Happiness in April 2015

I believe most people I know -- people who mainly live in the first world, who check small glowing screens several hundred times a day to be validated of their importance -- are concerned pretty regularly about their own happiness. I think about happiness in an evaluative way several times a day. Am I having a good day? Why am I not having a good afternoon when my morning was so full-feeling? When will I feel happy again? I suppose I believe myself entitled to happiness, much the same way I believe myself entitled to good food and hot showers and when I am deprived of these things, I expect that I will find some shred of compassion from somewhere because, How sad to go without.

Happiness always comes in certain measure for me after the cold and the gray of winter passes and spring stops flirting and actually sticks around. I have a strong burden to be happy on those perfect weather days. I feel like the dinged-up floor model of the human being if I can't just be happy all day on the days when everyone else is outside celebrating sundress season and tossing frisbees. There's actually a lot of pressure to be ecstatic, have you noticed? Today people spoke on the social media about the opening day of baseball season and it was like the chains of slavery, apartheid and Prohibition had all simultaneously been unshackled and now we could eat, drink and be merry from sea to shining sea.

What I want in my thirties is so much less and so much more. I don't want the long weekend full of spectacle and best-laid plans and friends jetsetting in from out of town. I don't need all that to be happy. I just want the weekend not to pass so quickly. I want to hold on to kite of happiness as it unspools and I want to keep it up in the air just so long enough that I can remember it and before it dips and nose-dives toward the ground. I want feelings and reminders of how good and sweet this life is and all its accoutrements to remain in my pocket in tact even after I launder my jeans. I don't care about the prize in the box. I just want to sit and enjoy my Crakcer Jack until at least the seventh-inning stretch, even if it's not opening day.

Things I have pondered while watching "A Different World" on #netflix

- The women of Gilbert Hall did not have landlines in their room. Merely a payphone for the entire hall. I believed that this was the case for my parents but that this was still happening in the late 80s seems ridiculous.

- Sinbad has reddish hair.

- The students appear to have infinite time and an endless appetite for dancing, such that in broad daylight, there are consistently a handful of students dancing for no reason, around other patrons eating at The Pit.

- Julissa is 26 years-old and living in a dorm. Nope.

- Maggie (Marissa Tomei) is the inexplicably white girl at a Historically Black College. I know students who are not black attend HBCs. But she transferred to their journalism program. Really? Cosby was down with this?

- The character of Whitley Gilbert seemed so overblown and unfathomable when I watched this show as an 8 year-old. As a 34 year-old, I have known many a Whitley Gilbert.

- Architectural wedge haircuts were some pretty gnarly 'dos.

- Maggie didn't know if her law school boyfriend was going to visit; he hadn't called OR sent a letter (which she would have found in an open slot in her dorm lounge). So meta 1988.

- The Debate Club met on a Friday afternoon. Wrong again, people who wrote about fictitious college life. Fridays are for napping/laundry/napping while you forget about your laundry.

- Dwayne Wayne really immortalized those flip-ups.

- Lisa Bonet is such an extraordinary beauty and not a bad actress. I would like to see her in more movies. I really loved her in "High Fidelity."

- I actually remember watching the episode where Rudy Huxtable visits Denise and takes a shine to Whitley. I believe I reenacted the Vaseline-on-teeth scene with my sister, multiple times.

-I wish I could have been a student like Denise -- skating by on my matchless beauty and always befit of the flyest fashions. But then that would have been boring after, like, a day.

- Skirt/pants waistbands are literally inches from armpits.

Review: Old Fashioned #oldfashionedmovie

I am probably too medicated to have been able to cry at all the right parts in the indie film "Old Fashioned." Oh, don't say that, they will say. Don't cop to your being medicated. That doesn't reflect well on Christianity. You should be able to pray away all your depression and anxiety....

I know I run a risk in reviewing a film that is Christian-themed. I might align myself with the more-righteous-than-thou who decry my meds. I might also align myself with the fanwagoners who try to pack the theaters when any faith-based film projects onto a silver screen.

The cool thing about Old Fashioned, which several of my colleagues helped to direct and produce, is that it is a film that is so counter-cultural, it is effectively without niche. It is not a Kirk Cameron morality tale. It is not a saccharine rom-com with Nicholas Sparks-caliber lines.

Old Fashioned is, on the surface, a sweet romantic tale about a born-again believer man who has grown a tad curmudgeonly in his set apart ways, and the attractive tenant who moves in above his antique store. The romance spools slowly and sweetly. As each character unpacks his and her personal histories, we see their fine lines and their friction.

But Old Fashioned is also about a larger love story. The film is an allegory for the Gospel, about how a perfect God came to offer a perfect love in a broken world. There are moments in Old Fashioned, whose lighting is perfect and whose soundwork is really strong, that crystallize perfectly the way divine grace is offered freely, and how we reject it and fail to offer it to each other in the form of forgiveness.

Old Fashioned is not a perfect movie. At times the script felt a little uneven to me.  Sometimes scenes where body language and facial expressions were totally winning felt a little squandered because the dialogue bordered on the preachy. But it is a good film with solid performances and a wonderful message for the righteous, the proud, the hypocritical, dastardly, wicked and vain. And even the overly medicated.