The Edge of Yesterday: Warning contains feelings about 2002 which was a really SHITTY year and also you've probably already heard me cry about this story

I went to see The Edge of Tomorrow last night. It made me think about the past and alternate realities and that sort of thing. But it was mostly the blog post I read this morning that sent me into a terrible time-loop of distress and self-loathing and I don't think there's a big alien to kill that will break me out of this one.

Sometimes you just gotta say the thing and let the other person deal with the thing. Working around someone’s terrible behavior while you grow to dislike them more and more and more isn’t actually kinder.

Captain Awkward

In 2001 I was at a party. I was trying to be… fun. 

You see - I had this problem where I felt really left out of my friendship group. And there were lots of reasonable reasons for this - we were in different year levels at school and so while they were busy with their final year of VCE I was floundering in mental illness and unemployment during the year off which was supposed to refresh me after my life-meltdown of year 12 and telling my mother and my therapist about my sexual abuse.

But it made sense, you know? They’d see each other at school and organise things there and they didn’t see me regularly so, quite naturally, we were drifting apart which made me sad, but not angry, because it was just a thing.

But I thought, maybe, if I were… fun and cool enough they would remember me next time they were having a party or going to the movies or hanging out and then maybe I would get invited to things more. And I wanted to be more fun. More ZANY.

I always wanted to be zany. It was sort of a ongoing struggle for me to… try and manifest some sort of personality. Everyone else had seemed to pick one up naturally at some point, but I felt like I’d missed out on mine. Everyone else seemed to be forming opinions and interests all over the place while the most I could manage was a distain for the Backstreet Boys and an obsession with the Barenaked Ladies.

And that’s probably not the only reason I would get drunk and say and do stupid shit. Or even maybe the biggest. I was fucking miserable, after all.

But there was a dude at this party who’d been someone that none of us had even liked when I’d last had classes with him - which was, admittedly, in 1997 before I skipped up a year. It was a reminder of how disconnected I was from my friends and I recall promising myself that I would put in more effort.

But as I was drunkenly making my way either to or from the toilet this dude pulled me aside and told me I should pull myself together and shouldn’t be so drunk and stupid because it was worrying and annoying and he… he told me that this was why people didn’t invite me to things. 

That wasn’t a kind thing to say. 

I didn’t believe him. This was, you remember, someone I had never considered to be my friend. I thought, that if what he was saying were true, someone would have mentioned it. Only in less mean words. Or something.

I think about it more now, than I did then.

So I tried harder to cling to my friendships - friendships are important, you know, and we’d been pals, the girls at least, since year 7. I started uni  in 2002 and had a pretty good first 6 months, even. I was meeting people* but, you know, that’s not the same as true friendship. The people that are there for the long haul through changing year levels and exams and VCE and all that.

Haha.

And at the end of 2002 I was invited to a Christmas party. I was VERY happy about that - I’d seen my friends even less than ever and everyone was always too busy when I’d invited them to do anything. So I went, and, unshaken in my strategy to be AWESOMELY FUN and MEMORABLE so that I wouldn’t be forgotten so often in the coming year.

I peaked early, as I generally did at parties. It seems more acceptable now that I’m in my thirties but even back in my raging teens I couldn’t really keep awake much past 10pm.

There was a designated “quiet room” though and I thought it would be nice to sit in the quiet room and be quiet for a while and catch up properly with my friends. There were a few people in the room already but soon after I joined them, they trickled out.

And closed the door.

I’d brought my boyfriend-at-the-time to the party so I wasn’t alone. But I saw him plenty often and was at the party to see my friends but no matter how many times I opened the door and tried to smile invitingly at the people who walked past… they just kept closing it so eventually I gave up and went to sleep.

It was not, I am fully aware, anyone else’s responsibility to check my behaviour or correct me or otherwise coach me into being a less irritating adult than I’d, I can reasonably assume, been a teenager.

Someone I didn’t like and who’d had enough to drink to feel it was appropriate to tell other people how to behave had told me I was annoying and that people didn’t like me the year before and I’d felt like that was mean. I guess what I am saying is that I don’t think that the people at this party were being kinder.

