Or What happens when Plan A fails.So recently I was listening to
This American Life and they were exploring the idea of how most people are living their "plan b." That is settling for less when your life plans fall through. It got me thinking about my own life and about how/where/ and why I live the way I do.
For the most part I am okay living the existence that I have carved out for myself.
Alright so while it is not the exciting, thrilling life I thought I would be living at 25, it is not a bad one either. I mean when I was ten I thought I would be married with a kid by now, but gladly I am not.
Then I stopped dwelling because I am no longer than precocious ten year old, and because people change. But in spite of my attempts to ignore the inadequacies of my plan b existence, technology and communication make this very difficult (if not down right impossible).
Perusing the social network myspace (which I no longer do with the fervor I once did) I happened across the profile of my elementary school crush, a boy who I remembered being a type A as far back as Kindergarten (Diego* was the kind of kid who had to color inside the lines, always be correct when called upon, and be the best at sports.) Alas we parted ways when his family moved him to a rival private school. I kept track of him, over the years, secretly gushing the way only a pre-teen, then teenage girl can. In fact it's probably a good thing I didn't have a myspace, or even an email until college, as I would have surely made a fool of myself trying to get his attention. So imagine to my surprise when after almost ten years I see him grinning goofily from behind rose-tinted sunglasses while wearing a Hawaiian t-shirt and a Vegas card dealer's hat. Like all good social network photos it is the perfect kind for someone who wants to appear both fun-loving but still slightly anonymous. Looking at his profile, knowing the kind of person I had known him to be growing up I couldn't help but wonder if he was living his plan A. And what I gathered from his non-private myspace page was that he at least believed he was.
He graduated with honors from the college (not quite Ivy League but a good school non-the-less) I remember Diego gushing about when we were not yet ten, ran a marathon, and likes to spend his free time traveling and being outdoorsy.
But then there was the picture. Something about his cocky grin behind those rose tinted glasses led me to read further into his profile. Some of his interests included
technology , Rocky, Star Wars (gag), reading Mitch Albom Books (double gag), watching romantic comedies (that one should get him points with the ladies) and listening to anything on XM radio. On top of all of this his statement about "who he wanted to meet" included people from some reality TV shows, of which he is admittedly an avid watcher seeing as no one who he knows (he now lives in the mid-west).
In spite of having bad taste in movies, literature, and having dooshie techno music playing in the background. Diego seems to be living his plan A. He is in very good shape (or at least the pictures of him running marathons would suggest so), he graduated with honors and now works in finance, and you have to feel bad for someone who doesn't have enough good friends to hang out with so he watches too much bad TV. I have people to hang out with and I still watch too much bad TV, usually with them. Besides he, like I, is a stranger in a strange land carving out an existence in a world that has no real need for another two people trying to just be happy and sucessful in it. While I no longer have the ten-year-old mushy girl feelings for which I used to dote upon him with, I find that I can respect him for living his plan A. I guess it helps that among his 20 or so myspace friends there were no skantily clad girls shoving their bodies in front of a cell phone camera.
*Fake name, the chances of someone other than my siblings, and elementary school friends knowing who I am speaking of are very slim, but still...
