slightly doom and gloom

Once again, so much to write, so little time. I'll just have to type fast...

Last night I went to see Blood Diamond and I came out of it in what I would call not exactly depressed or pensive but maybe more... introspective. Having no time to write about the movie itself, apart from to say that it was somewhat bludgeon-esque with the politic messages and quite heavy going (in an emotionally harrowing way) but otherwise I really liked it, I will instead direct you to by Dad's blog entries about it: 1 and 2. (Because in broad brush strokes, I basically agree with what he said.)And the old fav Rotten Tomato plot summary.

But walking home I really started to think. I mean in my existential way, I'm already in a what's-the-point frame of mind but this movie, or rather issues brought up by this film, really made me put my life in perspective. I always come away from this kind of thing slightly shell-shocked and immediately want to go out and help save the world. But of course I don't want to put myself into physical danger, and well, it's a lot of effort really, isn't it? But what am I doing about anything? My job involves putting images and text on paper and I can have a whole day taken up with deciding what font to choose and how big it should be. A bad week for me involves struggling with design or office politics. That is NOT a bad week. In a bad week you get chucked out of your home, most of your village is shot, you see your mother raped in front of you, your father and brother get shot, get raped yourself and possibly have a hand chopped off. That's a bad week. Me, I'm pushing images around a page- little to the left? Little to the right? Oooh, I don't know, that's a tough choice.

What the fuck does it really matter?!

What is almost worse than this is to know that in a couple of days, this feeling will probably have worn off and I'll go back to being the kind of person who feels good about themselves because they put £1 in someones's plastic bucket and got a sticker as proof that they "care" about blind people, deaf people, cancer victims and homeless abused children. And after that I'll pay someone to shape my eyebrows and put hot wax on my armpits to rip the hair off.

WTF.

So of course I called up Dad when I got home which is what a girl does when what-is-the-point-of-it-all crisis hits. And I took this away from our talk: you can't live every day in this heightened sense of this-world-is-super-fucked-and-I-need-to-run-out-and-save-it because it would drive you insane. I had already decided that. But you can allow yourself to keep that awareness at a certain level and use it to make your decisions about things, like what food/jewelery/[products you buy. And when you start to get pissed off because you can't get a page to look "pretty", well then just get some perspective.

This also made me think about my job/career though. I used to always think that I'd be doing design forever. I like it. Making things look pretty makes me happy and it can be like solving a puzzle when you get it right. But maybe there's something else I can be doing with my life that can fulfill me but be more generally 'useful' in the grand scheme of things... I was a bit surprised to find myself thinking this because as I said, I always assumed I'd be designing forever.

Also, and this I decided on my lonesome, you get to choose to be one of three people. 1- you complain about what's wrong with this world but do nothing about it
2- you are bothered so you get off your fat ass and do something about it, no matter how small
3- you stop caring

Now I really don't want to be person 1 or 3 so maybe, just maybe, I'll have to get off my fat ass...

This morning I woke up still relatively sombre about the whole thing. I thought about trying to snap myself out of it but I've decided to wallow in it for a while. I played Radiohead's Amnesiac on my iPod on the way to work which actually made me smile, if only because I was laughing at myself because it is rather Bathtub Brigade music and I was being quite self-indulgent... Then I got to work and saw Play.com was having a 3 for 2 sale (I went in only to buy Amelie but came out with Miss Congeniality and While You Were Sleeping as well. Mainly because when I came home last night, I wanted to watch something to girly and warm-fuzzy to snap me out of it only to find that I only own action movies...