Unexpectations

• A year-and-a-half ago, Darrell strongly recommended that I see The Color Purple. Actually, he felt so strongly about it, he recommended I buy it. I wasn't going to do that. I don't like Oprah. I've never been a big fan of Whoopi Goldberg either, and my mom's praise of films such as Sister Act did little to encourage me otherwise. Sure the film also boasted Danny “I'm gettin' too old for this” Glover and Laurence “I only have one line and still go by ‘Larry'” Fishburne, but I wasn't sold. I put it on my list and forgot about it, finally getting to it Friday night. It didn't happen right away, but by the end the film won me over and I was emotionally invested in all of the characters, mystified that a comedian resembling a Predator was capable of such an amazing dramatic performance. Clearly, Whoopi peaked in 1985. I was surprised that I liked something I never had any interest in. As for the ending, I wouldn't say I was bawling, but....hey, what's that over there?

• Tuesday night I was in the gym, running on the treadmill and being masculine because that's how I roll and I never cry at the end of chick flicks. Anyway, a rerun of Seinfeld that I'd seen dozens of times was playing. In one scene, Jerry is speaking in a bar with a couple of recurring television executives, basically faceless suits. For the first time, I noticed that one of those guys was Chris Parnell. Later in the week, pumping testosterone on an elliptical machine, I happened to catch a rerun of Scrubs which guest-starred DJ Qualls as a struggling intern. I had forgotten that the star of one of my favorite underrated movies, The New Guy, had appeared on one of my favorite sitcoms. Or maybe he was on Scrubs before I knew who he was; I definitely didn't know who Masi Oka(Heroes' Hiro) was during his stint on Scrubs.

• Yabadobedoo is an amazing resource for graphic designers. I stumbled across it this week while trying to figure out how to do something in Adobe InDesign and it became an instant bookmark. I don't think there are many questions in this world that I can't find answers to with the internet and I don't know how I would have survived without computers. I'd probably have had a life of hard physical labor that would have left me in much better shape to use my free time for dating girls. Damn computers...

• Knock on wood, but we haven't had more than a light dusting of snow yet this year. The news reports struggle to sensationalize “FLURRY 2007”, but thus far every warning of a messy morning commute hasn't amounted to anything. When I left work Friday night I was actually happy to see rain, because I knew that same precipitation a few degrees colder would have piled up. I expect that by typing this, I'll soon have a rerun of last year to shovel...

• After Rey lamented the premature cancellation of Day Break, I discovered that ABC finally kept their promise to show the unaired episodes online, and four new ones have gone up this week already! I'm glad I'll get to see how the story ends after all, and after I watch Cinderella Man and head to the bank to renew a mature CD, those four episodes are next on my list of things to do this weekend.

Life is full of the unexpected, and when we least expect good things, the things that surprise us might be good...