Fred Kontur - Diary

Monday, December 1, 2008

2008-12-02T04:12:02Z

Two Fridays ago, I had plans to go to the Air Force Academy hockey game with my friend Evelyn, from the physics department, and her brother-in-law. We figured we could buy tickets when we got there, but we were very very wrong. Apparently, they were giving away free pizza and hot dogs at the game. Also it was mullet night. Which meant that they were giving out mullets, or maybe you got extra perks and benefits if you had a mullet... I don't know, but what I do know is that we didn't get into the game. So, instead, we decided to go to the movies. But, when we got to the theater, the only thing that was playing that we wouldn't have to wait an hour or more for was Madagascar 2. So we said what the heck and bought tickets for Madagascar 2. It was a lot of 6- through 10-year-olds, a lot of parents of 6- through 10-year-olds, and us, wearing loads of Air Force Hockey paraphernalia, in the movie theater. After the movie, I kept on trying to joke that I couldn't follow the movie at all, because I never saw Madagascar 1. I stole the joke from Seinfeld. George said he hated Home Alone 2 because he never saw Home Alone 1, so he didn't know what was going on. They chuckled the first few times I told the joke, but after I said for about the sixth time, I think they were getting annoyed. Obviously they don't have my "unique" sense of humor. I thought that joke was gold. Gold, baby, gold!

Sunday, November 30, 2008

2008-12-01T00:11:42Z

I wanted to go hiking today, but we had a snowstorm blow through. It only dropped about 4-6 inches, but I hate driving in the snow, and hiking through the snow can sometimes be miserable, so I decided to hole up in my apartment instead. I have a collection of five Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies that I've never gotten around to watching, so I decided to give those a try. The first one I watched is their most famous, Swing Time. The story is silly enough. Fred's character, "Lucky" Garnett, is an up-on-his luck gambler (hence his nickname) and dancer who is trying to get married to his hometown sweetheart. Unfortunately, her dad thinks Lucky will never make anything of himself. So, Lucky moves to New York to make his fortune. There, he meets Ginger's character, Penny Carroll. Penny and Lucky form a dance team. Inevitably, they fall in love, but Lucky can't pursue the romance because he is betrothed to someone else.

As you might imagine, things work out for Fred and Ginger. Like I said, the story is fairly silly. The characters, too, are pretty thin, and could just as easily have been called "Fred" and "Ginger" with no loss of movie illusion. Nevertheless, the Lucky gambler character is an extension of the suave Astaire persona which lets you know that no matter how bad things look, don't worry, they'll take a turn for the good soon enough. David Thompson, in his New Biographical Dictionary Film, says that, "Astaire is utterly tranquil, hence the inane playboy figures he embodies, men who exist only to walk sweetly across lounges, to preserve rigorous trouser creases and that high, carefree tone of voice."

The payoff of the movie is the dance and the songs. Goodness, the songs. Two of my all-time favorite songs are in Swing Time-- "Just the Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance". "A Fine Romance" is sung against an amazing snowscape, shown in the image at the top of this entry. I would like to hear the story behind choosing that backdrop. I'm almost positive that it is a studio set, rather than an actual location. I'm guessing that it was up for another movie, and they just used it for that one scene in Swing Time. I think that's the case because there's no special reason for the scene to take place in a winter forest. Probably, the makers of the movie noticed that all of the scenes take place in hotel rooms and night clubs, and they decided they needed an outdoor scene for a change of pace. As integral as the dance scenes are to the success of the movie, amazingly the first dance doesn't happen until almost a half-hour into the movie, when Fred, masquerading as a novice dancer, asks for a dance lesson from Ginger, whose character is a dance instructor. The climax of the movie is a 6-minute song-and-dance performance, "Never Gonna Dance". Fred and Ginger's characters are each about to marry other people, despite the fact that they love each other. Like almost all of Astaire's dances, it's filmed in a single take (there are a few cuts during the initial singing, but none after the dancing begins). In order to keep filming when the dancers went up steps, the camera was mounted on a crane. I have two favorite parts of this dance. The first is when Ginger initially breaks away from Fred after the first bit of dancing. Fred runs and grabs her. His head and hand shake before they dance again. It's an interesting thing to do, even a little bit awkward. It embodies the desperation of a lover who is trying to anything, anything at all, to keep the person he loves from getting away. My other favorite part is right before the end, when Fred spins Ginger three different times. The spins are amazing and energetic. It makes you excited to see them, especially after the somberness of the beginning of the dance. Below is a YouTube of the "Never Gonna Dance" number. I highly suggest watching the video on full screen. I've seen it about 5 times now, and it still takes my breath away, every time I see the dance.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

