Last night (New Year’s Eve 2009) NBC played four favorite episodes of 30 Rock which I recorded on my TiVo and am watching today. The first episode was Reunion which takes Liz Lemon back to her 20th high school reunion. Jack Donaghy rents a jet and through a long list of Vietnamese immigrant related antics ends up joining her at the reunion.
Jack is feeling disenchanted with his life as an executive and catches the bug of just wanting to be normal. Jack ponders the simplicity of normal and even comes up with a saying he feels envelopes the concept, “Beers, Boats, and Buds”. Jack decides to impersonate one of Liz’s classmates, Larry Braverman, who hasn’t shown up to the reunion and was popular and in many ways like Jack himself. As Jack quickly finds, being normal is actually really messed up when one of Larry’s ex-girlfriends presents him with a boy who is supposedly his son.
My connection to this relates to both Liz and Jack’s characters in that I felt like a nerd in high school who escaped and became successful, and like Liz didn’t realize that being a nerd in high school was only a symptom of my attributes that would later make me successful. Like Jack, I quickly fall into the romanticization of normal and just as quickly realize normal is quite scary and tragic.
It would be great if there were a simple life where you were just a good, honest person and had a simple and yet wonderfully fulfilling job. But the problem is, anyone who’s successful knows that just doing a simple job is never enough. These people want to make a difference. As soon as they reach a plateau, they want to move forward. In some ways being a good and smart person means never having a simple life.
I think as a culture, we are all going through this. But as I look back on my life so far, I see that actually getting rid of normal has been a requirement for making my life better, and in fact, a little simpler as well.
But I still watch football every once in a while, or even watch NASCAR to feel like I’m a part of something that I’m really not. Like Jack, I enjoy fantasizing about the simplicity of a normal life which I will never have, and which is would not be good even if I could have it. I think, to some extent, even the people who are a part of the NASCAR scene are faking it. It feels good to be a part of something, and when we’re less mature, holding ourselves back to fit in can feel like the right thing to do. I’m as guilty as anyone of trying desperately to fit in when I really don’t. As I get older though, I know that trying to pretend I’m normal only leads to heartbreak and hard realizations. Luckily there’s always a jet waiting to take me back to the “New York Citay” of not being normal.