On the day of the "great blog power outage", I entered my first year as a "thirtysomething". Jenny and I were off relaxing on the San Juan islands. It was a wonderful three day trip of doing basically nothing. It isn't very often that I have a time where the greatest goal for a day is reading a few more pages in a book of fiction. In this case, Pattern Recognition
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Birthdays are important events in Jenny's world and my birthday has always been very important to my Mom. However, this birthday, more than any birthday before it, felt more important to others than me. I had an inkling of this feeling late last year but I still find it interesting to watch it play out in reality. I guess I feel like I'm still 27 or 29.
Anyway, I don't really have anything profound to say about turning 31 so I'm going to leave things with a random thought I captured a couple weeks ago.
Tonight I got home late (around 20:00). As soon as she saw me, Jenny made it abundantly clear before dinner that she wanted to go *out* to see a movie tonight. We had heard good things about “Juno” so that was the plan.
The movie is simple (no massive super starts or special effects) but really quite witty. It has also been out for quite a while. That meant the huge lines of teenagers outside the theater were going to a different movie. In this case, I think it was “Step Up 2”.
So, that left Jenny and I with about ten other couples (all couples) in a mostly empty theater. Pretty much the way I prefer it. Who doesn’t like their own private showing on the big screen?
A friend of mine, one of my previous roommates, is into movies. On the weekends he likes to play assistant director to independent film makers. It’s his hobby (I need a hobby). From him we all learned to sit through the credits at the end of every movie and pay our respects to those people that poured in their heart and soul or mind and muscle or time and money.
Jenny was sniffling since the movie has one of those type of endings. I was being quietly contemplative as I often am when a book or movie reaches its end. While sitting there watching the white letters roll up the black screen I noticed the people leaving. That’s when it struck me (as random things often strike me when chill). Everyone in the audience was in pairs and old.
I don’t mean they were 80 years old but they were all definitely over 30. Heck, next week I turn 31 and that still doesn’t seem right. Anyway, I thought about what that meant. Jenny and I were definitely behind the curl but that felt completely comfortable. We’re getting older but I suppose that’s just the way it goes. Maybe I’m just looking for the next “age appropriate” thing to be or do. I expect what’s next is something like what “Juno” did in the end.
Or maybe the reason they (we?) were all old was just because we picked the 21:25 showing and thus was after all the teeny boppers, or as one of my friends calls them “prosti-tots”, curfew. I kinda’ prefer the sound of that one.
Rob Mensching - 02/15/2008
posted @ Monday, February 25, 2008 12:21 PM