So it has been a while, so for my Japanese homework- I am working on telling someone about an interesting name and I thought of T.E Lawrence as my assignment, so my issue is to keep it very simple as I am not so fast in translating his life in Japanese, so I have to include the film 🤣🤣🤣
It requires a lot of brain work that I forget to do my kanji homework
Ok I just finished watching Lawrence of arabia in the big screen and I swear this is very europhic and yet I tremble in awe.
When we play the overture in the blackened room, I nearly wept. I dunno if it is out of my selfishness or it is out of joy, it feels like I am sucked back into the hot deserts.
Then my eyes cannot stop looking at the small details like the movement of the sand storms or the smallness of the riders.
Peter O’Toole (oh hail the king) acting trembles me to the core especially how he shakes when he is vulnerable, and his expressive blue eyes on the screen burnt me to the core.
How the sense of identity hits me like a truck, like I saw myself to be like T.E Lawrence balancing myself to be ordinary and extraordinary, and I have moments which I have burnt out which is beautifully acted. The question, what is that identity- and like the people in the funeral, it is never clean but a mirage of perspectives.
Is he is extraordinary? Perhaps? A man hungering for normalcy? Maybe?
It feels like a full circle for me as a whole- that yes the desert is the ocean cannot be dipped, but we will find the puddles.
I will forever burn this moment of self-care into my heart forever and ever. That some moments of ordinary, I can make it extraordinary.
Thank you Sir David Lean, and my king Peter O’toole for always being the north stars in my life though I stray from the paths of film that I found myself nerding again.
Ok I have never updated my blog for so long, if you are in home office (like me) and needs something to distract yourself- I found this amazing podcast on Spotify to listen while cleaning up some stuff.
“Certainly [our] Lawrence was very if not entirely homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time: Lawrence and [Ali]…” - (director David Lean)
Felt like making a “write your own biography of T.E. Lawrence” set of random number tables. Because there are a lot of angles people take when they discuss the guy, but it does seem to fall into certain patterns.
Roll 1d6 up to three times, to choose his Driving Internal Motivators:
Illegitimacy angst
Sarah Lawrence’s A+ parenting
Knight-errant complex
Short man syndrome
Sublimated conflicted sexuality
Adrenaline junkie
Role 1d6 to select his sexuality:
Gay
Asexual
Asexual, but preferred men to the extent he was into anyone (homoromantic?)
Too repressed to tell
Masochist NOS
Straight or bi
Roll 1d8 up to three times to determine why he was so messed up after the war:
Combined guilt and frustration re: Sykes-Picot agreement
Guilt and/or moral injury from other war or politics-related reasons
Post-Deraa trauma
Just getting shot at a lot trauma
Death of Dahoum
Death of other comrades/friends/family members
Exhaustion
Low blood sugar
And so on. Just roll on the tables to create your thesis, consult any good encyclopedia for basic biographical details, and flesh out your skeleton with selections from any of the primary sources the good people at telstudies.org have put up.