Two Photos - Too Funny

The only happy people I know are people I don’t know well. ---Joseph Telushkin

You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it – many times.

Laughter is the best medicine.

The old saw has proved true for me on too many occasions to count. No matter how sad, lonely, angry or frustrated I’ve felt – and believe me, I’ve had my fair share of hit-rock-bottom days (weeks, months!) – all it takes is a good laugh, often at myself - the drama queen having a moment – and I’m better. Not all better, mind you, but at least a bit better, and that’s a start.

I’m blessed with friends, who share my sense of the ridiculous (and then some); Gracie the Dog and Zoey the Cat, who never fail to amuse at just the right moment; and an extremely astute therapist, who once prescribed an episode or two of Frazier every day to help beat the blues – advice I’ve heeded with excellent results. On occasion, often when I’m surfing the Internet, I’ll come upon something that makes me laugh, as well, and every now and then also teaches me a lesson.

Ten months ago, I wrote an essay title Managed Perfection. I’d been reading a blog written by a woman I’d never met, but who was of interest to me because of her relationship with Burning Man Traveling Companion (BMTC). Intelligent, accomplished, energetic, a business entrepreneur with contacts throughout the local community, she seemed to be perfection personified living the perfect life. Eventually, I realized that, of course, she had to seem perfect. She was using her blog to advertise her services, and she had to sell herself if she wanted to sell those services. Her posts were a part of her story, but not the ups-and-downs, warts-and-all story that makes up the real life we all live, no matter what we’d like other people to believe.

It was all a fantasy, and I knew it, but that fantasy lingered in my mind. Surely she had to be someone really special – hadn’t BMTC pulled out all the stops pursuing her? Surely he'd also had to change his ways to attract such a paragon of womanhood, who was also 10 years younger than he. The man I'd known had lived off women one way or another most of his adult life, but this woman didn't seem like the type to put up with that kind of behavior.

One of the prerequisites for writing fiction is a vivid imagination and, oh boy, do I have one of those. I’ve always enjoyed creating “characters” and giving them a story, something I did on a regular basis writing as Nikki Benjamin. Thus creating the “character” of Ms. Managed Perfection was a natural progression for me.

I’d seen only a small head shot of her, looking serene, but it was a place to start. I imagined that, as a voice teacher, she would certainly sound lovely (and she does on her Web site podcasts). Since she teaches what I’ve assumed are similar-to-yoga-style exercise classes, I was also sure she was slender and athletic like every yoga teacher I've ever seen. BMTC is only 5’7” so she’d have to be petite, as well, and – let me repeat - slender. The man I’d known for nine months did not like overweight women and really dissed them in a mean and sarcastic way – so, yes, she had to be slender for sure.

In short order, I’d created a fairy child princess – a serene yet energetic and perky got-it-all-together-in-every-way little blog-world nemesis.

You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it – many times.

One picture (or two or three) is worth a thousand words.

More than that, one photo (or two or three) can be all it takes to crash-and-burn a fantasy with a reality that leaves you clutching your sides, howling with laughter, at yourself and your foolishness.

In the months since I’d written my Managed Perfection essay, I’d gradually lost interest in the fantasy character (and the fantasy couple) I’d created. I’d come to realize that my life was exactly the life I wanted to be living, right here, right now, and I’d begun to focus on enjoying each moment to the best of my ability. There was no longer any room in my head for thoughts of a woman I’d never met and a man I hadn’t seen in more than four years.

Having learned to use the social networking tool Twitter a few weeks ago, however, I was eager to see if anyone I knew or had known was tweeting. The only ones I found were – you guessed it – BMTC and Ms. MP; and, oh my goodness, what busy lives they were leading, all of it shared via tweets many times each day. I found it extremely amusing – when did they have time to actually work in between thumbing all those tweets, scanning the Internet for pseudo-intellectual information to share and attending all those social engagements? But their tweeting was also understandable since Twitter has, in fact, become a major way to sell yourself and your business by constantly blowing, um, tweeting your own horn.

Good for them, I thought. They were sell, sell, selling themselves relentlessly down the stream and, oh by the way, photos of a workshop they’d attended were posted on Flickr.

The temptation was too much for me – I am, after all, only human, and a very curious human, at that. So I took a look and…OMG!!!

The photos, for me, were like a roadside wreck. You know you shouldn’t gawk, but you can’t tear your gaze away. My jaw dropped and then…then I started to laugh and laugh and laugh. Not at the two people in the photos – the two real people shot candidly in the midst of what appeared to be anything but real-life happy moments – but at myself and the now truly ridiculous fantasy that had plagued me well past its sell-by date.

Here was an aging-not-all-that-well man with a paunchy belly and a sour expression on his face (an expression I’d seen often in the past).

Here was a rather large woman, tall and obviously overweight, wearing ill-fitting clothes and big-mistake glasses, her lips pursed, her arms crossed over her bosom (body language I recognized, as well).

Here were two people, supposedly together, yet not looking particularly happy about it – standing apart, sitting apart, gazing off in opposite directions.

Here was a slice of their real life caught on a digital camera, and it was so not the fantasy I’d conjured.

Interesting how life offers lessons at the exact moment we are ready to learn them. A year ago, I hadn’t been ready to let go of my fantasy. It seemed so…perfect. They seemed so…perfect, and I’d been envious.

Of course, I didn’t know them – or myself – quite as well as I do now….