"..magic soaking my spine.." -The Killers 

There's this really cool character on the show Girls on HBO, her name is Jessa and she's played by Jemima Kirke, and she's my spirit animal. She's everything I dream to be, which is really weird because she's everything I'm not and everything I wouldn't wanna stand for and everything I wouldn't be proud to be. She's a hippie girl with long curly hair and tattoos and she has all kinds of emotional problems and she's so raw and honest and she loses it sometimes out of nowhere and she's lonely and helpless but really fucking demented at the same time, but she's so beautiful and daunting too, impatient, careless, well-traveled, experienced, very worldly, endured through a lot of pain at her age, she's an atheist and she's SO cynical. The type of friend to get you into trouble, fun trouble, free spirited and just free in every other sense. She's not dependable, dropped out of school or quit her job or some irresponsible shit like that.

I want to be her but I know that I'm not like that and I would be stretching out my personality very far if I attempted to be this way, this way that I yearn to be. 

She makes other people uncomfortable and I feel weird by just even standing out in a crowd.. 

Or is it just that everyone always stresses to "be yourself" so much that I'm so blindly comforted and okay with not changing my timid ways? Or would I actually be changing who I am to become someone else? Or is that who I truly am.. Who I truly want to be, who I'm destined to be and if so does that automatically mean that the person I am now is not myself? 

I have questions

American-Hustle/Wolf on Wall Street

I watched two movies today: American Hustle and Wolf on Wall Street. They're both very similar, loosely based on con artists in the US. American Hustle in the late 70's, Wolf on Wall Street in the late 80's. As with every movie that I love, I of course, left the theater feeling very inspired. Inspired to hop into a time machine, move to New York, wear fur and marry a stockbroker. On a more serious note, I am enamoured with the glossy eyes through which Americans view crooks and their greed, materialism, physical beauty and egos among other things. 

 

(On "Wolf") 

Scenes of wild debauchery drive "Wolf" through a three-hour roller-coaster ride that taps into public fascination with lifestyles of the rich and crooked. "America loves a winner," Winter says. "We're seduced by the lifestyle: 'Oh, my God, look at the girlfriend and the wife and the house and the jewelry and the suits and the car. Particularly in this country, nobody really asks: How did you get all this stuff?"

It gets more intricate than that though. Alec Baldwin also starred as Wall Street con artist Hal Francis in "Blue Jasmine" earlier this year and had a very accurate description of the gray area in which this topic continues to thrive in our modern society: 

"Americans have a very complicated, almost inexplicable relationship to making money. We believe that success within this capitalism system is right and good, and we think if people cut corners, that's OK — to a point. But when someone wrecks the whole machinery just to serve their own needs, everybody seems to save up their venom and animosity for that one person — the biggest example would be Bernie Madoff. And yet people have no appetite whatsoever for reform."

As a middle class American, I agree. We root for the working class, idolize the schemers, condemn the 1% and pity ourselves. 

Which is why the nearest AMC sounds like much more fun than trying to sit at home, study statistics, weigh out losses and gains, pick the more convenient political party... yadda yadda yadda..

Although maybe your Great Gatsby withdrawals are enough to lure you into another 180 minutes of tuxed-up, man-of-the-hour Leo.