Duh.

I am madly in love with Alan Shore and his amazing closings.

I'm just saying. That wasn't what I wanted to write though.

My point is:
I'm retarded.
All that stuff about forgiveness.
Yeah, of course it's about letting go.
And what is letting go about?
Closure.

Seriously, how could I have forgotten that.
On Boston Legal the other night, Allan Shore argued that a mixture of revenge and justice can give a person the greatest and most satisfying closure.
Merriam-Webster says closure is, "an often comforting or satisfying sense of finality closure; also : something (as a satisfying ending) that provides such a sense."
In other words, it's understanding and acceptance.

And those two are pretty closely linked. For the most part, understanding is key to acceptance. Which is where the difficulty lies. How can you accept what you don't understand? And how do you come to understand what you cannot comprehend?
Sometimes, I think it just takes a bit of help from someone else. A different perspective.
But other times, I think you simply can't. In certain situations at certain times in certain places, you just can't. At which point, you just have to accept the fact that you can't understand, and therefore can't accept.

On the whole, it's not easy, is it?
Then again, what in life is?

It's really disconcerting how certain actions or places can connect so deeply to certain emotions or feelings that you associate with an experience. I was driving home a certain way before, and I was just suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that it was this time last year, or some time last winter. It was so eerie, especially because where I was last year is so different from where I am now. Except it isn't. But it is. I dunno. Whatever. It was just a really striking feeling and it hasn't quite gone away yet...

"Nothing matters in this whole wide world...

...When you're in love with a Jersey girl..."

The Truth about Jersey Girls

1. Only Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen are allowed to say “down the shore.” Otherwise, it’s never “the shore.” It’s the beach. Real Jersey Girls know this. And it’s not just a summer thing. True Jersey Girls haunt their beaches all year ‘round.

2. Sand is her friend. In between the sheets, in her car, in her hair – wherever. A Jersey Girl doesn’t mind – she embraces it.

3. She’s proud to be from Jersey. She knows that yes, the boardwalk is trashy. Yes, Seaside Heights is trashy. If a Benny argues otherwise, they’re obviously not from around here. If a Benny agrees, who are they to judge? It may be trashy, but it’s home. Though she may complain about New Jersey and say she hates living here, she knows its trashy spots are part of its charm, and when you get down to it, she’ll always defend it.

4. When it’s warm, shoes are optional, and if they’re on, they’re flip flops. She probably has at least half a dozen pairs. Make up is also optional, and if she’s wearing any, it’s probably mascara. Waterproof. She also knows there’s nothing shameful about tan lines – she’s proud of hers, just as she should be.

5. A Jersey Girl won’t play games: she’ll say what she means. Yeah, she might have an attitude, but regardless of how she says it, you’ll always know a true Jersey girl isn’t being fake.

6. She knows that it doesn’t take much to have a good time. She’s cool with just chilling on the beach, or spending an evening driving around town with the windows down and the radio on. Odds are, she’s up for anything.

7. Food. A Jersey Girl not only knows where the nearest diner is, but she knows where to get the best pizza, subs, hot dogs, boardwalk fries, ice cream – and she has no problem with eating it all.

8. Every Jersey Girl is different, but all of them are spunky, confident, fun-loving, laid-back, warm, tough, sweet, unpretentious, loyal, and independent on one level or another – some more than others, but it’s cool: she embraces her uniqueness, and is proud of the fact that there’s no one quite like her.

9. No matter where she is, what she’s doing, or what she’s wearing, all Jersey Girls are stunning. It’s a careless beauty, an inner glow, and whether you can see it or not, it’s there.

10. Jersey Girls are classy. Always.

"He was not averse to hard work, even when it was monotonous, but he did not like pointless work. Which this was."

(Wizard and Glass)

Amen.

Outta Here...

Going to college was supposed to be liberating.

Yet I keep feeling more and more trapped. More held back. More restrained.

What the eff.

Outta here,
How am I gonna get outta here?
I'm thinking outta here,
When am I gonna get outta here?
And when will I cash in my lottery ticket,
And bury my past with my burdens and strife?
I want to shake every limb in the garden of Eden
And make every love, the love of my life...

