Ecclesiastes

Yep, I'm blogging again.

I went to the premiere of what I call "our" movie last night. It's a long story, and I don't want to detail it here. So I'll just say that this whole thing has been pretty fantastic and amazing and any Hollywood superlative that you can dream up.

But. Every time I'm around these people, these Hollywood people, these people who are our gods (small g) in America and maybe the world, the people behind the scenes who have the power, I have this empty feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I woke up this morning from a nightmare in which I was falling off the side of our house. We truly live on a slope, but in my nightmare I had climbed some sort of stairs to the top and my legs were dangling. I was hanging on to a drainpipe, but I was hanging over the side of a house and my children were watching.

Why would I have this dream after a night in which it would be easy to say that many of our dreams came true? Many of our friends wrote on our FB pages that they were jealous....we got to get dressed up and walk the red carpet, hang out with stars, all that stuff. And we did. But at the end of the night, I was ashamed to be wanting more. I don't know what else I would have wanted....another drink, some more food, more encounters with these gods, although you don't have to spend too much time around them to know that they are clearly people. Gifted people, but people.

So after I woke up this morning and was done with sleep I drifted back to Ecclesiastes. It's up in the One Year Bible that I've been reading, and it's comforting in some very strange ways. "Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless!" Another translation puts it "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!" Hello Hollywood....

I guess what it's saying to me is what I already knew. That it HAS been amazing to see my family story get crafted into a beautiful piece of art. That it's fascinating to meet these icons. That people who work in Hollywood mostly, and self-preservingly, are assholes. That all is meaningless, and vanity, and that there's nothing really new under the sun, so we might as well enjoy ourselves where we are, enjoy our families, because we can want more and more and more, and never have enough.