Benjamin Buttons

Benjamin Buttons doesn't offer much satisfaction in post-viewing rumination. In the end, there's just not that much too it. The character is only interesting because he's aging backward and he's very good looking. Otherwise he's kind of a dullard.

But watching it was an absorbing experience, largely because New Orleans looked so very beautiful in the film. But it was also visually compelling to see Brad Pitt emerge from old age in to youthful beauty. He isn't my fetish of male beauty--that would probably be Johnny Depp. But still, I couldn't look away.

Also, even if the film isn't really saying much of anything, it does make fresh some things we all know too well, about how change is constant and we are ephemeral, how we lose the ones we love and even ourselves. Every pair of lovers at the peaks of their existences are going to fall into decline, and they ought to know it; but the film brings special poignancy to that awareness by creating a pair who are declining in different directions.

Aging backwads would have its benefits. If you reached your peak of health and beauty late in life, you would probably appreciate it and make more of it than the average twenty year old. Benjamin's end is not appealing, but if you have to lose your mind and be totally dependent on others, it might be better to be in the body of a small child rather than an octogenarian, because you'd be more appealing to your caretakers.

And in other news, bar review class starts again tomorrow. I'm totally unemployed and would be in a panic if I had the energy for it. I've been studying and have slowed down on my writing. But being here, with my family and its ghosts, has given me some new threads to work with.

Lightning

I had a dream I was back in Richmond. It was a warm day but a little light rain had begun and the wind was picking up in anticipation of a storm. I stepped out of my house to look -- maybe I knew something was going to happen -- and out of almost nowhere I huge crack of lightning struck a neighbhor's house. This was no ordinary lightning strike. I watched in shock and fear as blocks of downtown Richmond went up in flames and skyscrapers collapsed. Both my house and my workplace were destroyed.

I've been missing New Orleans lately, but if I were in Richmond I don't think I would miss New Orleans. My life feels like it has been destroyed by lightning, but I can't put all the blame for the destruction on an uncontrollable natural disaster. It would be better if I could blame it on an unpredictable disaster that made the news and roused people's sympathy and desire to help. Instead: I flunked the bar exam and had the bad luck to graduate during a huge recession. Now I am living in my sister's dining room, looking for a job, getting behind on my bills, freezing my ass off, dealing with my family of self-absorbed moping depressives. Pot, kettle?

My *&^*% mother!

There's no solution to this problem and maybe no point in even writing about it, but once again I am annoyed and upset after a short and seemingly innocuous conversation with my mother, aka The Underminer. She doesn't mean any harm, she doesn't know she's doing it, or maybe I'm doing it to myself. Cognitive therapy has helped me a lot but it hasn't allowed me to conquer my mother's voice inside or outside my head. She managed to imply that going to law school was a mistake but too late but maybe someday I will find a job. I know that she gets to me only because she's amplifying my own depressed and self-undermining voice. The best solution I can manage is to avoid talking to her, but I'm afraid that after she's gone I'll regret avoiding her. I keep thinking that when I get a job and the crisis passes I will be more able to interact with her without going over the edge.

Things are bad.

I'm living with my sister and sleeping on an uncomfortable air mattress in her dining room. I'm working part-time for the holidays at Macy's. My sister is laid off, and her unemployed alcoholic ex-boyfriend is living and drinking in the basement. My sister is starting to realize that he's not going to leave until she definitively kicks him out.

I decided to stay here instead of with my parents in the midwest because it's closer the the area where I want to end up. I decided to take the Maryland bar instead, and have enrolled in a bar review course in Baltimore, which is 50 miles away.

It's cold.

I don't know how I can manage to concentrate on studying in this situation. I might go stay with my aunt after the holidays, when her kids go back home after their holiday visit, and my class starts.

I'm not making enough money at Macy's. I can't believe I graduated from law school and I'm more broke and my life is more fucked up than ever. I've been job hunting for more than a year, and while I still have hope of finding a temporary paralegal or document review job in Baltimore, I'm not holding my breath. Last month I interviewed for a job that I thought I was uniquely well-qualified for, and they never bothered to call my references or to communicate with me about the job -- not so much as a thanks but no thanks. I'm starting to fear that there's something fundamentally wrong with me as a job candidate that I can't see or understand.

I have no health insurance. I wish I could get back on Wellbutrin, which would help me get up and face every day with my chin up, but I can't afford it.

I like Baltimore, but when we visited on 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago, my sister's truck got broken into.

My aunt told us some things about my suicidal grandfather that we hadn't heard before. She was in the house with him when he shot himself. She said that he went on some kind of anti-depressant medication in the late 1950s - early 1960s, and that because of it he was a different kind of father for her than he was for my dad. He took the younger kids on trips and didn't seem depressed. But, she says that he lost his job and was reduced to unloading boxcars when he was somewhere in his mid/late forties, which triggered the depression that caused him to end his life. He felt like a failure.