Something More Romantic Than Real Life

When I was a teenager, amongst the Duran Duran posters and pictures of teenage heartthrobs that plastered my walls was a comic strip, cut out of the newspaper. It had a blasé line drawing of a medieval prince, sulking in his velvet garments and cape, wilted feather in his hat. The caption read, “Somehow, I expected something more romantic than REAL LIFE.” Oh, the angst! I felt so validated, that somebody, somewhere, understood my plight. At least one comic artist commiserated with the notion that the fairy tale we had all been promised at the theaters was not to be! My crystalline fantasy shattered at the tender young age of sixteen. In the twenty (ahem, ish) years since then, I have come to realize that real life is dictated by the real YOU. (Or, in other words, we are the ones who get in the way of all our own fun!)  

My heart has been broken so many times over things I just knew I was supposed to experience, if only my reality were different- I was SURE I was born too soon, and had just missed the era of the Beatles and Woodstock. I wanted to travel the world with only a backpack. Every time I hear the growling engine of a Harley Davidson next to me, I still have a deep- seated fantasy that I will jump out of the car and climb on the back of some grizzly bearded biker’s hog, and we will ride all the way to Sturgis in perfect, lazy sunshine. (I even have an iTunes soundtrack ready in case it ever happens.)

Here’s where reality kicks me in the ass. I’m scared of motorcycles. Petrified, really, of any risky activity that requires both feet off the ground and balance to keep you safe and in one piece. I have to take Dramamine to go on the rides at Disneyland, for crying out loud. As a general rule, I am quite appreciative of both indoor plumbing and indoor sleeping. And I am equally unappreciative of mud, dirt, bugs- let’s just say that Motel 6 is my idea of camping. And half a margarita plus 800mg of Advil is about as hardcore as my drug experience will allow, thus, I have no doubt MY trip down the rabbit hole would not be a pleasant one. So, while the romantic notion of 100,000 of your closest, most open, loving friends transcending the planes of reality- partying, playing music, doing drugs- sounds like something I shouldn’t have had to live without, let’s be real. I would never live like that. Not even for a long weekend in Upstate New York.

More truth (reality) be told, I am a terrible traveler. I don’t want to be, but I am. The anxiety of being unprepared, unfamiliar, helpless, out of my element, out of (hmm, control??) sends me into a list- making frenzy before any excursion. True confession, the first night John and I were in Paris, I was so paralyzed by not knowing where we were or how to speak the language, we ended up just eating at the McDonalds across the street from our hotel and going back to the room, and I cried myself to sleep for the shame of it! (In retrospect, this might have been a much more novel experience if we had seen Pulp Fiction and could have laughed about ordering our Royals with Cheese!)  So yeah. Backpacking across unfamiliar terrain where I can’t speak the language, with uncertain opportunities for transportation and all the indoor services I have come to appreciate I can’t (or don’t want to) live without, sounds like a much better mind trip than a road trip for me.

Realizing that my mind is a much better traveler than my body has led me on a quest to live vicariously through other people’s accounts of their experiences. You don’t wake up in jail with a terrible hangover for reading about somebody else doing drugs, and no passport, shots, or reservations are required to read about foreign lands. A much more prudent and cost- effective form of travel, indeed. (Keep telling yourself that, Lauren.)   

For about two years now, I have been sludging through a few pages at a time of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s oddly all I can handle. You’d think a book about a man free from the trappings of responsible society, who gets to follow his id on magical journeys across the country-living off the land, charming his lodging, transportation, food, booze off of the kindness of strangers- would be the auto-biography of my ideal life. (I certainly thought it would be.)Well, some hedonistic bohemian I’VE turned out to be! I find myself reading every page judging him, imparting his carefree ways with the burdensome weight of the cast of characters that toil to support the lifestyle to which he has become accustom. Is it enough that he is a voice for an era of self-expression? That his contribution to life is his words he has shared with us, words that we are still reading 70 years later? Hell no! My inner judge bangs the gavel and cries, “GUILTY!” Guilty of capitalizing on the loneliness and gasoline of farmers, toiling their way across the country. Guilty of befriending boring old sots whose parents made a fortune so that their lazy kids could keep their leeching friends in booze and shelter. Guilty of thinking about joining the group to find day labor, then deciding sleeping- in sounded better. Guilty of flirting with the girls and getting them to clean your apartment so you could have another party. Apparently, I'm capable of shoe-horning quite a bit of REAL LIFE into this romantic tale. (And, apparently, I have a lot of guilt!!)  What I thought would be the pinnacle of sublimation for this lifestyle I fancy myself yearning for, is more like a funhouse mirror. Reflecting back the parts of me I was sure looked different, in distorted, frightening ways.

What it boils down to, is that all these lofty notions share a common idea. All of the fun, all of the glory, all of the conquest, with none of the elbow grease or grit or discomfort or RESPONSIBILITY that accompanies the road to them.  And what my conscience has discovered is that your id can’t go on vacation and leave your superego at home. Or at least mine can’t, not even in writing. And in my own mind, I am a free-loving, Sherpa –following, wall-street conquering giant, who can bring home the bacon from pigs captured on the top of Mount Everest, and fry it up in a pan, gourmet-style in front of audiences across America. In reality, I am a housewife, who ponders these things in the middle of the night and then goes back to bed, content that the relative reality I will wake up to in the morning is mine. Perhaps not as glamorous, definitely not as daring and adventurous as the version in my mind, but exactly how it’s supposed to be. Figuring it out in baby steps (literally and figuratively) rather than giant leaps and bounds.

The older I get, the more I realize, I expect something a little more realistic than romance. And really, when it comes down to it, I’m OK with that.