Words on Fictional Perfection, or: How Alexis Bledel Ruined My Life.

Lately I've been house-sitting for two of my closest friends, and I've discovered that watching a house is not nearly as fun today as it was when I was a teenager. For example, I'm convinced my friends had a conversation recently that contained the sentence "Marty's going to be here, hide all the good food." However, while perusing through their DVD collection, as I am wont to do in any home I enter, I came across a beautiful treasure trove: Five seasons of Gilmore Girls, a fantastic show you should feel ashamed for having never watched. For years, this show has been a guilty pleasure for which I feel no actual guilt, and this discovery felt like reuniting with a long-lost friend. And yet as I tear through episode after episode of my old friend, a sudden realization washes over me. Rory Gilmore has ruined my life.

See, I discovered this show in 2000-2001, when I was 12 or 13 years old. It was at that time that without realizing it, I fell in love with Rory Gilmore. Not Alexis Bledel, the actress who plays Rory Gilmore, but the fictional character. When I was going through puberty and discovering relationships, while that part of my psyche was developing, I came across this fictional perfection. This beautiful, smart, sweet, ambitious girl who listens to Tom Waits and makes pop culture references years older than she does that talks really fast and has a hot mom and a whole cast of wacky support characters, I wanted that. Who doesn't? (Though I could've done without this shpw's obsession with putting every character in Mom Jeans.) And so for years, in all my relationships, I found myself looking for that, a character of fictional perfection, who of course, doesn't actually exist.

Now, I'm not exactly breaking new ground here in saying that the characters we're raised on shape our perception of the world. In fact, like most things I say that make me seem smart, this was already covered pretty well by Chuck Klosterman in his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, where he theorizes that there is a large amount of women born between 1968 and 1975 who are madly in love with John Cusack, because they think that he is Lloyd Dobbler from Say Anything. I will, however, take it a step further, and theorize that every person raised even remotely close to pop culture has their own version of Rory Gilmore, a fictional character that set some kind of ideal, a meter stick against which all actual relationships are measured. Not even necessarily romantic relationships. Perhaps you wish you had a father like Arthur Cunningham. Perhaps you wish your friends were as funny and well-written as the the friends on Friends. I'm sure that the friends whose house I am occupying wish I was much less like the Kramer of their lives. It happens.

Unfortunately, we are setting ourselves up for unhappiness using people who don't actually exist as our measuring stick. Of course Rory Gilmore is a perfect character, she's designed to be a fantasy. All fiction is someone else's fantasy, good fiction is simply fantasy which happens to closely match the fantasy of the audience. This leads to another bizarre phenomenon. In order to be with fictional characters, we try very hard to be fictional characters. Similar to having role models, we attempt to be similar to the characters in our favorite shows or movies, while trying to pass them off as our own qualities. A look at any teenage girl's Facebook page will reveal quiz after quiz with titles like "Which True Blood character are you?" Our obsessions make us try to be different people, in an effort to attract those fictional people with which we are obsessed.

Let's focus on the more important issue here. There's nothing we can do about this phenomenon, but once we are aware of it, there are things we can do with this information. It should be a cause of concern for parents that the daughters of an entire generation are going to use Edward Cullen as their love-life goal. In fact, as I get older, I realize that we are influenced by our entertainment, but most parents who are concerned with monitoring what their children watch are monitoring for the wrong reasons. Don't talk to your kids about Harry Potter because they use magic; talk to your kids about Harry Potter so they realize that Harry and Ron would be dead if not for Hermione. But for those of us without families, here's a better concept to work with: You are not fictional. But there's nothing wrong with wanting to be smarter, funnier, or better-looking. It's healthy to fantasize, and also healthy to aspire, but there is a point at which you have to realize that your goal is to be like/be with someone who is written by people much smarter than you. In the end, it's not healthy to look for something that doesn't exist. It's a double-edged sword, and a recipe for misery. By the way, if anyone know Alexis Bledel, tell her to call me. I promise I won't call her Rory... more than twice.