Is it wrong to ever wish we didn’t have what we have now? The talents, the intelligence, the blessings.  If only because there is something satisfactory about not having to deal with pressure and big hopes and dreams.  And maybe opting for the simpler life, absent expectations, the pressure, and the big dreams that only set us up for a big fall when we don’t reach it, maybe the simpler life is the better life.

Well, it’s not like we had the option to choose anyway.

It’s been a week since I got back. And I’m sick. In my more than 1 year in the US, or almost 2.5 years if we are to ignore the month or two I flew back home for a short vacation, I have never fallen ill. So my family, I joked: I don’t belong here. And I truly refuse to believe otherwise. It was probably something so shallow as the better weather or so deep as the exhilirating experience of being alone, of independence, which from the moment I entered the national airport in January of 07 for my first ever trip alone has already provided that feeling. Somehow, I feel that this isn’t my place. Or have I simply changed?

Months after my last post, I was inspired to ponder on this, yet again, after reading a friend’s blog. This apparently is not the first time I have thought about it; my friend Belle can attest to the incessant ranting I’ve done, which I think in itself is a sign of my difficulty coming to terms with the fact that my old life awaits me. From my friend’s post, I picked up she did not completely feel settled despite having lived in Europe for around 2 years. With that, I once again thought, why does it seem like those who don’t want it as much as I do get them, while I don’t? Or is it only that I have not experienced exactly what they have that makes it impossible for me to conclude the same?

I am turning 24. With a Master’s degree and then some. Yet I still don’t feel accomplished.  The idea is to get a job and do something. But I am held back by the thought of considering any job done an “accomplishment”.  It seems like my definition has evolved (or it probably has been the same all throughout) – that accomplishment comes with a string of many other things, not limited by simply getting a job.  Or THE job, whatever that is. It has come to mean having THE job, being elsewhere, and living independently within my own means (it doesn’t help continuously being funded by parents).

With things not going my way, I can’t help but feel that Lady Luck is not on my side. And I question when she will ever be. I could only hope I don’t grow cynical, just like others have. There is enough cynicism in my system, I’d like to think. I am already plagued by the idea that I may have made the wrong turns in life. That instead of going left, I turned right and instead of following this path, I followed that. Then again, I thought, have I simply been too impatient, deciding to rush things with the hopes of having the dream standing right in front of me in an instant? It doesn’t help when people my age (or younger) have already done what I’ve always wanted (or what I think I would like to do). I could only question when my time would come, or if at all it would. Knowing I am not fully in control of my life, I could only begin to question what the plan is for me.

Fat. Ugly. Old. Smelly. Lesbian. Gay. Bitch. Drunkard. Asshole. Trash. Stupid. Horrible. Annoying. Halitosis. Flirty. Slutty. Dark. Short. Ridiculous. Unworthy. Cocky. Famous. Boring. Strange. Disgusting. Shady. Irresponsible. Late. Mad. Fake this. Fake that. Fake all. Serious. Airhead.

My evenings are slowly being taken over by movies. The Devil Wears Prada, Meet the Spartans, In Bruges, Scenes of a Sexual Nature, There Will Be Blood, and then Die Falscher (The Counterfeiters). And I thought I wasn’t a movie buff. I’m slowly realizing I might be after all. And foreign flicks, I believe, are occasionally more interesting.

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The winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, Die Falscher brings us back to more than 50 years ago when the Nazis were still pronouncing hatred to the world and the Jews were still being eradicated.

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One of the toughest things in life is finding yourself torn between standing up for your principles, which oftentimes involves ethics, and serving self-interest for the sake of survival. This thought came back to mind after seeing Die Falscher, which is a movie about people in the concentration camps during World War II. Described by some as one story of Holocaust not usually talked about, this is a movie that showed how some prisoners of war were coerced to set aside their sense of morality in order to serve the Nazis and their mission. Moral corruption it is.

People need to live. They seek for survival, sometimes at the expense of other people’s lives. Moral corruption didn’t stop existing when WWII ended. It lives on in other people- the wealthy and powerful who seek to attain even more than what they need, at the expense of a society much more worse off. Even the poor lose their sanity. They rob, they steal, they kill. Then they run and hide. All for a meager amount of money that’s just enough to get them by for a day.

Nazi Germany was only a model, a microcosm of a universal evil that we witness everyday. In the news, in our own lives, even in the movies. What’s odd is that no matter how evil they seem, some still beg to differ and defend themselves. Shifting a bit from doing evil for some evil purpose to doing evil for a ‘noble’ purpose, they argue that they need to survive. If it’s a matter of survival, where do we draw the line as to what is right and what is wrong? Who are we to tell a mother who puts her life at risk of being incarcerated for years by stealing just to feed the mouths of his children? Who are we to tell a father who shoots someone just because he is threatened to be sentenced to death and he does so because what he had in mind at that very moment was fear of leaving his family to get by by themselves?

When does ethics become a tool powerful enough to convince people of the purpose it serves? And when does it become a tool even just enough for physical survival?