Lost

Been too busy to watch and to be honest I’m losing some steam. I don’t know why. It could be that I know that I have 30 more episodes to catch up on all the questions. It could be that Sun is being a bit of a hard-ass right now with Jin and I don’t like that. It could be that I wish Jack/Sawyer/Kate would just get it over with. I will say that the flashbacks are still compelling. For the most part I haven’t reached the point of saying, “I don’t care about that! What happens now?” We’ll see…

Career: “What’s Your Message?”

I came across a couple of thoughtful articles by Steve Pavlina, a blogger with a brain and a soul. Sometimes he’s a little too California for me and his cheerful optimism grates my frosty, dark, Northern composure, but then if I just shut up and read his articles I find that he has a lot of good things to say and consider.

Case in point: our use of the word “career”, how overdetermined its usage is, and how defining it for ourselves usually leads to some soulessness. He says that we tend to be instructed on what our careers should be by a bottoms-up method in which we look at our physical/mental strengths and match those up to whatever set of strengths reside in an occupation. The top-down method employs the “What turns you on? What’s your core passion?” roster of questions to find another set of profiles that reside in some occupation. What I love about Pavlina is that he is quick about avoiding false dichotomies: he says that both methods have their strengths and weaknesses so he marries them in an 80/20 top-down/bottoms-up split.

I strongly sympathized with his assessment of his wife’s difficulties as a secretary. Pavlina’s wife, Erin, could type 90+ words / min, and that skill was overplayed in career considerations. “Oh, you can type fast? Why don’t you be a secretary?” Being a secretary never addressed her passion to be and  exhibit being compassionate. Likewise, I have a great deal of technical skill but working in an environment where emotions are taboo (engineers) is what left me cold at Ford. It was a stultifying experience, to put it mildly.

In his other article, he talks about how often we look only at our career’s label and its functional responsibilities and not recognize how poor and flat that view is. That view doesn’t really consider the person do the work and their multi-faceted motivations for doing a job. “Oh, you’re an attorney. You must like doing legal paperwork.” If your motivation and passion in being an attorney is to negotiate peacefully that passion is completely lost in the appellation, “attorney”. Pavlina suggests reframing the label, maybe just for yourself to something relevant to your motivations and passions, in the case above, “Peacebringer.” Yeah, I know, it sounds a little fruity to me too. But I too see and feel so many of us who get completely depressed talking about their careers or jobs. We seem to wait for some sort of put-down since we are obliged to hate our job. It is the appropriate and fashionable thing to do. God forbid that we might more plainly state what joy we do derive from our work.

So, I’ve been thinking about what are my real passion is. As Avenue Q, might ask, What is my Purpose? I think it’s to be a counselor. What form that takes, I have no idea, but I need to try harder to express that passion to counsel and advise. I like doing it. I like helping people sort out their feelings about whatever it is. Now, I just need to be mindful of that drive and to build outlets to express it.

Now that I’ve found Swan Station and the Tailies, I find myself even more frustrated by how far I am behind from all my friends. There’s so much I want to ask but I know they’re going to be all, “Oh, yeah… Just keep watching!” I’m losing my humor and really just want to be CAUGHT UP! I pretty much love everyone except Locke. I’m not believing that his faith in the Island is concordant with what he’s seen. I guess I would expect a touch more doubt. I was touched when Sharon died. I will miss her. Mister Eko is more stereotypically written than I usually would expect in a Lost character. Clare is being a twit with Charlie.

Musings

• The Numbers: I’ve been thinking about them a lot. 23 survivors in the tail section 43 survivors in the fuselage (42+1).
• Is it just me or should it be more rare for Ana Lucia and Jack to both work for their parents? As BF said, “Everybody has Father issues!” Amen.
• Is Sun going to be a Dominatrix? Is there going to be a three-way or what?

Getting a little tired of this season’s same scene/different perspective technique. I think they’re finally pulling out of that and moving on to the Tailers. I’m so glad they’re fleshing out the tragedies of Hurley’s big win and I’m glad he got to play Santa Claus with the food. Locke’s flashbacks with Helen and his father were so poignant. I was crushed when Sun buried the bottle of messages. It’s too bad the writers couldn’t have left the question open longer about what happened to the Rafters, but then there would have been a ton of flashbacks and I’d be even more annoyed.

Questions

• I’m intrigued with how Anna Lucia became a hard ass.
• I’m wondering if Locke’s lesson to be learned from the Island is that you will need to love others and rely on others in order to fulfill your purpose.
• My friend S thinks Rose’s husband is a dick. I’m intrigued to see if how he plays out.

