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Mom

One Film To Rule Them All

Monday, Mar. 01, 2004 - 3:10 a.m.

For the entirety of our existence, we as fans of science fiction and fantasy have been getting short shrift as far as our choices of entertainment are concerned. Not even the first Star Wars movie received acknowledgement.

But at last, last night, the spell was broken.

The film "The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King" secured a clean sweep at the Oscar Awards last night, garnering a total of eleven statuettes, one for each of the categories in which it received a nomination.

I'm still more than a little confused and a little disappointed at the fact that Sean Astin did not get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but I'm still extremely pleased with the fact that LOTR:TROTK was recognized by popular culture's most visible awards ceremonies.

For every gamer who campaigned through the night fueled on Doritos and Mountain Dew. For every programmer who crunched code without paying attention to how many hours or even days had elapsed since sleep; for every science fiction convention chairman who on the day of the con had difficult or missing staff members and no earthly or even unearthly idea how to get the program book to the event from the printers; for every overweight superintelligent well-read fanboy who constantly got overlooked by the pretty girls; for every old fart who saw Star Trek first-run and appreciated it from the very beginning; for everybody who's been hoodwinked by Harlan's claim that this would be the year The Last Dangerous Visions was coming out; for everybody who felt ripped off by the final season of Beauty and the Beast -- and for everybody who knew what a critical and amazing contribution the work of the unassuming British professor would mean to our time...

Last night was for us.

---

I think my single favorite Oscar Moment was when Adrien Brody used breath spray before announcing the Best Actress Award.

---

And now a few words that have to do with everything, and with nothing.

There's a situation in my life, involving baggage. I want to say something about that word. 'Baggage'.

I'm talking about the emotional stuff. The bad kind that will infect you like Smeagal and run your life in a way you don't need.

There's a lot of stuff that's happened to me that definitely qualifies as baggage: I have survived a rape, the suicide of a close friend in high school, an early and unscheduled departure from my home, a first husband who beat me regularly, a second husband who cheated on me, a car accident that left me disfigured to the point of having once seen a potential lover literally retch when seeing what had happened to my body, the early deaths of both of my parents, an inability to remain pregnant, religious discrimination, a cruel joke played on me by a celebrity impersonator which lasted more than a year and cost me several thousand dollars, and most recently, a sudden advancement of my nerve deafness for which I was caught unprepared.

According to all of this, I should throw in the towel. I have metric assloads of wonderfully rich and assorted baggage. I could use it as an excuse to hate the world, to be suspicious of intimacy, to behave badly when I'm nervous or frightened, to be unable to function properly if I think I'm going to lose a friend, to have a poor body image, to spread my meshes and exert my wiles so I can see by the various levels of obedience I receive just who loves me and how much, to think I'm unworthy if I'm not validated constantly, and to just generally settle into the pattern of letting my baggage be my excuse for a set of behaviors that would indeed assure my security -- but which would probably be hurting a lot of people around me in the process.

Instead, I've chosen to live through the anger and the pain, learn from my experiences, ask for forgiveness from The Higher Power, and any humans who need to hear it -- and then let it go. I let go of toxic situations, I let go of toxic behavior. I've even managed to let go of toxic people.

And the reason I choose to try and get through life this way -- without the presence of what I call 'Baggage Weaponry' -- is because it's too short. In my opinion, life is too short to go around and whack people metaphorically with a rolled-up newspaper and try and get my way all the time about everything. If that were happening, I would never learn anything new, would never try to expand my horizons, and would never make mistakes.

My next big goal is to take the money I will soon inherit from my grandmother's estate, and use it to go to school; I want to get credentialed and become a crisis counselor to help others who have been through what I've been through.

Nothing would please me more than to learn to help people deal with their baggage, too.

It's the reason I began this diary in the first place.

---

I'm going to have to go back and read The Lord Of The Rings books again.

Maybe the ring was a metaphor for baggage. :)

---

One more thing: I just looked at my statistics for yesterday here on Diaryland.

According to those, yesterday was February 30th -- and I received six hits.

Um. Yeah.

---

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