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Monday, January 24, 2011

I Wish He Was My Boyfriend

As my daughter and I drive around town singing along to Best Coast, it occurs to me that it's ironic for a woman nearing forty and a girl not yet seven to be belting out "I wish he was my boyfriend!" together.




The other girl is not like me 
She's prettier and skinnier
She has a college degree
I dropped out when I was seventeen
If only I could get her out of the picture
Then he would know how much I want him
Everyone gets jealous* and people who say that they "are not the jealous type" are lying.

But there are two kinds of jealous people - destructive and self-destructive. I guess there might be some kind of hybrid of the two and an occasional Mother Teresa who feels not the sting of the green eyed monster - but I haven't met them. The destructive type sees someone they are jealous of and want to destroy them, the self-destructive type sees someone they are jealous of and want to eat a metric ton of chocolate.

I am, you might have guessed, the latter. I find an author that I admire, someone that I think writes the kind of things I want to write and I get excited. I google them, I look at their blog, their site, their agents' site their publisher's site, articles about them, pictures of them, reviews of their work. Then I feel sick. I've fed my green eyed monster enough grist for the mill so that I can begin to take myself apart. Not good enough. You're fooling yourself. How could you compete? What's wrong with planning events, it pays the bills!

How do I stop this destructive kind of behavior? It embarrasses me that I even feel this way, like a slighted teenager.

I don't really have a good way of getting over this, I just keep going. I know turning on myself this way is asinine, but since when has that logic stopped anyone? I just keep going, knowing I'm wrong, not being able to help it and waiting for the life boat to come along. It always (so far) does, in the form of a comment on this blog, an encouragement from a friend or just a kick ass new idea. But damn, feeding that little mogwai is a bitch.


* I use the term 'jealousy' like I'd use the term 'envy' but there is a difference, as Cliffs Notes reminds us.

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