My life seems to deliver me into adventures all at once. Sometimes it seems quiet, and no matter how hard I try, nothing very interesting happens to or around me. Other times, like right now, life just feeds me one interesting, difficult, out-of-the-ordinary situation after another. Oral surgery wherein all four of my wisdom teeth are removed, new boss at work, possible major change in job responsibilities upcoming that is causing great tension in the workplace, trying to keep up the site and create a new daily comic strip, thousands of dollars of debt all of a sudden, trying to learn how to throw a family Christmas dinner and then throwing the dinner in the same weekend with no time for preperation because of everything else in the world that just keeps going on anyway, trying to figure out and maintain a relationship with someone that I love who loves me, in spite of many disparate options and circumstances that seem to muddy the waters of clear choice, and now a new and interesting thing to add to this long, incomplete list of the things that have been going on in my life of late: There is a man in my house who has recently been subjected to great emotional stress considering suicide and who knows what else; a roommate on the edge of tolerability as such. And he has a loaded gun.
The situation seems calm now. Most everything is quiet. I can only wait to see how this all works itself out. Certainly it will not be resolved tonite. It looks like veryone is just going to sleep in their respective beds and see what the morning brings. I am personally turning my alarms off; if I don’t have to see the morning at all, I’ll do my best to avoid it. I’ve been having a lot of very painful headaches lately, and if I can avoid another I’ll do what I can to do just that.
This weekend seems short because so much stuff is getting done. There are a few movies that opened this weekend that I would like to see, and a few more that open next weekend that make seeing this weekend’s movies soon more urgent. There are things that may be going on in my house over the course of the next few days that make spending time away from it seem more urgent. I guess I need to look for a new roommate much more seriously now. I guess I feel like I need some sort of escape from what life is handing me (even though the sheer volume of choices for that escape is something that stresses me out, too). Movies seem to work for me. For two hours or so I am pretty much totally seperated from the real world and my own questions and problems. I am able to totally put my mind into the situations rolling by on screen, usually not figuring things out until I am supposed to and even feeling all the happiness or tears that the actors can bring to the big screen.
I used to be able to seperate myself from the real world and the things that were going on in my life virtually all the time. I used to be able to recede into a shell that hid all the perils of the world from my eyes, whether I was in a movie theatre or not. Now I am too aware, and in some ways too responsible, to allow myself that selfish and destructive way of life. I won’t let myself forget all my troubles, forget all my cares, whenever the mood strikes me. I also won’t allow myself to ruin my enjoyment of someone else’s presentation (that I have chosen with my dollar vote to take in) by being overcome by the world. So I have found that when I go out to see a movie, I need to keep track of whether I am going to see the beautiful work created by dozens or hundreds of skilled craftsmen or whether I am just trying to get away from the world.
When I go watch two or three movies tomorrow, I think it will be both. I will be going to see what Mel Gibson and Laurence Fishbourne have gotten themselves into, and I will be going to get away from a loaded gun just waiting to go off. And his dangerous weaponry.
