After having it recommended to me multiple times, I finally got around to watching Crash. Now, before there’s any confusion, I’m talking about the Crash with Sandra Bullock in it, not Holly Hunter. Apparently the Holly Hunter movie is about sex and car crashes and that doesn’t really sound all that entertaining to me. But the Sandra Bullock version was a truly excellent movie. It was one of those movies that you have to watch more than once because you don’t realize what’s important the first time through. It was absolutely brilliant and beautifully put-together.

Basically, the movie is about the connections between people that we don’t even realize are there. How meeting someone for one minute can change your life and that person won’t even know. And things that we don’t realize are important in our own lives can grow to have significance over time.

For example, there’s a cop who’s having a bad night. He pulls over a black couple and is basically just being a general racist douchebag. But the wife starts getting angry and yelling at him and it pisses him off, so he ends up dragging her out of the car and “frisking” her in front of her husband. For him, it’s just one random couple that he uses to let off a little steam. It’s a jerk move, but he doesn’t think much more of it. But it leads to so many other things in the movie that there’s no possible way for him to even know about. Because while it was nothing to him, it was very much something to them. And to his partner.

This movie was one of those that I find myself thinking about several days later. And it also helped me to make a connection in my mind that I might have made eventually, but probably not in the same way. The movie is very much true. Not the story, necessarily, but the way that things are connected without us ever realizing.

My brother hurt his back at work. When that happened, he suddenly had a lot of freedom in his schedule, and when the workers comp people stopped approving his physical therapy, he took a week and went on a trip to Texas to visit an old friend. He was down there for a week. Then, he was home for two weeks before he met her in a small place in Oklahoma and they got married. When I tell it this way, it’s a little bit clear that getting married was connected to hurting his back. If he’d never gone to visit her, would they have gotten married? I don’t know. But he wouldn’t have gone to visit her if not for hurting his back. So in that way, the events are connected. And while he’s still having issues with workers comp a year later and had to get a lawyer just to be able to get treatment, he’s also still married. So in that way, hurting his back was a good thing for him. I’m not sure I’d say that to him, since it’s fairly wrecked his finances. But his life would not be anything close to what it is now, if not for that.

In high school, my brother and I were late to school one day. And yes, it was rare enough that it was noteworthy. We were usually there far earlier than we needed to be. On this particular day that we were late, there was a fight before classes started. And it took most of the day to find out what had happened. When we finally did find out, we were pretty upset because some of our friends were hurt. Badly. And my brother was upset because he knew one or two of the guys that started things off. So he was pretty convinced that he could have stopped it. But basically one group jumped another group and the group that was jumped ended up with several people in the hospital and even more gone home for lesser injuries (and a couple guys got sick from the sight of blood). Yes, high school is brutal. But the point of this story is not the fight (not really). The point is that I was so upset over one of the people who’d been hurt in the fight. More upset than I expected. And that was when I realized how much I liked that specific individual. I then began my lame attempts at flirting (is anyone good at that in high school) and if you fast forward 11 years, we’re getting ready to celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary. All because that fight made me examine how I felt about him.

It’s just another way that things develop significance over time. What could have just been a story about a heinous fight in high school, is actually the beginning of a love story.