If you'd like to be depressed--and who wouldn't be?! it's all the rage--go see the movie Revolutionary Road. I mean, why do all the women in all the great books and movies have to go and KILL themselves. Come on, Sylvia Plath, get your head out of the oven and do something fun. Dear Anne Sexton, put down the cigarette and the bourbon and go skiing! Poor neurotic, undervalued, over-gifted, women stuffed into the small box of wifehood/motherhood/ womanhood. You need to get some perspective! Stop taking yourselves so damn seriously. Really, honey, it ain't that bad.
In fact, it could be much, much worse. You could be a character in one of Jodi Picoult's novels. Or Stephen King's, or any other of the countless best-sellers, the kind readers race through, can't put down, ignore their children to read. These books are about tragedies. Death. Death. More death. Torture. Despair. Loss. Dead kids. Dead lovers. Dead spouses. Weird dead things. Court trials. Heartbreaks. Heartaches.
And we call it entertainment!
Okay, let's all get a grip on ourselves. A collective grip. A tear-jerker is great. A movie about the holocaust is...educational, but I don't really feel like eating popcorn while I watch it! We can't get away from violence, homicide, suicide, disease, and every other terrible, horrible, no-good-very-bad-thing that is constantly printed in the newspaper, published as novels, filmed for movies and watched for--I hope you're sitting down--fun. For fun! What's so fun about death?
Meanwhile, comic writers like me, labor in vain. I won't ever be taken seriously. I shan't win a prize. I am too unserious to be considered serious. Would that I would just pop my head into an oven and keep it there. Then, I might win the Pulitzer. Posthumously of course.
But life is way more fun than death. And laughter feels a hell of a lot better than gut-wrenching sorrow. And isn't life hard enough without paying to watch other people suffer? Call me a Pollyanna. I don't care. I'm not going to write about serial tragedies, horrific events, molested children. I'm going to be silly.
And it's going to make me pretty damn happy.
Pollyanna!!
ReplyDeleteWell what kind of blogger are YOU, then, with no schadenfeude? ;)
ReplyDeleteok, that new picture is much better, but you might want to crop just to your face, what with the cleavage... I like your long hair, btw - is that an intentional do, or just an I'm-too-busy-for-haricuts mom look? I seem to go about 3 weeks overdue for my haircuts every time, these days.
ReplyDelete