Family

Some things you run away from, some run away from you, while some stay with you wherever you go.  I’92m not sure where I heard this from or maybe I just made this one up.  Still, I was thinking along this line after watching Martin Scorsese’92s The Departed, and it’92s correlation to a question a President of a company asked me last Saturday when I was being interviewed for a job.

’93What is important to you?’94

The question completely caught me off-guard.  I’92ve been conducting interviews of my own and have never asked anybody this.  I was expecting to be asked the same things that I usually ask my interviewees, you know, about demonstrated behavior on a set of competencies.  I was too focused on getting relevant working history and trying to predict future behavior based on past experiences to really bother with ’93cheesy’94 questions such as this.  Or so I thought. 

But apparently, the President considered the question as relevant to their hiring process.  Either that, or he has run out of more relevant question and was just buying some thinking time by asking an open-ended question.

So I mentioned the first thing that came to mind ’96 family.  I told him about my desire to always be with my family; about how short time always is when I’m in their company.  I told him about our family talks and how freely I am able to laugh, how honest I can be when I am in the midst of my brothers and sisters. 

I thought I was just being corny when I told him how important my family is to me.  But as I expounded on my answer, I realized that indeed my family does play a big role in my life, and that I meant every word I said.

’93The Departed’94 is also about family.  Matt Damon’92s character, a detective in the film, uses his position to help out his ’93family’94– mob boss Jack Nicholson.  Leonardo di Caprio joined the force to escape the stigma of a mob connected family and was instead ordered to do undercover work and infiltrate the mob. 

We do not have a say on what type of family we find ourselves with.  Families are one of those things that fate shoves down our throat.  This, however, is not an excuse to just let fate run its course. How our lives play out is not always about the families we were born into, it’92s how we play with the cards that we’re dealt with that determines how our destinies unfold.

The idea for the movie is not a Scorsese original, although there were original thoughts added here and there. It’s an adaptation of a Hong Kong film ’96 Infernal Affairs, something which became apparently clear to me towards the end– having seen the Chinese version.  What gets my goat was that there was no outward acknowledgement of the movie which this ’93highly acclaimed’94 film was based on.  Nevertheless, it’92s still a very good film and totally worth watching.