Let’s Get it Over With

Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. during the Mercury-Atlas 6 Spaceflight

“Let’s Get It Over With”--it’s the new game show for those who don’t like to play games. With all the anticipation and anxiety conferred on almost all human activity, it becomes increasingly incumbent on the modern harried cosmopolitanite to get things over with. It’s great fun to look back with a kind of nostalgie de la boue at all the miserable experiences thrown at you by life (marriage for instance, can be defined as being in the trenches with the one you love). But it’s a lot greater to look back on it from the death bed then to actually have to endure the constant territorial struggles. Sex is another one. Hubba hubba, everyone one is supposedly hot to trot, but are we going to forget that in order to have sex you have to undress in front of stranger? Eventually you develop a certain familiarity, but remember familiarity breeds contempt. When it comes to sex, it’s always that first night of passion that everyone looks back fondly on. If only it were what it’s cracked up to be and there are some who can only say, if only it worked. Woody Allen spoke for all anxious lovers in Annie Hall, when he proclaimed to Diane Keaton that they should kiss and get it over with before repairing to a deli. Buddhists say desire is the beginning of suffering. Make a list. How many things make you so nervous that you have contemplated not even doing them at all? How many times have you gotten out of bed at the beginning of a day’s worth of activities that are generally considered to be fun and thought to yourself I’d rather be dead?