A few weeks Bob wrote a post about surprise endings:

I’ve thought about this particular Sixth-Sense example quite a bit. I think part of what made it such a great movie was that the evidence was all right there for us to see the whole time. Compare that to The Village, which–though not a bad film–was not the Sixth Sense. At the end of that movie, I did not blame myself for not having known the ending. Yes, things were linked, but I didn’t kick myself for not having known.

That’s not entirely it for Bob, either, as he also believes that it works if it “forces a reevaluation of a relatively large number of facts.”
I’ll start by saying that I still haven’t seen The Sixth Sense and cannot comment on its relative value (though I do know about the surprise ending).

I agree with Bob and would add that the surprise ending ought not only to have clues along the way, but ought to explain something that you either didn’t understand along the way or chalked up to innate weirdness.

There were two surprises in Memento and a lot of resolved mysteries. The answering of the mystery of how Teddy ended up in Leonard’s crosshairs wasn’t so much a surprise I guess but rather a mystery solved. The entire movie was a succession of mysteries getting solved (“Why am I here?” “why is [something] like it is?”). The first was how precisely the black and white scenes merged with the color scenes and that it was all part of the same timeline (I had thought that the black and whites were just flashbacks to establish a backdrop).

The bigger surprise, though, was Leonard’s culpability in his wife’s death. That didn’t do as much for me as other surprise endings have, though, because it didn’t answer any questions that I was asking. It did shed some light on past events, but in some ways it raised more logistical questions than it answered.

Fight Club was slightly better in that regard. There were a lot of weird things going on throughout the movie that the surprise ending answered. Eventually the viewer just resigned himself or herself to the idea that the movie is just weird and surreal and let it go because it was entertaining and interesting. The revelation about Tyler Durden, though, made sense of the oddities of Marla’s behavior (and in retrospect made her a more sympathetic character) and of other seeming loose ends. It did raise other questions, though (did the people around him really not get wind that he was crazy?).

Another example would be Jacob’s Ladder. Leonard Maltin complained that it “negated the entire film” but in my mind it explained more than it negated. It explained all of the oddities going on and either answered the mysteries or established that there was no answer to them. Wild Things is another one with a surprise ending. The ending didn’t explain that much about the preceding events, but it was interesting to have everything you watched adjusted to a different narrative and adequately explained (as opposed to Memento).

For several months a year or so ago, a post started formulating in my head, but I never actually got around to posting it. Had I written it, it would have gone something like:

One of the interesting things about relationships (both of the platonic and romantic variety) is how often they are dependent on timing and circumstance. My wife and I both commented that had we met earlier in our lives there is a pretty good chance that we never would have gotten together or if we had it might have been really toxic. Julie and I were nearly perfect for one another when we got together, but then we drifted separately to the point that I’m not sure we’d even be friends if we met today. There are also times when so much has happened that the best two people perfect for one another can hope for is to split up and meet someone almost exactly like their previous soulmate.

When Evangeline made her final effort at reconciliation shortly before marrying Clancy, one of the reasons I gave for going forward with the engagement was that while it was every bit as possible for things to go poorly with Clancy as they had with Eva, I knew in painstaking detail everything that could go wrong with the latter and a part of me would never stop bracing for it, no matter how honest her intentions were.

But this post actually has more to do with friendships than relationships. Specifically, it’s about my friendship with my former roommate Hubert. When Hugh and I were roommates at Southern Tech, we got along really well the first year, not so well the second year, grudgingly the third year, and miserably the fourth.

During that time, he was going through a real rough patch. His mother and step-father were divorcing, which was causing all sorts of financial problems. His college funds were drying up and suddenly he was unexpectedly going to have to start paying for his schooling. He had to change majors. Relationship troubles. Various family members were sick. Things just weren’t going his way. Add to that, he was wearing thin on a lot of his friends even before things in his private life turned nasty.

