Friday, January 30, 2009

Old Lady with a Cat

Nobody ever imagines that they'll be the old lady with a cat. I love cats, so it doesn't sound too terrible to me but I imagine the connotation is that this old lady, lets call her Sue, lives alone, is depressed, has given up on finding love, has let herself "go", harbors anger or sadness from a traumatic experience that makes her grumpy, shes difficult, she shops at Zabars, she lives on the Upper West Side, she's probably an angry liberal, and she has a fat cat. It's pretty funny to think of myself as Sue, mostly because she's a liberal. But I was thinking about this because I was watching one of those mind-numbing makeover shows today that sucks you in like two fat ladies having a "my man" fight on Jerry Springer. As I watched the doctors and makeup artists pick at her saggy face and gray frizzy hair, it occured to me that though I'm young and haven't quite let myself "go" yet, I'm in a loving relationship, I shop at Whole Foods, I live below 14th street and my two cats were given away when I went to college, I could eventually become Sue. I imagine Sue's life to be like this pit I've been in for the past few years. Even when I figure out that I could scale the wall and though it'd be dangerous and hard, I would eventually get out, I sit at the bottom and wait. I hear myself inside my head saying, "Why can't you just try to scale the wall, just give it a shot?" And still I sit. Sometimes I get up the nerve to scale the wall for a few minutes and then when it gets too hard or I think I'm going to fall, I go back down and sit. Luckily at the bottom of this pit is a computer with highspeed internet, a flat screen TV with new shows and movies a click away, my cellphone, my favorite magazines, a bed, food, a paycheck...you get the idea. It is nice and comfortable down there but I'm sure Sue's pit is too. All the same things await me outside the pit, but up there I'm also free from the burden of eventually having to scale this wall to see daylight. I know it is not my fault I am in this pit. In fact, I was thrown down here for no reason by a couple of different idiots around me and life since then, needless to say, has been pretty traumatic. Some people are in a deeper, scarier pit than I but generally most people are above ground. I know that I'm neither some people nor most people and that their circumstances will not help me scale this wall. As it turns out, there are several good shows on TV tonight.

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