Medium Delirium

Today I resolved to turn my leisure TV time into leisure reading time. I intend to become an intellectual by May and have declared as much to J, who was understandably incredulous.

It occured to me that a sure sign of having transitioned from girlhood – with its lightness, chaos, and careening about with wild abandon – into adulthood, with its gems shining from within murky waters, was when I re-watched (500) Days of Summer and loved it. I’d first watched it when I was about 17, and couldn’t make it all the way through. I was bored by its slowness and the way it circled around a resolution without ever touching its crucial core. When I saw it again around the age of 24, I saw my earnestness and yearning in Tom, my indecision and fear of commitment in Summer. I understood them both in a deep and intimate way, and it made perfect sense to me that there was no real resolution, for life, for all its glory, often simply doesn’t chart paths that lead to clean and simple answers that remain true across the duration of a trembling life. Between 17 and 24 I’d been through break ups, moved across the world and pretty much inhabited an entirely different paradigm through which I stared, equal parts hungry and cautious, at the world that swirled outside. Loving the film was a signal to me that something inside of me had slowed, settled, and scarred sufficiently for the film’s poetic sensibilities to call out to it and find resonance.

This period in my life coincided with discovering, and loving equally, Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy of films, and Haruki Murakami’s haunting and musical way of writing about slices of everyday life, which, when read, felt like swimming in tepid waters of unknown depth. Along with (500), these strike me as all being cut from the same piece of cloth.