just the techno-idiot being herself again

I wish LJ FAQs were easier to use. I need a simple way to look up things like how to embed someone's username link in my journal. I tried umpteen ways of searching for it in the FAQs -- embed username, insert username, and so forth and so on, and never could make it come up. I tried "carat lj username=name carat" and several of its variations directly in my journal, too, but when I previewed them, LJ couldn't make heads nor tails out of them. Making a post like this each time it happens so that someone can say "you do it like this" is *not* an efficient way to go about this, and, no, I don't want to clutter up my memory file with stupid little technical how-to-do-this posts, either.

Am I missing something really stupid here? I'd like to be using LJ to at least a *bit* more of its potential... (speaking of which, I'd like to be underlining and italicizing and so forth, too)

a sense of wonder

The concept of a sense of wonder has been appearing often in my world lately, in several different contexts. A friend and I were talking about it being generated by entertainment, especially movies, which led me to wonder (sorry) how that sort of thing is manufactured, if it's manufactured on purpose, and if it hits the same kind of note for most people or if it's just individual serendipity. The friend I was discussing this with and I had very similar reactions to very similar movies, but I don't know if that's because we're both pretty firmly convinced that we're twins 22 years removed or if our reactions were more universal than that [g].

A couple of the movies/scenes that do hit me very hard with that "ooh" [shiver] feeling are:

When that first brachysaurus raises its head above the trees in Jurassic Park and Alan Grant has just about the same reaction I probably would have had. Several other "they *do* move in herds" bits from that movie as well.

Three scenes from Dances With Wolves: John Dunbar's suicidal ride across the battlefield at the beginning, the buffalo hunt, and his dance around the fire when he returns to the fort afterwards. Other moments in that movie have me wanting to slap Kevin Costner upside the head for his sentimentality, but these three scenes get me every single time. Even when I happen to be channel surfing and just run across them out of context.

You'll note that both those films are over ten years old. Most of the movies that do this to me are. The only more recent movie I can think of that did that for me -- and it's a very brief scene -- is the bit where the signal fires are lit in The Return of the King.

It's not novelty. Not when it happens over and over for the same bit of movie. And it's one of the primary reasons I watch movies. Which bothers me, since I seem to be running across it less and less.

Another context in which the sense of wonder popped up is in Tygerr's LJ, when he wrote about novelty vs. the folly of youth. He was amused at a young friend's excitement over a business meeting, and compared it to the joy he finds in sailing in tall ships. He was trying to decide if his friend's feelings about his business meeting were just because it was new to him, or if it was because his friend is young and therefore everything is new (I think I got that right). I tossed in the possibility of the young hanging on to more of their sense of wonder, which might be why people see the young in that context the way they do.

My point here is not just that for some reason this sort of thing keeps whapping me on the head lately. And it's not just that, as I said in my comment to Tygerr, that when I lose my sense of wonder is when I fall into depression -- or vice versa, since I haven't figured out which is cause and which is effect yet. It's how is this all connected, and is it better to be fed a "manufactured" producer of wonder than not to have it at all, and if being fed the manufactured product helps us keep our sense of wonder or if it degrades it, and what can a person do when it abandons her altogether.

Because, as a creative person, I think it's an important thing to hang onto, and when mine goes away for a time, I get desperate thinking I'll never see it again. And then when I do, when it knocks me flat on my back for the first time in longer than I sometimes can remember, it's better than anything.

I just wonder if we have to go through its loss in order to renew it.

Or something.