I feel that this story tells us that we can throw our past away and start again. This is where I had some... disagreements. I feel that just leaving your past troubles will just let them get larger - yes it's true that Norma was there to support him, but what about the bills on the table? They're just going to keep piling up if no one does anything about them. Comment below if you disagree, but problems can be likened to cancer - if you ignore them, sometimes they go away, but more often than not they will spread to other areas of your life and eventually take you over.
But what if the problem's so deep that you can't deal with it? What if the cancer is already metastatic, and the doc can only put you on palliative care? Well first of all, if you're in such deep trouble you can't really run away from it. Second of all, sometimes people who have such gagging problems can recover - such as a relative of mine who did have metastatic cancer - but she did have to deal with it. This is why I feel that movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" (it's spelled wrong on purpose) shows a more realistic approach of dealing with problems. Probably because it's based on a real person.
SPOILERS!!! Quit reading if you haven't watched the movie and want to watch it sometime. It's a good one.
Chris Gardner (in the movie at least) is a very smart scientist and inventor - the problem was that his special bone density scanner was way more expensive than the conventional ones already out there - and only gives an output that is slightly better than the cheaper ones. As such, he couldn't sell very many of them, and his family was destitute. His wife left him, and he had to support his son while he continued to try to pay his bills. He loses his car, his apartment and eventually his motel room, and is stuck sleeping in the bathroom of subways when he couldn't get a place at the salvation army. He gets into a broker program and eventually gets the internship, but he had to sell all of his scanners first in order to rid of his debt - THEN he started on his new journey, his second chance. In many ways he fits as a hero too - his ordinary world is going downhill, so he gets his call to adventure (the need for money and the whim of being a stock broker), his refusal of the quest (he thinks that as long as he can get his bone density scanners out he can spread his name and have better sales and production), he then accepts the call (he really needs money, and his wife leaves him), his entering of the unknown (he has no idea what stock broking is like, so he enters a program and learns a lot), his meeting with supernatural aids (a stock broker executive), doesn't really have a talisman, but has his son as an ally that trusts him completely and acts as motivation to press forward, he endures tests (crazy people and hippies steal his scanners, his competition against others who want the internship and mind you his competition is made up of rich single childless people who have more resources and time than him - he also meets his "TA" who continually distracts him, nagging him to get him coffee and re-park his car), and of course gets the reward of the internship and a second chance in life.
That was a really long run-on sentence and I apologize to everyone who went through the trouble of reading it.
Anyways, I don't really have a "smart" point to make, just a comparison of the summer reading to a movie I watched, also over the summer. Comment below about your thoughts, feelings, and whatever else you want to say.