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Listening to: Bruce Springsteen - Livin' In The Future

"There are many things that we would throw away...

...if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."
- Oscar Wilde

Okay, so I was musing about forgiveness a while back, but it was completely illogical in practical application, which I realized even then. Saying the words and meaning them are two different things, obviously.

In a way, forgiveness is all about vindiction - it's all about letting go. And I've come to wonder if the act of letting go is something to be achieved, or something that just occurs. Can you make yourself let something go? Can you force yourself to drop a grudge or erase bitterness? Or is it something that just happens, something for which you need to wait? And if it is possible to make yourself let go, how do you go about it? What do you do to make yourself forgive and forget?

I feel like it isn't possible to be able to force yourself to let go of something, be it pain, bitterness, anger, or even love or desire. You can't insist that you forgive someone - if you try, you'll only be saying the words, going through the motions - for all intents and purposes, you'll simply be lying to both yourself and the person seeking or deserving your pardon. And you may honestly know they deserve it: you may be aware that you should be able to let go, forgive, and move on. You may be a bit ashamed that some kind of immaturity is holding you back from letting go. But emotionally, you can't. How do you come to terms with those emotions, let go of the bitterness, drop the grudge, forget what has upset you?

Though, is it really immaturity? What is it, exactly, that stops us from from wanting to forgive? In adults, it certainly seems like it's immaturity. It's exploited for comedy at times - in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry can't forgive Harmony for sleeping with his best friend when they were in high school 'cause she'd promised not to, even though that was probably a good 15, 20 years earlier, and he can't stop repeating, "You slept with [him]." It's a really funny sequence, and it makes him seem like he's a teenager trapped in a man's body, who's being really immature. But is that really accurate? Why is that so "immature"? Is it really, or has society just labeled it as immature?

It's difficult: why can't we let go? Do we just have to wait it out? Does it simply vary from person to person - is it easy for some, harder for others? I guess what you're letting go factors into the equation, too. If all you can do is wait for the feeling to pass, wait to want to forgive, what do you do in the mean time? How do you handle what it is you want to let go?


One night several weeks before Daniel had taken her out to dinner and asked for a divorce, she'd woken up and seen that he wasn't in bed. She found him in the living room, in the armchair, looking out at the rain. The wind was shrill against the windows, rocking the trees. Sylvia loved a storm at night. It made everything simple. It made you content just to be dry.

Obviously it was having different effect on Daniel. "Are you happy?" he had asked.

This sounded like the start of a long conversation. Sylvia didn't have on her robe or her slippers. She was cold. She was tired. "Yes," she said, not because she was, but because she wanted to keep things short. And she might be happy. She couldn't think of anything making her unhappy. She hadn't asked herself that question for a very long time.

"I can't always tell," Daniel said.

Sylvia heard this as a criticism. It was a complaint he'd made before--she was too subdued, too reticent. When would she learn to let go? Water poured from the gutters onto the deck. Sylvia could hear a car pass on Fifth Street, the shhh of its tires. "I'm going back to bed," she said.

"You go on," Daniel told her. "I'll be along in a minute."

But he wasn't, and she fell asleep. She had a familiar dream. She was in a foreign city and no one spoke the languages she spoke. She tried to call home, but her cell phone was dead. She put the wrong money in the pay phone, and when she finally got it right, a strange man answered. "Daniel's not here," he told her. "No, I don't know where he went. No I don't know when he'll be back."

In the morning she tried to speak to Daniel, but he was no longer willing. "It was nothing," he said. "I don't know what that was about. Forget it."


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Listening to: Mandy Moore - All Good Things

A Quick Explanation

So I've realized that I was being terribly one-sided in my discussion of how I wish everyone would just slow the heck down and take the time to appreciate stuff and live more fulfilling lives. Because there are people who don't move at the break-neck pace of the East Coast...rather, Northeast Coast...and who says that they live more fulfilling lives than the rest of us? Everything in the South moves like nothing else exists, like nothing matters - and I find it intolerably slow. Lifestyles in other countries are like this, too - no one's in any thing remotely resembling a "rush," ever. I don't think I could handle that, all the time.