Especially when I heard later via someone who would still talk to me that a bunch of people were really mad at me for being horribly rude and taking up the quiet room the whole night. Yeah.

The next morning someone offered me a lift home. I asked multiple times if they were sure they didn’t mind - because, not being able to drive myself, I was often aware of my inability to reciprocate in kind with lifts. She assured me that it was and I was very grateful and I thanked her again as she dropped me off.

And she looked me in the eye and she said “It was so great to see you! I hope I’ll see you again soon!” and she left without inviting me to the New Years Eve party she was hosting three days later.

I don’t think that was kinder.

And I don’t know, I guess, how hurt I would have been if at point between 1996 and 2000 or whenever it was that my problems became too difficult for anyone else to deal with (No blame here, we were all teenagers and my problems were way too difficult for ME to deal with and I had therapists and shit) I’d been told “hey we don’t actually like you or want to be friends with you”. Because I guess they’d probably told me that a million times with attempted slow fades and spurned invitations and not inviting me to things. I just didn’t hear it. Heck, a dude did tell me with words and I just didn't believe him.

Every few years this happens. Something sparks it and I think about it again and even after years of not thinking about it it still hurts so much and I wish I knew how I could make it not do that. Not hurt. Not come back into my head. At least one of those things.

I really enjoyed the movie though! Even though the ending was silly.


* am still friends with these people. <3

The Fellowship of The Hobbit

I remember the first time I read The Hobbit I was thrilled to discover that there was even more of the story than I'd heard numerous times on the book-on-tape version I had. I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep as a child (and as an adult) and I'd listen to my The Hobbit cassette while trying to get to sleep. And in the car on long drives. And sometimes just because I was bored. 

So eventually I borrowed a copy of the book from the library and suddenly I realised that my cassette tape had left bits out. There were new bits I hadn't heard before and I felt both betrayed (my cassette tape was wrong) and excited.

But mostly I was disappointed because those new (to me) bits of The Hobbit? They... kind of sucked. I found myself skimming over them to get back to the actual story because elves are boring.

So I think part of my enduring love of The Hobbit (compared with The Lord of The Rings which I don't care for at all) may be partly an enduring love of a clearly and soothingly voiced abridged version. I haven't read it in a while and I am pretty sure that I still like the book a lot.

This afternoon my husband and I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It's part one of a three film epic and I'm disappointed because I still think The Hobbit is a story which is improved by removing things, rather than adding them. 

As Leonard Nimoy says: perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Actually Antoine de Saint-Exupery might have said it, but I can only hear it in Leonard Nimoy's voice). The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey could have had quite a lot of stuff taken away.

I met a guy at a meetup event once who was studying filmmaking and so we got to talking about movies when discussing films that I thought were great I often commented on the pacing. He laughed (but in kind of a delighted way, I think) and told me that he'd only ever really talked about the pacing of movies with his fellow students. I don't know, I think that if you can watch a movie without being bored or confused then someone in editing has done a pretty good job. Pacing killed The Hobbit for me, I was bored through most of it. So that was pretty disappointing. I really enjoyed my favourite scenes from the book ("Good Morning!" and the riddle scene) but... pretty much everything was too long and it felt like Jackson was just showing off for the sake of it. Huge fancy scenes devoted to something that could have been a quick cut-away during dialogue, fight scenes that just went on for way too long. Ugh, oh well.

I have pretty high hopes for an amateur re-cut 120min version of all three films once they're all out on DVD though. That could be really amazing. 

Suresh's comment was that he wasn't sure whether the film was LotR: Episode 1 or LotR Fan Fiction. What do you think?

Life of Pi: or immunity to deepness: or there is a spoon

I grew up in a "new age" environment, attending a Rudolph Steiner school in Cape Byron from 1989 until 1994, and not even a measles outbreak in the early 90s which more than halved our class size for a week was enough to shake the anti-vaccination attitude of my parents, peers and most importantly myself.

