DVD Heaven

At a recent house party, my friend’s boyfriend asked whether my new house mate was a guy. He was in fact sitting right next to my new house mate, and she’s very definitely all woman, but what made him question it was the DVD collection he was currently admiring – which is in fact mine. In his mind it was a very masculine collection of films, and he couldn’t match up my taste in films with the person he knew me to be. I should probably have been offended, but it’s not the first time someone has commented on it. I once went on a date with a squaddie, who when he dropped me home and saw my DVD collection, automatically asked whether I had a “thing” for soldiers, due to the fact that a) I was on a date with him, and b) I have over twenty films/documentaries which follow a military theme. I don’t (for the record) but obviously I have a military background so it’s something I have an interest in. He wasn’t as observant as he thought he was though, because if he’d looked more closely he would have noticed than many of my DVD’s feature Matt Damon...I have a “thing” for him...not soldiers! Your DVD collection is like your iPod. It’s a window to your soul, and once you put it out there for people to see, they’re able to make assumptions about you, and your personality. I was once on a photo shoot with work, and our photographer had forgotten his iPod. He wasn’t happy to be shooting without music so I offered him the use of mine without really thinking it through, and then witnessed the horror unfold as he hit the “shuffle” button. Annoyingly, I think I was doing okay until Enya’s Orinoco Flow deprived me of any cool points I’d earned up to that point. Was I ashamed though? Was I hell! My musical taste is MY musical taste. Sometimes I want to brood listening to The Cure, other times I want to lie in the bath with a glass of wine unwinding whilst Andrea Bocelli serenades me with Canto Della Terra. When I’m getting ready for a night out I want to listen to something that gets me in the mood to dance, and when I feel the need to be angry at my lot in life, and the men who’ve made me mad, I’ve got Alanis Morrisette and Skunk Anansie to help me vent. I can get lost in a song as easily as I can get lost in a film. Men look at my DVD collection and see the CSI and Spooks series box sets...they see Jarhead, Full Metal Jacket, The Hurtlocker and Black Hawk Down and make assumptions, like my squaddie date did...but that’s because they’re so preoccupied with the films they see that they like they don’t bother to look any further. My girlfriends see the Bridget Jones films, the Titanic’s, Pride & Prejudice’s and the PS I Love You’s of my collection. They see the chick-flicks and Rom Coms that I rely on when I’m feeling low to cheer me up because they're the films they love too. There’s a film for every mood on my DVD shelf, just like there’s a song for every emotion on my iPod, and a book for every occasion on my Kindle. Perhaps the conclusion people should come to, is that I love escapism...and if you want to hold my attention, you’re going to have to make my time around you as much as an escape from the bland reality of day to day life as movies, books and music do. I love my life, and the world I live in, but sometimes it’s just better to get lost in another place altogether. That’s real freedom. That’s my little slice of heaven.