Uneven playing field
Summer’s winding down, though you couldn’t tell so by sticking your finger out for the odd whiff of wind – it’s elusive, as were my tailor-made definitions of “accomplishments.” This isn’t about the summer per se though, it’s about what I started a year and a couple of months ago, last summer, and stuck with for as long as I have: it’s about losing my grip on life itself.
Last August I was going to Anonimul, the Int’l Film Fest, eager, with a press pass and quite a few extra hours of sleep under my belt, to make sure I wouldn’t let my inner movie buff down and nod off before the screenings were well and truly over. This August, I was counting calories from dawn to dusk, yearning for some warmth in the sleeping bag while Gaspar Noe was running in what I would’ve considered, back in the day, to be the foreground. Now it is all background fodder. Noise and din, and other people’s drivel which I can’t shake nor care about much. At all, really.
It’s not that I’ve lost my love for them, it’s not that my little bout of feet-splashing in the shallow waters of real life could ever dissuade me from following my gut-entrenched lust. But there are quite a volley of butterflies batting their lashes at me in there, lately. All the same, I’m still drawn to celluloid, only it’s in a self-indulgent way, one which doesn’t imply any dreams of ever nurturing this passion into something marginally pragmatic. I don’t see myself ever getting to study at Edinburgh, it was pie in the sky and I knew it all along, only it’s what I do – I wrap myself up in pretty cotton candy and forget about the stickiness of it all. Life, that is. Until I get tossed head-first into a brick wall, like a yo-yo, clinging to my measly cotton candy thread.
Lacking, as I find myself now, in any kind of brain nourishment, focused as I’ve been, for what’s now my longest nutrients-drought ever, on making the 43-kilos par – the results are various: I’m plateauing, higher up than I thought I would, I’m slower, frailer, out of breath more often than not, my wit’s all gone, replaced by an endlessly-recyclable smile, and as far as memory goes… well, let’s just say my walking-talking movie encyclopaedia reputation will not be preceding me, not anymore. Not where I’m going.
So there – in Maslow’s graph, I’m way down, catering to my basic needs, long before, and saving just the smallest dollop of energy for, the high-end hobbies. Not to be overly-dramatic, though, I do get my occasional bliss blitz when I’m not alone, like now, left to ponder the ineffable, terrifying truths. That’s why I like waking up in other people’s houses, I guess – it instantly reboots me in social-mode and snaps me out of wallow-y willow black hole-dom. The falseness is a side effect no one notices or, if they do, it’s chalked down to the morning-after awkwardness. Which suits me fine.
My baby has her own problems, my down-to-earth bro’s got his head screwed on so tight there’s no room for my… emotional instability, as he might dub it, I’m sure. Not dismissively, just obtusely. And, who am I kidding? After all, I can’t blame any of them for not blazing through a sturdy wall of self-negating deceit, like I equally can’t for their not seeing the wall itself for the crowd-pleaser that it sets out to be. And I don’t really want to be stripped down to my bare bones, hollow and poke-marked as they must be – it would be pointless, to storm in on a wooden horse, for as flimsy a reason as the real me. I’m no Helen – indeed, I don’t know who or what I am these days, when I’m left to my own devices, trying like an automaton to be everything to everyone.
It’s a good thing I’m working, if I hadn’t started as early as I did, this intr-on-spec-tion would’ve broken me by now. On the other hand, it’s probably gotten worse for wear over these past three years all the same, more so ’cause of all the workplace shifts I’m constantly finding myself cozying up to – like Julia Roberts in “Runaway Bride,” only my osmotic likes and dislikes surface higher up the food chain than plain old eggs.
With everyone I meet, it’s about the first storey to a brand new house of cards, which, out of masochism, I can’t not build on, not when prompted by your own sense of insecurity or loneliness. Pervasive as those are nowadays, empathy dictates that I can’t turn my back to them – empathy and, to a much greater extent, the sick, deluded self-perpetuating mechanisms of my own insecure self, to keep pushing forward, see where it leads, and how long I can keep it up. You’re all a challenge first and an acquired taste eventually, something I choose to want for yourselves rather than my proclivity for showmanship – the rub lies in seeing the fine line and guessing your position in reference to it.
And where, after all, are the greener pastures? That is what you never seem to ask yourselves… and that, coupled with your own need to feel appreciated as opposed to hoodwinked, is why neither of us can ever come up trumps.
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