a year ago...

a year ago i couldn't have seen what was coming.

more recently (earlier tonight) i was watching 'The Santa Clause'. the north pole exists in a magic snow globe. i used to live in a magic snow globe. i still do, but someone dropped it. now everything in it is in disarray - still magical, but banged up quite a bit and some things are stuck in their new incorrect places. worse yet, there's a crack in glass. 'is it larger than a quarter? how 'bout a dollar bill?'. magic snow globes aren't replaceable. i've heard they can be repaired though...

the thing about clichés is that they are indeed true. it's just that mostly they don't really do justice to the emotions that led to the boiled down phrase. 'it made me realize what's really important' <..snore..>

when i was in high school, i got contact lenses my senior year. i frequently lost them or didn't have them in for reasons that were completely preventable, i'm sure. one friday night i was at my friend paul's house. paul was an artist. while waiting for him to get ready to go out, i spent a good 30 minutes admiring a painting of his. it was tropical. there was a monkey. he had a strange hat, three legs and was hanging upside down. there was a crazy looking parrot with a distorted beak and a broken wing. i thought it was disturbing and wonderful (the painting, not the wing...). i didn't have my contacts in. later in the week i was back at paul's...contacts in. i went back to the painting. it was of a plant. that's it, just a plant. the monkey and the parrot were in the negative space. between the leaves and branches and such. i could still see them - sort of - but i never would have noticed had the plant not been so out of focus.

a year ago, i didn't notice that i was living in a magic snow globe. worse, i didn't notice that the globe was precariously perched; one bad wind away from peril.