Alas, we don't choose (wholly) which years impact our lives the most, who comes into our lives and who leaves and I'd be lying if I said as wonderful as it's been there have been some very hard realities about life and myself I've had to face.
The bright side? It gave me a blog topic. ;)
This weekend I've been having a Dawson's Creek marathon. A bit ago I had a Ringer marathon. In December, I watched all the season's of Gilmore Girls.
When life gets hard for me, I turn to television, and more importantly television I watched when I was young, that meant something to me then.
I always wanted to be like Rory, have her mother and her boyfriends, and her life. She knew herself and she always held onto that. But she still allowed herself to change and grow and try new things.
Dawson's Creek will always bring me back to grade 4 and my best friends and I discussing it and using it in projects. And my secret hope that someday I'd be Joey and my best friend would realize he loved me.
I don't typically watch oodles and oodles of television and I love reading. I was the kid who walked home reading a book-walked into many a pole that way- I still carry a book with me when I leave my house. But when things get rough now, I don't read.
I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but slowly I've come to realize that the real reason I do it-and I think the world does it-is because television, movies, they make you feel different than reading. Reading touches people deeper, forces them to feel their own emotions because there's no laugh track, no visible person crying in pain, the subtexts and subtleties of books is raw emotion, and as humans we can't deal with that. We run away to fantasy worlds on screens where we can laugh and just chalk it up to "television."
Even in the most fantastical books there's always some truth, the revenge, the lust, the love, the fear, is real, even if the creatures can't be.
Or perhaps, I'm just philosophizing and books/television/movies all provide the same escape.
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
-Charles William Eliot
