Story of my afternoon

After much extensive reading, I took a break to watch two movies that both take place in two of the most beautifully romantic places in the world: Pane e tulipani in Venezia and Shirley Valentine in Myknos. Both movies follow middle-aged homemakers who've got absolutely rotten husbands and demanding children, so the women happen upon a much deserved escape and change of scenery.

One of the women continues to live happily in her escape while playing the accordion, and the other's husband finally assumes his role as husband and dusts his own shoes for a change.

My synopses fail miserably, and my left eyesight is three times as blind as it was two years ago (according to an eye visit), so there's not much of a conclusion here, only that:

my random selection of movies happened to be about two different cases of women being liberated from their deadbeat, cheating, and ungrateful husbands. That is all. And quite interesting too as I am waging my dear Aynnie's Virtue of Selfishness.

Experiment on my people

I temporarily deactivated my Facebook.

Two outcomes I expect:
1. Who notices besides my roommates
2. Who actually follows my blog (humanity rests on your shoulders if you do; I will mail you my Steel City Pops punch card... to get it punched for me)

So don't everyone go panicking at once about not being able to contact me, because you can. Via blog, cell phone, letter, or incarnate.

Within five minutes of deactivating, I clicked on my Facebook bookmark at least three times in between other tasks.

I am freeing myself of this holding ground Facebook seems to have sequestered me into.

My idea of "going off the grid." Hello South America!

So long, "friends."

JG - rectification

It has been brought to my attention by several of my readers that my focused commentaries on the movie The Great Gatsby were too critical and lacked a certain general appraisal.

I wish to appease this issue by simply agreeing with the masses: it was spectacularly filmed, the cast excellent, music and costumes absolutely enveloping and alluring, and the storyline one that matched the affluent of the 1920's. Yes, indeed. 

I too agree that it was a riveting film. 

In several of the party scenes I almost jumped from my seat to join the flapper dancing as if I were half-drunken on Gatsby contraband myself. 

In several of the scenes I cried with unidentifiable emotions so strong that I WAS DAISY. 

So yes, it was a jolly good film that I hope stays in the dollar theatre until the end of January. 

JG - Nick (in the movie)

I am frustrated the most by the movie's portrayal of Nick. Though he is the most uninteresting character, a sideliner in complacent observance with absolutely no consolation to offer any of the other characters besides his remarkable gift of  inescapable silence, in my personal opinion, and the movie portrayed that, though in my most lowly of opinions of him he ought to have been given more credit,

we are never to know that his hope ended in an institutionalized mental hospital in which he was treated for his insomnia, depression, alcoholic tendencies. 

That was not in the book, yet already it became the very first impression we are given of him in the first two minutes of the movie. Already, we have lost hope in Nick. He is useless to us, and we can only expect failure... unless we are to find some consolation by the fact that he is being treated for the repercussions of what was about to transpire validating the seriousness and greatness of what was to come... But I doubt that was the intent of the supposed "forwards" unseamlessly sewn throughout the movie, but that frustration calls for an entirely different blog post altogether. 

Oh Nick, all Nick had to do was reflect his position as the middle man, torn between two impossibles. The more Nick appeared, the more we grew to despise the others, because we were not in. And I think that is why I hate reading this book because I become Nick - the insider that is never really in - the outsider. But I think we ought to give Nick and ourselves more credit because we are more than just outsiders, we are involved, but we are not the insiders themselves. 

BECAUSE it isn't our story to tell. The reason why Nick is never in, the reason why none of us are really in is because Nick was present, he experienced, and he observed, so sure he was connected in that way, but he was just there. He was absent. He was boring. And he writes this story about his connection to the events and people of his past, but nothing has set him sail to a future. 

So now that we've come full circle, I don't think that we should be privileged to know what happens to Nick after those Golden-Egg days. I don't think it's fair to the characters, and I don't think it's fair to us as the audience to have an inclining as to what Nick becomes.

Why? Because it destroys the hope of J. Gatsby. 

JG - Daisy

Daisy is the coward. 

JG - death and hope

It didn't even really matter that nobody came to his funeral - Gatsby didn't care about them, he only cared about her. 

Nick was there, hopelessly committed to the man whose hopes left him no dismay, other than death that would separate him from being with Daisy. Even then, though, death wouldn't have defeated the hope he had because his love for her broke all bounds, set no bounds - his hope had no bounds. 

JG

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.