Well, it’s 2012 and as my friend was kind enough to point out during a lovely dinner yesterday, “This could be our last year.”

How pleasant.

That being said, it very well could be our last year, just as it could be our last week, day, or hour. You never know. I’ve learned that the Universe likes to play tricks on its inhabitants sometimes, be it placing items in direct pathways of clumsy people or teasing you with all the things you can have. So cue the cliches of living every day like it’s your last and here’s to another year (hopefully) of all the wonderful oddities and mishaps that make life interesting.

-L

P.S. If it didn’t come across, I am not a morning person.

Does it ever seem like the Universe needs a good laugh?

The past two Sundays must have been a field day for whoever is playing practical jokes up there.

Last Sunday brought an onslaught of emotional stress. Those details don’t matter- in fact, at the tail end of my day I had only to clean the bathroom before I could collapse and sleep off any lingering negative emotions. Cleaning the bathroom in itself provided a prodcutive way to zone out. I turned out my music and let the bleach fumes distract me.

And then I was standing in a giant puddle of water.

Normally I would attribute this to my general clumsiness; on the first assessment of the situation with my roommates that was the conclusion. So we mopped everything up (except, of course, we didn’t actually have a mop) and I continued on. It was approaching midnight and I couldn’t wait to take a shower in an exceptionally clean shower.

And the water appeared again. In fact, the water kept coming. Was the tub overflowing? No. The floor was… underflooding. In other words, the water from our apparently clogged tub was coming up from the floor rather than draining. The result looked something like this:

Once that crisis was finally resolved at 2 a.m. I finally got to sleep.

So the disasters end there, yes?

Today, this lovely Sunday, seemed pleasant enough. Other than a slight scare on the Red Line when the engineer had to “step off the train” to “fix” something or another, the sun shone for more than a few moments at a time and I didn’t blow away in the wind. Running on this relative pleasantness, I settled in to work on some impending homework thinking Life Would Go On.

And as I typed away suddenly the lights started to fade and in an instant the world was dark.

Okay, so the building lost power.

Now that I am re-settled in again after evacuting for about an hour, I should just be able to laugh this out. And the Universe would join me.

Is it next week yet?

Despite living in a diverse city filled with artistic opportunities, I found myself completely disengaged from multiple cultural events going on Chicago. In hopes of correcting this I set out this quarter to explore more cultural venues and less expensive boutiques, a quest which led me most recently to the Chicago Film Festival, a two-week event which features different movies that showcase talent and culture from around the world.

Unfortunately, like most cultural events, the Film Festival does not come without a cost; thus, as much as I would have liked to see multiple films I only attended one. On Tuesday, October 18, I shelled out the cash to go see the American film Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

Due to my aforementioned dysfunctional lifestyle, I assigned the task of picking out a movie to my more organized friends and thus had no idea what to expect from this film. Waiting in line for the theater to open, I learned only that I should anticipate a comedy starring Jason Segel and Ed Helms. Right before the movie began to play, one of the directors present also introduced it as “the funniest film ever.”

Jeff, Who Lives at Home takes place in only the span of a single day and consequently felt like a brief film. The title character, Jeff (Segel), is a thirty-year-old still living at his mother’s house. By the end of the movie I fell in love with him and his unfailing devotion to his brother and unwavering faith in his own fate and destiny, despite all the trouble such tendencies lead him to. His brother, Pat (Helms), at first seems a static, unfriendly character but later proves dynamic and just as loving as his brother. Their quirky mother, played by Susan Sarandon, reveals herself to be almost as dreamy as the supposedly misunderstood Jeff.

Without going into the details of the plot of the film, I found the characters and their unique personalities highly engaging. After the film, the same director, Jay Duplass, helped explain why the movie led me to feel this way.

Duplass, who wrote and directed Jeff, Who Lives at Home, and three other hit feature films with his brother Mark Duplass, described their style of filming as more documentary-like, relying heavily on the improvisation of the actors. “We just let it run,” he stated, and the result is the ability to “capture something real” onscreen. The characters in this movie certainly seemed very real to me, wholesome and loveable, even despite their flaws. Duplass also summarized the movie as one that acknowledges humans’ “great fear about not achieving [their] full potential.” When he described this at length, the movie became even more meaningful to me. Jeff, though described as “desperate,” represents the fear in all of us that we have not yet accomplished everything in our power. Such a feeling is similar to that of our own insignificance in the world.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home not only allowed me to experience something “cultural” but allowed me a moment of humorous reflection into those deep set fears. Because of the movie’s positive ending, however, it left me with a sense of hope that even though I may never fully figure out my destiny, I will undoubtedly have small moments in my life where I fulfill part of it.