The Human Resources Manager, a film

I am enjoying a series of foreign films shown at the the Cape Cod Community College, a free course that is open to regular students and we over-50s it the Academy for Lifelong Learning. Last week's film was a sad and moving story of a peasant in Bolivia and his family trying to simply life their lives in the mountains while the guerrillas were trying to take control of the area by intimidation that did not stop at murder. Colors of the Mountain was the English title.

Fewer people were at today's film possibly because they do not wish to see serious foreign film that touch the heart in a way very few American films do. Film makers in other countries are not slaves to the "entertainment" ethos but have the freedom to express themselves in an artistic and serious way. Today's film was The Human Resources Manager, an Israeli film which was actually set mostly in Romania. The HR manager of a large bakery finds himself reluctantly accompanying the body of a Romania employee who was killed in a suicide bombing attack back to Romania where everything that can go wrong goes wrong. The divorced husband is estranged from the punk son. Son insists mama should be buried in grandma's town which is in the far boonies, grandma doesn't want her buried there. The HR guy has many personal troubles as well as accompanying the body -- and he is dogged by a nasty little newspaper reporter. Everyone gets marginally humanized in the course of the film. This is a 2010 movie, for those who wish to trace it for rental or viewing.

The dean of the college who introduced the film said that traveling in the Central Europe with a body to be buried is so grim she wouldn't give us the whole story but her grandmother's body was being smuggled across borders in the trunk of a VW which got stolen and the body totally disappeared. She then talked a little bit about the theatre of the absurd and we understood that indeed much in life is absurd.

People who avoid films, books, whatever that might be a bit uncomfortable are depriving themselves of a depth of experience that could make them stronger and even happier people. By dealing with difficult emotions vicariously through art, especially good, complex art, we are better prepared when we face difficult emotional problems.

My Google Search vs Your Google Search

Ronni Barrett at "Time Goes By" [see side bar and click on it] does a collection of interesting stuff on Saturdays. Yesterday she had a wonderful, very short clip about dog wrapping himself in a duvet, a stunning 101 year old lady who drives an 81 year old car, and a Ted Talk that I highly recommend listening to. This is the introduction:
GOOGLE CENSORS OUR SEARCHES
Not just Google – other search engines too. You and I can search the same word or phrase and get entirely different returns depending on what the search engine knows about us from our past searches and other information.

Google is not the only search engine, or large internet site, that filters the information that comes to you. Facebook does, says the speaker. I don't do Facebook but I do buy from Amazon and was immediately aware of their "you might also like" messages based on things I've bought from them. In that case,I actually like the filer, they let me know of books I don't know exist and sometimes, yes, I might also like that, and I order them.

The information filters are scary. I don't know if my AOL homepage filters the "news" that pops up, I think it's possible. At any rate it seems to me what's happening is a kind of Orwellian Big Brother. This BB is without an agenda beyond sales [in Amazon's or NetFlix's case], and it is without morals, it is an algorithm of our own habits. It re-enforces our bad habits [yes, sometimes I wonder about who George Clooney is dating] and doesn't tell us things we probably should know [a recall of E.coli tainted foods?] Happily I get a lot of information the old fashioned way, through reading, but fewer and fewer people get any amount of real information at all. If we are being dumbed down, in a sense it's our own fault. I strongly recommend looking at the TED talk on "As Time Goes By".

To Hell in a Handbasket

Thomas Friedman [I believe] had an editorial page piece yesterday about American students' moral sensibility. He quoted a psychological study that interviewed many students on many campuses asking questions to assess their moral sense. Most asserted that killing as wrong. Otherwise they had very little to say about moral issues, often they said, "I don't really deal with that." They were asked about cheating, lying, stealing, various other matters and were wishy washy about most of them.

Today in the context of American economics and how American can compete with China and India, I raised the question of education. It's been a supposed knee jerk priority and yet I saw a young woman in a fast food restaurant this summer who clearly could not make change from a $5 bill. I have seen community college students who clearly did not understand sentence structure, the need for paragraphing and did not know enough, or care enough, to turn on a spell and grammar check program in order to present a readable paper. If American students don't know enough basic math to make change how can they become a part of a technological workforce? And if they cannot write and don't care about their communication skills enough to use a computer program how can anyone imagine they can succeed in a service industry that require interpersonal skills. And if they have no concept of right or wrong who can trust them in any kind of job?

I am taking a course that will talk about the economic rise of India and China, in a comparative sense, but it will hark back to American economic repeatedly. I get very tired of people who talk about creating jobs for Americans when they have a workforce that is almost subliterate. Whatever is going on in schools it's not basic education; whatever is going on in homes, it seems to have nothing to do with instilling vales and ethics. Oh, I know that's a broad brush generalization ... but so it that supposed panacea for maintaining the beloved "American way of life" which is jobs creation. This is a three-month course, I'm sure I'll return to this subject.

Only Three of Many Memories

[The Memorial Quilt for 9/11 - partial view]

My job at a transcription service gave me a compendium of information. I was the one who most often transcribed tapes with foreign speakers/ I had listened to a Japanese, or perhaps a Singaporean businessman, speaking about "the world trade center" in Singapore, thus learning that the one in NYC was not the only one in the world. When the owner of the company sought me out in my little cubby-office, since I was usually the first to arrive and he often second, he said, "An airplane has run into the World Trade Center." I asked "Which one, where?"

"Here. Ours," he said. A little later he came to tell me it was not an isolated accident.

