What If Our Lives Were Movies?

I’m officially 35 today. Time flies when you’re having fun.
As a result of my birthday, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about life and love.
I still haven’t been bothering getting back into the dating after taking this month off of it, thanks to a persistent yeast infection that has me pretty frustrated (but is starting to take its leave of me), and some other things. But I want to get back into dating in the coming month and will probably start lining things up soon.
There’s an assortment of men I’ve been sort of stringing along (for all the right reasons), and probably half have fallen away (not a bad thing), those who remain are a varied batch indeed. I may already have a favourite in that batch, but right now’s not the time to be hedging bets, I feel. I need my life to get past this short chapter so I can enjoy myself again.
It had me thinking last night about real life versus the movies, and I thought how much simpler my life would be if it was a movie. Edit out this boring bit with infections and fatigue, splice together all the fun and crazy dates, skip past the lame ones that don’t even offer comic relief, and then focus on the best of the good stuff when it finally comes down, and have all sex scenes be well-lit with great angles.
In the span of well under two hours in When Harry Met Sally, for instance, we skim over 20 years of preamble to their relationship, and finish with “Happily ever after?”
In real life, though, they’d have had to go through all those years, with all those days of wondering, “When will I meet someone that really excites me? How many more underwhelming people do I have to sift through?” They’d have to have the loser nights where they eat straight from take-out containers and drink out of the milk carton, all because they know just how “alone” being single really means sometimes.
Real life gets mundane for most of us. Romance and sex often offer more hassle than reward. But like addicts chasing that high, we keep going, we keep looking, we keep trying, if only because of the possibilities that exist.
As much as I’m not getting laid right now, I’m not worried about it. I’m confident in what I offer, what I can do, and what lays ahead. But I have a yeast infection, and that just doesn’t mesh well with a dating life.
But they don’t get yeast infections in movies. They don’t deal with complicated schedules and conflicting lives and inopportune moments.
They get edited.
These days, my life needs editing. The boring and unsexy needs to fall away, the drama needs its big return. The soundtrack needs to swell and boom. The budget needs to get inflated in my favour. Orgasms need to appear and jump me from around dark corners, brandishing gifts and affections I can’t imagine. “Climax” needs to occur in more ways than one.
I also need me some big investors. I need a producer and an expense account. I need the catering of craft services wherever I go.
There are so many ways my life could improve if it could only be a movie. Instead, I’m just another girl trying to make her way through a complicated life in a complicated job with complicated challenges to overcome, as I try to figure out just exactly how to get my mindset back into getting shagged by boys who’d probably really like to be providing me with that climax. But, of course, it’s “complicated.”
But, that, my friends, is the challenging conundrum of chronology. Unlike movies, however, we don’t have to worry about the two-hours-to-resolve dilemma. No, we have months and years, requisite dry-spells and the raging rivers of a fast-moving life, through which faces and happenings interweave at unexpected intervals. And we have a complicated ensemble cast that even Hollywood could never comprehend.
Who’s to say what will come our way in the weeks and months ahead? Unlike movies, we never have teasers about our future. There aren’t obvious plot points that lead to obvious conclusions.
And I guess that’s half the fun.

4 thoughts on “What If Our Lives Were Movies?

  1. Flying Angus

    Happy B-day Steff.

    Ya know, if life was a movie, eventually it would get pretty weird. Kinda like Pleasantville: do you really want to go there?

    But, you gotta dream, and what better time than on your birthday? Have a great year!

  2. Anonymous

    Pleasantville was too sugar coated, something regarding true love like “Natural Born Killers” is more true to life.

    Where else can you be so psychotic and still have someone love you???

  3. Anonymous

    just wanted to wish you the best for your birthday! I’ve been a reader (though rarely a commenter) for quite some time, and always enjoy hearing your perspective on what life (the non-tv-show kind) brings. I hit 35 a couple of weeks ago, allowed myself to wallow in a bit of overly self-obsessed reflection, and then decided to be (for the most part) ok with being irrefutably in the midst of my third decade with so much of my life decidedly not figured out! I hope you are celebrating all the positive changes in your life in the last year. perhaps with a nice glass (hell, its 35, a bottle would be in order!) of wine?

  4. Invisible G.

    I often reflect on my life during birthdays. I collect all the nasties that I dealt with from the past year and throw them on the landfill.

    Fresh slate. I then gather all the great things that worked for me, roll a big fattie, and smoke it. Breathe in the blessings in hopes conjuring more delightful vision quests.

    Happy Birthday to that…

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