My name is Terry and this is my blog. 
08/21/2005: "Catharsis or Restlessness."
music: Just lay your head on my shoulder/Don't worry 'bout a thang baby girl, I'm a soldiermood: Tired. I'll be editing grammatical errors in the morning.
Again, glorious is the mood as I accomplished everything I set out to this weekend. Haircut, deposit checks, Fellini double bill (Nights of Cabiria and Juliet of the Spirits), Xiu Xiu at the Troubadour, drinks with mates at The Roost, pancakes with Nick, a trip to the Getty Center, sweatin at Bikram Yoga and a blog update.
I had to pack in the weekend as any moment of non-activity leads to a counterproductive restlessness. I'm not usually the social butterfly, but have gained a new appreciation for just hanging about, talking shit with friends and just enjoying the present tense. Which is what everybody has been telling me to do for the last month and a half.
But as my Sunday is beginning to turn into Monday anxiety (workweek, survival, uncontrollable anxiety attacks) it's hard to dramatize the weekend's events chronologically/dramatically in a way that makes me look cool or interesting. This blog has always been about just keeping me busy, an emotional outlet and an opportunity for all my witty friends to post cryptic messages to each other. I can only hope that it makes their workday a little easier. I can't imagine this thing turning into a "Dear Diary."
So things came to a head this weekend emo-style while watching "Nights of Cabiria." I've seen this film before at Cornell a few years ago during a Fellini festival and it affected me in the same way that a film does, like E.T., Babe: Pig in the City, or Life is Beautiful. One of those "life is going to be alright despite whatever shit is going down. I think I cried the first time I saw it.
While I didn't realize it walking into the theater, I was walking into a film that I later perceived to mirror my life. In the film, the main character, Cabiria, a loud-mouth prostituted is hypnotized into falling in love. It's a mesemrizing scene, as she is tranformed from tough to tender, spilling her secrets into the air, returning to innocence in front of an audience of strangers. At the end of the film she is again deluded into love and surrenders her life savings to a husband who doesn't have the nerve to push her off the cliff. She begs for him to kill her, and while he runs off with the money, she passes out in the forest.
The film challenged what I thought of love as the panacea to a life where the only certainty is death. The cynic in me now wants to say that love is simply chemical. A complex combination of the sensory, synapses and electrical impulses that responds to the faintest touch, the slightest curve, the warm whispers. We create the illusion/disillusion that it's all fucking good. We forget that the heart can be deceitful above all things, that comfort can be misleading and tenderness turns cold easily. That intimacy will cut you wide open and "I love you" is a breath with one small tongue tap on the pallette and one small bite to the lower lip (read: meaningless, unless backed by action).
There is a happy ending, however. Cabiria wakes in the night and makes her way to the street. As she walks down the uncertain road (figurative and literal), a small parade of musicians and revellers. They swarm around her and as the tears well up in her eyes, she offers a tender smile. I was waiting to see if the scene would move me as the first experience. I became fixated on Cabiria's eyes. I didn't notice it the first time I saw the film, but there's a moment where she looks staright into the camera, straight into the audience, straight into me. As if to say that there is good in this world, that happiness will come when you least expect it. As it faded to black it hit me - the grand idea of what needs to happen (I won't give it away, as it is now mine). All I need to do now is run with it. Time to stop hitting the snooze button. Time to do what my father always told me about "getting smart."
Time to stop crossing my fingers.