Butterfly = Free ticket to "I Am Legend"

orchid20 wrote:
Back in 2008, I inadvertently got a free IMAX ticket for, and saw "I Am Legend" because of an injured butterfly my friend and I brought to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. Therein lies the sync. I have a wall of text to post about this if anyone is interested 😀

Here is the aforementioned wall of text:

Back in late 2007, my roomate was working front desk at a mid sized hotel just outside of Tacoma, WA. One day, one of his coworkers ran in and told him there was a "snake" outside the front entrance. He went out to check and found not a snake, but a large caterpillar perched on a twig in a shrub outside the door. It was reared up in defensive camo mode with two large eyespots showing prominently. He moved it to a more hidden area across the front walk. But the next day he noticed it was back on the shrub. So he left it alone.

He kept noticing the caterpillar in the shrub over the next month or so, wondering how it was surviving untouched while staying in such a visible spot. Later, it finally morphed into a coccoon; inexplicably attached to the brick facade of the hotel behind the shrub. It stayed that way for another month before something knocked it to the ground. My friend rescued it, and one Google search for proper coccoon positioning, one styrofoam cup, three toothpicks and a careful drive home later, it was comfortably incubating on our windowsill that evening.

The coccoon-in-a-cup sat for several weeks and I had almost forgotten about it when one afternoon, my roomate shouted at me "Come over here - you gotta see this!" A huge Western Tiger Swallowtail had emerged and was fluttering around our window. I tried to catch it and it flew right into my face and landed on my nose, causing us both to laugh.

Now it was still February (2008), and there was a frost outside that would have certainly killed the butterfly if we had set it out. So we kept it locked in my bathroom with a cap full of sugar water for sustenance. There it languished for over a week; becoming more sluggish and raggedy looking by the day. We were sad for it and thought hey, maybe the kind folks up at the Pacific Science Center Butterfly Exhibit would take it in. The following weekend, we were driving up to Seattle with a butterfly in a shoebox.

The entomologists at the Pacific Science Center gave the little bug a quick checkup, trimmed the scruff off of its wings and brought it away to be set free in the butterfly exhibit (though we were never able to find it later). In return we were given free tickets for the day to see the butterflies and the rest of the center.

The two main attractions there were said butterfly exhibit and the new(ish) IMAX theater. The movie showing that day was "I Am Legend"; and we were able to watch it in a nearly empty IMAX with full surround sound, courtesy of a butterfly.

Oh right, the syncs! There were a few:

(this first one is a one-off: There were not a lot of trailers before the movie, but the one I remember was the bank heist scene from the soon-to-be-released movie "The Dark Knight". When we saw the movie in full later that year, we walked in and caught it a few minutes late: precisely where the trailer left off. That was just a little bleep on my weird-o-meter and would not be enough of a reason to write here about if it weren't for the actual movie "I Am Legend" itself)

Since I was still years away from being red pilled about anything and even further from 2020, the irony was completely lost on me that we were sitting within a couple hundred meters of one of the world's largest "needles", as well as the newly constructed BMGF headquarters, watching a movie about a deadly pandemic caused by a malfunctioning vaccine.

But anyone who watches "I Am Legend" will easily pick up on a recurring butterfly theme throughout the movie. Those who delve a little further will learn that the movie had two different endings and the butterfly motif plays a key part in both. I was going to write about both endings but someone much more talented than I has done a fine job here (scroll down for butterfly stuff): https://thecinemaholic.com/i-am-legend-ending-explained-2/

And I can safely say that my roomate and I are probably the only people in the world who had watched this movie BECAUSE of a butterfly. And even though my roomate still doesn't care, I cannot get over -especially now - this fact as well as what the movie was about and even where I was watching it.

Not sure why I had such a big sync. Am I a legend myself? Nope. Am I meant to watch certain billionaires become "legends" fighting imaginary monsters, or finally realize that they themselves were the monsters all along? Maybe. I'm personally hoping for the director's cut!