movie and self examination

[Absaroka]

Some of you have read in the GG forums about me asking suggestions on telling my wife more about my CDing since i don't like the betrayal and secrecty I am practicing. A very unrelated thing happened to me last week which has made me think about .....everything.

I saw a movie with my wife on TV. Nothing about cding although in some ways its a pretty good relationship movie. It's called Open Water and was in the theaters a few years ago. Sort of Waiting For Godot meets Jaws, or K2 taking place at sea. For those of you who don't know about it it's about a couple who are in love but who's life together is having difficulties in spite of their best efforts. They go on vacation and engage in one of their favorite things, scuba diving. Underwater they are alone together with no distractions, doing what they love with who they love. They surface and the boat is gone and thus they get to spend a day of really far too high quality time together with some very ungracious finned dinner guests. They do their best to be supportive of each other and so on while also degenerating into blaming each other for their mess. Eventually it is all too much for them and there is a scene where they get about as primal as anyone would ever care to witness. It reminded me of watching people really truly freak out in severe psychotic episodes when I worked at a mental hospital, or of how people I have known have felt after the death of a child.

The movie leaves a lot to the imagination, both in action sequences and in the inner workings of the characters. For me this was an open invitation to fill in all the blanks, give them a backstory and write a sequel. They don't talk about evaluating their lives but I have memories of a bad car accident years ago where in the space of a second after it was over a great many things were suddenly very clear and my life stood wanting in a very serious way. So without being told I sort of know that this has happened to them. I watched the movie about 5 times. My wife watched it once, was reduced to yelling impotently at the tv, and said "that's an excellent movie, really very good, how in the world could you make me watch it?"

Reviews ( I read everything I could about the movie after I watched it trying to make sense of something) were divided by folks who said watching the grass grow would be less boring and those who said it was a deeply disturbing and excellent movie. I guess it depends on if you want an action movie, which it isn't. There were no luke warm reactions; people loved it or absolutely hated it.

Anyway on to cding. Watching it, as I said, was a bit like surviving a bad car accident. Like very, very few movies it made me ask myself what is important and how have I let myself get distracted from that. And it left me with a gut feeling that at the moment I don't want to put my energy into something as frivolous as getting excited over playing dress up. And I haven't had an desire to dress en femme, in fact I have had a strong desire to dress as I really am, which is just a guy, just me.

Now I know that the playing dress up is an intrisic part of me. Presumably the desire will return at some time and when it does that's okay. In the meantime the memory of a scene where the woman, Susan, is hysterically screaming I love you to the man, Daniel, as she holds him in her arms, both clinging to him and trying to protect him while he is being eaten alive by sharks in the night, has gotten me to a point where I am trying a lot harder to just show my family how much I love them in small day to day ways.

Now of course someone else here might react the same way and come to a different conclusion. Maybe for someone else it would be the catalyst for SRS or coming out or who knows what. Maybe seeing this movie was my equivalent of taking Virginia's challenge in the mirror.

I suppose we could talk about how at the end I identified with the female character, but actually for most of the movie I identified equally with the male character, and I think I identified with the female character at the end because of the movies structure (the male character is dead and being silently gobbled up, at least now it's painless as he is no longer being eaten alive, while the woman who has been screaming hysterically watches in silence with one of the best thousand yard stares I've ever seen on film)

I'll probably be back here in a few days. Post away especially anyone who saw the movie. i'd be very interested in how it affected you.

Absaroka

[Carolynn]

It was predictable and entirely self indulgent on the part of the director, despite the technical difficulties involved in keeping it looking deserted but for those two and their predators. Kind of an "Old Man and the Sea" for couples. It could have been an hour and half shorter and still packed the horror and the pathos of looking death in the eye, and really that's all it boiled down to as far as I could see.

I am glad it spoke to you. For you it was worthwhile. For me, it was mostly watching grass grow while hoping there was actually something more to it.

