I’m searching for something to watch and it’s making me more and more frustrated.
Nestled into one side of the loveseat, my ankle’s propped up on the armrest of the other with a couple of pillows. I’ve got more than one ice pack wrapped around it in a towel. It’s not perfect, but it’s helping to keep the swelling down.
I’m scowling.
I can just feel it.
With a sigh, I hit mute but keep scrolling. The previews that autoplay are just absolutely ridiculous and the “featured” section seems like it always has the same movie, but packaged 15 different ways. It’s like Hollywood collectively trashed the buddy comedy and replaced the entire genre with this dumb, templatized action-dramedy hybrid thing. You know what I mean? The type where some blockbuster movie star moves through a three act structure, with no cohesive transitions, as if it were duct-taped together at the last minute for a high school group project.
Unclenching my jaw, I let out a short exhale from my nose and keep scrolling. If I’m going to be laid up on the couch, I just want to watch something that’s going to pull me in. I don’t want to be tempted to reach for my phone, or wonder how much time is left. I want a story. Give me complex character development with actors that can own it and a director that’s going for resonance rather than spectacle.
This is when I hit the “Oscar winners” section... which, I didn’t even know was a thing.
One title in particular catches my attention.
Gladiator.
My eyes soften and my cheeks pull into a soft grin. In the early 2000s, I distinctly remember watching this movie for the first time in the TV room at my grandparents house with my cousins. We were undoubtedly too young. And, I mean, plenty of it went over our heads, but the movie does open with a decapitation and a retaliatory battle... which isn’t something you gloss over as a kid. So now I’m chuckling at the memory of my mom saying “You did WHAT??“ while trying not dislodge the ice packs from their loosely-swaddled perch atop my ankle.
As I’m pressing play, I’m trying to think of the last time I saw this movie, and I’m pretty sure it was on my NOLS semester in college. During the section where we got our Wilderness First Responder certification, we stayed on a ranch in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. There was no cell reception and no wifi, but they had this game room with a TV and a small selection of movies. Gladiator was one of them. After a few weeks of winter camping and backcountry skiing in sub-zero temps, that was pretty luxurious for us. Like, big time.
My thoughts drift to that cold-ass camping trip and the weird phases of social norms we went through as a group. It’s one of the first times I realized just how much pop-culture plays a role in peoples’ lives, because we’d be shoveling a snow shelter, or boiling snow for drinking water, and we’d be talking about movies... while surrounded by incredible vistas and wildlife in the Absoroka mountain range. I guess in the absence of technology, we sort of went through withdrawal. The first few days were bad—that stuff was all we talked about. By the third week, we’d acclimatized and were able to have conversations completely void of pop-culture references.
So, sitting there in my living room, Gladiator‘s about to start and I’m shaking my head. I’d seen that tech-withdrawal thing a bit on other trips before that one, but I saw it a TON after that semester when I started leading trips as a guide myself.
Today, though, I’m tucked into a loveseat in Vermont with my ankle propped-up. I’m not frustrated from searching for something to watch anymore, but I am thinking it’s probably time to take a camping trip.
Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
292/365
When you're looking for depth and can't find it, what do you do?
onward.
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