Left to my own devices

Sometimes someone says something and it doesn't appear to make a lot of sense. It's not that they're speaking gibberish. We aren't suddenly worried about their cognitive function. More like a non sequitur. That, or you simply think what they said was a tad odd. This happened recently and, as I was on a walk later thinking about it, the thought occurred to tap into some empathy.They could, potentially, not have known what to give voice to in the moment, and therefore said whatever came to mind. Some people may not know how to handle silence.

It would seem a tad dramatic to remark that I am here today (as opposed to being long-dead) because of one particular person, though it would at least in part be the truth. His name was Chris, and he was a classmate back in high school. He was a popular kid and I, well, I was not. He was young, blond-haired, handsome. I idolized him, in that perhaps unhealthy way that adoration of the concept of the person can lead to not really knowing the actual person. Chris wasn't perfect by any means, but then who is? I should probably clarify something at this juncture: Chris isn't dead. Sometimes I write these missives and it is because someone I knew has died recently, or has been dead for some time, and I remembering them for some reason. So, no, Chris is very much alive. In fact, the impetus for writing about him here is that I saw his picture on social media recently. And, no, he isn't the person I was writing about in the last blog post .

His face was staring back at mine, frozen in its digital essence. The person had commented on the post of an online friend and, well, there it was, a link to his profile along with an accompanying picture. Pretty standard stuff as far as social media is concerned. Only the person whose photo was staring back at me through the computer screen stimulated a minor negative response within my psyche. He was someone I'd known in high school and who had engaged in some minor bullying. Bullying is, unfortunately, commonplace. It can occur during adulthood, but seems rife during our youth. Beginning in fifth grade, right on through senior year of high school, bullying was often just a regular part of my school life. Some of it was slight (verbal taunting, etc.), while at other times it was more serious (threats, or actual acts, of violence). Again, this person's profile that I'd suddenly come across online was in the former camp. And yet it was enough for the connotation to

Our paths cross, briefly, likely never to rejoin. So it goes for, what, 98... 99% of the world's population? Perhaps more? The one-and-done encounters occur so often, are so much a part of the fabric of our lives, that we scarcely give it a thought. I know I don't, not often, anyway. But this past month saw a change in that, and I'm not sure why.

We're a little over halfway through 2019, and I wanted to compile a list of my Top 10 favorite movies of the year (so far). I've seen about twenty-five 2018 films, so this is a little less than half of them, ranked. Right, here we go... 1. Booksmart 2. Toy Story 4 3. Rocketman 4. Spider-Man: Far From Home 5. Photograph 6. Gloria Bell 7. The Mustang 8. Happy Death Day 2U 9. The Perfect Date 10. Always Be My Maybe To be perfectly honest, it's been a somewhat underwhelming year in cinema. I don't mean that to damn the aforementioned films with faint praise. They're all good. I'm just still waiting to be really wowed by a movie this year.