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"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."

-Orson Welles

            It’s not very healthy to be nostalgic.

            But, health be damned, because that’s exactly what I’ve been the past week or so, pouring over old yearbooks and the photos that are falling off of my wall. Most of my friends have already gone back to their respective colleges, forcing me to spend my days either focusing on the past or sitting cross-legged in front of my laptop, watching the "classic" movies that I have only pretended to see before.

            There was still snow residue on the ground today, the weather too cold and dreary for me to be putting my pants on, let alone for me to go outside, which is exactly what my little brother wanted me to do. I had to try and argue with him the importance of staying in and culturing oneself with the untarnishable, perfectineveryway Netflix queue. He quickly saw the value and recommended Paranormal Activity.

            I can’t normally bring myself to watch horror movies and today would, again, be no exception to that rule.  I already have way too much stuff in my life that I am worried about, that I am scared of, for me to be frightened by a man in a mask jumping out and spraying blood all over the 13” LCD screen of my MacBook.  And, whether it is the future or relationships or grades or doing laundry, movies have always been the best way for me to forget, for at least an hour-and-a-half.

            And so I would have to argue that a full Netflix queue is one of the purest forms of beauty on this earth, letting my afternoons be filled with, consecutively, The Shawshank Redemption, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Pulp Fiction. Over the past few months, though, I have found myself becoming less and less involved with the characters and the plot of films and more and more focused on the technical side, on what I can find wrong with the film. It’s not a very good trait to have. And so, if you combine heavy bouts of nostalgia and a developing movie snobbery, along with the (apparently) extraordinarily egotistical persona that I put off, I’m slowly becoming a person that’s not so much fun to be around.

            Excellent.