the groundhog day project

“Family is undeniably inescapable. Like a silent shadow, it’s your blood, your roots, and (at times) your ball and chain.” So begins Meredith Alloway’s review of Stories We Tell for The Script Lab . In the terms of these last few blog entries (today is Day 5 with Stories We Tell ), family is those people who are telling a story that keeps weaving in and out of yours. They are the people who have a bigger investment in your story than other people do, and vice versa, you have an investment in theirs. Whether by blood or by circumstance, family is, as Anderst’s piece on the film, suggests the storytellers here are, a chorus of voices, each telling a variation on a motif of the heart of the story. I’m reminded of words outside my own language as ways to conceive of family. One you might know from Lilo & Stitch if you’ve ever seen it— ‘ohana . On that show, they liked to say that ‘ohana means family, ‘ohana means no one gets left behind. (That word might be a relatively recent...

I don't think Donnie Darko was even on my list of time loop movies to watch in regards to the Groundhog Day Project but it definitely involves a time loop, one big one from beginning to end. And, I'm watching it as I write today's blog entry. I will watch Groundhog Day after. I don't intend to blog the details of the movie like I recently did with Haunter , mostly because a) I've seen this movie before, so I would not be writing about it anew and b) since it results in more than contains a time loop, there wouldn't be much to say probably. I will mention things worth mentioning as they come up. In the meantime, some asides: A friend of mine--one of the students on the speech time for which I coach actually--Pablo has a blog he's recently started dealing with photography. Yesterday , he ended "with a question to think of for tonight. Where are you in your life today and where do you see yourself in five years? I know it's a common question, but ...

The following is a segment from an informative speech I did a few years back regarding the the Pirahã (pee-duh-hon) (you can read the entire text here ): They have no phatic communication— hello , goodbye , thank you , I’m sorry . Daniel Everett [in his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes ] suggests these phrases "don’t express or elicit new information about the world" and are thus hardly as useful as actions could be in expressing the same sentiment. The closest they have to what we might call a greeting translates as "I have arrived." Thank you would be "transaction acknowledged." They prefer action over words and experience over ideas… …and this brings us to our second point, two concepts specific to the Pirahã, first xibipíio [roughly pronounced ih-bih-pee-ee-oh], experiential liminality . Translated roughly as "going into or out of the limits of experience," xibipíio can be equally applied (as noun or verb) to a man going out of si...