Accidental Historian

Let's Talk Dating for Some Reason

I’ve had a The Single Life and/or a ZOMG! Teh Menz post a-brewin’ for a while.  The problem is that it’s entirely based on me responding to articles, several of which I read about a month ago.  So it’s all getting a bit jumbled about in my head.  That’s fun, though, right?

What’s going to end up happening here, though, is I’m just going to put up a bunch of links.

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People love writing about online dating.  I’m no different, I suppose.  I’ve written a bunch of posts about online dating.  I haven’t written any lately, though, mostly because my ability to care about the whole thing is rather limited at the moment.  Still, I’m always interested when other people write about it online dating.  Mostly because about half of the articles end up being hilariously wrong or misguided.

Peter Ludlow wrote an article in The Atlantic as a follow-up to a different article written by Dan Slater.  I read Ludlow’s first.  That matters.

See, Ludlow’s article was all about how online dating has commoditized dating.  I actually wrote about that exact same thing many, many months ago.  One of the big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where there are too many choices.  One of the other big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where several of the available choices are pie-in-the-sky fantasy, at best.  Too many pie-in-the-sky fantasy choices could be the name of the next big online dating site.

I would never make a claim, however, that online dating destroys commitment, either in theory or in practice.  I think I was pretty clear in my own musings about online dating that I was going in with incorrect attitudes and presuppositions and that I was pretty damaged.  All online dating does is allow damaged people to meet other damaged people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and spread the misery farther and faster.

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I read the Dan Slater article next, pretty much in the spirit of an anecdote that Ludlow then jumped off of with a sort of detached journalism.  As such, I didn’t immediately notice that there were…shall we say, problems with the Slater article.

Amanda Marcotte and Alexis Madrigal sure did.  This is the introductory paragraph from Marcotte’s article:

Last week, Dan Slater at the Atlantic wrote what may be the worst piece on online dating I’ve ever read, which is a truly remarkable feat in such a competitive field. Slater’s theory is that because online dating sites are a magical wonderland where men can meet and fuck an endless array of women, it means men will have no desire to get married and thus will be the ruin of marriage. If I were married to Dan Slater, I would get a lawyer on retainer now, because there’s projection all over this thing. And let’s be clear: Slater means men. He claims “people”, but as Alexis Madrigal (who, if you’re rushing to disagree with him, I should point out is male, so you might want to slow your roll, trolls) points out in the same publication, Slater didn’t bother to interview any women, much less any men that have a different experience from his buddy Jacob.

This is the second paragraph from Alexis’s article:

Narratively, the story focuses on Jacob, an overgrown manchild jackass who can't figure out what it takes to have a real relationship. The problem, however, is not him, and his desire for a "low-maintenance" woman who is hot, young, interested in him, and doesn't mind that he is callow and doesn't care very much about her. No, the problem is online dating, which has shown Jacob that he can have a steady stream of mediocre dates, some of whom will have sex with him.

That pretty much sums up Dan Slater’s article in a nutshell.

One of the real big problems with anyone who writes an article about online dating that’s primarily from one person’s perspective is that that one person might be wrong about a lot of things.  I include myself in this.  I don’t offer myself as a paragon of people who have experienced online dating, since I freely admit that I was kind of being a major asshole a lot of the time.  Yeah, I might have just met some crazy people, but I probably didn’t do a damn thing to help myself, either.

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So yesterday Amanda Marcotte offered up the diametric opposite of the “guy who just wants to get laid” article with the “woman who desperately wants to get married” article.  Those are also fun.  Amanda offered her thoughts as a counterpoint to Jill over at Feministe and, for the record, I can’t be arsed to read the original article, since I really don’t care.  What I want to highlight is something Amanda points out that is a fascinating underlying assumption of all of these sorts of articles:

Now, I’m not married and don’t want to be, in no small part because the institutional nature of marriage leads directly to this kind of thinking, wherein “spouse” is a job you want filled instead of an outgrowth of your love for another person. But there’s definite ideological argument of gender underpinning these stereotypes of why women and men marry. Basically, the implication is that real love between men and women is a myth. This fits into a larger sexist belief that men and women are “opposites” who put up with each other out of necessity, but who don’t really like each other very much. Believers in this believe that women need men, who are their social superiors, to choose them and validate them. (Being unchosen is considered a fate worse than death, which is why so many conservatives think that it’s a game winner to “argue” that feminists are just unchosen women who are bitter about our lack of validation from men—validation that is our sole purpose in existing, apparently.) In exchange for validating a woman’s right to exist by choosing her, a man gets someone to look after him and his home, provide him regular sex, and have children that will be named after him.

