Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Timing

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This is not going to be the beautiful and pithy psychological investigation of the truism “Timing is everything” and it’s certainly not a treatise on the secret to comedy. No, this is a quick paean to the Mac app Timing. Timing keeps track of how long you spend every day in each application you have running. It only shows you how long you’ve spent actively in a particular application. Merely having the application open doesn’t add to the time total; no, you have to actually be using it.

This is both good and bad.

 

Timing can also show you specifically where you’re spending the time too. Kind of scary to see the three most popular applications I’ve used int he past week are Safari, Civilization IV, and Twitter.

All weekly

Everything during the past week

But what if I want to see how I’ve done specifically with my writing? I created a Group called “Writing” and put all of the applications I consider part of my writing into it. So let’s peek at that:

Writing week

Writing – this past week

Yeah. Kinda had a bad drop off there during the past few days. But it’s been better throughout January, right?

Writing month

Writing – all of January

I didn’t get so much done while I was in Hawaii, and it’s neck and neck with the time I’m spending in MarsEdit writing blog entries. I actually have done okay, writing-wise, throughout this month. (You’ll notice a couple of apps don’t show up in the weekly view but do in the monthly: yes, that’s because I didn’t use them at all in the past week. Also a good way to track whether or not you’re using those must-have apps.)

But I haven’t been wasting my time doing other stuff, have I?

Chat week

Too much chatting

Okay, so…yeah, I probably need to use my MacFreedom app a little more heavily at this point and stop chatting.

Anyhow — I don’t check Timing every day, but I find it really, really useful when I want to see how I’m doing at keeping control of my computer time.

 

Things I am grateful for

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When Darin bought his car, 16 or whatever years ago, one of the things the dealer threw in with the package was training at driving school in order to become a better driver. It was a great class, and if I could remember the name of it, I’d include a link. I think we can all use refresher courses on how to be a better driver.

One of the important soundbites I took away from that day was to forget the old mantra, “Look where you’re going.” That’s stupid. That’s how people drive off of cliffs. They see the cliff, they drive off of it. No, the thing they said was “Look where you want to go.” If you want to stay on the road, focus on the road. After you’ve driven for a while, you don’t have to instruct your hands on how to turn the wheel (remember how tiring that part of driving was?) and you’ve got a relationship with your feet on how heavy to ride the pedals. No, your job is to point the car correctly. Your autonomic functioning takes over after that.

Doing those “gratitude journals” and stuff sounded so hokey to me when I first heard of them. Let me rephrase: I absolutely love hokey stuff, but not when it substitutes for, y’know, actual work. So often things like gratitude journals are described as being modern versions of magic spells: do this and this and this, and you get X, Y, and Z in return. Suh-weet deal.

But, when I thought about it, I decided that a gratitude journal wasn’t supposed to take the place of anything else. Focusing on things I was grateful for — whether inside or outside of myself — is always good. I force myself to look at the good things in life, because like so many other people if I don’t work hard at it, I ruminate over the bad things that happen.

You know, the old hokey saying “Energy flows where attention goes.”

Note the similarity there to “Look where you want to go.”

I’ve mentioned in an entry a while back that I like the Happy Tapper’s Gratitude Journal for iPhone app. (There’s an iPad version too.) These apps are good-looking, they’re cute, they’re fun. They make it Not Hard to write down your 5 things every day.

After a while of doing this, your brain gets very good at picking out the good things about the day. You focus not on what makes you upset or angry, but what makes you happy, what gives you energy or peace or joy.

And doing this is especially good during the times you’re angry and you want to knock someone’s block off.

Which happens to be where I am right now. Seriously. I’ve been seriously rethinking my values and what kind of person I want to be, because someone I know seems to have done something bad to me, and I’m wondering how to respond.

While I was thinking about this situation, I saw the following quote (while I’m putting up quotes and epigrams) from Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

I don’t want to be that person.

I want to be the kind of person who looks forward, who doesn’t let the turkeys get her down, and who doesn’t use her blog to really hurt someone back. Because I know full well that I could. I have a very high Google ranking. I could really do some damage, simply by putting something here, even if no one ever reads it.

It was kind of scary to realize that I was the kind of person who’d ever consider doing that.

I’m not going to focus on bad things. I’m going to go find ten things in my life today that I’m grateful for, that make me happy, that make me feel alive, and reset my brain.

The cool thing is, I can even think of one thing I’m grateful about in regards to this situation (that I’m being deliberately oblique about), and I’m not being snarky at all. You really can retrain your brain.

 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: the review

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Some years ago I read a review (maybe in the Guardian, or maybe in some mystery-centered blog I was following) that was gushing/ecstatic/over-the-top glowing about a book called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that had just come out in the UK. I checked on Amazon; no such book had a page. I figured it was a Swedish novel that wasn’t coming to the US. So I ordered it.

In hardback.

From the UK.

When I read it, I thought, “Darin’s going to kill me if he finds out how much I paid for a book that I absolutely loathe.”

I managed to finish it and put it away, out of sight, out of mind.

At which point The Girl came to the US, and there’s been tons of gushing/ecstatic/over-the-top glowing about it and I’ve been baffled. What is wrong with you people?

