So I recently became addicted to the show House, and my laundry situation has improved dramatically. I use folding laundry as an excuse to allow myself to watch the show, since I regard TV as a waste of time. I download episodes from what is probably an illegal site, and now my laundry is folded and put away promptly where once it sat in a pile for days, getting wrinkled and sometimes dirty again before it’s even put away.
Great – I get entertained, and the laundry gets done. The problem is, I am now obsessed. I think about the characters and their relationships when I’m not watching. I caught myself looking at fan websites to find out more about Hugh Laurie. And most troubling of all, I’m fantasizing about a life in acting, in show business, in screenwriting, in Hollywood.
These are things I used to dream about as a kid, and now I am wondering, why didn’t my mother take me for auditions? Singing lessons? I had a certain knack on stage at the after school theater class I took one year, fourth grade I think it was. I wasn’t skinny, but I was funny.
So even if I had gone that route and become a struggling actor, dying to get noticed, I imagine I would have ended up the same in the end anyway – grossed out by society, all the overexposure. I would have had the same burning desire in my neshama (soul) for something deeper, something greater, and I would have found Torah anyway.
And now I’m at home with my four little kiddies and deeply happy with the situation. I have my novel that I am perpetually rewriting, which has gotten attention – good grades, enthusiastic readers, and even an agent. It’s my ticket, I’m thinking. My ticket to eventual stardom. First it’ll get published, then made into a movie by Steven Spielberg -- I’ll get to co-write the screenplay – and we’ll start collaborating on movies whose explicit intention will be to help bring moshiach (messiah), rebrainwashing the population to do acts of kindness and stop sleeping around. The heroes will be the ones who defeat their yetzer haras (lesser selves); the people who “just do it,”cheating on their wives, will be the big losers.
But I’m sitting here thinking of putting this all on a blog, and thinking that in the end, that sort of makes me a big loser. Because the blog thing, it’s all a cheap attempt at getting known, at getting famous. Okay, expressing yourself too, but, why is the thought of publishing this online somewhere out there where probably no one will read it anyway somehow more istically attractive than just saving it here on the computer for definitely nobody to read? There’s something exciting about the possibility of being peeked at; I guess that’s why the gay couple who lived across the street from me on Cornelia Street always left the shades up.
Maybe they had the same desire as I have, the same weird desire as everyone has who blogs or appears on reality TV or watches reality TV while fantasizing about having a camera on them while they take a dump or do their nails. When I sing Broadway tunes for my kids, I just know I’ve got what it takes to be famous. I would never say so to anyone because it’s positively puerile and embarrassing, but I just know it. It’s like a disease, a worldwide epidemic, embarrassing to see on other people and even more embarrassing to actually have myself – we all want to be famous.
Why?
Maybe it makes our mundane lives seem more important. What the hell is the point even of wondering about it or writing about it, trying to work it out on paper? Of course a million other people have written about it and figured it out already, so I’m not going to add anything new.
That’s the feeling of living in a massive, global society – there’s this threat of feeling insignificant. The famous thing says, no, I’m somebody; I’m important, I’m different, I’m special. Look at me. Check me out. Like me. Read my blog. Make me famous. Let me write movies and brainwash the masses to think like me.
See? It’s all so weird. And it’s all so weird to be a conscious, conscientious, consenting part of it.
But there’s a big difference between me and everyone else. I’m already famous. It’s just that nobody one knows it yet.
