Not only did i blog here twice in one week, I also contributed to my other blog Mid-Midlife Crisis. Check it.
15 Jul
Reason #118: Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop
There’s a certain special brand of paranoia that you get when everything is going great. You’re madly into somebody, and you can’t get enough of them. The honeymoon phase rocks, but you can’t (at least if you are remotely neurotic or jaded) help this feeling of anticipation. We’ve all been in relationships that we think are the “one”, but they turn to complete disasters seemingly overnight. So we get cautious as we get older. We don’t dive in headfirst. We take it one step at a time. Of course, just like in a swimming pool, nothing prepares you for the cold water on your private bits.
The anticipation of it is a gnat to your soul. It looms in the back of your mind, and you try and push it away, but it is still there. Nothing is ever as good as it seems. Those perfect women don’t exist, and you just wait and wait for the flaw to come. It could be a day, a week, a month, a year that that shoe is dangling, almost dropping, then stopping at the last second.
But it happens.
The one incident that changes everything.
She might get irrationally mad at you over the tiniest of things, or even something fairly legit. She might have something that goes beyond a “quirk” and into full-blown neurosis. Whatever it is, it’s the one thing that makes you reevaluate everything up until that point. We go through our relationships with rose-tinted glasses and a unreliable point of view. When you are falling in love with somebody, you tend to focus on the things that made you smile. When you break up with somebody, it’s all about what they did that pissed you off. That one incident, the shoe-drop, is probably one of the most defining moments of the relationship. It’s when you think about the good and the bad. You determine whether or not you are going to stick it out, if you are going to put up with the other person’s baggage, and if they are going to be able to put up with yours. It’s the moment where it gets real and honest, and hopefully the start of something deeper than just long, lingering lust.
13 Jul
Reason #117: Be-mused
It’s somewhat damaging to go through a proper English Literature education. You can’t help but be bombarded with tales of men, and the women those men define themselves through. Adam and Eve, Odysseus and Penelope. Helen of Troy. Daisy Buchanen. Brett Ashley. So on and so forth. You take it back to Adam and Eve, and men have been blaming women for their rise and fall since the dawn of time.
Aside from this, I grew up on family stories of quitting a good education and becoming a painter, all for the love of a woman. It’s all so damn romantic, and it seeps into your essence. I can blame my angst-filled teenage years and love affair with pop-punk on these stories. It’s also probably why F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite writer of all time. Well, that, and the fact that The Great Gatsby is a freakin’ masterpiece. But my appreciation for F. Scott doesn’t end at his writing. His personal life has a lot to do with it too. If you are unfamiliar with how messed up and beautiful his relationship with Zelda was, I suggest you check it out. I can seriously relate to somebody who has long lasting love affairs with the crazies. I’ve dated so many mentally unstable girls that I almost don’t know how to talk to or handle a normal girl.
The final dangerous piece is that I want to be a writer. And the thing of it is that I grow up and have this romantic, idealized notion that there’s going to come along a woman who will be my muse. Like I could just look at her and be inspired to write this great masterpiece. And I know that’s crap, especially for me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I just don’t ever really get that from women. I don’t lock eyes and come up with amazing lines that will be quoted for generations.
The idea of a muse is strange. If you go back to Greek mythology, the muses are pretty women, naturally. All these women that start wars, that ruins great friendships, that inspire us to beat Apollo Creed, they are all fictional. You can’t go around expecting a girl to do the work for you, and I think it’s semi-damaging to the contemporary male to sit around and expect it to happen. The best we can really hope for is a girl who will tolerate our neuroses, make us smile, and forget ourselves. I guess that makes me jaded in the romantic sense, or a realist, I don’t know. I truly believe that awe-inspiring, soul-crushing love is out there, and it will knock my metaphorical socks off, but I’m never gonna expect it to make me write the greatest cinematic masterpiece of the last fifty years.