Carolynn[/code]

[Virginia]

I have not seen the movie, but I remember the description of the sinking of the Indianapolis cruiser after they delivered "the bomb" in WWII as portrayed in "Jaws" as the camera fades away from the boat in the dark and those barrels pop to the surface on the scene. I guess we make of it what we want. Kind of like the "Star Wars" as those have been analyzed and over-analyzed to death. Or dare I say, the Bible.

I guess I have to wax philosophical for a bit in that it seems that more and more scientific evidence comes to light that "we" are born this way. However, given the complexity of the human mind/brain it would seem that "the gift" effects each of us a bit differently. Then you throw into the mix how we each see and face the world from our on psychological and socio-economic perception, it does get a bit complicated. Having read a bit about the studies in quantum physics and quantum mechanics and the "connecting thread" theories. Something somewhere makes us react the way that we do. As one of our sisters who recently returned to the sorority said, " I just took a break from cross dressing." How the hell do you do that, just take a break?

I am well aware of the fact that given the expanse of the continuum that we reside in perhaps it is possible to "just take a break," but that in itself raises questions for those who are of the inquisitive mindset. I don't get it but I don't really care either. I mean if that is where that person is on the continuum, who am I to question her "life."

As for the "coming out" aspect of our existence. We are back to why are we who we are and that introspection if done in truth and self understanding can often tell us how we should live our lives and how "the gift" plays its part in our existence.

As for "Virginia's Challenge," that is something to not be taken lightly in any respect! It has to be done almost as a last resort and must be with full self-introspection and belief in yourself that you will make the right decisions that you can live with, perhaps for the rest of your life.

Again, I don't think we here can tell any one of our sisters that "in this situation, you should do (this)." That is one of the beauties of this forum, that there are posted many responses and it, hopefully, gives you options to pick and choose from and hopefully some that you may not have considered.

And in conclusion we do stand by our sisters whether or not their choices have the results that they expected.

Love you all,

Virginia

[Elizabeth]

Absoroka,

I see your struggle much as I have seen mine, although our circumstances are much different and indeed even our views about those circumstances are different. To be perfectly honest I sometimes feel like perhaps you are trying to convince yourself to feel the way that you think would make your life the happiest, as opposed to accepting your feelings for what they are.

You seem conflicted by your desire to accept this, yet keep it from your wife because it's inconvenient and messy. I really get it. All I can tell you is that you can only trust your inner most feelings. The problem is, it's hard to know what we are going to regret later. It seems we never regret the things we do as much as the things we do not do. For me it boiled down to being my authentic self. I just could not live with anything less, no matter what the cost. Only you know what you can live with, but be careful about trying to figure out what others can live with. It's impossible to know.

Love always,
Elizabeth

[Absaroka]

Art is in the mind of the artist and the viewer, and one person's symphonic masterpiece is another's muzak. For me the movie said everything I could never bring myself to say and watching it with my wife was a deeply intimate experience. For others, not so. Thats why more than one movie, song, or poem exists in the world.

Virginia I too had the thought that you could make a movie about the aftermath of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, or the Juneau, or countless other ships. It might be a great movie but this was also a love movie I think.

It reminded me of experiences friends of mine have had, not in the water but in the mountains. Some involving fatalities and all leaving the survivors far different people after. I think one has to accept that the sharks are stand ins for the real enemies of dehydration, hypothermia, sunstroke and despair, all of which are less dramatic. Or at another level (with no disrepect or trivialization to those who have to endure these physical horrors) the sharks are stand ins for reality, nibbling away at the characters self deceptions till there is so much of them gone that they can not survive.

I remember reading that when they rescued the survivors of the Indianapolis that when they saw a group of men together in the water they would bypass them to pick up someone further away who was alone, reasoning that the man alone was in far greater danger, not from the sharks which were attracted to groups, but to despair and to falling asleep after several days in the water, which with the design of life jackets at the time meant death by drowning. I guess that relates to the purpose of these forums.

One man I was discussing the movie with said that he thought the movie was a great description of why we put our elderly family members in nursing homes-for better or worse, just like in our marriage vows, it depicts something we can't bear to watch happen to someone we love.

I have to go now and practice being profound.........

Absaroka