Monthly Archives: April 2015

The lanterns will light your way

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Above: A picture from the Lantern Fest. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera on me, so I had to resort to my phone.

Yesterday my roommate and I volunteered at the Lantern Fest, which was happening in a nearby town on a racetrack.

Knowing nothing about it, I pictured something like what happened in Tangled (minus the water and boats). Obviously I wasn’t the only one who thought about this because there were a few little girls dressed up as Rapunzel. However, what happened that night was more magical than I could have ever imagined.

Long before the sun went down, I started my volunteering hours by placing marshmallows in s’mores kits for all the participants. I ended up packing up these boxes for five hours with only a couple short breaks interspersed. Maybe on a different day, I would have become bored and irritated with my work, but as it was, I was enjoying the company of total strangers who had decided to come help out for various reasons.

At seven, my roommate joined me on a journey to put things in my car. We had plans to go back, but the front seats of the car were too much of a temptation for our tired legs and feet. We then watched the lanterns getting lit and then let go from a wall nearby.

I can’t describe the feeling that I got when a plethora of lanterns started rising into the sky. It was beautiful. It was awe-some. It was absolutely magical.

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Lanterns rising.

My roommate and I walked around the racetrack, watching in awe as lanterns were let go all around us.  The lanterns on the ground were like huge bishop hats, but in the sky they were stars. Our very own close constellation.

I felt euphoric, but I know not everybody was. At one point, it was announced that a six year old girl was missing and her parents were waiting for her at the stage. I felt the little girl’s terror as she was separated from her parents, having been lost in a store when I was that age. I couldn’t quite feel the terror of the parents because I haven’t been a parent yet. But I did imagine the girl finding her way into her mother’s arms, her mother bringing her back to their families’ fire, and her father lighting the lantern with a tiki torch, saying, “Everything’s fine now, sweetie.”

 

Recently Watched

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A couple weeks ago, my friends and I decided to rent a movie for a girls night. We were going for “Big Hero 6,” but ended up with “Blended,” a comedy with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore.

I usually am weary when it comes to comedies, especially romantic comedies, but I loved this one. What’s great about it is that is not wholly a traditional romantic comedy. So called “Rom-Coms” usually involve two single people who have great jobs and are typically gorgeous, but not a lot of responsibilities. In this movie, however, the main characters (Lauren and Jim) are both single parents.

Lauren and Jim are both relatively new at being single parents: Lauren is divorced and Jim’s wife died. And both of them have handfuls to deal with: Lauren has two incredibly boisterous boys who remind me somewhat of the Weasley twins and Jim has three girls, one of which is struggling with puberty and a dad who treats her like a boy.

Inadvertently, they end up at resort for families in Africa. Lauren and Jim (like Benedick and Beatrice, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger) don’t like each other at first, but eventually end up becoming mentors for each others’ children.

What struck me about the movie is that it does not pretend that there is dark in the world. While it is clearly a light family movie, it hints as much as it can at deep social issues. It sympathizes with those who do not have it together and the children who are starting to grow aware of themselves. It is thanks to the writers of the screenplay that audiences can see themselves in the teen girl, the boy who complains of his mother, but is incredibly protective of her, and the two parents who fail to connect to their offspring sometimes.

One example of this is a scene in which one of the girls leaves a spot at the table for the mother who she hasn’t let go of yet. Lauren tries to sit down in the reserved seat and the girl (sorry, I don’t remember her name) tells her its taken. Lauren takes a couple seconds to comprehend the situation and then moves to another seat. Throughout the movie, Lauren makes sure that the girl’s mother has a place to sit.

Not only does this attest to the strength of the writer’s minds, but also to the potential for brilliant human understanding and kindness.

On a scale of 1-10, I would give it an 8.5.

Currently Reading

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One of the books that I am reading for an American Lit class is White Noise by Don Delillo. Set in the 1980s, the novel explores the life of Jack, a professor who invented the field of “Hitler Studies” at his college, and his nontraditional family around the event of a chemical explosion.

Before we read it, my professor told us that it is okay for us to find some of the events and dialogue funny. And some parts of it is funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, but they deserve a couple chuckles.

For instance, this scene with two of Jack’s daughters:

In bed two nights later  I heard voices, put on my robe and went down the hall to see what was going on. Denise stood outside the bathroom door.

“Steffie’s taking one of her baths.”

“It’s late,” I said.

“She’s just sitting in all that dirty water.”

“It’s my dirt,” Steffie said from the other side of the door.

“It’s still dirt.”

“Well it’s my dirt and I don’t care.”

“Dirt is dirt.”

“Not when it’s mine.”

This scene is mostly funny because it is relatable. You can easily see siblings having a similar conversation.

The novel is very aptly named. Throughout the novel, Jack mentions bits and pieces of noise from the television, which no one really seems to pay attention too. Events, such as the smoke alarm going off and people going missing, are talked about but stay part of the background.The conversations are often like the one on either side of the bathroom door. Background conversations, ones that don’t really matter. One could argue that all the conversations (at least the ones I’ve seen so far) classify as such. I personally think that Jack’s family is all part of the white noise and that he and his thoughts on death are all that he really pays attention to.

One view of white noise, background noise, the noise that we don’t quite pay attention to, is that it is different for everyone. Some people have to have music or the TV on all the time and some people actually listen, so they can’t have it on while they work on their business. Another view is that everything, even your thoughts, are white noise.

If the second is true, if everything and everyone is white noise, then do we matter?

I’m hoping that the second half of the book will give me a semblance of an answer.