A while back I went on several dates with a woman.  She was intelligent and accomplished.  She also seemed to be quite well prepared for the whole settling down thing and decided that I was the one to do that.

My problem there was pretty simple: I just wasn’t that into her.  I tried to convince myself to change my mind, but I couldn’t[1] bring myself to that.  One of the interesting things about the way my mind works is that I draw pretty quick and accurate conclusions and then I spend about six months ignoring those conclusions until everything shakes out.

So what happened was I walked away from the first date, which went pretty well, all things considered, with Sons of Bill’s “So Much for the Blues”[2] running through my head.  I then proceeded to not really think about her much and act like kind of a dick the next time I saw her.  In spite of that, though, she kept trying.  It eventually hit the point where every interaction we had came down to a conversation about how we couldn’t get along.

It was pretty much awful.

This particular story is a bit different from the “women planning their weddings even though they’re single and will probably be single for a long-ass time” thing in that I don’t know that she was planning to plug me into a five-year plan in a marriage binder filled with clippings from Modern Bride or whatever.  I bring it up, though, because it’s pretty obvious she had a plan, she decided that I was the ideal person to fill in that part of the plan, and she didn’t notice that I was very much not on board.  Then, even though I pretty much played the role of major dickhead, she still tried to get me to play that role.

I think this is the danger of seeing relationships as a job and the potential job applicants as being interchangeable.  You ignore the person in front of you for the person who is in your head filling the role you think they should fill.  It’s a good way to get yourself hurt and end up developing extremely negative opinions of your fellow humans.

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[1]Protip: don’t do that.  Seriously, if something isn’t right, even if you can’t figure out why, just go with that.  Life is easier that way.

[2]For those who don’t know, it’s basically a song about a guy breaking up with a girl and not giving a shit.  Because he’s a total dick.  And now he’s going to write a song about it, because breaking someone’s heart to write a song is a worthwhile trade.  It also includes some of my favorite lyrics ever:

Yeah I wish I could write a song like Townes Van Zandt
Then I could be a son of a bitch and no one would give a damn
And I just keep telling myself that no one understands

Getting Carded, Part 6

The Logan Square/Bucktown/Wicker Park area of Chicago is one of those rapidly gentrifying parts of the North Side of the city.  I tend to skip the sushi places and trendy fusion restaurants and clubs when I go there, though.  For me being in that area generally means that I’m headed to the Double Door.  It’s a good place to get curb tacos, too, I suppose, but we’re done with that conversation for the moment.

For me pretty much every location matters because of the memories I associate with it.  The Double Door, then, is that place where I saw Local H and Lucky Boys Confusion on the same weekend I turned 28.  It’s the place where I found out that the Lovehammers were doing a secret show as “El Aiche.”  It’s the place where I met Marty Casey and tried to take a picture with him but failed miserably due to the fact that I was using my HTC Tilt, which has a shutter speed that’s best described as somewhere between “tectonic” and “glacial.”  I ended up with a picture of the wall of the restaurant above our heads or the street or something instead.  It’s a good place, one of my favorites.[1]

The Double Door is tucked inside the ground floor and basement of a triangular building at the corner where North Avenue, Milwaukee, and Damen meet.  That means that every time I go to the Double Door there’s a moment where I realize, “Oh, I’m at this intersection.”  For some reason I can’t figure out how to remember it between times, but maybe putting this all down in words will do the trick.

I didn’t go to the corner of Milwaukee, Damen, and North for the Double Door the first time.  I went for an event at 826 CHI.  David Eggers, the founder of McSweeney’s and the whole 826 thing was doing a talk and book signing with Valentino Achak Deng, the Lost Boy of the Sudan about whom Eggers wrote the book What is the What.  I wanted to go.  Amy wanted to go way more than I did.  I was totally okay with that confluence of events.

