Presence Over Ideal

We watched Young Washington today. Jordan loved it. I thought it was good, though there are definitely places it could still improve. One line really stuck with me though — the scene where his mom is trying to soothe him after he's lost his first battle: "You're hard on yourself because I've been hard on you. And I've been hard on you because the environment has been hard. For that, I'm sorry." Something about that chain of it, the way the hardness gets passed down and then finally named and apologized for, got me.

The portrayal of other peoples — Black and Indian characters — was good, though I think the movie could've gone deeper into their actual lives instead of keeping them at the edges. And the girl Washington liked early on, the one who ends up marrying someone else because her dad told her to, felt too real. We so often marry for circumstance and stability rather than love. Which is exactly why I'm grateful for what I have — I really do love Jordan a lot. He's the one who's actually been here this whole time, not whoever else drifts through my mind. Presence over ideal, every time. Good movie. I'd genuinely want to learn more about Washington's past now.