Idiosycratic Life

“I have a better solution: You keep me on the payroll as an outside consultant and in exchange for my salary my job will be never to tell people these things that I know. I don't even have to come to office, I can do this job from home.”
-Fight Club

I remember when I was, I don’t know, let’s say 10. I saw the movie “Big” starring Tom Hanks. And while there are many memorable moments from the movie- the scary nodding fortune-teller machine, Tom Hanks on the piano at FAO Schwartz- one of the more subtle things about the movie relates to when Tom Hanks’ character is playing a video game, probably on a computer like an Apple IIE, the kind of computer where you had to insert one disk to start and then put in a different one to run, and the snippet of the game shows him trying to defeat an evil wizard. And Josh, the character kid, tries to beat the game in the beginning, and nothing he does, not trying to run past the evil wizard, not trying to melt him or freeze him, none of it works. And in the end, when he decides to be a kid again, when he is truly “big”- mature, whatever- he plays the game one more time. And he decides not to fight the wizard, to walk away from this situation that he just can’t figure out- no running, no melting, no freezing, just deciding not to fight anymore. And he wins. The only way to defeat the evil wizard is to not engage him in combat.


Tomorrow is another day.