At the same time, I was going through my breakup with Julie after nearly five years. I was deciding not to go to law school. I’d gotten into my second serious auto accident in two years. I was carrying a full-time work and classload. There have been times in my life that I would have been perfectly happy and willing to help a friend through some troubled times, but that wasn’t one of them and Hubert at the time did not accept help gracefully. Do him a favor and he’d criticize you for doing it wrong.

By the time we parted ways, I lamented the fact that our similar circles meant that I couldn’t extricate him from my life entirely. Being as unlike him as much as possible was actually somewhat important to me. In some ways this was genuinely helpful to me because it broke me out of certain behavior patterns that he and I had in common, but it’s never good to carry that kind of hostility around you all of the time. When he announced to me that he was getting married, the first feeling I had was dratting that after all was said and done he was getting married before I was. Fortunately I’d met Clancy by that point and I knew I was going to marry her, so I was at least able to accept defeat gracefully. It’s noteworthy that he is the only friend whose romantic failures I delighted in and for whom I cared about who found their life partner first.

By the time he got engaged and got married, though, he had become a different person. He started getting a handle on his temper, which was huuuuugely important. He stopped trying to be so impressive and working triple-time to fit in. He got a better sense of what was and was not important and stopped alienating people trying to dictate unimportant things. You could mention something vaguely political without a big giant political wrath coming down upon you. Heck, you could actually discuss politics with him where you disagree without everything blowing up. He stopped talking about how he was becoming more laid back and actually started becoming so.

These changes were noticeable. He actually had a serious relationship that lasted more than nine months, and then when that fell apart, he went on to meet someone else and she tolerated him for more than nine months, too. She even married him! Clancy met Hubert on the same weekend that she met Julie. With all I’d said about both, she expected to like Julie and to have to tolerate Hugh. Instead, she came away with it not sure at all what to make of Julie and with a very positive impression of Hubert. She had to ask if that was the same Hugh I’d been talking about or if there were somehow two different Hughs.

Of course, there is a rub. No matter how much I can see the changes in him, I don’t feel the changes. It’s not that he’s betraying his new-self with old-self behavior just under the veneer anymore. Rather, it’s that I have difficulty seeing him as he is without seeing him as he was. I can’t stop walking on eggshells when I’m around him. I can’t stop waiting for the old-self to make itself apparent in some subtle or unsubtle way. I can’t stop letting all of the little things that would never bother me with anyone else bother me with him.

It’s all rather unfortunate. For better and worse I lived with the guy for four years. He and I share a whole lot of the same interests and developed them together or having introduced them to one another. We have many of the same friends. If I met him today, we’d be great friends.

But I didn’t meet him today. I’ve seen his really ugly sides and I don’t know if I can really get the image of it out of my mind and since it’s all so instinctual I don’t know how to influence these unhelpful thoughts.

—

I never wrote the blog post because I kept procrastinating and procrastinating and now I can’t write it anymore. I’m not sure when all of the above finally changed, but it did. Though I don’t know when it happened, I do know when I realized that it had happened. Clancy and I made our way back to Delosa for a short vacation. We got together with our wives and a friend and his wife and we hung out for several hours going to see a movie and then talking about it afterwards.

When the night had come to an end, he said, “This has been great. We should really do it again next time you’re in town.”

I said, “Yeah, we should.”

And I actually meant it.

The New York Giants are the NFL’s “champions”.

The New York Giants had a 10-6 regular season record. Four other teams had 10-6 records, one of which wasn’t even invited into the post-season.

A whopping 6 teams had a better regular season than the Giants, putting the Giants only barely in the top quartile of NFL teams from September 6th to December 29th.

The New York Giants did not win their division. Divisions only contain four teams. They failed to achieve a winning record within their division.

The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots, who went 16-0 in the regular season including a victory over the “champions” and whose only loss came at the end of the playoffs with a quarterback that may have been something below 100% due to injury. They won their first playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys, against whom they went 0-2 in the season making their overall record against the team a losing one for the year.

