I was at the beach today reading “Time” magazine. The current issue has a fall arts extravaganza about upcoming movies, books, TV shows, etc. I was flipping through it and came across their listing for Ben Affleck’s new directorial effort called “Argo”. This is based on a true story during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. Six Americans managed to escape to the home of the Canadian ambassador, and to get them out before they’re captured, a fake movie shoot was created by a CIA operative. They approached the Iranian government wanting to film their science fiction movie, also called “Argo”, in their country. During the “shoot” they managed to smuggle out the six escapees.
Time’s blurb about the movie mentioned that the C.I.A. posed as an American film crew. Now, I was pretty convinced at the time that they actually posed as a Canadian film crew, and I found myself getting annoyed that Time magazine got this seemingly important fact wrong, to the point that I envisioned writing a letter to the editor questioning the fact-checking nature of the magazine. Not wanting to leave the beach at that time, though, I simply made a mental note to check the most recent of Entertainment Weekly that I had received, which was their fall movie preview, to confirm my suspicions and continued reading the rest of the magazine.
(A little side note to both explain the magazine subscriptions and add a little levity to this point of the blog. I cashed in some of my mostly worthless frequent flier miles a couple of months ago on various magazine subscriptions, all of which I promptly forgot that I ordered. In the last few weeks I have been receiving Time, EW, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Wine Spectator, Sports Illustrated and, as far as I can tell, at least 3 separate golfing magazines. Which to me is the funniest part because, of all the things I do in life, I do golf far and away the worst.)
But as I enjoyed my time at the beach and on my bike ride home, I found myself realizing just what a ridiculous waste of energy I had created in myself. This is what I’m going to get up in arms about? A magazine potentially getting the nationality of a fake film crew wrong? Seriously, this is what I’m going to raise my blood pressure over? And the really silly “laugh at myself over this” part of it is I’ve been having a really good weekend. Very productive, very positive, getting lots done, moving forward, it’s as if I needed to create something just to get worked up about something. God forbid I not have drama. And there’s probably some psychological reason for it, transferring some other frustration into an innocuous movie review, but as I rode home, I just found myself shaking my head at myself.
People find drama in everything, if they want to. Some people do a much better job of it than others. We’ve all had that friend or relative or co-worker who can’t help but see the clouds on a sunny day. And some days it’s easier to do than others. We’ve had a long day at work, we’ve had a fight with a loved one, hell it could just be lousy weather, and we feel it affect us negatively, and we push that negativity on to the rest of our lives. It’s a forgivable part of life. It’s when we find ourselves having a great day, being on top of things, and yet still managing to undermine our positivity. It’s no different from being afraid of our own success. We feel we don’t deserve to be happy, to be positive, to have successful things in our lives, and so we find ways to create tension, to artificially keep ourselves down.
I thought about all of that when I got home. I had already decided that, regardless of what the truth was, I wasn’t going to write a letter. Indulging such a trivial matter would only help to further pull me down, and I learned a long time ago that when you’re riding a good wave, you don’t question it and you certainly don’t try to stop it. You just ride it as long as it allows you to. Eventually something important, something really and unfortunately deserving of your attention, will come along. Save your energy for what matters.
P.S. Best I could find out is that it was a joint American/Canadian effort spearheaded by the C.I.A. That and the early reviews are really, really positive. It’s slated to come out October 12.
PopcornJackTerry 