2008-11-30T03:00:16Z

Today, I went to see the movie Happy-Go-Lucky (reviews here and here). It's a movie directed by Mike Leigh, who is famous for gathering actors together to start work on his movies without any script whatsoever. All he has is an idea about what the story will be. The actors go through weeks of improvisations with no cameras rolling until their characters are fleshed out and a story is developed. Leigh's body of work, the movies that come out of these collaborations, are known for being bleak, depressing stories of everyday Londoners scraping by in their desperate lives. Indeed, Leigh's most famous movie, Naked, is a soul-killingly downer of a tale. Even though a majority of Leigh's movies are bleak enough, it's a bit unfair to say that that's all he does. He made a movie in 2000 about Gilbert and Sullivan, called Topsy-Turvy, that was happy and exuberant. And his last movie, Vera Drake, unseen by me, was not especially dark. Nevertheless, Leigh seems to be known as a maker of depressing movies, and his newest work, the aptly named happy movie Happy-Go-Luckly, is being called a huge departure from his usual style.

A kindergarten teacher named Poppy is the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky. In real life, she may be insufferable. She is one of those people who is never even a little bit down, whose bubbly setting is stuck on max. If she's not joking, giggling, or bouncing, then she's not awake. I said that in real life, she would be insufferable, but it's hard to believe that in a 2-hour movie in which her character is on the screen for nearly every second, her shtick isn't excruciating. But it isn't. She grows on you. And this is a testament to the actress who plays Poppy, Sally Hawkins, who is expected to be nominated for an Oscar for her work in the movie. Happy-Go-Lucky starts off as a light-hearted few-days-in-the-life story of the eternally silly Poppy. It actually could have probably pulled that off for the whole duration. The counterpoint to Poppy's character is Scott, the tightly-wound driving teacher whom Poppy hires after her bike is stolen. Their back-and-forth is delightfully Abbott-and-Costello-like (or Dwight-and-Jim-like, or Cox-and-J.D.-like, pick your favorite comic duo). Poppy knows how to push Scott's buttons, and despite her seemingly kind nature, she can't help doing it. This interaction is the life of the movie most of the way through. After about the halfway point, several "serious" subjects are thrown into the mix, and, indeed, we see an interesting and deeper side to Poppy's character when she has to deal with a student who is coping with a troubled home life. But, ultimately, this is not a serious movie. When it starts to veer too far towards the darkly serious territory, it rings false. I don't think it is impossible that people like Poppy exist, but in the real world, there is a danger to being so innocently optimistic and cheerful. At times, the movie broaches this, but then it backs off. It either had to go all the way into the dark consequences that linger just on the other side of cheerfulness, or pretend that no such things exist, but going halfway was the worst of all choices. These missteps are small parts of the movie (although one of those small parts is right at the end), so it's little more than a distraction.

