Meditative Prose
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
The details of my life always seem mundane when I write them down. But then again, what is there except details?
At midnight I brewed a big mug of black tea and put on one of my favorite movies, Richard Linklater’s Slacker. The movie is a series of conversations and interactions that take place among slackers (unemployed twenty-somethings, anarchists, philosophy students, conspiracy buffs — people) in Austin, Texas. You see one interaction, then the camera follows one character elsewhere until they meet someone else, and so on. The thing I love so much about this movie is its pure plotlessness. Sure, the people are throwing out ideas that you don’t hear everyday, but really they’re just living — riffing on whatever topics they like best, engaging with the world, arguing with friends, being truly social individuals (think about that!)
I’ve seen a lot of movies — probably too many. Sometimes I catch myself wondering about the soundtrack for my life: maybe I’m feeling sad, and I hear some Elliott Smith playing somewhere far off in the back of my head (probably remembered from that scene in The Royal Tenenbaums), and I think Yeah, that’s fitting: Elliott Smith providing the soundtrack for my despair. And he is, in a very real way, and it’s not doing me any good: just allowing me to view my life like it’s a movie, like I’m just a character to be pitied, with no recourse to help myself, because, you know, they’ve already started playing the sad music.
All this is just to say that I’m beginning to realize the extent to which the media we consume affects the way we behave and see ourselves. Had I known this in high school, I wouldn’t have listened to such whiny music, which only exacerbated my frustration with girls. And maybe if the girls who come into the bookstore where I work to buy OK! magazine or People knew this, they would quit seeing themselves through the camera lens, pouty and airbrushed and surrounded by ad copy. I don’t know. All I know is that when I put myself inside the world of Slacker, there is no soundtrack, no playing on my emotions or stroking my ego. It is a world of free people freely engaging with one another, where no one person is the center of attention but every individual counts: An existentialist society. Sign me up!