But… because they managed to eek out a slightly-better-than-mediocre regular season record and then pulled out wins in their last four games, the last three of which they won by a single field goal, they get to be the champions.

Fair enough. I don’t think that the Giants should have been in the playoffs because I don’t think that we should have wildcards, but those are the rules of the game and everyone knew going into the season that those were the rules of the game.

Yet many of the same people that will be talking about Eli Manning and the Giants and what champions they are do not believe that LSU were truly the NCAA football champions because they didn’t deserve a shot at the title because they lose twice, in triple-overtime, to Arkansas and Kentucky. Nevermind the BCS rules wherein every team knew that they might have to win every single game for a shot at the championship and that there’s no team that anyone can definitely point to as the team that “should be” the national championships (in contrast to 2002, when USC was the renegade champion).

So, in tribute to anti-BCS folks everywhere, I will put quotes or air quotes around the words “champion” and “championship” in reference to the New York Giants (until I get tired of doing so) because I don’t like the system that produced their so-called “championship”.

So… is everyone nervous about the Super Duper Tuesday primaries tonight? Is anyone? Seems to me no matter who you support, you have reason to be nervous. Two candidates lining up for victory that could quite easily be derailed and two other candidates whose candidacies could be killed today. I suppose that today is one of those days that it’s good for the blood pressure to be apathetic or supporting a candidate with virtually no chance of winning.

On a sidenote, there was some maniac cutting back and forth through traffic today, incurring the wrath of all of the drivers. Why was he driving so maniacally? So that everyone could see his “Honk if you support Ron Paul” sign. I suppose that’s one way to drum up support. My coworker Roberto somewhere got the idea that the honkers may have been doing so because they were agitated and not because they support Mr. Paul because it was usually the drivers that he was cutting off at any given moment that were honking. My other coworker Pat thinks that they were supporting Mr. Paul and only the drivers that were getting cut off could read the sign. In an effort to avoid work, we discussed this for about ten minutes.

Many years ago George Bush was campaigning in Colosse and traffic was shut down by secret service during a jog. My friend Kaye’s husband voted for Bill Clinton. It was the first time he’d ever voted for a Democrat and I don’t think that Kaye has forgiven him for that to this day.

I did something last week that I had never done in my entire life. Just my luck, a cop was right there to see me do it.

I was driving on I-31 from my apartment in Santomas 45 miles or so away to my job in Almeida. Out of nowhere, traffic halted to a scratch. It was so chaotic that I almost got sideswiped by a truck. Then it was dull, because all we were doing was sitting there. It’s not unusual for traffic on the interstate as commuters from one city to the next are not unusual, but never was traffic remotely this bad unless there had been an accident.

I saw hours and hours of my life flash before my eyes when I saw a ton of “Road Work Ahead” signs. Could they really be closing so many lanes during rush hour that everything grinds to a halt? I feared that if they were, my ordinary 45 minute commute was about to become a lot longer.

As more time passed and progress was minimal, I came to the conclusion that there must be an accident. There must, right? So I turned on the radio waiting for the traffic report. The AM dial was full of conservative talk radio hosts lamenting McCain’s victory in Florida the previous day and expressing their views on the immigrants from Cuba that assisted him in his victory. I couldn’t listen to any one of them for too long without getting pissed off, so I started maniacally flipping through of them waiting to hear the magic words.

“traffic report after these messages”

The ads were a welcome relief, and as promised the traffic guy came on. “There are minor slowdowns on Spencer Street and 8th and 9th street as is always the case on work mornings. Traffic hasn’t slowed down on State Highway 8 as much as usual. Traffic on the toll loop is clear sailing, so don’t forget to get your Estags so that you can start having cleeeeeeeear sailing around town. Also, I-31 is closed northbound because of an accident.”

