A Series of Homes

A forever long, reminiscing post that is part autobiography, part commentary on class and wealth, and extremely self-centered.

I had a pleasant lunch with my mother and my oldest sister today.  We talked about this and that and got to reminiscing about our history together.  We have always been fortunate - we had places to live, food, working cars, toys, and later on could even swing piano lessons and college educations - but as we talked today, I got to thinking about how my perception of being "normal" in terms of wealth changed as I grew and as our circumstances changed here and there.

Up until about age 4 or so, I hadn't thought much about these sorts of things, seeing as how I was still in the business of acquiring language, socialization and fine motor skills, in addition to singing songs to anyone who would listen.  Once I hit pre-k age, though, I think a certain crude, infantile understanding of "wealth" had been subliminally transfused to me through things like Scrooge McDuck's endless counting of gold coins in the DuckTales cartoons.  I cite that specifically because (1) it's one of the few things I clearly remember watching a lot during that period of time and (2) it's the only explanation I can come up with for why I believed that Grandma having "gold" handles on the drawers of her furniture meant that she was rich.  No seriously - I would go into her home (a newly acquired double-wide) and sit in front of the end tables running my fingers along the drawer handles.  She still has those furniture pieces and the handles are now only partially gold, as the veneer has been worn off by use and by my childhood caressing.  When we moved in with her, I believed we were moving into a nicer home because we were going from no gold handles to gold handles and from a heating system that consisted of one very loud heater in the living room to a system where heat actually came out of this hole in the floor right into your own personal bedroom!  Three bathrooms instead of one!  A big (to us) Christmas tree every Christmas!  We were so lucky!

As I became a preteen, my perception of wealth and status became influenced by harmful and misleading cultural narratives.  I made snarky remarks about being "trailer trash."  Not once did I consider what sort of stereotypes I was reinforcing, or how hurtful that sort of language might have been to anyone sitting near me who might also live in a trailer or who might wish they were lucky enough to have one...all I cared about was that the people I wanted to make laugh were laughing.  In any event, it was a sign of my new viewpoint: we were clearly classless and poor because we lived in a trailer, whereas normal people lived in "real" houses.  Never mind that the "real" house we had occupied prior to living in the trailer was crumbling and dangerous...I was a shining example of the phenomenon in which humans tend to hang on tenaciously to a specific worldview once they've landed on it and they tend to remember all data that supports it while disremembering all data that disproves it.  Stubborn creatures of habit, we are.

During my sixth grade year (which in my region is the first year in a new school for public school kids) we made our next move up the ladder.  We had one false alarm - had a house decided upon and were going to move during Winter Break, but then it fell through.  I was delighted, of course, because I had just gotten used to my school and was not at all anxious to leave.  Shortly thereafter, though, the parents picked out another house and we moved right before my 12th birthday.  I was partially distraught; dagnabbit, I had just gotten used to my old middle school and here I was having to start over completely and with only 2.5 months left in the school year!  But on the other hand, there was this house.

This.  House.  It was a "real" house, and it was so much prettier than the previous "real" house we had lived in, which was built in the 50s, had wood paneling on the walls and didn't originally sport a bathroom (one had been added before we lived there.)  This house, however, was built in the 90s.  The walls were painted, white in most of the house except the wallpapered bathrooms and the painted kid bedrooms.  THE BEDROOMS!!  Amber and I had separate ones!  Mine was big enough not only for a double bed all for me and standard bedroom furniture, but we could even finagle it so that the spinet piano Mimi gave us could fit in my bedroom as well!  There was a backyard with a playhouse and a hammock, a paved driveway instead of gravel that we could write on in chalk, a crawlspace to hide in during tornadoes so that we didn't have to run across the road to someone else's house...it was the most wonderful house ever.  We weren't poor people anymore, we were normal!

My assessment of us as "normal" lasted until I saw some of my new friends' homes, with their multiple stories and their internet access and their DVD players and in some cases, pools.  I downgraded us to the low side of normal - we weren't poor, but there were times when it felt like I was the only kid in the entire county school system who didn't have an AIM screen name, which I assumed was the result of us not being able to afford internet (it wasn't.)  Like lots of kids, I hoped that one day I would be successful enough at something to make enough money to have a big house with a pool and digital gadgetry and pretty decor and all that.  I wasn't contemptuous of our home, but I didn't fully appreciate it.

My next move came at 18, and I'll say only this: nothing will make you appreciate your one-story unpooled house like living at college.  To this day I rejoice in floors that are the same elevation at one side of the room as they are at the other.

