"Smile."
Wednesday 2 May 2007
People look at me and they see my brother.
Actually, that's exactly what my brother said to me when we had a big heart-to-heart a couple of months ago. And specifically, he informed me that this was how he felt growing up, as we both attended the same secondary school, albeit two years apart. The thing is, my brother was always the tough guy. At one point when he was about fifteen or sixteen he was probably, if not at the very top, one of the toughest five or six kids in the school. I was more about the charisma. I was reasonably well-liked at school, had my share of girlfriends, kept my nose reasonably clean, and look back on it with a fair bit of nostalgia. It's rose-tinted, definitely, like everything else, but I certainly never hated school. I fucked it all up, sure, because I spent my entire sixth form playing pool and drinking coffee, at the absence of actually, you know, attending lessons, but that was a fun time.
That's twenty years ago, however. Frightening. And since then, as it's prone to do, life has weighed down upon me a fair bit. Now, my life has certainly not been bad, but it hasn't come without its complications and its share of difficulty. Misery, even, at times. And this, naturally, has turned a once pretty upbeat kid into a guy who, at best, is of the 'half-full' variety. Quarter-full is probably more accurate. At least, that's how it looks to other people.
"Turn that frown upside down!" cunts like to say, and then usually point out how it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile. Yeah, and it takes two seconds to say 'fuck you', too. But they're right to an extent; one thing I hear, without fail, three or four times a night, is somebody coming up to me and going, "Smile!"
I'm absolutely one of those people who frowns a lot; who looks jaded, even, or perhaps 'serious' is a better term. To others, particularly people who don't really know you, this gives the appearance of being miserable or negative which, while sometimes right on the money, usually isn't the case. In my job I do have to observe and put up with a fair bit of crap, but most of the time I look like I do because that's how my face falls. I default at serious. Some people default at ecstatic. These people tend to work in entertainment.
What it doesn't mean, however, is that I'm a 'right old miserable bastard'. Indeed, I would like to think that the people who actually know me - i.e., my friends - think I'm a fairly funny guy, or certainly one who at least attempts to crack jokes, and to make them laugh. But a stranger doesn't know this, of course, and neither do most work colleagues, who, for the most part, I tend to only let see so much (drawing the line at pubes and nipples.)
"Smile!"
The thing is, this simple statement is a great, if totally superficial icebreaker, because the only thing you can do in response to it is smile, even if you're faking it most of the time. Otherwise, if somebody you don't really know says 'smile!' to you, and you just look at them po-faced, you're pretty much ticking the boxes that say 'I'm very pissed off' and/or 'I'm a sociopath'. Now, sometimes this can be a good thing, but typically the person asking you to flash a little pearly white isn't a cunt. They just don't know better.
The problem is when you find the same person saying it to you repeatedly, almost on a daily basis. That simple statement then becomes an irritant, like most things do that are overly familiar or expected. You find yourself waiting for them to say it. You find yourself avoiding eye contact with them, because you've thought about it and forcing another fucking smile will potentially lead to violence. Or extreme sarcasm, that may lead to an eating disorder on their part.
Of course, all of this risk could quite easily be solved by just smiling more often. By just looking happy. But who looks happy all the time? Cunts, that's who. And morons. Nobody of even moderately above-average intelligence can honestly claim to always be happy, surely? It's the domain of the intellectually spent, and never-theres.
And the rich, naturally. And male porn stars probably can't believe it. In some respects their life must be like an inverse take on what I've heard many people who've recently lost a loved one say when describing their world; how they wake up in the morning, and for maybe a minute life is absolutely perfect, and then they remember, and are crushed all over again.
For a male porn star, each and every day they must wake up, think that they're just a normal person for a minute, suddenly remember that they're not, and then a huge smile breaks out on their face and it's all like, "Fuck yeah!"
I guess the bottom line is you have to have something to smile about. In any passing second, for the rest of us, there really isn't all that much.
posted by Sheamus @ 11:30 am
