I Have Become Busy
Not long after my last post I got a call from the manager of the assessment and certification center at the local junior college asking if I was still interested in a part-time job. Well, sure, I said. So, now I work part-time at the center managing test administration. The center attracts as employees smart people who are required to master a large and complex set of procedures. The center is constantly busy, with at least a dozen or so people going through a series of tests at any given time. At the same time groups of students are being administered other sorts of tests, each with its own complex set of rules for administering them.
An interesting job with a varied schedule and a varied work routine. This is OK. The center manager is an orderly but eminently kind man and my colleagues are smart and interesting. Their computer system, however, is in need of some basic maintenance. Hard drives are too full, desktops are full of shortcuts without order, communication with the IT folks does not appear to be robust, network drives are not mapped properly. Perhaps I can make a dent in the backlog of maintenance work once I get the hang of how all this works.
Rain
I had been complaining about no rain. No more. We’ve had about 25 inches of rain in the last several months. So much rain my front door is harder to close from the moisture. I’m happy I had a new roof put on when I did. On top of the rain we’ve had a nor’easter the last several days with winds whipping at 25 mph and 9-12 foot waves and….rain.
National Storytelling Festival
We’re heading up to Jonesborough TN for the annual storytelling festival October 5-7.
Three days of storytelling by all sorts of people: native americans, good ‘ole boys pitching nostalgia for a South that never was, funny contemporary stories, narratives commemorating lost cultures or cultures attempting to be preserved. A wonderful variety of stories. Always fun but it does seem to get a little larger each year, with more and more people jostling each other for favored seats at the best sessions.
We fly into Charlotte and drive over, which is quite a ride. But the trouble is worth it for the time being at least.
Manhattan Short Film Festival
Last Friday we went to this festival to see 12 short films. We were surprised such an arty occasions would make it to our Southern burg but sure enough, there it was.
Marian and I had dinner at a stylish bistro beforehand. Marian didn’t want a picture taken of her but here I am:
This is about as good as I ever look so this becomes my official portrait.
We milled around amongst the hoi polloi .
By the way, I don’t mean this hoi polloi
The Three Stooges from their movie Hoi Polloi (1935).
Inside the theater we saw 12 great 10-minute features.
Such talented filmmakers out there beyond the reach of Hollywood.
The best was 
about a photojournalist more intent on getting the perfect war shot than saving the life of a young girl. The resulting photo wins a prestigious award but the ceremony triggers a flashback to that moment the girl was killed and her own culpability in that killing.
We both liked 
, a fanciful film about a young woman taking advice from a janitor. You’d have to see it to understand the power of the story. In fact, just what film promises, to use images effectively in telling a story. Just what this does.
I liked 
but Marian thought it was too contrived and too preachy. It tells the story of a Kenyan orphan living in an unbelievably bleak slum outside Nairobi. His relief from his stark life is to imagine himself a pilot, flying above all of this, flying away from this life, watching it roll by from 35,000 feet. The narrative is unadorned, almost a poem. I understand Marian’s objection. The idea this uneducated child from such a background could articulate so completely such a vision is absurd. With that in mind I enjoyed the idea that a child living in such dire circumstances could still use his imagination to take himself away from his awful life.
A little nightmarish was 
, about a British father living in a working-class neighborhood set upon by local toughs. When confronted outside his own house he backs away, only to be rescued by his own son wielding a cricket bat. Marian liked it and it was quite good but it had the smell of overcompensating machismo to it, almost as if the director was reacting to his own country’s inability to contain suburban violence or to enjoy an unambiguous victory in Iraq.
The other short we really liked was 
where a young student outsmarts his very unattractive teacher. It is sly and anti-authoritarian and the student is a sympathetic character. The film is from Spain. Perhaps it has special resonance in a country with a recent history of authoritarian rule.
The rest were quite good but those above are our special favorites. An enjoyable night nibbling at the edges of high society.
Vandalism
At the other end of the social scale, our neighborhood suffered some vandalism this weekend. Several kids from the neighborhood started shaking the fiberglass poles of our street lights. They managed to actually shear one pole off near its base.
We found the pole in the street when we went for our walk on Saturday morning. But the city had cleaned it up by the time we got back, leaving only the sheared pole and a warning pylon in its place.
The next night they struck again. They didn’t manage to knock the pole over but they did manage to topple the light housing.
Oddly enough I know who did this and I’m trying to convince the actual witness to report it directly. Otherwise I will and she’ll be drawn into it anyway. Bored teenage boys whose own sense of impotence prompts them to make the only impact they can think of by creating thousands of dollars of damage.
This kind of vandalism, not particularly threatening but a worry nonetheless, brings to mind our own insecurity, the shallowness of the footprint we leave behind. May Swenson quite ably describes our slight connections to the world and skewers what we see as a bulwark against a demanding and insistent world.
Question
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
————-May Swenson, “Question” from Nature: Poems Old and New
