During the mid-2000’s, I watched a lot of very bad movies, and a few really good ones too. One of the really bad movies starred Lindsey Lohan and Chris Pine, and it was called “Just My Luck.” The basic premise of the movie, which did not make a lot of sense, was that Lohan’s character, an attractive ginger socialite named Ashley Albright, was one of the luckiest people in the world, but when she kisses the handsome but sad-sack and down-on-his-luck character that Chris Pine plays (named Jake Hardin), who happens to be trying to promote the Brit-pop band McFly (who seem like friendly enough blokes), she gives her luck to him [1]. The rest of the movie finds the two of them swapping kisses and discovering that there is apparently only enough good luck in the universe so that one of them can be really lucky and the other spectacularly unlucky. While that makes no sense at all, it is not an unsuitable way to describe today for me.

As I figured going into today, today was a long and busy day. I began the day by getting up after a reasonable night’s sleep and doing some writing. Both last night’s entry [2] and this morning’s entry [3] deal with my own regrets about the lack of communication between my brother and I. I tend to find life frustrating when there is no open communication, and there are definitely some regrets about the distance and estrangement my brother and I have had between us. I’m sure that both of us wish that we could know that the other sees us for who we are, and not as who they thought we were a long time ago. Trust takes time to build up, and tends to be fragile, and when people do not feel safe being themselves for fear of being attacked or ridiculed or treated sarcastically, it can be a difficult matter to overcome. That said, life is too short to cut off anyone who is on our side and not hostile to our best interests at all.

After getting ready for services I left because there was an early choir practice for the piece that we are doing on the Last Day of Unleavened Bread in the afternoon. The usual crowd was there in roughly the usual order, and I ended up collecting a fair amount of the music from our last performance to return to the choir director. After a pretty good practice, and some conversation, there was a very intriguing Bible study from our local pastor about the deeper meanings of leavening (and being puffed up) that are found in the Epistles as well as the Gospels. After an hour of a bit of eating and more talking, there were some brief messages, including one by one of our older deacons about spiritual diabetes (poignant because he has diabetes and it came up later in the memorial service for one of our recently deceased elderly ladies [4], who also struggled with the condition) and a split sermon by our pastor on the probability of someone being able to fulfill even eight prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures that Jesus Christ did as Savior. I gave the closing prayer, which was mostly well-received.

The memorial was very short, and I had some babysitting duty during it, which was odd, to say the least (from what I can gather, my babysitting duty throughout the day appears to have been turned into photos that ought to be enjoyed by my Facebook friends, at any rate, in the near future). It was, to be sure, a somewhat odd experience for me. For one, I did not know Becky that well, and there were a lot of her friends and family (especially family) who showed up for the memorial service that was a trip down memory lane for other people and complete strangers to me. Many of them, as could be expected, were from one or the other Church of God groups, which is striking how people who know each other that well (it would seem) for that long can have nothing to do with each other except for funerals and perhaps weddings. We should not let ourselves be cut off from others who are mostly in agreement with us. Even if matters of politics or personality keep us from walking together, there is no need to throw out years of good times and to not have anything to do with someone else on such grounds. Life is too short to waste it in petty feuds.

In the evening, my luck too a decidedly negative turn. For dinner, I and a couple of friends (who happen to have a basketball team worth of small children between them) ended up deciding on a whim to head off to a Mongolian BBQ restaurant, and by chance we happened to see one off of a particular major road, and we stopped in to eat, with me taking care of one of the girls involved to lower costs for everyone else (since each adult could allow one child to eat for free). As it would happen, a few minutes after we arrived, as we were sorting out the payment, a group of teenagers came in that included one teenager who I am strang verboten (that is, strictly forbidden) from having any contact with whatsoever by a parent. Since our mutual arrivals were not planned at all under any circumstances by me, and it did not seem as if they were planned by the group of younger people as well, the two groups acknowledged the strange coincidence of our meeting and then proceeded to eat, leaving me with an awkward matter to ponder over.

After a scenic and only somewhat pokey route from the restaurant to pinochle, my run of bad luck for the evening continued. I ended up getting suck at the bottom table all night long, but had just a few too many points to win the booby prize for the worst player, although I was not very far off of that prize. By the end of the night I was definitely flagging as far as having enough alertness to keep track of which players scores I was adding, which certainly did not help matters. Winning the last game only served to keep me from ‘winning’ last place, as the late start on this apparent final pinochle party of the season [5] consigned us to only playing four rounds instead of the usual five or six. As it was, I got home near midnight with a lot of pondering to do about the nature of life and communication and a luck that seems so bad it could only be planned by someone else with a much better sense of humor than me.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397078/?ref_=nv_sr_1

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/brother-against-brother-a-civil-war-story/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/hey-brother/

[4] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/sudden-death/

[5] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/i-am-number-seventeen/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/let-the-games-begin/