Yearsh

I just remembered this time I was on the bus, and someone left his wallet as he was leaving. He was sitting next to a bum, and he just took it, opened it, looked inside, then put it in his pocket.

And I just sat there. I sat there. End of story.

Jeez.

Corona commercial

I want a stoop right now. I wish my neighborhood was a little more ghetto, so I can sit out on my stoop on my porch swing. I'll have a beater on, sum stunners, a shotgun, my plaid shorts on, and sum tsinelas with socks on. Oh, and I'll have a bucket of coronas chillin' on ice.

But I won't drink any. As long as they're there for my visual comfort. Limes, too, to add a lil' green to my scenery.

I'll just be waiting for my mail so I can finger through the new victoria's secret catalog. yeaaaa...

I'm scared of heights!

Vertigo.

What an accurate title for a movie that is about a guy with acrophobia and suffers from vertigo. But it’s doubly insidious that whoever thought up this movie (Alfred Hitchcock was the director, but it said in the beginning of the movie that it was inspired by some French book) named the movie Vertigo because of the effect it gives the viewer.

So powerful. I’m experiencing vertigo right now.

I will get back to the artistic value of this movie. How it was shot, and the very concept, etc. But I really want to address how it portrays how people of that era deal with psychological stress. 1954 was it?

I’m guessing they couldn’t deal with it. The paranoia I mean. They would just diagnose themselves as “mad” and be done with it. I’m guessing we all experience paranoia in our lives, but I feel it all really depends on how everyone else deals with it, too. That’s why I regard this as a result of the era, because it really depends on how everyone else thinks about a certain “thing.” So I guess here I’m talking about psychological stress and how people deal with it. In Scottie’s era, people look down upon it. When he asks the lady who ended up buying Madeleine’s car where she bought it and thereby mentions how Madeleine kills herself, the era of the movie names it “unfortunate.” That means I guess that being paranoid to the point of killing oneself makes it unfortunate. That is the era Scottie lives in. I guess we all still live in it as well. It’s not “good” to commit suicide because of a mental condition.

So people back in the day couldn’t deal with it. Some people today still can’t deal with it, and yes, sometimes suicide to them is the answer. In Gnarls Barkley’s new CD, “St. Elsewhere,” C-Lo says, “And I’ve tried, everything but suicide, but it’s crossed my mind, just a thought.” Maybe that’s how we’ve dealt with it since 1954 or whatever. We just recognize that it’s just a thought. But it’s not to think Scottie didn’t discover that as well. When he was trying to help Madeleine, he tells her it’s just thoughts, and whatever’s real, whatever’s happening right now is what really matters. Except Hitchcock shows how impetuous the mind can be with the portrayal of Scottie’s mental state after he sees the staged “suicide.” We change our minds so fast and so impulsively that we forget what we have just figured out about our present situation, our state of being, our lives. Sometimes we can’t deal with our own forgetfulness. Vertigo.

Hitchcock covered all the bases. He showed schizophrenia by Scottie’s multiple aliases. He showed depression with Scottie’s silence. He showed his era’s inability to deal with people’s psychological problems with the scene at the hospital. The doctor looked like an idiot. And paranoia was all over the film. Part of the genius is how paranoid the viewers were because of the movie. Good movies hit a strong chord in people in that way I guess.

I should’ve known the sneakiness of the plan. Any normal person would’ve totally known someone was tailing them. Scottie was the opposite of sneaky.

So this is the era we are trying to get out of. Our own self-awareness haunts us. And we have been dealing with it forever. Movies like this are a bookmark I guess, to show the future where we were at, to make sure we don’t fall far. So does that mean a society that produces much “bookmarks” (movies, art, books, etc.) is enlightened? I was actually glad to hear this phrase from the album "Emergency Rations" from a rapper called Mr. Lif, “I think he was onto something…” I guess that’s the phrase of this phase of my life, “I think I’m onto something.”

I should address the topic of love, and how the movie portrayed it. It was good. Real, kinda like how Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind portrayed it. I’ll get back to this.

How come movies as thought-provoking as this involve love? Is it the one thing we haven’t figured out?

I take that back. I, Robot was thought provoking. Back at square one…

Having a brain is so frustrating sometimes.

Zoom

I wish I had a propellor plane right now. I'd fly it away, look for some crop circles, shoot the sides of some barns. Oh yea, I'd have some guns on the plane too.

