Bryan’s Ramblings

I started school when I was about three years old. It was “pre”-school, but it was school. From the early age of 3 to the ripe old age of (almost) 22 I was in school and school was my life; it was all that I knew. My life went from grade to grade, semester to semester, quarter to quarter, summer to summer for 86% of my natural born life, which basically translates to 100% of the life that I can remember. When I finally reached the end of the line I was in 16th grade, my senior year of college, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I finally graduated and entered the working world, started to encorporate into Corporate America, and began my new school-less life. I was out of school for just under two years before…

I went back. I decided I would go for my Master’s Degree because my company would pay for it, so why not? Besides, I missed school. It was always a piece of cake for me anyway. Why wouldn’t it be? I’d been doing it for my entire life. Plus, when compared to the daily grind of a full-time job, going back to school sounded almost refreshing, and for the most part, it has been. It is completely true that school is a joke when compared to my job. However, that’s exactly the problem: school is a joke.

When school is your whole life, it is so easy to see its importance. School’s purpose is preparation. First grade prepares you for second grade; sixth grade prepares you for junior high; high school prepares you for college. What does college prepare you for? Yep, you guessed it: nothing! It’s supposed to prepare you for “life”, but it so drastically misses the mark on that one that parents have to continually cop out behind the “but it expands your mind” excuse in order to justify why kids should go to college. Don’t get me wrong, though. Everybody should go to college. The experience alone is a priceless one. However, school in general and college in particular is pretty much a complete waste of time. Essentially it is a forced social life with some semblance of an “education” mixed in that is designed to help bide your time while you wait to become an adult. By the way, I’m totally fine with this. It’s a societal necessity and I think it makes good sense.

What I’m questioning now is: what can an adult who has already gone through this academic assimilation and absurdity possibly expect to gain by going back? Other than a “graduate” degree (and hopefully a raise at work), I don’t know that I’ve figured that out yet. It’s tough for me too. I mean, I didn’t really go back just to get the degree. I really wanted to learn new stuff and try to apply it at my job. The problem is, there isn’t much new stuff, and the few things that are new, I’m totally unmotivated about learning because I’m too busy worrying about work and all the other stuff that real life brings; that’s all the stuff that being in school was able to shelter me from. On top of that, because school was always easy for me and because I haven’t been out of it for that long, I’m so accustomed to the ease and the format of a school environment that I don’t feel that I need to try that hard to do well. Then, when I don’t do well, I get upset. That in and of itself upsets me too. I shouldn’t care about an A or a B. That stuff is trivial when compared to deadlines and expectations at work. So ultimately it sends me into a downward spiral for no good reason.

Being in graduate classes where students often know more than professors and a working world where employees almost always know more than their managers, what do you really expect? It’s an upside-down design, but that’s how it is. I’m sure I will eventually understand better the importance of “higher education”, but for the time being I think I’m just going to have to keep going through the motions, hoping to gain something out of the trivial tasks that come with it…for now.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur always bring about extremely reflective and emotional thoughts inside my busy little head. It of course makes me want to become a better person and improve myself in whatever way(s) that I can. This usually includes promising myself that I will start going to the gym, start eating right, stop staying up late, stop procrastinating, and all that perpetual “New Year’s resolution” bullshit. Every year I hope that at some point I am able to meet those very meaningful and self-fulfilling goals. Of course, every year I fail miserably to do so…hence the reason for setting them every year.

Still, I’ve set them again for myself this year, and hopefully with something more of a plan than usual. I have a larger goal in mind this time; it’s a much broader target. I will reduce stress over the next year. I’m putting myself on a stress-reducing plan that includes all of the usual methods: more relaxation time, more vacation, and of course less work. As anyone can usually tell you but not actually do, the way to accomplish this is with more efficient time management. It’s the age old problem, and usually the root cause of all my headaches and problems in my life.

I never have trouble coming up with excuses to not work on something or to not do something or to not go somewhere or whatever. What I have a harder time coming up with is what the heck I’m doing that’s so damn important while I’m avoiding these other things (excluding, of course, the writing of this blog). I’m talking about laundry, bills, exercise, job work, school work, house work, and all that stuff. Sure, these things seem mundane and oftentimes they are, but if enough mundane things pile up, eventually you’ll have no clothes, have bad credit, be out of shape and have more work to do than time to do it. My life is rapidly approaching this state, and it’s a scary place to be.

