Avanti!

Resolutions from Bridget Jones' Diary (2001)

Instead of coming up with New Year's resolutions that I know I won't keep, ensued by a not so surprising sting of disappointment, I decided to compile a list of tidbits of advice/wisdom from people I know, books, and films as well as things I came up with to take with me into the new year.

1. "Never lose your childish innocence. It's the most important thing."

-Katherine in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)

This isn't to be naive but to keep a sense of childish curiosity and playfulness that is invaluable and could be easily lost with an accumulation of cynicism as we get older.

childish innocence channeled by Chaplin-esque Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina in La Strada (1954)

2. Not happy with something? "Fix that!" -Amanda 

(Co-pilot, remind me to get you a wrench that has "Fix that!" engraved on it one day.)

Disney's Handy Manny who happens to look like my friend George

 

3. "Guys are all bastards. Every guy has a bit of bastard in him." 
-Katy Perry-loving manboy

I take this piece of advice with a grain of salt. It also goes the same for girls. Every girl has the potential to do something bitchy. "Even angels have their wicked schemes."

4. Maybe is a vicious word that can toy with your mind. Just because you hope for a yes rather than a no doesn't mean that the possibly of something not happening won't occur.

Arrested Development Season 1, Episode 12 "Marta Complex"

To minimize disappointment, expect nothing rather than something because gambling on someone else's perhaps, perhaps, perhaps might bring forth even more disillusionment. Easier said than done, I know. Don't believe in false promises and don't reach for false hope because it usually doesn't pay off in the end.

5. Don't make excuses for someone else's behavior. It's not your job to do so and you're certainly not responsible for someone else's lack of consideration or misbehavior.

6. "In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other."

-John Steinbeck in a 1938 journal entry

7. If there's something you'll regret not saying, say it before you can't say it anymore because it's better to be an honest idiot rather than an idiot who stayed silent hoping for a chance at something.

8. "Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."

-Faber to Montag in Fahrenheit 451

borrowed words

Whenever I find interesting quotes that resonate with me, I jot them down into a notebook (that's it up there). It's like a diary - perhaps just as sensational to read, but a whole lot less embarrassing to revisit because it's mostly filled with borrowed words. These are a couple of my favorites this year, many of which have a very feminist undertone (haha). Enjoy!

Peggy Olson - Mad Men Season 3

film / television

"You're smooth. And charming. You turn it on like hot water from the faucet. But I've had measles once. Now I'm immune." -Linda Gilman, June Bride (1948)

"You're like an old coat that's hanging in his closet. Every time he reaches in, there you are. Don't be there once." -Desk Set (1957)

"The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings." -Kathleen Kelly, You've Got Mail (1998)

"You have set up a way of life that basically makes it impossible for you to have any kind of human connection. And now this woman comes along and somehow runs the gauntlet of your ridiculous life choice and comes out on the other end smiling just so you can call her 'casual'? I need to grow up? You’re a 12-year-old." -Natalie, Up in the Air (2009)

"I don't wanna make a career out of being there so you can kick me when you fail." -Peggy, Mad Men Season 3, Episode 13 "Shut the Door. Have a Seat."

Richard Burton

people

"He always thought that he had to do something about endangered species, forgetting that he himself was an endangered species the way he drank." -Billy Wilder on William Holden in Billy Wilder Speaks (2006)

side note: William Holden was an alcoholic. He drank too much and died from a blow to the head from a night stand.

"I'm not sure if it's a function of advancing age or just the times we're living in, but it's almost impossible for me to find complete external validation in any one thought, desire, instinct, or vision anymore." -John Mayer

"I feel like a discarded floppy disk." -moi

courtesy of Ms. Amanda

"He wanted the milk without the cow." -Amanda

"One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer." -Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor

"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love." -Leo Tolstoy

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder/yonder." -Amanda

 books / plays

"He is collecting pleasures and pains, gathered from his relationships with ballerinas and librarians, decent females without the right pheromones, and nut-balls. He is like a child learning what is too hot to touch, and he hopes all this experience will coalesce into a philosophy of life, or at least a philosophy of relationships, that will transform itself into instinct." -Shopgirl

"[Y]ou neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over - and it was not fear for what threatened me but for what might happen to you - when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in the future treat with doubly gentle care because it was so brittle and fragile." -Nora, A Doll's House

"I got to know you. You cured me of you." -Emma, One Day

Technology and the Single Girl

As we progress towards new technology, newer, hipper modes of communication are becoming increasingly impersonal. Face-to-face interaction would be ideal when you're trying to get to know someone; however, busy schedules or even physical distance become viable, prime barriers for a lack of personal interaction. When minimal face-to-face interaction occurs, what happens? My friend Amanda has suggested that "absence makes the heart grow fonder/yonder." But which is it? I've felt fonder and yonder with different men on various occasions before, but what tips the scale over from yonder to fonder or vice versa? Does someone feel fonder of someone else because that person is not readily available? Is it the idea of a chase that creates this (illusion of) fondness?

