Tail Envy

As a life-long pessimist, I’ve never understood optimists; people so inured to disappointment they are delighted when the waiter at the restaurant of life hands them half a glass. My world, in contrast, is a giddy carrousel of delightful improvements. I assume the waiter will forget my order entirely and am constantly amazed at the number of times he remembers my favorite dessert.

Take the Giveaway Caper for example. Last March, my publisher offered twenty ARC’s in a free giveaway on Goodreads.com. I told myself no one would bother to put their name in the hat. Hundreds of people did. “Okay,” I told myself, “you were wrong about that, but no one is going to like it.” I steeled myself for one-star reviews.  Wrong again. So far everyone who reviewed it, has liked it, even the people who received ARC’s with thirty to fifty missing pages.  Now a world-class pessimist might be able to come up with some way to turn this into  harbinger of forthcoming tragedy, but I’m a common garden variety pessimist and had no choice but to be thrilled.

The one downside to pessimism is blindsiding.  I am so accustomed to a world of pleasant surprises that when something isn’t demonstrably better than I imagined it would be, it has the impact of a full-blown catastrophe.

Last week, for example, I received a parcel from the publisher containing a copy of Sisters of the Sari from the first print run. I pulled it out of the package, expecting to see my name misspelled on the cover or some other printing disaster. It looked just fine, but I didn’t experience the familiar sense of surprised relief that normally accompanies the dissipation of groundless fears.  Instead, I felt vaguely panicked, as though I’d forgotten something.

It was lunchtime, so I made myself a turkey sandwich and ate it while I searched for the elusive memory. The harder I searched, the weirder I felt. I actually checked the expiry date on the mayonnaise jar to see if I’d accidentally inundated my intestines with some virulent strain of salmonella. Finally, I remembered the last few typo’s I’d found in the copy of the ARC I’d received at the beginning of the year. “They probably didn’t have time to fix them,” I muttered, and dug through the pile of papers on the desk to find the ARC, which I compared to the final edition. All the typo’s had been fixed.  

As I sat on my couch, holding the two books, it came to me - they didn’t feel the same. The ARC was just a tad heavier, the colors on its cover a smidgen more saturated, the pages a fraction whiter.  If I were an optimist, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed the difference. But I’m a pessimist. I’ve spent sixty years perfecting the art of imagining worst case scenarios. When reality isn’t an obvious improvement over my expectations, I teeter at the edge of a chasm of overlooked possibilities, terrified by the thought there might be something even worse. Eventually I figured out the two books were just printed by different processes and my tummy settled down, although it took almost a day for the sense of impending doom to fully dissipate.

The  A. A. Milne character I most resemble is droop-tailed Eeyore. But the one I wish I could be is exuberant, spring-tailed Tigger, bounding through life un-plagued by senseless worries and improbable premonitions. Sure, I’d fall into more of life’s potholes, but I’d have that amazing tail to propel me back out.