Note:

B) This column might have been more relevant 10 years ago.

In his recent column “Sex Crazed Sunnettes” (Sept. 11, 2007), Rob Fishman ’08 wonders why so many females and so few males write about relationships in The Sun. I’ve never had a girlfriend in my four years here at Cornell. But I have seen plenty of movies on the subject. So I’m more of a qualified expert than pretty much everyone else.

Last year, I wrote a column on The Notebook that explained how romantic films like these are perhaps the most dangerous types of movies. When you watch them you feel complete and happy. But when they are over, you feel horrible because your life doesn’t seem to compare to the characters’.

Maybe you’ll dump your boyfriend because he does not fit the grizzled yet seductively tame mold of Ryan Gosling. Or, maybe because of habit, you’ll keep going out with him but will always be left with the feeling of wanting more. In either case, you’ll feel lonelier than before you watched the film, and you will then need to watch another romantic movie to get rid of that feeling of loneliness that you have, which will make you feel even lonelier. Repeat.

Now, I don’t have a solution to this problem, but I have seen Titanic. Have you? It was awesome. Here are some thoughts I had while watching it:

• No one tries to pull off the long hair slicked back look anymore a la Billy Zane in the last half of the film. It’s too bad because whenever you shake your head, a few strands will fall forward and you’ll look disheveled … but in a hot way.

• There needs to be a scene where the first class male passengers make Jack fight another coach passenger in a cage match. All of the rich onlookers would wave wads of cash as the two fought. I’ve never understood why people wave cash at fights, but I see it happen all of the time in movies so there must be a good reason.

• Don’t you think that the actor who plays McSteamy on Grey’s Anatomy looks just like Leonardo DiCaprio — only doubled in size?

• When the passengers first start to get on the lifeboats, Rose gets put on one of them with her mom. However, she jumps off of the boat as it is being lowered to be with Jack. What Rose doesn’t realize is that she ironically ends up killing him. If she were on that lifeboat, he could have that piece of driftwood all to himself. This would have made a lot more compelling ending. “Hey we survived.”  “Cool, could you not be so poor?”

• Speaking of which, how can you marry someone else after a guy gives his life for you? I imagine that whenever Rose looked at her husband, she thought to herself, “You’re no Jack.”

• In every romantic movie, one of the lovers will repeat a line that the other lover said when they first met. In Titanic, that line is “You jump, I jump.”

• You know the scene that shows the old people lying in bed together as the water rushes in? They never show the follow up to that where their limbs are flailing uncontrollably as they are drowning in a room full of water.

• Whenever you watch a movie where lots of people die, you always wonder what you would do to stay alive if you were in that situation. I would do what Han Solo did for Luke in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I would cut open a fat person and hide inside of him to stay warm.

• When Titanic first came out, my dad got really freaked out by the shots of people losing their grips on the railings and falling into the sea. He didn’t want that to happen to me, so he had me practice by hanging off of various hotel balconies.

• As I’m watching the movie with my dad, the phone rings. We’re at the dramatic scene when old lady Rose is about to throw off the “Heart of Ocean” diamond. My dad gives me an angry look before he picks up the phone. “You wanna stop it?” He can’t miss this part.

• My dad then points out the problem with the movie showing all of the pictures of Rose doing the things that she was supposed to do with Jack — like horseback riding and flying a plane. Who puts up pictures only of themselves? No loved ones? Not the guy who you decided to marry, had kids and grandkids and such a close relationship with that you couldn’t tell about him about Jack? Not that guy?

I actually wanted to do something like this when I first came to Cornell. During the summer after my senior year of high school, I had my friend take a bunch of pictures of me leaning against a tree, laughing at something off camera, etc. I made them into posters so that whenever I would show someone my room, they would see only pictures of me. When it came time to put them up, I wussed out. You should have seen the size of my roommate’s dad.

I also wanted to bring makeup and black clothes so that before we went out on that first night, I would go into the bathroom, put on white face paint and black lipstick, and then come out. “Oh yeah, I’m kind of a Goth … no, not that serious of a one … just at night sometimes.”

• Even though the tragedy of Titanic happened 95 years ago, I still think we should hold a candlelight vigil … or at least a discussion group where students can talk about it.

Andrew Webb is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at awebb@cornellsun.com. Confessions of a Mental Patient appears alternate Mondays.