This quote always comes back to me on days like today: “Your life is not an episode of ‘Skins.’ Things will never look quite as good as they do in a faded, sun-drenched Polaroid; your days are not an editorial from ‘Lula.’ Your life is not a Sofia Coppola movie, or a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or a Charles Bukowski poem. Grace Coddington isn’t your creative director. Bon Iver and Joy Division don’t play softly in the background at appropriate moments. Your hysterical teenage diary isn’t a work of art. Your room probably isn’t Selby material. Your life isn’t a Tumblr screencap. Every word that comes out of your mouth will not be beautiful and poignant, infinitely quotable. Your pain will not be pretty. Crying till you vomit is always shit. You cannot romanticize hurt. Or sadness. Or loneliness. You will have homework, and hangovers and bad hair days. The train being late won’t lead to any fateful encounters; it will make you late. Sometimes your work will suck. Sometimes you will suck. Far too often, everything will suck—and not in a Wes Anderson kind of way. And there is no divine consolation—only the knowledge that we will hopefully experience the full spectrum—and that sometimes, just sometimes, life will feel like a Coppola film.” - Letters From Nowhere. My take: One of the biggest traps I find myself falling into more often than not is what is commonly described as the expectation over reality (syndrome), which, in a nutshell entails a whole range of messy symptoms or side effects, including but not limited to; disappointment, disappointment and most importantly, disappointment. This quote is overly, scarily relevant to me, and probably to you as well. It is a not-so uncommon ailment of our generation. Blame it on my over-stimulated imagination or the number of times Ive watched Amelie over the years, but everything inside of me pushes me towards expecting more out of everyday life. We are the generation where opportunities are limitless, the possibilities for our futures are endless - we can do anything. Were kicking the 9-5 lifestyle and doing what we damn well please. We are supercharged with this romanticised idea of life. The films we watch, the books we read. And if youre easily swayed, like me, then youre affected by it. You expect what you read and what you see to happen. And it sucks, big time when it doesnt happen the way it did in your favourite scene from (insert corny teenage drama series). We are living, breathing movies minus the exaggeration. Plus a little pinch of reality. We expect so much from each other, from our relationships because our role models for relationships are written in script in a Hollywood film. Real people are not the spontaneous protagonists out of a perfect plot, theyre reactive and complex and sometimes predictable. Maybe that is why were unsettled. Maybe, just maybe, if we expressed a little more than we expected, wed all be a step closer towards that perfect Coppola scene.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 12:47:29 +0000
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