TOPIC FOUR

Life’s a Garden

The best advice I’ve ever received, (that I can remember) was oddly enough, from a movie entitled “Joe Dirt.” In “Joe Dirt” David Spade plays the main character “Joe,” who is on a 15 year, (and counting) quest to find his parents. Most of the movie is a flashback; Joe is a guest on a radio station re-telling his journey to all of Los Angeles. The back-story; when Joe was eight, he, his parents, and his sister took a road trip to the Grand Canyon. During their visit, Joe gets separated from his family and is left behind. Later events show that Joe did get lost, but also that his parents made no attempt to try to find him. On his journey to find his parents, Joe gets into a little trouble here and there, but makes some really good friends and meets a wide variety of cool and interesting characters along the way. The whole point and moral of the story is, I think, that Joe gets so caught up in that one goal of finding his parents that it really takes over his life, and in turn Joe looses sight of the present. In the end, after hundreds of miles and years of searching, Joe realizes that he spent all this time looking for a home that he already had, with Brandy (the love interest). During the movie Joe has a conversation with his new friend “Kickin’ Wing,” and says; “Life’s a garden, you gotta dig it, to make it work for you.” I saw “Joe Dirt” when I was in sixth grade. I have remembered that advice for six years, if there was any other advice that I had been given that was more influential and impacting, I should have remembered it. My father will be the first person to tell you that although funny, “Joe Dirt” was one of the stupidest movies of all time, which is why I was so surprised to hear this advice flow out of Joe’s mouth. “Life’s a garden, you gotta dig it, to make it work for you.” You can either take life as it comes and hope that you get lucky, or you can get your hands dirty and make life do what you want, make life worth living. Whenever I find myself just sitting around the day before a quiz, (as one example), I think about Joe and his advice to Kickin’ Wing; and I pull out my notes from class and start to study. When I saw this blog topic I started to think about all the advice I’ve been given over the years. I came to the conclusion that, more than likely I have been given advice more meaningful than Joe’s, but can not remember it. If I had been given advice that was better than Joe’s, but just can’t remember it, that must mean that the advice I was given, was not all that great to begin with, otherwise I would have remembered it.