At the time I was still relatively inexperienced at the whole “driving to and in Chicago” thing.  I was also relatively inexperienced at the whole “finding a parking spot in Chicago” thing.  I think I’d probably driven up to Joe’s once or twice and the Vic at least once.  I was also not too good at figuring out how long various activities, up to and including “driving to Bucktown,” “finding a parking space in Bucktown,” and “walking the seven or eight miles from the only available parking space that was, coincidentally, somewhere in Lakeview” would take.  I’m sure that you’ve figured out I was about to experience a disaster of somewhat epic proportions.

Oh, did I also mention that I woefully underestimated exactly how popular the whole “Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng showing up to give a talk in what happened out to be a fairly small room” thing would be?  Yeah…good times.

When we finally got there the place was packed.  Like, to the point where we would have had to stand in line to be amongst the first dozen or so disappointed people.  Amy was pissed.  Like, she was super pissed.  Inconsolably pissed.

Well, she wasn’t quite inconsolably pissed.  They announced that, due to popular demand, there would actually be two presentations that night.  So all we had to do was kill some time and then we’d be able to get in on the Eggers/Deng goodness.

There’s a Starbucks on the corner directly across from the restaurant where, in a happier time, I tried to take a picture with Marty Casey and failed miserably.  It’s south of North Avenue, west of Damen, and in the wide angle where Milwaukee crosses both.  Every time I hit that intersection there’s a brief moment where I see that Starbucks and the geometry of the whole thing hits me and I suddenly realize, “Oh, shit, I’m here.”  I see myself in that Starbucks, sitting across the table from Amy, getting the silent treatment, trying to make the best of the whole thing by saying, “Hey, they’re doing another thing, so that’s good, right?”

Every.  Goddamn.  Time.

It worked out in the end, I suppose.  Amy was, ultimately, happy.  I now own a signed copy of What is the What.  But I remember nothing about that night except for the Starbucks on Milwaukee where it crosses Damen and North.[2]  Specifically, I remember getting the silent treatment and feeling, as I so often did around Amy, like a complete and total jackass.  Not that I would have admitted it at the time, of course.  I was too busy with the, “Why are you so pissed at me?  It’s totally gonna work out in the end,” argument.

Why am I telling you this story?  On one level it’s because I can, I suppose. More importantly, though, it’s because I’ve learned something: if you let someone into your life they will be there forever.  They might not physically stick around, but they will always be there, somewhere, floating at the edges of your memories.  Something will happen and, boom, there they’ll be, casting a shadow on whatever you’re doing wherever you are.

For a long time after Amy I thought the solution to this problem was to simply never let anyone in.  I spent a year and a half sitting alone in my apartment in Brookfield.  I spent a year and a half doing the same thing in Irving, Texas.  I watched too much TV, I drank too much beer, and I worked on building walls around my heart.  I never wanted to ever have to deal with the memories of another person again.

It worked wonderfully, if I’m honest.  As it turns out, I’m really good at building walls and finding ways to occupy my time.  It also happens that my skill set in that department isn’t exactly well-suited for creating any sort of sense of long-term happiness.  Who saw that coming?

I’ve realized something because of this, however.  There’s one and only one metric that actually matters when it comes to deciding who to spend time with.  It’s a simple question: “Is this person worth caring about?”

This isn’t a foolproof question by any stretch of the imagination.  What we think today might be totally different than what we think tomorrow, after all.  Someone I couldn’t imagine living without last Thursday might be persona non grata by next Thursday.  Crazy things happen sometimes.

What this rule of thumb does, though, is remove a lot of the bullshit that gets tossed around in searches for relationship-type-things.  Too much of what people say they’re looking for is the wrong stuff.  It needs to be someone who has X physical quality and Y education and Z career path.  But a person is more than what they look like and where they went to school and how much money they make.  All that shit is transitory compared to the underlying qualities of the person who might look like B and have H education and N career path.

This realization brings with it a certain level of responsibility, however.  If I want to find someone worth caring about then I, myself, must be someone worth caring about.  As such I must learn from my mistakes.  I must work on those things where I need improvement.  I must realize that the times where I remember myself as the innocent victim and the person I was with as in the wrong probably weren’t so cut-and-dry.

