eternal sunshine for the spotless mind and a little girl in the ladies' room...

I finally watched the Eternal Sunshine for The Spotless Mind last Saturday. It had long been my 'must-see-movie-no matter-how-poor-you-are-at-that-moment' since the first time I heard its review. So I did watch it, with my last 50 thousand rupiahs in my wallet for the rest of the week.

And yes I did enjoy the movie, it was a veerryyy good movie. I really love the cinematography, very symbolic, lots of beautiful metaphors that personify the characters’ feeling and emotion towards evidences happened in their life. I always take a shine to those kinds of movie – those which speak with symbols and implicitly convey their messages – for usually the messages conveyed remain deeper and mostly more meaningful than those movies which tend to forget the beauty of metaphor and impassively explicit in depictions.

However, this writing is not about the sort of sweet tingling sensation of that movie, or how do I recommend that movie to you, or how the movie had enlighten me, or whatever. This is about the occurrence happened in the ladies’ room that night after I watched the movie and was about to go home.

My dear friends, we all know how painstaking and irritating the queue in the cinema’s toilet. I mean, sometimes I wonder how could these people have the same impulse to go to the toilet at the same time. They come flocking to the toilet before the film begins, and they rush in throngs after. Maybe there are some sort of relations between every cinema in this universe and human’s bladder… or I guess there’s some kind of urinary euphoria triggered by watching movies, or maybe… – Sisie, cut it out… this is getting absurd… - Anyway, that was also happening that night, there were only four rooms in the ladies’ room and one of them was out of order. Meanwhile, there was like 10 people at that time that needed to get the businesses done. So there were lines of about three ladies in each room, including me too, standing in the last row in front of the door of one of those rooms.

Nothing’s really caught – or worth - my attention except that beside all those ‘goodlooking or tried to lookinggood’ ladies, there were also standing, in the same queue, a little girl, aged about eight or nine, carrying her little sister in one hand and holding another little sister of her in the other hand. She dressed in a most plain house dress and obviously she’s not one of the celebrated patrons of the cinema, probably just a daughter of one of the food vendors on the pavement outside. She waited in the other line, standing in the second row, with a tremendously big haired woman in front of her and a teenage girl aged about fifteen or sixteen, wearing a very snazzy soft pink t-shirt and a pair of big eighties earrings, behind her.

And just like every queue in this world, it took forever. It took maddeningly forever. I did not know what the hell those ladies doing inside those toilet rooms, but it took so long that I can secretly laugh at those funny furrowed annoyed faces of the rest of the ladies waiting outside the rooms – until I realize that it was a bit stupid and absurd to laugh at them for I know that I was also sharing the same dull fate –

So yes, she was standing there too, with the same restiveness as all the rest of us there. And finally the door in front of her was opened, a girl with big glasses and a long beautiful hair came out of the room and the woman with a tremendously big hair went inside. I was still standing on my row, remained still because the brainless lady inside the room where I waited still had not decided to come out and greet the world.

Anyway, so it took about more than ten minutes until I finally stood exactly in front of the room’s door. And the little girl was too, standing there at the final line waiting for the woman with the tremendously big hair to get out of that toilet. There she was waiting, while a bit assuaging her little sisters that getting more and more restive. After a couple of more minutes waiting, suddenly the door was opened, and the woman came out. I could even see the relieve sight of that little girl knowing that her waiting is finally over. She then went to step in to the room, until there’s a voice stopping her. It was the janitor, a woman with a plump figure aged about twenty-five or more. Still carrying her mop in one hand, she pulled the little girl’s shoulder while giving a way for the teenage girl with the snazzy soft pink t shirt and a pair of big eighties earrings that was standing behind the little girl to go inside the room.

What the heck? It was the little girl’s turn! But nobody could seem care less about it. Even the teenage girl only gave a disdain glance, as if it’s natural for her right to be prioritized over the little girl’s right that happened to be in a so-called-lower social class than her, and went straightly to the room.

And yes, the little girl could only gaze at the janitor with a quick silent protest, and then shrank into some sort of submission look; maybe she too thought that it was natural for her right to be set aside everybody’s right that happened to be living in a higher social class than she was. Meanwhile, the janitor was grumbling to her about how she and her sisters would only end up playing with the toilet paper and giving her even more works to do.

And the little girl kept silent.

And for some stupid considerations that I regret later on, I decided not to say anything too. So stupid of me. I chose not to say anything because I don’t like confrontation. I always think that if there’s still other way to solve the problem, to confront should be the last resort, if not to be avoided at all, since in most cases it only creates more problems instead of solving it. So I decided to find other ways to solve the problem. At that time, I knew that the problem lied on the fact that the little girl did not gain her right to use the toilet, even though she waited in line just like the rest of the people there. So in order to make the problem solved, I think what I needed to do was to give the little girl her right – which was quite logical of course, since the problem was an expropriation of right so the solution must be the restitution of the right – I decided to let the little girl take my turn to use the toilet, in order to restitute her right. By that I thought that the problem’s solved.

Which was wrong, of course.

I realized that the action I did that time only solved the problem in its surface. Yes, true that the little girl finally gain her expropriated right to use the toilet, but the core of the problem still lied there, remained unsolved.

If we take a look closer to the problem, we’ll see that the real problem is not about the expropriation-restitution of right; instead it’s about the classic problem of how society treat people based on their so-called social class. In the case of the little girl in the ladies’ room, we can see the example how actually people think that that discrimination as something which is natural, that is, there’s nothing wrong with it. Even the janitor herself, as the representation of the lower social class, thought that it was the right thing to restrain their own right under the superiority of the higher social class, even more, become the actor who provided the discrimination itself. And of course, those who regard themselves as ‘the higher social class’ do not bother to give a little time to their useless brain to think about how by taking the superficial advantage out of other people’s right is really make them less than human.

So I really do think that this kind of problem could not be solved by merely seek for the solution in its surface level. The society, need to be awaken up so they are aware with this obsolete case that should not even relevant anymore in the world nowadays. The little girl, and the janitor, need to realize that they do have the same equal right as those other people in the ladies’ room and even the teenage girl with the snazzy soft pink t-shirt and a big eighties earrings need to be aware that there’s no such reason that would justify the toleration of any single form of discrimination.

That’s why I kind of regret the thing I did that night, I should’ve said something to the janitor that would give her a shock therapy to make her think that it was not at all natural to yield to the people with the so-called higher social class. Or to that teenage girl with her snazzy soft pink t-shirt and the big eighties earrings, that she should start to think about other thing than what color of earrings she should wear to match her outfit – because apparently the color of earrings she wore at that night did not match at all, it did look that she tried to match it up though, with those pink polkadot pattern on his earrings, but she ended up looking a bit cheezy – there’s so much problem in this world to think about…

So yes, my friends… as a conclusion of this writing, I think we really need to do something about it. Discrimination, in any kind of form, should be banished from this world, for all human are equal and deserve the same opportunity in every chance. The closest and the simplest thing to do to solve this problem is probably by starting to make people realize about this kind of problem. By realizing, hopefully they will start to think, and maybe, just maybe, in the simplest case, that teenage girl would probably give a big smile while shaking her head to the janitor and say that it was the little girl’s turn.

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Thank you, my sunshine, for the discussion and for keeping me thinking.

---Sisie---