Tell me everything's gonna be alright

What, exactly, is success? And how are Gen Xers supposed to achieve it even after they define it? These are some questions I am musing upon as I read up on old writings and consider my current affairs. I equate success with happiness. For me that sort of genuine happiness is best whipped up as a trifecta: when I am doing good work, when I am not broke and scared, and when I am in a sweet, sassy, sexy sort of partnership with someone who believes in me as well as in himself.

But I done lost my joie de vivre, and now I am not so sure that money can't buy me love, or as my mother so eloquently put it to me my entire broke-ass life "it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is a poor one."

Let's examine that little nugget of solid motherly advice for a sec. I don't think it is too easy to fall in love, period, and finances have never really entered into it for me anyway. Besides, when you are not to the manor born but rather to the South Philly born, that does tend to level the playing field a bit. The gap grows wider as you cruise through life based on your looks and your religious and ethnic backgrounds, your interests and activities and schooling and career choices. And suddenly you may just find yourself (don't tell mama) single, and trying on all fronts (art, ducats, menfolk), but not actually finding what you would define as success. The days are long but the nights are longer and you start to see, sorta kinda, why people settle. And you wonder if you ought to.

When I was in high school I was asked to do an exercise on "Happiness." The class was asked to take ten minutes and journal what we thought happiness was. Mine read "Happiness is me, some towheaded kids, some dogs, a big white house with a picket fence, and John F. Kenndy Jr, who is my husband." I cracked myself up with that one. And fact was, I kinda sorta meant it at the time, I was offended that the inimitably hot Father Bond had one word for me upon reading this little masterpiece, accompanied with a sexy sneer: "Shallow." In my defense I think it was the week he both stopped smoking and was told by the administration that he had to actually give us tests and grade them, but still. I wasn't shallow. I was hopeful. Which is a worse curse than the hex of being an artist.

(Not much) later in life, with things with John-John not quite working out as we had all hoped, I changed tack and decided that what I needed was a nice Jewish boy. Growing up I was pretty sure I actually was Jewish, especially the strange period where I looked like a blonde Anne Frank (followed by my many appearances as Gwyneth Paltrow's ugly kid sister) so it seemed a logical leap. At any rate, less than twenty-four hours upon my arrival at college, wearing my kinda sorta shiksa appeal on my sleeve, I fell truly madly deeply in love with one. My father's quote, delivered with a shake of his head, was "We send her to Catholic school for 15 years....so she can meet the one Jewish boy who attends her Jesuit school." (I believe I should have just capped the "J" words in that sentence for emphasis.) In my defense this mad college crush has developed into one of the best relationships I have ever had, though sadly it led to no glass-breaking under the huppah. No Hebrew school carpool for me or kugel by the dozen. Sigh. In the boy's defense he wasn't nor was his family actually practicing any kind of formal worship so those things probably wouldn't have happened anyway. And we would have killed each other anyway if the first four years of our on again/off again relationship was any indication, and now he is happily married to some other shiksa and they have a happy little dude out of the union. Mazel all around, really.

My next move was to play opposites attract. I think we are safe in blaming Paula Abdul for this one. I met a friend of my best friend one night and was hooked. He was so different from me. He didn't finish college. He was a master skateboarder and used to ride me around town on the pegs of his bike. He wore cute skate clothes and he was excited about everything (except when he smokem peace pipem) and he was a tall drink of water. Plus, he fucking adored me. He had decidedly working class origins. Being working class once removed myself, I figured I could hang. So I did hang--for about a decade. Which really had never been the plan, it just kind of happened. Though the years brought many quotes of varying hilarity from my parents, I think the sk8r boi himself gets the honors for this paragraph. "It's like I'm a hick dating a supermodel." Though he was actually a suburban kid and I am barely 5'5", we really couldn't ever get past this pronouncement. I also learned that like any good supermodel, I could effortlessly develop an eating disorder in the year that followed our nasty breakup. So, moving on.

For my next act, being an actor, I decided to go for one of the same. Talent begets talent and onstage things seemed pretty fireworky. Offstage they were damn pleasant. I wasn't looking to commit, I was actually having fun. All fun all the time. I felt like I had awoken from a nightmare only to find oh, that was just a bad dream, your real life actually isn't like that, so get out there and play ball! This is when I discovered that I like to have fun, and that my earlier affairs had perhaps lacked that crucial element all too often--being drenched as they were with pesky little buckets of teenage angst and playing house. So I was a little piqued that out of nowhere, the fun was done, and the teenage angst and playing house I thought I had left behind with my 20s was in fact how this little liasion was going to go down. I don't have a good quote for this section because by then I learned to keep my mouth shut to my adagey parents about my personal affairs, and the boy in question is a quiet type. We are still one of the best couples I know to date. Except we are not actually a couple. Sometimes I think that is very sad, and sometimes I think that is very good, and in general I think it is very incomprehensible. Not even in a bad heartbroken way, just in a strange confusing way that in the end brings us neither love nor money, and screwed up some career stuff along the way. It is what it is.

Which brings us to the summer of love, in which we don't know much but we do know "it is of the utmost important to lead off with a bang. And a grand finale later." We have delivered on the first. Fairly spactacularly on many levels, I might add. Let the good times roll! But then the temps climbed and rains came and the fireworks fizzled. So now we are eagerly awaiting the big finish. And looking back at the past has cleared up the settling issue. Since I am not on the Oregon Trail it is unlikely to happen. Cause even though we ain't got money, this Gen X girl believes that (somehow!) everything will bring a chain of love.