I WAS WATCHING The Boy Next Door. The two blabbermouths next to me who couldn’t stop commenting on his manly physique suddenly stopped talking.
The “boy” was a psychotic kinda fella, who liked psyching out his prey. But Jennifer Lopez was acting the part of a mother protecting her child. And lawdhavestmercy, J-Lo poked the boy-man in the eye with a needle as long as my leg! Well, is bawl I bawl. When I tell you, BAWL.
It was a kind of reassured bawl, though, since Marcia Martindale was sitting only two seats away. So, I knew that if I had an accident and happened to soil my intimates while in mid-bawl, she could sort me out.
After all, her store is in a nook of Sheraton Mall, almost under the Olympus VIP, where we all sat, watching what the movie industry calls a “romantic thriller”.
The truth is, I am not thrilled about any kind of horror, blood or explosions when it comes to movies, so I have no idea why I went to look at The Boy Next Door. It’s probably one of those human-nature things: a prevarication tendency.
We fool ourselves into thinking that we can handle a situation and then realise that it may have all been a bit too much. Like my friend the other day, asking her boyfriend (he is a man, but I don’t like to say “man-friend” so I will use the broad terminology here) to tell her the truth, claiming that she “could handle it with broad shoulders”.
Well . . . long story short, friend spends the entire night with my only two tissue boxes, in a histrionic fit, telling me all the dangerous plans she concocted in her head.
So, while her man-boy was out apparently “playing football”, she was bawling so much that the next morning she took my last box of Strepsils, hurrying home to get dressed for work.
By the middle of the day she was back home, depressed. Here is the question: if she couldn’t handle the truth that she suspected would be true, why did she ask for it?
Sometimes we think we are more able than we actually are. We overestimate our capacity, while underestimating our ability.
Another example: Kiel (pronounced “Keel” and not “Kyle” as Mischa Knight likes to call him) has a sweet tooth, but he can’t handle the not-so-sweet truth.
He has dentophobia – an irrational fear of the dentist. Big man that he is, Kiel still eats about three chocolates a day and washes them down with cokes. While I may be a bit to blame – often offering him coke – he knows what happened the last time.
It would have been a Marcia Martindale moment. Except, I don’t think Martindale’s sells men’s intimates. Anyway, the lingerie would have had to do do (not a typo) since Kiel had a call of nature that he couldn’t answer in time!
(Talking about Marcia and movies, congrats to Marcia Weekes and the team on “taking Barbados to Hollywood”!
Veoma Ali is an author, broadcaster, advertising exec and, most important, a karaoke lover.