Thankfully, the High Holy Days are here, and it’s time for me to carpe diem and do something to avoid having to live in an unnecessarily stressful existence. So during these Days of Atonement, I am working on devising a detailed plan to get me stress free and 100% happy once again. It’s a sort of phased approach (thank you corporate America…) that slowly works in all the aspects of a stress free life.

Time management just means scheduling and planning and getting into a [good] routine…all things that I have always been so poor at doing. Usually I fail to achieve these goals because I try to change them all at once, but I can take baby steps over the next few months to make progress. Unfortunately, I need to dig myself out of the hole I’ve dug thus far…which means being on overdrive for the next couple of weeks and plowing through it full force with little to no free time.

My new favorite phrase is “I made my bed, so I have to lie in it.” It’s so easy to blame others for the problems you create. This stops now for me. I will face the music each time it plays loudly in my ear. I have no one to blame but my lazy, procrastinating self. It worked so well in school, but it just doesn’t work in real life. A wise puppet once said “I wish I could go back to college.”

So I know what you’re thinking. “This guy is all talk.” Yes, that’s definitely been true for me in the past. All I can say is that I hope it’s not the case this time. I feel like I have more of a handle on things now with the High Holy Days here right in the middle of crunch time for me. I’ve always claimed that I’m not a pessimist, just a pragmatist. As I’m getting older, though, I’m feeling more and more negative, which just isn’t me. So I think I’m going to have to try to switch to being a perpetual optimist just to offset the many negative things that pragmatism (i.e. real life) exposes.

I’ll say this much for my life right now: it’s never boring. I have so much going on that if I don’t implement this High Holy Days induced stress-reducing project as soon as possible, I very well may hit a brick wall and never be able to recover. I can’t let that happen.

There certainly have been some truly brilliant films: The Godfather, Gone With The Wind, The Graduate, Good Will Hunting, and countless others that don’t begin with the letter “G”. However, the vast majority of movies that get made don’t even begin to fall into this category. In fact many would argue that most movies aren’t very good at all. While this may be true, it really all depends on what you look for in a film. Aside from those relatively few celebrated motion pictures of our time, my favorite ones are usually romantic comedies.

I’m not talking about “chick flicks” like the over-dramatic Steel Magnolias or the tear-jerking Stepmom. I’m talking about happy-ending love stories that have some laughs and are scattered with a few poignant moments. You know the ones I’m talking about: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, Jerry Maguire, Never Been Kissed, Fools Rush In, Serendipity, and my most recent favorite, Just Like Heaven, among mounds of others.

What is it about these well done romantic comedies that I love so much? First of all, what makes them “well done”? Well, the good ones always have perfect performances, distinguished directing, refined writing and usually contain a superb score. While these are the qualities that any really great film needs to have, there is something else about the great romantic comedies that make them enjoyable enough for me to buy on DVD and watch over and over again.

They are formulaic. While some would probably classify this is a bad thing for a movie to be, I would disagree. If the formula works, why deviate? I mean I like suspenseful movies with great twists at the end like Usual Suspects or Matchstick Men. While those are very good movies, you will never be able to experience them like you did when you saw them the first time and had no idea what to expect. The really excellent romantic comedies never surprise you. They’re absolutely predictable. I can often mouth the lines in a scene of a good romantic comedy that I’ve never seen.

Let’s use Just Like Heaven as a case study since it is fresh in my mind. Serendipity or Fools Rush In or any of the others would work just as well, I assure you. There are so many things I can point to in Just Like Heaven that made me enjoy it so much: the likeable actors, the believable performances, the flawless directing, the touching music. Most of all, however, the predictable writing did it for me. There are so many setups and payoffs that it’s unbelievable. Nearly 45 minutes before the movie ended, I knew how it was going to end. I don’t just mean I knew they’d get together, I mean I knew how and where and why and under what circumstances.

This movie screamed “cheesy!” and had a completely unbelievable premise, not to mention the fact that the entire plot and most of the really funny scenes had already been shown in the previews a million times. But none of that mattered. The movie was brilliantly formulaic and wonderfully entertaining. I walked out grinning from ear to ear and wishing that I was Mark Ruffalo and that I was dating Reese Witherspoon. I loved my girlfriend more. I loved myself more. I loved movies more.

The movie-theater-going-experience is getting more and more painful with extremely high prices, a ridiculous amount of ads and previews before the movie, and more and more cell phones ringing in the middle of the film. However, as long as my favorite kind of formulaic romantic comedies are still being made and produced to perfection, I will continue to overpay to see them in the theater and then later buy them on DVD so that I can enjoy them time and time again.