Hard Times

    This summer has been a complete disaster.  I left baking for a multitude of reasons; one being that I was unappreciated and another was because of a false reputation spread by the lies of immature co-workers.  I continued writing and traveled to California, which was good.  Was supposed to swing back north the desert in a loop, but got severely sunburned and had to cut the trip short.  No only that, but I'd met the perfect girl online, and she lived in San Diego- a place I'd already planned to travel to.  I ended up coming on too strong and she wanted nothing to do with me.  She had a boyfriend anyway, and clearly my coming to San Diego would have meant unnecessary drama for her.
    Yes, I continued my writing.  Was completely shattered by an editor who found all kinds of nitpicky errors in an article I wrote that I was initially proud of.  It was about bipolar disorder.  I thought, with my broad knowledge of the topic, that it could finally push me over the hump and give some meaning to my writing career.  It has, in fact, shattered my confidence, and I don't feel like I'll ever write anything that has market value.  (I have written good articles that have been published online.  Unfortunately they are ghostwritten and not attributed to me.)  I was shortly demoted and decided to work at Panera again.  My partner wanted me to come back because she was struggling.  Lo and behold, she quit the same week I came back.  Thanks, E.
    I settled for two part-time jobs- one at UPS and the other as a dishwasher for a new restaurant.  Had to quit the dishwashing gig because I developed a horrid rash on my foot: an affect from all the water and detergent my skin had soaked up.  Also quit UPS because my boss threatened to fire me, despite my working harder than 95% of the people there.  He wanted me to work off the clock and I said no.  He treated me like garbage because I hadn't reached senority in the union yet.  Will be putting this noble manager into one of horror stories.
    The next job I got was as a packager and delivery driver overnight, which is pretty much the only good thing that has happened this summer.  My trainer and I got along wonderfully, but she is moving away and I'd rather not get close to someone who will be out of my life so abruptly.  This is a common theme in my life- pushing people away for fear of them leaving so soon.  Also had an interview to become a Microsoft librarian, but I was 10 minutes late due to an inexplicable amount of traffic on a Friday morning.  I'd even left 15 minutes early, anticipating it, but I was still late.  What's worse is that I nailed the rest of the interview.  So if I'd only left 10 minutes earlier I'd likely be a librarian for one of the largest companies in the world- a dream job on most accounts.
    Worst of all, my mom disowned me because of a financial misunderstanding.  It was a mistake on my part, but she shouldn't have done that.  Apparently she's on the same drug that drove me nuts ten years ago (Zoloft).  Brilliant, mom.  She apologized right away, but it really stung for a long time.  And she's going off the drug. 
    Then my father harassed me... He keeps trying to make me feel like I'm really a woman, just like he did at my age.  I'm really tired of it, so we aren't speaking anymore.
     To top it off, my new best friend is overly attached to religion, a real turnoff.  Everything in my car was stolen because the window is broken and I can't afford repairs.  Haven't heard from the magazines I submitted poetry to.  I just can't find my path.  Seems nobody wants me.

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

And Then There Were None is widely regarded as the best mystery novel ever written. Ten people who don’t know each other are summoned to an island and they don’t know why. None of them are aware of what they all have in common- they’ve each committed murder and were not convicted of it. After three of them are found dead the surviving members scramble to figure out which of them is the killer while getting increasingly paranoid. 

Much of the enjoyment from reading this comes from figuring out who the killer is and what kind of psychological affect an atmosphere of death has on its victims. There are about six solid suspects of the crimes and you always find yourself second-guessing who the killer is by each twist of the plot. Christie had a talent for putting you in each character’s shoes and using that to play with your suspicions about them. First, I thought the killer was Justice Wargrave, then I thought it was Blore, then Miss Brent, and about halfway through I settled on Vera (no spoilers- read it for yourself to see who it really is). It’s also easy to read and not a long book by any stretch. In fact, most people could probably read it in the span of a day. Highly recommended for mystery fans and casual readers. 

Cloud Atlas Revisited

     I saw Cloud Atlas again.  It’s still as powerful now as it was when I first watched it, maybe even more so.  In fact a couple of times while watching it it felt like I was having a religious experience, which is something I’ve never experienced watching a film (although in books and music I have).  In addition to all the connections I made eight months ago I noticed a few I hadn’t seen before. 
 
1.  When Sonmi was in prison she made eye contact with her father (Hugo Weaving) from a past life.  Then he backed away from her as if he had deja-vu.  It was right after he gave her a similar lecture during the “multitude of drops segment” with her husband Adam in timeline one.  It was as if the disinherited daughter was reminding him that she wouldn’t yield to his philosophy or threats even after centuries of being apart.  When I realized that it sent chills down my spine. 
 
2.  The Cloud Atlas Sextet can be heard twice near the beginning of the film.  The first is in the introductory Luisa Rey segment, when a rock interpretation can be heard playing from the balcony.  The second is in the introductory Cavendish section, which is a jazz interpretation and is also being played on a balcony.  You have to listen carefully both times to hear them.  What’s also interesting is that Dermot Hoggins throws a critic off the balcony in his timeline and Luisa Rey wants to throw a guy she interviewed off the balcony in her timeline. 
 
