Mediocre Spice

At my last job, I worked with a woman named after a character from a popular sitcom from the 1960's. For the purposes of this post, we'll call that woman Ginger.

Ginger had a relatively successful career. She came to us from a multi-national company where she'd played a key role in the merger of several smaller multi-national companies. She had an MBA, owned several small pieces of real estate, had a happy marriage, and lived in Lincoln Park. Her talent was to assess a situation, determine which course of action would require the minimum amount of effort to maintain a baseline of existence, and then generate only that amount of effort. She wasn't interested in earning an A for effort. She was comfortable with a C-. Her life looked smooth and comfortable.

And it also looked bone-crushingly boring. She would frequently go to exotic vacation locations and never set foot outside of the spa in the five-star hotel. She would go to punk-rock concerts by bands from the'80's, thinking she was being ironic, ala Alanis Morrisett, and never even be curious about the cultural genesis or context of the music she was hearing. Her presence at these places and events gave her all the character she thought she needed. She had no interest in exploring anything beyond its surface value and as a result she had the depth of a soiled Petrie dish.

One day this forty-year old woman came into the office with a new haircut. She'd gotten it cut because she liked the way it looked on Victoria Beckham. Let's just say that Ginger was no Posh Spice.

I truly hated her.

I thought about her today as I opened my three rejection letters. I was not accepted into any of the PhD programs I'd applied to. To be fair, I have no idea how Ginger would have responded to the news of my failure, but in my imagination I could see her smirking. Ginger had, and frequently exhibited, a superior attitude to just about everyone. (On three separate occasions I closed her office door and told her that laughing at someone in a meeting, and bad mouthing them when they weren't present really did not serve her purposes. I'm sure she never got it.) But I do know this: to Ginger these three rejections would be tangible, objective proof of failure, of inferiority. It would justify her feeling of superiority because she had never received such a rejection.

But the truth is, she also never risked anything. She had an MBA, but only God knows how she got it. There was never any shred of evidence that she was capable of using it. On more than one occasion she took credit for someone else's work, and on more than one occasion she shifted the responsibility for a failure to someone else. She never created or contributed anything that was even partially her own, let alone wholly original.

She lived, and I imagine still lives, a mediocre life.

And while she has more money than I, and holds more symbols of status, I'm not sure I would trade all of her Armitage-Avenue, boutique trappings for a single one of those rejection letters. Because I view them, not as symbols of failure, but as evidence of character. I shot for the moon. I missed, and the accompanying disappointment stings. But those letters are proof that I found the resources to dare to dream and to act on that dream.

For me, there will be other dreams, more effort, and one day I'll have another success. Just like I'll have another failure. For Ginger there will only be a lifetime of people confusing her name with a mediocre sitcom character and a common kitchen spice.