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Watch out! Spoilers under way!

Readers tend to relate to characters quite quickly when first reading a book. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Harry, a Frodo, a Katniss or a Bella. We just love to get to know protagonists and creepily following them around on their adventures. We relate to their thinking, their emotions, and want them to succeed in whatever they do. We rarely stop our bonding process to remind ourselves that they are not real. We never say to ourselves “Harry is just a product of somebody’s imagination, much like the value of money or god”. Had I done that while reading Sophie’s World, my heart might have not been broken.

 

She is a Norwegian teenager being taught about philosophy by a middle-age man with an Italian name. She is a lovely, smart girl who makes the audience fall in love with her right from the beginning. She asks quirky questions, she makes relatable remarks; all in all, she is just very likeable. She is the protagonist of Sophie’s World, a worldwide bestseller and certainly one of the best introductions to philosophy ever written. She is Sophie Amundsen.

Sophie Amundsen is a 14-year-old teenager living in Norway. One day, she receives a letter informing her about a mysterious philosophy course she would be given. She isn’t sure about whether she wants a philosophy course but once she learns about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle she falls madly in love with philosophy and indulges in its teachings. As you follow the story and join Sophie in learning about the history of philosophy from Alberto Nox, an enigmatic savant, you start building a relationship to Alberto, his dog Hermes and, most of all, Sophie.

A very puzzling aspect of the story, however, is a man called Albert Knag. He keeps sending Sophie postcards addressed to his daughter, Hilde Moller Knag, which are postmarked on dates in the future. Over the course of the novel, the frequency of these messages increases and they can’t just be found on postcards anymore. At one point, Sophie even finds a message from Albert to Hilde on the inside of an unpeeled banana. As the reader, you realize something’s going on but you can’t really put your finger on it. Before you can make out what might happen next, a plot twist makes sure to leave you suspended in the air with drool dripping out of your half-opened mouth you just can’t seem to shut anymore. How?

Turns out, Sophie is just a character. She isn’t real. We did know this all along, right? But even in the book, she is just a character. She is the protagonist of Albert Knag’s birthday gift to his daughter Hilde. While Albert and Hilde are probably fictitious, as well, the loss of Sophie as the protagonist hit me in the guts like no death of any character in any book had ever done before. This raises a very interesting question: If we know that our favourite protagonists are fictitious, then why does it open up a void of emptiness in our hearts to be told that they are not real?

 

A similar thing happened to me when I turned 12-years-old. Either Dumbledore had forgotten to send me a letter of acceptance or, much more likely, I wasn’t a wizard and Hogwarts didn’t exist. My friends told me “It’s not real, bro” (or whatever 12-year-olds talk like). This experience made me reconsider the close relationship I developed with my favourite protagonists. Sophie being part of a book inside a book was much more difficult for me to overcome but, admittedly, very philosophical.

I’m still not ready to forgive Jostein Gaarder, the author, for doing this to the world but he sure made everyone realize just how much they love to fall in love with fiction!

 

PS: Remember to be as weird as you can possibly be.

At 112 W. Washington Street, Cafe Zola encompasses the ideal artistic qualities of an Ann Arbor restaurant. From the outstanding salmon crepe presented beautifully on my plate to the brick walls decorated with abstract portraits. I could ramble about how perfectly proportioned and delicious my food was, I will gear my focus on the thoughts that the paintings provoked.

The figures showed creative expressions with exaggerated features that captured their unique personalities. While the people look different from one another in each of the painting, they all began as the same white canvas surface that later acquired layers and layers of color. That blank surface on which we all begin is our potential, our ground, the foundation upon which we build ourselves. We have the freedom to chose whatever colors we want on our canvas. For the most part, people look relatively similar when really this exterior is merely a house for the colorful soul that lies beneath the outer layer. These portraits help surface that color brewing under the skin, making it easier to see others for those colors instead of how they appear.

How do we surface these colors? Is it through clothes or extracurriculars? Friends or classes? These things are our valiant attempt to express ourselves. It is not necessary these things that define us, but rather the fact that we made the choice to associate them with our identites. You are not just “the girl with the green jacket,” the club president, a roommate, or a major. These are only tangible features that tap into who you are. While your character is represented with the colors on the canvas, these are simply the shades of the color.

What if we saw each other as a portrait? We would see that we come from the same beginning. While everybody has his or her mark of originality splashed atop the goat skin, no matter what is displayed on the painting, we are all equal.

 

This was great.

