the interview scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless”:
“What is your greatest ambition in life?”
“To become immortal… and then die.”
I finally get to watch some French classics thanks to my class. I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favorites, but the film oozes in style - which I can appreciate in itself.
“‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at… something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”
- David Nicholls, One Day
i love hearing him speak as much as i love watching his fights. hahaha such charisma.
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
gets me everytimee.
Most of the time, as an adolescent, your mind and your heart do not coincide. Usually you’ll find the two in a never-ending game of tug-of-war, pulling and pulling at each other until one or the other, exhausted and sore, gives in. Still, there were moments when I would catch my mind and heart in the middle of these long talks. They would just sit there, ignoring the world around them, and talk and talk. I wouldn’t understand what they were doing until I was older, but they were relating to eachother’s sorrows. Physically, I wasn’t invited, since my body was simply an instrument to them. Like when you find your parents and their friends really hashing things out in the dining room, and you just know that you’re not supposed to be there. You belong in your room. The funny thing is that I didn’t really mind being left out when they were communicating so well.
When they finally did agree on something, it was always about running away - not necessarily away from family, friends, the people I loved but just anywhere but here. I felt everything ten times as strongly back then. An issue wasn’t just an issue; it was the world on Atlas’s shoulders. Except I wasn’t Atlas, so the world crumbled down on me.
My mom never understood, or perhaps I just thought she didn’t understand, what she was doing to me. Holding me too close, an invisible leash like a noose around my neck, she kept me within her reach. I vented to my dad when I couldn’t tolerate her anymore. He hated conflict, so he patiently waited until the end of my tantrums to change the subject with a story. It was always essentially the same story.
“You know,” he always started with that, “your mom used to have a puppy when we first moved in together in college. God, she loved that puppy. It was the cutest mutt you’ve ever seen - white with brown spots and tiny little brown ears. It was so hyper, constantly running around and tearing up the place. I guess it was supposed to grow up to be a large dog. We named him Spike, because your mom thought all dogs should have a name like that. Like, Rocky or Buddy or…”
“Dad, I get it.”
“Anyway, I let her cut Spike’s nails one day, and she didn’t want to at first. She was nervous, because she didn’t know how. I told her everything would be fine. Animals are more resilient than you think. She took him outside, and a few minutes later I hear a yelp. I rush outside and your mom was sitting on the floor, sobbing, with splotches of blood on her hands and lap. She accidentally cut his nails too far. Spike was nowhere to be seen. He ran away, and he never came back. She couldn’t eat anything for the next couple of days. She loved that dog.”
When my dad first told me this, I couldn’t believe it - not the story - but I couldn’t believe he would tell me this right after I told him how much I couldn’t stand being next to her, sharing the same air with her. How did this help? I didn’t understand. It only made me angrier. Yet, I still vented to him, every time. At least he listened. Eventually, I didn’t mind the stories too much. A story about a run away puppy changed to a hamster eaten alive by ants, a fish tank knocked over and shattered by a burglar, a cat she was allergic to, on and on. I never thought too much of these anecdotes, unconsciously storing them in the back of my brain, until I had enough one day.
I received good marks at school. I went to church. I didn’t drink alcohol or do drugs. I did everything I was supposed to, so why couldn’t I go out and do a whole bunch of nothing with my friends until midnight? I was sixteen at the time, and I wanted everything my friends did. All I wanted was a later curfew, but I got an earlier one instead just for arguing.
“Be home by eight. Sharp. I’m not kidding Al.” She called me Al, short for Alice, and I hated that about her too. She called me by a boy’s name but refused to give me the freedom of one.
It’s not a surprise that I didn’t listen. Every weekend I pushed my curfew further and further, which only dragged out the arguments with my mom longer and longer. I felt foolishly brave one night after hanging out with my boyfriend, and I didn’t come home until two in the morning. I was hoping she would be asleep, but of course she wasn’t. She was lying on my bed, calm and collected, but she was crying silently with her arms covering her face. I didn’t know what to do with my guilt, so I yelled at her.
“You can’t keep doing this to me. I’m growing up, and you’re ignoring it. I come home, and I feel like I can’t talk to anybody. All you do is nag, and tell me what to do, but you never TALK to me. What’s the point of being home? What’s the point of keeping me cooped up in here? All we ever do is argue, and even when I try talking to dad about it he just tells me stupid stories about you killing animals!”
