Short & Sweet, Straight to the Point

While I was watching the movie "Diary of a Tired Black Man" (can be found on Netflix), I jotted some key things down in my journal that I thought would be worth remembering and looking back on. It was a pretty good movie, honest, at times comical, and at other times, my head just hurt (because certain scenes started to give me a headache). Aside from the cursing (which happened a tad bit much from a one or two of the people who participated in the documentary footage part), it was enjoyable for me to listen to various perspectives. At times, I became a bit frustrated to see the stereotypes that are still going around about certain groups of people (specifically Chinese women and relationships. Being a Chinese-American woman, it was ... well, frustrating). As I am sure that every woman I know who would gather to watch this film with me would be all kinds of frustrated at certain points of it.

As I was jotting things down in my journal, I wrote down (not necessarily inspired or influenced by the film) the following thoughts. I think I really wanted to capture what had been laid on my spirit, right at that point in time, which was:

I think I make the choice to be genuinely pleasant because there are so many unpleasant things, experiences, and people in the world that many of us have had to face and/or still face in life. Genuine pleasantness does not come out of a place of fickleness, falsehood, fake-ness, or pretense. It comes out of a place of wholehearted desire to rise above, to overcome the day-to-day evil we all know is out there already. Why subject myself and/or someone else to more of it?