It's so hot.

It's complex

I read something about the God Complex. It’s apparently in our head, the part that experiences emotions.

I can understand how scared the author could be when he was writing about this. But understandably so. Although, for the purposes he set out, I guess it makes sense to put this topic into the book. The book is rooted in research. And research says that we have a God Complex in our heads. When we have out-of-body experiences, a region in your brain is stimulated, apparently the same place would also be stimulated when a sufferer of epilepsy would be in seizure or something. Specifically, the part of the brain that controls emotions is stimulated. That’s why God is felt, not known.

But isn’t it weird? We’re talking about out-of-body experiences here, and SCIENCE. Usually those things are separate. You have to be in a different state of mind to talk about one thing and talk about the latter. Or do you? Do we really have to distinctly separate those two things?

I mean I could pretend for a minute that I did have an out-of-body experience. (Maybe I really have… wouldn’t you like to know?) I could really just go all out with the mysticism. It would be really easy. I could get swept by things like crop circles, abductions, the higher power, universal unification, dream catchers, four-leaf clovers, Bigfoot, optical illusions, tie-died shirts, salvation, philosophy, death, vampires, the sixth sense, ESP, cults, Harry Potter, and alternate dimensions.

But I don’t. Usually I say that I have too much sense for that. Recently, I asked “Do you really?” I’m at a very impressionable place in life right now. I think I could believe anything. Yesterday I was almost completely fooled by this Fundamentalist (or something) cartoon talking about evolution. It is seriously crazy, check it out. The guy’s name is Chick.

I’m just saying. I could go either way these days. Science, bah. It’s all about them preachers in the street, mang.

Helping myself to a serving of whoopass.

I bought a self-help book today. It was in the self-help section of Waldenbooks. Therefore, it is a self-help book. Even though it doesn't have a title like "Anxiety and Depression: How to deal with it." It's title is "An owner's manual to the Brain." It claims to be rooted in research, so it's not really all that mushy as "Chicken Soup for the Soul." But it doesn't hide the fact that's it's a self-help book.

I'll wonder why there's a stigma against self-help, why there's a fear of being called crazy, why I shuddered at the thought of carrying out a book on Depression, and yet carried out this book that is supposedly "rooted in research" LATER.

It must be the era we're all in. I'll stick with that answer until I can come up with a better one.

I want an invisibility cloak

Our deepest and most desperate desires.

It’s pretty cool reading Harry Potter at this time of my life. I like to overanalyze things, to the point of ridiculous. So Dumbledore has this mirror in one of the rooms in Hogwarts, that reflects upon the user his or her most deepest and desperate desires. Not only are they deep and secret, but they’re desperate. It gives a whole new meaning to the word desire. It is now a desire worth fighting for. Worth paying large sums of money for. Worth giving up your last French fry for. Worth letting someone else bowl your last frame. Maybe a desire worth dying for as well. Maybe that’s why Harry and Ron were so surprised and entranced at what they saw in the mirror. They even fought a little to get some time in front of the Mirror of Erised. Desire spelled backwards. Clever.

Wonder what I would see if I were to place myself in front of that mirror? Seriously. What would be my most desperate desire? Something material? Some sort of status? Another person, perhaps? And why would our most desperate desires also be deep? What in particular are we so ashamed of in our most desperate desires? Maybe the common characteristic of our desperate desires is that they all are all too human. And according to Gnarls Barkley, “Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.”

I’m embarrassed of myself. I messed up cutting my own hair today. I don’t know if I would like to see my own desperate desire. Even if only I get to see it.

Dumbledore is a wise man. Earlier in the book he said, “Ah, Music. A magic beyond all of what we do here.” And in reference to the mirror he said, “It does not do to dwell in dreams and forget to live, remember that.”

Copy that, Double D. (Or maybe Wise Owl would be a more appropriate code name?)

Mic check. I...2...

Hello. My name is Jarrett Bato.

I'd like to introduce myself to myself. I'm halfway (?) done with college and I feel like I need to do something different with my life. I changed a lot this year. And what have I done about it thus far?

I watched Kung Fu Hustle, Eternal Sunshine, Aeon Flux, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and a bunch of other "insightful" movies. I read Intimacy, by Kureishi and am currently marinating salmon with maple syrup and soy sauce.

I'll change my life later.