Life Moves Pretty Fast...

...if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Today was kind of a waste of a day, except I put the cucumber on the needles and committed to a knitting project for a friend that I may not be able to finish, but in which the design possibilities intrigued me. I've already printed out graph paper for charts. We'll see what we get from imagination and practiced techniques.

The ice cream man never showed, again! My younger son is in high dudgeon about it, and clearly the ice cream man needs to learn some better customer service, or he's going to lose his fan base. It's not like my kids are the only kids on the street. That, and he needs to lower his prices. Over three dollars now for the same cheap stuff he was selling me when I was a kid? What a rip! At these rates I'm going to need to take out an ice cream loan for the summer.

We all soothed our collective grumpy souls by watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This is a movie that never seems dated to me, even if the hairstyles and clothing are. John Hughes took a risk by making the lead actor break the fourth wall to speak to the viewers, but it works, and more.

It lets us feel like we're part of a smartass kid's world, a really cool smartass kid. One who doesn't need cell phones and texting, but prefers to get out and experience the whole of the world, filling his eyes with art, dining in fancy restaurants, and just going to a ball game. Ferris' mind is so full of things he wants to do that he skips school to do them, but that doesn't seem like such a bad idea to us, in fact it seems like a better idea to us. Don't just read about the world in school, go live it! Ferris isn't a bad kid, he's just a smart, curious kid who wants more than teachers dryly droning on to themselves about mind-numbingly boring subjects with no flavor. He does want to learn, he just does it on his own terms. I can get behind that.

Hughes' commentary on the school system here isn't exactly subtle; the teachers are either clueless, boring or vindictive. The parents aren't much better, although they at least show (some) caring for their kids. I think Ferris can see the way this is going to go and wants to get in as much excitement as he can before he has to become an adult and necessarily buckle down to life and work. His friend Cameron is already on the path to following in his parents' footsteps, with all his neuroses and anxiety. Ferris helps him break out, even if just for a little while, and we know that even though his dad is going to freak out on him for the damaged car, Cameron has changed and will be just fine.

I like to think Ferris will never completely give in to the routine; that he will always be a rebel in the system, showing us all that we should slow down sometimes and experience life instead of watching it flash by.

Watching the movie reminds me of that. I'll never be a rebel, but I will sometimes just sit on the front lawn and knit in the sun.