continuation of part 1.
“What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.”–Oliver Barrett IV, (Erich Segal Love Story)
Love Story is one of the few movies that I’ve seen at least 20 times, and that still makes me cry uncontrollably. I’ve all but given up on finding true love, so it especially hurtful for me that what is denied to me is so harshly stolen from oliver and jenny.
There’s this one scene where oliver and jenny fights because oliver gets mad at jenny for trying to thaw the ice between oliver and his dad. This is their first major fight. Oliver runs through the campus like a mad man trying to find jenny, the music sets the scene and the actor playing oliver delivers. The whole thing ends with oliver returning home, finding jenny by the steps of their apartment, as he is about to say sorry jenny lifts her and and stops him, saying “Love Means Never Having To Say I’m Sorry.”
That’s preety much how I feel about decisions in my life. I try to live consciously. I try to be self aware of the different things happening in my life. I try to make the best decisions possible in any situation that I am in the middle of. I weigh every variable and try to control for variables that affect my decisions such as, how does the effect on people I love affect my decision. I weigh everything and in the end pull the trigger on most decisions in my life with no regret. I have nothing to be sorry for, any decision I made I made knowingly and wholeheartedly. Somethings may have not entered my calculations. I may have overlooked or underestimated things and probably made a better decision with more time and introspections. But in life time is limited and your information is always imperfect. You will never make any decision if you let yourself be paralyzed by analysis, fear of the unknown, or the uncertainty of anything that can be considered trailblazing.
I have many quirks most of which are common enough not to engender any reaction outside of boredom. If I would fancy vanity, the expression of this would be how much I think about anything I do. The only times I am spontaneous would probably be in moments of anger, and those moment are seldom, but bunched up, yet occur in long intervals. I never allow myself to feel sorry for me and in turn any one. I believe that within the framework of God, we have free will and in that free will we have the power to shape our lives. I will never concede that we are powerless. I will never concede that our nation, that my/our lives are hopeless. I look around me and in those fleeting moments where a narcissist looks beyond himself I see only three kinds of people. One are those who are afraid, always blaming someone else, the government, his/her situation, his/her surroundings, Two the borderline, not knowing much of anything and yet their hope lies in the fact that they are still not within that negative self-feeding cycle of self pity, that most people of type One are, Three are the people who have No Apologies/Never Going To Say I’m Sorry Types.
They see the injustice in this world, the pain people go through and probably the narcissistic nihilism so prevalent in modern society and yells “UP YOURS”. The are the men and women who cannot be stopped. These are the people who may not eventually win but would never be losers. These are the people who say “Why can’t I dream?”,”What makes me different from people who looked up saw the moon and would not stop till man has finally touched its surface”,the person who do not doubt “That everyday is the real Time Of Your Life” .
I walk the streets and see a nation’s youth whose ambition is to go to greener pastures. To find a better life. I see them. Some of them are my friends. Some are most dear to me. But when I talk to them my hear cringes. I see the youth of our nations without heart, without courage, without resolve. I see people foreign to the simple truth that you can succeed anywhere, a nation whose greatest ambition is to not have to work hard.
(This is ironic for I am the one without work. I am an invalid telling working people they fear hard work. I would like to reply but this is not the post.)
For what is it that most people use as a reason for their flight, “For My Children To Have A Better Life.”
But what you are actually saying is that I am a shallow person beholden to the consumerist dictums of the modern senseless world. I want to raise my child in places where I am second class citizen, working 2-3 jobs just so that I could make LVMH or Mercedes, richer. I have no dreams whatsoever and my children would probably never be as successful as the son and daughters of Chinese,Japanese, and Korean immigrants. I just raised them to be cowards and slackers and If by some miracle of circumstance my child succeeds I would make it seems that he/she was a genius with boundless energy and charm, not the persistent and hardworking person that he or she probably is, Why because people from the Philippines never understand hardwork, they understand illicit trade, winning the lottery, marrying a rich husband/wife, but hard work, anyone who succeeds through hard work is suspect. (Why?This is for another longish ranting post)
This wasn’t supposed to be written like this, but I can either write following my mental outline or I can write the way that makes my blood pressure rise and Thank God I’m Alive!
Would you ever choose otherwise?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
— Teddy Roosevelt
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