It's March. It's hot. I hate summer and today has been a painful reminder that we're heading straight for the inferno. Kamikaze flies are buzzing around my lamp because I opened a non-screened window in hopes of catching a breeze. I'm thirsty and feel like I should sleep in mosquito netting tonight and go on safari.
A while ago I had a thing for an African guy I know. A friend. In my deluded, lovestruck state, I actually thought for the right man (and he seemed like the right man) I would be impervious to heat, to bugs, to dictators, to poverty, to eating crocodile. This is why women haven't ruled the world for a few millenia: if a man is involved we believe the most ridiculous crap, and most of it is our own fabrication. This guy wasn't hinting I should come home with him where we could make a home at the foot of the Ngong Hills with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Mostly, he wanted someone to go to movies with, someone to play miniature golf with, someone to drive him to the airport for his 20 hour flight home twice a year. I'm the one who filled in all the blanks.
No. It wasn't any sweet nothings he whispered to me that made me imagine this Daktari-style future. It was all me. And yeah, I wanted him (he smelled good, he was funny, and I loved the way he said 'banana'), but it is _possible_ that I also wanted to believe I am the kind of person who doesn't require airconditioning and porcelain. A person who could say at cocktail parties, "Oh, yes. That's when I lived in Zimbabwe." But I'm not. I'm me. I need several months of cold weather to get me through July and August. I need a suitcase with wheels. I don't really want to drink out of a _canteen_.
So I kind of know who I am, but what I wonder is this: who ARE those people we imagine ourselves capable of being? What's the line between having a goal/overcoming personal obstacles and just completely deluding yourself? I've never really wanted to be a self-deluder, yet the evidence indicates that perhaps that's exactly what I am. Perhaps that is the only way we are able to live with ourselves. I could admit--at nearly 40--that I'm never going to join the Peace Corp, yet I like the idea that I might. I might quit my job and join the Peace Corp. I might become a foreign correspondent. Maybe one of those people who cashes it all in and lives on a sailboat.
This is how fairy tales (and heat) addle our brains.
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