As a child I read Richard Bach and James Redfield, and graduated naturally to Neale Donald Walsch, which distilled in my adolescent self the sort of arrogance that lead to my parents praising me as wise and my early high-school teachers not knowing how to mark my book reports.

In year 8 I wrote a fairly thoroughly (but not well) researched anti-vaccination diatribe for my persuasive writing piece. I felt that I researched both anti-vaccination and pro-vaccination arguments. I no longer have a copy of the essay I wrote - I'm glad of that. I was thrilled that my teacher didn't quite know how to react. You might think that my overwhelming smugness would have prevented me from having any friends at all but apart from that essay and a few book reports on books I wasn't old enough to understand or appreciate (but I did anyway; both understand and appreciate) I didn't really let it out that much, and I'm sure that with a different upbringing my utter lack of confidence, anxiety and introversion would have made me equally as friendless.

We were something close to enlightened, I thought. Secure in our superiority at least. Lamenting the inability of the common people to really understand.

My youth warped messages that older people found inspiring into something all consuming. I was burned from the inside out. I was in awe of my own magnificence, and the magnificence of the universe. And inside my awe was the sort of soul crushing depression which lead to notebooks full of bad poetry lamenting the certainty of my own miserable existence (as contrasted with the uncertainty of absolutely anything else).

I was anti-vaccination until I found anti-anti-vaccination websites online. Until that time I hadn't even known that there was an anti-anti-vaccination movement and it wasn't the arguments against anti-vaccination that persuaded me so much as the very existence of them. I had thought that my philosophies of life were incompatible with almost everyone I knew because I was wiser or more enlightened.

There was a sort of epiphany to realise that other people might have discarded ideas like mine not because they weren't ready for them, but because maybe they were fucking bullshit.

In 1999 I saw The Matrix in the cinema. I liked the part where they ran out of plot and started shooting stuff but while my friends declared the movie "so deep"... I didn't really care about it. At all.

I was exposed early to pulp-pseudo-philosophy and, once I recovered, I'd become immune.

Which is all a very long way of explaining why I think I miss out (but don't miss) on something other people experience watching (or reading - I haven't read the book yet) Life of Pi. It was incredibly pretty - perhaps the most visually spectacular film I've ever seen. It was thoroughly enjoyable and brought me to tears more than once. But it didn't move me. I got it, I'm sure I'm not missing anything that people who find the story deep and spiritually moving see; nevertheless, I remain unmoved.

(It's also a long way of explaining that I'm apparently still pretty smug.)

Review: Looper

Looper? I hardly know 'er.

So my husband and I went to see Looper recently and I thought it was pretty great!

(mild) Spoilers for film follow.

Things I liked:

The synopsis wasn't really much of a spoiler. Too frequently the synopsis of a film takes you up to like 3/4 of the way through the movie... but the synopsis I kept hearing about Looper was basically that the guy has to kill the older version of himself. And that's "revealed" very early on in the movie indeed because all the loopers have to kill their older selves: it's part of their contract. I felt like Joe having to fight Old Joe was really the setting for the film, rather than the actual plot.

JGL as Young!Bruce Willis. So there was some very impressive makeup that contributed to this but a whole lot of it was Joseph Gordon-Levitt's acting. The way he stood, the way he held his mouth and the way he spoke made the scenes between Willis and Gordon-Levitt kind of freaky and super enjoyable.

Time-travel. What can I say? I basically love time travel movies so much I even voluntarily watched 'Hot-Tub Time Machine'. Looper is much better. I thought that the way it "worked" was very interesting and made much more sense than most time travel stories! I really enjoyed this rundown of the "rules" of timetravel in the Looper universe. I also liked the way they basically sidestepped explaining it all when Old Joe tells Young Joe they'll just get stuck playing with straws in the diner because, of course, it's not the point let's just get on with the movie!

Things I didn't like:

the film failed the Bechdel Test so hard that Old Joe's Wife didn't even have a name. I'm sure I saw her in the credits as "Old Joe's Wife". (There are three other female characters and they do actually have names. But none of the women ever meet each other).