Date Night

Every so often I feel I deserve to be taken out on the town. Maybe to a movie and dinner or just to buy something pretty. Whatever I think will make me happy. Call it a break from the mundane, if you wish. The part that makes people look at me strangely is that I tend to take myself out. Alone.

This weekend my boyfriend was working, most of my female friends have children and my sisters are thousands of miles away. So, I took myself to a movie and a nice quiet dinner at my favorite Greek restaurant. The movie: Don Jon. (Don't judge.)

You should go see it. It actually made me sit through the credits...just thinking. I won't give any spoilers but it was one of those movies that I'm sure my gender professor in college would have made us all write papers about.

Don Jon is about a guy who is so wrapped up in what he thinks of how life should be that he has lost connection with it. The more I think about the movie the more subtle hints I find. I don't feel that I'm reading too much into it, either. I've seen Joseph Gordon-Levitt speak in interviews about the film and the more he talks about it the more I discover.

Jon, the main character in Don Jon, is the typical 'guido'. He has a family he needs to impress, need to slick back his hair, go with friends to the bar to find the hottest girl to conquest for the night, sleeps with them, watches porn to feel any pleasure afterward and then needs to go to his Catholic church by Sunday morning for confession. By the end he is questioning the rules he has been following. Rules set by his family, his sex life, his friends, his girl, and his church.  Rules, set by the societal norms, that have been placed on himself and even those around him.

Now, you may be wondering why I'm writing a post about my 'self-date' (and a movie supposedly about porn) on a blog geared toward a southern atheist's prospective of the world around her. It's because, by the end of my date night, I was so unbelievably happy I cried.

The movie made me think that I was once (and perhaps still am to some extent) still caught up in what my life was 'supposed' to be. My life was to go to church, grow up, get married, get a job, get pregnant and grow old teaching my kids and grand kids about my religion. There was a lot of 'get' in that last sentence. What about what I should be giving to life?

So, the more I thought about my life after my night out, the more I began to realize how lucky I am. I'm not stuck in a love-less marriage (like almost happened to me), I don't have children (which I THRILLED about), I have a good job that pays my bills. I live in a place that is so breathtakingly beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. I live in the most scientifically advanced times in our history. There is no 2nd century church doctrine holding back my life. Nor is there a tight southern-girl mentality strangling the ever-changing life out of me.

There will be more social fights ahead of me but, for right now, the life and experiences that are at my fingertips are endless. The life that I have now is mine and it's all that I have and I'm so happy that I'm young and free enough to know this about myself.