Reviving Woody

I have a confession: I am a Jew who loathes a self-loathing Jew. Rather, I used to be. Hence the title of this post. When one is forced to spend long, languid hours at home due to the icy roads that keep one from getting out into the real world, this one tends to turn to film.

I don't know about you, but I get really into phases of directors/content/genre. Like, I'll watch everything Hitchcock ever made in a week, then I'll move on to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, then spend two weeks exclusively watching Seinfeld (or something campier like 30 Rock), and on and on. These past two weeks, I have decided to revisit a man from my past, a man whom I gave more than several chances to show me he could be different, to make me believe in him. But it never happened. Woody Allen never ceased to piss me off. His voice gives me the same feeling as watching someone file their nails (worst. thing. ever.). The scenarios are all the same. People fall in love, they fall out of love, they cheat on their spouses, they divorce, they date... dear god, we know, Woody, we know. Life is hard.

And now, the Universe prompted me to give him one more chance. Who knows?--Several years had passed, I had matured, perhaps even shifted some worldviews of my own. Perhaps I had never been ready for Woody. I had been writing him off as dull, whiny, and unoriginal, telling him with a shrug: "It's not me... it's you." But perhaps it really was me who had the problem all along. Or you know what? Maybe neither of us had anything the matter with us and had just grown and were finally ready for one another.

So I'll leave you with a little gem from Manhattan, which is now playing in another window (yeah, I have yet to learn to resist the will to multitask on a laptop simply because I can): "I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind."

If you're fed up with someone or something, don't be certain you'll feel the same way a few years from now. Sure, you may, but you may also find the perfect companion for all those sub-zero winter days when the only other living creatures in the vicinity are your cat and the exotic plant in the living room that's never once bloomed.