Last weekend was full-on in a way that can only mean August in Edinburgh is here and it’s therefore difficult to say no to events and shows and friends and the pub and all manner of great things which, when layered deep over three straight days, take the life out of you and mean you will be in recovery all week.
So this weekend I have spent largely alone, save for a few digital chats and the necessary social interactions required to buy things and exist in the world outside my flat. I’ve not had a proper, in-person conversation with a human being since Friday. Despite my previous post, this is perfectly fine.
I made a lame effort to include people in my cinema trip yesterday but no one was available, so it turned into the most wonderful and luxuriously indulgent of one of my favourite activities: going to the movies alone.
I took myself on a date and it was fucking glorious.
I didn’t limit this date to a film. Hell no. I know how to treat myself sometimes. I have plenty of that sort of energy to focus, and when you remove everyone else there is to try to take care of, you’re left with you, after all.
I eschewed the bus and took a long walk to the other side of town to listen to some podcasts. I sat in the Filmhouse Café Bar with a large glass of wine and a book for an hour and a half. Then I podcasted it up again on the walk home, bought a bad supermarket oven pizza (confirming once again my belief that chicken on pizza is and always will be wrong, just don’t keep trying it, Kate) drank more wine and watched the first episode of The Get Down on Netflix, which was hopeful and electrifying in the way only something about music can be.
But this did all orbit around my own plan to see Maggie’s Plan. It’s been two months since I’ve been to the cinema, and even longer since I’ve been alone, and that’s too long. Because here’s the wonderful thing about going to see a movie by yourself: there are absolutely no distractions or demands on your time or emotions except the thing in front of you. You turn off your phone, you sit in the dark, and you are captive. You can work through your own shit in your head in relation to what’s on the screen in front of you. You don’t have to share your snacks or the booze you snuck in. You can stay as long as you want through the credits or not at all. And you don’t have to talk about any of it right away.
I love going to the movies with friends as well, but it takes me a long time to process things I’ve just seen, and I find it difficult and intimidating to have a meaningful conversation about a movie that just ended 5 minutes ago. I am also remarkably oblivious to symbolism and subtext to an almost embarrassing degree for someone who made it her undergraduate business to read and respond to literature. In post-film-watching discussion, someone will casually refer to a detail of a plotline and I’ll be embarrassed for myself for not having noticed such a glaringly obvious feature of the story without a few hours of reflection.
I am a bad critic and I am less observant than people give me credit for. Perhaps this is related to my inability to recognize people in the street. But it makes the dissection of something I’ve just watched, film or theatre, into an anxiety-inducing prospect. So August in Edinburgh is, for me, simultaneously wonderful and internally terrifying. I usually just feel like an idiot who walked into the wrong classroom. Thank god there’s beer in just about every one.
I read a review for Maggie’s Plan a few weeks ago in The Skinny and it sounded like it fit nicely into the broader subjects dominating my life at the moment, so I needed to see it. It wasn’t a great film, but it wasn’t bad. It was predictable but some of the writing was so perfect it made up for its larger flaws. Julianne Moore’s character was such a badass. I love Greta Gerwig since seeing Frances Ha (and I wanted all her shoes in this film). And it’s impossible to dislike Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader. So in general, it was an appreciated and much-needed diversion.
I forget the specific phrasing, but there’s a bit where Maggie is talking to John about always talking his ex wife down from her meltdowns, and says, you’ve got me to talk you down from yours, but what about when I meltdown? And he says don’t worry, obviously you’ll talk yourself down. So she says something like, ‘So just because everyone thinks I have it all together, I don’t deserve any attention?!’ And it was like someone ripped the dialogue from my deepest-seeded insecurities.
I liked Frances Ha because of the illustration of how it feels to be completely scattered among people who seem to have it together in ways you feel you never will, and maybe don’t even need to (and also: ‘Unnnnn-datable’). But aside from a few tiny details, I’m nothing like Frances. I’m much, much more like control-freak Maggie. With the undying compulsion to take care of everyone and impose a ‘things organized neatly’ frame on everything I touch, often to the detriment of my personal sanity. I enjoy it, but it would be the death of me if I didn’t work on reining it in all the time.
Maggie later says, tearful and breaking-point overwhelmed from failing to fix everything just-so, and in a more funny than depressing way, ‘I’m just so tired of being… ME.’ To which, my inner dialogue said, ‘Oh, I FEEL YOU, SISTER.’ This is some exhausting shit and it is no one’s fault but my own.
Sometimes you need this sort of comedy to laugh at how ridiculous you know you are.