When I heard there was a US remake of the Swedish movie coming out, I thought, Nope, not seeing that. But then it was David Fincher directing…and Steve Zaillian writing… and there was nothing else to see last night…

And…I still don’t get it. Actually, it’s even worse than that. I think you people are insane.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the story of a disgraced journalist (Daniel Craig) who gets a hail-Mary pass from a wealthy industrialist (Christopher Plummer) who will pay him a huge amount of money to use his amazing deductive skills —

(During the scene where Plummer hires Craig, Darin leaned over to me and said, “This is a total wish fulfillment story.” I said, “Oh yeah.”)

— to investigate the murder of a girl on a remote island 40 years ago. He is aided in this quest by the antisocial, yet amazingly brilliant and super-competent Rooney Mara. Because of the Law of Conservation of Movie Stars (“Today’s movie budgets don’t allow you to fill the whole movie with stars, so if there’s an actor you recognize in a small role, you can bet they’re important”), it’s not hard to figure out who the bad guy is. The Law of Conservation also allows you to figure something else out ahead of time, but I’ll leave that to the viewer.

Let me get the good out of the way: the direction, the art direction, the acting, and the dialogue were great. This feels like a European movie, as opposed to most American movies, which feel like they were filmed on a Universal backlot (even if they were filmed on location). Everyone (except Craig) has a Swedish accent (with various degrees). The score by Trent Reznor is great.

I still hated it. There are so many problems with this movie, most of which come from the source material.

The original title of the book in Swedish was Men Who Hate Women, and that’s a more apt title than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Everything about this story has to do with violence, particularly sexual violence, toward women. Drew McWeeny at HitFix had a good essay recently about when are we, the Viewers, going to start drawing the line at depictions of rape and sexual violence in movies? Is that a good topic for drama or for crime? Of course. But as McWeeny and others have pointed out, often it’s all we get. And we’re offered sexual violence and that’s supposed to be meaningful in and of itself. Even worse, it’s often so explicitly offered that it’s not violence, it’s pornography: it’s meant to titillate.

There’s a whole bit of backstory, just touched on in the movie (I can’t remember whether it’s dealt with more in the novel or not) about Sweden’s history with the Nazis. Huh, that’s interesting…but never pursued. One of the bad guys was involved with the Swedish Nazi party. Is that part of what he did? We don’t know. Is it coincidence that he was a Nazi and a psychopath? Are we simply supposed to equate Naziism with psychopathy? (If so, congratulations: you’ve just cheapened one of the most complex psychological and political situations we’ve ever had to face on this planet.) The whole reason one whole series of girls dies is because they’re “Jewish” or “immigrants” — a factor never explored, just touched on, as though, y’know, we all know about that.

The murder mystery involves several generations of a wealthy Swedish industrialist’s family. There’s a particularly…unusual…psychological dynamic between one of the mid-40s generation and one of the mid-60s generation that’s an important part of the story, and we’re never given any idea how in the hell this happened. Did one teach the other? Does it run in the family? Is it just that they’re Swedish? Or is living on this island making them crazy? We don’t know. We’re just supposed to take it as given that such a thing is possible and apparently no one else in this family, who all live in close quarters, ever noticed. Um, okay.

Much more up close and personal, however, is The Scene, and then The Aftermath Scene. In case you haven’t heard, one of the main characters gets raped, extremely brutally. (She actually gets raped twice, but people pretty much only refer to the second rape when talking about “the horrible rape scene.”) This happens on-screen in the movie; it goes on for pages, with extreme detail, in the book. She then exacts her revenge, in a similarly brutal way, also explicit in book and movie.

The entire point of these scenes in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is that as a result of all of this she gets money. That’s it.

I’ve read a number of places that “Oh, this sets up some stuff in the later books” — I don’t care. In this movie and this book, the end result of two rapes and a revenge assault is that she gets money. She gets access to her own money without any consequences whatsoever. That’s the entire point of this story arc in Dragon Tattoo and it infuriates me.

She isn’t affected emotionally — she not only has other lovers right away, she becomes so emotionally involved with one of them that she undertakes a ridiculous, over-the-top international scheme to right a wrong done to Daniel Craig’s character. She’s not overly clingy or emotionally needy; she isn’t standoffish. No, she’s perfectly well-adjusted sexually and emotionally. Horrifying, painful rape? No problem! Horrible physical and mental assault you perpetrate on someone else? Just do it! You’ll barely remember it happened five minutes later.

She isn’t affected physically. She has no concern about strangers, about her own body, about where she is at any time.

She isn’t affected at all. The same extraordinarily gifted, socially-maladjusted woman we see at the beginning of the movie is exactly the same at the end of the movie.

I haven’t worked in rape counseling…can anybody tell me if this is how it works?

I also got the feeling, from the book and movie and from lots of reactions I’ve read, that we’re supposed to see Salander’s Revenge Assault as “empowering.” That we’re supposed to cheer her on because “he deserved it.” I got a different message from it: if you’re a technical genius who happens to film her own rape and if you happen to have access to lots of computer equipment and if you’re willing to engage in horrible, bloody assault, you are empowered. Otherwise, suck it: you’re a wimp.

The best thing in this movie is that apparently absolutely everyone in Sweden uses Macintosh, so that’s good.

(I totally forgot to mention at least 25% of this movie is people staring at photos or at newspaper clippings or computer screens, and then they react as though they’ve seen something incredibly significant…that’s completely non-obvious to us, the viewer. It’s not deeply interesting dramatically, to say the least.)