I recently watched this movie called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and it was pretty good.
The movie has a lot of neat ideas about memory and love and like a few people I am interested in those things. I don't want to wreck the movie for you so I won't go into any detail about it, and I also don't want to push the movie on you because I don't want that responsibility. All I am saying is that I liked it, I guess cause I'm such a big softy. Underneath my smooshy doughy exterior is the big giant heart of all the care bears heart's torn out and sewn together. It can get so heavy with love or artificial cinnamon that sometimes the bones in my legs shatter and I have to splint my legs and walk with candy canes.
Reading that last paragraph it is possible that maybe I'm a little embarrassed by the fact I liked a romance film. But that is sort of unrelated, so moving along.
A girl I know that has read my writing once told me that she liked it but that she also suspected in the future I would probably contradict many of the things I have already written. I was smart enough at the moment she said that to laugh, partly because it was funny and partly because I expected her insight was dead on.
Well it was. A while ago I wrote something about how I thought that my memories were what made me the person who I am, and that probably applied to everybody. I figured that our memories were how we know who we are. And not only in the "I've got amnesia from when a baseball hit me in the head and now I don't remember my name or where I live" kind of way.
I always thought that it was the good and bad shit that happens to us in our lives that shapes us, so our memories are what we can draw on to understand why we are the way we are. It would be logical, your opinion of yourself, what you choose to believe are your strengths and weaknesses, and your self image should be based on your experiences.
But now I think I was way off. Way off. I'll tell you why. I think it isn't what you remember that tells you who you are it's what you love. That is corny, but I think it is pretty much true, and it is also a bit of human insight that I actually stole from another movie. So proceeding with these ideas stolen wholesale from movies here's something to consider;
If someone erased my memory and I had to relearn everything all over again what would I be like? How would I feel when I re-did everything?
I'll bet you anything that the second after I re-ate my first re-burrito I would know I loved burritos, and that they were the most perfect food. And I think once again I would hate the taste of cilantro. I suspect that I would still really like music, and dislike music television, and extremely dislike reality music television.
Think about it, If you erased a Chinese guys memory would he still be good at algebra? I think so.
Maybe it is wishful thinking because I want to believe that our personalities are concrete and enduring. That would be sort of comforting, as long as you don't hate yourself, otherwise I guess its a life sentence. Or at least until you learn to like yourself.
When I think about it, if who you really are is demonstrated by what you love and not by what happened in your life it explains a lot of things, like when my personality and my memory totally contradict each other. My memory will tell me that I am extremely bad at singing. But 10 beers and a karaoke machine will tell me that maybe this will be the one time I get lucky and perfectly pull off "Against the Odds" just like Sir Phil Collins. And what that also shows is that I'm also irrational.
But maybe our personalities are kind of concrete. Maybe our experiences just give us a better understanding of who we are. If that is true it also kind of explains how hard it is for people to really change, and why people usually don't. Which might be not so terrible really. It also kind of explains something else I noticed. Like once you really like somebody you always kind of like them.
Anyway, I now believe that if you want to understand yourself a good way is to look at the things you like or love, and then maybe you will make more sense to yourself. Which I think is a good idea.
Maybe you love free running, or banana splits, or The Banana Splits.
Anyway, that covers pretty much everything I wanted to say about this subject. So if you have somehow made it this far through all this mushy crap I just wrote you can now get back to whatever it is you principally use the internet for. More than likely that is making computer viruses or doctoring photos of yourself to post on lava life.
As for me, I will get back to my hobby of self diagnosing myself with diseases I read about on emedicine.com.