The Perfection of Mediocrity

Let me start off by apologizing for falling off the face of the Earth. My last blog entry was posted just over two weeks ago — but from the feel of things, you’d think I’d been away for three months or something. Last week, my buddy, Alvin, busted my balls and asked me if I had writer’s block. A few days ago, another friend of mine, Josh, walked me down a similar path. “What happened?” he asked me. “You went from posting twenty-eight days in a row in February, to writing almost nothing in March.”

The short answer is, real life happened. All of my free time lately has been occupied by house renovation, packing and preparation to move out of my apartment, and troublesome work-related projects. In other words, I have had little to no free time in the month of March. Now that I’ve caught a moment to catch my breath, all I can think to write about is home improvement, and nagging imperfections.

You see, Saturday afternoon, my father put me on house renovation bitch duty and asked me to scrape out the excess cement between my new hallway tiles to make room for grout. Dutifully, I grabbed a flat-head screwdriver and got to work. About fifteen minutes into the job, I snagged my screwdriver at an awkward angle, and I accidentally chipped off a small piece of tile from the top decorative surface. I stared horrified at the marred tile as I contemplated an entire lifetime of trying to ignore my ugly mistake which had been immortalized forever on the cold, unforgiving surface of stone. I cursed silently to myself at first, but then I relented and shouted it loudly. My newly renovated house had already suffered a crushing cosmetic blemish, and Diana and I hadn’t even had the chance to move in yet.

Even in that moment, I knew that a chipped piece of tile amounted to the most trivial problem a person could ever have, but it still bugged the shit out of me. I was crapping my pants and everything. Once I changed to a fresh set of drawers, I walked back to the hallway to continue grieving over my mutilated floor. Unexpectedly, I had a hard time finding the chipped tile from my standing position. It wasn’t until I crouched closer to the floor that I was able to see the chip again.

“Nothing in life is perfect,” I told myself, and I reluctantly knelt to the ground and got back to work. It was all I could do to silence the screams and the sobs gurgling in the back of my throat. A man could drive himself mad by succumbing to the lure of unattainable perfection.

Living in the real world is about learning how to cope with all of life’s vexing blemishes and grating incongruities. Every person, every place, every inch of the Earth would betray a hint of imperfection if you ever took a close enough look. Sometimes the best way to cope is to simply take a step back, and to enjoy the larger tapestry of your life without paying heed to every unsightly tear, snag, and loose thread.

Yes, I know, I stole that tapestry metaphor from Captain Picard. Sue me, okay? I’m tired as hell, and I’m running on nothing but instinct and fumes.

What more can I say? This isn’t my favorite blog post ever, but it’s certainly not my worst. If I had more energy and a stronger work ethic, I’d probably proofread this crap and punch it up some more before publishing it. But hey, you can’t be perfect every time, right?

Hell yeah. Mediocrity never felt so adequate.