12 The Seagull SILVER LINING SOCIETY
words by SHAIRA A. AGREGADO
L
ately, the world seems to have been filled with nothing but gloom and despair. We’re three-quarters of the way through the year and have
ticked off all the harbingers of the apocalypse, fires, floods, storms, disease, earthquakes, war, and famine - hell even locusts. And it sometimes feels like it is harder to live through these times. On particularly bad days, Alex switches off her phone, wraps herself in a snug blanket, and settles in to watch a movie with a cup of steaming hot tea in hand. She always seems to pick soft, cozy Ghibli movies, like Howl’s Moving Castle. Or even a familiar Disney flick - The Emperor’s New Groove, or a chapter from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, something that will make her laugh. There is something comforting about these movies, like talking to an old friend. She loves to lip-sync the movie dialogues, laughing at jokes she heard before, like knowing what comes next. At that moment, she won’t want to engage with her problems, so she distances herself by just focusing on the movie. Her flatmate Lia, on the other hand, does the exact opposite. She selects something she’s never seen before; some artsy, avant-garde piece of cinema, and drowns herself in abstract philosophy. For Lia, watching a movie is a distraction. “At that moment, I don’t want to engage with my problems, so I distance myself by just focusing on the movie,” she says, “At least the movie has something good going on.” She admires these films for what she can learn from and through them. The comfort she derives is based not on familiarity, but on finding a story, a struggle similar to her present one, and gathering encouragement from it.
