Fluffy

I rejoice because my travel-weary friend is back from afar. I hope she kissed the ground when she got out of the airport. I've never had the courage to do so, but I've always wanted to because it seems kind of cinematic. It's not too late. I'll make her do it when I see her next.

She got a gas mask as a souvenir.  She's the best.

Last night I was driving home late after doing my friend's hair. There were few cars on the road, and nobody tailgating me up hills. I was in the dark silence of my neighborhood and reached a familiar four-way intersection at exactly the same time as two other vehicles. Our headlights intersected as we decided who would go first. I wonder if the other drivers found our coincidental midnight meeting to be as eerie as I did.

I pondered this the rest of the way home - I guess I felt like this was an event akin to the alignment of planets. Who in my quiet neighborhood but me would be out driving this late? No one. But tonight, there were two cars prowling the development and they met in the center by chance, with me. We were all deer in our collective headlights.

On the other hand, I'm sure my neighbors must have lives (go figure) even as they keep to themselves. Lives that may require late-night driving.

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May I discuss losing my phone? I found it in my car a day after I found that it was missing, but I'm mentioning that I misplaced it the other day because the morning I woke up without my phone, I stayed in bed as long as I could, grumpy and purposeless, because I didn't have my phone.

Is that not ridiculous?

I depend on my phone. I can leave it alone for long periods of time but it is a valuable communication tool to let people know I'm thinking of them, to schedule get-togethers, and to hold conversations. It has many other valuable functions but that one is the one I missed and was moping around about.

Sometimes I get lonely and realize it's because forgotten to that I have the power to make plans with buddies. Critique it or not, my phone enables me to do that.

Upon finding my phone, I went through my written list (in my journal) of people to text and re-set my life.

To-do lists give me something to live for. Mom would tell me that's over-dramatic, but sometimes the reason I get out of bed is to write down the list forming in my head. The list gives me little birds to shoot down, and I can always keep rolling over incomplete tasks from old lists into new ones. Looking back at a list from my past gives me a good picture of my recent history and takes me back to the time when I wrote that specific list.

Once I spoke to a woman, at a doctor's office about to-do lists (or it could have been a grocery store cashier...I forget) and we agreed about how great they are. And I continued excitedly, "Don't you love crossing off stuff like " take shower" and "text Johnny?!"" And she sighed wearily and replied, "No, my to-do lists have big things on them, like taxes and insurance and such." "Oh." I hold my smile and give her an empathetic expression.

As long as they get her out of bed too, right?

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So, I went to the dentist's office a few months back to get my teeth cleaned and my friendly hygienist wanted to know all about the road trip I had taken with my sister.

She had even read our blogs, she said.

It eventually came out that she mostly read my sister's posts because, I quote, "They seemed the most informative."

Really.

You decided to hold that opinion. And then you decided to tell me that.

My blogs were not fluffy. They were detailed and accurate. They were thoughtful. They described people we encountered and things we felt and explained differences between home and the rest of the country.

My hygienist is mentally fluffy.

I am also watching a cat named Fluffy right now. I love Fluffy. Fluffy takes me seriously. Fluffy is portable. Fluffy cuddles well. Fluffy talks to me. Fluffy also desecrated my suitcase, but Fluffy is old.

Watching Fluffy entails watering plants. This frightens me. I just pout water on all of them, but I'm not sure if that constitutes "watering" them. I just killed about ten seedlings I had planted. Let it not be so of this helpless greenery.

Speaking of greenery, I just watched WALL-E for the first time today. I didn't realize how beautiful it would be. I expected something very mediocre, but instead I cried at the unfair plot movements, the heroic acts of love between characters, the open and naïve enthusiasm of earth's colonists, the cruelty of machines, and the message of hope for our world. The movie, unlike some films that leave me certain of mankind's flawed nature and of reality's cruelty, assured me that resilience exists alongside entropy. In the movie, it took 700 years for humans to take the first step back to truly living, but what counts is that they took the step.

All I could see when the humans stepped off their ship onto the dusty planet they had left behind was a heck of a lot of work and nobody to do it. But I looked at the faces of the ship's residents and saw that they all wanted to start.

The closing credits took on a different visual tone than the rest of the movie. They looked like moving paintings, filled with color and depicting scenes of planting and growing, a boy fishing, and a tall tree. The prophetic illustrations suggested that the humans would not give up and that they would find joy from living on Earth again. This without having to make a whole series of movies about re-habitating the earth.
This movie reminded me of the good qualities humans possess, both from watching the characters on screen and from the knowledge that there is a team of workers who created this movie and believe in its message.

That is all.