All things in moderation?

Temperance is a funny thing. I've been working at balance in my life, and I seem to suffer from having too much of one thing and not enough of others. For example, I spend a whole lotta time on a really great site called NarniaWeb. The site is amazing. The five hours I spend there instead of doing other things is not.

I do love to do useful things. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but bear with me. I love the feeling at the end of the day when you look back and see that you really helped your mom with the housework, or finished some bit of schoolwork, or got writing done (if you're a writer, like me). That feeling is just one of satisfaction. For me, I go: "I actually didn't waste my day today! I did stuff that mattered, that change the way I'll be living tomorrow and in the future!" I don't exactly think like that, but that's the feeling in words.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons that the feeling is special right now is because it doesn't happen all the time. One of my goals lately has been to live each day well. Not okay, not acceptable. Just really well. It's really hard. I do too much of stupid stuff and not enough of the important stuff. Sometimes I really fall flat on my face and then I think at night, before I go to bed, "What in the world was I thinking? I was an idiot!"

To go off on another tangent from the title, I wanted to talk about movie content. I want to be a screenwriter, like I've said before in other posts, and I've been thinking a lot about my mission in that and just movies in general.

I have kind of really high standards for movies. My sisters don't share many of my opinions. The sister just above me, in particular, asks me to watch movies a lot and I'll look up the movies online to see what the lowdown is, especially on pluggedin.com. Mostly, I'll decide against watching the movie because it looks like it has a lot of vulgarity in it. My sister makes the case that, if I want to be a screenwriter, I have to watch all kinds of movies, not just the ones I think I'll think.

This is a bit of an issue for me. I don't agree with her completely. I mean, I can see that watching movies and listening to scripts can help you understand how to write them, but what if this movie is very lewd? What if the mindset of the characters towards pre-marital sex is very casual?

I don't know about you guys, but I have a very difficult time with sexuality in movies. It's a very big occasion of sin for me, and I know it. So do I go in to watch the movie, knowing what's there and knowing that it could lead me into sin? My stance is NO. I may not have watched the movie before, but if I know there's crap scattered all through the movie, I'm not gonna see it.

What do you all think, I wonder?

-Tina