umbra

Today is a lazy day. I didn't get up until 11:45, and have done not much other than put in a load of laundry and watch Thumbsucker. Watching it, and more specifically the interaction between Justin and Mike, I got to thinking about my own relationship with my father. In the film, Mike finds it impossible to acknowledge to anyone, not just how he deals with things, but that he feels anything at all. He asks his children to call him by his first name, because his kids calling him dad makes him feel old. He couldn't express his emotions because he was afraid of being seen as weak, but ironically was seen as weak by his children because of it. My own father says 'I'm proud of you' much more often than he says 'I love you'. Are these the same things? I've often wondered that. Which is not to say that I wonder if my father loves me or not, just to say that I wonder if the ideas that he communicates with these phrases are the same in his mind.

Update: the difference between being proud and loving... one centres around the feelings of others, and the other on one's own feelings?
I'll update more on this later, I forgot my train of thought while I was folding laundry.

Right now I'm sipping coffee and watching Sophie Scholl: the Final Days on TV. It's an interesting film about a girl who resisted Hitler's Third Reich during the war from inside of Germany. Besides being a character portrait, the movie brings into focus the concept of people dying for ideas. I still haven't decided where I stand on this issue. There are those who feel that ideas are the only things worth dying for, because they are eternal and inspirational and denote or embody change. And on the other hand there are those who feel that there is no greater waste of human life, because the only reasonable use of it is for the sake of preserving another human life.