The Joys of Mediocrity

I am so glad that nobody's looking at me. I am so glad that nobody follows me around with a camera or is curious to know who I'm dating. Like everyone else, I also have the fantasies of being rich and famous, walking around town looking hot with my handbag worth thousands of dollars from some chic designer house, with my half decaf non-fat cappuccino in my hand, browsing through boutiques for the 'it' jeans of the season while receiving text messages from my ultra buff athlete boyfriend. I think everyone has that daydream while they're riding the bus to work on a gloomy, gray Monday morning or standing in line at the grocery store behind the tired mom of three who's struggling to get her wallet and reusable bags out while not losing one of her brood.

But who would really want it? When you get the reality check and start reading the rag mags (I don't have to list them off, you know who they are because I'm sure you're guilty of reading them too!), you start to realize that it takes a supporting cast of 44 people to get any one star looking hot for the day. It's like the 19th century ladies with the corsets and powdered wigs and shoes so small that you had to be squeezed in by two people with another two people propping up your arms like a scarecrow as you half levitate off the floor so that your feet can be reduced to 2/3 of their size. And then the corsets takes one person to lace and another to hold your arms and keep you in position as your ribs start to bend and crack into the perfect pleasing V. Let's not even touch the lead-filled makeup and the nightmarish Bride of Frankenstein hair.

I do admit that progress has been made and that the process has been streamlined so as not to be as painful, cumbersome or humiliating, but nevertheless, the body perfect today still requires more manual labour than the pre-fabricated houses that most companies are getting away with selling to first time buyers.

I sometimes try to visualize what it's like to be a super hot celebrity getting ready for the day and it honestly exhausts and exasperates me. Most celebrities wake up and work out for 2 hours a day, either with a personal trainer or doing some trendy exercise on their own like pilates or yoga. So starting from this, you would have to roll out of bed every morning and prep for a solid 2 hour workout to keep yourself toned and firm. The average hair and makeup setup for a model is probably about a half hour to an hour depending on the complexity of the look. So if you just wanted to have perfect blow away waves and an 'au naturel' makeup look of mostly nude tones, this would likely take half an hour or so by conservative estimates and assuming, of course, that you're also having a good hair day. So it's already taken you 3 hours to get ready and you're not even dressed yet.

Most celebrities have personal stylists who ensure that they're wearing the latest and greatest clothing so that they stay current, but also to avoid embarrassing outfits that can land them on the What were they thinking? page. So you would then need about a half hour consultation to get dressed and to make sure that everything fits and falls in the right places.

But don't forget all the little beauty treatments. The wraps, the creams, the scrubs, the little brush things that rejuvenate. You can get steamed up like a carrot in a relaxing sauna. Or you can get wrapped in seaweed or get your face and body smeared with minerals. There are all sorts of ridiculous beauty aids and they represent a huge industry that you help propagate by sharing your beauty 'regime' with others. I don't know if I would personally want to turn into maki as part of my regime, but if it takes 5 years off my face, well, I guess you can't argue with that.

After 3 hours of this, there's food. Most celebrities have chefs and people who prep the food, but for this great service, well, I'd have to say it's the celebrities that are getting short-changed. You would need someone to handle your food as a busy person, but luckily, there's not much food to be handled. I find it crazy that you would need a personal chef to cut up your grapefruit and cook a tiny piece of fish the size of the palm of your hand and steam your veggies. But this is also part of the body perfect: just the right food and the right fats to keep you healthy.

After the 150 calorie breakfast, the real work of the day starts and it's generally something like a 14 hour day, with Blackberries buzzing and people milling all around you, tucking in stray hairs and touching up makeup. Then, if you actually had a gorgeous athlete boyfriend and wanted to go out to dinner with them, it would either have to be a celebrity fan circus around the exclusive $80 salad restaurant surrounded by photographers or if it was still under wraps, it would be a covert Soviet era mission with lots of back entrances and code words.

Who really wants their life to look like this? Sure, you get the millions of dollars, the special attention, the shopping sprees, the exotic trips. But all that effort to maintain that lifestyle and that image is exhausting and can't possibly be good for a person's psyche. What happens if you have a crap day? Do you really think that most of us want to come home and eat a piece of miniature fish? Hell no. We want to go out for burgers and beers with our friends or wallow in a big bowl of buttery microwave popcorn. And sometimes it takes us a world of effort just to roll out of bed in the morning, let alone run a mini-marathon while pretending we're Jane Fonda. And who wants to look good when it takes most of your energy to just look good? Most of us have other things to do and to take care of and it's not all about who or what we're wearing or how much makeup we've put on. And when our lives are over, won't it be nice to have people remember the things we do rather than the way we looked?

I can handle the joys of mediocrity, just getting up in the mornings, throwing on some clothes and tackling the day and having nobody gossip about me or talk about where I got my pants. I can handle making my own real meals and twice a week workouts. I could handle all of this just as well with a thousand dollar designer bag too. But the rest of it sounds like too much of too much.