Life as a Sitcom

When I was a kid, I was at the fair one time when a carnival worker stuck at his booth gave me $10 and asked me to buy him a burger and a coke. I took the money and immediately thought of how funny the scene would be if took a few steps away and then started running, money in hand, thus enacting a small measure of revenge for children everywhere who had been falsely led to believe how easy it would be to perform whatever impossible trick required to win the giant stuffed panda on the other side of the counter. I was so intoxicated with the idea, that to the surprise of the carnival worker and the delight of the delinquency-tending friend I had accompanied to the fair, I started running. Mainly because I thought an imaginary audience would find it hilarious, if they were watching. I even started thinking of imaginary newspaper headlines to capture the scene: "Streetwise Kid Turns Tables on Carnival Worker, Avenges Plight of Gullible Children Everywhere."

But I didn't actually want the guy's money. So despite much protestation from my the delinquency-tending friend, once I got out of view I did stop running, walk to a concession stand, and buy the poor worker some food. The look on his face when I returned to view slowly turned from rage to grudging gratitude as he discerned that I had in fact fulfilled his request, albeit with some unnecessary dramatic flair. I'm sure it would have been quite entertaining, had anyone else been watching.

Why do I bring this up? I think we get so used to seeing TV episodes where conflicts arise and find tidily resolve themselves within half an hour that we expect our lives to work the same way. Sometimes we needlessly create our own mini-dramas just so we'll have something to show our imaginary audiences to get them to tune in next week. Sometimes we create our own easy-to-sovle problems just to convince ourselves that our real ones will dissipate in similar fashion, in the next episode. We convince ourselves that we are the main character, so the Writer will magically resolve everything for us by the end of Thursday night. When we do face real problems, we expect them, at worst, to be continued only until next week. When they inevitably don't, we feel disappointed with loved ones, angry at God, and bitter about life, when the only thing to blame was our own faulty expectations. In real life, houses don't sell, jobs come and go, disagreements arise, and others--important people who you can't just write out of the script--have unrealistic expectations of you. Life's problems are rarely solved before the next episode begins.

But everyone wants to live in a sitcom; no one wants to live in a novel.