So I was planning to do a post on the end of my first year of graduate school – a post-mortem, if you will. I told myself I’d write it as soon as my papers were in, and then I said I’d write it as soon as I went on vacation back up to my home country, the Yay Area (the SF Bay Area, for the uninformed). And then I said I’d write it as soon as I got back to Santa Barbara, and, well, that was more than two weeks ago. I’m guessing from the fact that I never summoned the motivation to write the post, and that all I had planned for it was the title – Down the Rabbit Hole and out the Other Side – the post was just not meant to be. Suffice it to say that my first year of grad school was everything I needed and wanted it to be. While I’m certainly enjoying my summer off, I also can’t wait for school to start again, to go back to classes with the brilliant professors and fabulous classmates/colleagues, and to continue my studies. But that’s really all I have to say about that, without risking getting trite.
So I’ll switch to the topic of this post, one that I actually feel I have a lot to say about, mostly non-trite: The bad lessons my favorite movies taught me, and my slow process of unlearning them. As an introduction, for those who aren’t part of my inner circle (thought I still have a hard time believing that anyone not in my crazy inner circle is reading this blog) and don’t already know, my two favorite movies are The Wizard of Oz and When Harry Met Sally. Oz has been my favorite movie since I was two years old and my father brought home the 50th-anniversary video. I wore that video tape out by over-playing long ago, and am now the proud owner of the 3-disc Collector’s Edition DVD. When Harry Met Sally was introduced to me my freshman year of high school, and it just sort of took over my head. I tend to watch it when I’m feeling down, and I know most of the dialogue by heart, and not just the famous bits. So how could two such wonderful movies let me down? In the following ways:
