My best friend has been saying for years that he wants to join the Peace Corps. He’s probably the only person I know who struggles with a sense of restlessness even more than I do. He’s always looking for a new adventure, and those adventures often take the form of a new boyfriend, a new place to live, or a new job.
When my friend’s house burned down almost a year ago, he asked me if I thought it was a sign from God that he was meant to join the Peace Corps. All his possessions had literally gone up in smoke. He was no longer on the hook for a mortgage on a house he hadn’t been able to sell. His excuses for staying where he was were destroyed along with his grandma’s collection of Fiestaware, which I assured him was the gayest thing his insurance agent would ever see on a single man’s claim paperwork.
After the fire, he signed a lease that he could easily break if needed and began working on his Peace Corps application. Several weeks later, as he was wrapping up his personal essay and preparing to round up recommendation letters, he got a call. Someone at the Social Security Administration had finally gotten back to him about a high-paying job he had applied for months ago on a whim. And they wanted him to come in for an interview. Immediately.
The job offer came a few days later. The money would be good. Not six-figures good, but still 50% more than he was making at his current nonprofit job. We discussed the pros and cons over and over until there was nothing left to analyze. He took the job and called me every day to tell me how much he loved it. But every time he described what he loved, he’d rarely refer to the actual work itself. He focused on future perks that he’d been promised—like the opportunity to relocate, work from home, and climb the government employment ladder.
Within two weeks, he called to confess that he was miserable. He couldn’t spend another day in a windowless cubicle farm poring over medical records searching for signs of fraud. His government I.D. badge felt like a noose every time he put it on in the morning. He didn’t talk to anyone at the office. He stared at a beige wall all day and read and typed and typed and read. He felt the clammy hand of mediocrity slowly tightening around his throat, molesting him, touching him in the bad place. He wanted to blow his mediocrity rape whistle before “the man” robbed him of his specialness and numbed him to the wonders of the world. Things were getting far too real and he just couldn’t take it any more.
None of that sounded good to me. But I also knew that like me, my best friend has a tendency to turn every moment of his life into some type of Hollywood movie plot cliché. It’s important for us to relate our life experiences to something we’ve seen on TV. If someone sweeps us off our feet, our minds drift to scenes from Pretty Woman—but with a gay guy waiting on the fire escape while Richard Gere climbs up with flowers in his mouth. If work is boring, then we need to move to Paris just like the characters in Revolutionary Road dreamed of doing.
When I saw photos of the charred remains of my friend’s house, I was fascinated with some of the stranger objects that the fire consumed: a mattress stripped of everything but its squiggly metal frame, the plastic casing around a television wilted and wrinkled like an overripe orange. Everything burns. And all that’s left are saggy lumps that loosely resemble what once was. Initially, that’s a real downer. But perhaps it’s only sad because the lumps don’t look like anything in magazines and so we’re clueless as to how to appraise their value. Nobody brings a pile of broken, blackened Fiestaware to the Antiques Roadshow.
Maybe time slowly burns away our delusions of grandeur, pulling us out of movie-reenactment mode and forcing us to live an original life that, on the surface, seems uninteresting. Maybe that’s the greatest challenge in aging gracefully—coming to terms with the lump that’s left when time spoils our best-selling-memoir-worthy plans. We’ll never be geishas who fall in love with wealthy CEOs, and we won’t hide in attics to avoid being captured by Nazis. So now what? Do we stay in a soul-crushing job because the economy is in the crapper and mom says we should be thankful to have a job at all? Or do we set sail for a third-world country because agreeing with mom scares the shit out of us?
Perhaps there’s a third option that involves pissing mom off a little without getting malaria or parasites. But until I figure out what that is, I’m advising my friend to do something completely original—like move to Paris with a Russian artist so that the real love of his life can follow him there and finally find the courage to say, “I love you.” Or he could drive cross country with two sassy drag queens to compete in the mother of all drag pageants. (Just think what might happen if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere!) Whatever he chooses, I’m sure the results will make for a great movie.
