You've Got Mail

Good late night my darlings, it is a bit late for me to be up and doing anything but be sensible and just try to sleep. But here I am, awake, none the less; and blogging for that matter. The last few days, I have felt the urge to watch an old time favorite of mine that I grew up watching: You've Got Mail, with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Dave Chapelle, Steve Zahn, and a few other people I don't remember; oh, Yea! And Greg Kinnear. Meg Ryan is the small time bookstore owner, and Tom Hanks is the "price club" of books who is just opening up a new store in the same neighborhood as Meg Ryan's store, threatening to shut down her business.

This whole movie is full of so many sweet truths and the sweet seed of hope. Makes me think of all the endless hours as a child I spent at the Barnes and Noble in the Aurora neighborhood I grew up in. I can't even begin to describe all the lovely bits of this movie without rambling on for hours, and even rambling wouldn't fully get the feeling across for this film. I am a very non-verbal person, always using my hands, my face, and my expressions to tell a lot of my story for me.

This movie was in its' own way, my cult classic I grew up with. As I got older, it got put on the shelf where it collected dust, and I remember having turned twenty-one years old, and I pulled it out to watch, and my life was so different from where it had started and where it ended up at the time and even where it is now, and I remember watching it there, curled up in the corner of a ratty old couch that was my bedroom.... And I felt nothing for it. I didn't even finish it. It was like one of those sub conscience wake up calls, or like my conscience calling me from far away: asking me where did that part of me go that was comfortable just being myself? Where did that girl go that didn't have to act hard all the time? Where did that girl go that even when there wasn't someone else she was interested in romantically, she still had the dream of someone else?... Where did she go? I think that was one of the first poignant self evaluations I had of myself and the former life I was committed to.
I spent four years drifting away from this core classic of myself, and I am happy to say, it only took me two years to fight my way back. One of the emails that Meg Ryan and Joe Fox (tom hanks) share in the beginning epitomizes my sad poor pathetic addiction to Starbucks coffee and makes me laugh at myself thinking there is probably much more truth to what he says than I'd like to expand on, but I'm o.k. just laughing about it and considering it probably really is the truth, and I'm not going to fight it. It's who I am, and I am content with who I am, so why should I feel bad about it?

So, I will leave you with his opinion of people and Starbucks and I now realize it is one o'clock in the morning, so have a peaceful rest of your night.

"The whole reason of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. So, people who don't know what the they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee, but an absolutely defining sense of self."

~Joe Fox- Tom Hanks

And I have to say, the movie ends with Over the Rainbow.... It isn't the version by Iz, but I don't think it existed yet, so the Harry Nilson version just had to suffice in the meantime, and maybe the Iz version did already exist, I just didn't know about it yet.. But I know about it now, and they say when you find the real thing to hold onto it, so I will. And I wish you the same.

Brave

Hello my fellow bloggers, I hope you find yourselves enjoying this afternoon whether it is sunny, raining, or cold wherever you are. It is sunny and on the verge of being stifling hot. I doggedly tap away on my keyboard just because I know I am going to talk from my heart, and talking from the heart requires courage, and I have used up so much right now, and yet, I know it is required of me to continue using it until further notice. The summer heat supplies such wonderfully natural happy endorphins, and yet at a scorching price to be payed: getting sunburnt. *sigh* I rhetorically ask myself, "What can one do?" However, I was able to see the recent Pixar movie Brave on the weekend it came out and I have been bursting to talk to about it.

The short film at the beginning is my favorite Pixar short film ever, no doubt whatsoever. It is about three generations, a grandfather, father, and son that row out in a little dingy every night, put up a ladder and climb up to the moon. On the moon is where falling stars land and is where they sweep/rake up as many stars to give the moon its phases. The film encompasses the night the grandfather and father take the son/grandson up to the moon for the first time to teach him the family tradition. It is a beautiful and touching excerpt about learning the tradition we are born with to build yourself a foundation and then venturing out and finding your own way to build and expand tradition so that with each generation it evolves and betters itself, by learning from mistakes and each person recognizing the difference of individuals. It touched me, and quite honestly a day doesn't go by now, that I don't think about the moon and look forward to seeing just so that I can imagine them up there having cleaned up fallen stars.  Looking, as always, for the irony in life, I smile realizing my Nana loves her hot tub and atrium so she can look up at that "beautiful moon" and now I love it too; funny how those things work out.

I do not want to give away too many spoilers about Brave.... Skimming over what I summarized about the mini film, I realize that if Brave was a paper, the mini film is the beginning paragraph of that paper; it is the suggestive beginning of the feature films theme. So, I will tick off the main things about Brave that stood out to me.

1. Born into privilege/gifts requires great responsibility.

2. Tradition is a foundation, but only a foundation. A foundation does not build a house. Individuals build houses.

3. We are not our parents, and we are not our parent's mistakes. Coming of age happens at different ages for everyone, but once we do, we are not children anymore. We are adults. We are individuals. Free of our parents pasts, only responsible for our own history that we have created and only responsible for our  stories that are not reflections of our parents history.  We are born with this strange sense that we are born into living out and correcting our parents lives and where they went wrong. But that sense is misleading, because we are all born with our own destinies free of what our parents were and where they came from.

4. With Freedom, we are required to adorn our characters with diplomacy, humility, and integrity, for without these siblings, freedom would be boastful, hardly recognizble and scorned.


And this last thing is what I have most learned my darlings, long before I ever saw this movie, but was so readily reminded of after seeing this. Always remember, it isn't being brave, if you aren't scared. Figure out what you need. And learn how to ask for it. Never forget those things.

As always, my darlings, I sign off with much affection and I hope you are able to enjoy sweet summer and all of her fickle lazy moods. I know I am and my skin is my witness.

sincerely, and

 Red as a Lobster,

Read Riding Hood.