The Subject line is from "Amélie." It is a phrase repeated often by Amélie's father, as he continues to get photographs in the mail of his stolen garden gnome, taken in front of buildings and monuments all over the world. He just doesn't understand.
This is a wonderful vignette, based like most events in that movie on a real event, but in this case one of the only real events that didn't happen to the director and writer of the movie. This one happened to someone else, and he read about it in the press and felt that it just "fit" with all the other vignettes from his own life. I just love that moment, and that confused look on Amélie's father's face, as he tries to rationalize the completely irrational. That's the way I feel, zipping past the first few words of yesterday's posts on Fairfield Life in Yahoo's Message View. Je ne comprend pas...je ne comprends pas. I simply do not understand how someone can take themselves so seriously as to have to "defend" their fictional image of themselves as if it mattered. I simply do not understand the mindset of those who seem to feel that FFL is a battleground on which *to* defend these fictional images, as if there really IS a battle going on, and they (or anyone else) could "win" it. Most of all I simply do not understand how the people who do this -- day in and day out, for YEARS -- can do it while espousing the benefits of a meditation technique which ostensibly allows them to dissolve the self they are so desperate to "defend" in the bliss of Absolute blissitudedness. HOW can anyone who has been meditating this long still have so much self to "defend?" HOW can anyone in their Fifties, Sixties, and in at least one case Seventies still pursue these seemingly endless ego-battles defending egos that should have been lightened up (if not dissolved) decades ago? HOW can these adults spend so much time and energy writing endless narcissotracts to "defend" something THAT DOES NOT EVEN EXIST, their puny selves? Je ne comprends pas...je ne comprends pas. I would characterize reading yesterday's flood of narcissoposts on FFL as like watching kindergarteners, except that I have first-hand experience with kindergarteners, and *they're* not as obsessed with themselves as these Drama Queens seem to be. Their personalities are fluid, and change with the winds. The narcissistic Drama Queens seem to be rigid and fixed in their obsession-patterns, repeating the same scenarios (and often the same "defences") over and over and over, laying waste in their minds to hordes of "enemies," most of whom don't even seem to be aware that there is a battle going on because they...uh...have lives. Who could possibly CARE about the things that these people obsess over and write endless rants about? Who could possibly harbor such grudges against others on this forum full of people THEY HAVE NEVER MET, clinging to these grudges so strongly that they feel the need to diss their "enemies" so often, and try to convince others to do the same. The pettiness of it just boggles my mind. Je ne comprends pas...je ne comprends pas... The plaster garden gnome in "Amélie" had more fun with his life than these people seem to have had in years.