I said all of this, rushed, out of breath. Before I knew it, I was crying too, and my mom laughed at this and started crying more. But these tears were more light, less heavy and hurtful. She pat my bed and motioned me to lay down next to her. I listened to her, because we hadn’t done this in awhile, and I knew I missed it.
“During my third trimester…”
“Ugh, mom, really?” I started to get up, and she pulled me back down.
“Let me finish. During my third trimester while I was pregnant with you, I was laying next to your father reading baby books one night. I was so overwhelmed by all of the things I needed to remember. What if I forget this or that? Anyway, I was a mess. I loved you so much already, and I didn’t want to hurt you. Out of all people, your dad knew my track record with pets. I listed every single pet I had and reminded him what went wrong. Sometimes it was my fault; sometimes it wasn’t. It didn’t change the fact that I thought I was inherently unable to take care of another living being. Somehow, I will mess up or luck will turn against me like it always has.
“Your dad was a little peeved that I compared you to one of our pets, but he knew that’s not what I meant. I was scared, and he understood why. He just held me close with you in between us for a long while. He rubbed my belly and told me just loud enough for you to hear too that, if anything, I would just love you too much, too hard. Then you kicked for the first time, and I knew we were going to be okay.”
My mom wasn’t crying anymore. She was even smiling. I curled up against her chest, and we just laid there for the rest of the night. I didn’t kick this time. I stayed, still, right where I was.
“Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.
This was not unusual. He was always sad about the world. It was a large reason why I loved him. We’d sit together and be sad and think about being sad and sometimes discuss sadness.
On his last human day, he said ‘Annie, don’t you see? We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.’”
-Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
People become more and more jaded as they grow older, don’t they? It makes sense though. We need a way to protect ourselves from the growing number of emotional calamities we face as the clock ticks by. Like the way your skin thickens and scars after a physical injury, your heart does the same after an emotional one. So adults (as well as yourself one day) are bound to cultivate the mindset to think instead of feel. No wonder why the things we often say are veiled by sarcasm or irony. Although if used sparingly and wittingly, it’s funny as hell.
Still, I hope I never lose the balance between the two. I hope I will never stop laughing until my stomach hurts when something is funny or crying, tears streaming down my face, uncontrollably when something is sad. I already think too much as it is, and I know a lot of you do too.
random thoughts as i’m reading.
In my Banned Books and Novels class, we’re currently discussing “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg. It’s an interesting poem. Every stanza makes your mind boggle, but it all makes sense at the same time. His juxtapositions have me constantly going, “What???????????? Oh, yes.”
Anyway, I found it appropriate that I write my first tumblr entry about this class, because it’s the first class I’ve ever done spontaneous, let alone creative, writing in college.
We did this exercise with an image we had to choose before class first. None of us knew what the purpose of the image was until now. We had 30 seconds to just write what we saw/thought/felt/whatever. These were my professor’s only two rules:
- Your hand cannot stop moving.
- Do not use punctuations. Only use dashes. [I did use apostrophes, but it would have disrupted my thought process a lot more if I had purposely left them out.]
My image:
“It’s not shining - It’s glaring - so many colors - yellow purple orange - It’s too pretty - I can’t look but I can’t move away - feet grounded - face burning - It’s coming at me - visual suicide - too pretty but scary”
Then we were told to choose two words that juxtaposed each other from our ramblings and pass it on to the person on our right. We then used the pair of words we received and repeated the same exercise. Except this time, we didn’t have an image but rather words.
I received “opium peacock”
“A dangerous peacock - never heard of it - actually yes I have - they bite - they’re so pretty they’re arrogant - too many colors - meshed together - they would only seem black - black holes in their feathers - intoxicating to look at - swirls and swirls of colors - twirling into an abyss - never ending - dangerous peacock”
[My thought process: opium is bad, black describes bad, bad peacock] Ugh.
The whole point of the exercise is simply to write what you’re thinking right as you’re thinking it, obviously. But it was interesting for me, because it was like telling me to push my subconscious away. That’s really hard for me. I struggled at first, but I enjoyed the change. Although, I did realize that I tend to be a little dark…
