My Pedigree

I took a genetics class with Carrie in college, and our professor was this short, skinny, nerdy old Southern man who would always refer to family trees as "pedigrees." She and I had a lot of fun creating a pedigree for the white trash family we used to make up stories about. Let's just say, there were a lot crossed branches and twigs indicating learning disabilities.

Genealogy fascinates me, not that I have any really cool ancestors or anything--I just like to have an idea of where I come from, what life was like for the people before me, why they came to America, and what they would think of it nowadays. Why I am the way I am, I guess. It's really all about me, let's be honest here. So, I joined ancestry.com for a free trial of their like, deluxe package, where you have access to all sorts of records and other people's family trees to see if you have any matching information. It's pretty cool, and I've been able (if the information is accurate) to trace one line of my tree all the way back to France in the twelfth century! A lot of ancestors had Norman-English names, which is to be expected, since the conquest was so complete. Most of the tree dead-ends in various parts of England or Wales, which was cool because I didn't know I was at all Welsh. There were some people from Devon and Cornwall, too, which is kind of neat because supposedly they are from an entirely different tribe than the Anglo-Saxons. Although at this point they've all inter-married so much I suppose it hardly matters. There were some pretty crazy names, one being a guy called Oger Fitz Oger. There was also a woman named Amicia. That line of the family eventually moved to the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, then to North Carolina, and then to Georgia around 1800 or so. I had always assumed that because Georgia had been a debtor's prison colony when it was British that I was descended from some poor people who couldn't pay their bills! Looks like we're not such deadbeats after all! At least on that branch.

Unfortunately, I completely dead-ended on my Dad's branch after my great-grandparents. His mother was Irish and she was raised in Atlanta, but we aren't sure where she was actually born--she would say either Connecticut or Florida, but I don't know her mother's maiden name, and her father was one of about a hundred men named Jeremiah Joseph Sullivan that lived around the same time period. And while the site does have death certificates on file, they don't seem to have access to birth certificates, so that's a lot of missing information. There are no records from Mexico or Spain on the site, either, so nothing on his father's side.

My great-aunt did a lot of genealogy on my Mom's mother's side of the family, so I might give her a call and see if she can give me some more information there. Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week for the most part. The free trial is going to end soon, though! Maybe I should just print out all the stuff so that I have it. I think I will do that.

A New Look

I changed the colors on here. It was a little boring before. I wish I knew how to add a border, because I don't want the whole background to be this greenish color, I would like a white border. I'll have to do a little more snooping around on here to see if I can figure out how to fix that!

Masochism

So, TCM is trying to make me kill myself. Last night they played Gone With The Wind and Wuthering Heights back to back. I sobbed for about two hours during all that, and then decided to watch the final half of the "Doomsday" episode of Doctor Who. It was a puffy-eyed Tuesday I had.

Through A Glass Darkly

Last night I started Ingmar Bergman's Silence of God trilogy with the film Through A Glass Darkly. I got it from Netflix (along with the next film, Winter Light) back in November or December. I kept putting off watching them because they are black and white, Swedish films with subtitles. Having familiarized myself with Bergman in the past by watching two of his more famous works, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I knew I would need to be able to completely concentrate on watching the movie and reading the dialogue.

The Seventh Seal was intriguing, and very dark, and I kind of hated it, even though I didn't hate the experience of watching it. Wild Strawberries was much more enjoyable. For some reason, I like to watch people evaluate their lives and am always curious to see how artists depict what they, through the characters, find most valuable.

Art that struggles with the concept of God is also endlessly intriguing to me, which is why I added the Silence of God trilogy to my queue. Through A Glass Darkly was quite good. Short, at only ninety minutes, and encapsulated within a twenty-four hour period, there are just four characters, and the movie is basically all about them reacting to each other's reactions to Karin, a woman who is beginning an "incurable" descent into mental illness. The other three characters are her unimpeachable husband; somewhat absentee, novelist father; and sexually and artistically frustrated younger brother. After an intense day during which Karin finally decides to give into her darkness and has a vision of God as a spider that unsuccessfully attempts to penetrate her, she gets flown off to the hospital. But her father and brother stay behind and discuss finding something in the world to hold on to, and hoping that love is the true nature of God.

I suppose the spider, to me, represents all of the difficult questions associated with disillisionment about God, the feelings of helplessness when such terrible things are going on in the world, the self-hatred we feel when we allow our own inappropriate thoughts and feelings to overwhelm us. Had Karin allowed the spider to penetrate her, would she have fallen further into this fear and anger? Or would she have had to accept the duality of God (or as I see it, the duality of humanity, which we have assigned to God)? She was so blissful in her hallucination up to that point, wanting to leave reality behind, wanting to be allowed to see God. I like that the movie ends on a relatively positive note, a breakthrough between father and son, and the only idea of God that I really think should be adhered to--love. The world is full of grace, and as Studs Terkel would say, hope dies last. Unfortunately, we only get to see or access the smallest ideas of what God could be.

Anyway, I might try to watch Winter Light tonight. Depends how tired I feel after work today.

"Live Every Week Like It's Shark Week!"

It's Thursday night, and although I have Lost back, I'm really missing my other shows, especially 30 Rock. So in honor of the crew responsible for "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah", I present some evidence of the idea that Liz Lemon is based on ME:

Jack: Lemon, you're here early.
Lemon: Well, I gave up caffeine so I've been going to bed at 5:30.
(This happens to me a lot since I took a 9 to 5. Especially on days when I don't have coffee and I've stayed up really late the night before.)

Liz orders her meatball subs with extra bread!

Liz: You are a suit. You take the hard work and creativity of other people and turn it into commercials and pie charts and triangle graphs!
Jack: What's a triangle graph?
Liz: I don't know! It sounded real.

Liz: I've got my life together, okay?
(A molar comes tumbling out of her mouth.)

Jenna: That guy was going to buy you a drink.
Liz: Really? I already have a drink. You think he'll buy me some mozzarella sticks?

Liz: I don't have any money, if that's what you're after. And I'm not one of those girls that does weird stuff in bed because they think they have to. If you're a gay guy looking for a beard, I don't do that anymore. And if you're trying to harvest my organs and sell them, I have an uncle who's a cop, so don't even try.
(My uncle is actually a sheriff, but close enough.)

Jack's brother to Liz: You know you would be attractive if you didn't scowl so much.
(Sadly enough, I get this a lot. Still, I'd rather hear that I scowl too much than that I should smile. It's so condescending. If I feel like smiling, I'll fucking smile. Otherwise, leave me alone!)

Jenna: ...And you're wearing a one-piece swimsuit instead of underwear.
Liz (defensively): I have to do laundry.

Now that the strike is rumored to be coming to an end, hopefully some more hilarity from Tina Fey and company will soon be forthcoming!