Tonight's Jeopardy episode had a category called "Possessive Names" that featured clues about famous people as the possessive and things that belonged to them, like a "vulnerable point" was "Achilles's heel" and the argument that you should gamble on the existence of God (because if you're right the upside is so big, and you don't want be wrong about the existence of God if you're betting there isn't..., called Pascal's Wager- I don't necessarily agree with this, by the way, if you take it too seriously and devote this existing life to God and get too embroiled in religion, con men, religious cults, etc.), and one I didn't get called "Newton's Cradle," an example of something I've known existed since I was 7 years old but didn't know the name of, it's that weird scientific toy that some people have on their work desk that has a set of balls in a row and if you pick up the ball on one end and swing it into the rest, the ball at the other end springs into the air, falls back, and hits the row of balls, causing the original ball to go back in the air, and so forth. Awesome evidence of Newton's 3rd law: for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.
Anyway, the one most interesting to me, and easiest to visualize, of that category was "Chekhov's gun": the idea that if you have a loaded gun on stage, then at some point during the play it must go off. Chekhov being the famous Russian playwright. This makes a lot of sense in the physical sense and is all too real in America: a lot of guns exist in America and quite a large percentage of them are probably loaded ready to be fired, and if a gun is already loaded, it seems almost nonsensical for those bullets not to be fired.... it's just a disaster waiting to happen. That's America's gun problem, and gun control isn't being discussed at all in this year's presidential election because both major candidates are in agreement: they're not taking away the guns. Kamala and Tim Walz both own a gun, and she apparently is going to fire it if she needs to. In fact, it's one of the only issues Kamala and Trump agree on! Amazing.
The other, more philosophical idea of Chekhov's gun is less applicable in the real world: that everything happens for a reason (often said by religious people, I wonder if they are more apt to apply Chekhov's gun to real life).... that if I dedicated a lot of hard work to a cause, some good must come out of it, or if I bougth this set of golf clubs, I must become good at golf, or if I like this girl, she must like me back and we live happily ever after.... these things often make sense when watching a movie when viewers can almost guess the plot after seeing just the first few minutes of a movie or TV episode, surmising that "because this guy broke up with someone named Summer in the first part of the show, he must meeting someone named Autumn later" or something like that. Unfortunately, real life does not work like that..... things often don't follow a continuous story line, and things that happened previously in life coudl just be nothing, wasted, nothing comes up of it. In the movies after all the time I've spent studying trivia, we're conditioned to believe I would have made it onto Jeopardy already.......In the movies all this learning of who "Edward the Bear" is (Winnie the Pooh), what the largest archipelago in teh world is (Malay Archipelago) and who wrote Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson) would all eventually become useful in a Slumdog Millionaire-like moment when it all comes together onstage as I accomlish my dreams, but reality is that most of the knowledge I've gained will literally be trivia- good for nothing. After all the time and effort MJ and I (mostly MJ) have dedicated to having a baby, you'd think we will eventually have a baby, or should have had one already... but it just hasn't happened yet, and I'm sure there are some unlucky couples who went down the same path we did thinking they'd eventually succeed only to give up in the end. (Hopefully we're not one of them). Maybe, just maybe though, as we continue to live our lives and go through new experiences and new challenges, we'll find little areas where things do come full circle, and we're rewarded for our efforts...and Chekhov's gun, like so many real guns in America, actually goes off.
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