A Week of Failures
This blog is many very different things. Hard to categorize. Today it is a journal.
I have had a week of failures. Personally, I’m clearly failing to create a pleasant and warm environment for reasons I don’t understand. I suppose most of our failures have to do with misunderstanging the accurate questions to answer, misdirecting ourselves, and such. I suspect I’m not asking the right questions, let alone answering them correctly.
It didn’t help me to be called a “retard” in a recent blog comment. Even if usage of the term implies a likely lack of sensibilities and consideration, it’s still never fun to be called names.
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I was recently given a copy of “The Great Gatsby” to read. Only twenty pages in, I can understand how difficult it would be to make into a movie. So much of the novel is about intelligent perceptions, descriptions, and reading between lines that I don’t know how it could be translated into spoken and visual movie narratives. Given that Redford, Farrow, and Watterson tried to pull it off in 1974 (a heady cast indeed), I wonder if it can be done well. Better call in Emma Thompson and Ang Lee – if any duo could pull it off. It may be a short book, but it is complex, beautiful, and concentrated. I can understand why it is beyond many students’ understandings when they are given it to read in high school. Fitzgerald had marvelous language, insight, and descriptions.
I love the first edition cover of The Great Gatsby (shown above). It’s marvelous.
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Someone sent me a link, showing that Joni Mitchell considers herself a painter more than a singer. Who am I to debate the artist herself? If you’d like to see some of her paintings, here is her website:
http://jonimitchell.com/painter/
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Work is very slow, but at least for understandable and arguably good reasons. Nevertheless, this pushes me into trying more new things. Thank goodness I handle regular failures well – considering how frequently I have failed for so long.
Family is all heathy. I am fortunate and grateful for that.
Here’s a question flying though my head at the moment: If art is all the things that connect us to our soul, or our souls, then does knowing that information help us in any way?
That’s all for now. I will return to reading “The Great Gatsby” and try to figure out some of the many things I’m being asked to learn.
Oh, and by the way, here’s a general recommendation: If someone you love drops the name of a movie or novel they think you should read or watch someday, consider making the time to do it immediately. Don’t be an ignoramous and wait 15 years – you’ll likely regret that decision.
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I’m sorry to hear about your setbacks.
Someone called you a retard? My instinct is to leap to your defence and attack the jerk in kind, but then I ask myself; what would someone who possesses the ability to see the good in everyone say?
I have a belief. A deeply held belief; we don’t matter, none of us matter. We are not special. We are not sacred. We do not come into the world with any inherent value, nor do we accrue it anymore than the livestock we consume or the spaces we fill. It is no tragedy when we cease to be any more than it is a miracle that we come into being. There are six billion people in the world, none with anymore right to exist than the fact of existence.
Instead we are what we choose to make of ourselves. If we choose to find beauty, love and exercise compassion – then that is what we are. If we choose to be belligerent, intolerant: hateful (to call someone a ‘retard’ is to take delight in the challenges life hands out to others is to find gratification in the absence of similar struggle in one’s own life) – well, that too will be the measurement used on our character.
It takes a lot of effort to choose and value the things you have chosen. Ultimately, (I believe) you are not writing about an approach or a point-of-view or an idea. You are creating yourself. You are giving yourself meaning and value putting features on the blank space created by biological happenstance. By this same token the angry people in the world, the greedy and the righteous make of their self as they would have themselves be.
Failure? I doubt it. Likely this is merely another chapter in a life story that will prove its’ value only after some distance has been gained from the moment in which the events occurred.