Sharing an important email

Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape

going to sleep now Cuore

Finished season 4 (and my next show to watch, I found, will be the controversial HBO show Tell Me You Love Me)

i'm sleepy!  i celebrated St Paddy's day by watching Samuel Beckett plays on DVD.  The best one was That Time, which is like the discussion I had with Andrew porter about--for years and years and years in my life-- feeling the need to justify my actions to other people. And with that habit, before I went to Bolivia I spent much pain and stress trying to think of the best way to explain everything I did to other people, in case they ask me.  This I did almost subconsciously, getting answers ready to tell other people and taking those answers and discovering the best words to tell them why I did what I did.  It's not a great way to live, so I'm glad that when I realized both how I was and how rarely people interrogated me in that way, I stopped. And I realized that being an adult is exactly the time when you don't have to account for all of your actions and the reasoning behind them.  You just do, and don't have to explain.  "I do this because it's what I wanted"  should be enough, or "I won't do that because I don't want to" should be enough to tell someone if they harrass you to do something.  So that's my definition of being an adult.  Andrew Porter responded to that and said he would do exactly the same thing.  And one time in Bolivia, Amy asked him to do something and he flatly, but good-naturedly said "No, I don't want to" and she didn't care at all.  And I was able to look at him and know where that new edge came from.  Andrew had grown up.   It didn't hurt her feelings at all, and it was honest, and nothing further was needed.

That Samuel Beckett play, then, is exactly that same thing, but it's a lot more ugly because it is the process of trying to self-justify your life.  You trying to sell yourself the idea that what you did was right, and it's a torturous process, even more so if it's the end of your life and things are hazy.  The person in this play listen to their inner dialogue, their mouth not moving, just their face reacting to their thoughts. The memories are unclear, and so the motivation, the results, the actions are all jumbled and it's impossible to know if this life was well-lived.  But it wasn't overly vicious, and the man visibly lingered over the bright spots in his personal narrative.  So to extrapolate the conclusions of mine that I shared with Andrew, I suppose becoming an adult we take ownership of our personal narrative and don't have to  justify ourselves to others, though it doesn't make it any easier for us to judge our own life story and the things we have done.

Of course, of all the things with my Dad that have become embroiled in the past couple of weeks, another conclusion is that much of our suffering is self-inflicted and needless.

You're a 100% authentic Dolce & Gabbana love muffin, you know it? .  Just wanted to get my thoughts down (i think I'll post this on my Bolivia blog and my Morocco one).  

ti mao, have a good day at class!