Last night, I re-visited the Japanese horror flick, Ju-on: The Grudge and then followed it up with the American rendition, The Grudge. The original version felt as chilling, as if I were watching it for the first time. I still felt goosebumps as I watched the haunting and disturbing images float across the screen. The American remake was slightly less compelling, but wasn't short on providing chills. The Grudge is about a supernatural curse that is born after a wife and her young son die violently, in the grip of rage and sorrow (at the hands of the woman's husband, in a fit of jealous anger). Anybody who comes into contact with the curse, of course dies, causing it to grow and constantly repeat itself in a deadly chain of events... bouncing from person to person and feeding off of them. After watching both films, I began pondering the power and emotion behind passion and rage. I'm a passionate and tempestuous woman. When I was young and precocious, I had a difficult time harnessing those emotions and my anger. As annoying and selfish as preteens and teenagers can be today, I commiserate with them to a certain degree. Their young brains are still developing. That coupled with raging hormones and being caught in the throes of adolescence as well as being on the cusp of adulthood. Sheer insanity. Once we blossom into adults however, we are responsible for our behavior and how we choose to channel passion and rage. Some of us harbor it more than others. Our brains may be developed and common sense should no longer be a foreign concept at this point in our lives, but it still requires a great deal of restraint and grappling, to harness such intense emotions. I know I grapple with it, anyway. There are some with laid back, tranquil personalities sans incident and despite whatever turmoil and anger they may be feeling. What can I say, I'm intense. I boil, I seethe, my insides churn (even if I don't project that emotion externally). Kissing, eating, sex, anger, contentment... all of these wonderful and ugly things, I experience with an unbridled intensity. Passion and rage work in tandem as far, as I'm concerned. And are just as strong if not stronger, than the act of loving. Pondering and realizing all of this, I've come to the conclusion that perhaps this is why I may seem aloof to strangers or to those who haven't gotten to know me completely. What is in fact me showing restraint and being miserly, by not laying my emotions bare, for someone who is unfamiliar to me, to cash in on, and not having earned any of it. That's me, not wasting that passionate anger on the petty and insignificant. This applies to the brief relationships I've had too ... the confusion some of these men have felt, when I didn't chase them down or beg them for their time... me simply opting to move on and not look back. I'm personable and cordial enough and I open myself up, juuuust wide enough. I don't feel compelled to expend that type of energy on someone, with abandon and without thought. That passion, I'd rather save for something (or someone?) exciting and relevant, and channel it in productive ways, and have it paid back to me ten fold. I'd hate to waste passion and rage on the undeserving, only to have the results end up a tortured entity that continues on in a familiar pattern of anger and sorrow.