Unpleasantness in Pleasantville

Anyone have those moments where, while listening to music, your iPod seems to have some kind of mind-reading ability and plays what you need to hear? Like the songs that keep playing one after another have some relevancy to what you're thinking or feeling? It's crazy, right? Or honestly, perhaps, just a very rare moment of coincidence.

I had been having a rough week, a very rough week. I struggle almost every day, to be honest, with where I'm at and the speed of progress. I should have achieved the perfect standard of my life at this point. Too often have I reflected (and had been reminded) that at this point in my life I should be married, have a good job, a lasting career, a place of my own, and be so happy with everything that rainbows are shooting out of my ears. Instead, I'm back to living at home with my parents and younger sister, I work a crap part-time job, I'm working for free to establish a comic company, and the thought of having a family of my own is nonexistent. In comparison to my four other siblings in their twenties, I'm on the lowest rung of the ladder when it comes to achievements. I have always wanted the ideal life, the "American Dream" of lives, but I have no idea why I haven't gotten it yet.

A place where there are freak rain storms, tree fires, and people making out in the street!

So the one day that I decide to actually sit down and watch TV, what's on? One of my favorite movies, Pleasantville. I remember watching it in my high school sociology class and being instructed to seek out the social injustice themes throughout the film. It is riddled with those kinds of themes, from racism and segregation to women's rights. However, what stood out to me the most was that the characters were struggling with something more than turning technicolor: they were realizing a different part of their selves. Their changes brought out the most unpredictable in them, and it showed through the vibrancy of color. They were so used to having lived strictly scripted lives that any change shook the very core of their existence. I never understood the ending or what it meant (three of the adult characters asking each other what happens next) until I had watched the film this time around. It felt like a big sigh of relief, how they were so unsure about the future yet they were comfortable with the unpredictability of it all. They had survived the worst of the ordeal of change, and now their futures were their own to write.

Pinnacle moment where change is just simply misunderstood.

I didn't really empathize with the film's characters up until this watch-through. They seemed to be all the more real to me because of how there was the pressure of living life in a formulaic manner; that was my life in Florida, where my days melted into one another because it was just work, eat, sleep, and nothing more. Just as they had realized their identities apart from the structure, so have I. The struggle of uprooting from what is familiar and instituted is always a daunting, difficult journey. Pleasantville reassured me that whatever changes come around in my life, there is always an unscripted future to look forward to. I've gone through the arduous task of discovering what kind of person I am so far, and there's now only moving forward to achieve my ideal future.

I'm one to believe in coincidences, and having my TV play Relevancy Roulette with me the other day made me believe in them even more. The universe is strange and vast, yet it somehow sends out little but impacting signals to guide us to our destiny.