the beauty of being American...or alive in general

You know that movie American Beauty with Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey and that hot weird dude? Easily my favorite movie of all time. I remember watching it in the theatre with a friend and thinking, "Finally, someone has the balls to expose the disease of falseness and greed corrupting our nation." For someone who has always been concerned with image and false fronts and pretentiousness, this movie was like the wake-up call I was hoping America would heed. Looking at where we are now with the powerful consequences of greed being made clear on a level too personal for most Americans to be comfortable with, I guess the movie didn't reach as many people as it could have. I'm never a person who is able to quote movies or even remember actors' names, but there are a couple of movie quotes that have stuck with me, even though I may have morphed their exact verbiage (as in "Coitus. The physical act of making love, Mr. Lebowski."). One of them comes from this movie and is stated in the final scenes of the movie, when the scene cuts from party to party, the rhythm and cadence of the cuts setting us up for some huge climax: Janie and Ricky on her bed, planning on skipping town the next day; Carolyn Burnham, driving in the rain, aggressively repeating something about not being the victim, gun in passenger's seat; the militaristic neighbor, enraged by what he thinks is a homosexual affair between LEster and Ricky, plus his own shame at kissing Lester, maybe getting a gun, too?; Lester and Angela's failed attempt at coitus (the physical act of making love), where she casually drops the, "I've never done this before" or whatever she says. Anyway, all of these stories are seemingly converging to the height of the action and the resolution of the movie. Carolyn comes home and goes into Jane's room and says something like, "You can only depend on yourself in this world." Now, this is (1) a supreme truth in life, and (2) so fucked up to hear from your mother's mouth. I know my mother would never say something like that to me. She will always be there for me. However, this has its limits. I mean, she will always be there, but what if she can't give what it is that I need? And, even if someone is there for you and can deliver whatever it is you need from them at any moment, they are not going to be there forever. Ultimately, every relationship ends, whether in anger, in distance, in death. Some just fizzle. So that begs the question, are we constantly setting ourselves up for pain and goodbyes by getting close to people, whether that be romantically, or even as friends. Should we learn to depend on ourselves only for the emotional needs we may have? Or should we live life without regard for the cause and effect cycle. Without thinking of when this might end. Without considering the consequences of trusting someone, of letting them in, knowing that they could turn and leave you at any moment, when they realize that they must do what is right for them. How do people get married? How do they trust another person so deeply to believe that their union will be forever? Being a person of high levels of change and growth (or so I'd like to think), I can't imagine someone dynamic enough to move and change with me -- at all -- let alone on a path similar or even slightly congruent to mine. One would think from this little rant that I am a completely untrustful (word?) person, but really I am exactly the opposite. The romantic in me wants to think that there is that person on your page, in your world, on your path. The romantic in me wants to trust everyone and throw caution to the wind, lay myself out there, do it balls to the walls or not at all. And then I get shit on. Repeatedly. And then, usually, I will rely on the introvert in me to collect and analyze the residula data from the situation and make it into little pieces like this. Verses of Versus, right? What the fuck would life be without a little conflict?