Last night, I was passing out to Weeds– aka watching it on my laptop whilst I lay in bed, sideways, awkward, but not caring– and there’s that part? where– OH, SPOILERS in case you’re three years behind– where Mary Louise Parker was crying because she’s watching this sex tape her husband and her had made, and she’s crying because she’s the struggling mother selling dope, because she’s lonely, because she has two kids without a father, and I start bawling.
But not because of Mary-Louise Parker/Nancy Botwin’s problems.
sidenote: girl at 11 o clock has CROCODILES on her desktop. Not cute ones, either; not ones refined in the form of boots, but just… yellow, leathery crocodiles… gross.
I wasn’t crying because of Nancy Botwin’s loneliness. It’s really hard for me to cry, because I have trouble losing control of my tear ducts. Literally- I haven’t cried for a year. When I do cry, it’s like, a minute long and so not worth it. I would love to be able to cry on command, or cry when I feel upset, but it just doesn’t happen. My short attention span doesn’t allow me to moan about something long enough for an excellent sob fest, as much as I’d like to engage in the act of sobbing and its therapeutic externalization of my misery. Usually, I eat instead.
For the third time, I wasn’t crying because of Nancy, but for myself; I mean, sure, it was sad as hell, poor woman, her poor children, her poor pot-dealing ways. But of course my life is a lot more intense for me- and it was one of those stupid moments where you freak about life. Not in an emo way or anything; I’m a pretty fucking lucky girl, and I realize it, which is also probably why I can’t cry. I wonder if I have the SAD disease.
In Buddhism, we are taught that life is suffering. Again– not in the “emo” stereotype sense, but in the sense that life is a burden, and blank desire is the driving force of that suffering. We always want: we want to eat. We want to sleep. We want to buy Christmas presents for other people, we want Christmas presents for ourselves. We want the new laptop. We want the newer laptop and a new phone. We want a car, we want some new shoes… we want a better world…
And it never ends! There is no push-pull/counter force to desire: it overcomes both sides of the balance; it pushes and pulls us in different directions, and this conflict of desiring more and more, of never ever being content and satisfied, is what life is. It is suffering. We grow old and die too fast, with too little thankfulness for the items we do have– because we’re too busy wanting more. What makes humans humans– the ability to think and improve and progress– is also a cursed commitment.
I graduate from college this year. It’s terrifying; I’ve worked to get to this point, and now I want more college and less real-world. Yet another side of me is impatient to throw myself into work, get results…. see what I can actually accomplish. When four years of your life has constantly been divided into 1) school 2) work 3)family 4)friends, you don’t see results or big progressive steps in any of those departments… it all blurs into a dizzy, busy schedule.
So when I told the creepy, socially pre-pubescent boy that lived next to me in Terry dorms that I was too busy to have a boyfriend (because that’s what he asked me. Because he was on the verge of asking me to either go out with him or for advice on how to quickly attract the opposite sex. He was trembling.) it was ridiculous, and also true. Tara says I have trust issues. And that i’m picky, and unrealistic, and am only attracted to the unattainable… those also might be true. The boys that have made themselves available to me are boring because they’re so accessible. Physically and emotionally… there’s no tension of attraction. If I get along with someone, I get along with them famously, and both of us would know it. To me, there’s nothing that exists in-between.
But back to Nancy Botwin and my misery: yes, you want life’s problems to solve themselves, but then it would be too accessible, like those boys. You would get bored, and die bored, which sounds even more terrible than anything I’ve got bothering me now. It seems like you have to deal with things while keeping the bigger picture in mind; but it’s so easy to not care. It’s easy to sink into mind-numbing apathy and Baudelaire’s ennui, but how is that a better quality of life, of thinking? If you can’t fight the suffering of desire, you put it to good use, right?
All this thinking at 9 in the morning has me hankering for a cig; can’t you see the movie shot, moving down the slant of University Way, the coldness making the frosty parked cars and the searing air sparkle with ice, and there’s me, in my stupid yellow backpack, pulling a space-cadet-Margot-Tenenbaum-stance, staring straight into the camera with worlds and galaxies of possibly tantalizing thoughts just out of reach beyond a burning stoge?
I’m nowhere near as pleasant to look at, and I don’t have cigarettes, but this morning, the same addiction to endless circular meditation runs in my veins.
Graceee