After getting over my irritation that he’d saved the most noteworthy part for a single sentence in the back of his report, I started pondering my options. It didn’t take long because I had none. Ahhhh, well, I thought, and decided that half an hour in traffic wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Then I crossed over a hill and saw cars literally as far as my eyes could see. That was at least five miles and I’d gone one mile in the last half hour. That was when I saw it. The there was a little dirty bridge over the ditch between the interstate and the access road. Further, there was a Happy Burger just smiling at me in the town we were passing.

I had never in my life attempted to illegally exit a freeway. I typically look down on those that do since all it does is clog up the access road and doesn’t seem to speed anyone up. But then I thought about it some more and if I was just going to hang out at the Happy Burger and get myself some breakfast until everything cleared, what was the harm in that? Heck, at the rate things were going I could catch a movie at the theater behind the Happy Burger. By the time the movie was out surely the wreckage would have been moved, right? I was wrong about that, incidentally, and besides no movie would have been playing that early in the day.

So I decided on an impulse to try to make my naughty exit. And there was the officer on the motorcyle who happened to be passing along right then. In the previous 45 minutes I had yet to see a single police car. That was why I had thought that it might just be routine construction. Usually when there is an accident, there are police cars headed towards it, right? Up until that second, there hadn’t been.

Surprisingly, the cop just stopped in front of me and pointed for me to get my ass back in line. I was surprised that he didn’t write me a ticket because illegal exits (like driving on the shoulder) are the sorts of things that really piss cops off when they see it. I think it disturbs their sense of order disproportionately compared to the nature of the crime.

Regardless, the cop let me go and went on his merry way. I easily could have exited again, but decided against it. A Happy Breakfast Sandwich would not have been enough to make me happy at that point.

When I related this to my coworker Pat, she explained a theory that she had. Cops, above all, want to be important. They signed up for important work and instead get stuck on things like traffic detail. One of the reasons that crying when you get pulled over is one of the better ways to get out of a ticket is not because of sympathy on their part, but rather submission on yours. You’ve acknowledged their importance, so no need to be an ass about it. It is when cops feel that their importance isn’t being acknowledged or when they have nothing else to do that they start going all Napoleon. When there’s something big going on, like a wreck, they’ve got better things to do. They’re already important.

It’s an interesting theory.

All told it took me about three hours to get across six miles of Interstate. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even get to see the accident. It happened on an overpass, naturally, and they had forced us onto the access roads at that point. When you pay admission, the least you should get is to see the show.

The Interstate was closed for a whopping six hours in all. A flatbed delivering kitchen tiling hit a car or got hit by a car and there were apparently shards of tile everywhere. No one was hurt, but they had a lot of tiles to pick up and a gasoline leak to manage.

When I finally broke free of the traffic and was going 90 miles an hour (why not? Every policeman in the county had Important Work to contend with and nobody on that freeway was going below 80), I heard another traffic report on the radio. About twenty seconds of explaining that traffic on city roads were going slightly slower or faster than expected, five seconds shilling for the Estag, and one sentence at the end explaining that I-31 was closed due to an accident, once again not even mentioning where precisely the Interstate was closed.

Back when I was in college, I had a job as a night operator over a computer network. I was also on what I call the “Water Diet”. The goal of the Water Diet is to drink obscene amounts of water. It would push the food through your system faster and keep you full to prevent you from eating too much. It was great while I was on it, but it became more than my bladder could bear.

The tipping point was when I drank 3/4 as I was leaving work and on my drive home. I figured I would be okay bladder-wise because there was usually a 45-minute delay as the water passed through my system before it needed to come out.

There was a traffic jam that day. A huge, huge traffic jam. I was in that car for a lot longer than the alotted 45 minutes. Worse, I was unable to get off the freeway to find a McDonald’s or convenience store to take advantage of.

I’ve always had a weak bladder and I’ve never suffered it kindly. I expect at least one restroom break whenever I go see a movie. I held it as long as as valiantly as I possibly could. Then, on the floorboard on the passenger side, I saw the empty water bottle just emptily sitting there completely empty.

By the time I made it back to the university, I had filled 2 /12 one-quart water bottles.