Once I got married and started working, my whole understanding of wealth and class began to broaden.  I began to see the myriad ways in which people gain and lose, began to think about the crushing cyclical nature of poverty, and began to realize how unbelievably lucky I had been as a kid.  I had parents (several!) who were able to acquire jobs to support the family and were able to complete their own educations so that they could help me and my sisters complete ours, we lived in structures where we felt reasonably safe and felt confident that if something did happen, we would be listened to and protected by law enforcement, we had enough money to buy nutritive food, medical care, and cars to take us to get those things, the parents had sufficient income without any of the kids having to get jobs to help sustain the family (getting jobs to help pay for things the kid wants or help with college is a different thing) so we kids could focus on school, our parents' occupations were scheduled so that they were at home most evenings and thus had time and energy (hehehe) to talk to us and see after our emotional well-being and included weekends off for leisure activities...there's a domino effect happening here.  One layer of luck tends to lead to another.  I have no personal lived experience with poverty, but based on what I have read from those who have and various thinky blogs like Sociological Images, the same happens at the other end of the spectrum.  One layer of suck leading to another.  If any one of several elements in my family's history had been just a little different...if this one hadn't graduated from high school and thus hadn't gotten into this career, or if another hadn't had a parent at home to help with homework in the subject that would one day become his/her passion, or if I hadn't been at the right place at the right time, the whole story could have changed.

Of the many advantages I had as a kid, one of the biggest was the life lesson that you should never stop learning, never stop listening, and never believe that you are 100% right because the world is big and varied and you aren't God.  I hope to keep that lesson always and use it to keep learning about people and to help them add some layers of luck to their own lives.    

MEEP

I have me a theory based purely on my own musings while cooking myself lunch and watching old Looney Tunes on Cartoon Network.  Probably I am noticing things that are glaringly obvious and stupid to someone who knows from animation and film, just as I am contemptuous of people who declare that "the ABC song and Twinkle Twinkle have the same rhythm!"*  Or I am noticing things that have already been written about and I just haven't searched long enough.  But I'm having too much fun with this train of thought to keep it to myself, even if it is potentially idiotic and/or unintentionally pirated.

In my neverending search for film and television trivia/nostalgia, one of my favorite tidbits (owing likely to the fact that it has to do with two movies I adore) is the fact that Dumbo was made quickly and cheaply to help recoup the losses from Fantasia, which was a pretty big flop in its initial release.  They expected Fantasia to capture people's hearts and they expected Dumbo to just squeak by and nearly the opposite happened.  Fortunately, both movies turned out to be major favorites over the course of the seven billion re-releases that each one has gotten as film technology has changed.  (I've not looked, but it occurs to me to wonder whether they pull that Disney Vault crapola with digital retailers like iTunes and Amazon.  They're like the Girl Scouts of cinema and their best films are the cookies.)

I thought of this today while I was watching Wile E. Coyote attempt to accost the Road Runner.  My extensive minutes-long research on Wikipedia has not produced anything that confirms my theory, but it didn't produce anything that disproves it either.  To be safe, however, please consider everything in this post, as you likely consider everything on this blog, to be purely hypothetical.

I bet that the Coyote/RR cartoons acted as budget savers for the Warner Bros. animation studio.  During the golden age of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, such cartoons were shown in theaters and I would think that they, though to a smaller degree, were at the mercy of audience whims just like feature films.  Maybe if they blew the budget on one of the bigger names like Bugs or Daffy, but still needed to create another cartoon for another venue or purpose, the Coyote cartoons were a quick fix.

Consider:

1. Sound and Syncing

As far as I know, in every cartoon that pits Wile E. against the Road Runner, not one word of spoken dialogue was uttered.  (There were about 6 or so cartoons produced toward the end of the Looney Tunes era that paired Wile E. with Bugs Bunny - in these, he finally speaks and turns out to be kind of a jerk.)  So they didn't have to hire voice actors or worry about animating mouths to sync with the recorded dialogue, which probably saved a great deal of time and money.  They had only the musical score, the sound effects (your standard booms, bangs, propellers, large springs, hammers, etc.) and the one piece of vocalization - "thunka-thunka-MEEP-MEEP" - to sync with the animated images.  They may have granted the Coyote one or two "YEEEEEEOWS!" in reaction to being blown up, but I have a feeling that "YEEEEEEOW!" is easier to animate and sync than, "My goodness, but that was a painful experience."

I noticed something with the ubiquitous MEEP today in my viewing: in this particular cartoon, even though the MEEP MEEP happened several times, Road Runner was only on screen for one of them.  For all the others, he was either in the process of running toward us from a distance with fine details obscured, or was simply not visible at all, his location meant to be inferred by the viewer based on wherever we last saw him.  Genius, I tell you!  Because then you don't have to be achingly precise with where the sound goes - as long as it occurs somewhere within whatever 5-second time period you're trying to establish his presence, you're good!

2. Storyboard/Plot

It's rather difficult to call what was going on in these cartoons a "plot."  One reason I have never actually been fond of these types of cartoons is the repetition.  I feel similarly about Tom and Jerry.  But again, this could have been a money-saving move, because you don't have to pay a bunch of writers to come up with the witty banter and clever mischief required of more complex stars like Bugs Bunny.  You don't even have to use "real" writers - you can take two of your goofy friends out for dinner and then ask them to come up with weird schemes to catch Road Runners.  Insert explosion/failure and poof: completed script!

3. Setting

This ties a little into the previous point about the monotony of the stories.  Whereas Porky Pig might be on an island in one cartoon and in a house in the next, or Daffy in the woods one day and in the arctic that night, or Bugs continually making wrong turns at Albuquerque that land him in all manner of locales, the Coyote and the Road Runner reside exclusively in Unnamed Desert.  Backgrounds often have little detail besides the topography of whichever section of Unnamed Desert they're hanging out in.  Road + sand + cliffs + sky = a Coyote/Road Runner background!