However, the fast pace of life here is only tolerable when it's simply a tool to keep you moving, to prevent idleness, to maintain excitement and interest. When the fast pace gets to be stressful and overwhelming, when it makes you blind to the important things in life, that's when I have a problem with it. And when it never stops, but just keeps getting faster, sucking you in deeper and deeper. That's when it becomes detrimental. I guess as in all things, a balance must be found.

I feel better having explained that to myself.

"To die so young is more than merely dying; it is to lose so large a part of life..."

"Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you got till it's gone?"
- Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

So my Facebook homepage feed told me today that a guy I had a class with last year joined a group called "Stay Strong Nick." Description: "To a brother who could always make us smile, you're forever in our thoughts and prayer, we love you brother." Recent News: "Nov. 3- Nick was in a severe car accident last night. *Nov. 4, Nick passed away late this afternoon...our deepest condolences go out to his family." Related group: "STAY STRONG GARY..YOU ARE IN OUR PRAYERS". Description: "PLease leave and stories or memories you have of Gary. RIP GARY DEVERCELLY..you will always be in our hearts..we will never forget you "CALI" We love you G-Baby 9.4.88- 3.30.07"

This is the part that Blogger keeps deleting on me that I've written twice already and am now trying to remember:

I hate these groups. Mostly because there are too many of them. Far too many. It's lovely that people gather together to share memories and love for a lost loved one, but none of them should be lost. No matter what the reason - an uncontrollable terminal illness, a freak accident - it's a tragedy every time. Too often, I feel like it's probably the result of some reckless act of youth. When we're young, we have this subconscious belief that we are impervious, that we are immortal. I hate that. Nothing can touch us or hurt us. I feel like this is almost a natural, inherent attitude, that occurs in everyone in various degrees. Bad things don't happen to us, or to the people we love - only to other people. Other people get into horrible car accidents, other people get alcohol poisoning and die, other people get assaulted - it's always other people. And this attitude is reflected in what we do. We get careless and thoughtless, we take so-called "calculated" risks that only calculate what we risk in terms of ourselves, not in terms of others. We do stupid things because "it's only one time" or "just this once." We flirt with fate, because nothing can get to us - nothing can reach us, in our youth. We've got it all: we're young, we're healthy, we're carefree, and we've got our whole lives ahead of us.

Except that's not always the case. Bad things happen. Often to people who don't deserve to have bad things happen to them. But they happen. And when tragedy strikes, we feel it deeply, but often only fleetingly. We mourn in that dramatic melancholy that belongs only to the young - the kind that lasts only a while before our world moves on, and in a sense, we forget that it ever happened or could ever happen again. Not everyone does this, but many do. And then we go back to our reckless lifestyles until one day, we stop, for whatever reason - there are many.


"Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerers and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment."
- Harlan Ellison


We never really value our lives or the moments we're given. There's so much in every mundane, little moment that we take for granted. Cracking a joke with a stranger. Sitting around in silence with a friend. Meeting someone new. Going on a trip. Getting a new job. Listening to a speaker. Eating your favorite food. Dancing. Taking a solitary walk. Splashing through puddles. Alone, these things are simple experiences that everyone can understand. Woven together, they're your life.


"There is so much in the world for us all if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves--so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful."
- L. M. Montgomery


We waste a lot of time being angry. I guess that's okay, on one level - without the anger and pain and bitterness and negative emotions and bad moods, the good stuff wouldn't seem so great. But letting that control us - it'll drive you nuts. Shakespeare said, "Sweet are the uses of adversity," and they are. Everything that we experience, it becomes a part of us, and being positive about everything we experience makes our overall life that much sweeter. Of course, that's easier said than done.


"I don't know, you know, I always think that if I could just accept the fact that my life was supposed to be difficult, you know, that's what to be expected, then I might not get so pissed-off about it and I'd just be glad when something nice happens."
- Jesse, Before Sunrise


I guess we just do the best we can and that's all there really is...

I dunno. I'm not really succeeding in the whole transposing thought/feeling to words deal tonight.

Haha. On that note, one last quote:

"I quote others only in order to better express myself."
- Michel de Montaigne

Think of all the people that you know or have heard of, who do stupid, obnoxious, insane things. You know the ones. The people who do stuff just so they have a good story to tell, so they seem more interesting.

