Happy Endings

I love movies. I love the way the men onscreen say the right things at precisely the right time. I love the popcorn and the air-conditioning. But the thing I love most is a good story when a plan comes together. This rarely happens in my own life. Oh, I plan! I’m a planner! I’m a planner with a to-do list. It’s just that, by the time I get to the end of the list, the plan has changed or become obsolete. I can’t replicate anything I see on the cover of Martha Stewart’s magazine either. My husband thinks it’s a talent issue. I just think that Martha has better production assistants than I do.


I can’t execute a long-term plan in my own life and make it look like the package I had envisioned in the beginning. I hope this is just simple evolution. I make a plan, I start down that path, and then I have to make adjustments along the way to contend with obstacles and opportunities that I couldn’t have seen coming. By the time I’m a few years down the path, it looks nothing like picture in the brochure. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad, it’s just frustrating. Which leads me back to movies.

I like a good movie. A well told story performed by talented and capable actors is nice. But what I really like is a flawed movie. A story that starts out with compelling characters or an interesting premise and, for some reason, it steers completely off course crashing into a pile of unrecognizable plot points and loose ends. It’s because what we watch in a mere two hours is some director’s baby that he has poured a year of his life into. Just like our sidetracked plans, he is so close to the process that he has lost sight of what makes a two-hour story great and, because I’m not close to it, I have the opportunity to fix the flaws. I go home and replay it all in my head. I make notes and I re-imagine scenes and dialog. I eliminate uninteresting characters, even if they were played by a big star, and I return to the conventions that were ignored by the director. Sweeping music at the end, check. Lovers embrace, check. Happily ever after, check.

It occurs to me that maybe I just need an outsider to critique my life. You know—an objective opinion that could steer me back on course and, once they showed me where I needed to make changes, I’d happily get started. It would be a smooth road to perfection, except that I’m me and, personally (and I say this with all the love in my heart), I don’t care what you think about my life. Right or wrong it’s my life and your life belongs to you. Perhaps we should leave perfection to the movies because sometimes perfection is plain boring.