous close ups of those FACES that lit up the silver screen suck me right in; the decadent wardrobes make me gasp at each entrance of the characters; the little throwaway lines that are absolutely, subtly brilliant delight me to the core.

When I'm watching an old film I feel like I'm home. Like I'm wrapped in a fleece blanket, drinking hot cocoa with extra marshmallows late at night during a thunderstorm. They're just so beautiful.

Old films offer an escape from reality--one that is more complete than contemporary films; in a contemporary film (even one set in a different time period) the picture quality, the color correction, and the editing styles are constant reminders of today's technology, trapping the audience in the present. Old films allow us to time travel. The grainy picture, the simple shots, the rough lighting--it's all a ticket to the past. We get to experience not only the story in the film, but the time in which it was released.

This week after watching a number of old Audrey Hepburn films (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, and Sabrina), I am absolutely clamoring to invite a little more class into my life. I want to BE Audrey Hepburn . . . or rather, I want to be ME but . . . Audrey Hepburn-er. ;) (If that wasn't a classy statement, I don't know what is. Ha. Ha. Ha.)

I guess what I'm saying is, here's my "To Do" list:

1. Go to NYC, wear silk gloves, and eat a pastry in front of Tiffany's.
2. Learn "Moon River" on the guitar and sing it while sitting on a window ledge.
3. Spend a day strictly doing things I've never done before.
4. Have the time of my life in Rome.
5. Dance with a barber.
6. Fall in love with Gregory Peck. (DONE)
7. Re-invent myself in Paris.
8. Make a positively stunning entrance at an evening party.
9. Rock a fabulous look.
10. Never settle for the idiotic womanizer.

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UNDER-APPRECIATED VOCABULARY WORD OF THE DAY:

panache n. flamboyant confidence of style or manner.

QUEEN OF CLASS QUOTE FOR YOUR PERUSAL:

"People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone."--Audrey Hepburn

Nostalgic for School

It's that time of year again: tuition, textbooks, school supplies, and girls who unfortunately wear leggings in lieu of pants. Summer's ending, and fall is just beginning to tiptoe into the scene.

Having just graduated in May, I haven't had much time to absorb the fact that I am done with school. It's just felt like every other summer... until recently. Now that I'm back from several awesome trips in July, it's finally hit me that I'm not going back to USU. Though my university did not come with moving staircases, secret passages, or school feasts, I feel a bit like Harry Potter missing Hogwarts in book seven when he knows he won't be returning for the school year. I long for the required reading I dreaded; I'm almost sad that I don't have to tow a three foot high stack of textbooks out to my car; I crave the class discussions about classic literature; I think longingly of how certain essays and certain professors were so awful that they caused friendships to be formed between the students subjected to them.

That's not to say I want to go back... NO, SIR. I'm still very happy to be finished, but I've reached a new appreciation for the parts of school that made it all worth it, even if I didn't see it at the time. I've come to the conclusion that blogging more often will partially fill the void left by written assignments, so expect me to be posting here fairly frequently for the next little while.

Are any of you in the same boat? Leave me a comment telling me how you're dealing with it!

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UNDER-APPRECIATED VOCABULARY WORD OF THE DAY:
sorghum: n. something cloyingly sentimental.

BOOK QUOTE FOR YOUR PERUSAL:
"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. [...] You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
--John Green, Looking for Alaska

To Cheese

I’m not sure exactly what it is about you that makes you so irresistible, but I want you to know that it’s working. I am yours and yours alone, and you will have me for as long as you will stick around. I’m prepared to throw many other things aside for just a shot at you—I’ve driven miles to get you at your best, and I never want you to change. I like you for you and will never desert you for some “skinny” version of you, so please, never think for a single second that I want you to go down the path of low-fat-zero-calories-fat-free-whatever. As many songwriters have proclaimed, you’re beautiful just the way you are. You’re always there for me when I need you—I can’t even remember a time when you weren’t around; you’ve had a definite presence in my life since the time when I could barely chew. I love you and want to thank you for how good you’ve been to me in the past, no matter what color you are (white, yellow, some kind of… mixed race…) and no matter who else you’ve been with (Seniora Macaroni, Ms. Cracker, Mademoiselle de Salade, etc.). At the moment you are single, and I just wanted to make sure you knew I was interested.

