Last night, after a satisfying meal of lasagna and ice cream, my husband turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels. He surfed for a bit, landing briefly on one show, then skipped to another during the commercial, as he often does; a practice that drives me crazy, as I would prefer to sit through a bunch of commercials rather than have my attention divided by three shows at one time and risk missing some of the show that I really wanted to watch. Fortunately, between DVR, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HULU, we rarely watch live TV, so this is not usually a problem. One might think given all the opportunities listed for entertainment, that we watch a lot, but the truth is with the exception of a few reality shows (Survivor! Amazing Race! and embarrassingly, Big Brother), and an occasional movie, usually several years old by the time we get to it, we rarely watch TV at all. Certainly not in the daytime, and depending on our schedules, sometimes days go by without either one of us turning it on, since we are both of the opinion that we’d rather do something fun, then sit and watch someone else have it. This is pretty much the same reason that I refused to be a cheerleader growing up, because I never wanted to just watch the action and cheer for someone else, I wanted to get out there and have someone cheer for me.
In any event, we somehow settled on The Hunger Games, a movie I’d seen on at least two other occasions as well having read the series several years ago; a literary fad sitting squarely between the innocent Twilight series, and the grownup 50 Shades of Grey, which I could not get into because of the shocking lack of attention to detail as evidenced by the way-off base use of adjectives and verbs in a supposedly American setting (brilliant, keen…seriously?!? I don’t know any person around here who says those things!). Why not just set it in Britain then, a country whose vernacular it’s author is clearly more familiar with. Even the “Grey” in the title is the more widely used UK version. C’mon! Obvious faux pas such as these, drive me bonkers, and ruin the whole book for me, often within the first chapter and is something I consider to be a turn-off, rather than the turn-on the author intended (but, grammarly and smart people, please don’t judge me as harshly, for I am but a lowly nurse blogger with no editor and no matter how many times my super-intelligent sister tells me, I always forget the proper usage of colons and semi-colons and let’s not even get started with how many times I end a sentence with a preposition and those run-on sentences! Ugh! Sorry, Mom!).
But, I have digressed into a weird off the wall rant, so sorry about that. I had a direction for this post and it was this…Ah yes! My comparison of Hunger Games to life…. stay with me on this. My husband and I watched a bunch of normalish, albeit extra good-looking people, face an onslaught of obstacles, with only a brief rest before another attack commenced, all while also fending off other competitors in attempt to win the right to stay alive to fight another day. Although this may seem a bit far-fetched, I couldn’t help but compare the tribulations the characters faced with the trials we all face daily. Sometimes it does seem as if you’ve barely recovered from one set-back, such as costly repairs to a vehicle, when another punch lands right in your pocketbook. Add on sick kids, frozen pipes or a daycare that has inexplicably closed for the day, and it’s enough to make you inadvertently turn against your strongest allies. “Remember who the real enemy is,” one of the competitors in the game said, as the heroine froze, bow poised in a moment of fear and confusion to shoot him. And she did. She did remember before she hurt him and turned instead to aim at the true enemy.
It’s so easy to turn on the ones we love and lash out at them, although they’re there to help. At the risk of sounding cheesy, we are all playing a version of the Hunger Games, and in this game called life, with its twists and turns, its setbacks and frustrations, we must remember who our allies are, and who the real enemy is. It’s not the guy who channel hops like a bunny, and who never gets back to the real show on time, and it’s definitely not the guy who hand shredded three big blocks of cheese for the lasagna and washed a mountain of dishes after. This is my ally, my biggest fan, and the one who has my back, just like my big brother Jesus. Because lets face it, it’s impossible for the odds to always be in our favor, so I’m pretty happy that I’m always in His.
