(500) Days

I was somewhat suffering from insomnia again last night. I was studying til at least 1 AM, lied down by 1:20 AM, tried to write a letter or two but failed because I was so brain-dead. I owe a few people whom I really care about some snail mail/Christmas cards that's long overdue, so here I am, making a promise to myself (and whoever's reading this) that I will write at least 2 letters tonight after I finish this post. I hate making empty promises, but sometimes it's impossible to keep up with everything. Especially when the people I care about so much are so far away. I can't afford to call them/text them....the only other way I can get a hold of them is e-mail. Which is probably just as personal as those stupid facebook "nudges".

So I thought, I am brain-dead from studying, so why not kill it more with some mind-numbing Hollywood flick so that I can actually fall asleep? I googled "Comedies dvdrip 2009", just to check what movies are up and out. I left my fate in the hands of my computer, closed my eyes and randomly pressed a button on the computer after doing a CTRL-F. The first movie that came up starting with a 5 ....was (500) Days of Summer.

I was caught pretty offguard - I never expected this movie to be the way it was - afterall, I was only expecting yet another hyped-up Hollywood bust (that's so common in the past 10 years). If you haven't seen it yet, it's about a hopelessly romantic dude who believed in fate and a girl who never believed in love, let alone finding the one. I'm not going to give too much away, because I think it was a movie actually worth seeing fully awake. It was witty and subtle. It hinted at how my life is and could be. I felt throughout the movie that I could easily have stepped into the shoes of the protagonist.

Without hinting at the rest of the movie though, I think I need to learn the same lesson that Tom Hansen learned at some point. Life is a mixture of fate/randomness, but we're somehow totally in control of it. Sounds like a cliched oxymoron? It is. Yet sometimes we just can't help but feel overwhelmed by all the things that happen in life. In every helpless situation, we just need to realize that we must help ourselves to overcome whatever the obstacle is.

....and I think my next obstacle is my fully-empty stomach.