This Is Where I Leave You

Another movie about family, their dysfunctions, their humanity, and the way we all just keep on "growing up". Jason Bateman sorta plays the same guy in each movie he's in. In this one, which is threaded with quiet humor but not really a comedy because there's so much family drama in it, he's pretty sweet, just as he is. But there's this one scene where he's lying on the ice in a rink with Rose Byrne and she said something to him, and to me, that made me stop and write this down.

JB-I've spent my entire life playing it safe just to avoid being exactly where I am right now.

RB- You know, where you are right now is in a cool rink on a hot day listening to a Cyndi Lauper classic, underneath disco lights. Cut yourself some slack, Jake. Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.

Like tonight when I went to take a hot tub in my emptied house and realized that the electricity is turned off and finding out the "children" thought they had paid the electric bill but paid the water by mistake. Like realizing that I thought the whole city hall shenanigans around my lot line adjustment were over but found out it's only the beginning of the end at the bank getting 3 drawings notarized with my neighbors.

With all the "hurry up and wait", I am so many different people these days. The one getting all her ducks in a row. The one relentlessly romantic by herself. The frustrated one. The one who cries sometimes alone at night but laughs at and talks to playful beautiful crows in the day. The impatient Aries who is often the oblivious one. The older woman watching everything unfold. Still, there's this one that sits with my Self more constantly these days. The me that understands that all the moments, the dilemmas, the wrong turns, the traffic, the joys.... all the ways and the "ones" that I am, they are all blessings. She's the grateful one who continues to teach me about who we all really are with lessons on the source of happiness.

And then, of course, there is the one that will digress regularly.

Another really good part of it is where Deborah Monk and Jane Fonda come out to the entire neighborhood and family with a luscious kiss!!