I, in short, need to go back to that night at the Starbucks at North, Milwaukee, and Damen.  I need to realize that Amy wasn’t unjustifiably pissed at me that night.  I could have left earlier, after all, and not relied on dumb luck to make sure everything worked out.  Even if everything had happened the exact same way I needed to realize that she was unhappy because she saw an opportunity to do something that she wanted to do slipping away.  She was, in short, someone who had goals and expectations and I had fucked it up for her due to my own (perceived, correctly or otherwise) mistakes.

It’s those realizations that convince me that I can never make life about just what I want and how I want other people to react to me.  There are too many variables out there and the variables are often the very people I want or need around me the most.  Ultimately, I think that’s why I’m not a fan of the whole idea of just going out to find the hottest woman around and trying to sleep with her.  It’s why I’m not a fan of doing the passive-aggressive thing where you try to talk yourself in to someone’s pants from The Friend Zone.

The person across from you is, in fact, a person.  That means you’re looking at someone with their own thoughts, hopes, and dreams.  That means you’re looking at someone who you can help or hurt without even realizing it.  That means you’re looking at someone who might see a coffee shop six years from now and have a sudden, unbidden memory of that time they were in that place with you, doing that thing.

It’s an important thought, I think.  I don’t think I’ve done an even remotely adequate job of covering it, though.  I don’t think I could do so in thirty pages or three hundred pages.  But maybe telling a story and the story of a lesson learned got somewhere in the neighborhood of what I wish I could find the words to say.

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[1]For the record, my four favorite Chicago venues are The Vic, the Beat Kitchen, Joe’s on Weed Street, and the Double Door.  I also like Schuba’s, the Riviera, and the Aragon, although the latter two are in one of the hardest parts of the North Side to reach if you’re driving.  I’ve finally figured out that the trick is to park in a garage in River North that offers night/weekend rates and then take the Red Line or the Brown Line, depending.  Or, y’know, go to a show after work.  That’s always an option.

Parking on the North Side is an awful, awful experience.  Driving on any of the surface streets in Chicago is also an awful, awful experience.  The problem with taking the train at any time that’s not rush hour, however, is that if you miss your train you’re going to be waiting for at least an hour for the next one.  If you miss the last one you’re stuck in the city until about 5 AM.  Driving, then, is a necessary evil.  The trick is to realize that you don’t actually have to drive to the venue itself.

[2]Oh, wait, I remember two things: I left my freaking mp3 player in said Starbucks and had to go there the next day after work to pick it up.  If I recall, it’s the same exact Creative Zen Vision:M that ultimately disappeared after I left it in the seat pocket of a Southwest Airlines flight when I went to Dallas the first time.  It’s equally likely that the one from the Starbucks was my old Dell Pocket DJ, however.  The main issue is that I don’t recall when, exactly, the Eggers near-debacle happened.

Getting Carded, Part 5

There’s no place worse to be than The Friend Zone, amirite, guys?

We all know what The Friend Zone is, I hope.  It’s that terrible purgatory wherein you get to spend a whole bunch of time with that one member of the female gender who is, like, completely perfect for you in a making out and boobie-touching sort of way, but she just won’t let you touch her boobies and totally won’t make out with you.  It’s an awful thing to behold, truly.

And we all know how one gets put into The Friend Zone.  It’s when you, as the guy, say something like, “We should go on a date,” or, “You know we’re perfect for each other, right?” or you keep “accidentally” touching her boobies when you’re hanging out, and then suggest that maybe she should let you actually touch them in a non-accidental sort of way.  But no matter what you do she just plain doesn’t let you touch her boobies or make out with her because she just doesn’t want to ruin your friendship.

Of course that whole thing is bullshit.  She’s just trying to use you.  Or keep you as a backup.[1]  Or string you along out of some sort of crazy-ass sadism because women are evil, controlling bitches like that.

You know, when I put it in those terms, The Friend Zone doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.  I literally cannot figure out why anyone would want to stay involved in a relationship wherein one person has been put in The Friend Zone.  Obviously the woman doing the putting into The Friend Zone is some sort of using, controlling bitch, so why would her poor victim even want to touch her boobies?[2]  She’s obviously controlling him with her feminine wiles and the poor sap has been brainwashed by boobies.[3]  Boy, howdy, does it ever suck to be that guy.

Wait, no.  That still makes no goddamn sense.