I’ll begin by saying the main strength of the book is probably its sentiment balance. On one hand, it’s sensational and sentimental; as the climax approaches, the whole world is watching Mark on TV, so the ending is destined to be either heartbreaking or enormously crowd-pleasing. On the other hand, none of Mark’s log entries are particularly sappy. We don’t get any musing about the meaning of life. We don’t get any sections where Mark is seriously distraught or on the verge of suicide. He’s calm, methodical, and good-humored, which makes it fun to spend time with him.

It really proves that (in my opinion) when it comes to getting your reader to root for a character, building a personality for the character is more important than simply creating a backstory for them. We learn next to nothing about Mark’s family or friends back on Earth; the book is fairly minimalist, and we don’t even get physical descriptions of anyone. It’s a corrective to stories like Gravity or The Shallows that, while good, resort to unnecessary tragic backstories to get us to like the character. We don’t need that! They just need to be believable people!

For the first half of the book, I preferred the sections focused on Mark Watney alone on Mars. I don’t think dialogue is Andy Weir’s strongest suit, and some of the conversations back on Earth between the supporting characters – Venkat, Teddy, Mindy, Annie, etc. – were a little predictable. I didn’t think the humor came across as well in those sections; Mark was by far the funniest character, and sometimes when other characters tried to be snarky, it didn’t land as well for me. There’s something particularly funny about Mark’s brand of sarcasm, something about the way he’s primarily just joking around with himself, and with an imaginary reader. Hearing Mitch and Teddy exchange Sorkin-esque, half-inspirational, half-snarky dialogue wasn’t as amusing for me. Besides, the Mars sections don’t feel quite as isolated and dangerous when the NASA perspective is introduced; part of me longed for a Gravity– or All is Lost-esque story limited to one guy alone trying to survive in a foreign environment.

As the book went on, though, it became clear that those sections back on Earth were very necessary, both to build the stakes – wow, everyone on Earth is watching, and if anyone screws up, this will be a colossal waste of time, money, and human life – and to offer a break from the dense scientific material of Mark’s survival tactics. Weir is careful to keep the book fairly accessible, and based on the audience reaction, he certainly succeeded at appealing to the public. But at times it did become slightly difficult to visualize everything that was happening, and that made some chapters from Mark’s perspective a little slower. I wouldn’t classify the book as a ‘slog’ at all; that’s too far. But there were a couple times when I was ready for a break from the science.

That said, most of the science worked great. I have no idea if anything in this book is accurate – I imagine it’s at least partly based in truth based on Weir’s background and the way he made sure to meticulously acknowledge potential plot holes at every turn – but the point is that it’s convincing enough that you completely believe everything in the story could really happen. There’s something that’s just so fun about watching Mark try to finagle his way out of certain issues; there’s something irresistible to me about survival stories focused on a character who takes a breath, concentrates really hard, and figures out an ingenious way to get out of a seemingly unsolvable problem. There’s enough complex science in the story that you can’t really guess what the solution is going to be, but it’s based enough in fact and makes enough sense that the solutions never really feel like deus ex machina.

All in all, just a fun hard sci-fi thriller that manages to avoid cliches by staying focused and minimalist, and not resorting to cheesy sentiment until it’s absolutely necessary.

         Over the years, I’ve discovered that I’m afraid of many things. When I was young, it was the instinctive fear of the dark. All the associated phobias of monsters or killers in the night were still unformed. That came later, after watching too many Chinese television soaps. Instead, fear began undefined and nebulous. The dark was its own being that could reach out and grab me right out of my bed. Then, I was afraid of my parents. Their disappointment was always palpable when I did something wrong. These fears pursued me in the daylight at school and the darkness of my room became my shelter instead. They also became more concrete. They were the grades on my report card, the group of girls that always shared a table, and the feeling in my stomach right before a test. They multiplied by the day and I began to yearn for the day where all I ran from was the boogie man.

Fear is a gift. Without fear, a sabretooth tiger would have torn apart the last of the human species an ice age ago. We learn from what we dread the most. In fact, many of our fears are manifestations of previous wounds. Perhaps it was a bee sting or a scraped knee. Perhaps it was a particularly awkward third-grade presentation that creates a life-long aversion to public speaking. There is always something that prevents us from achieving our full potential. Even when the entire affair is forgotten, that twinge of pain casts a shadow upon our aspirations. Other fears are instilled by society. By the time high school began, I had even learned to fear my own body. There was too much fat here, not enough there. Suddenly, I started fearing the prospect of walking through life alone. It was the terror of never meeting someone that truly, intimately understood me. And so, I fretted over outfits, over parties, over a thousand little things, because now, there was a new formless fear, love, or more specifically, that I would never, ever, ever, ever find it.