Your adoring servant,

Kiera Jo

UNDER-APPRECIATED VOCABULARY WORD OF THE DAY:
imperium, n. 1. Absolute rule; supreme power. 2. A sphere of power or dominion; empire. (As in, “Cheese has attained quite the imperium in my stomach and heart.”)

COMMITTED-TO-MEMORY MOVIE QUOTE FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT:
“Do you like… cheese?” (She’s the Man)

Hourly Comic Day

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A Soliloquy

As can be evidenced by my tweets the last twenty-four hours, I have been working on a soliloquy assignment for my Shakespeare class. It's pass/fail and we're supposed to compose a soliloquy of ten lines or more in iambic pentameter spoken by a character of our choice (we could make up our own, pick a celebrity, pick a book/movie/tv character, a person from history, whatever). I chose Severus Snape. Yep. If you have not read the Harry Potter series and do not want to be spoiled on important plot points in it, DO NOT GO ON. You've been warned. Without further ado. Ahem.

The Soliloquy of Severus Snape

This soliloquy would be expressed by J.K. Rowling’s enigmatic character, Professor Severus Snape, towards the climax of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in her Harry Potter series. At this point Snape is looking back at the choices he’s made in his life just before he dies—looking into Harry’s eyes—and passes on his memories to Harry.

His dad was such a cocky jock; it’s true,

Yet I can see his mother in his eyes.

Her floral grace—it seems to beckon me

Within those spheres of green beneath the scar.

The scar and eyes cement me to this side

Of good, which forces trickery of me:

A deathly dance among the pure of blood

Who bear an evil mark to match my own.

I dread them delving far beneath my mark

To where I am a being much in love

With someone long past dead—all due to me.

In every taunting look her son shoots me,

An arrow penetrates my heart and leaves

A gaping hole of mis’ry and remorse

For what I’ve lost but never can get back.

Though I despise her son, he offers up

A chance for me to cure my past mistakes—

Redeem myself for all I did before,

So I will aid and help him find the way

To vanquish Voldemort—to be The One.

We, both of us, are marked by The Dark Lord:

He, by his scar, and I, my telling stain.

My life begins to fade far from my reach—

I’ll gaze one final time into his eyes—

Her eyes—those verdant eyes—and I’ll be gone.

The Sound of Silence

I know it's only been a few days since my last post...but as I keep promising myself and twitter, I really do want to start blogging more often. And it's a lot easier for me to do now that I have a laptop in my room with me every night--when the blogging urge hits I can just start immediately before I lose motivation. And tonight, the urge is persistent. It's like this little kid tugging my sleeve and whining, "Kiera...Kiera...Kiera?! BLOG. Please blog. When can we blog? Are you going to blog? Huh? Huh, Kiera? Are you?! Kiera!!!" Obviously it's pretty annoying. And how do you expect me to sleep under those conditions?

I find myself quietly tucked away in my room this evening after my penultimate first day of school. It's been an unusually short summer, not as in it went quickly--though it did--but as in "it already freaking feels like fall even though it's still technically freaking AUGUST". My window's cracked open and letting in a cool, after-rain breeze, and the periodic sound of water slowly slipping off my roof to the ground pulls me in and out of my own thoughts. My room's a little chilly at the moment, but I like it that way since it gives me an excuse to pull out my (always comforting) lavender footie pajamas covered in penguins--these (the pajamas...not the penguins) have gone significantly unnoticed and unused since about March. I value times like these when I can just sit on my own and think to the noise of late-at-night-in-a-small-town.

Tonight I'm thinking about silences. Silence seems like something that's very straightforward: the absence of noise. But it's far more than that. There are many different types of silences. They each have a noise and a tone all their own within their soundlessness.

