http://www.youtube.com/v/SKw9eHt6nl0

Oooh.

Did you like the film? I mean, the first time you saw it. If you remember it, before every tired comic everywhere decided they were going to mine its melodramatic tragedy for humor.

I didn’t get to see it in the theater. My parents had something against movies (and even if they didn’t, they’d probably have had a problem with the rating.) I saw it pretty much as soon as it was out on VHS, which meant that I could check it out by myself from a library and bring it home before my parents had read the case in detail. And even then I ended up watching it with both of my parents, one of whom enjoyed making snide comments at the screen (”Young people are so crazy etc etc” — you can probably guess who this is) and then later fell asleep mid-movie. I saw part of it on television a year or so later, and then I watched a couple of clips last night.

I thought this time I’d find it to be ridiculously cheesy. It wasn’t. It’s was actually quite good, and if the media hadn’t ruined it, it would’ve been even better.

For some reason I don’t think either of my parents really understood the movie. My mom probably understood it a bit more, seeing as she was actually awake. But, I think, if you grew up when I grew up, Titanic wasn’t just a movie. It was a little era of its own. Everyone remembers seeing the clip played at the Academy Awards. If you were my age, you stayed up all night listening to KIIS FM waiting for “My Heart Will Go On” to be played, so that you could record it and play it on repeat 100 times because the soundtrack wasn’t out yet. Kids who traded mp3s online probably had it in at least 3 different languages. Your parents listened to it in the car. The kids in school who knew how to play piano all had a copy of the score and the better ones could play it from memory. Even the guys. Especially the guys. In fact, if you knew how to play “My Heart Will Go On” on the piano at school, you were Piano God because no one else thought they could play anything more impressive. And of course there were my parents, who kept playing that song in the car for 4 more years, at least when I wasn’t there, because for some reason it was the only song that came to mind when they were looking for a song to play at my aunt’s untimely funeral when I was in 8th grade. It was totally inappropriate. It’s actually really, really creepy now that I think about it. Nonetheless, my relatives thought it was fitting.

So… apparently there was a great deal of controversy as to whether Rose is dreaming in the end, or if she dies. Here’s a reminder if you don’t remember. I’m pretty sure that when I was in the 4th grade, I thought she was dreaming. Definitely dreaming. Now, I can’t imagine that she might just be dreaming — it seems clear that she’s reuniting with Jack in the afterlife.

Okay, so what’s the point? Well, I was just reminded that clearly, I didn’t have much of a concept of death at age 9. My mother had cancer that year and I was sent away for several months as she recovered. I apparently thought it was a particularly long slumber party at Big Cousin David’s house. While I was playing in the back yard one day, David asked me if I was sad, and I said, “Sad? No, why should I be sad?” (And he said, “If I were you, I would be sad.”)

It was definitely different back then.

I don’t do anything extremely obsessive-bad or obsessive-dangerous, by the way. They’re mostly things like,

“Ahhh I just realized I have all this really terrible fan art/fiction and it’s really stupid and I don’t want to ever get sucked into it again *deletes entire collection*”

“I can’t write without a really cute, smooth, balanced, amazing Japanese pencil. *shops for 3 hours*”

“I really really really want a nice fountain pen *shops for 3 more hours*”
“*Listens to Rihanna’s SOS* Oh, now I understand why modesty is so important! *deletes every such song from itunes playlist*”

If I could bake like Alissa, you might find me buried under a ginormous pile of cakes and muffins one day because I wanted to bake the perfect muffin or something. It’s a good thing I don’t really bake.

{EDIT: recent event — roommate asks to borrow hairspray. I can’t find hairspray. Roommate leaves. I spend another hour looking for hairspray not because I need it, but because I need to know where it is.}

{EDIT: more recent event — couldn’t go to bed until I typed up the incident of the hairspray.}

I feel like I’m kind of prone to obsession. I’m not quite sure it’s a good thing; generally moderation in all things is best, right? Why do I become obsessed with things so easily? It’s as if once I have some idea, I start acting on it on some crazy-passionate level to the exclusion of a lot of other activities like eating and sleeping and homework. If I’m interrupted while studying — if I take a break — I can’t get back to work until I’m dead tired and just collapse out of exhaustion and wake up again. Or if I decide to do work, I can’t eat or sleep or anything until I’m done with it. Or I’ll go on 8+ hour math or chem study binges (to borrow Jen’s phraseology) or pull an all-nighter studying Tanakh for no reason other than that I can’t stop. Or the time I pulled an all-nighter watching South Park for the same reason. Or that one time I was supposed to be studying for a German midterm but felt an uncontrollable urge to review Japanese and learn Russian and Hebrew and other stuff at the same time, and stayed up till 4 doing this, so that by the time I got back to German I was saying things resembling “Nico hat はなしました, ‘Извините, Frau Weiss-san, ich habe noch Нет ihm mitgetroffen でした, aber אני רוצה für die Polizei etwas zu tun.’” (Nico said, “Excuse me, Frau Weiss, I haven’t met with him yet, but I do want to do something for the police.”) with all of its crazy redundancies of tense. Unfortunately for me, my German teacher speaks none of the above except German (he speaks French as well, but for some reason I didn’t decide to spontaneously catch up on French). Fortunately for me, I didn’t break out into any other languages during my exam.