Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Positivity Corner
It occurs to me that a lot of what I write here on the blog tends to be somewhat negative, whether I’m listing out the thousands of reasons that having to get up and go to a job each morning doesn’t quite delight and amaze me or breaking down the slight physical imperfections and vocal tics that I believe dim the shining stars in our great galaxy of celebrities (i.e. Katie Holmes’s lazy eye, Drew Barrymore’s lisp). I think at times I come across a bit like my 93-year-old grandmother, demanding my foot massager from my powerlift recliner while lamenting the sad state of contemporary hairstyles and wondering aloud how That Erica Kane can get so many men when she clearly has an ugly back. Suffice it to say that I do not consider our contemporary world to be beyond reproach.
I do believe that life is basically good, however, and although that may not be imbued with such high hilarity as my daily Hilary Duff musings (How is it that I can love Lizzie McGuire but hate La Duff with the same fervor with which she "powders her nose" in a LA club ladies’ room? And who the hell is Haylie Duff?), it is nonetheless perhaps worth noting, in service of my Bill O’Reilly-level interest in being fair and balanced. I like things (Murder, She Wrote reruns and Chinese food come to mind), and more importantly, I genuinely like people, especially before I actually meet them. Riding on the train each day I create a little stable of delightful fictional characters out of the i-pod sportin’, conversation-about-real-estate havin’ strangers all around me, imagining what secret joy underlies the mysterious smile on the face of the woman in the purple head scarf clutching a copy of Twisted Desire or what hidden insecurity motivates the middle-aged man pouring over printed-out copies of a powerpoint presentation about automotive supplies to unnecessarily take up enough space for any given five people. Of course, I start to like people a lot less once they open their mouths and explain why books are boring or whose personal lives we ought to be legislating against, but the point is that humanity, as an abstract mass at least, is a net plus. Which is good, because I don’t think I’m ready to give it all up and live among the apes just yet.
It occurs to me that a lot of what I write here on the blog tends to be somewhat negative, whether I’m listing out the thousands of reasons that having to get up and go to a job each morning doesn’t quite delight and amaze me or breaking down the slight physical imperfections and vocal tics that I believe dim the shining stars in our great galaxy of celebrities (i.e. Katie Holmes’s lazy eye, Drew Barrymore’s lisp). I think at times I come across a bit like my 93-year-old grandmother, demanding my foot massager from my powerlift recliner while lamenting the sad state of contemporary hairstyles and wondering aloud how That Erica Kane can get so many men when she clearly has an ugly back. Suffice it to say that I do not consider our contemporary world to be beyond reproach.
I do believe that life is basically good, however, and although that may not be imbued with such high hilarity as my daily Hilary Duff musings (How is it that I can love Lizzie McGuire but hate La Duff with the same fervor with which she "powders her nose" in a LA club ladies’ room? And who the hell is Haylie Duff?), it is nonetheless perhaps worth noting, in service of my Bill O’Reilly-level interest in being fair and balanced. I like things (Murder, She Wrote reruns and Chinese food come to mind), and more importantly, I genuinely like people, especially before I actually meet them. Riding on the train each day I create a little stable of delightful fictional characters out of the i-pod sportin’, conversation-about-real-estate havin’ strangers all around me, imagining what secret joy underlies the mysterious smile on the face of the woman in the purple head scarf clutching a copy of Twisted Desire or what hidden insecurity motivates the middle-aged man pouring over printed-out copies of a powerpoint presentation about automotive supplies to unnecessarily take up enough space for any given five people. Of course, I start to like people a lot less once they open their mouths and explain why books are boring or whose personal lives we ought to be legislating against, but the point is that humanity, as an abstract mass at least, is a net plus. Which is good, because I don’t think I’m ready to give it all up and live among the apes just yet.
