What’s one small improvement you can make in your life? That’s the site prompt today, and probably deserves an answer.

I watched 2 documentaries and a movie this weekend. I’m still recovering from a cold that I am getting more and more resigned to carrying for the rest of my life. And it was raining, so it was a perfect weekend to climb under a blanket and watch something other than the NBA playoffs.

Finding Andrea is a 3 episode series following the disappearance of a woman in Kentucky who, incidentally, belonged to an organization that searched for (and was instrumental in finding) missing persons. She was complex, hiding the many facets of her life to the point that very few would claim to have actually known her. She died having lived a mostly dishonest, inauthentic life with lots & lots of secret compartments. She was probably killed by her sister and her boyfriend (at least that’s the implication I took from the doc). I don’t imagine we’ll ever know, because Andrea wasn’t the only one in the family who wasn’t interested in honesty. Her own dad would rather protect the possibly guilty daughter/boyfriend (who didn’t participate in the film) than be further torn apart by the truth. I guess I can’t blame him, who knows what I’d do in his place??

Max Joseph was a co-host of the Catfish TV show, and created a documentary called 15 Minutes of Shame with Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky knows of what she speaks, as her life was torn apart by a series of very public poor decisions and behavior. This film looked at a guy who tried to sell and sanitizer at a ridiculous price during COVID, a woman who sent an ugly joke on Facebook and became the object of national scorn, and a man who was “cancelled” over a mistaken hand gesture in a company van. We think we know these people based on 1 small aspect of their personalities or an isolated incident, sometimes misunderstood, always without any shred of context. I don’t know Andrea’s dad, and to assume I know his motivations based on 2 or 3 clips is the height of arrogant condescension. Of course, he seems like something, the hand sanitizer guy seems like a scumbag, the woman seems heartlessly callous (as do the political pundits who condemned her). The hand gesture guy is obviously pretty silly, and the product of a culture gone power-crazy. But how do we actually know? I bet I seem all kinds of ways, based on extracted phrases in any one of these posts, or in overheard conversations at my dinner table.

The movie was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and was absolutely as great as I remembered. It’s funny and feels good. But what’s notable is that no one is played as only a fool. Everyone acts like a fool at times, everyone is embarrassing in moments, but they all just seemed like “normal people.” Sort of. Admittedly, most are caricatures, but the caricatures leaned towards a positive, good nature rather than the mean, minimizing, debasing cartoons we are usually fed. I would guess that Ms. Vardalos sees the rest of us, sees “normal people,” through beautiful lenses that believe the best. I would guess that she likes us. That her idea of “abnormal” is abuse, betrayal, and violence. I believe the same.

We are made to walk together, to hold hands, and to love each other, and I’ll never be convinced otherwise. Maybe the shamed examples in 15 Minutes weren’t sorry they were caught as much as they were heartbroken they were led down a path so antithetical to their design. I thought the fiction of the movie was far closer to truth than the documentaries, because it showed the world in which I live, where the overwhelming majority are like you, trustworthy and awesome. Monsters exist, but in such small numbers, they stand out like neon signs at midnight. We’ve just bought lies for too long, choosing to acknowledge the missteps and failures as complete pictures, that we stopped seeing the beauty in each other.

I don’t know who Monica Lewinsky is, no matter how many pages I can read on the internet about her. And I’ll say the improvement I can make is to stop pretending I do.