Okay, let me try to figure this out in some way that does make sense.  Okay, what about this: let’s take a hypothetical approach wherein the female in question really does want to be friends and the male in question is a whiny little dipshit.  Then let’s see where this whole thing goes.  Conceptually, of course.  Theoretically, even.  Because we all know that this scenario is, like, totally impossible in reality.

Let’s say that the woman in question genuinely doesn’t want to date right now.  This could be a general thing and she’s totally off the dating scene.  It could also be a specific thing and she doesn’t want to date the guy in question but, like, if Orlando Bloom showed up and said, “Ya wanna go for coffee?” she’d be all, “Yes, Legolas, oh, god, yes.”  It’s not likely, but, hey, it could happen.

Let’s ask the question, “What could possibly going through a woman’s head when she puts some poor guy into The Friend Zone?”  This, of course, depends on any number of factors.  We must consider them.

There are the general environmental factors.  Has she recently experienced a big life changed, including a career change, a death in the family, a cross-country move, or something similar?  Is she currently engaged in some sort of long-term self-improvement project, including going back to school, trying to write the great American novel, putting more of her time into charitable giving, or finally learning how to make those awesome pastries she’s always wanted to learn to make?  Is something taking up a shitload of her time, such as finishing her Masters while working full-time, a huge project at work, an ailing family member, or a recently purchased house that needs a lot of work?   Has she recently gotten out of a long-term relationship?  Has she recently gotten out of a short but intense relationship?  Has she experienced a string of bad relationships with guys who suck?  Is she, for that matter, currently in a relationship?

Once we get through the general environmental factors we need to ask specific factors.  Does she tend to date dumb jock types while you happen to be a pointy-headed intellectual type?  Are you pretty much her only friend and confidant?  Does she happen to be best friends with your sister?

These are all valid, nay, important questions to consider.  This list is also far, far from exhaustive.  Chances are that these or similar questions are all part of the mental calculus a woman puts into a potential relationship.

Guys, on the other hand, pretty much only ask two questions:

1.  “Is she hot?”

2.  “Is she single?”[4]

If the answers are, “Yes,” and, “Yes,” respectively, then there shouldn’t be any roadblocks in the way.  Any woman who does put up a road block, then, is being some sort of scheming bitch who is trying to destroy the guy in question.  Because, really, what else does a relationship need?

The problem with this difference in approach is pretty simple: the guy signals that he doesn’t actually give a shit about the supposed object of his affection.  If it’s only worthwhile to be friends with someone if she’ll make out with you and let you touch her boobies, then that person has been reduced to tongue, lips, and boobies.  It’s really that simple.

As such, the guy who sits around and bitches about being relegated to The Friend Zone sends the message that he is not and never will be boyfriend material.  Because, really, why would anyone want to date someone who doesn’t actually give a shit about them?  I suppose that there are women out there who are like that, though.  So maybe Captain Friend Zone needs to go find one of them.  Chances are he’ll be doing the object of his attention a great service if he does.

For the record, I’m not saying any of these things as someone who hasn’t fucked this up.  I totally have.  I’ve simply made it a point to learn from my mistakes.

Amy and I dated for about three months, then spent the next year and a half or so in this kinda-sorta pseudo relationship thingy that was bad for everyone involved.  For whatever reason she decided it wasn’t going to work and then tried to Friend Zone me, with a certain level of success, most of which had to be qualified by me pointing out that I did the passive-aggressive douchebag thing for most of that time.  After we stopped talking I realized from time to time that I actually missed her.  It wasn’t that I missed sitting around thinking about how great it would be if she let me touch her boobies.  It was that I missed having her around as someone to talk to and as someone who I knew would know Thing X about Subject Y that I, personally, knew fuck all about or would want to talk about Subject Z that I knew most other people I know couldn't be arsed to discuss.  Ergo, I hadn’t broken up with someone, I’d lost a friend.  I missed that particular friend and there was no getting her back.

Meanwhile, at a later, non-disclosed point in time I met a woman I came to value as a friend.  She was in a relationship when I met her.  I eventually figured out that she was actually someone I would date in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.

Eventually she broke up with the guy, which I considered a good move on her part.  It wasn’t because I knew I could then make my move, but because she wasn’t happy and I wanted her to be happy because she totally deserved to be happy.  The fact is that by the time that happened our friendship had progressed to the point where I didn’t want to potentially fuck it up by making a pass and finding out she totally wasn’t interested.