So trust me, though unceasingly bubbly, happy people may be grating in real life, not so in this movie. So you should give it a try. And you can have fun annoying your friends when you're out driving by repeating "enraha, enraha, ENRAHA!!!!" over and over again. Watch the movie, and you'll get it.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

2008-11-26T03:35:58Z

I've been invited to spend Thanksgiving with a friend in the physics department and the friend's family. Which is a wonderful, amazing, very kind thing to offer. The thing is, the rule is, you can't just show up at someone's house for Thanksgiving with nothing. The other thing is, I basically know how to cook three things: (1) Hamburger Helper, (2) scrambled eggs, and (3) sweet potato casserole. Because the Pilgrims were primitive and didn't have supermarkets or chickens, apparently Hamburger Helper and scrambled eggs aren't considered proper Thanksgiving food. I could make a sweet potato casserole to bring to the dinner. But I've found out the hard way that there are always about 15307513074 sweet potato dishes brought to any given Thanksgiving dinner. So I want to bring something a little different. To that end, I googled "simple Thanksgiving recipes"... What I've found is, if you google any random recipes, they always involve stuff like "mincing" and "broiling" and "sauteeing". I'm sorry, but I need a recipe that says "cut this stuff up into little pieces" and "put this stuff in a pan and put the pan on a burner" or "turn your oven onto 400 and turn that dial to bake, then put your stuff in the oven". As soon as you tell me to "cube" or "tenderize" or "poach" or "reduce" something, I'm lost. Fortunately, I found a recipe for Honey Roasted Squash Rings that I think I can handle. Hopefully it'll turn out well. I'm going to buy all the ingredients and get it started tomorrow night. Squash is something like a pumpkin right? Or a zucchini? Or a cucumber? Do they label that stuff in grocery stores?

I'm already regretting saying yes to going to Thanksgiving dinner. I've mentioned before how I'm a loner. What that means is that the prospect of spending a full day meeting with and socializing with people whom I don't know and whom I've never met before is dreadful. I hate small talk. I hate talking about work or sports or where I'm from. I know, right now as I'm writing this, the rational part of my brain is telling me that it won't be terrible, and, in fact, it will almost definitely be a fun and entertaining and generally pleasant experience. But I'm dreading it. I honestly want nothing more than to stay home all day on Thanksgiving and watch House reruns and read and surf the Internet. But I live in a society, and part of living in a society is being social. So I'll be cooking my squash or cucumber or zucchini or whatever rings tomorrow night, and I'll meet new people on Thursday and that will be that, and probably when it's all said and done I'll have a good time. And then if I'm lucky, maybe I'll get home in time to watch some House reruns.

Saturday, October 25, 2007

2008-10-26T03:13:47Z

Pauline Kael is my favorite writer.

If I'm ever asked who my favorite writer is, which I never am, but if I ever were, I might give any number of random answers. Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson would be possibilities. At one time, I might have picked Jack Kerouac. I fell so in love with Catcher in the Rye for a while that I might have picked J. D. Salinger on the strength of that one book. I've read more of John Updike than just about any other author, but I can't say have a great affection for his works.

But when I have the time to stare at my bookshelf and make a mental tally of the books I've read and loved, the books I've read and hated, the books I've read and forgotten about, I have to admit that Pauline Kael is the one writer whose writing I would keep coming back to because she has such a gift for words - for being intelligent and engaging and persuasive and maddingly disruptive to your sense of what you thought was true. She was a film critic who made her name in the late 60s into the 70s working for The New Yorker. I first found out about her through reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews, which often referenced Kael. I fell in love with her work when I read the piece Replying to Listeners, which originated as a radio broadcast on KPFA. It begins thusly:

I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don’t want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, “Miss Kael, I assume you aren’t married—one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more “mature,” they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.

I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notions that the woman is semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs; now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis—which any man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the shadows.

The end of the piece is something that inspired me to take up, very briefly, a career as a movie critic. And by career, I mean, a 10-minute weekly radio spot on the Rice University student radio station, KTRU, that lasted for one semester. But let's call it a career. Here's what inspired me, the end of Kael's article:

