Moral Majority & Me

My boss has just been sitting here talking about his children and their many successes in life. I like my boss, he's a nice guy and I'm sure his children are nice too, but I don't want to hear about how all five of them are doing well in life, and are all married, even the ones around my age. The thirty year old is making 6 figures, the next one younger is a very successful horticulturalist and architect or something, married to a woman who just got her PhD. in Molecular Biology. When they moved to Chicago so she could continue school he had jobs lining up to hire him. The youngest was a government employee by the time he was in college. Because he was so good at being a receptionist(!?), they offered him a job.

I sat and listened and thought about my family, my friends, my life. My thirty year old friends don't know what they want out of life, and they certainly aren't married. My family is a mess. My resume does not reflect any brilliant flashes of cubicle cohesion. My GPA is only a smidgen above average. If I ever even saw an out of town job offer I'd be so confused I'd probably throw rocks at it. My boss' family reads like the Christmas newsletter families I barely know send my mother to make us feel bad. I wondered where the black sheep of the family is; was there a sixth child who was disowned because she was single and working as a waitress? Did the youngest drink once too much in that GMU frat house? Did any of them ever try drugs? This family sounds nice, orderly, conventional and boring.

Boring is one word that does not describe my family. In fact, in polite society we are normally referred to as that Byrd Family. It used to bother me when I was younger that we were always the odd ones out. We never had matching fluffy towels and didn't live in a McMansion with beige carpets which my prepubescent self thought was so important to decency and moral order. We had an old manse house where the pipes froze one winter, forcing us to place jugs of water by the toilet for flushing purposes, and go over to neighbors for showers. We had a minivan whose upholstered roof began to unstick itself and hang like a curtain, brushing our heads. Eventually we removed the upholstered part altogether and rode around with the metal frame of the roof as our only barrier. We were the ones who didn't have a television until I was ten, so we created epic storylines with our Barbies, constructing tent houses for them out of those mismatched towels, and imagined dust angels swirling around our ankles when we stepped into the silty creek bottoms and knew every child safe movie made up through the Seventies, because that's what we were allowed to watch. We were the ones who lived in an old house behind the McMansions, with a chair lift for my grandmother that all of us kids would ride simultaneously for the fun of it.

Boring is not a word that describes my friends, either. Pouring dishsoap into fountains to see what happens, having spontaneous Chinese dinners, serving microwave s'mores at 2 am, sewing clothes while sitting around in her underwear, moving to Europe for the experience, moving to another country for love, getting yelled at by Belgian conductors, taking road trips up to New York for the hell of it, or to the mountains to capture the perfect summer day, these are not the things of normal people. These are not the things my boss would be bragging about if it were his children, but these are the things that will save us from the life he does brag about.

All of my favorite people are a little unusual, they do things a little oddly and laugh a little too loudly. They plan poorly but execute splendidly. Anyone who gets anywhere does it by not being conventional. Think about it. What actor, writer, inventor or artist gets where they are by being a conventional person? Since I don't plan on living a life of convention why would I care to compare myself to the people who do? Nothing wrong with those people, but I don't want to be one. Now that I've been unconventional for so long I've gotten used to it and I think I'd like to continue. It's more fun here, on the fringe, where you're allowed to dream about being an artist and make up your own games. I want us to keep being the strange ones, the ones without a plan, but having a lot of fun. Let's burn burn burn and never settle down. We'll be Jack Kerouac, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde and Pablo Picasso all rolled into one.