Adolescent Angst

Dad and I share a good sense of humor. He’s got range. He can be hilariously self-deprecating. There are other times when he’ll mention something and I’ll laugh at his seeming naivete, but later, I’ll wonder if he was being deadpan, perfectly aware of how he exposed a situation and laughed to himself at my own naivete. This is called a “reversal” in playschool circles.

The other day Dad called me to say how happy he was that I finally changed my profile picture for gmail. This is what it was before the change:

I changed it to a picture of the softcover of Bertrand Russell’s Has Man a Future. It’s Russell’s examination of the consequences of the development of nuclear weapons.

Dad seemed sincere. “Every time I saw picture of baby crying I thought you were sad in New York. Now, you have a happy kid. This makes me happy.”

I laughed. I told him that it was a picture of a book cover. It was written by a philosopher and that the kid was about to scream. He's looking up at a nuclear missile that's about to hit him, I said.

Today, I’m thinking that maybe I should change the profile pic again. Is he manipulating me into changing my pic? But, for whatever reason, I find these pictures to be poignant yet funny.

Yesterday, on NPR, I was listening to Terry Gross interview Tamara Jenkins, director of The Savages, a movie I definitely want to see. In the movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are siblings who find out that their estranged father has dementia and needs care. And it’s a comedy. Gross asks Jenkins, “How do you figure out where the humor is in such a sad situation?”

“A couple things…I guess it’s part of my sensibility, part of my dna, or the way that I see. The world separates comedies from tragedies, dramas from farces, but I actually think that if you are paying close attention in life that you’ll see that they actually are operating in stereo most of the time. If you look under the tablecloth or through the curtains or if you’re attentive you can hear under tragedy is a kind of human farce happening also.”

I agree.

The movies that I am excited to see are Juno, Grace is Gone, I’m Not There, The Savages, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Sweeney Todd, Man in the Chair, and Be Kind Rewind. Somehow, I feel that this is going to be a record year for good movies.