second life

There is a huge gaping chasm between the person I want to be and the person I am. The person I want to be - or PIWTB - is, right now, running on a treadmill. She’s getting a whole hour in before her Pilates class starts. She is on first name terms with her postman, the taxman, ALL her neighbours (and not just the ones who look normal). She’s down with the local kids, reads to blind old people on Sundays and goes to lunch at The Ivy with Gordon Brown. She often follows that up with cocktails at George Clooney’s. Okay, okay, maybe not the last two. Gordy and George are on first name terms with the Person I Will Never Actually Be (PIWNAB). But I’m over HER now.

PIWTB is my alter ego. The one who unwittingly taunts me from the shadows of a parallel-but-quite-handy-for-local-schools-and-M25 universe. She’s always one step ahead. Doing something I feel I ought. Course, she would never taunt me intentionally, she is too nice for that. She’s really Potential Me in Technicolor and Dolby Sound. The one teachers used to lament over. She is currently writing the novel I’ve been threatening to write For Ever. She won’t let me see it in case it gives me any ideas. She’s like that. She wants me to evolve at my own pace. In fact, she’s been writing a blog for years now. Its being made into a book/TV/film with Cameron Diaz in the lead. She might well meet George after all.

She's always there, somewhere. She’d have written this blog entry last week instead of indulging in a week-long bad mood.

She never has a bad hair day. Like me. Right now. I’m not going to leave the house.

She would though. She’d never be that vain.

Always that one step ahead. (Sometimes its quite a big step, admittedly). She gently cheers me on. She inspires by default. Some days she is so out of reach she can be mistaken for the PIWNAB. Sometimes, I think they might be the same person – with a simple Clark Kent disguise separating the two. Other days, she’s almost in reach. I can smell her perfume (we share the same tastes there).

It’s amazing to me that there are people who will spend hours and hours of their real lives living a bona fide Second Life online. Their Baywatch avatars living the electronic dream: house, car and business…selling avatar clothes and avatar furniture to avatar friends. Maybe it’s a way of escaping their PIWTBs or, worse (for some people) their PIWNABs.

For me, a woman who doesn’t even own an electronic mouse (really, no-one understands how I function full-time on a tiny laptop without one) that just isn’t a possibility. I like this world too much. If I can, I’d rather materialise those dreams right here. Or at least have fun trying. I think my PIWTB would agree with that.