When I think of drama, I generally think of actors.  Drama is typically considered the performance of a situation by actors, portrayed in a realistic manner.  Drama is fine on the stage, although dramas about real-life scenarios tend to bore the shit out of me (why would I ever want to watch a married couple arguing about their problems, when it is so unpleasant to do the actual thing in real life?  It’d be like watching a movie about someone doing bank reconciliations).  What I have a big problem with, though, is when drama BECOMES real life, or when one’s life becomes filled with drama, whether related to you or not.

I hate drama in my life.  Drama is something actors do when they pretend to be someone else.  Drama is what others inject into my life for some fucking reason that I can’t fathom.  Whether it’s someone on Facebook posting something vague and dramatic (“I need serious help right now”) or someone hinting about deep knowledge they have about a situation and are trying to advise you in a sage manner about what you should do without actually telling you why or what they know, it makes me want to punch people really hard in the fucking face.

I don’t need drama in my life.  I have a mortgage in the six-digits during a struggling economy.  That’s pretty fucking dramatic.  I have a wife with her own needs and wants that I can discern unless she tells me, so I have to make sure our lines of communication are open.  This is also serious and dramatic.  I have 3 dogs that I love dearly that get sick or have problems and can’t tell me that fact, so I have to be aware of what’s happening and take them to the vet and make sure I remember to give them medicine and everything else.  Quite important and potentially dramatic.  Add this to a list of other things, like a job that I am gradually creeping towards despising with every fiber of my being, worries about my health and creeping age, maintaining a large circle of friends without offending anyone and making a domino effect of stupid proportions – all of these things make life a pitfall of potential drama.  If you let it.

I don’t want to let it.  Everything about life tends to be considered too fucking serious.  It all is important, sure, but that doesn’t mean that we should obsess over these things constantly, worrying and pacing and fretting and all that bullshit.  Life is really fucking short.  Like, seriously, you-could-get-hit-by-a-fucking-bus-or-brain-hemorrage-at-any-time short.  And when you die, that’s it.  You might believe in Heaven or whatever, but for everyone else, you just cease to exist except as a cherished (hopefully) memory.  So what the fuck is the point in spending those short fucking hours and days and years worrying about the mights and unknowns?  What is the purpose in taking life’s struggles, those things that every fucking person has and don’t make any of us special, and amplifying one or more to the point of all-consumption?

I can’t answer that.  I don’t know why someone will take an aspect of their life and elevate it to the point where it defines them completely.  I do know this, however: people who inject their drama into other’s lives, or need to insinuate themselves into the lives of others and pump up the drama there, are generally attention whores.  When they don’t feel like enough attention is being paid to them, here comes the status updates asking someone to take them to the hospital.  Seriously, who the fuck does that if not a big stupid fucking attention whore?  If I need to go to the hospital and can’t take myself, I have this fucking technological marvel called a telephone, and this magical fucking device allows me to communicate verbally across vast distances.  I can use it to call a friend or family member, or even dial 3 numbers and have someone I’ve never met drive to wherever I am and take me to one.  So why the fuck else would you use a slow and unreliable means of communication like a fucking Facebook status update other than to generate a list of sycophantic comments about how fucking awesome u r and other horse shit?  You are a fucking attention whore.

Same thing goes for people who need to bring their disagreements with one person into the lives of everyone else.  Again, Facebook is a great help to this, allowing people to post catty bitchy status updates clearly directed at a particular person.  Why the fuck for?  Don’t these people have friends that they can tell this shit to privately, allowing them to vent while maintaining a certain level of fucking decorum?  I can’t imagine doing that shit, but I almost want to fake a catfight on there just for the hell of it.

It’s not just Facebook, though, oh no.  People are perfectly able to do that shit face to face.  Like, say, come up to a groom at his wedding, and in a loud and dramatic voice introduce the groom to his own fucking brother that the groom grew up with.  That melodramatic kind of bullshit really gets under my fucking skin, if I haven’t indicated that.  Or when someone decides that your own personal affairs are where their own personal level of fucking expertise comes into play, since they KNOW YOU SO WELL AND ARE SO WISE.  Don’t ever fucking tell me what I think.  Don’t even tell me what you think I should do, unless I asked for that particular nugget of fucking sage advice. 

I do it too, I know, but I hate fucking doing it, and have tried to perfect the art of nodding encouragingly when I hear someone talk about whatever stupid-ass decision they’ve made in their life.  Why?  Because in the big scheme of things, it doesn’t fucking matter to me (close family is different obviously).  If someone decides that they want to quit their job and join the circus, it isn’t my fucking job to quote statistics about the likelihood of success or tell them what they should do.  Advice can only go three ways: one, it gets ignored and I’ve just wasted my fucking breath and thoughts for part of my finite existence, or two, it gets followed and goes badly, making me the fucking scapegoat and feeling like an ass, or three, it gets followed and goes well and you don’t get any fucking credit at all because you weren’t the person who actually did anything at all.

So why the fuck do people do it?  A lot of reasons.  I think some people just like meddling in other people’s shit.  Their lives aren’t great, so why not involve yourself into other people’s affairs and try to stir shit up just to give you something to do and talk about while you are at a party and can talk shit behind their back?  God knows I’ve invested enough time in gossip and dealing in salacious funtime rumors, so yeah I am a fucking hypocrite, just like you and everyone else who has ever walked this fucking earth.  I think some people just don’t like seeing other people happy.  They like to go to movies where everyone gets cancer and dies or see someone’s marriage explode so they can feel better about their own fucking existence.  These people live to ruin your fucking shit.  “Hey, I’m moving to LA!”  “Oh, wow, isn’t there a lot of violence and earthquakes and typhoons and meteor strikes there?!?”  Fuck those people and the joy they take in other people’s failure.  I love seeing people fail, don’t get me wrong, like the guy chainsawing a tree down and watching it topple onto his house, but only when I don’t know them.  So who the fuck are the people that like to see their actual friends and family miserable?  Fucking assholes, that’s who. 

I hate drama in my life.  My life has a lot of serious things going on, but I try not to let them consume me.  I try to wake up every morning and let the day happen, just in case it’s the last one I’ve got.  It makes me irresponsible at times, but you know what?  That’s life.  Life is fucking brutally short.  I look back and think to myself, how the fuck did I get this old?  I try to live my life in the pursuit of happiness, not the obsession over trivialities.  If you don’t like it, and want to tell me how to handle my personal affairs and relationships without my asking you, or you want to involve me in your stupid fucking slapfight and force me to pick sides, guess what?  I will do the exact fucking opposite thing you tell me.  Why?  Because making you waste your fucking breath is the only bit of fucking revenge I can exact for you injecting drama into my goddamn life.