When I got home I had to tell someone about my near-explosion, my surprising limberness within the car, and my good old fashioned inginuity. So I messaged my friend Clint and told him the whole story.

That’s what I thought I’d done, anyway. I realized my error when I got a message back from my mother.

trummama: So it all worked out, then?

trumwill: Oh crap!

trumwill: Hi, mom.

trummama: No pun intended, I’m sure.

trumwill: Sorry, I thought I was sending this to Clint.

trummama: No problem. Glad it all worked out for you.

trummama: Must be nice being male.

Recently the Wall Street Journal had an article about how more churches are culling their flocks:

Her story reflects a growing movement among some conservative Protestant pastors to bring back church discipline, an ancient practice in which suspected sinners are privately confronted and then publicly castigated and excommunicated if they refuse to repent. While many Christians find such practices outdated, pastors in large and small churches across the country are expelling members for offenses ranging from adultery and theft to gossiping, skipping service and criticizing church leaders.

The revival is part of a broader movement to restore churches to their traditional role as moral enforcers, Christian leaders say. Some say that contemporary churches have grown soft on sinners, citing the rise of suburban megachurches where pastors preach self-affirming messages rather than focusing on sin and redemption. Others point to a passage in the gospel of Matthew that says unrepentant sinners must be shunned.

It’s odd to me that the article doesn’t seem to make any distinction between kicking someone out of the church for being a flagrant sinner and kicking someone out of the church for the sin of disagreeing with church leadership on procedural matters. What is really distressing is how some of these pastors don’t see a difference, either.

Some of you may remember the story of Walt. Walt was a friend of mine that had a relationship with a divorced mother. A long story short, though she was legally divorced she was not divorced in the eyes of the church. He was excommunicated and within months he took his own life. It’s difficult for me to read about these excommunications without thinking about Walt.

Churches are of course free to excommunicate those members that do not adhere to its beliefs. The Catholic Church can deny communion to pro-life politicians and it all makes a certain amount of sense to me. It’s one thing if someone sins and is repentant, but it’s another if they flagrantly sin or advocate views that are unholy in the eyes of the church. The existence of sin is one thing, but the embrace of it is another.

In that sense, it pains me to say that the church was within its rights to do what it did and on one level I can understand it.

It seems to me, though, that such a thing ought to be a last resort. Sin and redemption are par the course for Christianity. Walt was never given a chance to reflect and repent. Further, and this is where I see things very differently from a lot of more conservative churches, there are sins and there are sins. Walt’s only crime was sleeping with (not having sex with, only sleeping with) a woman whose divorce was not recognized by the church. In the greater scheme of things that has to count less than being a home-wrecker or supporting the legal sanction of 750k murders a year (which, if one believes that a fetus is a full-fledged human life as many churches do, a pro-choice politician is doing), isn’t it? Not in the eyes of a lot of churches, I’ve come to find out. A sin is a sin is a sin in the eyes of many.

It seems to me that if a church goes this route, there won’t be any perishoners left. That’s perhaps what disturbs me most of all. A lot of these are going to fall under “selective enforcement”. Is selective enforcement better than no enforcement? Maybe. The problem is that when certain types are targeted for enforcement. I remember reading a while back about a Catholic school that wouldn’t let a pregnant student walk for graduation… but they let the father. When it comes to sexual sins, we’re very frequently more harsh on the women than on the men. I’d imagine that rich and generous perishoners would be given the benefit of the doubt for their sins in a way that those that haven’t as much to give wouldn’t.

Some of the shunned people in the article had sins no worse than irritating the priest. There’s the woman that was shunned for “gossiping” and a lot of space devoted to a woman that disagreed with her pastor on a procedural matter. One wonders why the exiled wouldn’t say “good riddance”, but the nature of the separation is pretty unchristian in nature, to say the least.

Of course I come at this from an Episcopalian’s perspective, where church is more about brotherhood and community than it is righteous indignation.