(the popular fantasy of an apartment in Harlem overlooking Central Park)Several years ago, Miss Cheapist tried therapy as a way to navigate different transitions that she faced. At the time, it was productive, primarily because she realized how little she really understood about herself. One memorable evening on the couch, she shared a feeling of suffocation from the desires and expectations of those closest to her. With fatigue, she sighed, “I’m just so overwhelmed with everyone else’s fantasies!” Her therapist, a woman who never changed the register of her voice, and colored her office with photographs from travels in the Himalayas, responded, “And what is your fantasy?” Her question gave Miss Cheapist pause. She wondered, when it seemed easier to respond to others, rather than barrel forward with her own dreams, did she really dare to fantasize? Or by doing so, was she only setting herself up for failure? Even after using the word so glibly to describe the predicament of others, when she had to look inward, the concept of “fantasy” really seemed so difficult to define.
In the holiday season when everyone is determined to articulate their wishes, and for the less cheap, make the wishes of others actually come true, it seems appropriate to determine the value of fantasies. Who can even afford them? At first blush, it seems that fantasy comes easy, especially through television. Miss Cheapist, most recently, has thrown herself into the unexpectedly enthralling Gossip Girl: a constructed TV world of earnest, class-conscious teen love, self-congratulatory WASPdom, unfettered bitchiness, and photogenic NYC streetscapes. The unapologetic Whiteness of the show was potentially alienating, and yet Miss Cheapist found herself emotionally drawn to the characters (who doesn’t want to be Serena Van der Woodsen). This show has become a panacea for the seasonal affective disorder that inevitably arrives with late autumn. Can we call that appeal anything other than the power of fantasy? Yes, television, with its porn aesthetic and ability to take ordinary people and transform them into 21st century beauty queens, definitely provides fantasy.
However, underlying our fantasies is the belief that we can access them, making them another type of aspiration. Are fantasies our generation’s way of setting goals? The fantasies of Miss Cheapist’s peer group are diverse. Some revolve around getting out of work for the rest of our healthy, able years: spending ones days trying to catch the largest fish imaginable on a fly rod, becoming a trucker and traveling the highways of America with ones spouse in the passenger seat, moving to rural America and owning a gun, or having a baby and becoming a stay-at-home mom. And other fantasies seem more pragmatic, a way to cope with everyday anxieties: having one extra bedroom, buying a brownstone in Bed-Stuy only to have the market immediately take off, renovating a kitchen in the Provencal style, affording an original Eames chair, and of course, marrying rich. Other fantasies involve wealth achieved by artistic impulse: producing the next home design trend from ones Bushwick studio based on an art school thesis, going to architecture school and becoming the next Maya Lin, establishing a homemade jewelry business, selling restored vintage clothes on E-bay, moving to China and capitalizing on the new contemporary art scene…and of course, the fantasy of having ones blog discovered by an book agent and becoming the next Bridget Jones! Miss Cheapist is even willing to admit that she recently wished for unnamed forces to catapult her small, episodic blog about an whiny, cheap, Asian girl into a cable television show that rivaled “Sex and the City” in its scope and impact.
Will these fantasies be mocked years later as mere indulgence? Will they be seen as suffocating the less fortunate of this post-Gilded Age? Or will the residue of Internet millionaires (hello, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, et. al) and Myspace-created celebrities actually mark this decade as a revial of the American dream? Are fantasies heightened because people believe now, more than ever, that they can be realized? Or perhaps we are craving fantasy in the face of an impeding national crisis: economic recession, environmental catastrophe, recognition of the limitations of democracy, heightened nativism, and a loss of faith in the ability of public institutions to lead and provide a safety net for the neediest. Oh Miss Cheapist, really, what is your fantasy?