Now strip them of their stunts, of all the crazy things they do. Count how many of them are actually incredibly dull people when you get down to the core.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bottom line: you can pull as much stupid crap as you want, and you can make everyone, including yourself, think that this makes you interesting. But the more worthwhile people are the ones who are interesting without all the dressings. Substance over style, folks.

"Slow down, you crazy child, take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while..."

Everything in our world moves fast.
It forces us to move as fast, if not faster.
It's all about speed - you have to move quickly, just to keep up.
Fast is better, we learn: work fast, drive fast, learn fast, live fast.
Except that's wrong.

"I can't. I can't go on. It goes too fast. We don't have time to look at one another... Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you... Do any human beings realize life while they live it?-- every, every minute?"

Thornton Wilder wrote that in Our Town 70 years ago. And the world's gotten even faster since then.

Life goes by so fast as it is. Why do we want to go even more quickly through it?
How can we enjoy it when we go through at such a velocity, we barely perceive what's happening around us?
We're moving at millions of milles a moment in, out, around our surroundings.
How can we get anything out of it if we can't even slow down enough to see it?

We move slowly when we're little. Or rather, at our own paces.
Then school starts. Pre-school, pre-K, kindergarten.
Elementary school. Middle school. High school.
Push push push push push. Get through fast and efficiently. Do as much as you can in that small period of time so you can keep going.
College. Work work work. Gotta get a job then. Or go on to post-graduate studies. Either way, there'll be a lot of people to impress on the way. After all, you still have to meet a life partner.
Get a job. Get married. Have kids. Now you have a family, and you have to move through their lives at the speed of light, too. You can sleep when you're dead.
Oh wait. At the speed you're going, you're going to be dead by the time you're 50.
But that's what you get for trying to live successfully in such a fast-paced world.
And that's just for society's definition of success. These days, success isn't analogous to greatness. And it isn't analogous to happiness, either.

"At that moment, I knew that success, not greatness, was the only god the world served."

If we could only forget the drive to be successful in our high-speed world.
We'd move through life at a natural pace - at our own natural paces.
We could appreciate the great things about life instead of constantly being weighed down by the negatives.
We could live, and not just exist.

"Slow down, you're movin' too fast -
You gotta to make the moment last.
Just kickin' down the cobblestones,
Lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy...

I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep,
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morningtime drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you, all is groovy..."

Paul Simon wrote that 40 years ago. He was right too.

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Listening to: Billy Joel - Vienna [Live Unreleased Version]

'Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time'

By Rob Sheffield, contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. It was a great book - when he was young, he married a girl he met at graduate school in the late '80s - "a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl" - nothing like himself, except in that they both loved music. He used the mix tapes he made as a boy and during his relationship with her to chronicle his life, his love for her, and what he went through when she suddenly passed away in the late '90s.

I loved it because it toyed with the idea of how our subconscious connects different things in our lives - like songs - to feelings or emotions we experience when we are involved with them. An object or a song or a movie or a book - none of these are merely things. They are all alive with the feelings or thoughts that we associate them with. Newsweek's movie reviewer David Ansen did something similar recently - he's been keeping a list of every movie he's ever seen since he was twelve, back in 1958 or so. He wrote an article that appeared in the magazine recently about how what he was watching at the time brings back memories for him of what he was thinking, how he was feeling at the time.

I thought a while ago about doing something similar myself - recording different associations like that. It's not just music - it's clothes, writing, smells, and so much more, too. It's both good and bad - it's comforting to have memories, but disconcerting in that it makes letting certain things go, incredibly difficult - to make myself break these associations. So many things have a history for me, and my past is never really gone - it's still with me in the little things I see and hear every day.


"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
- Maya Angelou


On some days, it feels like it'd be nice if the crazy machine in Eternal Sunshine was real, and certain memories and connections could be erased from our beings. Or, at least, if we could have the option of locking them up and forgetting about them temporarily. Not forever or even for a long time. To be liberated from them without having to work at it, just for a day. That'd be lovely...


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Listening to: Fall Out Boy - Hum Hallelujah