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Monday, September 1, 2008

2008-09-02T03:56:40Z

I've finally gotten around to posting my Ecuador pictures. You can find them here. I had big plans to sort them by location and activity, but then I decided that my time was better spent watching Scrubs reruns... So when you have to scroll through close to 800 unsorted pictures, blame Zach Braff and gang, not me. I've had a few people ask me about them, so I hope you enjoy them. I'm definitely going back to South America next year. My one disappointment this year was that my Spanish language skills had deteriorated since last year, so I didn't really interact with the locals as much as I did two summers ago in Peru. So my goal for this year is to learn, really learn, Spanish before I take my trip next summer. I've been cutting back on my work hours, just so I don't go insane, and in my free time I've been doing half-hour Spanish lessons ever day on my computer. So hopefully I'll keep up with that and achieve Spanish-speaking-awesomeness by June.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

2008-09-01T03:29:16Z

Let me return from my long blog absence to extol the virtues of melancholy. Or more specifically, let me recommend this link (via Andrew Sullivan) to someone else extolling the virtues of melancholy. I don't have much to add to it except that I think being dishonest and inauthentic does more damage to people than most anybody realizes. Pretending to be happy when you're sad, pretending to be ok when you're not, is a denial of who you are as a person. There are sometimes when self-restraint is called for - there's a quote I Iove from Catcher in the Rye, "I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though." - but when you start lying to yourself, when you start telling yourself that you're happy when you're not, that's when you are really hurting yourself. It's ok to be sad and down and depressed, but, in our society, it can really feel like it's not ok.

On a different note, the NFL season is about to start, which means another season of Loser Bowl. Loser Bowl is a league run by my sister-in-law, Leanne, in which you have to pick one losing football team every week of the football season. The catch is you can't pick the same team twice in a season. So the first few weeks are, theoretically, easy, but then you start having to pick better and better teams to be losers. I've never come close to winning the league. This year is going to be tough, I think.... the Chiefs seem pretty crummy, but they're not completely crummy, so as soon as I pick them, they'll surprise me with an out-of-the-blue win and ruin my Loser Bowl season. The Dolphins should stink, but they look like they're getting better. The Raiders are saying that they want to run the ball about 600 times this year, which is, um actually, a pretty good idea. But the thing is, for the run-heavy offense to work, you need to have a defense that, how should I put this diplomatically, lacks suckiness. Which the Raiders defense traditionally does not lack. So we'll see. Speaking of defenses that lack suckiness, it looks like Houston is willing to start anyone and everyone at cornerback, so be expecting a call. And the new quarterback in Arizona is Kurt Warner, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the old quarterback in Arizona, Kurt Warner, who also bears an uncanny resemblance to your grandfather. Because he's so old. It's a joke, laugh! Ok, well, I'm calling it a night.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

2008-05-28T09:04:36Z

Now that Barack Obama has more or less sewn up the Democratic nomination for President, you are going to start to hear a slew of stories about the next big dramatic event in the Presidential race - selection of the Vice Presidential candidates. Already, you might have caught news stories about John McCain inviting potential VP candidates to his house for a Memorial Day barbeque. As the last few Democratic primaries play out, you'll hear more and more stories speculating on whether Obama will offer the VP slot to Hillary Clinton as part of a deal to get her to leave the race. Regardless of what you hear, you should keep in mind that it doesn't matter. As this post at The Plank says: "[T]he evidence indicates that running-mate selections usually have zero impact on election outcomes, even in the running mate's home state." So feel free to ignore all the news stories that breathlessly speculate on all the possibilities, typically illustrating their points with bar graphs and poll data and quotes from inside each campaign.

Speaking about Vice Presidential candidate speculation, I read a story about Jim Webb, one of the leading Democratic VP possibilities, that made me not just enormously disappointed but also repulsed by someone whom I had admired until quite recently. One of the major knocks against Webb as a VP candidate is that he has made questionable comments about women in the past. I didn't quite realize the extent of his questionable comments until I read about the specifics of them in this post on Matthew Yglesias's blog, by guest poster Kathy G. In a 1979 article arguing that women don't belong in the military, Webb declared that no senior female in a leadership position at the Naval Academy won her rank by merit, thereby impugning the accomplishments of every female midshipman and throwing fuel on the smoldering resentments of a vocal minority of disgruntled midshipmen. This article had a very real effect on women at the Academy. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 Naval Academy graduate, said, "This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us." More recently, Webb has tried to minimize the sexual abuse of women by Navy and Marine officers in the Tailhook scandal, placing the blame on "social engineers" who were insistent on ever-increasing sexual mixing in the military and on feminists who seized upon the Tailhook scandal to attack military culture.

