The Pen Pal Club

            So for our first documentary we tackled Life in a Day which I stole from Anthony’s Netflix queue list. It was a very interesting watch that was beautiful, horrifying, touching, intriguing and sad. It was a story without a story, a look into the lives of strangers. It was poetic and made me want to be philosophical. It asked what people love and fear. It made me feel superficial and materialistic and the desire to just give everything up and live simply pulsed though my chest. It made me want to call everyone I love and tell them how much they mean to me and made me sad that I am so alone. It made me think about myself and where I am and what I am doing, how I am both so small in this world and made me question what my dreams of the future are. It’s funny because where you are in your life and the people, places, books, movies, day-to-day experiences that you share are what make you who you are and influence your perspective at that moment. Because all my friends from high school are having babies I’ve been thinking about family a lot. Because Micah is going through treatments for his leukemia I’ve been thinking about death and how we never know how much time we have or what God's plans for us are. Because I’m reading War and Peace I’ve been thinking about love and hatred, the triviality of the traditional mating rituals and the futility of war. Duty and philosophy. All these things swirl around in my brain and if I wasn’t doing or seeing one of these things than my perspective might be completely different.

            I guess I don’t know how to write about this movie and how it made me feel. It made me feel a lot of things but it also made me feel my lack of feeling. It made me disgusted with the amount of time I waste, the amount of tv I watch and all the goals I have abandoned. It makes me sad that I don’t wake up and write every day, that I don’t go to the museums much any more and challenge myself in new ways. It makes me sad that I have become complacent with the way that I live. But this is me going off on a stream of conscious overflow.

            I enjoyed the movie but it made me sad because I wanted to know more about these people and their lives and I know I never will. I wondered how in the world so much beautiful footage was taken and I can’t even imagine how many hours in took to watch, compile and edit all of the video.I was interested the entire time and although I didn't enjoy the final monologue and it made me question what the original intention of the documentary was, I really take my hat off to all the people who made it happen. I totally recommend it and maybe I'll have to watch it again some time.