Found In My Drafts: I Tried; A Table for One Manifesto

~ Maris ~ Leave a comment

“With my music, and for whoever listens to it, I think I’m not the best singer in the world at all. But no one else can sing my songs like me.”

~ Adele

With very few exception, I dislike covers of Adele’s songs.

Often, the focus is on trying to out-sing her, to somehow prove how overrated she is by how simple the notes are to sing. While the results vary, the most common one is they are unsuccessful. Lots of shouting, lots of “Adele, who” posturing, lots of going not much farther than the social media post.

She is the example I use in life of no one being able to tell your story like you can. And nowhere is this most evident than in the attempts to sing songs from her latest album- particularly the single “To Be Loved”, my favorite-I-can-never-listen-to-it-again track (we all have one per album). The soul-shredding final “let it be known” screams the cost of choosing yourself for a person who only knew love to mean constant self-sacrifice. As if she was screaming at the world that this was not a rash, self-absorbed decision.

Reader, she tried.

* * * *

It’s been years. I am not the same woman I was. And I had to stand in front of that man and tell him the woman I am now is not a woman he would fall in love with, no matter how much he thought we would work now that he was “ready”.

Because sometimes you just have to walk away. You are too far gone to ask someone used to you loving them a certain way to just be ok with an earth-moving shift. I’d argue it is kinder to walk away than to ask him to change everything about how he interacts, relies and enganges with you. Just because I have drastically changed does not mean you have to. It is far easier to find another me than to ask you to try.

And reader, I tried.

I tried. I tried pretending I was solely responsible for my personal happiness and for the happiness within the unit of our relationship. That I needed no affirmation. No tokens of thoughtfulness or consideration. That I did not need to know he saw me in the world at large, and in his world specifically.

But even succulents die, and I could no longer live hollowed out.

* * * *

The sole place setting at my table was not a matter of no longer wanting companionship. It was a realization that the woman I was becoming, and the parameters with which love would be possible for me, with the massive amount of space I need to remain intact and not fold into my partner- well no man I’ve ever met would tolerate those circumstances and I had no interest in looking till I found one. Similar to my fleeting desire for children, it simply was not enough of a want for me to attempt to overcome the obvious, glaring roadblocks in my path. It was a want, not a need; and I’d long had been accustomed to carving new paths when I could not get what I want.

The greatest trick I might have ever pulled was convincing anyone that My Table for One was a destination I planned and not a place I ended up. This was borne of me taking a frank look at my life and making the choice to build a solid life out of the cards I’d been dealt, rather than a sandcastle of an imagined life contingent on a person who would likely never arrive.

I asked, “If the life I have now was all I ever have, how can I make it work for me?” and turns out I liked the life I built more than the one I’d unsuccessfully tried to.

Oh, but reader, let it be known.

I tried.

In Defense of “Passengers”

~ Maris ~ Leave a comment
The only movie to ever make Chris Pratt look attractive.

I have a stash of “quiet” films that either have very little music, very low music, or are set to ambient music that I keep in the clip for low-energy days. “Passengers” is one such film, and I honestly think it has an undeserved bad rap.

First, let’s get the hand-wringing out of the way. Made during the height of the “we are sick of them” era of Prat and Lawrence, the main (rational) ire with the movie is the premise of the love story. And I mean…

Have we never seen a “man briefly sees woman, man becomes obsessed with woman, man drastically alters life of said woman to get her undivided attention” romance before? Honestly, it is Pratt’s morality clause that keeps most from liking the movie, because had it featured the logical amount of sex that two people stranded on a luxury ship should have had, we’d have called it a cult classic. It is basically 365dni: Space Odyssey. Moving on.

Anyone who has read my posts on romcoms knows one of my favorite tropes is “this is billed as a classic romance, but the romance is actually secondary/ a plot vehicle/ mooivation for the woman figuring out her own shit” and this is right up my alley because what?

Aurora is a writer. Not just any writer, a writer with lack of life- induced writer’s block, with a smattering of impostor syndrome. Jim liked her face, but fell in love with her words, He ends up being the one she wants to read her book, whatever it turns out to be, the most. He offers to step aside for her first love, The Words. And in the end, she chose him because what she had with him in the present was a better story than the one she had been writing for herself, a “what may happen” set in the future.