Several hours later I walked three miles north, alone. The streets were nearly empty, Times Square was strangely desserted. Two tourists were staring at the lighted news strip that usually gave stock market numbers. It gave the planes' number and number of passengers. An evangelist thrust a tract at me, I gave him a fiercely cold stare and walked on through the eerie emptiness and quiet that occasionally carried a distant siren wailing its way to a hospital.

Days later, when the subway was running again, people made eye contact with strangers and began telling their stories, "I was on my way to work..." "My wife called me to say ..." Small memories -- even those with mere crumbs of memory, like mine, wanted to testify that they, too, were touched.

Calling Ourselves By Another Name

I just had lunch with a largish group of people and met a couple or three people I had never met before. We all had name tags. One very dignified, very well put together woman [maybe the best dressed in the room] had a name tag that revealed her first name is "Fuzzy". We were all teachers in the Academy for Lifelong Learning, nearly all over 60. This woman was 70 or more and, as I said, very well kept. I had seen her name in the course listing and had formed a [you'll excuse the irresistible pun] fuzzy impression of what she might look like. Of course I know that guessing what someone will look like is impossible. She told me, "That's what my father called me the second day of my life." We were interrupted before I could ask what her actual name is.

Most people would have dumped a baby name like that before grade school, and certainly after graduation. Why would a person take a name like that to college? Or like Muffie, Sparky, Bunny, Jimbo, Mags ... I could go on. A high school reunion is upcoming and, the times I've joined these events, I've had difficulty calling Lindalou, Lynn which she used from College on, two Eddie both became Ed, two Bobbies became Bob. That makes perfect sense to me, they grew up, they got rid of the childish diminuative. I think mostly women maintain their nicknames. I hate stereotyping, especially women as a group, and I can say that in the brief time I talked to Fuzzy nothing about her seemed childish, but I think women are [or were in my generation] more inclined to continue the child-like role than were men.

For my part, I've never really had a nickname. My name, in fact, doesn't appeal to me very much and it has seemed not to appeal much to the men in my life. I was more often called Honey or Darling or by my last name. I've never thought I was a June and always wished I were something else, but what? ... well, Honey and Darling were satisfactory, also Mom, Mother, Grandma and Greatgrandma -- although I averred only yesterday that I'd be happy to respond to simple Great. The child to whom I said that only has about 12 words at this point, maybe "The Great" will stick.

Will Power, Ray Baumeister

Will Power: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, is reviewed in this week's NYTimes Book Review. The author is Ray Baumeister, a psychologist, and the reviewer the almost omnnipresent Steve Pinker. The book discusses an experiment from the '60s by psychologist Walter Mischel in which, as Pinker puts it, he "tormented preschoolers with the agonizing choice of one marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes." Decades later the now grown children were interviewed. The children who had the foresight and will power to wait for fifteen minutes had, in almost every way, fared better in their lives than the ones who took the immediate reward. They were more successful in their studies and their jobs, had more money, and were happier.

I don't know if Baumeister writes about whether it seems that children are born with or without "will power" or if they had learned it before the age of four from their family situation. I would guess the latter. The subtitle of the book tells us it's message. I think of all the times I've had dessert when someone mentions "saving the icing [or heart of the watermelon} for last versus eating it first. I'm a saver 'til last and have always been. Intuition has always told me that saving the best part last says something about our outlook. But questions arise about whether that's necessarily the best approach. Too many people defer their dream vacation, deprive themselves of some pleasure for this reason or that [good sense financial reasons or from fear of daring]. Few things are either/or. Yes, I believe will power is good, especially when more appropriately called "self discipline." Put money in the IRA but go see the pyramids too. That has been my method and, yes, I'm happy about it -- but no one offered me either one or two marshmallows. I don't remember any discussion in my family about discipline or eating the icing last. My brother eats it first. Maybe the tendency is inborn along many other personality traits.

Birds Harvesting -- what?

The Canadian geese have been back for a few weeks. This year they arrive in gaggle of 8 to 15, browse the lawn for about an hour and take off. I assume they are stopping by here for a while, perhaps another month or so, until they go further south where snow is rare.

The last few days I have noticed this infestation [is that the word? seems right] of starlings -- a flock of several dozen that arrive in the late afternoon, and do not stay long. I watched them today, since it's Sunday and I was wracking my brain over the Times crossword puzzle as I sat on my mini-patio. They arrived from the north, settled in the middle of the sizable lawn [photo shows the south end which is less than a quarter of the entire lawn] they browsed for about five minutes then gradually individuals flew a few feet further south, others followed suit until the whole group had moved forward about ten feet, then they repeated that process a coupe of times until they reached the edge of the lawn, then some individuals [the leaders?] flew back ten feet north and the rest gradually followed, this was repeated a few time and then they were up and off as a group.

I don't know what they are eating, but they obviously are. Are there seeds from the grass or are there insects. I believe the geese actually eat the grass although they don't make an appreciable difference in its appearance except for their piles of droppings.

My botanical ignorance has been bothering me lately -- but not enough to do serious research. When I walk on the beach I watch the tiny sand pipers [or maybe baby sanderlings] running along at the very edge of the tide, pecking at something. I suppose it is small insects, what else is there? I can't see anything but they clearly find things that they eat. They are all fascinating, I think of Mary Oliver's line in her "Summer Day" when she says she has been watching a grasshopper which she describes exquisitely, and asks, "What else should I do?" Indeed.