Envy: The Impossibility of the Erotic Dream

At 22, I was a community college dropout and a waitress in a pizza place downtown. The year 2000 was nearing, and I was not close to any of the goals I'd imagined I would have achieved by that pivotal year. The goal that had persisted throughout my childhood was to be a writer. There were other possibilities I'd considered; at age 4, a doctor/lawyer/actress hybrid; at age 9, an archaeologist; at age 15, a professional revolutionary.

But Writer was the one I returned to. Specifically, a published writer. I imagined I'd have to move to Manhattan, where I'd entertain the bohemian literati on my balcony, which, in my mind, was identical to the one where Annie Hall and Alvy Singer conducted their subtitled conversation.

I did go to New York at age 19, by Greyhound, anticipating my new life for two full days and a night as we rode through Madison, Chicago, Cleveland, the whole green length of Pennsylvania. For a summing-up of that experience, it is illustrative to refer to this story narrated by Mel Brooks, in which a young he, as a young man, meets the legendary Cary Grant and is so excited he can barely speak or function. He is dazzled in the presence of such mighty celebrity. Cary Grant -- Cary Grant! -- even invites him to lunch. And then Cary Grant invites him to lunch a second day. By the end of the week, Mel is actively avoiding Cary Grant: "I had nothing more to say to him!" In a similar vein, I was dazzled when I first disembarked at the Port Authority, but I found that after a month, New York and I had nothing left to say to one another.

So I wrote in Minneapolis instead. It was second-best. Okay. I revised my plans. I worked in obscurity.

I did some other shit too. I was in this stupid band that played to empty coffeeshops and bars. I traveled around the country (by Greyhound, mostly; sometimes by car or plane) to see friends and new places. But mostly, I was a community-college dropout and waitress. And not even one who got the good, Friday-night shifts. I got weekday lunches. (And this was when Clinton was president.)

In June of that year, friends began graduating from college. The four years since high school had sped by, obliterating the past into a flat jumble in my memory. I should have just stayed in college, I thought. I could be a college grad now. I could be checking the 2nd-to-highest box on warranty cards, if I ever bought new appliances. It was about the seventh in a series of panicky, existential crises.

I went to a good friend's graduation from art school. I had witnessed her evolution as an artist since we were high school freshmen together. She drew manga before I had ever heard of manga. I was really happy for her, but I also sat through the ceremony stabbed by feelings of regret and jealousy that I tried unsuccessfully to subdue. She had a solid base for her future plans. I was just being silly with my life.

Later, at her graduation party, we sat on her porch swing and ate cantaloupe and tortilla roll-ups. She told me about her plans to move to L.A. with her new boyfriend. It was a vision that seemed hopelessly beyond my reach, and she was discussing it with enviable insouciance when she interrupted herself and said, "I'm so jealous of you."

I nearly choked on a piece of melon. "What? Why?"

"I've been wasting my time in college for the last four years and you're living your life. You already have an apartment, and you're in this cool band, and you've traveled all over...You're an adult. Like, what have I done? I live with my parents."

"But you're moving to L.A! You have a degree now! You can do anything!"

"Eh. I'll get some crappy job. If I'm really lucky I'll get to assist an animator's assistant or something. That's if I hit it big."

"My job is horribly crappy, trust me."

"But you don't have loans to pay off. And you're in a band! I don't know, I'm just second-guessing all my decisions."

The lessons from this barely need to be stated. But, in case you are dim: 1) Everyone's life is enviable to someone, 2) People who appear to have enviable lives probably don't. These are things that I know, rationally, are true, but have a hard time remembering in day to day life.

What we desire, once we achieve it, rarely has the effect on us that we assume it will. V. S. Naipaul: "We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves." Our vision never matches the reality. We achieve a goal (maybe), we are momentarily pleased. And then everything is the same again, mostly. No matter what we achieve or change in our lives we can never, in the end, escape ourselves. For most of us, there isn't a magical point at which everything is permanently okay. And who would want that kind of stasis, anyway?

So we see those who have what we think we want, and we are jealous. Jealousy is just misdirected striving. It's understandable, but unproductive. I have to constantly remind myself of this.

Most of us are equally miserable, albeit for different reasons. Not a happy conclusion, but nonetheless. To reference Annie Hall again: "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable....The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled....And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable." 

The best we can do is to find the beauty in "two bodies on a stained bed" after the erotic dream has dissipated. There is beauty in this too.