You're Beautiful, Stupid.

I am Kate Monster.

Who would’ve thought that, sitting in the audience of Avenue Q, recently, I’d find myself relating profoundly and completely to one of the musical’s main characters? A main character who happened to be a puppet.

Poor Kate Monster. A cute, fun girl looking for love; and, when she finds it, it quickly eludes her because, even though he loved her and loved spending time with her, it was “the wrong time.” Whatev. You’re so much better than that, Kate, I wanted to yell.

The experience inspired her to share her feelings through song (as main characters of musicals are generally apt to do). The title of the song was “There’s a Fine, Fine Line.” A fine line between a lover and a friend. A fine line between reality and pretend. A fine line between what you wanted and what you got. And between love and a waste of time.

This play was supposed to be a comedy. But as I sat in the darkened theater and listened to a lady with her hand up the ass of a puppet sing a song about lost love and whether it was really even there to begin with, I started to cry. Not the kind of tears provoked by Beaches or Stepmom, but tears nevertheless.

It also made me start thinking. Here I was, listening to the words of a song, and immediately relating them to my life and my past, as though Kate Monster was singing directly to me, about me. Her words reminded me of relationships past, her experience hit home. I felt completely silly. Silly, yet, in a weird way, relieved.

I tend to do this quite a bit…take songs and relate them to my life, or associate certain songs with certain relationships. There are two songs, in fact, that follow me wherever I go and completely and totally define my last relationship. As Objection can attest (if she ever makes it back into the blogosphere), James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” is my nemesis. If it’s not on the radio, it comes up on shuffle on the iPod (despite the 1500+ songs I have, and despite my taking off any ratings it may have accrued). If it’s not someone’s ringtone (damn you, people!), it’s playing on the muzak.

The other song is “Collide” (which plays all the damn time for new television promos, on the radio, on the iPod, as the background music on several of my weekly television programs…). I listened to this one on repeat for three months last summer because it was my life, unfolding (or so I kept telling myself). In fact, he who shall not be named took on Mr. Day’s persona one evening and, during a very heated and tequila induced “conversation,” even said to me that it scares him that he knows I am always thinking about him. (I am not that girl. Do not think I am that girl.) You’d think that someone who was so [diagnosed as my friends as being] narcissistic would revel in the supposed overload of affection and attention.

So maybe I was thinking about him a lot. But he was doing nothing at the time (disregard the abovementioned conversation and do not make assumptions about its impetus) to make me not want to think about him. And, great...now I can never listen to that song without thinking about him. Or the other one.

Songs like Kenny Chesney’s “I Can’t Go There” are a perfect example of how while I am sometimes egocentric and think (1) the songs are written for me and (2) that I’m the only one who can relate to them, that’s not exactly true.

When I get too nostalgic (if you can call it that), I cue up Sarah MacLachlan’s “Stupid” or Kelly belting out “Since U Been Gone” and I’m reminded that, while I’m not the only one who finds love (or like), struggles with it and then loses it (whether by choice or not), I am also not the only one who realizes, afterward, that it might not have been as good as I thought it to be at the time. As Kate Monster said, there’s a fine line between love and a waste of time.

Because I view every experience as one from which I can take something positive (eh, it’s my attempt at not being a pessimistic cynic), I can’t say that any of the relationships I’ve had were a waste of time, per se (though this doesn’t take away the relativity of Kate Monster’s words). It’s easy to see, when something fails, how all the effort could be looked at as a waste of time. But the important thing, I’ve realized, is the time spent afterward dwelling and bitching and berating that is the real waste of time.

But what would we talk about otherwise?