This has been tooling around in my brain for the past few days and I wasn't sure I wanted to write anything about it, but seeing something tonight on TV pushed me over the edge.
I sometimes watch
Fear Factor in syndication as it comes on right after
Seinfeld. I'm not a fan of the show, but it's interesting in so far as to watch people attempt various feats of physical and mental skill and endurance and see people dig deep and surpass what they thought they could do.
And tonight was the corker.
I'm rather obsessed with my failure. I use the singular in a comprehensive sense. My life is a failure, in every respect that is important to me. And yet, I'm still alive. Each day is an opportunity to turn things around. So I think a lot about the fact that I seem to have no motivation to act to turn things around and why that is and what I can do to change that. The responsibility is mine. I must act. My failure, truly, is not so much that I have not achieved this or that, but that I do not try.
In my musings and reading on how I might find the impetus to act, I've come to recognize and find that others have recognized that it's not always the best or the brightest who win. Winning is often about being "stupid" enough to just keep on going or to go where no one thinks it's possible to go or go in a way that is "known" to be wrong.
The phenomenon seems almost to be a law.
The Judeo-Christian God seems even to affirm it.
A friend of mine recently posted
a short note on the subject in which he links to a longer, very good piece in the same vein called
The Clueless Manifesto.
Idol threat - Elliot YaminI'll get back to
Fear Factor in a minute. There are a couple of other examples I want to look at first. On this season's
American Idol, we've run into a talented young lad named Elliot Yamin. For those of you watching the show, you should be able to make the connection before I even get into it. Do you remember the incident in the Hollywood groups phase? Evidently, he was the weak link, not serious about the contest, doesn't do vocal warm-ups, didn't stay up half the night to work on the group's number. When the time came, he outshone them all.
Not only did he stand out then, but he's quickly distancing himself in the voting stage. The highest praise from the judges, including Simon, have been to only a small handful of people of which he is a member. In fact, Simon's words were that, of the five seasons they've been doing "Idol", he might be the strongest male performer they've seen.
Now, clearly, there are times when what looks like the wrong way to most other people
is the wrong way, and one has to be diligent to assess things as honestly as possible. In Yamin's case, he's bucked some serious rules of what a singer should do and how they should approach this kind of opportunity. It's working for him, so there's no reason for
him to try following other people's rules.
Amazing Race - frat boys make good
You look at all the teams starting out on the first leg of this season's
Amazing Race and the frat boys immediately stick out as a middle of the pack or bringing up the rear team. Clueless? Lacking any clear advantage? They're the first to admit it. Other teams think they themselves have a mental or physical edge, and they indeed appear to have. They are smarter, wiser, stronger.
So, what team shows up first at the $10,000 checkpoint in a Brazilian football stadium? Guess they can sock it toward whatever school loans are fresh off the griddle.
Fear Factor - "Evidently, fear is not a factor for you."
So, tonight I'm watching
Fear Factor. It's a special all-female edition. I tune in after it's already started. One of the lasses is at the bottom of a skinny, Plexiglas cylinder in a bikini trying like the dickens to turn one of two little wheel handles that moves a steel bolt that will unlock the floor allowing her escape. All for a chance at $50,000. Not to worry -- there's enough of an air pocket at the top of this what looks like about an 8 or 9 foot tank of submerged claustrophobia, so were not talking life or death...but tell that to the girls when they get in the tank.
As I've tuned in, she has been at this attempt for about 4 minutes. She's having a lot of trouble with that wheel. In fact, she never gets it. After a few more attempts she gives up. I don't remember the real reason for her abdication, probably because as with all the other stunts I've ever seen on the show, that just happens to one or two of them every once in a while, so I didn't give it much notice. She gave a good effort, just came up short.
She gets out. There are five other girls left to try the stunt. Our previous contestant ended up being in the tank for, oh I don't remember 7 minutes or so. The kind of time you look at as an observer and go, "Well, great, so now time isn't really a factor for the rest of them; just get the stunt done and you're through to the next round. Simple."
