1/7/2004 12:11:10 PM|||Amy|||I saw this movie the other day on dvd, "I Capture the Castle". It's based on one of my sister's favorite books, though I have never read it. It’s written by Dodie Smith, who also wrote "101 Dalmations". I really liked the movie. But, at the end, there was a voice over monologue by the main character as she talks about how even if she never gets together with the man who has captured her heart, she will remain optimistic that life won't disappoint her. An alternate ending is included with the deleted scenes on the dvd. In the alternate, the main character is performing the same monologue but instead of standing in the turret of her family’s home, a castle, she is walking the streets of London. As she goes by, a man with a Dalmatian turns to stare at her at the moment in which she says something like, “I love. I have loved. I will love.” I thought this was so poignant, so memorable, so much better than the actual ending of the film. The optimism in that moment is bittersweet and it’s spurred me on to think about my own past and the present and my future and that poem by Yates, “When You Are Old.”

Part of the excitement of being a teenager is the idea that your life is stretching out before you, that you will have opportunities and experiences, and those will create a cartographic imprint for the path you find yourself on and the one you take. The next step is unknown, the next adventure untold – and I believe that if any one of us can remember that innocence and that excitement, then we will be eternally capable of remaining optimistic.

For lunch today I had a sandwich. The layers of the sandwich were enfolded between two slices of very thick, not very tasty, white processed bread with some herbs mixed in. I think the herbs were meant to make the bread gourmet-esque. They failed. Thick white bread which tastes inescapably of lowest cost ingredients and a machine bakery cannot be disguised by a few herbs. I’m such a snob, and for this the karmic wheel is going to make me pay a million times over. I am destined to live my next lives as an ant which nibbles on the leaf of a basil plant only to be killed by a high powered, but probably organic, insecticide.
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