On Reading O

A copy of O found its way into the house. American magazines are rare or cost about two Harvard courses here. Like many glossies it is difficult to find the articles between the ads, and yes, because of my profession I know it’s the ads that pay for the magazine not the stand price.

A couple of things caught my attention. One was the side bar that the difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful people fail more. Logically, if you don’t risk you don’t learn, if you don’t learn, you don’t advance…yadda yadda yadda…that’s a good yadda yadda yadda not a sarcastic one, by the way.

I do hear my friend Mary’s voice, saying “define your terms” and one person’s success is another person’s failure, so if being a CEO is nowhere on a success chart, that’s okay. But as a writer and as a person who teaches writing, I remember a Simmons professor who said every writer has 250,000 bad words in them. Well that’s 250,000 failures if you want to use that term. I prefer to think of it as 250,000 experiences enriching my life on the way to computer pubelle…good riddance, I loved you well for a short time.

I suppose I could say I was a success because I accomplished everything I set out to do: university degree, write, marry, have a daughter, live in Europe. In my youth I still hadn’t added work honestly, make the world better, have strong friendships, etc. And in even achieving even tiny parts of each of these goals I made some really big goofs along on the way. As I tell people who say they did something stupid, “But can you claim you divorced a dead man you were never married to in the first place?” and they realise I’ve won the stupid mistake contest even though I never set out to do that.

My mother used to say about her many neurosis that they were her neurosis, she cultivated them and she loved them. I guess I feel the same way about my failures, but like revenge they are best tasted cold.

The other second thing that hit me was a beauty column where a woman worried about the bumps left on her underarm skin shaving. I wanted to write the editors and demand the name and ask her “Are you for real?

“With the US Constitution under attack, with US poverty second in the industrialized world, with thousands of people losing their homes (not to mention those all over the world who have lost jobs and security because of alleged smart leaders' clever investing), with people being killed in two wars of US making and hundreds of thousands more being killed in tribal conflicts, with global warming threatening the planet, you, you idiot are worried about underarms bumps?”

The mind boggles.