i'm on a plane, yeah, i'm on a plane / with the snorin' people

On my way to Munich on a big Boeing airplane, blissfully being surprised by . . . silence.

And delighting in it.

It is a fundamental fact of melancholic introverts - even ones who try to beat themselves out of it - that without a chance for our souls to percolate and formulate our own voices and thoughts, we rapidly turn into empty wells.

Why?

Because we need - need with a capital "n" - time to let ourselves and listen to ourselves just . . . think.

All that deep pithiness that makes us delight in ourselves . . . the small comfort that we have of tapping into something meaningful and divine . . . flies off and leaves us devastated when the well runs dry. Social interaction becomes nothing more than sliding token thoughts into the slot machine of other people's expectations when you have smothered your own voice.  There ain't nothin' to say to others when you ain't saying nothin' to yourself.

So you know what I thought about?  My deep, pithy thoughts as I reveled in silence?

How downright stupid Twilight is.

I tuned in to Eclipse (Lord help my soul) right at the (apparently) GREAT CLIMACTIC FIGHT SCENE where one (or two) of the main characters . . . umm yeah, the one who just stands there on the sidelines as a battle being fought for her rages on ludicrously . . looks bored and angsty in 90s flannel.  In the meantime, people/vampires/some-sort-of-dysfunctional-human-beings-or-something-like-a-human-being-who-knows are having their arms ripped off and heads decapitated, but instead of nice normal gore, the weirdest clinking noises accompany their body parts breaking off like china.

I'm sure there's some deep, insightful, wonderful vampirey explanation for why it was done that way, but I don't care.

It was stupid.

I thought I'd tuned into a B-list "When Porcelin Dolls Spout Violent Tendencies and Bite Each Other - WITH WEREWOLVES!" on Fox.  It was that bad.

Then I spent a full 10 minutes (after I started from the beginning and actually watched 80% of the entire movie, gag) trying to figure out what the angsty, ANGSTY movie had to say about the women about of America today. They violently love this movie, from all given reports. Is it the (ridiculously blatant) troop of husky teenage boys running around shirtless, looking like they all just escaped from the Abercrombie factory and beefed up at the gym and the steakhouse before they stumbled onto a freak-fest soundstage?  Is it that the older women of America are dissatisfied with their lives so much that they identify with a TEENAGE storyline that revolves around discovering your identity and choosing things that really aren't that healthy but your emotions are so confused that you're going to push for the blatant huge mistake anyways?

I don't get it.

But I did love Toy Story 3.

"Amigo o nemico?"

"AMIGO!"

And Psychology Today agreed with everything I just wrote (well, most of it): Revenge of the Introvert.  Now I know why I hate being put on the spot.  Yay.

I love airplanes.