Indulge me. I have been feeling sorry for myself lately. I know. I know. Helen Keller said, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” But does that mean we can’t be upset?
There are always going to be people worse off than me. There are always going to be people better off than me and those are the ones I choose to place my focus. Living in an Internet world we hear daily of successful people who, years ago, abused women or comedians being fired today as tapes suddenly appear of racist language used years ago. How about famous people who paid to have their children with poor grades admitted into prestigious colleges?
To be clear, I love it when we find out that tv and movie stars screwed up years ago and are paying for it today. Racist jokes by comedians before they were mainstream famous? Fired today? That’s a tough one. Powerful men taking advantage of women? I hate that. It’s bullying. Inviting a woman to your hotel room to help with their career and then spiking their drink and raping them. That’s messed up. Isn’t it great when they deny or blame the woman or yell that they can’t remember?
Let’s go back to one of my earlier issues. Famous people, who have made a good living acting and lose sight of reality, buying their kids into college. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing when they made these choices and let’s face it, they are only apologizing because they were caught. I mean good for Felicity Huffman. Her daughter performed poorly on her math SAT’s and she had the opportunity to raise the grades by paying a guy to re-take the math portion. Nobody had been caught in the past, so why not?
She apologized to the judge and said she convinced herself to believe she was helping. She did nothing of the sort. She cheated the system and knew she was cheating the system. I performed horribly on my PSAT and my parents, after an afternoon of yelling at me and each other told me about next steps. (It’s so great when your mother and father are talking about you and you are standing directly in front of them). No television. After homework, I was to work with the SAT workbook and if I was still not up to speed, the ultimate punishment. I was going to be enrolled in the Stanley Kaplan SAT prep course. That was 1978.
Today, we have the Kaplan course, tutors, countless online prep courses and school advisors to discuss options. Notice I never mentioned if you really don’t want to do any of that, just pay a guy who knows people who will take the math portion of the SAT for you? That’s because they don’t advertise. They are not spoken about with your child’s academic advisor because that’s called cheating. You don’t get nominated six times for an Emmy without an understanding of right from wrong.
Believe me, the two weeks she spends in jail will feel like an eternity. But wait, she will come out, pay her fine and perform a month’s worth of community service. Upon completion, we should know the outcome of other parents’ fates, including Lori Loughlin who will no doubt receive years, not weeks for claiming she and her husband were under the impression they were donating $500,000 to the building fund for the school. And then? She writes her book.
Her poor husband, who is somehow not charged with a crime said last week that he has been unemployed since the story broke. Nobody seems to want to touch the award-winning actor.
On the publicity tour, the acting begins again. She knew it was the right thing to stand in front of America and apologize for her mistake. She paid her dues in Federal prison, scrubbing toilets and eating institutional food, making her bed every morning at 6:00 and going to sleep at 10:00, wondering if she would ever see her family again.
The book will be a New York Times bestseller and the now humbled actress, along with her husband, will start to be offered roles again. After all, America loves a good comeback story.
What does any of that have to do with me? Who cares about this stuff? Why, you ask, am I feeling sorry for myself?
Well, when I sit back and think about life and say it isn’t fair, I ask, “isn’t fair to whom?” Now I have the answer. It took 58 years, but I got it. Me. It’s not fair to me. It never was. I know, we are not supposed to say things like that.
But, tough. Am I angry? You bet. Am I full of hostility and sitting here saying why me? I am. Why not? What have I ever done? Nothing. I have pretty much failed at everything I have ever done or tried to do.
When I was 17 and sending out college applications, my father asked me what I wanted to do. Did I have a major in mind? I told him I wanted to be a writer. When he was done laughing, he asked what I REALLY wanted to do. My parents had limited hope that their children could accomplish anything. In retrospect, maybe the fact that I survived for 58 years with a limited skill set and a belief instilled in me that I am good at absolutely nothing is a reason to be happy.
I said that I love when famous people do stupid things. Buying their kids’ education is up there with any stupid thing I have ever done. I am not going to feel sorry for myself much longer because at least when I did stupid stuff, which let’s face it is only stupid because somebody caught us, it wasn’t published from sea to shining sea. I only had to answer to my parents or my ex-wife.
Now that I’m divorced and trying to get my life back in order, there is time to feel sorry for myself. In fact, there is time for a great deal of reflection. There is also time to focus on the world I never could before. My ex-wife, like my parents, laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a writer.
So, here’s the plan. Stop feeling sorry for myself. Focus on the positive and forget the negative. Remember, there are other people with bigger problems than me. All I have to do is figure out how to move one step ahead.
Wait. Hang on. What? It’s called what? It’s a pandemic. What? The Coronavirus disease? Who has it? Oy vey…