I hope that, for everyone reading this, I'm merely stating the obvious when I say that the time has long since passed when it was questionable whether women should be in the military or whether women should be officers in the military or whether women should have equal status to men in the military. It's amazing to me that people still argue, quite vociferously, that that's not the case. I have a feeling that 25 years from now, long after openly gay people will have been allowed in the military, there will be similar situations where hardline military folks, typically from traditional military families, will make ludicrous arguments about how much better the military was when the gays weren't messing everything up. Just like 35 years ago, I'm sure there were people arguing about how much better things were when blacks and whites were separated in the military. Like I said, it's discouraging that these things have to be fights. I don't claim to be more enlightened that anybody else, but when you're doing dangerous, difficult, stressful work, then it seems to be that anybody who can get the job done should be welcomed and accepted whether they are a person of color or whether they have boobs or whether they share their bed with a person of the same sex.

Monday, May 26, 2008

2008-05-26T15:59:36Z

Below is Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah". Andrew Sullivan posted a number of different versions of the song on his site last week, and at the end of the week he linked to an essay that discussed the circuitous path this song took before it became embedded in our popular culture. Basically, the Jeff Buckley version below is a cover of a John Cale version of the song that itself was a cover of a Leonard Cohen's rendition of the song at a 1988 concert. Leonard Cohen's original version of the song, done in the 60s, was much different and little noticed. It was Buckley's version that started to achieve popularity and that was the basis for most of the later covers. The song was featured in The O.C. and Scrubs and Shrek, and now is a recognizable pop culture touchstone. The "sad montage" song is what the essay describes it as. Anyway, Memorial Day is as fitting a time for a sad montage as any, so enjoy "Hallelujah".

Sunday, May 25, 2008

2008-05-25T23:25:25Z

Some of my students found out about this blog, and since then the traffic to the site has gone up 5-10 fold. The biggest hits seem to be the pictures on the front page... I guess it's surprising for my students to see their physics teacher hanging out with friends drinking beers or dressed up like a punk rocker for Halloween. Anyway, I've neglected this blog for a while because I've been busy but, maybe even more than that, I haven't felt like writing anything. We've had a pretty exciting Democratic nomination campaign, and while I was and am a Barack Obama supporter, I really didn't have opinions much different than you could have read regularly, and more eloquently spoken, on sites like Talking Points Memo or The Plank. I've been going through the Jane Austen canon at the suggestion of one of my students, but I don't know that I have much to say about them. I've read Jane Eyre, which, since it was written by Charlotte Brontë, does not fit well into the Jane Austen oeuvre, but is very Jane Austen-like. I also read Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, both bona-fide Jane Austen books, and pretty soon I'm going to start on Emma. They're all good books, but I don't have much to say about them. What I have been planning on writing about, since I found out my students have been reading this site, is why I got into science and what I think is great about science.... And maybe I'll get to that sooner or later, but my own personal journey into science isn't really a conversion tale so much as a gradual drift dictated more by inertia than passion. Which is for the best, I think. Passions go out as quickly as they are inflamed. But finding something you're good at and sticking to it is not something that's easy to come by, and it's worked out well for me. Anyway, anything I wrote about science could not come close to Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, so any students who want to know why I or anyone else would want to go into science, or why the Academy insists on all students knowing all sciences, would do well to read that book. Now that I've spent 10 or more sentences talking about what I'm not going to write about, it's probably about time to talk about what I am going to write about, or even better, maybe I should write about what I am going to write about. Well, what I'm going to write about is what I'm doing this weekend. A few weeks ago, one of my students was telling me how she went and played basketball. Actually, it was the same student who recommended Jane Austen. And it got me to thinking about when I was growing up, and I stunk at basketball. Actually, I didn't stink at basketball so much as I never really played, so whenever I did try to play, I had no idea what I was doing. But one summer I decided I would get good at basketball, so every day I would go to 2nd Street Park and shoot layups and shoot jump shots and shoot foul shots. I'd run back and forth up and down the court and dodge pretend defenders, twisting at the last moment and ending up on the wrong side of the hoop and making a backwards layup. I'd pick a time to practice when nobody else was there, so that I could get good before playing with other people. Finally, after doing that for a while, I started playing pickup games with my friend Bob BeHanna and some other guys. I wasn't the best player, by far, that was Bob, but I was good enough to where I had to be captain of the team that Bob wasn't on or the game would be a blowout because having me and Bob on the same team was too uneven. On my best days, I was the best player on the court, but because I never played real basketball but learned all on my own, my fundamentals were terrible and I did things so awkwardly that I could be really bad as easily as I could be really good. Anyway, I quit playing basketball when I went to college, and the last few times I tried to place it was ridiculous. I was embarassing. So, what I'm going to do tomorrow is go out early in the morning and shoot some baskets in a park down the street from my apartment. I don't know if I'll ever get really good again, but I miss shooting baskets and pretending to dodge defenders, and it'd be a nice way to blow off steam, so I want to give it another try. I have tomorrow off because it's Memorial Day, so it's as good a time to start as any.

