The Jane Austen Book Club

I just finished watching the movie The Jane Austen Book Club. And I loved it. I guess I had pretty low expectations, since I'd heard that it wasn't really all that good. But I really loved it. It was amazing how watching it made me fall more in love with Jane Austen's novels, with literature in general, with French, with the world, with the vast variety of people there are, with love, with libraries, with travel, with staying up late to read a good book ... with so many things. After such a sucky day (you remember, the one that started with the super-depressing cyberbullying suicide video?) it's remarkable how much that movie excited me about life, about what I'm doing with life. Granted, it also made me hope for a time when it'll be just me, alone in my house and holed up with a good book, staying up until who knows how late doing something that just makes me happy. But I suppose at the same time that's not really what I'm supposed to want ... aloneness, endless recreation, not ever having to work, etc. It's glamorous, idealized, and for the number of problems those characters have, it's remarkable that I don't really attend to them. It's wonderful to get caught up in a movie like that, to just depart from reality and, for at least a few moments, enjoy another world.

I don't really know how to feel right now. I know what I feel, but I also feel like I shouldn't be feeling what I feel, that I shouldn't be wanting what I want, that I'm some kind of lousy slug for wanting what I want, that what I want isn't really what I want because I've made it into a whole other creature in my head so I'm wanting something that's completely unattainable, that what I perceive as what I want is really just a glamorized illusion of a means to get what I really want, and that, tragically, I can never have what I want because it doesn't exist, and all of these realities are going to come crashing down on me like a cold bucket of water on my head on a frosty February morning.

Is everything I'm feeling an illusion? Am I stuck in a movie? Am I exaggerating how good I feel right now because this has been a Monday that has fully fulfilled its reputation? Am I experiencing a minor chemical imbalance? Am I crazy? Can I have what I want? Do I want what I want because it's the easy way out since the past few days have been a spiraling misery pit wherein I've started to fear that many of the big things I want from life are going to be snatched from out around me without me being able to control any of it? What is my problem? Am I trying to eat away this ebbing tide of unhappiness that is ever so slightly tainting my life? Am I becoming a bitter cynic whose expectations for life have been inflated to the point that they can never be fulfilled? What do I want in the short-run?

Too many questions. I'm losing the glow of my movie delight, and that's annoying. Time for bed.