Time to Be Irrational

"You came up in our reading. There was a card where a young woman was bound and blindfolded and surrounded by a broken gate. It meant that someone close to me feels very trapped right now, but since the gate is actually broken there IS a way out of the woods for you. The reader told me that the best way to help you is to lead by example, NOT by telling you what you should do since that would just be adding another gate to you."

-email from my sister dated 1/29/2011, regarding her tarot card reading

I went to see the new Javier Bardem movie, "Biutiful," yesterday. I couldn't help wondering again why people are constantly drawn towards darkness. When given a choice between a dark drama such as "Biutiful" and a light, fluffy, romantic comedy like Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher's "No Strings Attached," why do people choose 2.5 hours of suffering and misery? Is it pure voyeuristic tendencies? A secret longing for pain? Or a more "noble" desire to see the truth of how the other half lives? I'm sure those who can afford a $10 movie ticket are rarely in the same boat as "Biutiful"'s Chinese immigrants who were inadvertently gassed to death in an overcrowded basement, or Senegalese workers who were deported for trying to make an extra buck selling drugs. Why the interest?

Maybe it's the same reason behind piercings and tattoos. Finding some sort of external manifestation (physical pain) and socially-sanctioned cathartic release for emotional trauma or existential paralysis encountered through everyday living.