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sunshine jen: The Other Family
I like hanging out with the offspring of my friends. Kids have imaginations that I can relate to. Besides, I can give the children back when I’m through with them.
Recently, a four year old girl, told us about her Other Family. Apparently, her Other Family lives in a pink house with a pink lawn, and they eat candy all the time. I’m not sure if the candy is pink as well. After describing her other world, the girl then sneezed and her snots ran down her shirt.
Later the girl went into an epic monologue about elephant poop. Fortunately, the mother stopped the elephant poop monologue after about five minutes. The little girl was starting to gross me out.
Getting back to the less smelly idea of the Other Family, I wonder sometimes if we might have doubles of ourselves out there somewhere. What if our doubles are living our lives for us? What if we walked by our double on the street one day and didn’t even know it?
Thinking about this whole double thing, I recently netflixed Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique which I hadn’t seen in over a decade. In the film, Irene Jacob plays both Veronika, a singer in Poland, and Veronique, a music teacher in Paris. Even thought the two women never meet, they are doubles of each other.
I remember seeing it back in college and being a little perplexed by it. Okay, so there are two of them, and one dies and one falls in love and it all ends back at Dad’s house. I think I was too young for this movie.
When I saw it this time, I was blown away (oh my gawd, I was like so blown away by it). Kieslowski gives us not too much and not too little. It’s a triumph for precision.
But getting back to the double idea, what I got from the Veronique film was the idea that we have doubles all around us---they can be lovers, family, art objects, but we are never alone. Even the trunk of a tree can reflect something of ourselves. We all have other families. They just don’t all live in pink houses.
This paragraph is a digression. Have you noticed how websites easily turn into verbs? The most obvious is google which can be defined as searching with the google search engine. Above, in order to get the idea out quickly, I said, I netflixed instead of I rented with my netflix account and watched after it arrived at my house in a timely manner.
Can happyrobot also be verb? Leave me alone, honey, I’m happyroboting. How about, let me happyrobot and then I’ll call you back. I gotta happyrobot, I just gotta happyrobot. I’m gonna read through this piece one more time before I happyrobot it.
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