I have, from time to time, stumbled onto a blog in which someone is being very forthright and full of details about some event in their lives. What is prompting this remark is a blog that a few years ago talked about a middle-aged man suddenly finding out he had asymptomatic heart failure, a condition his father had died of at 35. His wife, an author, chronicled the daily progress of his condition; he eventually stabilized.

I suppose my point is that I did not know these people and it was hard to keep in mind that they were real and not characters in a novel or soap opera. Time went on and then he had a major event and she began reporting on what was happening; then she stopped, and not because he died. I find myself thinking, “Well, what happened, what is going on?” It is like falling asleep at the end of a movie and not knowing how things turned out. Of course, I have to keep reminding myself it is not fiction at all, but part of me is wondering about the continuation of the plot, although, as I said, it is not a plot, but real.

It all makes me feel like a voyeur jerk.

Two of us went to see Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation last night because it was someone’s birthday and because we have a really nice refurbished theater in town with $5 ticket prices and the first refill on the popcorn is free. The movie about those fantastic four people was playing on the other screen, but it got a 9 on the Rotten Tomatoes scale and even if it had been highly touted, it is not my type of movie.

In the very first scenes on the MI movie, I found myself thinking of the Bruce Willis movies where all the old spies get together. There were quite a few laughs in the movie and I kept wondering if it were an action film with training wheels for newbies to the genre who needed a slow introduction to the tension present in some of the original ones. THIS IS NOT REAL was virtually stamped on all the actors foreheads, along with THIS IS NOT NEW AND WAS FIRST DONE 30 YEARS AGO  on the foreheads of rubberized facial masks. Of course, all those years ago, the masks were made with a computer 3-D printer in a glass cylinder but that’s just a detail.

In addition to the movie with the birthday, we know have 10 helium balloons floating around the house – five of which are Elmo’s. They are cute; they float to the ceiling and stare down at you with there big Elmo eyes and orange noses; you almost expect them to giggle. It is a tradition that isn’t worth explaining and will probably have disappeared by the time the 19 year old is the age of this scribe.

Because the 19 year old’s mother is working a Baylor Nursing Shift this weekend, we will probably have an on-going birthday week starting Monday. (The day the birthday person has a doctor’s appointment -HAHAHAHAAH. I shouldn’t laugh, but I do. At least it’s not the dentist.)