3.  When Robert Frobisher commits suicide, the future Sixsmith asks Sonmi if she believes in the after-life in timeline 5.  It's interesting how it's the future Sixsmith who's the first to believe in Sonmi.  In this segment he seems to be wondering what happened to his long lost love, Robert Frobisher, whom he (presumably) never meets in his future lives because of the way Robert left him.  You can see it in his eyes when Sonmi talks about meeting HaeJoo* in "another world".  It's almost as if he redeems Robert by simply believing in another world for them to exist in, the same way Sonmi does, which in turn changes the course of history after he leaks the interview and propels all her other beliefs.  Robert's own opinion in his letter supports this; "I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith, and you will find me there." 
 
 *HaeJoo is Adam Ewing in a future life, and Sonmi was his wife Tilda in a past life (yes, that red-head really is Doona Bae).  Their reunion is illustrated beautifully here, and when people first see this connection they are often enamored by the power of the film. 
 
4.  Most importantly, I finally gathered up all the influences each story must have had on the others.  In the Frobisher story I noticed that after shooting Ayrs, the bullet from the Luger rolls on the floor in the direction of a torn book that is holding up a corner of the bed.  On the binding, it says The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which means that it was the second half of the journal Frobisher was trying to find.  This is important because I think Frobisher’s despair was influenced by Adam Ewing’s story.  We are shown that he never read the second half of his journal and therefore must have assumed that Adam Ewing eventually died from the poisoning of Goose.  Before his suicide he’d written a letter to Sixsmith saying, “I feel as hopeless as Adam Ewing, blind to the fact that his friend is poisoning him.”  If he’d read the second half of Adam’s journal, would he have taken a more optimistic outlook on life and not killed himself?  What does this say about the influence of each story on the one following it?  Luisa Rey asked herself, “Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over?” while reading Frobisher’s letters.  To me that translates into telling herself not to give up the way Frobisher did.  It wasn’t until Cavendish was reading the Luisa Rey Mystery that he got the idea to spend the rest of his life with his long lost love.  As he was reading Luisa's manuscript he got the notion that he’d been here before, in another lifetime ago... Ursula.  Reading his previous wife’s story (Jocasta was Luisa Rey, both played by Halle Berry) must have softened his heart and made him remember his true love.  Also, if it weren’t for Cavendish’s heroics, Yoona wouldn’t have persuaded Sonmi to think about the outside world.  Cavendish's outburst, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse!”, may have inspired the whole fabricant revolution.  Even with Zachry, the orison of Sonmi revealed to him the truth about his home, which is why he ended up leaving with Meronym.  I guess this whole domino effect is another way of tracing Adam’s single act of kindness that rippled through centuries.  Originally I’d thought that the slave who’d saved him inspired him and his wife to make Sonmi into a martyr centuries later, thus becoming the embodiment of good in Zachry’s soul- a person whose decisions prolonged human life on another planet.  I’m now thinking it’s a combination of both, that both the heroes finding the stories and their subsequent actions- that fate and free will- are what shaped the future stories.  The bottom line is that if you do good things, you might indirectly save the world centuries from now.  That’s what Adam is talking about when he says, “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”  Even though he didn’t directly save humanity on Earth, his drop is connected to the one that did, Zachry’s, because his actions centuries ago changed Zachry’s thinking in his timeline.  It means that all the drops in an ocean blend into one another, and all our thoughts are mirrored by actions in the eons coming before us.  In the preface Zachry said, "Wind like this, full of voices... ancestry howlin' at ya, yibberin' stories... old voices all tied up into one."  The stories are all part of a chain reaction in which all of them together round out Zachry's tale.  He must have had mystical powers, since he was able to hear the voice of Old Georgie and had dreams in which he had visions of the other six stories. 
        Now I also understand what Frobisher meant when he said that "the boundary between noise and sound are conventions... all boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended".  It's a metaphorical reference to Adam Ewing's "multitude of drops" quote.  We are born as drops and once we enter the ocean we are boundless.  Therefore we are subject to Oneness, transcendence, and the integration of other drops so that we may break free of all barriers, including prison, truth, social pressure, poison, forbidden love, and death.  "Nay the dead never stay dead.  Open your ears and they never stop a yibberin'", says Zachry.  Like currents in the ocean, we are clouds drifting on an atlas that is as unpredictable as it is orderly.  Free will is one variable and fate is the other.  The direction of the cloud is predetermined but the shape it takes is not, just like a drop in the ocean.  Is that all we are, clouds and drops... dust in the wind?  Free to shape our lives yet bound to the stories of ancestors and our actions in the past?  Sonmi said, "We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness we birth out future."  That seems to be Cloud Atlas' most powerful message, and a profound one it is.  All of the greatest quotes in this film are a part of the same message, which makes all six stories more complete as a whole and not a random mess when separated.