As I said just a bit ago...tell that to the girls when they get in the tank.
Each of them do, in turn. One after the other the scene grows more incredible. They walk over to the side of the pool with Joe saying how confident they are and that they are totally ready and going to totally do it. Two or three of them didn't any more get the tank submerged before they made the throat slashing motion signaling they were quitting.
It was astounding. Of all the
Fear Factors I'd seen, this was finally starting to get compelling. The next girl, got the tank submerged, she took a breath, dove under water, and in the same motion resurfaced without hesitation signaling she quit. Stunning. She said when she dove she didn't see anything but black, murky water. Imagine it: you're treading water, looking around, waiting to dive, seeing everything clearly. You finally take the plunge and you're enveloped in a mass of dark open space, directionless, murderous. Darkness was one of her biggest fears. So she leaves.
The next girl, confident as all the others, begins her descent. She doesn't even get submerged and she starts freaking out, thrashing in the water. Her legs press to the sides of the tank as if they were a magnet and the tank was made of steel. She doesn't even get beneath the surface of the water and she's signaling her surrender like there's no tomorrow...and perhaps she's thinking she's trying to prevent just that. I don't remember exactly what it was with her -- the coldness of the water (yep, it's that cold) played a part, I believe.
The next girl steps up. Confident? Of course. It can't be
that hard. She'll be fine. She actually brings things back to a bit of normalcy. But...oh, my that had to hurt. In her haste to get back up to the air pocket for a breath, she bangs her head on the ceiling of the tank. She's fine. But she does it again. She does it four or five times, and now she's getting dizzy. Now she's being more careful, leading herself with an outstretched hand, but it's too late. It's overtaking her, she knows it, and she has to grab a handle at the top to keep herself up, and reluctantly brings her fingertips back and forth across her throat. She's done. After
nine minutes in the icy, narrow tank.
Five girls have tried. A couple made what, at first, would have seemed like really poor showings, but ended up being nothing short of impressive. Three of them encountered something immediately that threw their minds into a gripping state of fear. These were women in great physical shape.
The last girl. Joe takes a look at her. She's not in bad shape. She actually has, in a robust way, an attractive figure. Does she work out? She chuckles a little. No she doesn't. There was no question her comment was nothing but genuine. It had a little bit of being intimidated in it. But when she said that, I thought, "She's going to do it. The law of the clueless."
Ladies and germs, I can't tell you how it took my breath away to see her, once the tank had submerged, dive to the bottom, turn those wheels like they were freaking motorized, and drop the bottom out of that tank in a matter of
seconds!
SEC-ONDS!
Oh, c'mon, Huston! I hear you screaming. I can't believe you can't see past that. It was a set up!! If that was the first
Fear Factor I'd ever seen, that would have been my reaction, with eyes rolling like they've never rolled before. But I've seen enough of them to be totally convinced that that was not the case. I've never seen any
Fear Factor episode, let alone a single contest play out the way this one did. Not even close.
It happens, peeps. It happens. History is rife with these very kinds of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction incidents. How many times have you seen something and known it could never go into a movie because it's too corny or too coincidental, too unbelievable; nobody would buy it.
Ricky Gervais, the co-creator and star of the UK's The Office, has commented that they had to leave some true incidents out of their scripts because no one would have believed them; they'd come across as cliche or too ridiculous to accept.
That little gal did it. Not only did it, but eviscerated it, drove it into extinction, went supernova on its behind. She was the one who didn't work out, Elliot is the guy who doesn't do the screwy vocal warm-ups, the frat boys were the team just running around having fun.
To me, I don't think that's a lesson to be contrarian as a lifestyle choice, but to not let your own perceived shortcomings or external obstacles stop you from trying, from going for it -- that you don't have to be the best to get the job, to win the part, to get the girl/guy, whatever.
This Judeo-Christian God person seems to know
what He's talking about.
