Winter Break

Winter Break '09-'10 is quickly coming to a close. Winter Breaks in my experience tend to be pretty slow yet go by fast, if that makes any sense. I've found that there are lots of days where not a whole lot of stuff goes on in, with the wintry cold dissuading lengthy outdoor activities and the lack of the hectic business of college life lending itself to a general apathy towards any achievement. After living in college, home transforms itself into a very different place. Even though we obviously worked at home while in high school, I discovered sophomore year when I brought my final essay back home how hard it can be to work at home. Once you've established this home as a place of rest and relaxation, a place of winter break, it is difficult to change it back into a setting of productivity. Winter break is a time we think we can wake up early, read a lot, work out and do all those things we never got around to during the year. Nevertheless, my time here often deteriorates into mindless late nights surfing that immense internet cesspool of procrastination that is Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia. It takes more mental will to finish one book or learn 100 vocabulary words in another language over winter break than it does to pull out an all-nighter essay during college. Similarly, I'd rather run 10 full field suicides at Ultimate practice than drag my butt out into the sub-freezing weather for a 3 mile run.

Nonetheless, I did try very hard to have a productive winter break, and I did not completely fail. I saw some fantastic movies in theaters (Sherlock Holmes, Avatar, Up in the Air) and some terrible ones at home (2012, Final Destination 4), spent some very quality time with friends, including 2 bar trivia nights, a fantastic ski trip, and a ridiculous new year's party at my house.

About the movies: they're all damn good. I was excited about Sherlock Holmes after seeing the trailer over half a year ago, even though I wasn't a huge fan of the few books that I had read. I mean the problem with redoing a popular character like Holmes is that the qualities that made him popular, namely the writing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, will have nothing to do with this movie. Basically you're just hoping that the writers are able to fashion a strong enough plot and dialogue on their own because the series is not as formulaic as the James Bond series to be easy-to-manufacture blockbusters. But as it turned out, the writers did a really good job and created a Sherlock Holmes who displayed superbly his legendary powers of observation while getting a modern facelift. I thought Robert Downey Jr. did a fantastic job, making his character seem deservedly quirky yet baller.

Avatar is great and seemed to get a lot of press from the user interface mass media, aka twitter and facebook. I was told before it that it was awesome, but that it was basically Pocahontas. Having seen the preview and knowing that it was a futuristic action movie in 3d with blue people, I thought that was a joke. 30 minutes into the film, I was laughing at the similarities. Even the protagonist, Jake Sully, has the same initials as John Smith. My dad remarked that maybe this does take away from the originality of the script, which is so important for Best Picture consideration, but I doubt voters will really give it that much thought. I do think that the analogies to our modern environmental situation and the Bush regime were too obvious, and that the villains were too much like caricatures. Nonetheless, I loved the fight scene at the end which was both creatively designed and stunningly displayed. The whole 3D thing was definitely a cool novelty as well. But yes this is one of those movies you run to see.

Then before heading home, Frank Greg and I went to see Up In the Air. We ran into an RL kid from the class of '09 at the theater and he asked us what we were going to see, and I replied, "Up in the Air." He was really confused and thought we meant we hadn't made up our minds yet. Anyways it was this Clooney-piece that left me with the most to ponder. Basically I believe that George Clooney's character loves a life of complete freedom without any attachments weighing him down, and spends all his time traveling for his job. The movie resonated with me, not that I would ever cut myself off from all my friends like that, but it did remind me why I like traveling. When I was living abroad in '08, I did love the feeling of walking around like an unknown, knowing that I was taking in such different things than the locals, and not being held to the same accountability that I am held to in my own country. It was so very freeing living in a place so far from my home. That feeling was one of my favorite things about living abroad, although perhaps it is a feeling that can only accompany relatively short stays. My other favorite part about studying abroad, besides the whole seeing-and-meeting-new-and-cool-people-and-places, was being automatically considered interesting because I was a foreigner. It was a blessing and a curse, and a lot of people would prefer not to stand out like that, but it really appealed to me.


Anyways those were some random thoughts. I also splurged for myself and bought a book of Top 10 lists, cause I love lists and trivia. It's going to inspire me to make some of my own top 10 lists on this blog, including a top 10 Georgetown basketball games in my career, which I am already so excited about. The UConn game I came back early for is going to be high up there.