Monday, March 24, 2008

2008-03-25T02:56:28Z

As you can tell, I've been very busy lately. Sooner or later I'll figure out a way to deal with my crazy schedule, but right now I'm working and working and working, and when I'm not working I'm thinking about working, and when I'm sleeping I'm dreaming about working. This week is Spring Break, though, so there's a bit of a respite. I don't get Spring Break off myself, but I can work my actual work hours, 7:30 A.M. - 4:30 P.M., which is much better than the hours I have been working. With the increased free time I have this week, I went ahead and scheduled my vacation for this summer. Last summer, I went to Peru, and I loved it. This summer, I'm going to Ecuador. Here is the description of the vacation:
Explore Ecuador’s spectacular Andean interior and the Amazon lowlands. This trip includes some very special experiences, including a village homestay in the jungle and a 400-year-old hacienda. Add hot springs, colonial Cuenca and the largest handicraft market in South America and you have the trip of a lifetime.
You can see more information about it here and an even longer description here. A yellow fever vaccination is mandatory for any one going into the Ecuadorian jungle, so I'm going to try to get that this week. Also, there is a volcano right outside of Quito, Cotopaxi, which is 19388 feet in altitude and which I'm really hoping to climb at the start of my trip. I'm going to email the local guides tomorrow to see if I can do it. I'm hoping that living in high-altitude Colorado will make me acclimated enough to the altitude to do it when I first get there. I don't have time to do it at the end of my trip because the fall semester at the Air Force Academy will be starting up right when I get back. Even if I don't get to climb Cotopaxi, I'm still really excited about the trip. I've started studying Spanish this week so that I can talk to the locals when I go there.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

2008-01-20T03:12:22Z

To those of you who know me in real life and wonder where I've been, what's going on with me, why I don't write anymore, this post is for you. The people who were in my Peru travel group still exchange emails semi-regularly. And, most recently, everyone has been sending "happy holidays" wishes to everyone else. As you may have noticed, it's now January 19, so I'm way past the due date for sending out a happy holiday email, but nevertheless, that's what I just did today. I was the last one, or close to the last one, to send one out. But I did it. So for all of you who are still waiting for "Happy Thanksgiving" or even "Happy Labor Day" emails from me, this one's for you:

Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:06:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Fred Kontur
Subject: Re: happy holidays!
To: Peru Group

Hey there everyone!

I realize I'm very late to be jumping on the happy holidays train of emails (or very early to be starting off the happy valentine's day train of emails) but it's been so nice hearing from everyone that I didn't want to be left out. And I also wanted everyone to know that I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, which some of you may have thought based on how terrible I've been at replying to emails for the last few months.

