Linsey DuncanRestless
February 28th 2009 09:38
I'm looking up restlessness as a medical symptom but the stupid computer is so slow it is driving me insane in my restlessness to hang out for the answer. Computers are like everything in society they suspend you in waiting. You don't do something else because you think it will only take a second but that second creeps into minutes and you keep remaking your concept of time thinking just one more moment will make all the difference, Surely the little green lights at the bottom mean it is doing something. I don't think they do they are just the computers smoke screen to make you think it is doing something while it twiddles its thumbs with no intention of doing much at all other than freezing up. By the time you finally cotton onto the fact it is frozen you've wasted an age. If you press the back button it suddenly decides to work and takes you in the opposite direction from where you wanted to go.
Everything about society makes you wait and I guess TV and Film are recepricals you can put your mind in while your body is on hold. Time drains out of you and if you actually analysed what you were watching you'd find that like in class at school the content could be crushed down into ten minutes of viewing. But we hold on as in every aspect of life to the idea that the waiting time isn't going to be long. The ads will be over in a sec. We are in Watching TV mode or waiting for traffic light mode, contantly life seems to be full of lapses of consciousness created expecially for all the waiiting moments we even have waiting rooms in which the action is acknowledged with waiting passtimes like magazines and TV's provided. They really should extend the same courtesy in trains and all public transport, travel is just waiting when it is undertaken in a vehicle.
I have developed a phobia to the whole waiting business since discovering the release and freedom I felt breaking away from the convention. Instead of thinking I had to wait for the bus I started running home. Sure it took longer but I felt like I was making progress the whole way being proactive no longer waiting.
When I approach TV or film I like to feel I've run out all the energy that can make me feel like I am just on pause in waiting mode. I like to feel to approach the experience in a state of no more energy available to get up so I'm not waiting to get up and do something else this is the recovery from doing it. To watch not to wait is bliss but it is never a feeling that lasts long. Even if you are watching a show you specifically want to pay close attention to and take every detail in you find they have sneaked waiting moments into it. Waiting for it to start, waiting for the ads to finish for it to start again, waiting for the news break to finish for it to start again, waiting for the characters to figure out what you figured out in the first five minutes. The only thing you never have to wait for is the credits. For some reason they are quite happy to be in a massive hurry to role them and move onto the next thing. I guess to get you hooked into the first few moments of the next show so you'll get sucked into the whole waiting system again. The one time when you want to wait, to dwell on what you have just seen and let it absorb if it was an especially nice movie with cool music on the credits. It is odd really how society seems to have it's timing all stuffed up. They are allways hurrying us on to the next thing to wait for but we never seem to get more than a moment experience of what that was if that. Perhaps life really is just expectation, there is nothing to arrive at it is all the build up to it. After all party's and Christmas are an anticlimax once the sleeps til them are slept and it is the sleeps after them already. Delaying waiting time is perhaps delaying the enjoyment of the blissful ignorance of the mundanity of the actual reality. In the waiting time we can build up to excited feverish pitch an idea of how great and perfect everything will be. That dissolves like icecream or chocolate in the moment of experience and all we really have to console us is the next thing to wait for as it is still in our imagination thus still flexible and able to be coloured embellished as wonderful.
Films have always played on the overactivity of the imagination. They want to suspend us in the imagined moment, they want to take us into that world when everything is perfect. (Well generally if they are classical hollywood as it is all about entertaining, taking you out of reality, taking you on a ride, other cinema's focus more on disrupting this concept but I'm not discussing them)
In a way by doing this films have damaged us because we indoctrinated by them from childhood when reality and fiction is hard to delineate and we spend our life waiting to grow up and experience this wonderful perfect extraordinary reality that films have convinced us exists, We have expectations this should be our reality (The fact that most hollywood films are about middle class american life can give very unrealistic expectations of how well jobs are going to pay and what are supposed to be norms of everyday living. normality can be blurred with luxary's that most people live without but films suggest normality should include. )
Films can leave the impressionable in a very disillusioned or suspended state. A state of disatisfaction, always looking up wondering when the something better is going to be. We can't accept the normality of reality because we are convinced that things are meant to be like in films. If we fall in love and that love is just an ordinary feeling we may question if we are in love at all because we don't feel like they seemto feel in the films. And we could miss the actual real thing because we have preconceived notions of what it should be and so it passes us by without us recognising it.
Films can be an escape from reality which is a good thing if you know you are escaping, but it is impossible to live a satisfied and fulfilled life if you always have this idea that it isn't an escape at all but the way life should be that we just aren't experiencing yet. Films start the whole when I grow up idea building in a childs head. But life is so strange, you can grow up and if the things you though would happen because they do in films haven't happened you can never feel like you have grown up yet.
I guess I just have to come to terms with the fact that there is no actual destination waiting doesn't seem to require that you actually have anything to show for what you waited for. The only remedy is to make sure the waiting time isn't time wasted, that you are waiting for something worthwhile, that it is something that actually exists, that you get a realistic idea of what you are waiting for, that it might not resemble at all what you thought it was going to, that things that tell you what it is going to be like are very likely not very good indications, they are someone elses idea for a start, they are based on someone elses experience, most likely their ideal of what the experience should be. They are manipulated to entertain not to bore so you don't realise you are waiting.
Films are so clever this way, they are designed to fool you they are taking you on a journey when they are only really distracting you from one.
Most of our time settles in a coffee cup, cafes are sophisticated waiting rooms
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