The unexamined life

I saw Wanted last night, and it was much better than I expected it to be. It is rare for a trailer to able to show the soul of a movie, and in this case the producers did not even try. The trailer for Wanted is the standard collage of action scenes and one-liners that could have come from any summer movie of the last ten years.

What sets Wanted apart from your run of the mill action flick is the frame: a sci-fi conceit (that there are people born with the ability to move and react so much faster than the average human) wrapped inside of a fantasy motif (that there is an external force--here called fate--that can communicate with our reality). The central question faced by the hero is: Who am I? What shoudl I be? These are questions I've thought about quite a bit recently.

I will be changing jobs in fall of 2009 when my current contract expires, and naturally this has led me to ask myself: Who am I and what do I want? There is the immediate question of where I want to head next in my career. Do I want to emphasize my teaching, my research? Or move in a third direction? Towards money? Towards a family? Who am I? What do I want?

In Wanted, the choice was made far easier for the hero since Angelina Jolie was willing to act as his guide towards a new life. Most of us have to make our own way without an archetype of sexuality looking over our shoulders. Still, I thank my personal fate that I live in a time and place where I can ask these questions, and take action on whatever I decide the answers to be.