I don't have any big news or revelations. I went home to Pittsburgh for the holidays and had a wonderful time with my family. I even took a detour to visit my brother in Rochester, NY and see his new house. As you all know, I started a new job teaching introductory physics at the U.S. Air Force Academy in August. This is what's made me a terrible email correspondent. Teaching is the most amazing, difficult, and time-consuming job I've had by a longshot. My student evaluations were average (compared to other physics teachers) and my students performed a little below-average in the class, so I can't say I was a rousing success right off the bat, but I absolutely love being in the classroom and towards the end of the semester, when I realized that classes were going to be over, I realized how much I was going to be missing those 19-year old kids who probably wanted to be anywhere except in physics class three days a week, but who were amazing people to get to know and work with. I don't want to tarnish my reputation as a rock-hard cold-as-ice manly man, but I choked up a little, or maybe a lot, on the last day of classes. I hate being such a crybaby anymore, but it seems like I'm always saying goodbye to people I adore.

Anyway, I'm teaching a new set of students this year, and I'm just as busy and just as much loving the job. We have a long weekend this weekend, which is how I'm finding the time to write this long email. I read some teaching handbooks over the break, so I'm hoping the students like the class a little better and do a little better on the tests. We'll see. I've already been told, unofficially, that I'm hired on for another year. I'm going to be course director for the intro. physics classes this summer. Course director, I'm told, is Latin for "work your ass off", so I'm hoping to squeeze a vacation in before the class starts in July, after which I'll have no time whatsoever.

Well, I wish you all the best and I hope you know that you're all in my thoughts often. That little two week trip really does seem to have been a life-changing experience for many of us in both large and small ways, and it makes me so excited to hear about where we've all gone from then.

Os extrano muchismo,
Fred

Sunday, December 30, 2007

2007-12-31T05:16:52Z

Yesterday, I went to see Juno, a movie about a 16-year old pregnant girl. I've been looking forward to the movie because the trailers were absolutely hilarious and intelligent and also because the movie stars Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, who used to star in the criminally-cancelled TV show Arrested Development in which, when they had a scene together, they could make reading from the phone book sound funny. It turned out, though, that Michael Cera and Jason Bateman didn't have single scene with each other in Juno. Also, in general, the movie is more quirky funny rather than rib-hurting laugh-out-loud funny. However, the movie is intelligent and engrossing and real... The characters in movies are so often phony and contrived that it's almost shocking to see a movie with people in it who might be real, like people who you might meet in your everyday life. They make mistakes and they don't always know the right things to say and their lives are alternately boring and dramatic and confusing and complex. The characters in Juno make good and bad decisions, are weird and nonsensical and infuriating, but most of the time they try their best, just like real-life people. And the best thing is that the characters you care about manage to make their way out of a pretty shitty situation and find some happiness in their lives. Even the most clichéd characters, the yuppie couple played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman, end up having unexpected depths as the movie progresses. The music in the movie is also wonderful and great. You can listen to some of the songs on the movie's soundtrack at this site. One of the songs, the Moldy Peaches' "Anyone Else But You", I am so in love with that I think I will make it my bride-and-groom dance song at my (hypothetical) wedding when I marry my (hypothetical) girlfriend who will of course also hypothetically love the Moldy Peaches' "Anyone Else But You"... Er, anyway, most of the songs in the movie are sung by Kimya Dawson, whom I hadn't heard of before this movie but whose music in this movie I adore. Below is a YouTube video of her song "Loose Lips", which is on the movie's soundtrack:

