TV, Movies and Second Chances

November 16, 2014:

Take it from a person who watched too much TV growing up: it is utterly and completely misleading.

Being a Hollywood junkie has destroyed me beyond repair. I didn’t even know how bad it was until recently, after a long and deep session of self-reflection. Here’s how it went: growing up, I wasn’t good at a lot of things. I had average grades, and friends who were nice enough. I wasn’t confident and not a leader. But this is what I was good at, give me the name of a song and I could find it for you anywhere off the internet. Give me 10 seconds into the start of a movie and I could tell you its name. Give me the name of a TV star and I could tell you their life story, character and real-life. It amazed me – the reel world – where anything was possible and everything was larger than life.

When it came time to choose who I wanted to become, it was clear… Movies was all I was good at – I wanted to do something with that, so I became a film student. I wanted to make movies about that character, who was normal and ordinary like me, who rose to be larger than life, and made anything possible.

Here is where things went wrong: I started thinking life was a movie, that it was okay to be that  awkward girl because one day a dreamy eyed guy will like me for all my quirks, that at some point in my life I will have friends who would be like your soul mates, that no matter how badly I screw up I would be able to redeem myself with one grand freaking gesture and start over, that it’s okay to have your heart broken… because the guy you find after that will be so fucking perfect that you wont even know what you were crying about before you met him.

You realize quickly enough that life is not a movie, it kinda sucks, it can not be edited to only include all the interesting parts and your have no control over what genre it fits you in. But here’s what doesn’t get through the thick skulls of brainwashed addicts like me: that it will always be this way and never change!

Basically, I always take my life as the first act, and feel every time I fall that it was just the kick start to the main plot and now anytime the second act will begin… every time a friend walks out I feel we would find our way back to each other in some dramatic emotional way, every time I screw up I will somehow find the courage to make it better, and that every time some guy walks in to my life he will somehow magically love all my quirks, detect all my fears and reservations and fight to break them and just be there, present at all the right times, whenever I need.

So this is what happens to you if you watch too much Hollywood, you start thinking of your life as a movie… you start thinking of yourself as an adorably weird main character, when truth is probably that your just awkward and life is a long and awful first draft of some mediocre film. But if you embrace that fact, learn to love awkward you and your first draft mediocre life… then isn’t that the box office hit right there?? Isn’t the thrill in the not knowing of when the plot will thicken and the second act act will begin? and who knows, if you’re lucky… you might even get that Hollywood second chance… who knows… after all Rule no 1. in film making always is: A good movie always keeps you guessing right till the end!

So here is to TV, here is to Movies and here is to many, many chances!