Holding out for a hero

A couple days ago i watched Marty, the 1955 Best Picture winner. In case you haven't noticed, a careful blend of Turner Classic Movies and DVR have been really helping this blog out this summer.

The movie is about a 34-year-old bachelor whose younger siblings are all married, and who is getting a lot of pressure from older people (like his mother, and customers at the butcher shop where he works) to settle down, or on the other hand, pressure from his peers to continue a lifestyle of bar-hopping, or perhaps finding certain streets to see just what kind of action they could find (for a cost, surely). Well, he gives into the bar-hopping one night, but inadvertently finds a girl who had been ditched by her date. They hit it off and spend several hours just talking and getting to know each other. The next day, the same people pressuring him to find a girl have changed their minds (for instance, his mother realizes she doesn't want to lose her last child to marriage because she'd be left all alone), and his friends urge him to not waste his time on a girl they deem less than attractive enough. In the end, Marty decides that what he wants and what makes him happy are the things he should be focusing on, and calls her up. i suppose the rest of the story is the material for a different movie.

All in all, i really enjoyed this film. It taps into fears that i think a lot of college students have - that we'll end up 34 years old working a mediocre job, having still not found the one we want to spend the rest of our lives with. frankly, it's an outcome that scares me sometimes when i let it. However, there's something to be said for patience. There's also something to be said for pursuing things the right way in the first place, and another thing to be said for knowing what we are capable of and having reasonable expectations. If we stay grounded and patient, then anything exceeding expectations gets to come as a wonderful surprise! and if we stay on an appropriate path from the beginning, those disappointments are more likely to fall few and far between. The right things fall in to place as long as we push just enough and not too much in the right directions. So here's hoping that after college i can seek after jobs and a career that are right for me and make me happy, never settling for something less-than, and never taking something more-than simply because of the attraction of a pay check or a reputation. Sometimes patience, reason, and (dare i say it) righteousness can actually pay off.