A very Gen X thing about me is my yet-to-wane addiction to games of the candy crush/ Royal match variety, and often I have to tell myself to play the game I have now, not the game I might have eight strategic moves from now- as we all know how that usually goes. This movie kind of reminds me of that. Aurora got on the ship with a 250-year plan, with the hopes that the future she’d wake up to would be more fulfilling than whatever she had going on in the present. And while some unfortunate choices were made for her, what she chose for herself in the end was a thing I can identify with- the better writing material.

“Passengers” is a tale about the stories we write ourselves, not a Space Beauty and the Beast. I mean, it is also that but at least they pulled it off in a way that made Pratt look decently attractive. Also, while I can’t prove this, I am convinced it was written with Katherine Heigl in mind. Jennefer has her exact cadence in it somehow and that in itself is highly entertaining. Anyway watch it again, or watch it for the first time, and prepare to ask yourself why you hated it or avoided it years ago.

**Also. The Academy needs to invent a new category called “mid-act-bomb-dropper” just so Lawrence Fishburne can win for his apparent hobby of coming in the 2nd or 3rd act just to fuck shit up, steal the whole movie and then die. Between this and “Predators” he deserves something.

Vanishing

~ Maris ~ Leave a comment

I am accustomed to the end of life.

I was born into an older extended family, and attended a church with mostly older members. By 10, I’d been to more funerals than a child probably should have. I am accustomed to the behaviors and theatrics and denial of the living amidst both the dying and the dead. And yet somehow, I was unprepared for the “dead to me”- how it feels when a person ceases to exist in your world while continuing to exist in the world at large.

There is a permanence to death, recognized stages one goes through when you remain among the living. There are storage shelves in your heart and mind for people whose stories have ended, places you hold them as they were, unchanging.

But what do you do when that person continues to live? Where do you store them as they are when they have the audacity to not remain frozen in the exact condition they were when they departed from your life? What stages of grieving do your people tolerate when there was no death? How is it possible to both forget a face and still see it?

When the “as it were” fades and the “as it is” begins to take over, there is an acceptance that comes with the knowledge there is nothing you can do. When the dead to you walk among the living, the denial can be infinite, forever simmering just under the surface waiting for a moment you would have otherwise shared with them.

I can speak to the dead, where they rest in the stores of my heart. I can marvel at how much room my heart has to grieve and love as the memory of their faces turn to light, their voices into warmth, their complexities into grace.

For the vanished, the only way to hold them as they were is to obsessively ruminate. To pour over every conversation, every missed moment, everything you wish you said. To breathe the air you would clear if you ever had the chance.

There are rituals for the dead. But you’re still alive.

I am accustomed to the end of life.

I still need a manual for the living.

In Defense of Rocky V

~ Maris ~ 1 Comment

Being as covid-conscious as I’ve had to be is quite the lonely endeavor these days. Often, it’s been a lot easier to sit at home and revisit movies I liked-or didn’t- and reflect on how they either were as good as I remember (but for entirely different reasons than when I initially watched), or better than I remember (now that I’ve had a chance to reflect as an ADULT- adult). The latter brings me here, presenting a different take on the much-maligned Rocky V.

Many a long-form pop culture tome has been written on the parralels of Rocky and the masculine journey. Which is why it surprised me how many aspects of Rocky’s chatacter arc were glossed over in order to paint the series as an out of touch, badly-aged snapshot of hyper-masculinity. It seems they all focus on the fact that his fighting strategy, and approach to life, was mainly to take hits till he outlasted whatever came at him. And on its surface, it IS a fair take. By the fourth movie, a glossy testament to the power of a good training montage, capped off with the best-presented and most pointless fight in movie history, “be MORE” man than him” could easily be seen as the mantra of the series. In doing so, the fifth does not make any sense.

Which is why I’m here, writing this equally pointless three-point argument on why the fifth not only makes more sense than every entry after the second, it is far better than you think. Well, at least better than the fourth.

Rocky V Brings Rocky Back to Earth

Between III and IV, Rocky transforms from a regular man in a character-driven story of extraordinary circumstances to a larger-than-life avatar. In doing so, the average viewer forgets that for the majority of his life, Rocky was functionally illiterate. I hate to break it to you, but Rocky V is exactly the sort of thing that would happen to a person who was only literate for a fifth of their life-while simultaneously being the richest and most famous they’ve ever been.