There are library silences and test-taking silences, where everyone is quiet because of an almost unwritten rule and social agreement that those are settings in which a low sound level should prevail. There are conversational silences--some natural and comfortable, some entirely awkward and nearly unbearable. There are shocked silences, and there are disappointed silences. There are silences that defy connection. But there are also silences in which communication and understanding are still taking place--in which words can become unnecessary. Tonight's silence is a relieved silence. I've made it through DAY 1 of the new semester and am perfectly happy to just sit inside while still experiencing the air from outside, knowing that everyone else in my house and most of the people on my block are sound asleep as I type these words.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite Simon & Garfunkel songs, which has a line in it about no one daring to disturb the sound of silence. But as those fabulous lyricists encourage, I do dare disturb the sound of silence--I add my own punctuating rhythm of clicking letters, making it my silence: a silence in which I express my muddled thoughts, but in many ways am still saying nothing at all.

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Under-Appreciated Vocabulary Word of the Day:

lacuna (lah-kyoon'-uh) n. a blank space or a missing part; gap.

Random Song Lyrics for Your Entertainment (and/or Enlightenment):

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence"

--Simon & Garfunkel in "The Sound of Silence"

Emerging Enlightened

As a college student, it’s pretty much my job to get really stressed out on occasion. School isn’t always exactly a cakewalk, and sometimes it’s best to just ignore my looming pictures of the future and focus only on things immediately at hand; the future is a scary thing to think about—I’m graduating soon. While I’m excited to be done with school, I’m not excited at the prospect of trying to find a job with my degree in English (emphasis: Literary Studies). I feel like my whole life has been leading up to this point where I get to go off and really show the world who I am—become a hardworking adult with not just a job but a CAREER: a life of my own choosing. It’s terrifying to think that any of the choices I’ve made could have been wrong.

But my thoughts continually return to my favorite class I’ve had to date—we’re not just talking my favorite college course; I really mean it is my favorite class EVER. I’ve had a lot of teachers I’ve loved and learned so much from, but this class has stuck in my mind the way no other ever has. The themes of it return to me all the time—it’s honestly changed many aspects of my perspective on life and experience. This class was my Literary Theory class last semester.

On the surface, it shouldn’t have been as life changing to me as it was; on the surface it just looks like any other university literature course—no, I take that back. On the surface it looks more pointless than your average university literature course. I confess as I read through the syllabus on the first day I couldn’t really remember why I’d signed up for the class beyond the fact that I’d heard the teacher was fabulous: the course description basically sounded like, “This class is going to be about spooky ghost stories in literature and the roles of the supernatural in our daily lives.” I was thinking it would be crazy and useless and asking myself why ON EARTH I was going to spend an entire semester reading and discussing the supernatural—that is really not my kind of thing at all. I don’t buy into ghost stories; I’d never become a “ghost-hunter”.

But for whatever reason (probably because the extremely clever and perhaps slightly eccentric professor intrigued me from day one) I stuck with the class. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

That class helped me come to a realization that I suppose I’ve known all along, but that I’d never given much thought to previous to taking the class. THE REALIZATION: We don’t have control over a lot of what surrounds us, only of how we react to those surroundings; the world is chuck full of chaos—chaos that’s nearly impossible to decipher. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, yet it’s our natural instinct and desire as mankind to make sense of the things we don’t understand. While in many cases this is fantastic—giving us new technologies or medicines or ways to accomplish things—sometimes we become so fixated on complete understanding and control that it tears us apart and impedes further progress in other areas. There comes a time when we just have to accept that we can’t control everything or know everything or understand everything—to accept the chaos for what it is—to willingly plunge ourselves into it at times and come away from it not fully comprehending it all, but feeling enlightened on some aspect of it…and knowing that that’s okay. “Willingly fling yourself down the rabbit hole and emerge enlightened instead of insane,” became the constant motto of the course.

And that was just the message I needed to hear. Now as I look to my not-entirely-certain future, I try to de-stress a little: it’s okay that I don’t know exactly what I’m doing after I graduate; it’s okay that school feels chaotic at times and that the real world is even more so. As long as I emerge from the rabbit hole feeling enlightened—as long as I come away from every chaotic experience having learned something—having improved myself—it was all worth it.

EMBRACE THE CHAOS!

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Under-Appreciated Vocabulary Word of the Day:

gallimaufry (gal-li-maw'-free) n. a hodgepodge, jumble; a mixture of diverse things

Random Movie Quote for Your Entertainment:

“My journey took me somewhat further down the rabbit-hole than I'd initially intended and, though I dirtied my fluffy white tail, I've emerged… enlightened.”

—Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes (2009)