January 24th 1999 - We watched the movie Sliding Doors. First she gets fired, just like me, from dancing, by a bunch of male chauvinists. Even my sister noticed that correspondence. -Ooooooh. It’s a wee bit uncanny. What, Helene slips into a second life path simultaneous to her first, while the first is an entrapping downer with a controlling male [a deadbeat unpublished writer at that] who must contain her, and lives off of her? She works two jobs, as a server in a restaurant and in a deli in that one. (Me too. Server for catering, and the last two years I’ve done deli on weekends.) In the second she breaks the bad relationship and meets her dream guy, (though this path has its requisite trauma), opens up, takes initiative on her own career, but then she dies on that path, dream guy loses her, and in the end it becomes clear she’s actually only existed in the first? But because of her conjunction with the second, even though it had no tangible reality, when it comes round again it’s in a way that cannot be missed; she’s retained the content of that path even though she hasn’t lived it?
And she loses her baby too. And when she awakens, the nurse tells her that was a narrow escape, and Helene agrees, but she means from her first partnership, which she leaves behind, even though apparently the future holds no compensation. And oh, yes, the story takes place in London. Petty details: the guy she leaves is an Aries (dear dad), and because she’s indecisive, the new amour divines she’s a Gemini: It’s hard being a Gemini sometimes, isn’t it?
Then of course the film’s axiom, the one that becomes the clause of mutual recognition: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Ha-ha. –No, I didn’t, but I sure got one.