The fact of the matter is that I know the standard guy response to that situation is, “Ask her out.  Who cares about the consequences?”

I do, that’s who.  And I care because in the final analysis I ended up being more unhappy that I didn’t let Amy Friend Zone me than that she didn’t let me play with her boobies and make out with her and shit.

Turns out the dreaded Friend Zone isn’t necessarily such a bad place to be.

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[1]I originally wrote this as “Or keep you as a backpack,” which would be really, really weird.

[2]I mean, other than the obvious reason.  Boobies are fun to touch, after all.

[3]Brainwashed By Boobies is also the name of The Curb Tacos’ debut album.  Out June 12th.

[4]This question is, sadly, optional for some guys.

Getting Carded, Part 3

[I don’t do this very often, but this post needs a trigger warning, since it covers a topic that’s impossible to handle without discussing rape.]

I was having curb tacos across the street from the Double Door last Friday with a buddy.  Curb tacos, for the record, are regular tacos consumed while sitting on a curb.  They aren’t a venereal disease and there’s nothing sexual about the whole thing.[1]  It might be a bit soggy, but it’s not sordid.

The Double Door, for those who don’t know, is a Chicago music institution located at the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen in the extremely gentrified Bucktown/Wicker Park area of Chicago.  The entire area is Asian fusion restaurants and trendy bars and Starbucks and various things that are magnets for childless people with disposable incomes in their late 20s and early 30s.  Last Friday was a bit misty, but it was warm enough that there was a lot of foot traffic and a whole lot of people who apparently thought it was the middle of goddamn summer and dressed accordingly.  The upshot of this means there was a veritable smorgasbord of two things: attractive women and short skirts.

So my buddy and I were having a conversation that should have cost me a man card or three, since it was me articulating my various feelings of inadequacy as a human being.[2]  He kept stopping to check out women who were walking across the street with their nice legs and shapely buttocks.  He also, in the time-honored tradition of men everywhere, made sure to point them out to me.

My answer was always some variation on, “So, what?”

At one point he got mad at me and said, “So why do you keep doing this?  Do you think you’re more mature than me or something?”

The answer to that question is “No,” which I tried to articulate, but probably didn’t do so well, since his question didn’t make any sense to me.  It would be like if I showed up with my new Mazda and my buddy was like, “That’s nice for you, I guess, but I prefer Hondas,” and I was all, “Why are you telling me my car sucks?  Is it because you don’t like gray cars?”  I couldn’t answer the question because it wasn’t applicable to the situation.  He thought I was judging him.  In truth I just didn’t want to be bothered.

Attractive women are nice to look at and all.  I’ll accept that premise because I wholeheartedly believe it.  For me, however – and this might be something that genuinely only applies to me, I don’t know – seeing an attractive woman isn’t that big of a deal.  I could see the most attractive woman in the world walk past me right now and by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten that it happened and gone on to something else.  For me it’s not a question of maturity or self-control or superiority so much as it’s a question of utility.  If I’m trying to have a conversation and maintain a train of thought someone stopping me to say, “Hey, look at that ass!” isn’t helping.

There’s also a functional point to be made:  I’ve made it a point to not think of women as a nice set of legs or a curvy ass or a sweet rack.  Does that mean that I can’t see and appreciate such physical features?  No, not at all.  What it does mean, though, is that I’ve basically deprogrammed my brain from being constantly and casually distracted by the presence of a nice set of legs or a shapely ass.  There’s pretty much zero chance I’ll end up striking up a long-term, meaningful relationship with a woman crossing the street half a block down, so I can safely not give a rat’s ass about her shapely ass.

Does that make me weird?  Probably.  Does it make me more mature than other men?  I’m going to say no, since I don’t think that maturity has anything to do with it.  That’s a completely different dimension of human attitude than a simple mature/immature continuum.

And yea, verily, do we reach the part of David Wong’s Cracked piece that pissed me the hell off and convinced me to finally pull a bunch of disjointed thoughts together and write about them: “#3. We Think You're Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us.”  Um, yeah.

