Forgotten Beatitudes

It is always a bad idea to google people from your past. There is the endless hope that they’re doing worse than you. An unspoken hope, of course, but let’s be honest…no one likes to see people from their pasts doing better then them. More often, though, you find out that people you were once sure would come to a bad end haven’t due to pesky free will and, perhaps, a liberal application of voodoo.

For example, I recently googled someone from my high schools days, a fellow singer who I was always extremely competitive. Let’s call him Cherrymane because Firecrotch is already taken.

Now, I’ve long since given up any hope I may have once had about being a professional opera singer. Really, I’m totally okay with that and my only regret is it took me four years pursuing a degree in vocal performance to figure out I truly loathed opera.

However, discovering that Cherrymane does indeed have an operatic career fills me with a sort of smoldering anger I haven’t experienced since…well, actually, I felt it last night during the George and Tony Show, and, honestly, I feel it quite a bit, but the frequency of the smoldering anger should in no way detract from the significance of its individual occurrences.

It doesn’t end there. Not only does he have an operatic career (something which I once thought would be a sure sign of an approaching apocalypse or at least a pandemic of deafness), but he has a professional web site, a healthy yoga practice and he’s married.

To a woman.

Who saw that coming?

So what began as a simple little ego-booster ended up biting me exactly where it should have. Not only was I forced to reevaluate my own life choices and go through a moment of “The Career I Could Have Had” retrospection, but I was slapped in the face yet again with all the weight I’ve put on since I quit smoking (seriously, I was crying so hard, my wildly jiggling belly nearly knocked me unconscious) and the fact that I apparently do not possess functional gay-dar or good taste in music.