the future of cinema, support your local paranoid, I don’t have to handle it

1. My favorite movie at the middle school film festival: “Follow Me,” an homage, I think conscious, to The Red Balloon. A boyfriend and girlfriend, holding hands, walk into the school, the whole frame shot in black and white except that the girl holds a red balloon. They part to go to their separate classrooms, and when the girl reaches hers, the balloon escapes and floats back toward the boy, while the boy’s shoes, also red, slip off him and walk by themselves toward the girl’s classroom. Then we see the boy and girl holding hands again as they leave the building at the end of the day; the balloon floats behind them, with the shoes tied to its string.
PS: I recommend this 2007 French homage to The Red Balloon.

2. Within a mile, I twice cross paths with the same ratty little car: it has bumper stickers for 9/11 trutherism, Alex Jones, and Brave New Books. I hatch a plan: I’ll follow him all day, freak him out, make him think the enemy has arrived, just as he’s always dreaded and hoped. Or -- what if I followed him and he never noticed? He’d have to be stripped of his Conspiracy Theory membership!

3. Confronted with a parenting difficulty, I inquire into the stressful thought, “I need to know how to handle it.” Turns out I don’t!