Go with me down the rabbit hole for a moment.
Tonight I watched Pretty in Pink. I mean, okay, Ewan and Iona and I went to a wedding and when we got home, after some ham and cheese sandwiches, I caught the last forty-five minutes of the movie. And oh, my irony and smirking and yet also sentimentality. Slap me, please. James Spader was so cute and young (but was he always forty, even when he was twenty-six?), and Andrew McCarthy, what did I ever see in him? Molly had such beautiful skin and lips and hair. I reminded Ewan that we saw Jon Cryer on a plane from New York to Chicago, but he sat in first class so we weren't able to stare at him as much as I would have liked. Ewan said, "Who?" "Ducky! Ducky!" At that point Ewan went to bed.
I watched. And you know, it was a pretty good movie. I think it was lost on me at nineteen. (Nineteen! I was old enough to get it! But I was sheltered. Anyway.)
Frequently, in my mind and out loud, I deride the person I used to be for being silly or unfashionable or uninformed or not discerning. But after she kissed Blaine and the credits rolled and the Psychadelic Furs played the theme I was absolutely transported to my young nineteen-year-old self. I realized (again) that we never stop being that person. Or the person we were at four or one or thirty-two. So let's take that a step further. Is it also true that we never stop being the person we will become, pre-birth, pre-conception, the person who lives in the genes of our two parents (and our grandparents and our great grandparents, and so on)?
My deep question for tonight is, how much of us is wired to be who we are before we're born and how much room is there to be impressioned by the Psychadelic Furs and Nik Kershaw?