Robert Redford, Hot Grandpa

I watched “The Great Gatsby” over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie was as about as true to the book as it could get.  Often I feel the directors have not even bothered to read the book before making it into a movie.  To be fair, it is a difficult feat, even if done well. 

Is it disturbing that I find Robert Redford extremely hot and have since I was 15?  Man, I have always made fun of girls who go for grandpas, but if the dudes looked like Robert Redford then I could begin to understand such a disgusting age difference.  Sugar daddies never look like that and gold-digging is inexcusable…….unless it’s Robert Redford or Sean Connery, Rule #1035 in the Book of Brittany.  Anyway, Redford’s birthday is August 18^th, 1936, which makes him exactly 44 years older than me.  That is highly disturbing.  He’s almost 70!  No!  He's almost 80!  Is that right???  He's 75?  Hurry, check my math.  I think my grandpa is 80 and it's freaking me out.

I have posted about “The Great Gatsby” before and it seems to be a button that always gets me talking because I love the book so much.  Those of you who have read the book will understand the correlation that I am making and those of you who haven’t, read it please.  I have a friend who is a little broken-hearted right now.  Her “one that got away” just got engaged and thanks to stupid-ass Facebook torturing herself has become a much easier practice.  She was young, he was young, and the timing has never been quite right.  Over the past ten to twelve years, they’ve had a spark, but now it’s coming to an end out of necessity.  I watched “Gatsby” and thought about her.  I started to think about this notion of “the one who got away” and whether it even exists.  We hear about it, we see it in the movies, but if they got away, well then they weren’t right or something was off, right?  Can we romanticize so much that we forget about what it was that pushed us away to begin with?  Or is it truly as tragic as it can appear to be and “true loves” can be separated?  I think that the romantic in us both wants to and doesn’t want to believe that it’s possible, but in all reality, why doesn’t it work out if it’s “right”?  Sometimes I wonder if memories from our youth play with our memories and distort them into much more pleasant existences than they really were.  Can anything be as sweet, pure, and lovely to us as it was when we were 16?  Gatsby made a life for a girl that existed in his memory and in reality she sucked.  The times that they had together were during the most pure that you are in your life.  I know that teenagers are “bad” and get into trouble, but there’s something so innocent about them and the love that they feel for another is more ideallic than an adult can feel.  Adults know what life is, how hard it is, what marriage really is, that people have faults…..teenagers are able to escape those thoughts, which is what makes them so stupid—innocent, but clueless and ignorant.  Therefore, when looking into your past and remembering the people that you loved, you should remember that “You can’t repeat the past” just like Nick says in “Gatsby”.  You can’t repeat it and you can’t replicate the experiences you had when you were that young.  Chasing your past only gets you into trouble.  Here’s the message to my friend.  (You know who you are.)

Since there’s nothing you can do about it now, remember that back in the day his mom picked up his underwear from off the floor and scraped the globs of toothpaste from his sink……and it would now be your job if you were the one with the rock on your finger.  In fact, he’s probably picked up some more disgusting habits that you would be forced to endure.  Did I cheer you up?

leitmotif \LYT-moh-teef\, noun:

1. In music drama, a marked melodic phrase or short passage which always accompanies the reappearance of a certain person, situation, abstract idea, or allusion in the course of the play; a sort of musical label.
2. A dominant and recurring theme.