I wish I
was Ginger Rogers. I wouldn’t need to try and choose a man from countless
suspicious, unreliable too-old-for-a-25-year-old individuals wanting to take me
out just to feel the excitement of going out with too-young-oh-how-thrilling-indeed-25-year-old. I could skip all that, and enjoy the excitement
of marrying Fred Astaire again and again, after countless of adorably wacky
relationship chaos’s. And to do it all (NB: even sleeping) in the most gorgeous
dresses. On top of that, my dancing career would blossom, the world around me
wouldn’t be obsessed with dead-end technology and every time I would want to write
a letter or a diary note, I could type it with my Remington portable without
needing to reboot it after every half an hour. Miraculous.
But instead of all that jazz, swing and tap, I’m
living in this world of post-post-contemporary dance where every performance
has a cutting-edge technology projection on the back wall where the dancers
aren’t even moving, marriage is “a constitution against equality” and I am
indeed trying to choose a man from middle aged troubled souls, who trouble their souls with such an empty, man-made issue as "being middle aged". Surely
I could choose to go for a younger man, in the same way I’m choosing to sleep
naked instead of wearing a frilly, itchy and tight satin vs. lace – dream. Or
in the same way that I could choose a woman instead of a man. “Today I decide
to start liking women instead”. Sure. And I should be already in the bed
because Fred Astaire is waiting for me to join him in my heart-shaped chamber of love…
The thing is
that all the magic has been violently whipped of from the lives of modern people,
and these days, when I’m feeling gloomy and tired, unwilling to lift myself up
from the melancholic world of Facebook and technology, my own world looks
temporarily grey as well. As if a rabbit wouldn’t be able to carry a clock in
his waistcoat pocket! I regress into a lifeless narrator of Fight Club, who’s
life is a pathetic realm of suicidal thoughts, or indeed like any other Finn
living in darkness without one single jultomte peeking from the windows.
And when
after a day like this, yet another not-even-middle-aged just about potential man I’ve
been seeing a few times before my previous trip to Oz sends me a message
telling, how he wants to “do the honorable thing by letting me know he’s dating
a twenty five year old local chic”, and so “how about we bunk off and take the
jeep to a pub in Kent”, I can't help but shake my head, sigh and watch Top hat instead. Fred Astaire
might have seemed a little naïve when it came to showing affection towards
Ginger Rogers, but that kind of clumsiness is not something you want to hear
from an intelligent 43-year old post-post-modern businessman. It does make me want
to go to sleep and dream of being forever ageless Ginger Rogers in golden 30’s.
