correction

i'd like to retract most of what i said regarding woody allen. this is a little strange, but i bought the transcript from his interview with terry gross and read it the other day. i for about all the amazing things he said regarding his philosophy of life. it's pretty much exactly how i feel. An excerpt (it's long, but worth it):

GROSS: One day, Boris finds a teen-aged runaway named Melodie, played by Evan Rachel Wood, sitting in front of his Manhattan home, begging for some food. He reluctantly takes her in, she stays, and they eventually marry, in spite of the approximately 40-year age difference between them and in spite of the fact that Boris thinks she’s brainless.
At the start of the film, Boris states his philosophy of life, which is: Life is short, so take what little pleasure you can get in this chamber of horrors. It’s a philosophy expressed in several Woody Allen movies. Here’s Woody Allen at the beginning of “Annie Hall.”
(Soundbite of film, “Annie Hall”)

Mr. WOODY ALLEN (Filmmaker): (As Alvy Singer) There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says boy, the food at this place is really terrible. The other one says yeah, I know, and such small portions.
Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life, full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

GROSS: At least three of your films kind of start with the same premise. I’m wondering why has this question framed several of your movies, that life is hard, life is full of pain, but life is short, so do what you can to get some pleasure.

Mr. ALLEN: Well, this is hardly an original thought with me. I mean, down through the ages, all the important writers and all the important philosophers have, in one form or another, come to the conclusion, the obvious conclusion, that you know, life is a terrible trial and very harsh and very full of suffering, and so whatever you can do with the stipulation that you don’t hurt anybody without, you know, ruining a life here or there or causing any damage, there’s nothing wrong with it.

GROSS: So when we talk about making movies, does that give you pleasure? Like what’s the ratio of pleasure and pain in making a film?

Mr. ALLEN: Well you know, it’s a different kind of pain. See, making a movie is a great distraction from the real agonies of the world. It’s an overwhelmingly, you know, difficult thing to do.
You’ve got to deal with actors and temperaments and scripts and second acts and third acts and camera work and costumes and sets and editing and music, and you know, there’s enough in that to keep you distracted almost all the time. And if I’m locked into what would appear to be a painful situation because half my movie works, let’s say, and the whole second half of it doesn’t work, or a character in my movie is terrible, you don’t believe the love story or something, these are all problems that are, or generally are, solvable with reshooting, with editing, with thinking, diagnosing what’s wrong. And they distract you from the real problems of life, which are unsolvable and very painful problems.
Also in the problems of moviemaking, if you don’t solve your problem, all that happens to you is that your movie bombs. So the movie is terrible. So people don’t come to see it. Critics don’t like it. The public doesn’t like it. This is hardly a terrible punishment in life compared to what you’re given out in the real world of human existence.

GROSS: So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

Mr. ALLEN: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face or that anyone faces, you know, the uncertainty of life and inevitability of aging and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations and holocausts, and not just the manmade carnage but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here or what possible meaning your life can have and the conclusion that you come to after a while, that there is really no meaning to it, and it’s just a random, meaningless event, and these are pretty depressing thoughts. And if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat. You can’t even get up to have your lunch.
So it’s better to, you know, distract yourself, and people distract themselves creatively, you know, in the arts. They distract themselves in business or by following baseball teams and worrying over batting averages and who wins the pennant, and these are all things that you do and focus on rather than sit home and worry.


And that, my friends, sums up how I feel about life. It really does.