The mirror and the lamp -- The crate and the barrel

In the past few weeks, I'd been trying to think up some devil-may-care adventure to have on this birthday, as some sort of last hurrah to youthful indiscretion.  But the other day in Russian, we were examining the subtle difference between the verbs "настроиться," "расстроиться," and "перестроиться."  The elegantly cropped-haired, dame d'un certain âge professor scribbled the root, which relates literally to tuning a stringed instrument, on the board.  Then she waved a hand covered in chalk dust and egg-sized gemstones and purred in her deep, throaty Russian: "You know, it's like with children.  They'll get worked up [настроятся] about something and then when it doesn't happen, they'll be disappointed [расстроятся].  Adults are different; we just shrug and say, I'll get over it [перестроюсь]."  In my mind, a little melody played out: cheerful whistling at first, then discordant piano keys clashing, and finally mellowing into the velvety, imperious sound of a champagne glass struck with a fork.  I blushed and reconsidered my birthday options.

So today, instead of taking the cheap Chinatown bus to New York City and spending the day trying to look purposeful as I wandered the length of Manhattan, I went out and bought three thousand dollars worth of furniture for my new apartment.  Not only have I never paid that much money for furniture, I've never paid that much money for anything, ever, in my entire life.  The experience was surreal and vaguely numbing, making me understand why it becomes so easy for the rich (or not-so-rich and thus hopelessly in debt) to spend increasingly absurd amounts of cash on increasingly useless things.  There gets to be a point -- I'd put mine at the 500 dollar mark -- where you feel a giddy watershed effect and the digits lose all meaning.  All that becomes important is the fact that things are attainable, that you can point to them and say "yes" and "I'll take it," and suddenly a piece of the world gets carved off the slab and handed to you, gutted and gift-wrapped.

Probably my favorite fairy tale character ever has always been Aladdin, and not just because of the feature film and subsequent, spun-off Saturday morning cartoon.  Even before I watched the Disney version, I'd had an illustrated Ukrainian children's book that contained, among other stories, Aladdin and Ali Baba.  Much like every deprived Soviet child, I was a secret aesthete at heart, yearning for beauty in a world of gray Stalin-era cinderblock housing, and my nascent orientalism instantly made me latch onto these characters and fuse them together into one.  The "Persian" stories offered immense luxury and ornamentation; instead of reading the text, I'd stare at the pictures of Aladdin reaching up to pick the scintillating forbidden fruit from a magical ruby-encrusted pomegranate tree, or the one of Ali Baba opening the treasure chest and raking his long, sinewy fingers across a heap of ducats and countless tangled ropes of pearls.  Only one thing really troubled me: why was Aladdin "The Diamond in the Rough?"  The story never said, and Disney certainly didn't make it any more clear.  I never bought the flimsy "pure of heart and gentle of spirit" veneer that Walt & Co. tacked on and still couldn't figure out why Aladdin was special, why he could get the lamp when no one else could.  It was only recently, reading Kierkegaard, that I thought about it again.

Whoever knows that happy moment, whoever has appreciated its delight, and has not also felt the apprehension lest suddenly something might happen, some trifle perhaps, which yet might be sufficient to disturb all! Whoever has held the lamp of Aladdin in his hand and has not also felt the swooning of pleasure, because one needs but to wish? Whoever has held what is inviting in his hand and has not also learned to keep his wrist limber to let go at once, if need be? ["In Vino Veritas"]

Well, it certainly wasn't Aladdin's ability to let go that garnered him the whole "Diamond in the Rough" moniker, just like Ali Baba couldn't help draping his rough, frail body with the treasures in the Forty Thieves' cave.  But maybe it was precisely this weakness that made the lamp and cave call to them, honing in on vacuums of avarice and luring them to a glut of plenty.  Aladdin could wish and wish and Ali Baba could draw from the well of treasures in the cave forever, and neither would ever slake his rapacious thirst.  I think this is the part that Disney glossed with sunny songs and the comedy stylings of Robin Williams: Aladdin is a hero not because he is good, but because he, like most children, is a greedy despot with the power to wish unflinchingly, unhesitantly, always for more.

I realize now that Aladdin was my hero not because I resembled him in the least, but because I'm absolutely his opposite.  I was never a demanding child, and I'm not even close to a demanding adult.  I never knew what to wish for as a kid, and I haven't gotten any better at it now.  For the past two years, I've lived in a cheap, shitty apartment in a cheap, shitty neighborhood, dragged home free or nearly free furniture and thrift store clothes, and been perfectly content with the garbage, the bums, and even waking up to the sound of rustling late at night, turning on the lights, and being greeted by the cheerfully industrious face of the resident mouse.  I've also been in a long-distance relationship for the past two years, and, aside from a few breakdowns, I've been generally complacent about the fact that I get to see the man I love a maximum of once a month.  Hell, right after we got married, I we lived with his two younger brothers in a one-room loft.  My husband worked, I lay on the couch reading Either/Or and watching the kids play video games, we went to Six Flags once.  It's not that I don't want things; I just never want them to be any certain way.  

But the lamp begs to be rubbed, and I've always wondered what it would be like to be the kind of person that could, Xtina-style, rub it the right way.  Today, for the first time ever, I could feel my fingers tingling the way I imagined Aladdin's did while reaching for that ruby pomegranate, or Ali Baba's for the ropes of pearls.  After dropping nine hundred on bedroom trappings alone, I stole away to the food court of the local Asian grocery and ordered myself a huge platter of Korean fried chicken.  To the palpable horror of the decidedly un-Persian-style "oriental" onlookers, I snatched up a breaded wing, shimmering with grease and scalding-hot sticky-sweet garlic sauce, and tore in.  I polished off the meal in minutes and, with rapaciousness satisfied, stomach leaden, and finger-tips singed, I went back to the furniture store and made the rest of my purchases.  And then I went and got a hot fudge and butterscotch sundae.  This is secretly why I never became an Aladdin: I've always been more into the real, not the ruby, pomegranates. 

So, I guess today I've figured out the Aladdin mystery, as well as a little bit about how and why I'm tuned the way I am.  And now I've popped the cork off a bottle of chilled, carbonated French hard cider and am letting myself live in a blissfully drunk cloud for the rest of the day.  As the Russians say, "перестроюсь" -- I'll get over it, but literally, I'll recalibrate, retune, remake myself from the inside out.  Probably not all the way towards the extreme of enjoying the daily dropping of Benjamins, but far enough to exercise some firm demandingness once in awhile.  Now that's a birthday wish I can get behind.