Breakfast at Tiffany's

This weekend was one of those weekends I felt I had put to waste, moping the days away…then come Sunday and I wished I hadn’t been such a self-wallowing slug. I have the tendency to want one thing and when I get it, I start to miss what I’ve given up…when I’m at one place, I dream that my life would be different elsewhere and when I get to that somewhere- I miss where I was…I want to be a free spirit and not be held down by any such inclinations of love or dependence, but when I get that opportunity to be released, I become a prisoner of my own emotions being pushed out of where I was once comfortable.

I spent all of my Saturday morning watching and re-watching “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” even though I have seen it one too many times before…I love that I get transported into another place and time where I can forget my small troubles, which fades away every time into the backdrop of the old glamour of uptown New York.

I’ve always wanted to be a Holly Golightly, a carefree darling who mingled her way to a Manhattan loft, worked her way into the socialite realm, who dated many but was held down by none. As life would have it, perhaps I too might be starting on the same road as Holly (née Lula Mae)…a suburban girl from humble beginnings who falls into a committed relationship in her teenage year…sometimes wishing to break free to be on the other side of the world.

But it’s obvious that Holly is just as unhappy as Lula Mae…she gave up something stable and dull, like a pair of cheap Soda flats, for something unstable and exciting, like a pair of 5 inch Christian Lacroix heels. There was no balance, since she was always at polar ends of the spectrum. Paul made a comment that struck a cord …

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

My preconceived notions of who I want to be or ought to be gets lost in my reality at times and I forget to count my blessings that perhaps having a lover whose wealth fluctuates with the stock market (who bought me Chanels and took me to fancy restaurants when the market was up and later then tells me to shop in my own closet and cook ramen for dinner when the market is down) is better than dating the “ninth richest man in the world” who will dump me at the slightest itch of a surfacing flaw…or even perhaps recycling last year's wardrobe to be recession-friendly is better than shopping every weekend to keep up with the times to end up in a deeper debt than the Federal Reserve...

Nothing political today…just a wake up call for the dreamer in me…and when I wake up I won’t be eating a croissant in a chic black gown in front of Tiffany’s down 5^th Avenue, but rather I’ll be at work in my bummy clothes eating oatmeal down in Culver City… and I am okay with that.



Nat