Posts tagged hope

In 1987 (yes, I’m dating myself right here on the World Wide Web for all to see), my high school classmates voted me Most Likely to Succeed.

I have been failing with alacrity ever since.

In fact, I would go so far as to call myself a Spectacular Failure (note the caps). I’m talking blowing it on the big things, little things, and everything in between. I’ve dated the wrong guys, taken the wrong jobs, quit the right jobs, gotten on the scale while retaining water, borrowed too much money, been a bad roommate, you name it.

I realize that the classmates who were kind enough to dub me imminently successful have not given it a second thought (indeed, I can’t even remember who my male counterpart was in that category– I wonder if he has succeeded?), but I still feel kind of bad about it. They could have chosen plenty of other people in my class who have since delivered the goods – the speech writer for President Clinton, the television commentator, the surgeons, architects, and firefighters, to name a few. Instead, they picked me, a job hopper, who, twenty five years later, still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. Or rather, knows exactly what she wants to be but just can’t figure out how to make a living at it.

That’s not to say that success is measured only in dollars and careers. There are many ways to look at success. For example, I am very successful at eating an entire half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream with a side of sheet cake at one sitting, and, while it took me about ten years longer than I would have liked to get here, I am thrilled to have finally succeeded at becoming a wife and mother. But I can’t help thinking that my classmates probably had something a little flashier in mind.

I console myself with the knowledge that no one can say I don’t try.  To paraphrase Ben Stiller’s character in Keeping the Faith, at least I suck with style (please forgive whatever porn image comes to mind here).

And so, in an effort to “embrace the suckiness” as Rabbi Ben instructs the bar mitzvah candidate whose changing voice promises to crack repeatedly as he sings the Haftorah, I’m starting this blog to highlight the up side of down, the bright side of bad, the spectacular in failure. I hereby vote myself Most Likely to Fail at Blogging, which I think is a pretty good bet given that I am media challenged and have never even read a blog. But no matter. Because if I have succeeded at anything, it’s failing. Spectacularly.