Yesterday I fell in love...

Yesterday morning I watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.  Incidentally one of the last tolerable Matthew McConaughey films ever made, unless you count Magic Mike, in which he simply plays himself.  In this movie you have savvy, cute, intelligent Andie Anderson (played by the queen of the decade Kate Hudson), a writer for the fastest growing women's magazine who wishes she could stop writing silly How To articles about getting skinny and avoiding tickets and could instead write something called "How to Bring Peace to Tajikistan".  Cause, you know, she's super smart!  And you have Ben Barry, an advertising agent trying to snatch a big diamonds account from two super slutty coworkers.  Andie tells her boss that her next article will be "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" where she'll start dating a guy and then drive him away using all the usual mistakes that most women make.  Ben makes a bet that he can make any woman fall in love with him in 10 days, and if he wins he'll get the big account.  The evil slutty coworkers pick Andie, who happens to be at the same "top watering hole for the young upwardly mobile", to be the lucky girl.  The rest of the movie is Andie bouncing between being her charming and delightful self and an insane, clingy, devil-spawn and Ben trying desperately to not shoot himself in the face as he tries to deal with her and also make her fall in love with him.  Hilarity ensues.

I still enjoy this movie on a very superficial level.  It's mildly funny to see all the things Andie does to drive Ben crazy.  But the entire time I am just thinking "this is absurd!  What is wrong with these people that they're actually doing this?  What is wrong with them???!!"  Why would you screw with someone like that?    And then why would you keep screwing with them when you started to actually like them as a person?  Not only that, but here are two young adults in very promising careers who have so few problems that the only way to create enough tension for a movie is to manufacture the world's stupidest work....assignments? bets? whatever... This is not my life.  I don't know whose life they're supposed to be portraying, but it is no one I know.  The whole thing left me with a distinct disgruntledness.  Who are the people that are supposed to identify with that movie?  This movie was made before my generation had quite grown up and faced reality.  It was made in a different time, in a different social atmosphere and it is no longer relevant to the world in which I live.

So I looked for something made very recently.  I wanted something contemporary and indie and real.  I found The Giant Mechanical Man.  I'd seen a trailer for it several months ago and remembered wanting to see it.  It stars Jenna Fischer (aka Pam from The Office) and Chris Messina (Danny from The Mindy Project or the husband in Julie and Julia) as two 20-30 somethings who are trying to figure their lives out.  Jenna plays Janice, who gets fired from her temp job, not for being unreliable, but simply for allowing her apathy for temp work to show.  Without a job she gets evicted and has to move in with her well-meaning but terribly insensitive sister who is constantly trying to "fix" her life for her.  To satisfy her sister, Janice takes a job selling concessions at the zoo (a job for which she is terribly overqualified, as the manager mentions when she hires her).  Tim is a street performer who dresses up as a giant mechanical man and wanders around the city.  He loves it, but when his girlfriend leaves him because she can't stand "the artist's struggle" any more, he decides he should try getting a "real" job, so he also gets a job at the zoo working sanitation.  The two quickly become friends.

I watched this movie first at work.  Then I came home and asked Matt if he would watch it with me.  I wanted to share it with someone.  He wrote his own review of the movie here, and I really like everything he said.  I sort of want to take up where he left off.  He talks about how this movie depicts real life in all of it's awkwardness.  People rarely talk to each other in perfectly turned phrases and bon mots.  They don't say the right thing.  Often a conversation is much more silence while two people try to think of something to say to the other that isn't completely stupid. This movie captures that in a really lovely way.  He also talks about how it is a movie about our generation and our problems.

This is what I wanted to talk about.  I have long been fascinated with the way movies reflect the cultural atmospheres in which they're made.  Where How to Lose a Guy reflected the optimism and the carefree feelings of pre-recession America, The Giant Mechanical Man reflects the bewilderment of my generation.  I don't have links to them right now, but I've read dozens of articles about my "lost" generation.  Articles about how people my age are waiting to get married, how we're losing the art of human interaction due to social media, how we aren't sure we are ready/able to be parents, and of course, how we are struggling to find something beyond "college work" that we could call a career.  We are supposed to be adults now, but we don't know how to do it and we're not sure we could even if we did know.  At one point Janice says "I feel like those people you were talking about, like I was just born into this life and I'm supposed to know what I'm doing.  Like I'm supposed to have it all figured out.  But I don't have it all figured out.  I just feel lost."  I feel like those words sum me up.  They sum up so many of my friends.  This movie is about feeling like everyone else somehow has it together, somehow has a plan, somehow knows the magical secret that you don't about how to be a successful human.  It's about wondering why you don't have that secret; what's wrong with you if you can't figure it out. But it is also about how to deal with that.

