www.mymaterialworld.org

Jump to Comments

For the last 3 1/2 years or so, I have had a borderline obsession with a bat-wielding superstar named Alex Rodriguez. I have spent many an afternoon at Yankee stadium not paying attention to the baseball game, but rather staring endlessly at how good those pinstripes looked on our gorgeous third baseman. I’ve studied his form, memorized his warm-up routine, and drooled over every last bit of chewing gum that passed through his lips. What started out as an ordinary school-girl crush, however, has recently turned into a crushing disappointment when I found out that not only has he been “Kaballah-ized” by Madonna, he also has admitted to using illegal steroids to beef up his game. This, in my opinion, makes him a fraud, a liar, and in the end, not so stunningly cute. My supersized crush gone wrong has got me thinking about how many crushes I’ve had over the years. From the bowl-cut sporting Doug Bivens in 5th grade, to the short-cut taking sport star A-Rod in adulthood, I now know just how unrealistic these silly fantasies can be. We have a tendency as humans to build people up to be “larger than life” and place them so high up on a pedestal that they become unreachable by mere mortals. Unfortunately the higher up we place THEM, the farther WE fall when we come to realize that they don’t have the superstar qualities we attach to them. There’s a reason they are called “crushes,” as there is usually some type of disappointment involved in this emotionally dangerous situation. Either we never actually become involved with our crushes (or in my case never even meet them) and are left forever wondering what “might have been,” or we actually do hook up with our fantasy mate and  find out that they aren’t as seemingly perfect as we thought they were.  So either way we are eventually screwed, and destined for disappointment when we have unrealistic expectations of another person’s fabulousness. No matter how great they look in a pair of old Levi’s or an iconic baseball uniform, we eventually figure out that our chains have been “Yankeed.” It doesn’t take long, however, before our hopes are often re-ignited when we find a new crush to thrive on. As we begin to feed off the magical power of fantasy and strive toward our ultimate wish fulfillment, we work ourselves into an emotional frenzy yet again with the hopes that this one will actually work out. But not me, not this time, because I’ve learned my lesson and realized that had my superstar crush A-Rod actually “worked out” in real life…he wouldn’t have needed any steroids.