You Won't

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You have no idea how ready I am for this upcoming 3 day weekend. I have been traveling like a mad woman this month and I am uber excited to camp out in my apartment, eating, tv watching, and video game playing to my heart’s content. Since my friend Erin and I are basically the same person, she read my mind and revealed the secret to the perfect movie marathon. I was already planning my own little movie marathon for the weekend, but I’ve been wrestling with a little dilemma all week.

My movie marathon plan was to watch the Bourne movies. I’ve never seen them, and after seeing previews for the new Bourne (which has Jeremy Renner in it, and I think he’s my new bf. In case you didn’t know, he plays Doyle in 28 Weeks Later and we all know how much I love Doyle) I was intrigued. Plus they just seem like the type of movie I'd enjoy, so I always meant to watch them at some point.

However, I don’t own the Bourne trilogy. I mean of course I don’t, we know I have a very strict rule against buying movies I've never watched. So I picked them up last weekend from my friend Pietro. EXCEPT Pietro also gave me the movie Cars, and said that was the price of me borrowing them.

Fricken A.

See I have this thing with the movie Cars. I have declared I will never watch it. Pietro knows this and it’s beyond his comprehension. He has been “subtly” trying to get me to watch the movie for a while, and this is just the latest attempt.

Why am I never watching Cars? Well that’s simple. Too many people told me to. For whatever reason I didn’t see it when it first came out. I was busy or something. Basically everyone else in the world saw it, and all of a sudden that’s all they could talk about. My friends, the people I babysat for, random people on the bus. EVERYONE kept saying “oh it’s so great, you should watch it!” The first time I agreed, the second time I made a mental face, and by about the third or fourth time I was dead set against it.

You CANNOT tell me what to do. It ends badly. In fact, back in college my friends used to have a game called “you won’t.” Not only can you not tell me what to do, you can’t tell me what NOT to do. So whenever they started a sentence “you won’t” they knew I’d end up doing whatever they said.

Some people out there might call this a mark of defiance. Some might call it stubbornness. It’s more a mix of both.

For the longest time this was a big joke in my house. My parents were always talking about how “defiant” I was, but I just didn’t see it. It felt so natural, I assumed everyone did the same thing. You know, normal kid stuff like sitting at a table for hours because they refused to eat dinner instead of icecream. Attempting to run away at 5 years old because they weren’t allowed candy before dinner. Not talking for a day because their brother said something to make them mad. All totally normal!

It didn’t really occur to me that perhaps I have more issues with authority than most people until I got into reading Indian captive stories. I love historical fiction, and at some point in my preteens I went through an Indian captive phase. Yet I soon realized that these stories inevitably infuriated me. The problem was that eventually, the main character succumbed. Personally, a lot of times I was on the side of the Native Americans. Their culture seemed way more interesting. BUT, if the character starts their captivity by swearing they’re not giving in to the heathen ways, then they better not change their mind halfway through! I don’t care how much sense it makes, you DO NOT GIVE IN. In fact, screw just being sullen and unpleasant. Try to escape! Go on a hunger strike! Attack your captors! ANYTHING besides meekly submitting.  

At this point I’ve accepted that I might have some defiant tendencies. Luckily they don’t rear their ugly head in professional situations. And I’m well aware that this is the entire reason I won’t watch Cars. So knowing this, can I indulge my bad habits and stick to my guns, or do I need to mature a little and get over it?

I’ve been debating this all week, and as usual, the universe just keeps throwing it back in my face. I get to CA, and there are signs all over the place for the new Cars theme land. Cars 2 commercials keep coming up on tv. Even the radio was talking about Cars.

Thus I now have to turn to my favorite way to resolve a situation… the pro/con list.

Pros to watching Cars

• I might like it.
• I like Pixar movies.
• I won’t feel bad about borrowing the Bourne movies.
• If Pietro asks, I can answer honestly.
• It will be a good step towards dealing with my defiant & stubborn tendencies.         

Cons to watching Cars

• I said I wouldn’t.
• A little piece of my soul might die.
• Before all the madness, I once saw the first 10 minutes and wasn’t impressed, which is a good indication I might not like it.
• Pietro will probably not pursue whether or not I watched it, so I’d be giving in for nothing.
• Technically, he didn’t explicitly say I had to watch it in order to watch the Bourne trilogy, it was really more implied and I can’t be held to an implication.
• I said I wouldn’t. 

The real problem is that Pietro didn't say I HAD to watch Cars. If he did, that'd be a no brainer. He's far too evil and clever for that. He presents situations like I'd be an idiot not to do something, and then shrugs and says he doesn't care what I do. It's infuriating, because I can't get mad about it.

But the con list is so much more stacked right now...