It’s New Year’s Eve-day and the family have no plans, so we’re all doing our own thing. I decided to doodle, picking up the 30-Day Drawing Challenge (though Lord knows how long ago I started it).
Here’s what I came up with:
- Favourite book character; can’t be a movie. Well, I don’t have one of these, so I just chose the lead character from the most recent book I finished, Now Is the Hour, by Tom Spanbauer. Chuck Palahniuk says Spanbauer is the man who taught him how to write, so I figured it was worth a try. I liked it and thought it had real life to it, though the territory (midwest US farm boy comes of age) is extremely well-trod.
- Favourite word. Enantiodromia refers to the tendency for things to find a balance. Jung used the word (as I understand it) to describe how suppressed desires will come out more even strongly in other, possibly inappropriate areas of life. (cf: homo-hating Republicans who get caught in public restrooms with male prostitutes.)
- Favourite animated character. I don’t have one now, but when I was a kid I yearned to be Mickey Mouse, and pretended with a Method-actor intensity that I was him. Now, though, I think the Disney corporation is a vile peddler of imagination-ruining nonsense. (Girls, there are only about three available princess jobs in the world, and princesses tend to become very, very unhappy. Or dead.)
- Favourite TV show. Craig and I enjoyed a show this year called “Getting On” by UK comedian Jo Brand. It was a clever, dry-as-gin, yet engaging look inside the crushing and ridiculous bureaucracy of the National Health Service. I thought it might be no fun for Craig to watch on TV more of what he has to deal with every day, but there’s a lot of cathartic joy in seeing someone articulate””with humour and insight””exactly what your situation is like, and that’s exactly what this show did.
By contrast to Getting On is the TV I’ve been seeing here in Canada: the Canadian news strikes me as extremely good, but the adverts are just shockinglybad. The voice-over actors are all doing what sounds””to my UK-conditioned ears””like a berserk level of over-emoting up and down the scale from the women, and way, way too much of that gravelly fake-manlymanly extreeeeeeme voice from the men.
Then there are all the pharmaceutical and “Rah! Rah! Support the troops!” ads from the States. Presumably there’s a target-marketed type of individual on the other end who responds to these messages. The thought frightens me.
The Canadian ads go for a more folksy, funny, “Aren’t we quirky?” angle, but they still ring a really fake note to my ear.