A Pirate's Life for....someone else!

Last night I was watching this terrible reality show called “Wife Swap.” The premise, as the network describes it, is this: “Each week from across the country, two families with very different values are chosen to take part in a two-week long challenge. The wives from these two families change places to discover just what it's like to live another woman's life.”

This week’s episode involved a “wife swap” between a family of neat/control freaks and a family of “pirates” claiming to live their lives according to a chaotic principle they called, “pirate-titude.” That’s right, PIRAT-titude. This, of course, is not a real word; but the bastardized joining of the words “pirate” and “attitude.”

The father in the pirate family did not hold a job, and instead preferred to spend his days writing pirate fiction while dressed as a….pirate. As you might imagine, the neat freak mother did not fit in with this bunch of free-wheeling buccaneers-and spent most of the episode shacked up at a nearby hotel or trying to organize and make labels for the pirate-children’s messy rooms.

Now I realize that this is reality TV, but whenever I see people waxing poetic about how great it must have been to live in , I am forced to immediately disagree, knowing full well just how poorly most of us would really fair in a world without toothpaste. I mean let’s be realistic about history here: our forefathers lived in rougher times! And it was perhaps only the smallest percentile that had it good (i.e. owned their own horse). Give me a time period, and I will tell you why I wouldn’t want to live then. You might think it was all fine and dandy-but odds would have it that you wouldn’t be royalty-or noble; odds are you would be one of the poor people who died of scurvy or lost all of their teeth before the age of 15.

I mean, it’s fine and dandy to sit around all day romanticizing the pirate life of yore; envisioning that (unlike the majority of people who lived during the 1500’s) you would be different. The family on the show acted as though they would have ruled the seas or ended up in the best possible versions of pirate society. I, on the other hand, know better than to make those kinds of sweeping assumptions, understanding full-well that I would never have had it that lucky.

Had I lived during the 1500’s, I know enough about myself to be able to confidently say that I would not have lived in a cushy set up as ship captain, or even as the captain’s main whore. Indeed, if I was alive during the 1500’s, I would have served in one of the following capacities:

1. Pirate Hostage/Bargaining tool
2. Dilapidated bag of bones
3. Parrot

Knowing this understandably takes away from the appeal of that time period, and makes me once again thankful that I live during this time-and no other. It might be fun to imagine your life in another time and place; but, I think it is fair to say that comfort is a luxury of the present.