I find great comfort in these commercials. I don't really know why. I like the way the nighttime feels around the car. Like the overnight train I rode from Paris to Nice- speeding in cushioned darkness. I find comfort in the little lights of the car's console. I like wondering what city we're driving near, and what's happening there, what's the air like there? Sort of similar to the way I take evening city strolls- especially in the fall and winter- catching glimpses inside apartments. It's warm inside, and people are going on with their well-lit lives- eating at the dinner table, watching late-night TV. I feel comfortable for them.
And then the music shoots the car along the C.G. superhighway. And I feel like if I close my eyes, my life will drop altitude, suddenly propelling me into slow motion. My hair whipping around my face, the night wind blowing my belongings around me as if none of it matters, as if I'm standing at some important intersection, some central moment, the deal-breaker scene in the movie about my life.
Maybe I'm making too much of a car commercial. I am facing some important decisions now. I'm looking for a job, which causes me to rethink the city in which I live, the apartment for which I pay rent, everything I do. So maybe I am making too much of everything, looking for signs, mistaking the little events for the broader ones that I couldn't possibly visualize accurately right now. I keep thinking about daily events and decisions as if they were being retold in an "E! True Hollywood Story."
But it's just a 30-second commercial. And when the 30 seconds are up, I realize I'm not behind the wheel, but more like I'm hitchhiking on the side of that C.G. superhighway. And that sleek vehicle, shooting out into the starry horizon, leaves me in the dust.
Yesterday I saw a posting for a Sears portrait photographer and it reminded me of a now retired department store that was right near our old apartment in Queens. We used to take the escalator up and right at the top was the stand where you could get your portraits taken before an array of paper backdrops with pastel and neon designs. What if I walked away from city pressures and the pressures of my industry and walked into suburban Sears and filled out an application? When I walk past the "help wanted" sign in the window of my neighborhood Urban Outfitters, I have the same thought. Folding flannels seems like such a simpler fork in the road.
My boss admitted having these urges- when she was a producer on the road and she was checking out her rental car in a foreign city. She said she fantasized about working at Hertz for a living. Just type in the customer's name and hand them the keys. You could disappear in that thought for hours. As if working at a minimum wage job (on your feet all day, thanklessly, mindlessly, fantasizing about someone else's lifestyle) is an afternoon on the hammock. I get it.
It's just that sometimes it feels like all I've done for myself-- by going to grad school and fighting the late hours and low pay to stay relevant in my celebrity-studded, who-you-know industry-- is complicated things. And by the time I get to this thought I feel very, very tired.
So I'm going to go back to my life where my former career services advisor tells me there are "absolutely no jobs right now" and where I seriously pause to read a job listing for a department store photographer for which, I sadly realize, I am wholly under-qualified.
My British friend once told me he is baffled by American car commercials. He said in England, car commercials are slow-paced, and set to classical music. How refined.
No comments:
Post a Comment