Sunday, December 15, 2007

2007-12-17T02:22:36Z

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, there's an interesting discussion about the pathology of the Nice Guy™. The Nice Guy™, to be distinguished from nice guys, is the guy who is convinced that his gal pal(s) only fall for jerks, and if only the gal pals were more intelligent, less superficial, and more perceptive, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would realize that they belong with the Nice Guy™. There are a lot of problems with this kind of thinking, but the biggest problem for me was that I can see myself agreeing with the argument... I mean, really, isn't it true that the jerks get more girls than the good guys? Isn't it true that being a pushy, arrogant, and inappropriate alpha male is a surefire way to get dates? I honestly don't know if that's true, but I could see myself nodding in agreement to those opinions. The problem with the Nice Guy™ way of thinking is that, just under its surface, it's assuming a number of pretty terrible things about women. The most obvious not-very-hidden assumption in Nice Guy™ thinking is that gal pals and women in general are too stupid or foolish to make good decisions in their own love lives. In fact, not only is gal pal not able to make a good, rational decision about whom she should date, but Nice Guy™ is a better judge than the woman herself regarding the man she should date and why she should date him. Another assumption is that Nice Guy™ is entitled to a woman's love simply by virtue of his niceness. In other words, niceness, rather than being an admirable quality in and of itself, is a toll to be paid for love. It's the same line of thinking as religious people who assert that a person can't be moral without the promise of palaces in Heaven awaiting him or her or, conversely, the punshment of fire and brimstone in Hell for breaking the rules. It's a pretty heavy indictment of one's own moral thinking to believe that the reason for morality is the promise of tangible rewards rather than the intangible reward of bringing joy and happiness to those around you. Another problem with Nice Guy™ thinking is that it leaps from the isolated case of the one girl who rejected his clumsy, stumbling advances hidden in the guise of friendship to a sweeping generalization about all women. All women, according to Nice Guy™, want to date jerks, and all women deserve the pain and heartache they get from dating those jerks. The final issue with Nice Guys™ is the hypocrisy inherent in their thinking. The women who Nice Guys™ chase are inevitably not the shy, awkward, not-conventionally-attractive women who probably most closely mirror the personality and physical qualities of Nice Guys™. The women who Nice Guys™ chase and who ultimately reject him are the pretty, popular women. Therefore, at the same time that Nice Guys™ accuse women of shallowness and superficiality in their choice of dating partners, Nice Guys™ do the same exact thing. I'm not saying that only pretty people deserve to date pretty people. But if prettiness is your main standard for whom you choose to date, you shouldn't be surprised when others apply that same standard when deciding whether or not to date you. At the end of the day, I think the most accurate thing that can be said about love and dating is that it's complicated, mysterious, and unpredictable, and that nobody is entitled to or deserving of someone else's love. The sooner men and women learn to accept that, the more likely they will be to have a happy, rewarding dating life.

Monday, November 26, 2007

2007-11-27T02:46:57Z

Via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this blog post, the first in a series, about Virginia Woolf, which tries to answer the question, "How can we learn about ‘the good life' from a woman who killed herself?" It touches on two things that I've come to believe strongly. One of which I've discussed before-- the hardly-ever-acknowledged value of being a loner. Loners are, at best, considered eccentric, and are more often thought to be mentally ill and potentially dangerous. It's almost a given that it's more desirable by a longshot to be sociable than to be someone who enjoys being by themselves. Despite this bias, some of the greatest contributions to science, art, and politics have been made by loners. And while an argument can be made that it is better for people to be sociable than to be loners, it's not obvious, to me at least, why that should be the case. The second thing that the blog post discusses is that a "good life" is not synonymous with a happy life: [T]o be a fully realized, accomplished human being never means "just being happy." Being fully human means feeling an often-painful empathy and working for a community we have not yet built. I once heard, I think in a movie that I can't remember, a statement that basically describes my view on happiness that I'll paraphrase thusly: "Happiness comes in small doses. It's a cookie before dinner, a cool breeze on a hot day, a kiss from a pretty girl. Happiness isn't a constant state; life is for the most part lacking happiness." I don't think that's depressing because I don't think I need to be happy to be fulfilled. In fact, I would say the 'good life', that is the life you would most like to live were you able to choose, is the life where ,more often than not, one chooses the difficult, perilous path rather than the easy, happy path. The things that are worth the most over the long term like character and self-confidence and wisdom are not forged during happy times, but rather during times of difficulty and uncertainty.