On Occasional Sadness of Varying Degrees
(Or why Zach Braff will never be her lover...)
06/04: She reads Oblivion, a collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace. Doesn't remember much of the book, but does remember one sentence regarding the fact that much of the meat of our lives is spent tending to the "management of mediocrity."
07/04: Tristesse, the infinite kind. She finds no comfort in New Jersey. Her brain never stops while she's driving. Or she gets where she's going and she doens't know how. She misses him. He was 82 years old.
3/05: A friend of hers attends book reading for some novel. Read blurb: "is life worth living if you can't live famous?"
5/05: She recently endures the sad kind of morning where one's experiences indescribable melancholia, and cries through the whole of "Garden State," wishing hysterical numbness was her problem and, of course, briefly falls in and out of love with lead character/actual actor playing lead character/writer and director, who are of course, all the same man. She later finds his blog and reads a bit, sad to find that he belongs to everyone (and yet, to none of these people) and that his fans are legion and that her googling and logging on is the opposite of unique. This is when she remembers the events noted above.
She comes to some sort of conclusion, I think, consisting of the thought that (a) nothing is really ever enough for everyone, (b) that Zach Braff probably has to manage his own brand of mediocrity more often than one would think, (c) that life is certainly worth living if not famous (if only for the fact that you never need to worry about getting punk'd), but definitely, she thinks, always a little bit harder than if you were famous - in that it never really gets easier to deal with kind of way, but blends into the landscape of one's life without feeling as grating as it used to the more that time passes, kind of like her mother, and (d) that when a friend once told her that, for whatever its failings, Garden State was one of the most tender movies he'd seen, she didn't then, but now would have to agree.
06/04: She reads Oblivion, a collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace. Doesn't remember much of the book, but does remember one sentence regarding the fact that much of the meat of our lives is spent tending to the "management of mediocrity."
07/04: Tristesse, the infinite kind. She finds no comfort in New Jersey. Her brain never stops while she's driving. Or she gets where she's going and she doens't know how. She misses him. He was 82 years old.
3/05: A friend of hers attends book reading for some novel. Read blurb: "is life worth living if you can't live famous?"
5/05: She recently endures the sad kind of morning where one's experiences indescribable melancholia, and cries through the whole of "Garden State," wishing hysterical numbness was her problem and, of course, briefly falls in and out of love with lead character/actual actor playing lead character/writer and director, who are of course, all the same man. She later finds his blog and reads a bit, sad to find that he belongs to everyone (and yet, to none of these people) and that his fans are legion and that her googling and logging on is the opposite of unique. This is when she remembers the events noted above.
She comes to some sort of conclusion, I think, consisting of the thought that (a) nothing is really ever enough for everyone, (b) that Zach Braff probably has to manage his own brand of mediocrity more often than one would think, (c) that life is certainly worth living if not famous (if only for the fact that you never need to worry about getting punk'd), but definitely, she thinks, always a little bit harder than if you were famous - in that it never really gets easier to deal with kind of way, but blends into the landscape of one's life without feeling as grating as it used to the more that time passes, kind of like her mother, and (d) that when a friend once told her that, for whatever its failings, Garden State was one of the most tender movies he'd seen, she didn't then, but now would have to agree.
posted by Lisa at 12:25 PM
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