I Like to Watch

May 4, 2008 | Some days you merely survive. You brush your unwashed hair and pack something crappy for lunch. You trudge from the car to your office. You sit and check your e-mail, the highlight of your day. And now the real work begins. You pick up the phone and close your eyes. Your co-workers say "Hi!" and you struggle to muster an appropriately chirpy yet professional response.

And just when you think the day is all about getting by, a glimpse of sunshine out the window or a melancholy song playing in your headphones sends you out of survival mode into some dreamy, nostalgic state that makes the pragmatic world of work feel horribly mundane. Your quest to simply get through the day is replaced by a painful longing for more. The world is full of hope and heartbreak and lukewarm coffee and glasses that don't fit quite right, and you have to do something about it. You want to walk outside and spend the day wandering around in the springtime sunshine. You want to pick your kid up from day care and take her to the park. You want to bail on that lunchtime meeting and go see a movie down the block. You want to get a pedicure, and then have a sandwich and a big glass of iced tea. You want to stare at the wall and let your eyes go unfocused.

And then, when you go to lunch alone and you sip iced tea and stare at the wall with glassy, unfocused eyes, you recognize Glenn Miller on the stereo, and that gets you thinking about how romantic and unmatched the big-band sound was, how maybe it was the war raging overseas or the styles at the time. Thinking about it makes you want to go back and live in some smoky, noir, black-and-white version of the early '40s. You'd wear cinched dresses and uncomfortable pumps with neatly pinned hair and red lipstick. Even though you know your vision is formed from some sentimental, blurry mix of old movies, newsreels about Rosie the Riveter and your dad's Time-Life books about the Third Reich, you still think it would be nice to live back then, writing letters to the troops with an ink pen, and baking cookies in your bad shoes. You'd probably be married to someone rigid and unyielding, and you'd be forced to look good, forced to smile politely when people made ignorant, inane remarks, like the poor, pent-up, chain-smoking heroine of "Franny and Zooey." Modern times are too permissive, after all, and someone like you, with your unwashed hair and your dog-hair-covered sweater, would clean up nice and thrive, really, under oppressive societal conditions.

Join the circus
And now we get to the point, which is that the point may be beside the point entirely. Your day doesn't take shape from mere survival, or even from how efficiently you check items off your to-do list, but rather from the texture and weight and meaning of your experiences, replete with those unhinged daydreams about bad shoes and red lipstick.

However self-indulgent they might be, there's an enduring importance to our romantic flights of fancy. We all need them, whether we're walking numbly through our lives, unaware of our desires, or we're on pins and needles, painfully aware of the contrast between our lives and our imaginations every second of the day.

The stories we tell each other, the hopelessly common little tales about laundry piling up and impending deadlines and planned vacations and recalcitrant contractors and petty squabbles with co-workers, never do justice to the richness of our internal lives. Even though we may only recognize some variation on survival mode in each other, even though we mouth trivialities and small talk, inside us there's a kaleidoscope of emotions, a million and one imaginative leaps to faraway places, along with looming questions and unfocused needs and bouts of nostalgia. We carry around three-ring circuses of hope and regret inside, with sad clowns and fat ladies and graceful trapeze artists soaring through the air, even if the rest of the world sees nothing but one lumpy, forlorn-looking tent.

The return of Showtime's "This American Life" (the second season premieres at 10 p.m. on Sunday) may be the one show on television that does justice to the jugglers and the screaming children and the elephants in headdresses that live inside us all. This show is all about flights of fancy: giving in to your best (or worst) impulses, following your whims wherever they lead, unraveling a thread of an idea and then weaving it back together and unraveling it again until you understand something new about yourself and the world.

Like the radio show that preceded it, "This American Life" takes snapshots of people's lives and turns them into art. We catch a glimpse of someone else's landscape. We experience for a minute how it feels to be another person. We put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Nothing is overexplained or exaggerated. There aren't unnecessary flourishes that might take away from the central mood of the story.

The tone of this show is respectful but amused, cautious but curious. The storytellers always have an appreciation for sadness, for the dark side of things, for conflict, for flaws, for the contradictions inherent to being human, but they're carried along by a wicked sense of humor and an almost buoyant sentimentality. And why not? Ordinary people with problems and hopes and secret desires are being celebrated here, thoughtfully and artistically.

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