A WORD on "Forks" and Not the Kind You Eat With...

In an excerpt from perhaps his most famous poem, Robert Frost writes: "Two roads diverged in the woods, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

Alright, never fear people. I just stepped down from my intellectual-high-horse. I will share with you, however, that I have always loved that quote because it speaks to the decisions we make, some trivial...and some enormous, and the resounding effect that these choices can have on our lives. I also thought about two of my favorite movies, "Sliding Doors" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which both explore the idea that a lot of what happens to us in our lives inevitable, no matter how much we try to prevent it.

Are our lives defined by the "forks" we encounter in the road? Sometimes it certainly seems that way. I think we can all describe times in our lives when there was a major CHOICE bearing down on us. My first real experience with a "fork" was at the end of my freshman year of college. In my search for a summer job, I received two offers which were as different as night and day. The first job was an internship in the Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities, the other was as a Customer Service Rep at Tiffany and Co. I still remember sitting in the student lounge of my dorm with my friend, Marisa, while she helped me mull over the decision I was facing. I chose Tiffany, and went on to learn a great deal there...but a part of me feels that my life would have taken a much different turn if I'd set up camp at Mayor Giuliani's. Is there any point in wondering what might have been? Probably not. But at my present point in life, if I were living in the world of the movies where characters can be catapulted back in time to find out what would have happened if they'd made the other choice...I would definitely choose to see what would have happened if I hadn't chosen Tiffany. In some ways, I can't imagine it at all, and I think that's why it puts my imagination into overdrive.

Though my time tying Tiffany bows has ended, the choice to work there effects my life to this day...My senior year of college, when I was looking for a "career," I happened to submit my resume to a famous NYC company I had heard of in passing. The thing is that the person who ended up contacting me from that company is someone I had heard of in more than just passing. The person who had hired me as a college freshman for my job at Tiffany was now the HR representative in charge of recruiting for this company....the company for which I now happily work. The "fork" that led me to Tiffany diverged again, and my life is (thankfully) as it is now.

But job-schmob, let's talk about the fun stuff! What about the forks we encounter in love? Sorry to disappoint you, but I have never been caught in the crossfire between two men who were willing to rip each other to shreds for my heart. At least not to my knowledge (har har). What I think the movies explores is the concept that, sometimes, no matter how much two people try to fight it, fate throws them together. Take Gwenyth Paltrow in "Sliding Doors," the movie follows her through two different scenarios. In one, she catches her train, comes home and finds her lousy boyfriend cheating on her, makes him grovel, starts her own company and meets a wonderful guy named James. In the other scenario, she misses her train, gets mugged, never catches lousy boyfriend (who continues to cheat!) and ends up miserable. The only problem is that in the first scenario (with James), she dies, and that sucks. But ahhh, in the scenario in which she's seemingly miserable, she ends up meeting James anyway after dumping Lousy Boyfriend after a much longer tenure than he deserved.

Then there's the movie I love more than life itself. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which I could literally sit and talk about for hours because there are so many ways to read it. I guess the message that it sends is that it's a good thing we can't erase people from our minds because even the pain that they put us through is invaluable. I also find it amazing that even though the mind erasing worked, Joel and Clem found each other again... Sometimes the diverging roads in our lives bring us to the same destination, no matter which fork we take.

Forks are simply a synonym for the free will that we have in our lives. They are a way in which we take control over our own destinies. As the movies have proven to us, however, sometimes destiny overrides the decisions we oh-so-carefully make. So I guess the "moral" of this posting is not to sweat too badly over the "forks" because sometimes whatever will be, will be, and it's not worth all the antacid. As my friend Gabrielle said when I told her what I was writing about: "I hate forks. I like spoons. They're smoother."