Before texting and the Internet, people resorted to telegrams, letters, and the telephone. If you look at mail correspondence, this is still considered as impersonal communication because there is a barrier preventing you from having direct, personal correspondence. A letter would have to go through a middle man, the post office, before arriving at its final destination. Certainty for a single girl, this whole waiting for a letter to endure a long physical journey to get to you is completely romantic and sentimental. The idea of a letter from a guy you adore makes you smile because as sappy as this may sound, he once held the letter you are holding, and plus he handwrote, or more like scrawled, the letter you are reading. You can't help but feel special - because this letter is for you and no one else.

Klara (Margaret Sullavan) reading a letter in The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

If a single girl regularly receives some kind of correspondence, such as letters, from her object of affection and suddenly that correspondence ceases, she can feel unwanted, abandoned, unnerved, or worse - inadequate. (Ladies, we don't need validation from men to be/feel amazing.)

Inbox empty. Better luck another day, Klara. Poor lady... don't cry, Shopgirl.

No one likes this kind of needy behavior of waiting for that other person to respond back, but many of us are guilty of waiting for an e-mail back or even a telephone call back (myself included) because our singleton heart craves attention and affection. It's nice to be wanted and/or needed. I'm a little old fashioned but men who are able to write beautiful letters, or at least attempt to handwrite a personal letter to their object of affection, are a dying breed. I wish this wasn't the case, but it is. Nowadays, men can steathily or awkwardly dodge unwanted females by plainly ignoring those girls' e-mails, ims, and texts with the reasoning that one isn't obligated to reply back immediately or ever to electronic/digital messages.

When it comes to the telephone, especially before cell phones came along, one often pictures a single girl waiting at home next to the telephone. It is such a depressing image. Imagine the time wasted on waiting for a jerk who said he'll call but he won't. Why do we have such a passive image of single females waiting? There is a double standard that women aren't supposed to make the first move when it comes to dating men. Honestly, I initiate things anyways. I know it comes off as "unlady-like" but you know what - sometimes men don't have the nerve to make the first move. Women should give men a little push, and if that little push doesn't work, you move along to another guy. It's all trial and error. I refuse to wait for one guy too long; I'm not getting any younger, and it's not like that guy is going to grow another pair of balls anytime soon (plus, that would be really disgusting).

The good thing about talking on the phone is that even though you can't see the person you're talking, you can hear the tone of that person's voice and so there's a smaller chance of misinterpreting what that person is saying. Flirting via the telephone is always fun. It's a great way to be coy and indulge your object of affection and yourself with some witty repartee (which I love). I'm sure phone sex occurred way before that term was actually coined as well.

split screen telephoning between Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959)

some telephone action in Pillow Talk remake Down With Love (2003)

I really doubt that any guy would do push-ups with a phone on his shoulders, but whatev - it's the movies.

Then along came the Internet - with instantaneous e-mails and instant messages. Instead of face-to-face interaction, it's you and the screen with text sent over not so long ago. Since it's an impersonal form of communication, many people feel like they can get away with typing certain things over the Internet that they normally wouldn't be able to have the nerve to say in person. No one likes confrontation and so the Internet removes that fear behind possibly saying something confrontational or inappropriate. Guys can easily flirt with single gals with a keyboard and a mouse, without witnessing those girls' possible looks of disgust. Getting rejected online reminds me of what George said in You've Got Mail (1998): "Well, as far as I'm concerned, the Internet is just another way of being rejected by women."

 

Inappropriate e-mail messages from Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001):

 

Although communicating over the Internet is impersonal, there is that advantage of being able to freely react to messages uncensored in the privacy of your own personal space.

As far as instantaneous communication goes, sometimes technology encourages people to become rude, insensitive human beings, by doing something as brutal and impersonal as breaking up with someone over a text:

 from Up in the Air (2009)

Notice that the date sent was two days before Valentine's Day.

I realize that I kept on harping on the impersonal side of technology, but technology is a double-edged sword: the great thing about it is that you can receive instantaneous messages from anyone all over the world; however, there's that person-to-person interaction that is completely priceless that you can't experience by receiving e-mails, ims, and texts.

I'll leave you with the following quote:

"The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings." - Kathleen Kelly, You’ve Got Mail (1998)

It was a quote I kept on thinking about maybe a year ago. It's something I will never say to this one person I know, but that person kind of brought me back to life with a whole lot of nothings online when I was going through a very dark time. It was an unintentional doing on that person's part, but I am still grateful for all those nothings that meant something to me.