Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Honestly, I have to say that this was perhaps the first M. Night Shyamalan movie that I not only admired but also had a lot of FUN watching. (I should note here that I never got around to seeing "Signs", so I'm comparing "Lady in the Water" only to the likes of "The Sixth Sense", the very provocative and unsettling but emotionally resonant "Unbreakable", and "The Village", which was useful for starting discussions but not ultimately satisfying to me personally as a story or as a movie-going experience.)

I'm short of time tonight, but I felt so jazzed Thursday afternoon, after seeing "Lady in the Water" for the first time that I felt I just had to stay all the way to the final dedication at the end of the credits.

Now, I need more time to figure out exactly why I found this film so encouraging and inspiring.

Maybe, it was because of that whole "nobody knows who they really are" thing (although, honestly, who WOULDN'T have guessed that it was the cereal-box-synchronicity-reading kid, rather than the puzzle-solving dad, who was the real symbolist/interpreter, from our first meeting with that family? But, still, that only means that I knew who the kid was, not that the kid himself knew who he was, so I guess the principle remains true.)

Or, maybe it was seeing how this oddball community came together -- no matter how long it took to sort out exactly who was who -- to try to do one good, meaningful thing for one another and for the world. Shades of what we all love best about the "chosen families" in our favorite shows, from BtVS to Farscape, as discussed in that Friday morning WriterCon panel a couple of weeks ago.

Or maybe I just identified heavily with the custodian who turns out to be so much more, who had lost so much and suffered so much, but still wouldn't give up hope for the world, wouldn't give up trying to take care of people, even if he no longer felt able to do so as a doctor. And maybe I identified even more heavily with Shyamalan's character himself, "the vessel" who had to overcome all his fears and finish his work . . . and then come to terms with the fact that his contribution to the world would require his own death at an early age.

Or maybe I just enjoyed all those quirky, weird, wounded people pooling their talents and "knowledge" to try to save the world, or at least the life of one little "narf".

At any rate, I felt strong enough afterwards -- having been feeling overwhelmed with health concerns and a general sense of the unrelenting stresses of life prior to going to the movie -- to go run some errands, including voting in the primary election. And then Friday morning, I took the risk of taking advantage of Tennessee's back-to-school tax holiday to go to a different store and buy myself the laptop computer that I had really wanted, all along. Fortunately, I was able to return the unopened boxes containing the big desk-top set-up that I'd purchased on Tuesday and had been unwilling to even look at since then.

Not much of an achievement, I know, but with the way I'd been feeling earlier in the week, finding the wherewithal to go back to the stores and say "this is what I really want", and "No matter how nice the sales guy was, I'm not going to keep the stuff I never wanted" does feel like a victory, no matter how small.

Then, I went to my doctor's appointment at the health center yesterday afternoon, where the new doctor (my regular doc wasn't on duty that day) took blood samples but assured me that no, the creeping numbness in my extremities that had been spreading from right to left and up my limbs since Sunday, WASN'T likely to be either leprosy (too fast and no rash) or a stroke (too evenly balanced on both sides of my body), and took blood samples to try and find out what WAS wrong. Numbness is no worse today, by the way, than it was when I awoke yesterday, so all in all, life does not suck.

Oh, and my sister was very encouraging when I talked to her last night: even after I told her that I'd been planning to leave her my new laptop computer in my will, but that apparently I'm not actually dying yet, she still said how glad she was that I wasn't dying! Sometimes, it's very good to have a sister -- especially one who's willing to talk nonsense to you on the phone for an hour, when you've been scaring yourself silly all week with thoughts of strange, arcane illnesses that surely only Gregory House could diagnose!