rehabilitate my smile

There’s Lots Of Things About Things

I just listened to The Thing About Things and it pulled on every single heart string I had and it then lead to tremendous sobbing. Well done to Amanda for once again writing beautiful music, even if it does destroy my soul.  

I’m a self confessed hoarder.

I own this memory box which is full of stupid crap I’ve collected over my time. Gig tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, theatre tickets, squished paper origami, notes, letters, envelopes,  things I’ve found on the floor, CD art work, etc etc. It’s guaranteed to mean nothing to anyone but me, and I love that. To someone else it’s a pile of rubbish, to me it’s memories, ideas, thoughts, tokens, nostalgia, and symbols of time and friendships. I love the idea that objects can have their meanings altered - a penny that lies dirty, unused on the floor  is supposed to be a currency (admittedly, not really, because you can’t buy much with a penny) but it can also potentially become a classic in joke between two friends. 

In Amanda’s song she talks about a ring her grandad owned, and how she hated her grandad, but kept the ring anyway, and how I interpreted it is that  this ring then becomes the gateway into not hating her grandad, and actually a way of mourning him.

My mum recently gave me a photo of my grandad, who I never met, but I’ve been told about. (I’ve never met any of my immediate family outside of my parents and sister). My grandad was an alcoholic, who according to my father, was the type of person who had too much life spilling out of him - he was whacky and spontaneous but that definitely wasn’t always a good thing.  I spilled nail polish on this photo of him and my mum shouted at me for it for ages, but I thought about this idea my dad had of him, this bat shit guy who drank too much spilling out everywhere -  and thought that maybe my nail polish endevour is representative of that, and it actually improves the photo. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of saying, ”actually, this is who he was.” This photo where he looks clean and prestige doesn’t fully reflect him, the green splatter on it does. The photo then becomes a person, not just an image.

That’s also why I don’t mind being tagged in ugly  photos with seventeen chins, or ones where the lighting is bad, or it’s not fully focused - so long as it looks like me. Photos don’t have to have meaning of course, or they don’t have to reflect you exactly, but it’s great when they do - even if the quality of them aren’t great. 

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I love that feeling when you are physically and emotionally incapacitated by something which in practice, you probably shouldn’t be. The end of a song, or a chapter of a book, or a scene in a film/television show. It’s just paper, it’s just sounds, it’s just words, it’s just moving pictures, and yet they have the same power over you, in the same way real life actions do. You can feel the same amount of emotion for when a fictional character dies to when someone in real life does. You can feel more sadness for someone singing about their heart being broken then when your own heart was actually broken. You can relate to someone you’ve never even met and never will. It’s just mind blowing when you think what can make your heart ache. 

I think that’s why I find emotional refuge in fiction more so then in real life. I can’t recall the last time I’ve cried because of the situation I am in, or because someone has said/done something to me - but I can recall the last time I cried over a song lyric. The emotion has the same impact, but one comes from a different place, a place that you can control, a place where you define what is sad and what isn’t. If someone says something shitty to me they’re dictating that I should be hurt. If I watch something sad, I’m controlling the hurt. I’m letting the pain in on my own will. 

”You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you.”

let’s have some ROMANCE DISCUSSION. That’s not really a thing discussed in HQ of forgivemeloveology so why not! (tis the season and that)  

I think one of the most attractive things in a person is how much they can make you think. If they can cause a big impact through what they say. I love when someone says something and you instantly remember it, or question it, or agree with it  - what ever it does, it just stays with you. Even when they aren’t there. I’ve only really met one person who had this impact on me. Also Conor Oberst. But he can’t really count ha. (even though I think about Bright Eyes lyrics all the time, seriously, I’m half in love with them) 

I think the other most attractive thing is how comfortable they can make people feel. I love people who instantly try to connect with everyone, and make them (and you) feel as if they don’t have to put on a false pretense around them. 

What do you find ~attractive~? Tell me a love story, make it sound pretentious, make it sound soppy, I don’t care. 

I believe the Colorado shootings were, and are, a complete and utter tragedy. There is absolutely no way of denying that. But saying that The Dark Knight Rises is a tragedy because of it, is totally unfair. This film has had so much work and time put it into it to create what it is - SO many people have used their craft to create this piece of cinema and have literally slaved over it. Attaching this stigma to these people that it’s somehow their faults, or somehow they share the responsibility is just completely absurd. They work on telling a story. Creating characters. They don’t believe in the use of violence and the killing of innocent people, and they certainly don’t believe/or work on promoting these morals throughout the film. A person chooses how to absorb and interpret things by their own doing. If the perpetrator is using this warped romanticisation of The Joker as part of his motive - it’s his decision entirely. Not anything connected to the filmmakers. I hope that the sadness, the loss, the pain and devastation from this incident is treated entirely separately with the film. If we are too condemn the film we are simply not understanding the true weight to what happened. The tragedy is not creating things in the cinema. The tragedy is that somebody believes they are ”creating” something similar, when in reality they are just simply destroying.