conundrous

Right at the start of the movie Love Actually -- which is the credits, really, I guess -- I'm laughing, I'm crying.  That premise of people meeting each other at the airport, picking up loved ones, being picked up, the hugs, the smiles, the extreme happiness of that moment of reunion: I love that so much.  It's everything that's best about us.  It's that combination of so much sweetness and so much love that gets me every time, that makes me just laugh and cry at the same time.  

I'm not kidding: Every Time.  Because that's a movie that's in my holiday rotation, along with Miracle on 34th Street (an adorable, delightful movie that we were never allowed to watch as children because our mother could not abide Natalie Wood, which is a ridiculous reason, seriously), and Babe (cutest EVER movie with talking animals, and so sweet the love between man and pig), and Elf (a freaking classic).  To fully inhabit holiday mode, I ingest those movies.  They ramp up my happiness, my givingness, my love for everybody. 

Sometimes I forget how sweet we people are. I need to be reminded.

In the same hour that I was shocked to see this video of a car hitting two cyclists and taking off, I also watched this piece that just rocked my whole world.  It made me laugh and cry exactly the same way as the credits of Love Actually, loving how much potential we humans have to be funny, to be goofy, to be cute.  And yes, I should add that it made me laugh and cry EVERY TIME I watched it, since I probably watched it 4 times yesterday.  And just now, embedding in this post, I watched it again.

Which brings me to the word conundrous, coined by my clever husband to describe how he says I am about people, a personified conundrum, making me, yes, conundrous. 

I adore people -- love their cleverness, their cuteness, their sweetness.  I am crazy for certain people in certain transactions, the checker who was funny or particularly nice at the supermarket, the funny man I met while walking Mr Burns, the amazing guy driving the free shuttle from the Toyota dealership.  I have all these great interactions with strangers and with the amazing people I actually know, lots of opportunities to sigh and say, "Damn, people are just so great!"

But I might spend an equal amount of time bitching about how lame people are, how loud they talk or eat in movie theaters, what assholes they are when behind the wheel of a car, what idiots leaving their carts thoughtlessly blocking an entire aisle at the store, what morons disseminating incorrect information to their children at a natural history museum, what monsters hitting two cyclists clearly in the shoulder of the road and then driving away, just like that.  "Damn, people are such jerks!"

Hence the conundrous.  But maybe it's not just me.  I'm not alone in being conundrous.  We all are that funny word which I wish would catch on 'cause it's so great.  

We are all the driver of that black sedan in the video,

we are all the guy dance walking down Fifth Avenue.  

I know I'm just as big a jerk behind the wheel of a car, getting crazy about being in the fastest lane, talking smack about the drivers around me, bitching up a storm in the imagined safety of my metal and plastic container. But then I'm also the person in the airport throwing my arms around somebody, my sister or a friend.  I'm also the person offering to help an old lady standing in the mall parking lot clutching her walker with one hand, her left-overs in a plastic bag with the other.  I am also the goofy one dancing, hoping others will join in or at least smile and/or laugh, with me or at me, I don't care.

We are all conundrous.  But let's work on swinging the pendulum more to the happy side.  Let's remember what the movie and the song say: Love is all around.  Let's dance walk, baby, making friends with strangers, smiling, crying, laughing to the beat.  

XX