Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York." - William Shakespeare

HAVE you ever gone through a "winter of discontent" and wondered quietly if you could trade your life for someone else’s?

If you have, don’t flog yourself silly. You don’t even have to admit it to anyone else but yourself. It’s nothing more than a normal rite of passage that allows us to imagine what it would be like if we had someone else’s luck, genetic make-up, breaks, talent, connections, relations, education, intelligence, looks, skin color, pedigree and other x factors that are supposed to tip the scale in our favor and make us happy and fulfilled. In short, these refer to those things that allow us to live a charmed life and drive our fellow men mad with envy.

The discontent hits you when you’re feeling most vulnerable: when there’s not enough cash to tide you over until the next pay period; your job stinks; you’re going through an extended rough patch with your wife or husband or lover; your car needs an overhaul; your kid hit a schoolmate and you need to see the principal; your sister in the home country, needs you to remit moolah fast, and lots of it, because your younger brother got into trouble and needs bail money. Everything sucks. Well, you get the picture of a gothic novel nobody wants to read. You want to scuttle everything and trade up to a charmed life. But would you, if you knew the real score behind those deceptive, airbrushed images of the charmed lives we see on TV and the rags we read?

We are sitting ducks open to negative suggestions we receive non-stop. We end up unhappy and dissatisfied with who we are, what we have and our place in the universe. We’re too fat, too short, too poor, too old. We don’t make enough. We drive clunkers. Our clothes are passé. Our nose bridge needs a lift; the chest is too flat; hair is too thin; skin is too sallow; our eyes need to be lasered; our teeth need whitening; our ears stick out; our behinds, too saggy. Picture the word REJECT stamped on our pathetic, little foreheads if we were in a conveyor belt in an assembly line, as we head directly to the recycling bin unless we undergo a drastic make-over that will cost us plenty.

We look and read about the airbrushed lives of celebrities on the red carpet. We see them parading and preening in their Pradas, Jimmy Choos, or Blahnik shoes, sheathed in thousand dollar Versace and Vera Wang gowns with décolletage showcasing ample natural or shored up cleavages, their gravity-defying faces tight with botox or nipped and tucked by a surgeon’s scalpel and dripping in Harry Winston gems, escorted by equally gorgeous hunks dressed to the nines in their Armanis, as media people buzz around them like flies around honey. And we’re hoodwinked to the vision of charmed lives.