Please Don't Read!

Unless, like me, you are fascinated with other people's frustrations.

This is not a gardening entry, this is not a cooking entry (though it is on the eve of having 50 people over at my house for an early Thanksgiving feast, which we've done for 9 years), this is just one of those long, boring kvetches about other people who have no say in my life.

Wendy has a bag from this clever, and very expensive company, called lululemon which reads on the side: "Jealousy works exactly the opposite of the way you want it to," or something to that effect.

Well, I've been having what you'd call a jealous day. Maybe it comes on the top of working hard, being busy with the kids, prepping for this function, and having my back go out. Maybe it just was lurking underneath the whole time.

While listening to NPR's podcast of Driveway Moments today I heard a voice from the past talking. It was Mitch Hurwitz, maybe known by everyone else as the creator of Arrested Development, but to me he has more personal ties than that. While I was working for the production company, Witt-Thomas-Harris, he was the golden boy I watched rise to the top. Was he a bad guy, no, no certainly. But there is something to watching someone have it so good on paper (I believe he went to Harvard and had already started and sold the Boston cookie company Chipyard that he and his brother had started in their youth), go onto better things.

There is something about looking the part, acting the part, and becoming the part. And there is something to being a middle-class, not-going-anywhere-fast person who watches that ascension.

Not that I'm saying that I was the creepy guy who lurked in the shadows fixing computers, writing scripts late at night and hurtling darts at his picture. Exactly the opposite. He and I hung out, dated the same girl, and I had him look over my scripts, he being a fledgling writer on the fast track.

Now here's the odd thing, I did not want to stay in TV. After coming home one night at 5:30 in the morning after a long (and really crappy) script rewrite, my wife broke into tears saying she didn't want to live this way. She was right. I hated almost every show on TV and I was breaking my back to entertain people I thought had very low expectations.

So Mitch is one of those people you think about when approaching your high school reunion. That person you know has become wildly successful (Emmys, anyone? 7.5 million house, sir?) and you wonder why you have not.

I have a closer friend, who went onto produce movies, TV shows, and become a household name and left all the rest of us gasping for air at the end of his unanswered phone calls.

What is this jealousy? What is it we wanted so desperately out of life that we have trouble hearing other people's good fortune?

Maybe it was because we tried ourselves and failed. Which is partly what happened with me in TV. Failing and quitting. Regardless, it still feels bad when you hear that person and instead of an old flame, who brings back old feelings, this person brings in new feelings like, "What the hell went wrong in my life that's going so incredibly right with theirs?"

Bringing me back to the golden boy. Both of these friends were set up for it. Both are talent writers who worked endlessly to get their scripts to be as incredible as they could get them. One had a prominent father in the business, the other business acumen.

I tell myself, often, that the things that really matter in life, those items I hear time and again from everyone from Jesus to the man on the street, is family, God, and happiness. Sometimes they even let happiness drop off! (The Bible's full of unhappy souls doing God's work.)

And when I was in TV, I saw second and third marriages and some of the unhappiest (yet funniest) people I've ever met. If I was going to stay there, there'd be a good chance I'd sacrifice all that I now have. (My friend's wife told us a few years ago they've teetered on the brink of divorce many times.)

So what, Mr. Jealousy? What to do with you now?

I can't explain you away and I can't drink you under the table.

I'll have to sit with you awhile, the same way I did with Forgiveness when he wouldn't let me forgive someone I believe wronged me.

Ugh.

Double ugh.

Now aren't you glad you didn't read this?