3 Jul
Reason #116: False Shared Interests
There is something special about meeting a girl who magically has the same interests, laughs at all your stupid jokes, or will go with the flow about anything you say. Then you get to a point where she doesn’t find you as charming, or she’ll all of a sudden never mention how she loves indie music, and be relegated to pop. The curtain drops. People are funny, especially at the beginning of relationships, we pretend to like the same things. Why? Is it because we want the person to like us? Is it because we want them to associate us with their interests. There is nothing wrong with genuinely wanting to take interest in something that your significant other is interested in. A girl who will watch a football game with you, or be willing to go to a concert where she doesn’t even know the band, is a rare catch. Sure, she could be sitting there hating the whole thing, but she goes because she wants to share that with you. If it’s important to you, than it’s important to her. That is a really admirable trait, to be genuinely open minded to new tastes. But the ones who will pretend to like something just to score brownie points with you, I don’t get it. People don’t have to like the same things. If a girl lies to me and says she loves hockey, I’m not gonna think more or less of her. Yes, it’d be cool to have somebody to watch a Rangers game with, but I have guy friends for that. It’s not going to make the difference, and it will be that much weirder when she all of a sudden is like, “oh fuck that, I hate hockey.”
18 Jun
Adultalescence
The following is a reading from the CT film Festival of a two scene excerpt from Adultalescence, written by myself and Matt Donofree
11 Jun
Reason #115: The Scorecard
When you meet a new person the inevitable necessary evil of the scorecard is going to be coming up. This is when you make the running mental score of all their plusses and minuses. She hates Woody Allen, minus five. She gives great massages, plus twenty. And so on, and so forth. It’s an interesting thing when you meet someone and every little thing they do factors into your feelings for them. Sure, the big ones matter most, but if you toss enough of those dumb things in there in the first date or two, it could be enough to sink you. Nobody likes anybody that crazies out on the second date, unless they are awesome enough for you to want to stick it out.
The more you stick it out with somebody, the less these things matter. Because that is when the person becomes a person, somebody you have shared laughs and moments with. They aren’t just the guy you tell your friends about that you met at the grocery store, and is taking you out for sushi. If he takes his cell phone out all night, or makes any of those tragic, rookie first date mistakes, he’s toast. Because he isn’t much of a person. Well, he is, but he’s just the guy buying you a nice meal. He blows his chance at making himself a real live boy to you.
3 Jun
I know I know
I’ve been neglecting this, my first born. I did, however, just post on my newborn. I guess it’s true what they say, parents favor the youngins. But don’t worry, I’ll be hitting this site hard next week as a prep posts for every single day.
21 May
Reasons Why I Love Girls #14: When They Bust My Balls
There is something to be said for a girl that keep you on your toes. Like I’ve already said, people like a challenge. I don’t know what exactly it is, but the girls who bust my balls, lately, they are exactly my type. I’m a fairly sarcastic person, toss in my uncanny ability to make jokes at all manners of inappropriate times, and the writer-ness, and that boils down to 90% of my personality. Sure I’m sweet, a hopeless romantic, and all that jazz, but I’m mostly a wiseass. If a girl can toss back some witty banter with me as well as she can toss back her booze, I will instantly fall 2% more in love with her.
19 May
So
As you can see, I put up #1, and the numbers now go chronolgically, welcome to Phase 2 of Reasons Why I Hate Girls….
And also, theres posts being put up at Mid-Mid Life Crisis, my new blog, quite periodically so always remember to check both sites. (I know the extra .3 seconds of clicking the link to your left is annoying)
19 May
Reason #113: Chick Lit
There is something about chick lit that I have never fully been able to get behind. Not even just Chick Lit itself, but any real feminist or super chick-litish work of fiction. As an English student I’ve been forced to read The Awakening, The Poisonwood Bible, and so on and so forth. My problem is that these books tend to have great strong women, but they are written so out-of-the-ordinary, intentionally non-stereotypical, that it just comes off as false and cheap to me.
I’ll even go further to say that there are no more than 5 female protagonists that I even enjoy. I really struggle to find an example in literature. I really enjoyed Faulkner’s females, but those were in Faulkner novels that had multiple narrators, and they definitely were not at the top of the pile. And I suppose part of it could be that I’ve grown up reading fiction written by white males writing about white males and yadda yadda yadda, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve yet to be wowed by a female main character. She is either written as the stereotypical battered down or so far the opposite. There seems to be no be no middle ground. There are no heroic but flawed classic literarily ladies. Scarlett O’Hara never got beaten down, but she was flighty as hell, and her motivated was a man, a douchey man.
