왓섭?

(via jessicachu)

I saw Wedding Crashers last night (I remember jennjade really wanted to see that when it first came out, and she eventually did) and this soundbite epitomizes exactly what I took from the film.

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play two young guys who aren’t actually quite that young, who crash weddings to hook up with girls for one-night stands.  The movie’s tagline is “Life’s a party.  Crash it.”  This tagline completely contradicts the existence of “rat racers”, a distinct category of people in Tal Ben-Shahar’s book, Happier, who suffer their entire lives in constant pursuit of an ever-changing goal, in the hopes that they’ll finally fulfill the one achievement that makes everything worthwhile; like a holy grail, in the sense that they never find it.

We had to read that book as part of a university fellows program.  I started it, optimistic that I could reap something of value from this experience; I turned pessimistic after the first 4 days.  However, a lot of what the book was saying in its descriptions of miserable people (which I constantly denied regarding myself), framed perfectly all that I was (and still am, sort of) doing in my life.  It talks about how the general sense of happiness that goal-oriented people feel isn’t really happiness - it’s a sensation of relief from a never-ending cycle of work and suffering.

In Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson’s character, John, goes through a shit ton of failures in pursuing this engaged girl named Claire.  It doesn’t even seem possible that he can have her.

**~~~~~~**SPOILER ALERT**~~~~~~**

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But he does.  In the end, John gets Claire, and suddenly I realize that he could just as easily have failed (let’s just suspend the cash-seeking agendas of Hollywood screenwriters for a moment, and imagine that this is a true story - I know this idea is incredulous and juvenile and pathetic, but bear with me).

It was illogical for him to pursue her, since the chance for failure was so large.  But just by being himself and doing whatever he wanted, he found his holy grail.  After however many years of crashing weddings and one-night stands, he latched onto something and he got it.

I’ve recently revived my lust for fixed-gear bicycles, after pondering a method of transportation to the hospital for shadowing (car, bus, walking, bumming rides are all out of the question).  My old commuter bike died (the head set tube rusted, thus rendering the bike unsteerable), so I need a new one.  My mom said I could just get a really good bike, since a car is unfeasible at this point.  So I’ve been looking into road bikes and fixies. 

Along with getting a good bike, one must procure the necessary skillsets to be “worthy” of such quality equipment - the track stand, hopping curbs, countersteering, etc.  (I’ll have to ask chessmaster about unicycling over the summer).

So I was trying to do a trackstand in the common room on my suitemate’s bike, and failing terribly.

But it was refreshing to try something without caring about my success.

It was nice to forget about being pre-med, to forget about not disappointing my family, to forget about representing the University Fellows, about winning all the time, about being somebody, about being respected, about anything. 

If you want a quality, act as if you had it. - William James

Fake it ‘til you make it. - MUN