No, I do not want to plan my own funeral ahead of time...

            I had my blog all planned out. I was going to write about how Maxine wore black to Ashoke’s funeral while everyone else wore white. I researched funeral practices around the world.

 Then I came upon a particularly intriguing yet extremely troublesome website. I am talking about myfunkyfuneral.com. Just the title of the website should have been a dead giveaway. But I entered it under the pretense that I would find information about funeral customs in different cultures. A tab of the side of the website caught my eye. I hesitated for a few minutes, but curiosity forced me to investigate the links under the category “Glamming up the Graveyard.” Stunned, I explored the “Funky Coffins,” “Fabulous Ashes,” and “Freaky Urns.” Did you know that you can make about 240 pencils out of a person’s remains? I definitely did not. You can also get your ashes packed into fireworks, a gem, or an artificial reef, along with allowing them a ride in space. I say “your” because this website encourages visitors to sign up and plan their funerals ahead of time, including song choice, eulogies, and poetry. I continued looking around, finding coffins that one can prepurchase and use as a coffee table, an urn which is actually a magic eight ball, and a couple others which are, quite frankly, too disturbing to mention. This website changed my opinion of Maxine’s dress at the wedding. I previously thought Oh she is so ignorant. She does not care about his culture at all.  Well this may be correct. But at least she respects his father’s death. At least she, unlike this website, did not encourage Gogol to find “the FUN in Funeral.” Maybe she did not understand that Hindus wear white, the color of purity, because they believe that the deceased will go on through other lives and that excessive mourning could hold them back. She simply followed her cultural tradition, which dates back to the Roman Empire, and wore black. Based on what I gather from this website, she could have been much, much, worse.

Link: http://www.myfunkyfuneral.com/index.php

Oh My God, Her Face!

The classroom buzzed with anticipation as Ms. Serensky approached the television, ready to the begin the movie, The Namesake, based off of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel. For weeks we had toiled, ready for the fateful day where we would turn in our data sheets and relax to the film. We stifled our left-over giggles that her warning had sparked and prepared ourselves. She pressed play.

A collective gasp filled the classroom; it was somewhere between a shriek and a very loud intake of breath. The screen displayed an image: An image so unexpected and ghastly that we could not help ourselves. It was the face of a women. We did not know who at the time, only that she was very unattractive.

Ms. Serensky quickly covered up the screen. The class sat dumbly in shock. We were not prepared for this. Ms. Serensky artfully returned to the beginning of the film, telling us to look away in case this happened again.

The film restarted, and we relaxed, enjoying the typical footage of various shots portraying the setting. We watched eagerly, excited to see how each character looks. After analyzing and judging each character, we had created our own mental pictures of their appearances. We wanted to see just how right we were.

Then we saw Ashoke. And Gogol. And Sonia. And Moushumi. As each new character appeared, I shuddered at just how off my mental picture was. They all looked so different to what I had imagined! Each time something did not fit my predefined image, I felt slightly annoyed at the director. How could she be so wrong? I mentally complained about this common occurrence. After reading a good book, I will watch the movie and become frustrated when something is not how I think it should be, or when the director left something out.

Then I realized how stupid my annoyance was.  I feel frustrated because someone sees something differently than me? Because they have a different opinion? That kind of thinking creates wars, for goodness sake! Just because something turned out differently than I expected does not mean I should feel any animosity. I should respect the director, Mira Nair, for boldly making a film that she knew would face large numbers of critics. Like Sonia, she made some daring decisions, knowing that some people might not like them. But Sonia ended up happy in life, just as Nair ended up with a film that got an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.

We need to accept different ideas for what they are, as opposed to what they are not or what we find wrong. Nair faced quite a challenging task, and although I disagree with some of her decisions, I need to respect her for that. If I could manage to one day give everyone the respect they deserve to leading their lives through their own decisions and opinions, I know that I would be a better person for it.    

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/namesake/

Christmas: Culture or Religious Celebration?