Tim invites Janice to go to a party with him.  It's a birthday party for some friend of his.  When it is time to blow out the candles on her cake, the friend stands up and gives a toast.  She thanks her friends and she thanks her man.  She says "It only takes just one person--just one person--to make you feel special, and valid, and like you belong in the world."  Later that night Tim is trying to explain to Janice why he likes her so much.  He tells her that she's real, and honest; he says "when I look at you...I can see you.  I can see you."

Yes, The Giant Mechanical Man is a love story.  But it's not a love story about two perky, adorable people saying perky, adorable things to each other and being oh so witty and oh so clever.  It's a love story for my time.  It's about two people who aren't sure what their life is supposed to be finding each other and telling each other that they understand.  Every time Tim and Janice talk Janice will try to explain her thoughts or her feelings to him.  She is not eloquent, she can't express herself clearly, but his response is always "I understand.  I get it."  She doesn't have to word it quite right because he's felt what she's trying to explain.  He knows it already.

There were so many other things that I loved about this movie.  I loved the colors.  I mean...I loved the colors.  They're rich and vivid and beautiful.  I think it is beautifully shot with some very interesting visuals.  I thought the music was fitting, it didn't feel overwhelming or blatantly manipulative.  So many things about this movie were perfect.  But the overwhelming feeling that is still lingering this morning--the thing that outshines all of the other wonderful aspects--was that this was a movie made for people like me.  It wasn't cloying or absurd or perky.  It was awkward in the realest sense.  It was sincere and unsure.  And it was honest.

Personal Progress...

I'm not gonna lie.  I kind of hated personal progress when I was a teenager.  It didn't seem important to me, the projects seemed like busy work, New Beginnings was an annoyance.  And yet, here I am at 26 struggling to take control of my life.....I'm trying to institute my own version of personal progress.  Howe humiliating.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about a better way to motivate myself to improve the things that need improving.  I said at the time that it was likely to be the first in a series of, um, (for lack of a better/less cliche phrase) self-makeover posts.  At the time I was thinking my next post would be a continuation of the "I'm great right here, right now" theme.  However, the project I was thinking about at the time isn't happening just now (don't worry, I'll talk about it later).  Instead, I've been thinking today about the "where I want to be" side of things.

Last night I did 10 sit ups.  Just 10.  And then I stopped.  And I am not joking when I tell you that my abs didn't even wait till morning to let me know that they were not excited about that idea even a little bit.

this is how my guts felt.

I texted Kara after I finished: "I just did 10 sit ups and then stopped.  Clearly I am not good at exercise."  She texted back enthusiastically "that's excellent!"  Bless her heart.

But here's the thing.  Between none sit ups and 10 sit ups.......10 sit ups is excellent, if only because it isn't none.  Because even if I only did 10 yesterday, maybe today I'll do 15.  Or maybe I'll just do 11?  But the point is that I'm doing something, and if I start small, well then there's plenty of room for improvement.

the one place we all know will always have room for improvement
also, this is from xkcd.com, in case you live under a rock...

Part of the reason that I never work out is because I think about the prospect and I think about how much work it's going to be and it literally drains me of every ounce of....of anything!  Of desire and energy and good intentions.  (at this point I would like to post the clip of Jim Gaffigan talking about going to the gym, but alas it does not appear to exist on youtube.  so instead I'll tell you to go to netflix and watch both of his specials because they're ridiculously funny, and pay special attention to the part about the gym).  Anyway, I think this is because I assume that if I work out it is going to have to be super maximum hardcore and intense and I'll have to spend so much time on it and it will make me want to kill myself.  As I explained to Kara, the evening we spent making and gorging on poorly executed yet nonetheless delicious and fattening candy, I have never yet experienced the so-called "runner's high".  That is to say--I don't appear to have a body that releases endorphins when I work out.  I get exactly nothing from the experience except exhaustion and misery.  I'm not hyperbolizing for rhetorical effect.  I feel like shit after I exercise, and all I want to do is die.

ah grumpy cat...you never fail me

But I realized last night that when you're as out of shape as I am.....well, maybe starting with 10 sit ups is a perfectly good idea.  In my defense, I want you all to imagine not just that you're doing normal sit-ups, but that you're doing them with a 10 to 15 pound weight sitting on your chest.  Not to mention, you have the abdominal muscles of a 3 year old with stomach flu.  But the point is that I realized that...I could stop at 10.  It was something, but I didn't have to keep going till I hated life and wanted someone to punch me in the face to distract me from how much I hated it.  And more importantly, I stopped before I became overwhelmed at the impossibility of doing this insanity to myself more than one random night in my life.

