Considering the year is 2011, after reading that title you're probably thinking "Oh look, this kid just watched Inception and he's even more confused than I am over that ending and now he's going to rant about it." If that's what you said to yourself, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Just like Leonardo. Except he was just dead. Dead in the water. Yep, I'm talking about Titanic and how watching it also ruined my chance of sleeping ever again.
That's what I get for sleeping over at my Grandma's and let her choose the movie. While for some, this may have been a powerful story of love transversing all barriers such as social-class, death, and the ocean, however, there are only three things I got out of that movie:
1-Confusion over what it was I wasn't allowed to see while my grandma used one hand to cover my eyes and the other to fumble with the remote.
2-Worry over my grandma holding her breath for almost a minute along with Jack as he struggled to free himself from the law office.
3- UTTER AND COMPLETE FEAR OVER ICE-BERGS, DROWNING, BOATS, LARGE BODIES OF WATER, AND WET.
The next several months of my life were filled with urgent nighttime prayers offering the sincerest of supplications asking not to be drowned in my sleep. I'm not sure where in my young mind I reached the conclusion that I could possibly drown in my sleep on the second story of a house where the nearest body of water is a drying-up lake several miles away, but it was there and the idea held on like a parasite (reference to Inception completely intentional). I would lay awake at night periodically leaning over my bed to see if there was a rising water level I should be aware of. I even had an escape plan. Throw the emergency ladder out the window and somehow manage to get into the canoe downstairs.
The peak of this traumatic time in my life was reached when my family planned a vacation to Washington where we would take a CUSSING FERRY to Vancouver for a day. Yeah, you read that right, a ferry. As in something that goes out on a bottomless pit of drowning, suffering, and cold with an inevitable destiny to ram itself into an iceberg and slowly plummet to the bottom of the sea while the only saving grace is the strings quartet playing hymns on the upper deck. Hardly fair compensation for dying if you ask me. I feel it appropriate to mention that to this day my least favorite thing in this world is being cold and wet. There's obviously some unresolved psychological issues there.
That morning I awoke with what can only be described as 'raving anxiety' and repeated questions about whether or not there would be icebergs we'd be forced to dodge. As if the pilot of the boat was playing some version of the river-crossing game in the Oregon Trail game, and all that separated us from death was his ability to hit the left and right arrows in the correct sequence.
Somehow I survived the boat ride and managed to kill worry and time by eating a bite of nachos, being appalled at how spicy it was, running the length of the ferry to the drinking fountain, running back, and trying it all over again.
I'm obviously lucky to be the well-adjusted young man I am today.