So, I made it past the finale and chortled with the cliffhangers that would have left me furious for the months after if I had followed the series live. Glad to see Jin made it out of the drink, was worried there for a tic or two. I like that the writers are playing with 108 and other Asian cultural artifacts like the symbolism of the Book of Changes, Tao Te Ching.

Musings

• Did the writers use Tao Te Ching hexagrams in the classical way (indicating the eight cardinal directions) for the Dharma project or do those hexagrams reveal something else? (I want to look elsewhere online but I’m not gonna!)
• I’m guessing that Desmond had no intention of coming to the Island during his race around the world and despite his having quite the regular workout routine has just encamped himself in the Dharma bunker.
• It appears that the “illness” is real and not a figment of Danielle’s murderous mania, but Desmond seems a little crackers too.
• The Others have a thing for kids (not pedophilic, I’m sure) and it could be because they have newer DNA, stem cells, whatever.
• I wonder why the Dharma project initiators (who used Apple II’s apparently and data tape banks) would require someone to “reset the clock” every 108 min?/hr? Now that I think on it, could it be that for whatever the Dharma project was for the participants needed to be inoculated regularly? But then why did Desmond have Locke do the number key entry to reset the clock?

Hmm…

Emotions

I love Sun & Jin! I was so glad to see them make up at the end of Exodus, p1 (They remind me of the ups-and-downs that BF and I have dealt with and how cultural differences can be both exotic/attractive and isolating). I was glad that Shannon stopped being a bitch for five seconds and took Vincent. I was teary when Vincent tried to swim out after Walter. I’m glad that Jack heard about his dad from Sawyer. I’m glad that the writers wanted to show that Sawyer is more wounded and angry and is ultimately trying for redemption. And I’m really glad that Ar[n]dst got his just desserts. I giggle at the thought of how the writers might have been exorcising their demons of embittered high school teachers. Rose (the black wife — sorry, PC police, that’s all the writers have really given me to work with) should be providing some wisdom to Clare, so I’m a little surprised that the writers haven’t let the Wise Woman of the Island, a.k.a. Rose, do that.

Random musings

• I (as the jury) am still out on Kate and I don’t know if it’s casting or the monstrously complex background that’s being gestured to. I keep waiting on how they’ll reconcile a truly frightened Kate in Episode 1 (who needs the “Just let the fear in for 5 seconds…” speech from Jack) with the total hard-ass she can be. Was that first portrayal just an act? I guess I was fooled then.
• And what the hell is Kate thinking of romancing/being nice alternately toward both Jack and Sawyer?
• I’m waiting to see where Sun got all of her medicinal knowledge.
• I’m now waiting to see what’s become of Alex, Danielle’s girl.
• My mind (the Eternal Mathematician’s) is still playing with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42… Is it a mathematical series? Which one? Fibonacci, no…

That’s all for now. Just wanted to write that down…

I did it! I updated WordPress without wanting to kill myself. The thing that I learned though is FatCow (my hosting site) won’t let me directly upload gzip files directly to my site and it appears that their ZIP utility doesn’t seem to decompress the package into the WordPress directory. No biggie, 7 minutes w/FireFTP from a decompressed package on my desktop and… Voila! New, more stable WordPress (fingers crossed). And in playing with WordPress, I thought I’d change up the design to something a little more regal, Royale 1.0. Très Chic!

Ugly Betty

Anyhow, while charting out my day with FreeMind, a mind-mapping tool, that geeks who worship Getting Things Done play with, I watched Ugly Betty and I need to tell everyone, “WATCH THE SHOW! It will make you smile, laugh, cry and somehow make your day a little brighter!” Tanner Stransky – EW.com said it very well, I love Marc and Amanda’s vile antics and cuts, but I admire that the writers appear not to be throwing away an opportunity to examine more critically the hysterical obsession gay men have with their bodies and their image. It will be awesome to see what they do with budding romance between a paunchy photographer like Cliff and an extremely superficial fashion assistant like Marc. I also want to shout props to the writers for being so deft at balancing all the characters. I just keep thinking, “Wow, what a great crew!”

Lost

So, BF & I have a new obsession. It was the sort of thing where I had not returned movies to Blockbuster.com in forever, finally did, needed to do ironing and then, “So, what’s with Lost?”, the ever-skeptical BF asks. “Um, friends liked it, recommended it and I have work to do…” And he didn’t leave and now we keep watching and now we have something like 60-some-odd episodes to go! Well, I’ll have more to say, but I’m going to wait to finish with Season 1 to critique.