In My Own Little World

Tonight, my daughter's choir hosted a madrigal dinner where they sang all these madrigals I remembered singing in high school choir. All the girls were going to be wearing these cute costumes. I remembered that I had a Renaissance Fair outfit in my closet and decided that I'd wear it tonight. Even though none of the other parents or guests would be in costume, I wanted to pull mine out and get all gussied up.

I checked with my girl first of course...I didn't want to seem too weird - but there were plenty of other adults in costume also, they just had "parts" - she was totally fine with me being myself. She's pretty great that way.

So this is who I am. I dress up in costume if given half the chance. I always, always, always think there's something better out there. I sometimes hear background music to my life when it doesn't exist in reality. And I almost always believe people. That last point - the always believing people part - well...that sometimes causes me problems. But that is, perhaps, a topic for another post.

And then I came home and watched my Ally McBeal DVDs. Specifically, I watched the episode when The Biscuit tells Ally that she probably imagines things (you know, like judges bursting into song and dancing babies) because she has such high expectations for the world and she knows it will never live up to her expectations. So...he suggests that she's decided to just stay in her own little invented world. Because the made up world won't let her down.

In other words, I came home from one of my classic Jenn-in-her-own-world experiences to get lectured by John Cage about the fact that I have so many Jenn-in-her-own-world experiences. And I began to wonder about how maybe there are parts of my life where I need to be happy with practicality. Don't get me wrong...I am practical in many ways. I work hard, I'm professionally pretty successful, and I do lots of extra stuff too. But I don't want to be practical. I think that, deep down, I've been just doing the practical thing because I figured that eventually my own little world would come true.

I guess the truth is that there are parts of life where a person has to be totally practical and, you know, accept that fact. Seems obvious, right? Well - when you're wearing a costume it's not as obvious as one would think it should be.