*     *     *     *     *     *

Of course, it is possible (likely, in fact) that I am grossly generalizing and conjecturing because of a hyper brain that no longer has students to visit its whims upon.  This was, after all, ignited by a single viewing of a single cartoon out of many in the same vein, which is not a statistically significant sample.  But it was a fun little mental exercise to envision what sort of work might have gone into these sorts of cartoons as opposed to others.  Chuck Jones was involved in several of the Coyote/Road Runner cartoons and was also one of the major animators and shapers of Bugs Bunny and it mystifies me a little how such a creative talent could produce such different products.  Bugs cartoons are filled with personality, layered with cultural commentary and innuendo, infused with all manner of comedy from the satirical to the slapstick...they dazzle with their compact complexity** and Coyote cartoons just seem so...elementary.  So formulaic and dull.  I have trouble believing that the same sort of professional pride and vigor went into "I'm a fiddler crab!  Shoot me!  It's fiddler crab season!" as went into "......[crash boom MEEP]...."  I keep seeing where different behind-the-scenes books have been published, but I've yet to find many of them in Kindle editions.  What a bunch of crap.  Until that happens, expect lots more navel-gazing and hypothesizing from me!

Actually, you can probably expect that henceforth in any case.   

*For any nonmusical readers who are mystified by the ABC/Twinkle thing...they have the same rhythm, which is a single element of music, because they are in fact the same tune, which is a broader entity encompassing rhythm.  It would be like your friend saying, "This vegetable is the same color as this vegetable!" while pointing to two identical pieces of broccoli.
**Well, most of them dazzle...the Censored Eleven disappoint in their blatant racism and stereotyping.

Inexplicable Bad Days

Yes, I know I haven't posted in about a zillion years...I started a bunch of posts that got to be inordinately long and I had to stop halfway through and never restarted and by the time I revisited the dashboard, too much time had passed for them to still be relevant.  Sorry.

So something was sort of...off today.  Nothing particularly bad happened, certainly nothing to justify the semi-depressed, sensitive mood I was in.  As a matter of fact, my unshakeable raincloud is the only thing that made it a bad day.  It painted neutral or inconsequential events into sepia-toned bummers.  Many good things happened today.  I got to watch a silly video, my kids started painting ceiling tiles, my department head treated me to a pedicure, I got to sit poolside with some family members and got a free dinner with my good friends in the worship department at Pueblos.  That ought to be a good day.

Normally when this happens, I try to probe my own brain and emotions to find a root cause.  I look for clues in my own psyche, like things that I catch myself constantly thinking about or moments I keep replaying in my head.  I have a similar process for when I'm mad at somebody - if I find myself continually arguing with this person in my brain and trying to find different points with which to defend my opinion, it usually means that there is something about me (usually that I was wrong) or about the situation (usually that the other person highlighted something about me that needs improvement) that I am unwilling to admit to myself and I just need to admit it and move on.  My mom always taught me to pick my battles and it's turned out to be fabulous advice because really and truly, there are lots of battles that are really not worth fighting and although I am not one to fight with people very much, this little mental process helps me stop fighting with my ownself as well. 

With sad days, it's a little tricky, because sometimes things pile up on you and create or inflame sensitive spots in your emotions that you don't realize are getting sensitive until you find yourself ready to punch somebody because they told you your fly was down.  It is much more rare for me to think of a specific moment in the day that caused me to be sad - instead, I find a collage of moments, physical states and environmental influences that all contribute to a down day.  In reflecting, I think lots of different things all conspired to start today on a wrong foot.  I didn't sleep well last night because I was beset by horrible pain for about an hour, I felt uncomfortable in the clothing I picked out but didn't have time to pick out different clothes, some of my students and coworkers were in a funk as well, and at two different times I had very valid, gracefully articulated advice given to me that, because I am a sensitive egotist, I took as being told that all my decisions are invalid and stupid.  With one of these people, I did not even bother to conceal my pique in my facial expression, though I did weakly try to excuse it as being "tired" (Sorry, Jenna!  You were right and I was wrong and it made me grouchy!)

At this point in writing this post, I feel my mood improving a little, which usually means I found the problem.  It disappoints me a little how often it's the same problem - feeling like I'm being criticized when someone was actually just expressing a difference of opinion, or being validly but kindly criticized and feeling like OMG NOTHING I DO IS RIGHT EVAAAAAAR!  It has been my goal this year to teach myself that a difference of opinion doesn't automatically mean I am wrong and stupid, and that valid criticism of my mistakes doesn't make me a failure because everyone makes mistakes.  It seems so basic and uncomplicated when I type it out, and yet my psyche reacts to the phrase "you should" the way my body reacts to an allergen.

But hey, a couple of years ago, this wouldn't just have made for a sad day, it would have made for a sad week, at the end of which I *still* wouldn't be totally clear on why I was so sad.  Progress!