Buying a scratch ticket

Some people have the kind of luck where they should just never play the lottery. I have the kind of luck where I’ll decide to buy a scratch ticket, talk myself out of it, and then watch the person behind me buy a $10-million winning ticket only because he heard me talk about getting one and he liked the idea for himself. That was my ticket!

Okay – I’m over it. I didn’t buy the ticket, I couldn’t win the money.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve never been good at taking chances. Well, certain kinds of chances. I’m a musician, so my whole life is one big chance in that way, but it’s the smaller chances I don’t take – the day-to-day chances that I’ll kick myself over.

The great Sy Johnson, Charles Mingus’s right-hand man for years and my teacher over the last year, yelled at me because of this. I was writing a big band chart for him, and he looked at my page and said, “You had the right idea, and then you backed off. What happened?”

“I got scared, I guess.” I was afraid to take the chance. I decided to write too little knowing it would sound good, even though it was only using three horns when I had thirteen available. Sy told me stories about his life and some of the chances he’d wished he’d taken. Most of them were either about his music or about women.

“Funny,” I thought when he spent 45 minutes of an hour lesson (that lasted 2 hours) telling me about the risks he regrets not taking in his early-life. “Women and music are my downfall, too.”

So what’s stopping me? Why is it that the relationships (romantically speaking) I’ve been in have all been initiated by the girl. From a girl feigning interest in a Massachusetts General Law passage about saying “The Pledge of Allegiance” in school daily to a girl asking “Why haven’t you kissed me yet?” my romantic life has been completely out of my hands.

Admittedly, the chances I have taken – which have been few and far between – have all ended quite poorly for me. But the point remains the same. I’ve missed my opportunities. After-the-fact, a lovely girl who has moved and will possibly never be in the same city as me again said that she would have said yes had I actually asked her out when I wanted to. A girl in high school had a thing for me once, and I didn’t notice it or start to feel anything towards her until weeks after she got a boyfriend. (I know what you’re thinking – I only wanted her because I knew I couldn’t have her. I actually didn’t find out she had a boyfriend until I got up the courage to say something to her, at which point I was stopped by her friend before I opened my mouth saying, ‘she started seeing someone two weeks ago.’)

So what am I so afraid of? What drives me to not do the things I should? I’m not afraid of failure. I believe in myself enough to know that if rejected romantically, I can move on and not hold it against the other party and continue being friends with her. (Hell – I have anecdotal evidence of that.)

I blame the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic who was spoiled by past relationships. I want to feel a click. I want to be swept off my feet.

I’m reminded of a poem by a poet I’ve seen in a number of poetry slams in New York City over the last few years, Andrew Tyree. His poem is “Let me be your ‘ee’.” (I’ll see if I can find a copy of it to post or at least link to at a later date…perhaps next entry?) He basically says that he wants to change the roles in a relationship. That he wants to go from being the seducer to the seduce-ee. He wants to not be the lover, but the love-ee. He wants to be loved in the way the princess in fairy tales always wants.

I want that.

I guess what I’m really afraid of is what’s happened to me too much in the past – I get caught up in the romance of situations – not just romantically speaking – and start to love more than I am loved and things get one-sided and inevitably fall apart. Maybe that’s why I’m always sitting around waiting for someone else to make the first move, because then I have the confidence that she will love me as much as I’m probably going to love her.

I learned a lot from Sy. One of the things I learned is that no mistake is unfixable. I always say that I never regret the actions I make, only the ones I don’t make, and Sy basically told me that that’s exactly how he looks at his life. He said he got over it and learned to actually take action.

Right now, I regret too much in my life. I need to start acting so I don’t have any more inactions to regret.

But maybe I need to realize that the chances of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” happening to me are slim to none, and even in those lovely chick-flicks, which I’m not ashamed to admit I enjoy, things don’t just happen, they happen because someone put themselves out there and acted.

Maybe it’s time for me to buckle down and buy a few scratch tickets. Both proverbially and literally. I could sure use that $10-million…