When one door closes another one opens? Why is it that I hate losing more than I enjoy winning? What have I learned from recent events? Why have I had strong emotional reactions over the past month to William & Kate’s Royal Wedding, Princess Diana documentaries, Mother’s Day and Urban Cowboy? A collection of events that on face value have no correlation outside of maybe the Royal Wedding & Princess Diana documentaries. Why do I collect romantic comedies? What is the correlation between my hatred or fear of losing and my interest in romantic comedies/tragedies?
What does this all mean? What have I learned? Is it that art imitates life or is it life imitates art? Is life just a big revolving cycle that repeats itself? Does that mean that with us living longer we will see more repetitions of cycles?
I thought I had nothing to write about recently and then it hit me. As I sat down last night at the Tipsy Pig (a place I keep calling the Thirsty Turtle), I spoke to someone for hours and my recent Netflix selection came into play. These recent movies have been Princess Diana’s documentaries. I was asked why them and what I thought. As I listened to the flow of consciousness coming out of my mouth I realized things coming together. I spoke about how I was doing my research following the Royal Wedding with the documentaries. The Royal Wedding put things into perspective for part of my childhood. Watching the Royal Wedding and hearing about the sham of Princess Di’s wedding. I did what I naturally do which is internalize and analyze. What was there to analyze? Plenty actually, just look at this 1,700 word stream of unconsciousness you are in the middle of….
Princess Di was in an arranged marriage that needed to be pure according to the standards set by the Royal Family. She was married at 19 making her both innocent and naive. She became a mother early and was driven to be a protector and teacher to her children. She had a thirst to help others, but an extreme insecurity about herself internally. She died at 36 in August of 1997, at the same time I left home for college. She would of been 50 this year, same as my mother.
That little piece of information is the underlining theme which is the correlation in this entire story. I combined the knowledge I took from a few hours of non-stop coverage of the Royal Wedding along with the awareness that my Mom took off that day from work to watch all of the coverage, to seed my internalization. As I began to plunge into the coverage and follow up articles and videos I began to remember parts of my childhood. I began to overlay the timeline of Princess Di’s life and my Mother’s. This is what started to tease out this epiphany I felt coming on. I began to see how my Mother always had an affinity for Princess Di. It was like her appeal of Pretty Woman that also rubbed off on me. My Mom like me saw ourselves corresponding leading character in movies we watch. She wanted to be swept off her feet by a Prince like Charles as a 19 year old but also tried to balance the hardship reality of the dark-side of relationships like in Urban Cowboy. The issue with the downtrodden life in Urban Cowboy was through the extreme pain they still managed to have a happy ending. My Mother even today said she still cries during this movie. I could see how this baseline effect that occurred with this 1980’s movie repeated its behavior for my mother in 1990 with Pretty Woman. This time it had a lasting effect on me. It appeared to me that my Mother had once again identified with a strong woman (Julia Roberts) who struggled with men similar to Princess Di and Sissy from Urban Cowboy. Now that Prince was Richard Geer a successful Investment Banker in Mergers & Acquisitions. Has anything really changed for her in this affiliation? No, but it has for me. What had really changed was the effect on me. The is reason that I at the age of 10 was impressionable sitting on the heels of my Mother watching intently. I saw the glow in my Mom’s eyes and didn’t realize at this time that I was destine to follow in her footsteps. I wanted for years to be an Investment Banker that was afraid of heights but still stay in the Penthouse because “It is the Best”. It took me years to realize that I wanted this because of Pretty Woman. More specifically for my Mom, because I felt being that person would provide the financial security, flexibility and, freedom to support my family and my mother in a way a Hollywood writer has shown me is important.
Is this really the person that I have been chasing? A fictional character who has been drafted perfectly by professional writers with their cyclical research of decades of relationships from as early as Romeo and Juliet. Do I really think that you need to hit complete rock bottom before you can be ultimately happy in a relationship? Am I forever flawed by my eternal search for an ending only Hollywood could write? This is not something I can answer nor am I attempting to answer today, but I dont know that Hollywood has profited off this characteristic of mine for years. Just look at my movie collection or Netflix reviews.
I do know that May 2011 was an interesting point in my evolving script. It was the month that annual houses Mother’s Day and this year it included my Mom’s 50th. Like my blogged called “Power of Online…” which held similar themes referencing romantic tragedies and social networking. The irony of my deep engagement in technology, social media and, family was that at 2am the morning of Mother’s Day I couldn’t post a photo of my Mothers since I didn’t have any digital copies. I had a box of photo albums, a few frames and tons of loose pictures but not a single digital image. How could I keep up with the momentum of goodwill being created by facebook without a photo of my mother this Mother’s day to keep pace? How could I have lost track over the years of not taking a digital photo of my mother? Have we really grown that far apart? I quickly had an idea of photos my Aunt had compiled for a video montage for my 30th birthday. One particular photo which reduced me to tears when I saw it came to mind. It was a photo I had to capture and post.
I am not sure if that moment was the tip of the iceberg (ijsberg), but it sure was a glimpse into the 90% not normally seen from the surface. It was a moment that uncovered both joy and pain from good times and poor decisions by me and others. It reminded me of a time that was pure and naive in my life. A time in which my innocents drove my aspirations. That innocents still very much does drive my lofty life goals. A few of those goals are very much alive in this story. I am still shooting to be a Richard Geer type and I still want to be able to provide for a Princess Di type.
I leave you with this. As much as I fear the lose of a game or a person, I am always willing to face the challenge head on for the chance to thrive in the battle of sport of love with the risk of defeat. I have never been a person who embraced practice, but relished in the moment of performance. Being a person that always wants to be in the game, I find it hard to practice (Or kiss a lot of toads) when I am always focused on the end game. Its a battle that is sometimes overwhelming for me and off-putting for others. This is why I believe that school and early development are the best places to find a partner, a confidant or soulmate (depending on your end game). School is a collection of similar people (within a standard deviation of each other) if you ask the admissions board. Individuals trying to find themselves personally while all facing similar pressures at marginally close periods within their lives. Someone once recently said to me that people change from those school days and grow apart. As much as this is or could be true, there still is a baseline or foundation of where we all started. It is like every romantic comedy if you have the foundation you can always with effort find a way to center yourself back to your beginning if the desire is there.
Romance is like one of the oldest sports that developed the oldest profession. Once again life imitates art (or sport here), because romance is one of life’s oldest past times very much like baseball is one of America’s oldest past times. Baseball is long, tiring and challenging. Hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult things to do, because hitting a moving round object with another moving round object is sometimes impossible at least hitting it fair is. This is the same with relationships, because as much as the multiple iterations of individual actions on a baseball field are repetitive and cyclical, baseball is still a team game the same as relationships.
Relationships always have a loser. It is as certain as taxes. There are only two types of endings (well for 5% of the population the combinations vary a bit, but the concept is still the same) boy loses girl or girl loses boy. Even the great ones end like Princess Di in 1997 or Romeo & Juliet. But as certain as taxes, death is equally as certain. Dont let death leave you as the person toasting yourself with glass full egg nog and regret because fear overcame you. You cannot fear death, but instead embrace the finality of time as a motivator to drive and achieve lofty goals.
