There is that line about history and its repetitions, first time tragedy, second time farce - and years ago when I saw Dancer in the Dark, I thought it was a beautiful, sad movie - most of my love, of course, being inspired by Bjork's participation in the film. Last night, I watched it again, and I could not take it seriously at all. I roll my eyes a lot lately, but man, last night, they were getting an extra work out. There were times when I giggled and times where I wanted to shout at the screen. And I feel a little like a flag-waving conservative but it's not jingoism, it's that Lars von Trier is not an American and should stop trying to make these big statements about America because he doesn't get it, doesn't get it at all.

It was Dogville that allowed me to see those same cartoonish sketches of America that Dancer in the Dark is full of. The overwrought melodrama, that ham fisted striving for the classical sense of tragedy - that doesn't even annoy me so much, even though I think it is the worst kind of storytelling - what really annoys me is this immigrant story, Bjork exploited in every way by America and by her neighbors. Forced to kill her neighbor just to keep the money that is hers, in that scene right after there is a prop just as subtle (read not at all) as the rest of von Trier's style of cinema: an American flag waving over the house that he has to keep including in the shot, as if we don't already get his point. Everything about this movie is so incredibly stupid. Ugh, critics that cream their pants over him need to get punched in the stomach.

Luckily, Bonnie came over right as the movie was nearing its finale and I hung out with her downstairs with Jamie. Our Florida house reconvened here in Brooklyn. We sat around and talked about things and didn't talk - it felt pretty similar to sitting around our living room in Florida. It was nice and the whole time I thought about what it is I want to be doing because it was then in Florida in a similar setting that I thought about those things, listening to Bonnie talking about what she wanted to do with her life and they were serious plans which no one in New York seems to have, but which everyone in Florida had - aspirations of some sort. And I aspire to get those aspirations back, reclaim a nervousness toward the future that I have lost here in New York to a self-satisfied comfort in going out often, hanging out with attractive people and having nice little moments, none of them strung together in any discernible line, but just these atomized moments which I am beginning to wonder mean anything if they are not somehow connected. Need to either figure out how to connect them or find some other method of having moments, one that has a pattern.

I am not as happy as I could be as I often as I could be. Sadly, lots of the reasons are because I often don't have money and this infects pretty much every aspect of my life with stress, so a job I need, yes. I have been applying all day to temp agencies and jobs online. And I am also figuring out who is good for me and who is not. Some people I am going to break up with and spend less time with for my own sanity and my own attempts to move my life in some direction I like. The question of what makes a life meaningful has resurfaced in my life and that is a good thing even though it might make me sad to examine my own current life under the lens of that question, because self-awareness is the only way to move forward. It doesn't really seem like too much for one to desire, a life of meaning (and its resultant happiness), but how to achieve that is the one of the hardest questions for me to answer. Yes, dissatisfaction is creeping in.