An Unlikely Reflection

It’s a dark and windy night, and yet doesn’t feel in the least bit sinister. I guess maybe it’s because in all the horror movies I’ve ever seen, as the suspense builds, the editing tightens, the music that is swelling is not “In the Navy” by the Village people. Great, one cliché stereotype down…several more to go.

Well, as this is sortof like the weather you get at the beginning of a movie (though not a very good one I’ll wager, maybe something along the Lines of Ed Wood though without the cross-dressing or the freakiness…which is pretty much the entire movie, so maybe forget that whole comparison and move on) it seems that this would be a fitting time for a reflection of some kind. Fantastic. The idea’s there, now all I need is something to reflect on. In the films they never have this problem. Whether the protagonists life is anything ranging from inane to unrealistically dramatic (which, for some odd reason is always the most realistic) they can always immediately launch into some anecdote, which will inevitably lead to three things: 1) someone crying, 2) a love interest of some kind, and 3) (usually) some sort of situation where everyone is chasing after everyone else, either by running, or in cars…or on unicycles…and it is guaranteed that somewhere in there, there will be chickens.

But all of this is rather ambitious…and I am still at a loss as to what I should reflect on. The past year? I’ve been brainwashed by Maths to such an extent that when I open my pencil case, I automatically get my calculator out, without even giving it a thought. This is strange and unnatural, and chances are high that you will never see something like that happen to someone in a movie, because, simply it is not realistic…

This brings me to a point. I didn’t have one initially, but I figured that if I just kept typing, something would jump out at me. Reality. Or, more specifically, what is realistic. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what is realistic, and what isn’t. What the movies portray is a strange form of reality. It could happen, but it’s unlikely. Some people, while watching a film ( usually while other people are around…) like to point at the screen, and say “that is so unrealistic.” And fair enough, most of the time, what happens on the screen is so far fetched, you are more likely to have your winning lottery ticket struck by lightning, then have your life emulate that of a flawless movie character. But when we say, “unrealistic” what are we actually trying to tell people? We are comparing what we see on film, to what we experience every day, we are drawing a clear distinction between that, and our own lives. (just typed liver…and yet, still makes grammatical sense…interesting…) Or at least we think we are. In reality WE ARE NOT. Just think of some of the things that happen to us, that are just so wack, random and unlikely.

Bowling balls bouncing out of the gutter, and back into the pins. When you’re thinking or talking about someone, and they walk past or bump into them (“first week back, guess who bumped into me”…grrr.) ok maybe that’s not such a great example, but nothings really springing to mind, but I know that strange, unlikely things have happened, more strange than things you would see in a movie, and I have no doubt whatsoever, if someone were to film them, present them as a movie to people who had never met you, they would have no hesitation before pointing and proclaiming those inescapable words “that’s unlikely!”

So, I said I had a point…it was heaps clear before, and now I’ve confused myself, so now, the point has forked into two directions:
1) Life is stranger than fiction – you couldn’t write some of the things we experience in these strange, teenage years…
2) Nothing is “unlikely” in the conventional sense of the word – it looks better when I have a comment here…

Anyways, though we can statistic things to death…weird things will still happen. Life is more interesting than movies!

This is the part where everyone holds hands and runs off into the sunset, laughing and grinning idiotically, then we snap back into the present, where the protagonist is sitting at his/her typewriter ((getting a really “Series of Unfortunate Events” vibe here…that would make me Jude Law…hmm)) smiling to themselves, as they take the last page of the manuscript out, and look at it reflectively…

What they wouldn’t do/say is:

I don’t run…I HURTLE