Did you ever wake up one morning and just realize that you were bad at life? Incomparably, immeasurably bad. It’s funny, because when I was a kid, I always invariably won at the Game of Life — I managed, with a few rolls of the wheel ‘o life to graduate college, climb the corporate ladder, find a wife and 2.5 kids, and wind up in the mansion before any of my competitors. Yet, in real life, I find myself amongst the minority of my friends, most of whom are married, have children, own a house, and seem to have obtained a general level of happiness, while I am a single renter who can’t get her shit together enough on most days to clean her cat’s litter box, let alone be responsible for raising a baby or maintaining a healthy relationship. Somehow, my friends have managed to figure out something I haven’t…how to play the game of life when it doesn’t come with pre-assorted, multi-colored spaces and an instruction manual.
Granted, I’m not exactly at the beginning of the board — I got the college degree and then some, and I’ve climbed the corporate ladder high enough that I don’t save up for months to afford Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts (which, in all honesty, are money savers compared to dry cleaning bills), shiny black cars, and hotel rooms at the Wynn Vegas. Yet, the Game of Life never told me exactly how not fun being successful can be. Not having to worry constantly that I may have overdrawn my bank account (a constant game in college, when I can recall making do with peanut butter and Ramen during finals time when the financial aid started getting thin – no wonder I gained the freshman 15 and then some) is a bonus, but my essential position in life is as a small cog in a giant legal wheel, which moves forward slowly, moving money from bank account to bank account ad infinitum. There’s nothing particular special about what I do — a hundred different lawyers could do it and many of them could probably do it better or quicker or in high heels. Sure, a few hours of each year, I get to do something that really matters in life — a pro bono case that argues on behalf of the constitution or attempts to save a man’s life. These are the high points, and they almost make it all worth while. Except for the fact that every hour I spend on one of these cases is an hour I worry about not billing to a client willing to pay my employer for my work, lest I not make my billable hour requirement two years in a row. My life has become a series of counting to eight every day…eight units of my waking life that require either (a) a singular focus, which I’ve never had (I’ve always been the kind of gal thinking 10 different things in her head at once) or (b) excellence at time management, which I also don’t have (I would pretty much make the worst personal assistant ever). This probably explains why I’m at work on a Sunday night at 8:30pm not doing work. The Game of Life never had a red-colored space for “Yuppie Life Crisis.”
Despite all the above, there was someone in my life, up until recently, who kind of colored all the above a wonderful shade of “content and happy,” but in the end, I’ve never really gotten the hang of getting anyone I ever dated to want to stick around very long. Certainly not long enough to make it to the 2.5 kids and the mansion. Maybe they’re playing on a completely different game board with a different end game, or maybe they just don’t like the idea of me hanging on too tightly when they’d like to let go. Either way, I seem to always end up playing the same 10-15 game steps over and over again and the result never seems to differ. Perhaps the Game of Life should have a path for “Not Marriage Material and Should Consider a Life of Polyamorous Lesbian Debauchery.” However, not only do I think that would get Milton Bradley slapped with a lawsuit from the Christian Right, but it’s never been a particularly attractive or viable life path for me. I’ve always been more enamored of the idea of sleeping with one person the rest of my life than someone new every year. I guess you could say that I’m an old-fashioned romantic that way. Too bad I wasn’t born when “Leave it To Beaver” was popular. My romantic sensibilities are rather useless to me in the day and age of “Tila Tequila” and “The L Word.”
In the Game of Life, you achieved happiness by being the first little widget to enter the mansion, thereby earning the right to gloat over your fellow life competitors (until they beat you at Sorry or Chutes and Ladders or Candyland or some such). In real life, I kind of feel like the caboose that got accidentally detached from the back of a train — I don’t have the foggiest fucking clue how to achieve lasting happiness…I just keep on the track hoping that one day I’ll connect to something that sticks.