Has Christmas become a part of the American culture? I think that it has. Although we disguise this holiday under the pretense of Jesus’ birthday (which is ironically sometime in the summer or fall), Christmas seems to have become an excuse to eat, celebrate, and indulge in our consumerist values. It appears that in the attempt to worship Jesus, we actually focus on a bunch of other things. We spend insane amounts of money to attain the picture- perfect image of Christmas, despite the fact that many people do not even have enough to eat. Do not get me wrong, Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. I love getting together with my family, sharing gifts, and enjoying various treats. However, I think that we American residents have taken the culture aspect out of proportion; we have managed to collectively stifle the real purpose: religion.  Since when has “Frosty the Snowman” been a “Christmas” carol? I do not have any recollection of a dancing lump of crystallized water in the bible. Personally, I love the religious aspect also; I like the midnight mass with the story of Jesus’ birth. But I think that this appreciation has come with age and a greater appreciation of my religion. The media tells children to focus on the nonreligious aspects. In the movie, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Cindy Lou Who feels like something is missing; she knows that Christmas does not center on presents. Yet she neglects to mention Jesus at all—her “true meaning” is about with family: important, yes, but that was not the original purpose! It appears that Americans who are not religious have clung to this meaning and used it as an excuse to call Christmas their own. Of course, I have nothing against these people. I would be a hypocrite if I did; I celebrate Thanksgiving although I was born in England. And any reason to get together with family is a good one. But I think that we sometimes need to remember why we get together with family, feast, and buy gifts. I agree, the cultural aspect is fun and family traditions are important, but it is easy to forget the traditional aspect.

Q: Moushumi can find happiness A: b (false)

       Lahiri looks into how people feel about about the lives that they created for themselves in “The Namesake.” Gogol lives a content life now; he knows who he is and he knows what he wants. Yet Moushumi cannot tell what she wants in life or what kind of person she has become. Gogol, who will never leave Manhattan, finds a certain satisfaction with the stability and control he has in his life. But Moushumi can never really feel satisfied because she spends her time trying to escape from her life. For example, when she sleeps with Dimitri, the narrator explains how “the complication of it [calms] her” (266). She creates many separate lives for herself, each with a different version of herself, to create enough confusion so that she does not need to face what she fears the most: herself. She has a life with Gogol, a life in Paris, lives with Astrid and Donald, Dimitri, and her family. When she mentions how she might need to leave New York to get a job, the narrator explains how “There is something appealing to her about this prospect, to make a clean start in a place no one knows her” (254). Moushumi embraces these chances to make clean starts because she can continuously just find new ways to hide from the parts of herself that she does not like. She fears her lonely childhood and the prospect of loneliness, her mother’s dependence on her father, her cultures conservative lifestyle, and more. Moushumi’s constant hiding from herself forces her to live a false life; she can never really find the contentment of satisfaction that her friends and husband can because she does not actually know what she wants.

Pride and Patriotism

    Although I strongly dislike Moushumi, I find that I can really relate to her when it comes to confusion with national identity. For I too, was born in England, and I too, moved to the states at a young age-- four and a half, to be exact. Born in England? Really? People ask with bemused expressions. But you don’t have an accent at all! I acknowledge this statement with a half laugh and say something seemingly related, allowing them to go on with their lives. When I moved to America, I feared it, just like Moushumi’s parents, “perhaps because of its vastness” (212). I wanted my mom to make my bedroom smaller because I thought it had too much space (now, of course, it never seems to have enough). Yet unlike Moushumi, I wanted to get rid of my British accent. I knew that I stood out a lot already; the accent just added to that. I wanted to fit into the American culture and have things in common with my friends in preschool. When I lived in England, I had no problem standing out. For about six months, I would only agree to wear a Snow White costume to preschool. But here, in America, everything had changed, so I felt like I needed to also. For years, I would try to make my mom say the American versions of words. Now, as I look back on these times, I realize that I did not understand that it is not a crime to show ones culture in another country. Though I still craved English foods like Marmite and Ribina, I did not want to have a foreign background. The American culture sucked me in, just as it did with Gogol and Moushumi.  Over the years, my family has accumulated more and more artifacts that claim us as Americans: the flat screen TV, the family-sized minivan, the love of Chipotle, and the American flag, which we ended up stuffing behind a desk in a particularly dark corner because we never got around to putting it outside. However, I still desperately cling on to the last remnants of a British childhood. I admire my red passport with a golden unicorn and the fading traces of what used to be an accent. Sometimes I feel like a faker, like people will only believe me if they see my name printed on a green card. I do not want to completely give up my past, but America is my home now.