when the fear is so real you could easily be dominated by it

First. Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

It is Friday and you’re alive.

Unless you’re reading this on another day. Or you’re a ghost. In either case, I think we’ve proven that things are rarely as obvious as they seem.

Still. I love the phrase, Let’s get the obvious out of the way. It seems wise. We have to get what is easily seen out of the way so that we can see more than we imagined possible.

Second. I enjoyed the dread of Saint Maud.

Also it’s possible during the film that I very nearly had a panic attack. I’m not really sure how these things work. Words. Panic. I focused on my breathing and gravity and these things helped.

I love this article about the actress who played Maud, Morfydd Clark.

Here is one of my favorite bits:

To prepare for the role, Clark studied Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. She also kept coming back to Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, which both Glass and Eternal Beauty director Craig Roberts had suggested she watch. She was inspired by the ways those films deal with terror. “When the fear is so real you could easily be dominated by it,” Clark explains. Glass and Roberts were both drawn to the actress’s ability to use her porcelain veneer to hide a fraying mind. “Those are the kind of parts a lot of actors want to have: the characters that seem calm on the surface but are Travis Bickle inside,” Roberts says. “She’s able to get moments in the silence with her reactions. It’s a gift that she has.”

Third. Smart people make mistakes. 

I enjoyed this whole thing. I don’t remember how I found it. Here are some bits.

Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

Everybody rationalizes. We all want the world to be a particular way, and we all make mistakes, and we all want to be successful, and we all want to feel good about ourselves.

We all make decisions for emotional or intuitive reasons instead of rational ones. Some of us admit that. Some of us think using our emotions is better than being rational all the time. Some of us don’t.

Smart people, computer types anyway, tend to come down on the side of people who don’t like emotions. Programmers, who do logic for a living.

Here’s the problem. Logic is a pretty powerful tool, but it only works if you give it good input. As the famous computer science maxim says, "garbage in, garbage out." If you know all the constraints and weights – with perfect precision – then you can use logic to find the perfect answer. But when you don’t, which is always, there’s a pretty good chance your logic will lead you very, very far astray.