It never happened

A few days ago, as soon as I drafted by poem on the FMEA method, I sent it to Marie and asked for her feedback to make it better. A few days later she sent me a reply that she hadn't done anything with my poem yet, but that a book she was reading had inspired her to write one of her own.

====================

“The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened.” Robert Macfarlane, Underland.
 
it never happened
that i wed you as a girl
that we ran lightly
among trees hung with yellow fruit
 
it never happened
that i threw myself away
into the dark
 
it never happened
that we never
met again
 
we are here, and all that
never happened

Training in the FMEA method

I'm sitting here in a training class in Sticksville on the FMEA methodology, and the instructor just finished introducing a typology of failures. Briefly, any kind of tool, product, or service is defined by having a certain kind of function. And once you know what the function is, then a "failure" is a deviation from the desired function. And there are five possible kinds of deviation:

• No function at all ("total failure")
• Quantitative deviation (it does the right thing but in the wrong amount, too little or too much)
• Time deviation (it does the right thing but too early, or too late, or it misfires somehow)
• There is an unintended or undesirable function
• There are impermissible side effects (noise, heat, radiation)

So far, so good. But it got me thinking: do these same types apply to human failures as well? I think they do ... and here is my first pass at thinking through how that could work.

“How many kinds of failure are there, now?”

The trainer asked us, reading from the screen.
And answered, “Five — it all depends on how
“The non-fulfillment of the function’s seen.”

“There’s total failure: nothing’s done at all.
“Then quantitative: little or too much;
“Early or late; wrong functions great or small;
“Or side-effects, like noise and heat and such.”

I harbor all of these deep in my heart:
The sluggard who just dreams, I know him well;
The one who does it backwards, end to start,
Who’s thoughtless, and whose voice clangs like a bell.

For every type of failure we define
Is surely one that I can claim as mine.

    

Visiting Debbie, 4 ... and another movie

After my last visit to see Debbie (see here and here) she commented several times how much she had enjoyed my visit, and that I was welcome to come back. So I took that as a hint. This week I am back in Sticksville for another training class, so I flew in on Saturday and spent the weekend with Debbie instead.

As usual, it was a quiet weekend … last time I called it a "Sabbath" and that's not wrong. We visited with her daughter and son-in-law and their son (now about one-and-a-half years old). We meditated together. We went to church on Sunday. It's too cold to work in the garden and anyway she says the season is over: they've already gotten the first frost. We cooked. And (as always) we didn't fuck. We didn't even kiss, because Debbie had a cold and didn't want to give it to me.

And then we watched a movie on Netflix, one she called "one of the sweetest movies she has seen lately": "Our Souls at Night" with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. (See this article here for one review.) She's right. It is a sweet movie -- about a man and a woman around the age of 80, who are neighbors and who finally discover each other at a deeper level after living across the street for 40 years. And I'm left wondering … is she trying to say something?

You remember that during my last visit we read aloud Walt Whitman poems to each other. This time we watch Robert Redford and Jane Fonda slowly falling for each other on-screen. But she made no move to cuddle with me on the sofa as we watched, and she was careful to put me in the same guest bedroom where I have always slept. So … is there a deeper meaning to these things? Or maybe not? It's hard for me to say.

And perhaps I don't need to know. But it is always pleasant to visit with her, and she always seems to feel the same way. It's all good.
  

Movies about broken people

You know, it's interesting .... Normally I go out of my way to communicate with Wife as little as possible; but after the last two movies I've seen I have shot her a quick note each time suggesting she go see them: I mean "Where Did You Go, Bernadette?" and now "Judy". So I started mulling why that might be?

 

The first thing is that in both movies there is something about the main character that reminds me of Wife.

• With Bernadette it is her problematic social skills (and total lack of interest in improving them), and her general contempt for the people around her. Nonetheless Bernadette gets something kind of like a happy ending, so in a way I suppose my subtext to Wife was, "Get up and go DO something and you'll be happier than you are just sitting around!"
• With Judy Garland it is her narcissism, her magical thinking, her roller-coaster emotions, and her total inability to see herself from the outside. (Though the boys tell me that Wife has gotten better about the roller-coaster emotions now that she has been ordered to give up drinking for good.) Of course in real life Judy Garland didn't get a happy ending, but I also know that Wife is a big fan of hers.

So in a sense both movies are about broken people, and I wonder if that is what I have a taste for ... or at any rate an interest in. Of course it is also true that in both cases the main characters are not simply broken: Bernadette and Judy each has some kind of greatness in her past and somehow in her reach if only she can figure out how to stretch out her hand towards it. And for me that makes the stories more interesting and more poignant. Hell, there was a long time when I tried to find some way to tell myself that kind of story about Wife, as a way to reconcile myself to the way that she seemed to be caving in before my very eyes. Ultimately of course I realized that was the wrong story template in a number of ways, and also that the features which I was seeing ever more clearly had in truth been there all along. But clearly that hasn't diminished my interest in brokenness ....

    

Unpopular movie opinions

Back in August I ran across this xkcd cartoon and sent it to a few of my friends: https://xkcd.com/2184/.

What I added by way of commentary was this:

He’s right … it’s harder than it looks.

Especially because even if you can think of such a movie, you might not want to admit that you like it. (smile) 

And hey – even “Pacific Rim” got a 72% freshness score from the critics (!!) and a 77% score from the audience. “Transformers” (2007) got 58% from the critics and 85% from the audience. So it’s not like there are a lot of popular movies that routinely get BELOW 50%.

 

So does that mean it's impossible? No. Just that it's really hard to admit to your friends that you like such a movie. I can name one right away, because this is an anonymous blog: a movie that scored 29% from the critics, and 56% from the audience. For what it's worth, though, one of the few critics who liked it -- maybe the only one, now that I think about it -- was Roger Ebert. So there's that.

 

The movie is "Threesome" (1994) with Lara Flynn Boyle, Josh Charles, and Stephen Baldwin, and I really like it. Why?

 

OK, the setup is preposterous: it's a college dorm where a girl named Alex is assigned to a dorm room with two guys because some administrator assumed that "Alex" must be male. OK, fine, it could have been anything else. That's just what threw the three of them together.

 

But then they become friends, ... with a complicated set of attractions among each other. (One of the guys is attracted to Alex, who is attracted to the other guy, who is gay and attracted to the first guy. As I said, complicated.) And I think what I like about it is that I find them believable. They find themselves in a confusing situation, and they talk a lot more than they fuck -- but that's college, isn't it? A time when everyone wants to be fucking like bunnies, but all these complicated thoughts keep getting in the way and so they have to have long, earnest conversations about it all. Later in life this becomes simpler, but in college we are all still feeling our way. Err ... so to speak.

 

And the movie carries the story far enough along that we also see them drift apart, leaving a nostalgia not only for what was, but for what might have been and wasn't. That, too, feels really true for me.

 

Yes, at one point they do finally all end up in bed together. And whenever I watch the movie I always think, "Finally!" But it's really not the focus of the story, and it all happens towards the very end. There's other sex that happens in-between scenes, but we don't see that at all. As in Greek tragedy, it's all reported by a herald who runs in from offstage. (Well, not literally but you know what I mean.) And that's because, while they are all thinking about sex all the time, actual real-life sex is not the center of the friendship. Most of the story lives in that in-between state, where each of the three is thinking, "I think I know what I want, but do you know what you want? And is it the same thing?" College students.

 

As I say, I really like the movie. Roger Ebert liked it too, but apparently almost nobody else does. An unpopular opinion.

 

Not that I'll ever admit it in real life.