18 May
Reason #112: The Evil Ex-Boyfriends
*Read the Scott Pilgrim Books
There is something to be said for the fact that if you date a girl, you date everybody she’s ever been involved with. I think it is ridiculous to get upset on where people have been, but I also think some girls carry around their ex’s (and associated baggage) around with them. Sure, you shouldn’t forget about them, but you can’t dwell on where you have been and what all the other guys you have been with have done to you. We all have issues. Whether they be trust, jealousy, “space”, or a group of exes that form a league of evil, we all have the good/bad stuff from years of being beaten around in relationships, but at some point you just have to let go of the past.
There are some exes that you can be friends with, and move past it, but a lot of the time that won’t pan out. You slip into old habits, have the same fights, and so on. The issues of the past don’t just wash away, you have to fix them, and you have to move on.
To be a guy coming into any relationship, we know the deal. We know there are exes and there are the exes. The ones who just beat you senseless. In a weird way, we have to fight through them. To show you, to prove to you, that we aren’t the same guy. Of course, the problem is, you start this fight from date one. And since we are starting this fight from the gate, unless a girl really & truly knocks our socks off, we aren’t going to do it. There are so very few girls worth fighting for that it makes it a big red flag if we meet you and immediately have to hear about the issues of the exes.
14 May
Reason #111: “Ok” Cupidites
Whether or not it’s Myspace, Facebook, or any social networking site, there is an issue that comes out. It is much, much more prevalent on online dating sites. Sure, I’ve covered the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butterface issue, and this is sort-of related. There are the girls you can’t tell whether or not they are cute, but then there are the girls who only appear to be cute. Why you might ask? Because 95% of the people on these sites fall into two categories: fattys and uggos. Yes, yes, I know that is horribly superficial of me, but who isn’t superficial? Moreover, who isn’t superficial on an online dating site? If you are looking for love in all the right e-places, you are going to be judging them on pictures.
These questionable girls could go either way. They look cute in some pics, iffy in others. Which begs the question: why put a silly, yet unflattering, picture on this site when you know people are going to judge you on your looks? Sure, it shows you have personality or something, but it isn’t going to help you out, especially if you are a coin toss situation. But then again, these girls are girls you only think are cute in this situation. If you met them in the real world, you wouldn’t be as easy on them. On these sites, you get bombared with ugly friend requests, and if a cute girl comes your way it jumps her looks up about 2 points higher than you would normally think. So I gotta wonder if that is setting yourself up for an eventual let down of a realization that you fooled yourself into believing this girl is more attractive to you than she really is. And you find out she’s just “ok”.
13 May
Reason #1: Because I Don’t
For all the gripes, the bitching, the over-analyzing, and the general bad karma that results from women, I don’t really hate them. I hate a million things they do, but for every single thing they do to piss me off, a bat of baby blues, or an unexpected hand grab can wipe that all away. Of course that usually is a catalyst for even more trouble, but I don’t care. They make me forget myself, they make me want to be a better person. They make we want to write musing upon musing about them. Ever since the first encounter in grade school, I have constantly been bemused, beaten, and awed by every single occurrence I have with the opposite gener. I strive to understand them, to have them understand me. I kill myself trying to find the closest thing to that indescribable four letter word that has been described for ages, and yet still can never be pinned down into words.
Whether it’s the girl I almost got engaged to, the girl who shot me down before I could get the stones to tell her how I felt, the girl I will eventually marry, the girl who I drunkenly hook up with at a party when I lose all judgement, I always, deep down, appreciate every story, every stupid fight, every 3 AM phone call, every time I go out of my way to tell a stupid joke and get a cheap laugh, even if it isn’t appreciated. Everything gets me closer to the person I want to be, and everything shapes me into the person I am. I guess we just learn to take the good with the bad. The cheaters with the ones that steal your soul, and just hope that we struggle along until we find that phantom person that makes it all worth it. And it kills me that despite all my cynicism and bitching and horrible battle scars and war stories, that I still think that person is out there.
