Fantasizing About Getting Frustrating Feelings Off My Chest

One of my favorite TV shows is “Yard Crashers”.  It’s a show where unsuspecting shoppers in local home improvement stores are approached by a landscape architect who is willing to come to their house and provide them with a $20,000 backyard makeover.  The best part of the show is at the beginning when he is scoping out his “victims”. 

The landscaper is a very clean cut African American named, Ahmed Hassan.  The people he approaches are often wary of him and his proposal, though I’m not sure if that is because he is Black or because he is clean cut or because he is offering them an unbelievable opportunity of a lifetime.  Surely he does look too handsome and clean to be making his living playing with dirt and bark mulch.  And how many landscape architects do you know walk around Home Depot offering a $20,000 backyard makeover to unsuspecting shoppers?!  The lucky person who takes the risk and agrees to bring Ahmed home and accept his unexpected proposal gets a backyard worthy of a feature story in a magazine, usually complete with patio, outdoor kitchen and dining room, pergola, and, of course, a water feature.  I live in a condo now, so I don’t have a backyard to make over, but how I would have loved to have run into Ahmed in a past life.  I love landscaping and gardening and often said that if I ever won the lottery, I would quit my job and dive my hands into a pile of bark mulch.  A great fantasy!

I remember an “Arlo and Janis” cartoon of a long time ago.  Janis accused her husband, as a representative of his gender, of always thinking about sex.  He defended his fellow men and responded that they are certainly capable of thinking of other things and that they do when something needs their attention, but that thoughts of sex were “the default”.  For myself as a woman, I was amused but could not relate.  Maybe in my younger years, but as I get older, more and more my fantasies turn to conversations I would have with people if I had the chance and the freedom to speak frankly.

Some of these people are national public figures.  I’d love to take one of those oil company CEOs, for example, for a walk through reality.  And there’s a birther or two that I’d like to slap “upside the head” to see if I hear an echo.  But most of my fantasy “discussions” are local.  There are many people with whom I would love to share what’s on my mind.  I hold back though, because doing so could jeopardize goals and projects that have priority for me.  To me, the satisfaction of having the conversation is not worth the potential impact on things that are more important.  And so my “default” mode is full of conversations and my frustration grows.  My frustration is getting so high, that I am starting to lose sleep.  I’d love to tell one “so-and-so” that divisiveness cannot be solved with division.  Democracy is messy!  It would be great to tell another “so-and-so” that I don’t appreciate a public drubbing as a retaliatory tool.  The voters have a right to expect that I will advocate for them.  I’d love to tell a whole bunch of ‘so-and-sos” (is that a word?) that they cannot live in the past, they must accept that the world has changed and they need to get on with the task of creating new traditions.  There is excitement in progress – trust me!  And, then there’s the “so-and-so” to whom I would just like to flat out say that I don’t trust him.  He forgets that I am in a lot of places and that I see so much more than he gives me credit for, and that he’s not fooling anyone.  That’s his fantasy, I guess. 

There are so many more of these conversations that I have as I lay my head down on my pillow at night, as I drive in my car, as I write this blog!  When I was given the opportunity to blog for Patch, I thought that this might be a good place where I might be able to have some of my fantasy conversations in a way that I can get them off my chest without having to face the consequences.  Alas, this blog may be the best that I can do.  But I can fantasize.