I have a huge appreciation for how Stallone wrote Rocky’s literacy arc- down to Rocky reading the newspaper aloud at Adrian’s grave in “Creed”- with a caveat. You see the world open up for him in II, as letters become words. You see the world become too big for him in III, when words become stories. And then all that character development drops in the 4th, when he tries to write his own stories. Rocky V is a course correction, and could have easily fit as the third or fourth in the series. If you watch it after II or III, instead of after IV, you’ll see how out of place the fourth actually is. And, how unrealistic it would have been to stop the story there.

Rocky is a Story About Life thru Boxing, not a Story About a Boxer

People ALSO forget the tagline for the series-right through to the third installment in “Creed”- is, “no one hits harder than life.” Which makes his “it’s not about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep going” read completely differently. Rocky goes through an unimaginable amount of grief over eight movies; literally every character in the movie does. When you review how many hits they all take, it’s a bit hard to bill it as a series meant to lift the spirit. However it does- simply because it is real. No one tells you that getting older is a matter of out-living who doesn’t and figuring out how to live with that and find some joy or purpose between, but it is.

Which brings me back to the claim that it is an out-of touch snapshot of hyper-masculinity. Were we all watching the same movies? Rocky cries in all 8. Paulie cracks apart (there is another post on how Stallone accurately wrote a casual alcoholic). All of them struggle with what it means to be a man. Apollo died from his struggle. The fifth saw Rocky struggle the same way Apollo did, in defining who he was outside of what he was known for. The difference was Apollo tried to hold on to it through a fight he never needed to take (at the expense of his family), and Rocky tried to hold on to it through mentoring a new fighter (at the expense of his family). His fight at the end was his first attempt to close a chapter, rather than let life close in on him. Was that point better covered in the excellent “Rocky Balboa”? Possibly. But you couldn’t get there without what was covered in V.

But of all the solid arguments on character arcs and story development, I think a lot of people miss one common-sense detail…

Not One Member of that Family Was Good With Money.

Did you sleep through Rocky II? What did you think was gonna happen?

Friday Faves, Friday Rants: How Good Can it Get?

~ Maris ~ Leave a comment

Happy Retrograde!

Reflections are a big part of retrograde for me, as I mostly slow down and let whatever past thought or past neglect come to the surface to pass. Sometimes my body lets me know I’ve been ignoring something (if I’ve visited an Urgent Care? It’s likely during a retrograde). Sometimes an old hurt un-mourned or an old argument unsettled bubbles up. Most times it’s just one of three select exes says hi on some social media platform. I journal what I notice to keep track of any patterns and usually keep the contents to myself; however, as I dedicated May to being more proactive on health I was surprised it fell in sync.

One goal of mine was to lean more into seeing good outcomes for myself. I have the highest confidence in my friends and will never hesitate to “send good thoughts” (aka, do a small intent exercise envisioning the best outcome for their endeavors) yet I famously operate by “a no is what I had when I started” and rarely think of the best that could happen for myself. While this is pragmatic, it makes for a miserly life if applied too liberally. So I followed the lead of my many whimsical friends who romance the hell out of their lives and announced aloud, “show me how good it can get”!

While I’m certain it was of good intent, over the next few weeks I noticed a few…issues.

First, I was not alone. Almost overnight, it seemed that it had become the next social media mantra, the new trendy tagline uttered by general assholes whose favorite pastime is demanding care from a community they have “self-cared” out of their own responsibility to contribute to (see: “I don’t owe anyone a call back, but I know who my real friends are by who reached out while I was being a hermit”). Anyone who knows me knows the second it becomes a trend, I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m not a movement and my life is not resistance. It is annoying to watch and participate in.

It is also devoid of substance, which brings me to my second issue. Coming from a place of lack, a statement like that sort of becomes a dare to be proven wrong. It wasn’t working for me, and I had to be real with myself and admit I can’t see how good it can get if I refuse to see the good already around me. The world is a complete dumpster fire but my world isn’t (completely- I still can’t run for the bus, fk covid).

So what is this post? Perhaps a second acknowledgement I need to get the hell away from the socials for a bit- as what is the point of logging on to something that annoys you-but also an olive branch to the universe, who has decided to come full circle on me this retrograde and only bring up thoughts of decent, nice and outright sappy shit that has happened since the panny upended life as I knew it. It’s bad out here, but it isn’t all bad. And I guess a bit of gratitude couldn’t hurt.