A Road Less Travelled

I’m sitting down to write a blog post, simply because it’s Sunday afternoon, and I’ve just remembered how much I like having friends.

I’ve been having a difficult time with life lately–refer to my last blog post. This morning during church I cried my way through a (very helpful) sermon on assurance, once again making mental notes *not* to wear eye makeup on days when I’m feeling emotional. Why I always forget this I don’t know… After church, and after finally convincing Margary that really, she’d spend quite enough time going to the bathroom, and we could go talk to people now, I took a deep breath and headed off to see how this whole socializing experience would go with the way I was feeling.

Next thing I know I’m having a serious conversation about happy music, Seth is playing with a large plastic dinosaur and making me laugh at the geekness of it all (and how much of the geekness I totally get!) and I’m reminded almost in passing that the best plots are the ones you can’t figure out until the end (regarding my recent status message that my life has a superb cast, but I can’t figure out the plot). I’m pretty that last one is actually jaw-droppingly momentous in my life at the moment, so I tuck it away for later.

Pretty soon I’m piling food on my plate and arguing that Snickers ’salad’, excellent though it may be, does not count as salad, sparking the suggestion that maybe if added M&Ms so it would have something green…

I can’t handle the agonies of desicion making at this point in time, so instead of trying to figure out who to sit with, I head for an empty table in the classic ’see who likes me enough to sit with me’ maneuver. I have a brief twinge of guilt for neglecting to track down some return visitors that I should probably be joining to make them feel welcome, but within moments they’ve come over to sit with me, so it all works out. Pretty soon Gabrielle, Colton and Samuel E have also joined us and we’re once again hashing out the question of whether Gabrielle or I is scarier. We established that Gabrielle is more willing to inflict pain in a social context, but got sidetracked before we figured out how this fits in with the fact that she’s actually nicer (perhaps less cold…) than I am. Even pulling pitiful puppy dog eyes and saying ‘please’ didn’t convince anyone to admit I was scary… Sigh.

And so here I am, still clueless as to what the plot actually is, but with a cast like this, does it even matter? Seth reminded me earlier this week, in very similar context, that I am a control freak. I want to know what’s going on, and how all the storylines that I brush up against fit together in the end. But it’s not the end yet.

Today was that scene in the movie that’s a lot of fun to watch, but doesn’t seem to tie into the plot a whole lot. Call it character development. Except, in really good movies, doesn’t it usually happen that two scenes later someone mentions some throw-away line from that fun ‘pointless’ scene that ties in to this thing over here, and whole thing turns out to be crucial? Like, maybe, this devoloping theme that I really need to stop being a control freak and trying to figure out what’s going to happen next, and just play the next scene. Hmm…