The Movie Network Sucks

They show the same fucking movies, all day, for like a week. And they all suck! I mean, they were showing some really good movies when we first had it back at the old house, but now I can't even watch half the movies they show when I'm bored.

Exams are done.

It’s amazingly cold outside, I think the wind-chill factor is at about -35C; all the more reason to spend an extra hour in bed. The cold weather is much better explanation for why it’s so hard to get out of bed. My brother just turned on some Lionel Richie, and it annoys me. The song it’s even all that bad, it’s just so emotion-filled, and I really don’t know how much more emotion I can take. This is mainly because I have no outlet aside from this blog, which is hardly an outlet.

Now he’s got Lisa Loeb on…I thought Lisa Loeb was pretty hot actually. I love that look; kinda chubby, but cute and youthful. Her glasses were way too thick but generally I think glasses are hot. However, I argue that unlike the likes of her 90s 2-hit wonder counterpart Jewel, her lyrics were less rich with substance. Here I am nearly 10 years later, and I can’t make any sense of what she meant when she said, “..and you smoked with the ghost in the back of my head!” Maybe that line is a complicated metaphor that my grossly undeveloped mind fails to unravel, but I’ve been giving her that benefit of the doubt for 10 years. Today I say, regardless of my intellectual status a truly well-constructed metaphor should be of the sort that the intended audience can both easily connect with and furthermore be moved by.

Getting back to that thing about having no outlet, during exams I was thinking a lot about a passage I read during existentialism. I forget if it was from Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky, but it was a little commentary on human relationships. He highlighted a difference between a person lending themselves to a friend/companion versions authentically lending themselves.

Lending yourself is what everyone does. If we have a friend in need we lend them our ears, or lend them our shoulder for support; lend them our time and effort and precious brain space. Even the most genuine-at-heart fall into this category of ‘simple-lending’ (my terminology, not his), nonetheless it’s not authentic. Authentic-lending carries more virtue. When you authentically lend yourself to a conversation, you don’t just hear it, or listen to it, or respond to it, you feel it. You’re in it, not just a part of it. I’ll draw a quick analogy.

Simple-lending is like when you’ve noticed that your neighbors car hasn’t left the driveway for 5 days, and he’s not on vacation, and lives alone, so you knock on his door a few times, he doesn’t answer, so you knock louder and louder and get concerned, and depending on the person your actions fall somewhere in the range of shrugging it off and going back home, or calling the cops to investigate. Authentic-lending is like you come home from a short-walk and realize you’ve locked yourself out, your 2-year old child is locked inside and you smell smoke. You look in the window and see the flames. At that instant the rest of the universe fades to black and you see nothing but the door, your obstacle, and your goal. All of your actions after that point is authentic-lending: the irrational and vigorous banging-away at the door, the yells, the scream, the passion, the pain, the pleading. You become one with the task of breaking the barrier and getting in touch with what’s on the inside!

Sorry if I just pulled a Lisa Loeb there, but the door/barrier refers to the facades and emotional barriers of your friends, and ‘the inside’ refers to object of your concern, your friend. I think I made a tidy finish of that analogy.

So with authentic-lending, it’s not just about really caring for the other person, or hoping for the best. It’s about having a personal stake in that person’s well-being. Correction, it’s about having a personal stake in that other person’s very existence! I’m lacking that. I mean, I know my family has those feelings for me, that’s a foregone conclusion. But the natural human urge is to find that degree of emotion from someone new. Sometimes when you’re up until the wee hours of the morning thinking about nothing else then the issues and problems of your friends’ lives, you start to wonder if they ever invest that much thought into you. If not, you’re forced to believe one of 2 conclusions. One: that you simply think too much, or two: that you’re simply not worth their thoughts. And then you remember that authentic-lending is a virtue, so one can’t be true, unless virtues are “too much.” But that’s a different philosophical debate.

The average reader of this blog has probably simplified this whole posting into something like, “Jamil’s just starving for affection.” I know I did, when I read about this for class. But for argument’s sake, let’s assume I have the ability to partially dissociate my feelings from my thoughts. I just wonder what’s the cause of all this lack of authentic-lending. Is it something about me? Actually, the better question is a totally different attack at myself. If someone really did want to authentically-lend themselves to me, would I let them? I know a lot of judgmental people, in fact everyone is judgmental. And there’s hardly a day that goes by where I’m not judged by at least someone. Maybe it’s just easier for me to be judged by lenders rather then authentic lenders, because the lenders only judge the mere surface that they’ve made contact with. But if an authentic-lender were to bash away at my door and break inside, and after seeing my core judge me still, that sort of thing might crush me.

For those of you who have taken on this task of reading 1000 words of unabridged 4am Jam-Thoughts, you’ve proven that you’re one-step closer to being an authentic-lender then I imagined. For those of you who merely skimmed it, you know where you stand. And for those of you who never read this, chances are you and I will continue on for the days and years to come, and the whole time you were nothing more then at best a lender, and never even knew it. No worries, many lenders never realize it. I suppose being a lender is better then being a borrower.

I will NOT get into a monologue about borrowers and lenders, I had my fill of that in Money and Banking!