High definition body lift

I had a wonderful weekend in the city, and am now returning home. I have spent some time on Friday shopping for cosmetics since Shoppers Drug Mart had a special deal. One of the things that I have researched and decided to try was a cellulite cream by Clarins, called something like "High definition body lift," not because I particularly care about having cellulite (I have other bodily obsessions instead, such as the never ending quest for that oh-so-elusive flat stomach), but because I felt like being frivolous.  And frivolous I was.  I have applied the cream to my buttocks that night, and felt very refined and well cared for in the context of my tingling lightly scented underside, until I fell asleep.  What a luxury!

I woke up in the morning and my first thought was to check and see if the cellulite cream had worked.  I jumped out of bed, and inspected the "treatment area" in the mirror.  I could swear that I had no cellulite in the morning light.  I don't know if I had any to begin with, but if I did, then the cream seems to be working miracles.  My husband and my mother are poking fun at me, with my cellulite cream experiment, but I am trying to convince them that it is a good investment of 65$ for preventative purposes.

Later on the same day I went to see "Tales from the Golden Age", a movie about Romania during the 1980's, when I used to live there.  (If you have time, click on the blog stories, they are pretty much universal for everybody who lived there during Ceausescu's time).  I came out of the movie terribly disoriented, as if my life so far since that time had been a dream, and the reality was back there, back in time.  It took me a good few minutes to remember that I am in Canada now, that this is a different life.  Strangely, the thought that helped me connect the most with the present moment was the realization that before bedtime I would be applying the "High definition body lift" again, a luxury that was inconceivable during those times.  

If in 1980-1990 someone were to tell me that I would end up here today, I would not have believed it any more than being told that I would live on Mars and wear a spacesuit.  Romania was very closed to the outside, and we had no idea what the world "out there" was like.  To most Romanians at that time, the idea that communism would one day collapse and give way to a different ideology was too strange to fathom.  In fact, Romania today is vastly different, almost unrecognizable, from Romania in this movie.  I felt like telling everyone around me (cultured Vancouverites who came to watch this movie so well received at the Vancouver International Film Festival), that the place on the screen was real, that it was not a fairy tale, that I used to live there, and that through some unexplained magical events I ended up here, watching the movie with them.

The High Definition Body Lift may not have diminished my cellulite, but holding it in my hand is tangible proof that life can take one to unbelievable places, and offer unthinkable experiences.  Life is full of miracles, twists and turns that cannot be predicted.  No matter how much we try to prepare and seriously imagine the future spread out until the day we die, there is a good chance that the magic carpet will take us to a very different place indeed, a place that we cannot even conceive of now.  This is not a fairy  tale.  This really did happen.