Last night I felt like watching an “old” film and I did “Cast Away” watched with Tom Hanks. And I don’t know if I’m just crazy, but I just thought: it’s about me, that’s me!
Short summary:
Tom Hanks actually had other things planned and just out of bad luck crashes his plane over the middle of the Pacific on the way to one of these things. He can escape to an island and makes a makeshift living there. He has no shoes, no knife, nothing, until the FedEx packages from the plane load begin to wash ashore, containing a lot of things he might need to survive.
At the beginning you can clearly feel that he’s not quite up to survival yet, and in the first half hour of the film he drinks decidedly too little water for my taste.
But little by little he makes things that help him survive on the island, and he even makes fire, which is, as we all know, a big deal in terms of survival and also culturally.
After four years, an old Dixie toilet door washes up on the island, from which he can build a raft with a sail and escape from the island. In the middle of the ocean, almost dead from exhaustion, a huge tanker drives past him and then picks him up, and his life goes on “normally” from then on, albeit forever changed and stuff, you know.
Caveman with poor eyesight
In four days (not four years) I’m moving away from Berlin-Neukölln forever. Almost thirteen years ago I was stranded here in this apartment in which I am currently sitting and writing this column, and I lived in it without any real rhyme or reason. I’ve never put anything like a shelf here or managed to keep the walls white even after painting them once or twice.
What all civilized people have learned, at least rudimentarily, simply passed by this apartment and never touched it. I probably lived here more like a caveman, putting some inherited and some found pieces of furniture in there, arranging baskets, buckets and boards somehow so that things could fit on them and constructing a toilet paper holder out of a chopstick and some yarn.
While my friends were very keen on beautifying their homes and keeping them “prestigious” in a sense, in case they needed to impress any unsympathetic people, for me it basically looked more like a male’s home Students with visual impairments.
Like Tom Hanks, I too have achieved a reasonable standard of living in this apartment, but soon I’ll be moving onto my raft for good and then I’ll be heading towards new shores and maybe even something like a well-thought-out interior decoration…
I can barely wait for it.