Excuse me, I need some adjustment here...

Theatrical release poster

One of the startling -- or perhaps, even comforting -- assumptions of this movie, The Adjustment Bureau based on Philip K. Dick's story Adjustment Team, is that all of us who are blessed with great ambition can be assuaged of such ambition simply by getting into an intimate and rewarding relationship!

Personally, I like this theory, and would like to use it to justify (rationalize, did I hear you say?) my raison d'être, "sit back and enjoy the world going by." After all, I do have the good fortune to be in a wonderful relationship, so why should I blame myself for not wanting to struggle.

But blame myself, I do. There's a compendium of short stories, waiting to be finished, or should I say, screaming to be finished. But the more it screams, the more I stay still. It is a surreal game of chicken in my mind.

In my less charitable moods, I often wonder, "why afflict the world with yet more words?" or "why do I write? To contribute or to seek glory?" When I lean zen-ward, I do, and don't ascribe meaning or project outcome -- the chicken-game protagonists suddenly finding themselves in different dimensions, discombobulated and purposeless -- it gives me a deep sense of fulfillment.

Back to the Adjustment Bureau, another assumption is that the more you struggle, the more you rewrite your "destiny" (the opposite of the Eastern notion of fatalism). More Prozac anyone?

Are you a writer?

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Conventional wisdom confidently dictates that only those who fearlessly stick the label onto their backs proclaiming their affiliation to the lofty group of "writers" (and for good measure of hopeful reminders, onto their hands and other appendages) stand a chance of being granted membership into that exclusive club.

After all, do we want hacks operating nuclear plants? Or our government (wait! maybe that was a bad analogy).

Oh, so you, the wanna-be writer, ponder. Is that what I am missing? In the face of my daily struggle with the keyboard that somehow only wants to inject sneer-worthy words onto the screen? And really, can I not be a writer also, as in "I fix cars but don't consider myself a mechanic?" Alas, no, declares Conventional Wisdom. Ask anyone who considers himself the paragon of that virtue, and you'll get the same response.

Somehow, they'd have you believe, by donning that robe, you transform yourself. From a hack to a pro. Just like that.

According to CW, by choosing to emphatically call yourself a writer, you have no recourse but to write. You have no back alley for your soul (and creative energy) to escape. No today-I-felt-like-being a voice-over-recording-artist. You're tied to that writing chair even if you can't pull a blessed word out your tired muse. No gallivanting to an office cube sinking your butt into a rocking, coffee-stained upholstered chair, enjoying being a PR wiz, pointy-headed engineer or programmer to the delight of your back-patting boss. After all, if you're a damn writer, you write, and the rest of the time, you grudge every minute away from your work. Your guy or girl comes home after a hard day's work and you don't lift your eyes off the screen. Maybe you greet them with, "Go fix your goddamn dinner yourself -- I am busy being a writer."

That's the way it works. CW knows it. Do you?