What a Day for a Daydream

I'll bet people who work in gray, windowless cubicles indulge in a lot more daydreaming to make it through the day than do folks who have thrilling jobs--or even folks who have windows at work.

I'm not complaining. I'm just making an observation.

I realize that the daydreams to which most women retreat during the work day probably involve making out with George Clooney and that my daydreams are not normal.

Because I have some "emotional issues" (OCD and something that looks like depression but probably isn't), one of my wildest and most desperate dreams is to be a rock of stability.

In my rock-of-stability daydreams, I am generally comforting some poor unfortunate who is less stable than myself. It might be a tragically mistreated dirty-haired teenager. It might be some jaded individual old enough to be my parent. The main, important thing is that the other person is all weepy and emotional because of all that they've suffered, while I am a comforting rock of not-quite-smug stability. Now that I think about it, I suppose that in addition to being a bit short of normal, this particular daydream is just plain morbid. No wonder even my pets are neurotic. They just don't have a very good role model.

Sometimes, when the hormonal rollercoaster happens to be taking me for a ride at the same time that I am having my fortress-of-mental-stability daydreams, I am also pregnant just so everyone else involved in the daydream can see that even when I am seven months into producing a baby, I am still utterly unflappable in the face of a crisis. In reality, I have never actually been pregnant nor have I ever faced a crisis which did not leave me stunned and slightly hysterical. Just last week, for instance, I nearly burst into tears because I was invited to the ten-year reunion of the summer camp for the overly smart that I attended as a teenager.

Interestingly, in addition to being a paragon of mental and emotional solidity in these daydreams, I usually look much better than I do in real life. In particular, I usually visualize myself with a much prettier tattoo than I have right now. And I'm wearing this one awesome dress that I saw at hottopic.com one time, with cherries all over it.... But I digress.

Lately, under the influence of too much VH-1, I have also evolved a daydream involving rock stars. Of course, it is far from your typical woman-and-rock-star daydream. I respect musicians for putting their personal lives on records for the rest of us to listen to, and possibly even to laugh at, but some of them seem to take it way too seriously. I agree with Lester Bangs that rock music is legitimate art, but I also think "It's a rock-and-roll album. Go count your money and hush your fussin'." (This viewpoint may well come from being a writer who thinks, "I don't care if they put a big picture of a nekkid man in the middle of my article, as long as they publish it!")

In my rock star daydream, I have a television show on which I interview musicians. On one of the very first episodes, a tortured-artist rock star talks to me about an album he made.

The rock star tells me, "Because my bandmates didn't share my vision, I had to take five thousand dollars out of my multi-million dollar fortune and pay for the production of the whole album myself."

"Oh, yeah," I reply casually. "That's really sad. You know, John Sebastian got screwed so badly by his record company as a young pothead that he now has to make infomercials to finance his records. But by all means, why don't you tell us about one of your favorite songs that you've written, and then you can play it for us."

The rock star reaches for the guitar beside his chair, then informs me and the audience, "This is a song I wrote after my girlfriend lit all my pants on fire."

He croons, "The fluffy bunny of despair banged on the drum of my hearrrrrrt...."

When he's done I shake his hand and say, "That's a beautiful song, but Roger Miller would have written much funnier lyrics about the same incident."

The rock star begins to twitch.

I know that this is probably not the usual way in which rock stars figure into the daydreams of women. I even wonder whether it might be better if I could just daydream about making out with George Clooney, like a normal woman. But any daydream of mine about George Clooney would more likely involve his telling me what it was like to be Rosemary Clooney's nephew.

Or maybe using my rock-of-mental-stability powers of persuasion to convince him to cough up some of that movie-star dough and donate it to John Sebastian....