The one where I talk about time travel again and also finally admit what happened to the girls’ Christmas gifts.

Against my better judgment, I went to the Redbox one evening last week and rented The Time Traveler’s Wife, and if you don’t know what I mean by “against my better judgment” this old post explains a lot.

For the record, I decided to go ahead and risk watching the movie based on three factors:

1.  Redbox only charges $1.00 plus tax for rentals, so even if I couldn’t watch more than, say, thirty minutes of the movie, I figured that was still less money wasted than that one time I bought the girls Bendaroos and Pixos for Christmas and then threw them both in the garbage by New Year’s. (The Bendaroos and Pixos, not the girls.) Also that time I had my entire face waxed and the “”"”ESTHETICIAN”"”" kept enough of my skin to make a girl suit, and by the time the scabs healed all the hair had grown back. Moving on.

2.  Jake, my seventeen-year-old son with aspirations of a career in film directing, is a certifiable Movie Snob, so I make it my business to watch movies that I know will annoy him to even have in the house. If Parental Retribution on Teenagers was an Olympic sport I would take gold.

3.  I have a girl crush on Rachel McAdams, and by “girl crush” I mean I would pay full-price-movie-admission-plus-popcorn-and-a-Diet-Pepsi to watch her read the phone book. Or the health care reform bill. Mooooooving on.

Anyway, I started the movie, watched the first twenty minutes, stopped the movie and thought about what I had seen and what it all meant, rewound the movie and watched the first twenty minutes AGAIN, and then stopped the movie AGAIN. As I sat on my bed deciding between watching the rest of it or cleaning the upstairs bathroom drain, Jake walked into my room and asked me what was up.

I explained the plot up to that point to him and expressed my dumbfounded confusion about how a human person could travel in time in their present body and meet up with their past body or future body since we only have one body and why are we all here and why does my head suddenly hurt and everything is going black in my right eye???? And Jake, in his seventeen-year-old-Movie-Snob wisdom said the words that have forever changed my life: “It’s just a movie, Mom. Time travel can’t really happen.”

With that, he left the room, and I decided to go ahead and watch the rest of the movie. And you know what? I LOVED THE MOVIE. LOVED it. Like pet it and hold it and squeeze it and name it George LOVED it. Like still smiling and bawling ten minutes after it was over LOVED it. LOVED. LOVLOVLOVLOVLOVED.

All because I have a new-found wisdom and comprehension that the meaning of life is: TIME TRAVEL CAN’T HAPPEN.

And now Jake will expect a new Xbox game for that.