And the sooner you deal with that and move on, the better off you’ll be:
Whatever gave you the idea that life was fair? People can be fair, from time to time, in individual cases, and you should always strive to be, but the creative life is a crap-shoot, and Fame is not merely a fickle bitch-goddess, she is an idiot bitch-goddess. (And here I am talking about Paris Hilton again.) The process by which She picks winners and losers in the Great Lottery only makes sense in retrospect, and then only with a certain amount of tap-dancing and hand-waving, and time spent courting Her favor is time wasted that you could have spent creating something. Worrying about whether you will receive the blessings of Fame is the sort of thing that causes writers to seize up with writer’s block, which should more accurately described as literary constipation, or worse, to one day throw down your pen and declare, “Screw this! I’m gonna write books about an overweight Southern lesbian vampire detective who solves crimes with the aid of her psychic cat!”
I don’t worry much about fairness. I didn’t when life seemed to be outrageously unfair in my favor, and I didn’t when things appeared to be swinging the other way for a while. I strongly suspect that God isn’t fair either; it’s not hard to understand why He might have chosen David over Saul, but why should He have favored David over Jonathan? I’m sure He had his reasons, just as we have our own nonsensical reasons for preferring one individual to another. Who am I to question Him? Who, for that matter, are you?
Life is more than what we make of it, but one cannot hope to do more than make the best of the hand one is dealt. In some senses, I tend to feel as if I’ve badly misplayed the full house I received in the first hand, but I’m still at the table and I have a few useful cards. I am content, even if there are times such as today, when I stare nervously at the coming economic storm and marvel upon discovering that, in this time of incipient chaos, the local news du jour should happen to be… my family.
C’est incroyable!
It’s not unfair, mind you. Absurd, absolutely, but hardly unfair. I think I shall leave the lesbian vampires and the psychic cats to the OC, though. His take will be far more amusing, and anyhow, I have more dastardly literary deeds to inflict upon an unsuspecting public.