Chasing Butterflies

Last night, after we'd exhausted all of our other DVR options, we stumbled across a horror film called Them. The premise is incredibly simple: a French couple living in a cavernous old mansion in the Romanian countryside hear strange noises and end up being tormented by a gang of bored kids who just wanted someone to play with. It terrified the crap out of me.

"This is not the best commercial for Romanian adoption agencies."

After checking that the front door was locked and making sure there were no hooded Romanian pre-teens lurking in the closet, I lay in bed thinking about what greater meaning this film could possibly have. Because horror films are never just about terrifying the crap out of you.

So, basically, it's a commentary on how sometimes that desperate feeling of wanting to entertain yourself can become so overwhelming it tortures you. When all anyone really wants is a roll in the hay, an improvised dinner, and a peaceful night at home in front of the television.

I seem to spend a lot of time telling myself that it's okay to stay home.

There are very few general rules I keep: Be as kind to other people as possible. Laugh at yourself. Don't mix grape and grain. Apart from those rules, I'm convinced that life is always better if you're not preoccupied with creating unnecessary obligation for yourself. There's nothing in life that you have to do. Not even the fun stuff.

Even so, I constantly push myself. If I'm in one room, I belong in the other room. If I'm reading this book, I should be reading that one. If I'm outside, I should be writing. If I'm at my computer, I should be outside. I wrote this last night:

I have an idea.

Let's us, every one of us, right now (YES RIGHT NOW), scooch ourselves away from these little electronic devices, remove our hands from our keyboards, peel our eyes from the screen, care not about what book we're reading or what music we have loaded onto our portable devices, and interact with the world around us.

Let's all go chasing butterflies.

It's the whole issue of what it means to be writing here in the first place. Why should we have to justify these pixels? Why do we feel compelled to write that life would be better if we went outside and did something else?* Even though most of the time we are outside, and when we're inside we're writing about all the great things we did while we were outside?

How do we get trapped into feeding these strange loops?

I won't even go into how writing about what someone else has already written about elsewhere on the internet is just adding a cigarette butt to the pile. But I swear it's not just me. Everyone seems to go through this questioning phase. Lately, it seems to be particularly strong. I wonder if it's the proliferation of Twitter, or the Pod People-type power that Facebook seems to have over everyone you ever went to school with. Something is telling us that we need to rethink every day what we're doing here and why we're writing these words. Whether we're adding anything valuable to the conversation.

Or if we'd be better off chasing butterflies.

(*Okay, I lie, it probably totally would.)

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