Day 4,086—Grabbing onto Happiness—

 

         I have been rewriting my guidebook (Finding Joy in 365 Days) recently, and one of the days I talk about doing something different, in which I relay a story of how I went to see a movie at 2 a.m., so last night I did kind of the same thing. I went to see the new Wes Anderson movie at 10:45 p.m. in the city. It is always risky because I will likely fall asleep, but I had been wanting to see this movie for months, and it isn’t playing in most theaters anymore, so it felt like it was either now or I wouldn’t be able to see it in the theater.

         I feel like it is almost cliché to be a Wes Anderson fan at this point, but I have been seeing his movies in the theater since the Royal Tenenbaums, so it is almost not even about the movie anymore. His last two I didn’t get to see in the theater, and I didn’t like the last one very much at all and the other one, I was just so-so on.

I arrived at the Foundry way after 10, and it was deserted. When I went to buy a ticket, there were guys talking with the manager because they had bought a ticket to the wrong movie, so they were seeing if they could get a refund. When I sat down for the movie, the guy who waited in our theater came out and checked my ticket to make sure I was in the right theater. There were only five of us in the theater: me and two couples. I probably should have felt weird being alone, but I didn’t. I felt comfortable and confident. I even debated buying hot coffee to keep me awake, but I ultimately didn’t.

It was so difficult to get up on time this morning. When I got home, I sat and wrote for a while before making it upstairs to sleep. It isn’t like I wasn’t tired. I missed the climax of the movie last night but woke up in time to see the conclusion, but I still had a good time. It will just be an excuse to rewatch it. With all the bad things happening every day, reading the recent Supreme Court decisions makes me question if we live in a democracy anymore, but I am trying to reframe the bad news with a reminder of how important it is to grab onto any happiness I can find.