The Best Day Ever (July-30, 2006)
Recently I had some male company over. Rough trade: people who’d crushed O’Doul’s cans against their foreheads after emptying three in a row. Every chef locked their quiche up when these guys rolled into town.
Anyway, one of them was going through my dvd of absent-minded video “notes” (scenes from movies I extracted as notes to myself) when they came upon 3 minutes of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. I was outed. Instead of presenting a pile of Maxim subscription cards to evidence my invertebrate manliness, I simply answered “what the hell is this?” with:
I kept this scene of Lola/Mary saying “it’s the best day ever” (when she found out she had been selected for the lead of a school play) because it puzzled me. Do you ever wonder how is it that the smallest thing can easily turn a day into “the best day ever” when we were all younger? And despite the inflation of dreams in our adult lives, a whole lot is still not enough to make a good day a great one? It’s not so much about the essentials that went into making a best day, it’s the elegant simplicity of the desire itself: one single event was enough to make a day stand out when we were young. In the peer-conscious company of adult males, nothing short of a blond trophy wife, high-fives from office underlings, thumbs-up approval from black males, hole-in-one, Vegas jackpot, while sucking down a prime rib winning a poker hand while doing it with two girls and getting a promotion all at once can even begin to make a day come close to being a the best day ever.
Certainly the danger of complacency is lurking wherever adults have days that need very little to achieve greatness. Those who asked for less are sentenced to extinction among Darwinian achievers. In the moment of nostalgia however, I opened my eyes this morning as I lay in bed, and that singular event, was enough to make my day.
Oh alright! So the stuff bunny was nuzzling against my neck too!
glad that was your best day ever