Do you ever get so paranoid you think the car in front of you is trying to follow you?
I did that the other night. To outwit my forward pursuer, I cunningly didn’t indicate my left turn so that he sailed past the road into which I then turned. I was just congratulating myself on being really quick-thinking when I realised how neurotic I was.
Or how about irritating yourself so much you literally are a pain in your own neck?
The same night as the car paranoia I dropped a contact lens in the editing booth at work. Problem was I didn’t realise this until I got home at half past nine at night. In my rush to get back to work before the lens dried under a desk at the SABC, I yanked my neck pulling out of my parking.
So when I did finally locate the withered and useless husk of my optical aid, I was not only squinting out of one eye, I was hunched against the stabbing pain in my neck muscles as well. Rather like the Quasimodo of Auckland Park. It struck me at that moment that I was not only the most annoying person I knew, but also a pain in my own neck.
Life lived full-time is full of insignificant, silly moments like these. It’s only in the polished-up and edited images fed into our minds through adverts, movies and our own high standards that life is a slick montage of stylish and exciting scenes. Girls with swinging bobs and cherry-gloss smiles eating sushi, a loving couple dressed in matching knit polos tumbling in the sunny grass, a woman rising joyously out of her bed in the morning.
In the real unedited world, this is what those three scenarios would look like:
Sushi-eating is a stylish thing to do, but in reality it’s very seldom a stylish business. It normally involves too much wasabi making one choke; too big a piece of sushi being shoved in the mouth at one time, resulting in the bulging eyes and puffed out cheeks of a goldfish (the fish’s revenge perhaps); or my particular specialty, disintegrating the entire stack in a messy pool of soy sauce and rice and calling for a fork. Flicking one’s stylish bob at this point would do little to redeem one.
The polo-knit couple in real life might have ended up having a few giggles in the grass, but it’s very possible they would also have had a huge row on the way to the picnic because he got the directions wrong and she forgot the plates.
As for the woman rising joyously out of bed ? well, I don’t need to tell you that the only thing that propels most of us out of bed really quickly in the morning is the need for the bathroom.
I’m not saying life doesn’t have those breathtakingly perfect moments, or glamourous and stylish ones. After all, you know when something really special is happening because your brain can’t quite believe how perfect it is. You think you are in an advert.
The problem is that when we are not cracking 10 jokes in five minutes, or falling in love with a new person every week, life starts to seem a little dull. Compared to the condensed, pithy half-hour instalments we see on television, real life, which is a laugh-a-day maybe, instead of a laugh-a-minute, can start to feel somewhat dissatisfying.
I think it could also make us both more judgemental and more insecure. If the Great Love of your life doesn’t make you feel like the star of a Hugh Grant movie all the time, he might get the boot. Similarly, too many images of Britney’s beautiful belly and Penelope’s perfect pout could make even the most confident of women fear exposing her particularly unique early morning face to a lover.
Important to realise I think is that there are no perfect people. One glimpse into another’s life might flash you a dominant image of success or happiness, but life lived as it is in the detail is a varied pattern of success and failure, smiles and frowns.
It’s okay to be smart one moment and dumb the next, or to have a relationship that is heartstoppingly romantic one week and boring as hell the next.
In short, life is not all good hair days and we shouldn’t feel we’ve failed when the fringe has flopped.
If life didn’t have those dull, ditsy or dreadful moments, we’d never appreciate the really beautiful ones when they came along. At least that’s what I tried telling myself the other night once I had given my neck a massage and was speaking to myself again.