Thoughts on Life and Zombieland

Today (well, technically yesterday) I had a day where I did a lot of deep thinking. It all started with watching ‘Zombieland’…

If you’re familiar with the movie, you’ll know that everyone, at least in the United States, has been turned into zombies except for four people and Bill Murray. You would never pick these four people to take a road trip together so that they can get to Pacific Play Land where there are, supposedly, no zombies whatsoever.

Columbus has this tiny notepad where he wrote down some personal rules that he keeps and refers to often throughout the movie.

First thing that I thought about: How much I really, really want to take a road trip. I don’t really care where we end up going. Heck, I’m game for just taking whatever strip of highway looks best and then getting the Google map later so that we can get back. The big thing that I want to do is see the world and what better way to do that than to get lost and find all the good hiding places?

Second thing: How Columbus’ rules really can and should apply to real life. Seatbelts, that’s obvious. Double tap was a little harder. The only thing that I can think of since I wrote this as a draft at 2:17 in the morning is food. If you’re not entirely sure if your food is ready, cook it again for a little bit longer. Appreciate the little things, absolutely. Lots of people are so worried about the big picture: a crumbling economy, politics and whether or not it’s working to their advantage, health care, parents, children… it’s all so overwhelming when you step back and take it all in. In the big mosaic of life, when you step back too far, you miss those intricate patterns that you would have easily have caught had you been standing closer to the wall.

Never thought that I would get that from ‘Zombieland’!

(My actual elementary school, just several years ago when there was no areal mural. Excuse the bad quality)

Later, when I decided to exit my room and actually be social, I went into my basement where my mom was getting ready for bed and my sister was watching a movie on TBS. It just happened to be ‘Forest Gump.’ I’m not sure what caused her to get up, but my sister got up, left the room, and returned with her box of stuff from grade school. It seemed like a cool idea, so I followed suite and went and retrieved mine

Old art projects, crappy yearbooks, humongous handwriting that I can’t even dream of reading any more… it’s a huge nostalgia-fest, but it was really nice to just take stuff out of our boxes and show each other what really weird people we used to be. My sister spelled enough like “e-nuff” and I thought that bears “lay their babies” like a bird would lay an egg. So we weren’t the brightest bulbs in the tanning bed… We laughed at horrible spelling and grammar (alright, I did. It was horrendous…), bad pictures that were taken when our hair was cropped too short, we had gained a lot of weight (something I’m still ashamed about to this day, because whenever one of my former classmates finds a picture, they always point out how big I was), or we just looked funny in general…

My entire point of this section of this entry is that I learned just how much I’ve changed over the years. I’m not going to go so far as to say that this had a larger impact on me than on my sister (because she’s about to enter high school and that’s a big step), but since I’m three years older than her, there’s more stuff for me to go through and recollect and remember; she was in fifth grade three years ago and I was in fifth grade six years ago.

I’ve changed a lot. I don’t feel like the crazy-cat-lady that I deem my younger self to be (I’m hardly joking when I say this). I don’t want to be President when I’m forty-six, my notion that you had to be sixteen years old to start babysitting was false… my drawing style has changed significantly. I don’t use crayons nearly as often. I don’t pass notes to my best friend any more because we go to different schools and hardly see each other any more. We do email a lot though. I hope that my writing has improved significantly. Coherent sentences would be nice at the very least… I don’t feel blind to life as I kind of perceived while going through my stuff. I thought I knew so much at such a young age, but I was just a ten year old kid. I can’t know everything. I can’t be completely prepared, because certain curveballs just won’t come my way while others will. As scary as all of that might sound, that makes me feel a little bit better about myself now. If I’ve gotten through all of that crap that happened starting twelve years ago, I feel like I can take on the next great adventure with my head held high and with confident actions.

I’m sorry if this was incredibly dull for you to read, but I felt like I need to write this and I feel so much better! If nothing else, this will be good material for a future story.

Thanks for reading! I’ll try and get some more reviews up in the next few days.

--Jude