It’s New Year’s Eve. We are almost into 2024, which is weird as fuck. I have declared September 3rd, 2021 as my re-birthday, which means that I am two years old and heading into my third year of re-birth.
I’ve been thinking it’s time for a change. A shift in my way of thinking, if you may. I need to start looking forward because apparently, I am not permanently dying any time soon. I’m fifty-two in real years, which means I’m (probably) in the second half of my life.
I wrote about in yesterday’s post that Everything Everywhere All At Once was a movie that on paper, should not have worked. When the actors talk about it in interviews, they laugh as they try to describe what it’s about. I mean, you can give a superficial description.
It’s a story about an ordinary (immigrant Chinese) woman who is beaten down by life and everything is unraveling. She discovers that she can universe jump, and she needs to defeat the great evil, which is her daughter. Basically.
But that does not do justice to any aspect of the movie. In trying to do that, you would have to talk about the whole movie, bit by bit. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing! But it means that it’s not easy to define. Which is one reason I love it so much.
I watched a bit of someone reacting to it, and she was ‘WTF is happening?’ every few minutes. Which, legit, but also–just go with it. It took maybe fifteen minutes before I realized that I was not going to understand everything as it happened. That was a deliberate choice by the Daniels, and one I appreciated.
Side note: It’s one of my favorite things about FromSoft games. Miyazaki does not explain shit in a straightforward manner. Eevrything is in item descriptions, a few brief cutscenes, and whatever the community can cobble together. He trusts that you’ll figure it out–or not. And he’ll include optional areas in the game, realizing that a huge chunk of the players will never see them.
Which still blows my mind! In the first season of Prepare To Try, a very young Rory mentions in the secret episode as Krupa shows him the entryway to Ash Lake (you have to hit two illusory walls to get to the way to get down), “Imagine this is your first game. You would be ruined for other games.”
It was practically my first ‘hardcore’ game, and it did ruin me for other games. Basically, I like FromSoft games and I like indie games, and nothing else.
Side note: I have tried. I have tried hard. I have tried a variety of games. This is what it comes down to. I don’t like pop culture. Period. I have a brain that is broke in ways that doesn’t allow me to look at things in the same way that other people do.
In fact, I did a quick look at reactions to EEAAO, and no one saw the same things I did. Or rather, no one saw some specific things I saw that were negative in nature. About family. And it made me realize how different my brain is.
I knew it was different. I knew I thought about things on a completely different plane. But I’m constantly surprised at HOW different my brain is.
Anyway. This is not about the movie. I will be doing more musing on that later. This is about my real life and how I’m about to do something different. And how I should not let anything stand in my way.
One. I am going to get tested for autism and maybe ADHD. I know that I am neurospicy. Now. I would not have said that at the beginning of 2023. I would have said I was weird–even deeply weird. I am so weird. I am all the weird. In addition, I’m really smart. The two do not play well together most of the time.
I thought it was because something was wrong with me that I looked at things so differently. Yes, my last therapist told me over a decade ago that I thought on a level five whereas other people though on a level one (so they literally could not understand me), but I did nto put that together with being neurospicy.
In addition, the description of autism (which, need I remind you, is based on a young boy) did not resonate with me at all. It was only in talking with non-male people who had autism that I realized that several of the things I dealt with were autistic indicators.
ADHD is more tenuous, but I have several of the (non-male) traits for that as well, though to a lesser degree. What complicates that is the fact that I am very much not detail-oriented or time-focused, but also that I am rigid in scheduling my time. In other words, while I might have issues with executive function, I have also come up with ways to combat that. Also, coming from a culture where everything started an hour late, I hated it so much. I overcompensated as a young adult by being fifteen minutes early for everything.
At the same time, however, I always worked to the back of a deadline. I didn’t miss deadlines, but I drove myself crazy over them. When I accepted that I was always going to work to the back of a deadline, in a weird way, it made me less of a procrastinator, but it also made it so I didn’t obsess about not doing the thing until I actually did the thing.
I can’t stop thinking about the butt plug scene in the movie. Not because of the shock value (it wasn’t that shocking to me). More because it’s a symbol of the ‘why the fuck not?’ mentality that the Daniels had about the movie.
I need to cultivate that in my own life. I get way too hung up on ‘no, I can’t do that’ or about thinking of the obstacles in my way. I’m not saying one shouldn’t consider the flaws/negatives, but not if it means that one does not move forward at all.
In listening to the Daniels, it’s clear that they just…did it. They probably heard what they couldn’t do all the time, but they didn’t care. They wrote this role specifically for Michelle Yeoh. And asked her to do it. They wanted Ke Huy Quan for Waymond, not even knowing if he was still in the business or not.
It’s quite the shift in mentality. Simply going ahead without thinking there might be obstacles in their way.
I’m done for now. More tomorrow.