Story of My Life #4 -I Freely Admit...

... (Or Endings I Didn't Care For)

I freely admit I'm one of those people who tend to compare 'Real Life' to whatever fictional world I happen to be obsessed with at a time - this time frame can go for a few hours spent watching a movie to years of wishing there was a real Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the fictional worlds include movies, TV, books (of course!) and even anime (surreal hair and all!).

I also freely admit that I get seriously pissed off when I don't get the ending I hoped for. Like today, for example, I was busy, had chores to do and errands to run temptation won and I decided to channel surf for a bit before getting a move on (because, as I've said many times before, I'm lazy), and I stumbled across an Audrey Hepburn movie (another free admission: I love Audrey's movies) and I had to watch.

The movie was called The Nun's Story, and it's about a young Belgian woman who enters a convent to both become and nun and a nurse (and work in Congo) and eventually has to decide it she's really meant to be a nun or not. Well, let me tell you something: it took me about twenty minutes to figure out she was not cut to be a nun, it took her two and a half hours (and about, I guess, some 10 years of her life as portrayed in the film) to realize she wanted to be a nurse more than she wanted to be a nun.

There is a flirtation with a doctor - if it looks like a flirtation and it quacks like a flirtation, I'm calling it a flirtation, even though she's still a nun at this point - once she FINALLY gets to Congo, but then nothing happens, she's sent back to Europe, and we never hear from Congo ever again, thank you very much! Half an hour later the movie is over, *SPOILER ALERT* she quits being a nun, and that's it.

I mean it: That's It! I felt completely cheated out of my time. I don't know if I expected some big romantic ending (maybe, I do hope for and expect a little bit of romance in everything because it's my favorite genre in the world), but I hoped for something. I hoped to learn that, after everything, she would be happy.

I hoped and that's a big thing for me.

I can deal with endings that are less-than perfectly wrapped in a bow (like in Nick and Nora's Infinite Play List or even in Buffy, The Vampire Slayer) but I need hope. I need to have the feeling in my gut that these characters - these people - I just shared part of my heart with have some sort of Happy in their future.

Because, without hope, what's really the point of it all?