And one last thing....even if I don't do 10 sit ups tonight, or 15, or 11, or whatever...I will do them tomorrow and that's ok.  Or if I do them tonight, but not tomorrow, that's ok too.  If you fail on any given day all it means is...well, nothing.  Tomorrow is, as Scarlet O'Hara says, another day upon which any previous days have no bearing.  I won't get overwhelmed and I won't get discouraged.  It's funny how cliches are cliche for a reason.

Sometimes a little self-love is not a bad thing...

One of the key aspects of Mormonism (and probably most other religions, but I don't have firsthand knowledge) is the idea of repetition.  That is--you can never hear those "plain and simple truths" too many times, you can never read the scriptures too often, you can never study the gospel so much that you no longer have anything to gain from it.  Endless relief society lessons on visiting teaching and motherhood aside, I have found this idea to be, more or less, true.  Not simply at church, either, but in many other facets of life.  In fact, there is one particular idea that comes to me, epiphany-like, every couple of years.  It's like seeing fireworks; even though you've seen them before and, really, one firework is pretty much exactly the same as the next firework, every time you see them again it's like the first time.  They're beautiful and thrilling and dazzling no matter how many times you see them.  That's like this idea of mine.  Every time it bursts inside my head it is illuminating and inspiring like the first time I ever thought of it.  Even though it's clichéd and recycled.  It is simply this:

The most effective changes in your life come from self-love, not self-hate.  

So many times I have taken stock of my life and and I have looked on the results with loathing.  I have been so disappointed in myself.  I've seen my failings and my faults and I have asked myself why I have not yet fixed them.  I can't understand it.  I know what is wrong, I know what needs to be done to fix it, and yet the problems remain.  How pathetic must I be that I can't just fix the damn things already?  Over and over again I come to the same conclusion:  I must not hate my problems--my sins--enough to excise them from my life.  I must secretly like all these faults.  I must not want it badly enough...

 I must not be unhappy enough.

That's consistently where my thoughts end up.  So many times.  So I just hate myself a little more.  And it's a beautiful system, really, because it's so self-sustaining.  Now, not only can I hate myself for my imperfections, but I can also hate myself for, apparently, deep down not hating them and for lacking the discipline to change all these things I hate, which means that I can hate myself for choosing to be miserable....you can see it just keeps going...

But amidst all that disappointment and dislike, do you know what doesn't happen?  Any of those changes I wanted way back in the beginning.  I get so distracted and weighed down with hating myself that either I don't have the time or attention for actually fixing the problems, or I simply give up and accept that it's not worth the effort for someone as pathetic as me (and even if it was, it wouldn't work anyway).  You can see the problem here, I think.

Do you know when I have had success changing myself and my life?  Clearly it is not when I am depressed and full of self-loathing.  The times when I have had the most success effecting the changes I want to see in my life are the times when I love myself, and am proud of myself, and tell myself that I'm doing ok.  

The way it works in my head is that the more I hate myself, the less I am worth the effort of trying to improve--why suffer through all the work I know it will take for something I actually dislike?  But the happier I am with the current me right here and right now, the greater the value in investing in this self.  If that makes sense...

Which finally leads us to the here and now.  I honestly have no idea why it is happening, but I find myself in a place where I am consciously trying to cultivate that positive attitude about myself .  Usually this sort of positivity requires the kick-start of an extended and extreme happiness.  But I can't really say I've been extremely happy all that much recently.  Regardless, I have started trying to invest in myself.  Those initially minute investments have been enough--not enough to inspire greater investment, but enough to remind me of that ever-recurring epiphany.  Enough to inspire me to start loving myself so that I will then want to continue investing even more in myself.  

There is a lot more I want to write on this theme.  There are some specific experiences and challenges that are looming on the horizon that I want to discuss.  But in the interest of length (this is already too long) and time (it's my bedtime now...) I shall leave those for another post.  This is enough to be going on with for the time being...