Ordinary Days

Today is an ordinary day, the day when I decide to start a blog. Which is just as well, because special occasions are really just ordinary days when we decide to be the stars of our own little soap operas. We dress up, we put on a happy face, we exude warmth, even if we feel like wearing our pajamas, snarling at any other life forms, and poking them in the eye if they try to talk to us.

Weddings are a good example of how we produce little soap operas to celebrate "big days" in our lives. The bride has to wear the most uncomfortable dress she will ever wear in her lifetime. The groom will never let on that he'd rather eat ground glass than hug every guest. The whole damned dysfunctional family will line up for photographs which show them as loving, beautiful people. More money will be spent than anyone can afford.

So we pretend to be beautiful, stylish, loving, wealthy people for one day. Trust me, you will never again in your marriage feel all four of those things in one day. Reality always gives us a pimple on our nose, more bills than we can pay, and niggling little differences that keep our relationships slightly out of balance no matter how much love we feel.

Even funerals become productions. Through our grief, we want to send our loved one off to the grave with panache. Armloads of beautiful flowers they can't smell, clothes they wouldn't have been caught dead in ... oops, well, you know what I mean. And sometimes, we have a little party after the funeral, where all the "guests" eat, drink and try not to be overly merry. And, again, we pretend we're rich by spending a ludicrous amount of money on a casket, a plot of ground in the cemetery and a gravestone nobody will ever visit.

But ordinary days string together to make a life. They are not all good, not all bad, and rarely do they require a white dress with veil. We are ourselves on ordinary days. We smile, we laugh, we like to look nice, those are not bad things. But we also cry, yell, ignore one another, wear questionable clothing, hang up on telemarketers and eat cold pizza for breakfast. And we choose to spend our time with those we enjoy being around, we spend our money on things we need like food and books, and we wear clothes straight out of our own closets.

Evidently, most people enjoy those special days, because weddings are still being thrown and we still gather 'round to see our loved ones off to the next world. But luckily those days are rare and ordinary days far outnumber special days. We need ordinary days to find out who we really are and where we're really going. Ordinary days are also the days when we wash our clothes, put gas in the car and earn a living.

So today is just another ordinary day when I decided to start a blog and who knows, probably no one will even notice. If you have noticed, and you're reading my blog, thank you. If you don't like it, go away. I say that lovingly -- don't read things you don't enjoy, that's just a waste of time. If you like this blog, I'll try to provide more of the same. And I hope you'll be back to share an ordinary day with me.