I confront a conflict of interest.
a) I value art, opinions, and universal understanding. This is idealistic. I must have a staple diet of news, movies, books and music. Because it is impossible to discover all perspectives on your own.
b) I want to do right more than anything. I am a Christian and my values are very important to me. I want to apply my faith in everything I do, without becoming an exclusive bitch.
So where do the sneaky fellas come in? American Beauty is one of the sneakiest movies I have ever seen. It hits you with powerful, convincing cinematics and a great script, is pro-drugs and pro-adultery (if it helps you get your fix, why not?), and hell, what is with this line: "and that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever"? I swear it's a contradiction in terms. It just is. A clumsy attempt to combine my a) and b), and I go, "Here's a solution... wait a minute!" Why should I gain a life lesson from a director? Would I bar my child from watching it? And here I am, preaching against censorship.
By here it is. I am perfectly okay if you want to show, in a wide, flat way, things that happen, because they happen. Drugs and adultery exist. It would be stupid to pretend otherwise. What I'm not okay with is when they are portrayed as all so good. I'm not expecting characters to wind up in a burning pit of hell or repent for life. A lot of people don't, and I refuse to take any part in condemnation. But Lester appeared so... happy. Like lusting after his teenage daughter's friend was... a solution.
It was just kind of freaky. The worst part is that it is such a good movie. Beautifully filmed. And how the director so cleverly kept you guessing, from beginning to end, how Lester was going to die, and you kept suspecting every single person along the way? Dead-on sneaky.
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Two people I know from entirely different places recently met and, unbeknownst to them, have blogs that are separated by a mere few links. It's fun reading what they think about each other. Blogger is, simply, a phenomenon.
I shall set the clock backwards. I attended my last day at work at Serene Centre. I decided that I love searching for books for customers, it's great to see their faces light up with joy when I present them with their purchases. I also smile widely when they choose expensive books. I grinned sharkishly at a guy who bought what seemed like the entire Where's Wally? series - altogether fifty-something dollars. A Chinese-Canadian man walked in all enthusiastic and asked what was the theme of the shop - "New Age?" It had me thinking for a while.
Met 1C for the first time after prom - it occurred to me that before this the class was never separated for more than a month at a time over the course of two years - and enjoyed the sight of all the army boys shouting at each other, exchanging buddy-buddy handshakes. I am also happy to note that none of the girls coloured their hair - which a lot of people seem to think is a necessary symbol of no-longer-schooling. I miss them, I am proud of them.
For the past week I've been attending the Asia-Pacific biotech conference to sell books for World Scientific, the publishing company I'm interning at. Academics like to ask difficult questions like Which books will be helpful to me if I'm switching from a Computer Science to a Bioengineering major or Hm this book isn't entirely relevant to the conference is it? I also had to sit in close proximity to some seriously boring books. Let's see if I can remember any titles. Ah. The Mathematical Nature of the Living World, Topographicsomething, the most interesting being Fuzzy Logic for Beginners, because it had Illustrations. But I did get to meet people from a bewildering range of places - Austria, Korea, Portugal, India, Canada. There was this guy from the University of Minnesota who actually gave me his card and said to feel free to contact if I had questions about US universities when I mentioned a possibility of going there to study. It's nice to see pieces of the world in one small NUS hall.
Mel left on Tuesday. I miss her. Yes, I will remember everything as a closing of this chapter - the way we all squeeze into a camera frame for a self-portrait, to keep it there, exactly the way we want it, for now.