11.12.2006
LOST again
I just watched last week's episode of LOST. It has Nathan Fillion in it as a guest star, which made me happy. But the whole episode made me sad. I can't help but wonder if I'm the only person that feels depressed after watching tv shows or movies. I mean, I love the show, but part of me feels pathetic that I watch this show in which the characters are in life-or-death situations constantly and it makes me realize that my life is never going to be like that. I mean, my god, if I were a character on the show, I'd have to be a background, non-important character, simply because I have no secrets, no tangible ambitions, no dirty laundry. It's not that I feel sorry for myself because I'm boring, it's that I feel sorry for myself that I always will be. I'd like to see a tv show about how hard it is to live real life, going through each miserable, horrible day, praying that something will ease up, that someone will elicit some real joy in me, that I won't feel like it's pointless all the time.
So yeah, I watch LOST and feel like a loser. I know it's just a tv show, ultimately, and that someone is brilliant enough to write it really well, but it's still a mirror for me. It still makes me see what I feel inside, which is nothing lately. Maybe I was fooling myself before when I was happy, but I can't even do that now. I have to count calories and make doctor's appointments and go to work and solve peoples' claims and hate it, hate all of it, hate everyone who seems less unhappy than me. I don't want to feel this way, but I also feel powerless to control it. Feelings suck.
I've been fighting lately the things I love to watch on tv. LOST, Firefly, House. Great characterizations in all of them. I fancy myself in love(superficially) with at least one character in each. Jack, Mal, House. They're similar in some ways, I suppose. They get the job done, no matter what that requires. And, and they're hot. I'm not oblivious to it, despite my best intentions/idealism. But here's the thing: it's pathetic to love characters on a show. They're static, one-dimensional, even for all their complexity. There only is what is written about them. I can't have a conversation with them, can't interact with them, can't even disgust them.
I bore myself with these recriminations. I can be no more than what I am, and yet I struggle so hard against the daily shackles of my own life, even though we all create our own world. I hate my job, but don't leave. I hate that I don't have a life, but I don't get one. I love and hate my tv shows, but I keep watching. I did, however, change my desktop background from a picture of Matthew Fox as Jack on LOST to a forest scene, deliberately, to attempt to abort my near-obsession with these characters I love, but it feels wrong. I don't like looking at the forest. I like looking at the pain in Jack's/House's/Mal's face too much. I have to change my desktop background, but I'm going to resist the urge to make it one of them.
Most of all, I hate that I have enough selflessness to realize that there are tons of people, probably that I come into contact with everyday, that have it so much worse than me that my gripes seem to be the whinings of a middle class, lonely, white girl. And they are. And for that, I'm sorry. I don't know if I have enough fortitude to help those kinds of people, but I would like to think I could. Someday soon, when I go into the Peace Corp. No Nathan Fillion there. Maybe then I'll find peace inside myself.
alannablue at 1:02 p.m.