Little Voices

When Sophie was 3 or 4 weeks old, I had a sort of breakdown. I don't want to call it Postpartum Depression, because I don't think it was. I think it was more that I was going stir crazy from spending too much time indoors with the baby and not getting much (or any) time to myself either inside the house or out. Not to mention all the postpartum hormones that sent me on an emotional rollercoaster. Smiling and laughing one minute and screaming or crying the next. I was pretty even keeled all through pregnancy, I think my body let it all out after the baby was born. Needless to say, Neil was a tad unsure about how to deal with me.

So after one particularly nasty episode, it was agreed that I get at least one outing a week where Neil watches the baby while I go do something fun. I think that conversation went something like this:

Me: I. (sob) Need. (sob) To. (sob) Get. (sob) Out. (sob) Of. (sob) The. (sob) House. (sob).
Neil: (nodding frantically).

These outings do not include grocery shopping or other mundane but necessary activities. So far Neil has been really good about keeping his end of the bargain, probably because he likes being married. However, due to circumstances beyond our control, I haven't had an outing in a couple of weeks. So, as you can imagine, I was raging to get out on my own by yesterday morning.

These trips usually include Aparna and movies are often our destination. So yesterday we went to go see Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I won't go into too much detail about the movie other than to say that it was very funny. And there was full frontal male nudity, in a comic setting, not sexual. Jason Segel, the lead actor and writer who also stars in How I Met Your Mother (another very funny show), was just great. And did I mention there was full frontal male nudity? Definitely not for the kiddies.

Anyways, we went to the 11:20 am show because it's cheap and no one is there. Does that make us really smart or really lame? We were almost late because I had it in my head it was showing at 11:45. Luckily, the theater plays 20 minutes of previews and commercials before the feature. A fact that normally really irritates me. I mean, come on, I go to movies to AVOID commercials. But often if you show up late enough to miss some or all of these you have to sit in crappy seats. Like the time we had to sit in the front row of the 800-seat theater to watch Lord of the Rings. It was like watching a tennis match, not to mention that a woman next to us had brought her 2 year old and allowed him to jump in his seat and run around in the open area in front of the screen for the WHOLE three hours. I have a pretty low threshold for those sorts of shenanigans and I was ready to strangle the mother by the end. Who brings a 2 year old to a three hour movie? There's a reason kids movies are only an hour long and its not because they don't feel like making longer ones. That will not be me and my kid(s), even if it means that Neil and I don't get to see a movie together again until the kids go off to college. But I digress.

There weren't a ton of people there yesterday, but enough that in order for us not to sit next to anyone, we wound up on the aisle. A couple of rows in front of us, there was a 40ish fellow sitting by himself. He talked, quietly, throughout the whole movie. It wasn't loud enough to bother us, really, but loud enough for us to be aware of him. The first time he said something, Aparna looked at me and we kind of smiled. The next time, we gave each other a "what the?" look. From then on, we would just sort of giggle whenever we heard him say something. Not because what he was saying was funny, because we couldn't really understand him, but just that here's this normal looking guy talking to himself at the movie. I'll admit to doing that occasionally (all right, all the time) at home, but not out.

So about an hour and a half into the movie, just as things were winding up to the crescendo, he gets up, grabs his drink and popcorn, and walks out. We watched him leave and I thought, well, the drinks are HUGE, maybe he has to pee. Fast forward 15 minutes to when the credits were rolling, and we realized that he never came back. He sat (and chatted) through an hour and a half of a movie and then left just before the end. Not that anybody was surprised by the direction the story took, but still, who leaves after an hour and a half? Maybe it was a sudden illness that prompted his departure although you'd think we would have picked up on that from his running commentary. Or maybe he got a call on his spy watch/phone and had to leave to go save the world. Or the little voices in his head, the ones that were maybe talking back to him during the movie, told him that he had to leave.

Whatever the case, he left both of us wondering. Prior to this we just thought he was eccentric, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe next time we'll look out for guys sitting by themselves.

How cute is that picture of Sophie and Aparna? She stopped by for a cuddle (with the baby, not me) after the movie and Sophie was totally eating it up.