How to turn disgust into hope

Sometimes I feel as if the universe is out to get me. For instance, last night, I was looking forward to a luxurious night of self-pampering. My husband was out with his guy friends. I planned to put our daughter to bed at 8 p.m., pour myself a glass of wine, sit down in the recliner and watch a Woody Allen film, one my husband would never ever in a million years want to see.

I’d looked forward to this night all day long.

My night started off well enough, too. I ended up knocking myself out and making a huge gourmet dinner: roasted broccoli, roasted tomatoes, roasted chicken portabella. Everything was fantastically delicious. After all, I’d used half a head of garlic on the broccoli and tomatoes, not to mention a generous amount of oil. How could I go wrong?

Things began to unravel with the wine. I poured my glass. I took a sniff. It smelled kind of funny. I assumed there must be something wrong with my nose, so I took another sniff. The wine still smelled funny, kind of like gasoline.

I am the type of person who prefers denial, though, so I took a generous sip.

Then I spit it out in the sink.

It was corked.

“Oh this hurts. This really hurts,” I said as I poured the contents of the entire bottle down the drain.

I stood in the kitchen for a while. I could have opened another bottle, but I’d lost the moment. I decided to eat a lot of chocolate instead. I ate it while standing in front of the fridge with the door open.

Bad move.

By the time I walked away from the fridge, I felt fat.

“What was THAT about?” I wondered.

Still in denial about the universe holding some sort of grudge against me, I inserted Match Point into the DVD player, settled in the recliner, and pulled a blanket over myself. Wine or no wine, I still had my movie!

Here’s the thing: Match Point isn’t the typical Woody Allen comedy that I usually love. It was a drama. I knew that going into it, but I’d assumed that Woody Allen was as versatile as a writer and director as Robin Williams was as an actor. If Williams could be just as good in Dead Poets Society as he was in Mrs. Doubtfire, I assumed Allen could write a drama that was just as suspenseful as his other films were funny.

And, on Netflix, other people have given it 3 ½ stars. More important the blurb even described the film as having Alfred Hitchcock style suspense. I was looking forward to seeing something akin to Annie Hall meets The Birds.

Well, I don’t know who Woody Allen paid off to get Alfred Hitchcock’s name mentioned in the movie blurb, but I can tell you this. The only remotely possible link between Match Point and Hitchcock was that the completely unlikeable main character was afraid of heights. Yet, unlike Vertigo, the fear of heights in Match Point never amounts to anything. It’s just a random detail that has no link to the film’s plot whatsoever.

And about the plot: it was about as suspenseful as watching C-Span.

About half way through the movie, I was so bored that I started skipping and fast forwarding through some of the scenes.

By the time it ended, I turned off the DVD player in disgust.

To try to take my mind off that huge sense of disgust, I went on the Internet and surfed around. There I stumbled onto a blog with a clip from Fox Business News where Gerald Celente was predicting the end of the world as we know it. The hundreds of comments after the clip urged us all to buy guns and bury groceries in our backyards.

Oh that really lifted my spirits.

So I went to bed, feeling thankful that, at least, I hadn’t decided to eat even more chocolate after watching the news clip. Perhaps I could find the willpower needed to hoard it and bury it in my backyard.

This morning my daughter was exceptionally whiney. I was hung over from the chocolate, and my gas tank was empty. I do realize that the hang over and the empty gas tank were largely my doing—but still!

I was in dire need of a pick me up. If you are of the same frame of mind, I hope you enjoy the following Feel Good clips. You can’t help but feel this incredible sense of “I Can Deal with Anything the Dang Universe Sends Me” after watching them.

First, when faced with “I Can’t,” keep trying: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ0Wz77ip-M

Turn failure into success. “If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.”: http://wimp.com/bigfailures/

And this one, by far, is my favorite. It inspired me to tears: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vB59PkB0eQ

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Tagged as: disgust, happiness, inspiration, Woody Allen