Perks of Being a Wallflower

Really, there's no word for this film other than "infinite." Which is apt, because that's how the protagonist of the story feels throughout his adolescene.

The goal of this story, as I see it, was to produce a film that didn't feel like just-another-teenage-movie. "Perks" succeeds in this goal overwhelmingly--the create something that doesn't cheapen the teenage experience.

As we grow older, as we move forward in our lives, we forget how we felt at 16. More than that--we want to forget how we felt at 16. We want to make our actions during adolescene unimportant, because back then, we were still under construction. We want to think that who we were in high school wasn't real. That what we did didn't matter, because we were still figuring out who we were.

While it's true that the time for experimenting with identity is during adolescence, that fact does not make any of our experiences less important. We would all like to to disregard our mistakes and crystallize our successes. "Perks" argues that no matter what, everything we expereince is important. We should remember the good along with the bad.

"Perks" challenges how we, as adults, perceive our years in high school. It says that our pain, our uncertainty, our emotional struggles--all of that was real. And we should strive to remember that with clarity, because we can't remember our recovery from pain realistically unless we do. Our discoveries, our reaching out for understanding, our being reached out for--how do we know this if not emotionally? How do we find happiness if not in the midst of pain?

What use is there in remembering the golden days without remembering how our friends saved us-- and what they saved us from?

I find myself wondering if watching "Perks" as a teenager is different from watching it as an adult. If we all, no matter what age, want to elevate our past experiences. Make them into something better than they were.

Indecorous

"Mr. Worthing! Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous." 

These are lines spoken by the character of Lady Bracknell in scene 1 of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.  Lady Bracknell is shocked and disturbed to find Mr. Worthing in the throes of a less than perfect marriage proposal to Gwendolyn; and Gwendolyn, perhaps, is enjoying the guilty pleasure of pushing the boundaries of social decorum.

Jasmine recently played the role of Lady Bracknell in her high school's performance of the play; so I had the occasion to read the play, and then enjoy the performance.  The scene is hilarious, but the word, "Indecorous" is a perfect reflection of Lady Bracknells character... slightly obscure, so as to mark the speaker as educated and articulate; defining fashion and style, so as to define the speaker as superficial and pretentious; and percussively stacatto, so as to hammer home the character's lack of diplomacy.

Words, like 'indecorous', are beautiful things; filled with subtle meanings, found in nostalgic contexts, and sometimes used again, like lethal weapons.  I think that everyone out there has there own arsenal of unusual words, sometimes associated with a certain memory or experience, captured forever in their conscious or sub-conscious mind.  If we could distill their thoughts, or disect their speech; we would probably find an utterly unique list of unfamiliar words befitting that person alone.  'Logical'...'Arrhythmia'...'Callipygian'...'Reckon'...'Iatrogenic'...'Identical'....

From time to time, I'll post a blog entry regarding a word that I find to be particularly lively or poignant, maybe even personal.

Etymologically yours,

Steve

"If I love you, what business of that is yours?" -Goethe

I find more and more that YouTube comment boxes simply don't have enough room for any kind of real answer to any question. How can you put a character limit on love? Christine, I hope this answers your question. Link!

Firstly, I have to say that I love P!nk's new album. Ironically, it is titled "The Truth About Love." I know right, totally unrelated. She says about love, "It's all the poetry that you ever heard." I think that P!nk's lyric may have just become a contestant for my favorite of all time, knocking out Ben Folds' "And don't forget, to give me back my black t-shirt." a lyric from his "Song for the Dumped."

On an unrelated note, I'm going to try and limit the number of times I actually use the word love in this post; yet I will inevitably find it surprising just how much we tend to devalue this word by using it to refer to ultimately inconsequential things.

I hope you enjoy all this music. It is my beleif that the best songs in the world--the ones we listen to every day, the ones we love-- are the ones that are about heartbreak. Pain is what gives us our inspiration.

I think that love is what happens when you care about someone. Love is that answer that we keep trying to pin down but can never quite get to the bottom of. It's a paradox: simple and complicated at the same time. Love is the same for everyone. And yet everyone's love is so extraordinarily different that it's not. Love is someone loving most about you what you hate most about yourself.

Here are a few more quotes for you guys. I hope they illuminate something about love for you. I like them, at least.

 Kisses are like tears. The real ones are the ones you can't hold back.
-Author Unknown  

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
-Anais Nin