Use It Well

There are some movies that I can just watch over and over again.  You've Got Mail is one of those.  I am watching it right now and wondering why I do this to myself over and over again.  I get so involved in the shows I watch and the books I read.  I really feel like they are part of me, that their worries are my worries and their joys are mine as well.  It probably seems odd and I have trouble expressing exactly how it feels at times, but I do feel a connection with characters and situations that are purely fiction.

Nabokov once wrote, "Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited.  In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much."  I think about this from time to time when my imagination gets the best of me.  Usually it is after a rather intense reaction to something I have seen or read (i.e. my previous two posts) or when I have imagined how a situation would turn out in my real life, only to have to go completely differently.  Both are situations where my imagination builds something up so high that when it does fail, and it nearly always does in these cases, it is almost damaging to my psyche.  So instead of enjoying a show or being excited about something going on in my real life, I get disappointed that things didn't go exactly as I thought.  As I write this, I am well aware of how selfish and self-important I sound.  It's just that with my mind and the way it works, I can't help myself unless I consciously make the effort from the beginning to not form notions of how things will end.  Usually I am already into it by the time I realize there is a problem, which is not helpful.

I will leave you with my fortune from the chinese Adam just brought over: "It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well."

Comments

  1. KacieJune 13, 2010 at 11:58 PM

    Oh man, I'm the same way! I get very involved in characters lives and end up so upset or excited for them, it's hard for me to take that they're not real. And You've Got Mail is one of my standbys. Is it sad I know The Godfather quotes from it and not the original movies?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I am fat.

I am fat. I've always been fat. Well, not counting my senior year of high school when I starved myself to fit into the prom dress I had already grown out of two months later. My weight has varied as well as my clothing size, but in many ways, when my chronic illness started, I was pretty healthy. Despite medications that encouraged weight gain, I was maintaining and even losing a little. I was working out and feeling good about myself. Then pain set in. At first, when I was still trying to work, all I did in my freetime was lie flat, try not to cry, and go to one doctor's appointment after another. Even with all the physical therapy I have completed in the last twenty-one months, I am weaker and much less healthy. And most importantly, I am not happy about it. We have been trying to eat more greens and less meat. I'm trying to cut most sugar from my diet and working on getting off the Pepsi train. Other than yesterday, I have completed a yoga youtube video everyday this wee
Read more

I'm still fat.

It's so funny to me that the last time I posted here it was on the same topic that brought me to write something four and a half years later. I'm still fat. I'm still in pain. But for the last two and a half years, I've also been a mother dealing with those first two.  The past two years have been some sort of mashup between a rollercoaster and a train wreck with parenting and the pandemic. There have been many times I thought about journaling here or in a physical journal, but to be honest, I didn't really want a record of how dark a place my mind had been. It's a struggle to know what's the right thing to do in the midst of a new and ever changing pandemic and I think parenting is always a struggle. At least, I think it always would have been for me. And that's not something I really have wanted to record for posterity, though I admit it would probably help the child's future therapist out. I started some new treatments for pain this week. After st
Read more

Santorwrong

Image
by Jeff Darcy, Cleveland Plain Dealer ,  So I doubt it will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that Santorum scares the crap out of me. He looks like a nice guy and then he opens his mouth and says thi ngs like  "CO2 is a pollutant? Tell that to the plants." and I just want to scream.  I like to think that the only reason someone goes into politics is because they really think they can make a change for the better in some way or another. I cannot imagine someone willingly putting their lives and the lives of their family up to the media  scrutiny of any political race, much less the presidential one, without them really, truly believing good could come of it. So I have to believe that as much as I disagree with nearly everything that comes out of his mouth, Rick Santorum honestly wants what he thinks is best for America. He does not deserve (and we, as Americans do not deserve) this. By Monte Wolverton  It is 2012 people. Do we really need to be afraid of
Read more