A Life in Dulcet Tones
posted in Word of Reason |
My ten-year high school reunion is coming up and I can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe that’s because I don’t want to grow up and maybe that’s because I simply can’t grow up. Either way, in preparation for making my final decision to attend or not, I’ve decided to take stock of what I’ve done with the last ten years, what I’ve done with, what is ostensibly, my life. Ten years isn’t a very long time in the grand scheme of things, but it is a long time to waste and so I will proceed to cull from the past decade everything that I might use as ammunition to validate my life to a bunch of people I don’t really care about that much. Or that’s what I keep telling myself.
Since I’ve seen only a handful of my former classmates since graduating, I really should begin with stories from college. Here’s one: my freshman year I was part of a crew that stole almost a thousand dollars worth of alcohol from gigantic refrigerators in the basement of my dorm. The alcohol belonged to the Alumni Association. I guess I thought at the time that I would never be a member of that group. Well, since I was wrong on two accounts here, I don’t think I’m gonna be including this story in my repertoire anytime soon.
Alright, here’s a good one. The summer after my sophomore year at college I had an awesome internship at HBO Documentaries. It really rocked. I watched every film in the HBO America Undercover and Cinemax Reel Life series (there are twenty-six Real Sex movies – 26! – that’s almost more soft-core porn than you can shake a giant neon dildo at) and wrote coverage for films that had been submitted to HBO for funding or finishing or presentation. The department’s head, big-time executive producer Sheila Nevins once gave me a big compliment in a room full of people when she told me that the coverage I wrote was “very insightful and funny.” Of course, people stopped really talking to me after that, but what can you do? That’s life, I guess. Also, at the end of the summer, I totally banged one of my co-workers who was smoking hot. I’m not gonna mention that part of the story at my reunion, but I wanted you to know.
There’s not too much else of note from my college years. Sure, I had sex with some cute art history majors and have some crazy stories about my then-buddies, almost none of whom graduated from college, but it’s not really the stuff validation is made of. It’s pretty much the reverse of validation. Ok, then. Now, if screwing around and getting into marginal trouble with campus rent-a-cops doesn’t work, then the reverse should. Right? Yet, somehow I don’t think that telling people about some really good papers that I wrote on David Hume, James Joyce, or Jacques Derrida is really going to knock anyone’s socks off, if you know what I mean. Not a lot of people would care that a well-renowned professor called a paper that I wrote on Historicity and Authenticity in New York City-set films “masterful.” That sort of thing just doesn’t do for most of the population, but I tell you, if it did my whole life would totally different. Maybe I should just keep moving.
So, college ended. I worked a couple of production jobs but I hated them. Then I wandered around the city doing nothing for a couple of months. Then I landed an internship at a post house working like a slave for no money. And I crawled my way up the ladder, learning at a ridiculous pace and besting many people who had been doing it way longer than I had. I struggled and fought and worked late for three straight years, working at least one day of the weekend, trudged through the tough times and made what I could of them. And then one day I woke up and I was, egad, a working editor. I got some offers to edit some pretty decent material and most of it was well-received: short films that got into festivals, spec work that made it to air, and many of my collaborators continue to be successful and bring me work to this very day. Snore.
I guess this is where abject mediocrity gets you, and by that I mean nowhere. Truthfully, there’s nothing special here. I screwed around a little in college, but not enough to ruin my life and make an interesting story. I had internships during college within my chosen field, so I never had adventures spanning the globe. Admit it, a story that begins with a bar fight in Guadalajara is much more interesting than the analogous story from my life: the time I almost got into a fight in the east village because I couldn’t believe some mustachioed hipster had never heard of the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. No one wants to hear that one, and in truth, I don’t want to tell it. I never took an amazingly stupid risk for a pointless goal (unless you count stealing that alcohol) and so my life has trudged on without a spike in the waveform of excitement. In fact, the exact reverse is the case; I have lived a life of dulcet tones.
So here I am. To not go to the reunion would be to admit defeat, to admit that I do not stand worthy to show up and pretend to brag, like all my other former classmates will be doing, to admit that I’ve done nothing with the last ten years, which is probably the truth. And so I will go and I will attempt make myself seem like a worthwhile person living a worthwhile life, but we all know that it is nothing more than a charade. I guess this is what happens when you don’t screw up, and so I guess I can stop asking the queston: what have I done to deserve this? The answer, clearly, is nothing wrong.
