R.H. blog

Although the commercial focus is on romantic love, Valentine’s Day is a good time to think about love in general, as a force and as a philosophy of life. People describe love in a million ways and tack on countless definitions to it that vary infinitely, and yet love remains the same and is understood in the same way by all, because love eludes the intellect and impresses itself instead into the heart and soul. All of the most fundamental things do so, because the intellect is the least fundamental form of existence. The intellect deals with existence after it has taken a physical form, when it has reached its most tangible state. The intellect deals with existence at its surface, and analyzes the ripples in the water rather than the original disturbance. Nothing that deals with the form of existence rather than the spirit can truly comprehend love. But, like anything, love takes a form, and that is precisely where the confusion arises. Love makes ripples in the water, but the ripple...

When it comes to pop culture trends, I consider myself a cautious follower. I like to wait a little to see if a trend will last long enough to be worth my time, but I eventually hop on the bandwagon, which makes me an objectively uncool person: not cool enough to be a trendsetter and not cool enough to ignore trends altogether. But when it comes to film, I’m especially lazy. By the time I got around to Stranger Things , almost everyone I knew had already seen it. I watched Game of Thrones long after the final season was released and then only through a heavily censored, abbreviated series of YouTube videos. And by the time I watched Squid Game I already knew half the plot from the memes alone. (Incidentally, memes are my primary motivation for watching most shows.) Regarding James Cameron’s Avatar , my laziness is a little more understandable since I was eight years old when it was released and I still hadn’t recovered from the shark scene in Finding Nemo. As I got older, I felt ...