I spent the morning watching What the Bleep Do We Know, a movie with a very silly name, a Yanni-esque website, and a scene with a ridiculous wedding interlude, but a movie that got in my head nonetheless. It attempts to explain quantum physics in the most layman’s terms, relating it to our perception of our universe.

“Reality” is a word thrown around often lately, from real life to the simulated one on television. In this movie they discuss the notion that our perception is what makes reality. That whole “How do I know the color blue I see is the color you see” epiphany we all have over that amazing bong hit freshman year of something or other. It says that we make our own destiny, that we “create our own day.” [The phrase, “Create a Cool Day,” is something we gave to Buffalo Bill. It comes from one of stee’s ex-girlfriends, and while I cannot say it with a straight face, it’s been in my head since this morning.]

If our brain cannot tell the difference between what it sees and what it remembers, if memories and reality are exactly the same, then that helps explain the strange disconnect last weekend. It helps me feel better about the “Myth of Pam,” my father’s phrase for when I would remember something adjacent to what he called “The Truth.” Our perceptions created our realities, and he and I rarely perceived things the same way.

Whenever I start thinking about these things the voice in my head turns into this burned-out stoner. I’m going to try to overlook that because I’ve had all these trippy thoughts in my head today, and this is why we have a blog — so my annoying, trippy thoughts are the words you have to read for a few minutes so that I can stop thinking about them and you can think I’ve had some serious deterioration in my writing ever since I started getting paid to do it.

If everything leads to the next because we are controlling the path of our day, then we should be able to see the path I gave myself from the first thing this morning.

Work on manuscript. Get frustrated with a chapter. Forbid myself from surfing the web. Realize I have a Netflix movie waiting for me.
Movie in bed on laptop.
Research books and websites on quantum physics for an hour.
Shower. Get dressed. Change when we aren’t sure exactly where we’re going. All we know is we’re getting “Drinks by the beach.” I decide to wear what I’d like to be wearing for the concept of “Drinks by the beach.” Poor stee brings a towel and a book, just in case.

“Drinks by the beach” turns out to be a restaurant and bar we’d been to before in Malibu. I had dressed correctly. Our friends ran into their close group of friends. They all live in Hollywood, but all just happened to go to the same restaurant, seemingly randomly, and had that awkward, “Gosh, I didn’t invite you, and you were here with those people, which means you didn’t invite me. Hi.” Is that random, or is that how we as particles (if “we” can even be considered particles, because we’re way too big for that, right?) work? We are destined to keep bumping into the same people over and over again, which is why we never meet most of the people in the world. We have to deal with the few hundred that are in our orbit, bumping into them again when we’re supposed to because they teach us something or give us something or make us feel a way we need to feel (the movie has a large section on addiction and unhealthy behavior, and why some of us need to feel miserable).

“Because the color blue to you might be green to me, dude. Don’t you get it yet?”

In terms of fate and human interaction, why do we meet the people we meet when we meet them? If everything happens for a reason and everybody is there for a purpose, how do you know when your interaction is a reality for everyone, or just your own perception of the reality? When I was little, I once thought a girl was my friend, but it turned out she was being nice to me because her parents made her. Was she only my friend until I found out the reality, and then it negated all of the fun we’d had together, or did she remain my friend as long as I continued to believe my memory of her to be our friendship? Can you still do that and think of her as someone mean? Can I make her be my friend, even if she doesn’t want to, because I can imagine our friendship, and perceive her to find me fun, or does that make me the creepy girl who follows her around the playground? Why can’t she perceive my reality?

I suppose that’s what we do with past relationships. When they don’t work out, it’s easy to turn them into bad memories, which change the reality of the relationship you were in from The One to The One Where He Made Me Feel Like Shit All the Time. But you still have good memories that surface. Are they good memories that really happened, or ones that your brain creates for you to help you get through the shitty person you were dating for some time? How much of our good memories are your brain helping you not jump off a cliff when you think about all the crap you’ve gone through?

“What if the guy I dated is the same guy you dated, but like, you were dating him at the same time except in an alternate universe?”

The discussion at Drinks By the Beach turned to horrible drinking experiences.

[scripty]
REBECCA
Everybody’s got that one story that kept them from ever drinking Tequila ever again.

ADAM
Can’t even take the smell.

PAM
I had the unfortunate experience of drinking trashcan punch once.

DAN
Ugh. Was it in a trashcan and everything?

PAM
Yes. And I still had to explain that it wasn’t Kool-Aid. That was my job, warning people about what they were actually drinking.

SARA
Where were you at Jonestown?

PAM
Do you think the Kool-Aid people were pissed off about Jonestown?

DAN
How do you spin that one?

PAM
That’s what I’m saying.

STEE
The Kool-Aid man came bursting through the wall at Jonestown and was like, “OH…NO!”

DAN
“OH….SHIT!”

PAM
Backing up, picking up pieces of brick and wall.

SARA
Fixing the drywall with his bare hands.

DAN
Painting frantically.

PAM
Holding a fan to it so it dries faster.

STEE
“OH… NO!”

SARA
Calling up Mrs. Kool-Aid, making sure he’s got an alibi.

PAM
“I was with you, baby, the whole time.”

DAN
And she’s all, “Don’t make me have to marry someone else and take yet another hyphenate.”

SARA
She’d wipe that condensation smile off of his face. Fill him up with ice so she can draw a sad face on him, because it would look weird for him to be so happy about all those people dying.

DAN
It’s condensation?

SARA
Yes, and he’s a pitcher that nobody ever had. That shape was never found anywhere but in the Kool-Aid man. We had a tall pitcher. It’s not fair.

DAN
You really have a lot to say about the Kool-Aid man.

SARA
Yeah, I never realized.
[/scripty]

Dan and I have tickets for a 7:30 movie in Hollywood. We leave with more than an hour and a half, but we’re soon a combination of lost and stuck in traffic.

[scripty]
PAM
And then it said that water is susceptible to thought, and since we are made up of more than eighty percent water, that just thoughts can change who we are, our identities, how we feel about ourselves.

DAN
I really have to rent this movie.

PAM
Like right now, we could say we’re lost.

DAN
Because we may very well be.

PAM
But instead, we are going to visualize the 101, and then we will be there.

DAN
Can we visualize money in the backseat, too?

PAM
We can visualize it, and I think it can be there in some kind of wave form, but once we try to perceive it, it has to change to a specific particle, and one we wouldn’t see–

DAN
Because it only exists in another dimension?

PAM
Something like that. Like the Matrix.

DAN
Pam. Take the red pill.

PAM
Check it.

DAN
The 101. You did it!

PAM
Visualize the bag of money. And us getting to the movie on time.
[/scripty]

And then there’s this. The movie, which I’ve never seen before, deals with women taking red pills. We saw the movie with a woman we’d never met before. When I got home stee was getting ready to watch another movie, and the woman I had just seen the last movie with was in the movie stee was about to watch. So I went from watching a movie with a woman to watching a movie with the same woman but she was on the other side of the television screen. Is this the path I created for my day? Because here I am right now, right where I was this morning, in bed with my laptop in my lap, and a blogger screen open as I try and get myself psyched up enough to go back and finish that chapter of the manuscript. Maybe I’m keeping myself away from it because I perceive it to be a lousy chapter and therefore the reality is that it’s a lousy chapter and I should delete the whole thing and start over. Maybe I had to go through all of this to be okay with that.

Maybe I should stay away from geek/hippie documentaries, because they get me overstimulated and then nobody wins.