Lauren Baratz-Logsted - A Little Change of Face

“Shoot.”

“Promise me you’ll really think about it before embarking on this crazy road.”

“Okay.”

“‘Okay’ is not the same as ‘I promise.’”

“Okay. I promise.”

“Good. And one other thing?”

“Hmm?”

“Promise me you’ll think twice before shaving all your hair off?”

I believed in three things, beliefs I formed not while reading a book, but rather—gasp!—while watching a movie.

The movie, the name of which I no longer remember, had one character spouting off about Greeks, obituaries and passion, something along the lines of when a Greek man dies, his obituary isn’t about what he’s done, but about whether or not he had passion.

This is a wonderfully, wildly romantic notion of funerary rites that I have no way of proving or disproving, not having ever been to Greece or being much of an expert on Greek culture or even worldwide obituary practices in general.

“But,” you’ll say, raising your finger in the air as you make your indisputable winning point, “you are a librarian.”

“True,” I will concede.

“Surely,” you’ll go on, “you of all people should be able to place your finger on such information within moments. I mean,” you reiterate, “hel-lo! You are a librarian.”

To which I’ll finally have to respond, grumpily, “Fine. So maybe I don’t want to know.”

And it’s true. I don’t want to know if that stupid thing about Greeks/obituaries/passion I got from that stupid movie is true or not, particularly if it’s not true. And, even if it seems unlikely that a culture foolish enough to center their dietary menu around things like lamb and massive olives should come up with such a vast improvement on our distillation of a person’s entire life down into one short, fairly boring paragraph (plus inclusions about where to send flowers) by cutting right to the only thing that matters—whether a human being who lived had lived with passion—it seems equally likely that that same culture that built the Parthenon and that treats flying tableware as objects of joyful expression could have indeed accomplished such a thing.

Having admitted that I got the inspiration for my own life philosophy from a movie, here are the three things that I have chosen to stake my passionate claim on:

1. books

2. friendship

3. men.

The order changes from day to day; so sue me.

You probably can readily understand the books and friendship parts, at least why those things would matter to me so much, given what you already know about me. But here is where I take confession one step further. Here is where I tell you something about category three that you might not agree with, having perhaps grown too cynical.

I believe…I believe…I believe…

“Oh, God, Scarlett! Would you just fucking say it?”

Please don’t ask where that voice just came from.

Fine. Here goes.

I believe, not only in being passionate about men in general—which I am, always have been, can’t see myself ever not being—but I further believe that while you can go through an incredible number of men in a lifetime, and that there’s nothing wrong in doing so, and it can even be an interesting way to live, and you can love them all, and you can even love two at once, I believe, really believe, that for each person there is only ever one true love, and that if you fail to find that love, then at the end of your life the Greeks will eulogize you by saying, “Yes, Scarlett did some things passionately, perhaps, but she did not have passion.” I also believe if you give up too soon, if you settle down and marry someone before locating that one true love, then that’s exactly what you’re doing: settling.

One true love.

One—in my case—man.

Only one.

And I got all this—fucking A, as we librarians are known to say—from some stupid movie.

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