Complex Numbers

Avoidance

Hey, what's wrong with negativity? Nothing.

PROMPT November 11^th

A reminder I could say to myself before I’m tempted to respond to anger with anger, to fear with fear, to negativity with negativity is...

"It just doesn't matter."

I need to make that into a motivational poster. I wonder what the picture would be? A mushroom cloud? Nah, too violent. Maybe that iconic image of the black hole that astronomers managed to obtain, to remind me of the ultimate fate of everything. No, everything is probably not going to get sucked into some black hole or other, but there's no image I can think of to represent the eventual and inevitable heat death of the universe. Hell, over a long enough time scale, even black holes dissipate.

But I'm not usually tempted to respond in such ways. I've developed coping mechanisms over time. Mostly these coping mechanisms consist of avoidance. It works for me.

Someone gets angry, I leave. Someone gets fearful, I leave. And when someone gets negative... well, okay, you got me there; I'm already a black hole of negativity. ("Are you positive?" "No.")

But on the rare occasion when I can't leave, I remember that soon enough, one or the other of us will be dead, and what little time we have left isn't worth spending on anger and fear. That's why negativity is such a wonderful thing: it makes me realize that nothing matters unless I want it to.

Of course, I dislike it in other people, but hey, who doesn't have internal contradictions?

One-Sentence Movie Review: Eternals

Eternals distinguishes itself well from other comics-derived team movies; it's gorgeous with plentiful effects, solid camera work, and decent acting, with each character well-defined, and it earns its extended runtime (cue "eternal" jokes) by giving us time to get to know each player in the large cast, but somehow it manages to fail to live up to its hype — though that's probably more a fault of the hype than of the film itself.

Rating: 4/5