#Redbox 52: Marry for love?

There are few things that are good about being sick...but if I had to pick one, it is being forced (for the most part) to stay home and stay warm and do what you like. For me, that has included, eating healthy, reading books, taking baths, and watching movies.

Today's Redbox 52 takes a strong look at love and marriage and fidelity and forgiveness.

Anna Karenina looks at several different types of love, dutiful love, forbidden love, maternal love, enduring love, and, of course, romantic love. Sadly, only two of these loves comes out a true winner in the end, and that's romantic love combined with enduring love, but boy oh boy, watching it all play out before your eyes sure is beautiful.

If there was one thing this movie made me think about, it was the reasons we choose to get married.

When I was younger, a family member told me marrying for love was foolish because love can fade when certain things change and that the smart thing to do was to marry someone you could work with. As unromantic as that sounds, I understand what they meant. Too often we see people rushing to jump the broom because they're severely infatuated with someone, they don't necessarily know them and they have a bunch of qualities that aren't that great, but they're in "love" so they get married.

While I see marriages that start like that usually end in unhappiness, I still believe in marrying for love as long as the love is also matched with common goals and the desire to make the relationship work.

In Anna Karenina we see several couples, many have married as a way to move up in their social status or simply to maintain it. For most, the marriages are loveless aside from their children. You see affairs as characters go in and out to try and fill a void they had hoped to have managed through their union. With Anna's character, she is content in her marriage, though she knows she did not marry for love, however her husband is noble and kind, with a good head on his shoulders and a career that can sustain the both of them, for most, the ideal man to marry.

However, she soon finds herself caught in a different type of situation, a love that starts with an obsession and then grows to an addiction, and as most addictions go, it ends badly. In the movie, the topic of infidelity comes up several times, but my favorite quote is from a man who believes desperately in true, virtuous love.

"An impure love is not love to me. To admire another man's wife is a pleasant thing, but sensual desires indulged for its own sake is greed, a kind of gluttony, and a misuse of something sacred, which is given to us so that we may choose the one person with whom to fulfill our humanness."

As I said, I believe in marrying for love. I'm a staunch believer in romantic love, true love; I believe it comes with time and with work, but that two people, committed to growing together can make it work. That is why romantic + enduring love will always come out a winner, whether in fiction or in our day to day lives...call me crazy but I believe it.

If you've watched the movie, or read the book - which I plan to do - tell me what you think! And when it comes to love, what are the things that you believe make it work? Would you marry for love or are other factors more important?

The beauty of a new view

I have been fortunate to work with a bunch of crazy talented people in my day, but one of the most awesome individuals that I've run across is Shannon Boodram.

A couple years ago, I interned under Shannon and her friend Andrea on their shared website. The experience was great and to this day, I'm grateful that I got the chance to work with both of them, but because I was on my way to becoming a reporter, I wanted to focus on writing, so I worked hard to establish a bond with her.

I was reading her blog and she posted something I really tacked on to that also matched with my last blog on the journey into adulthood.

"I am a firm believer that in today’s day and age too many people believe that pursuing their dreams and patience are opposites. On the contraire it’s called common sense. If you want to be an actor but you have no money, no connections, no support and no stability maybe now isn’t the best time for your dreams. What you need is to do your due preparation to give yourself a fighting chance at eventually pursuing your dreams." (Reinvent Your Wheels) 

Reading that was automatically easy to identify with because I felt like it was the path that I had taken since beginning my career in television as a production assistant in Philadelphia. I used my 9 months between graduating and getting my first reporting job to build connections, work on my reel, and try to soak up as much as I possibly could so that when the time came to make this big transition, I could.

My generation is one that has big dreams. Many of us have these ideas in our head for what we want to do with our lives, but we simply haven't sat down to plan in a realistic manner, so when things come crashing down we get frustrated. Even worse sometimes is when things magically begin to fall into place prematurely, because nothing hurts more than investing so much in something just to have it fail miserably because you weren't ready.

I have had quite a few ups and downs in my current job, but reading her blog reminded me of the ups and downs at my old job. Though they weren't as numerous, I also have to take into account that I was a part-time employee, simply eager to get my foot in the door - now I'm in the big leagues, but I'm paying my dues to get where I want to be, so it's not that I'm doing anything wrong, I'm simply preparing for my future and if things keep progressing as they have when I put my hard work into it, then I have a lot to look forward to in the next year, so here's to going hard with what I got and making the most of every situation! It reminds me of one of my favorite Latin proverbs: Amat victoria curam - which means literally, victory loves carefulness, but as one of my adored movies puts it, victory loves preparation.

What are some changes you plan to make to achieve to your next big goal?

Good, Bad, Ugly: How do you adult?

I've had an amazing March. I've seen family and friends, went on vacation, ate good food for free, had some awkward and hilarious encounters, and got some amazeballs gear...but I also got some insight.

This month (like almost every month since graduating college) has re-taught me multiple lessons. Things that I thought I had mastered, I saw turned on their head which in turn made me have to react a bit differently.

One of my closest friends since graduation made her way to PCB this weekend and we had a long chat with one of our mutual reporter friends about how difficult the transition to adult life is.

"I mean, how do you adult?" DP said while we laughed over wine and beer.

It's a question we ended up mulling over for a couple hours, at first complaining about how little we truly knew about being an adult, then blaming our parents for not telling us more than "you better enjoy your youth while you have it" and how college would be the "best four years of our life," finally we came to an agreement that it's just something that you grow into, though some of us were doing better than others.

Put in the effort.

Every once in a while I get one of these inspirational emails from Danielle LaPorte.

Although the advice is usually basic knowledge that I could get from anyone, I appreciate the timeliness of her random bits of wisdom.

There's this thought process that seems to permeate our culture that once you follow your intuition, determine what it is that your soul-calling may be, that everything just falls into place. Once you get it, you're supposed to just be able to get it - whatever that it may be. Whether it's realizing your purpose and going for a specific job or however your intuition seems to communicate with you, there's this expectation that realizing your thing should mean it's guaranteed to happen.

Friday Photo: On Finding Your Personal Heaven

Whenever I'm seeking peace, whenever I need to take the time to look around me and feel peace despite whatever I'm going through, I go to the beach.

I've been blessed to work in paradise. I mean, there's no other way to describe where I live, work and play. I'm constantly driving between Panama City Beach, Destin, Port St. Joe, Mexico Beach, Apalachicola…a bunch of places that are all within an hour or so from me and they all have their own little bits of heaven in them.

I can say without a doubt that I feel closest to God when I'm by the ocean. There's something about how huge it is. I mean…it goes on forever, no matter where you're standing, even when you reach a coast, all you have to do is turn around and see that you're completely surrounded by water.

Those thoughts always knock me right back down to size when I start to feel a little bit too self-righteous. I just look around and it's an instant slap in the face of how humble I should be when I consider just how amazing and awesome everything else is.

"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances." -Mahatma Gandhi

There's no profound nature to this picture, it just captures the essence of what I need. I was driving to story to watch a sea turtle be released in Port St. Joe and I couldn't stop being staring out my window (obviously not my smartest/safest choice…but that's neither here nor there).

Eventually I pulled over so I could take a picture of what I saw. It was the perfect capture of everlasting peace. There's something about the sound of water lapping at your feet, a slight breeze to your face that rustles your hair and the overwhelming silence of distractions. No computers, no chattering people, no pings from iNews, no yelling…just quiet.

My personal heaven.