I watched a movie, as it so happens to be with the majority of my life, that has touched me in a very special way. Before I go into why and how it touched me, I want to talk about how movies and music have set a really low but high expectation for life. Primarily, romantic flicks seem to cause me a lot of strife. I'm the good guy. I don't, honestly, know if that's a good thing or not. I know that I strive to be the good guy, though, because it makes me feel good about myself. To be nice, and to have people like me because of that means that my personality has to shine more to be comparable in nature with my niceness. I guess, perhaps, that because of my overbearing personality I push people away from really seeing me as much.

I didn't expect to get off on that tangent, but I like it. Movies make me think real life works that way. Honestly, it should work that way. There's no reason everyone can't just be open about how they feel, and let everyone know, and go with what they feel, happy or sad, and see where it taks them. That, in and of itself, is the basis of all my problems. I put myself on a limb constantly with people, and I do so knowing that the way it works in movies is how it works in real life. Because they are but an extension of the life that we lead.

That's not, however, the case. While I keep doing the same thing over and over again, placing myself dangling by my ankle above the pit of hungry pirahnas with the hope that someone hero will save me, reality, itself, personally kicks me square in between my thighs. I'm not so much complaining as explaining, though. I've set myself up for that fall, because there are places in me that know that my logic is not completely correct. The set-ups are all similar to the films I've come to look at for advice, but the reactions to those set-ups are always distrastrously disproportionate in the world I have to realize I actually live in.

The problem with that scenario is that I have this silly little bugger in the back of my skull known the world over as "Hope." It's always there in my head, it's infested my soul, they talk about it on television, my friend's harbor it, and a presidential candidate is riding it all the way to the White House. There's really no getting rid of the process of hope when all of America is sitting in their living rooms hoping their asses off.

My hope forces me to, above all else, want things to work the way movies have taught me they should. The good guy wins in the end. He gets what he wants right when it seems furthest away. And, while he must endure quite a many hardships and frustrations and hopeless endeavours to get to the end of the movie, the finale causes jubilation on a scale that could counteract Hiroshima.

It's at moments where my hope fails me, and I have to endure the stress and pain that is this world I've made for myself that I need to step away from it all before it eats me alive. That's the problem with who I am, essentially. I am so open, that it causes emotional fluctuation that I am open about which causes more and more in that vicious cycle until I get to a point that I have to back away. My character's fundamental flaw, is that he wants people to know how he really feels, what he really thinks, who he really is. He cares so much about those things that when he let's someone in to see everything that he hides, even in his openness, that it should be something more.

My definition of myself is flawed.

That being said, this morning I watch a movie that has, once again, touched me in a way I didn't think it could. First off, let me tell you that it was "Finding Forrester", which was directed by Gus van Sant, who directed "Good Will Hunting" as well. The movie is about an overly intelligent African-American teen, Jamal, who accidentally meets William Forrester, an enigmatic famous writer who disappeared years ago. I thought from the beginning that the entire film would be about how "tortured" the poor little black boy was going to be because of living in the Bronx, having to hide his intelligence to be accepted by the rest of the neighborhood, but it's not the case at all.

Sure, that played a role in the development of the character, but it was about writing, trusting yourself, and the friendship of two people that have similar lives. The first two are tied together far more than I assumed at first, but the more I really think about it, they are so close in relation in the story of the movie, that I really can't believe that I neglected it. "The first draft, you write with your heart." I hope that I can do that. I hope that I can just trust myself and my heart to put my words in the right direction. Maybe this time my hope won't devour me.

I will write more soon.

--Kris Peraldo