A Night at the Movies

Driving home last night, somehow the conversation turned to my blog.

"If one of my friends wants to read your blog, is that cool?"

"Uhhhh, which friend?"

"Oh, I don't know, (names a friend)"

"Isn't her husband some kind of Grand Wizard of their church or something? I don't want to feel censored."

"You never write anything that bad, do you?"

"Gee, thanks for reading!" (both laugh). "You know, maybe that's best left alone right now."

"You ought to write a blog about the human leg I saw under the car last year."

"Maybe you ought to write a blog about that--you can post it on mine, if you want. Besides, if I write about it, I'm going to write how it was fake!"

Background: Fran SWEARS that she saw a human leg dragging under a car last year on Halloween (hello!). She even called the police and everything, which is probably why my property taxes are going up this year. Later that day, our brother-in-law, who was a fireman, told us that a person jumped from a bridge over a highway downtown, and got run over so many times that body parts got dragged all over the city. I tried to tell her that there are so many practical jokesters, including incredibly resourceful ones, that you can pretty much never believe what you see anymore.

This week is our 14-year anniversary. On someone's anniversary, my mom likes to dramatically and sarcastically say, "(x) years of wedded bliss!", the same way one might say "(x) years of living hell!". But I must say that, in my case at least, it's been a great 14 years (OMG), and there's not much I would change (our topic at dinner last night).

So, we got a babysitter and went out to the movies for the first time in a long time, just Fran and me. Fran chose Elizabethtown, which definitely had a chick-flick feel to it, but it had a nice theme about finding meaning in life after a guy has a disastrous business failure, which kind of hit home for me in light of my recent thinking. When we walked in at the front of the theater, there was a couple whom I believed were escaped mental patients, because they had their infant and 2-year-old with them--Obviously I love kids but I was ticked that we had waited for months and months to go to a movie for a nice quiet time and certainly didn't want to hear kids screaming...

It may just be that I was overjoyed to be spending a night out with Fran, but I just loved the movie--I even got a lump in my throat when watching the main character's flashbacks of spending time with his dad when he was a boy, and hoped that Ryan has nice memories of growing up. When the movie was over, I leaned over to Fran and said, "Great, huh?"

She paused, then said, "Well, it was okay." She pointed out that the movie was a disjointed collection of ill-fitted parts. Damn it, she's right! Then I felt like I should have been a little more discerning instead of happily clapping at the pretty colors like a lobotomized monkey.

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I've been fighting (and losing the battle with) this lousy cold for about a week. Friday, I laid on the couch and drank hot tea and watched movies (okay, I checked my work Email 4 times, too), but it was the first sick day that I took in 10 years! I've now restarted the clock on the "Iron Man" streak (2 days so far).

Two weird things: One of the conditions of my cold is the complete absence of taste or smell for about five days. The other is that I was watching The Matrix. There's a scene where Cypher is eating a steak and says, "I know that this steak isn't real, it's just that my brain is telling me that it's juicy and delicious. But I don't care."

I thought to myself, " I know this food really would taste good, but my brain isn't receiving any signals telling it what it tastes like. And I really do care quite a lot!"

I had this weird, out-of-body thought that maybe I'm lying in my Matrix pod somewhere and one of my little hose-connections, the one for taste and smell input, has somehow come unplugged.

Help! Somebody plug me back in!