FDR, of course, would come to say that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. What is often forgotten is the extension of that idea. That we should fear that fear keeps us from achieving our true potentials. That we will let fear control us our entire lives and never truly live or be ourselves. This is the fear spawned by the inevitability of death. The last and greatest despair is that we will leave nothing behind and be forgotten without a protest. Perhaps that was what I saw as I considered the dark all those years ago. But I think the worst thing that you can do in the face of fear, is refusing to acknowledge it. Fear is as legitimate and useful as any other feeling. After all, there is no love without fear. You love someone because they alleviate that fear of loneliness, because they can accept you for all your vulnerabilities. It is only when fear overwhelms everything else that it becomes something to be afraid of. Confronting fear is easier said than done. But it also the only path to a truer understanding of self.

There is a fantastic one-time gag on The Eric Andre Show, where the host, Eric Andre, hits his head on a glass wall during the middle of his interview with Tyler, The Creator. Isolated from the simultaneous dialogue between Hannibal Buress and Tyler, the Creator, the gag lasts maybe three seconds. Not even. After the glass to head collision, the camera cuts away, only to return to Andre waving his hand around where the invisible wall supposedly was, only to find nothing there.

This is a tame gag when considered in context with the outrageous comedy permeating through the show – a show that features an intro composed of an always-changing selection of debauchery and destruction. But for some reason, although I enjoy gags like Andre getting his head pulled off while attempting to pull a tooth out, enjoying carnal pleasure with a disco ball, or a Sprite plug superimposed on an actual wolf that is staring at the host, there is something about the glass wall that is so totally pleasing.

The pleasure of the glass-wall-gag cannot be considered with the sole factor of nonchalance – a trait that pervades almost every gag on the show. It is also not as shocking as the other jokes. However, it is incredibly concise. Although each episode is short, resulting in an often-disorienting segmentation of gags, the combination of nonchalance and oddly banal delivery leads to a gag wide open to interpretation. In other words, the show suggests that it does not have the time or patience to spell out the joke for you, or even explain it to you in conjunction with the ferocity of the surrounding content. It does not even spend the time to say, “That happened.” Instead in my first viewing, I found that I’d actually missed the gag entirely. It kind of happened and I never consciously registered the joke.

From a metaphysical standpoint, the gag has many ramifications. Considering how I had to return to the short interview to discover the gag, is oddly reflected in the characteristic of the gag itself – did I just hit a glass wall? Following question: never mind, what were we talking about? Simultaneously, it is just funny to watch Andre’s physical comedy at nothing beyond the basest form of comedy. Perhaps that is why this gag has forever left an imprint in my psyche. It kind of happened and now I know it happened and I keep considering how it happened and enjoying it while ironically, it is a joke that kind of happened.

The Hungarian short film directed by Kristof Deak “Sing” explores the life of a young Zsofi as she transitions to her new school. Amongst the stress of the adjustment, she finds comfort in the her love of singing. This happiness is quickly denied when the choir director Miss Erika tells her to mime the music. Zsofi and her friend Liza scheme a way to expose the malicious nature of the revered teacher.

While the short film peers through the lens of the sweet, timid Zsofi, Liza has the same degree of significance in the story. Sometimes the main character isn’t always the conductor of the story. It’s not the person standing in the limelight that drives the plot, but often the people who place the spotlight on them who have anchor roles in the production. Because of the limelight’s ample advertising, we might find ourselves accrediting the center of attention such as the main actress, the highest scoring player, the wealthiest entrepreneur. With that being said, these publicized roles are not greater nor lesser than the more subtle roles; they are equal. Every element of the work forms a network with elements dependent upon one another, bringing them to their maximum potentials. As Liza helps Zsofi find her voice. Zsofi helps Liza harness her leadership skills. Besides the context of the entertainment industry, someone who brings out the best in another demonstrates the ideal friend. Although Liza is highly regarded as a vocalist and seemingly unaffected by Miss Erika’s maltreatment, she initiates the movement to bring justice to those who are afflicted. In this short film, Liza encompasses all the qualities of a good friend. Someone who takes your concerns as his or her own to attest to your best being, who seeks to understand why you are not acting yourself, who will not let you be defeated by a challenge…that’s a good friend.

Overseeing it all, the excellence was made possible by director Kristóf Deák and his team. This is why I greatly appreciate the Short Film Academy Awards; those behind camera are put in the spotlight.