Post 131

Last night I watched Intolerable Cruelty with my roommates. It was a good flick; I kinda enjoyed it. The humor was fast and clever but never called attention to itself, so I occasionally found myself thinking, "I think something funny just happened, but I totally missed it." Therefore I feel confident in saying that this movie probably gets better the more times you watch it.

I understand now why Thmazing likes it so much.

More than reviewing the movie, though, I'd like to ramble about some thoughts that've been going round and round in my head of late. [I've never really understood that convention: "of late"? What the heck is that supposed to mean, anyway? Grammatically, I mean. It just seems so archaic. Why do people even use it when we have "lately" at our disposal?] It was funny to me that I had just been out on a long walk, monologuing to myself about a certain topic, and then I came home and watched Intolerable Cruelty, which dealt with that same topic, so now I can talk about it in reference to this movie that I'm pretending to review and no one will know that this movie review is just a pretense and that I'm actually following my own private agenda. Oh! I'm so sneaky.

Anyway, I wanna ramble about the concept of independence. I'ma gonna go out on a limb here and say that the desire to be independent is not a righteous desire, and my comments section is, as ever, wide open for disagreement, dissension, and mudslinging. So. Onward!

In Intolerable Cruelty, Marylin is seeking independence. She spuriously marries wealthy men so she can divorce them and take their money, but she doesn't claim to be a simple gold digger; she says that money means independence, and independence is what she really wants. Marriage and divorce are merely means to get money, and money is merely a means to get independence--and--and--uh....

I give up. Here's what's on my mind:

So many people seem to be driven by a desire to be completely independent, to transcend their reliance on other people and society as a whole, to transcend their reliance on organizations and support groups, and ultimately (in some cases) to transcend their reliance on any sort of Supreme Being. I doubt many readers of this blog would argue that we ought to try to become independent of God, but I think that our delusions of other forms of independence are nearly as crippling.

My parents raised me to become independent--at least, that's what my Mom's always lamenting because, as it turns out, they did a bang up job of it: we kids never come to visit much. I remember a few months ago when a friend of mine told me that she was planning to leave at the beginning of the summer, I was honestly confused.

"Where are you gonna go?" I asked.

"Um. Home," she said, as though I were mildly retarded.

Oh. Why on earth would anyone do that? It just doesn't make sense in my head. I mean, I love my parents, and I'm always happy to see them; I call them every Sunday just to say hello and chat for a while, but I could never go back to living with them! That, to me, would be an indication of regression.

Yet, in the Gospel, we're always talking about sealing all the generations together, and we talk about heaven in terms of families; heck, Joseph Smith said that we'll have the same sociality in the Celestial Kingdom that we have here (D&C 130:2). Furthermore, from a more biological and less theological standpoint, we humans are social creatures; that's our nature even if we are constantly fighting against it.

But I'm not really talking about kids and parents drifting apart. No, it is good and healthy for offspring to leave the nest to build a nest of their own. I'm talking about the lack of trust we have in each other. I know some people who are so guarded that they are little more than a facade; they hide deep within themselves and never let anyone inside to meet them. They build a fortress from the bricks of bad experience with the mortar of pain and set a guard out front. Sometimes the guard is a jester; other times, a brute. Either way, the royal soul inside wastes away, unknown and unknowable. [Little over the top? Hopefully not too much....]

I think I understand solitude better than many people my age. Maybe not, but I like to think I do. My long walks after dark are almost a nightly occurrence; I'm just the sort of guy who needs some alone time on a fairly regular basis. I don't consider myself an antisocial person; I just like my solitude. It's refreshing to walk alone in the middle of the night: my mind clears, I pray aloud, and life starts to make sense.

On the other hand, I know all too well how crippling solitude can be, and I know the pain of isolation. For one who claims to love his solitude, I sure do find myself grappling with intense loneliness a lot, and I find it hard to believe that people who hole up deep within themselves and never let anyone get too close can ever be truly happy. And I worry about those people a lot because I know that, beneath that smooth exterior, a sea of emotion is roiling just below a boil. The thing that scares me most is that, we're all so oblivious to what's inside of people, there's rarely any way to know the time bomb's ticking until it goes off.

I propose, then, that, if we all shot for interdependence rather than independence, we'd all be a lot better off. So, I dunno, like, go give someone a hug, or something, before the whole world explodes.