This is a fairly common idea.  Way back in the day Amy articulated it to me as, “Women know that if you can get a guy’s blood flowing to the little head he doesn’t have enough to think with the big one.”  It’s common knowledge, basically.  It’s not even like the idea is regarded as a moral failure or an issue of immaturity.  It’s just a value-neutral fact, like the wetness of water or blueness of sky or eastness of sunrise.  Give a dude a boner and he won’t be able to think anymore.  The goes with the attendant idea that all a woman has to do is flash a little thigh and said dude will get himself a boner.

Okay, so, this is conventional wisdom.  It’s generally accepted and considered part of the overall male-female interaction and everyone is just kind of okay with it.  Because that means that women get to control men through sex and boys get to be boys and we can all just live happily ever after.  Until it comes time to take someone to court on rape charges and everyone shakes their head and says, “Well she shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt.  She was asking for it.”

Then it becomes a problem.  But only for those sluts who really should know better, anyway.  But that’s okay, too, because obviously they were going out in search of a guy to put his penis into them, so if they were planning on having a penis in them isn’t one penis as good as another, even if the one that happened to end up there belonged to a guy who grabbed her in a hallway and shoved her up against a wall?  I mean, seriously.  Why should she be picky, since she got exactly what she was after?

And, yeah, David Wong goes all the fuck over this territory, in spite of his protestations to the contrary.

First, you need to understand something about the unique love/hate relationship men have with their penises.

Do you remember that story about police having to free a guy who got his dick stuck while humping a pool filter? Or that other guy who got stuck humping a park bench, or the other guy who got stuck humping a picnic table? Or that judge who got caught jerking off while on the bench listening to testimony?

I, for one, do not have a love/hate relationship with my penis.  I neither love nor hate my penis.  And I can assure you that I have never gotten anywhere close to getting my dick stuck in a park bench or a public pool because I’m not a fucking dipshit who can’t control myself.  I would also be willing to bet that better than 95% of the male gender would completely and totally agree with me on that one.  There is as much of a gulf between “a guy who owns a penis” and “a guy who owns a penis and plays with it in public” as there is between “a guy who owns a knife” and “a guy who has stabbed a hobo to death.”

Simply having something that someone else has used in a way that’s frowned upon by society doesn’t mean you have to use it in that same way.  The story about the guy who gets penis stuck in vacuum attachment is going to get a hell of a lot more play than the million or so stories every day of guys who used a vacuum and managed to not stick their dicks in the various hose-based accessories.  It’s kind of the same thing as a story of kids getting kidnapped get a lot more play than the stories of kids who don’t get kidnapped.  Children are, at least according to the statistics I’ve seen, safer now than they were during the golden ages of years past when kids played in the streets all day and night and befriended magic hoboes who taught them important life lessons and told them where to find secret hobo treasure.  But all we hear about are the kids who get abducted, so people assume that there’s some creepy, candy-besotted stranger with a windowless Astro van around every corner.

I guess my point is this: I’ve never seen a dude fucking a picnic table or humping a pool filter.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Also it’s fun to talk about hoboes.

Either way, the Cracked piece actually gets worse, if that’s possible.

You see this type of story come up a lot -- check your local police blotter. And they all have something in common: They're all guys.

Seriously, do a Google search for "masturbating in public library." Notice something in common with all of those stories? They're all dudes. Obviously I'm not saying women don't pleasure themselves (every single study would prove me a liar); I'm saying that men are far, far more likely to engage in extremely high-risk masturbation in public. They're more likely to do it at work, and they're more likely to do it in situations where they could go to jail.

No, it's not some rare, weird exhibitionist fetish, either. It's that they can't even wait the couple of hours it'd take to do it safely at home.

I can’t believe that I have to be the one to explain this, but here goes: women are fully capable of masturbating in public.  Chances are that they do it, too.  Possibly as often as men.  Women, however, have a distinct technological advantage in the public masturbation arms race: they don't have penises.

I’m given to understand – and any women who happen to stop by can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, since god knows I have absolutely no business acting like I know anything whatsoever about the secret functioning of ladyparts – that it’s entirely possible for a woman to stimulate herself without drawing much attention to the act whatsoever.  If I’m correct in my understanding it requires a hell of a lot less work than whipping out a six-inch meat log and furiously stroking it for thirty seconds.  That’s kind of an attention-getter.  And it’s rather hard to disguise as some other, more innocent activity.

All that aside, especially if it turns out I’m wrong (although, really, what the hell else are kegel exercises for?  Again, I have ZERO expertise in the area of ladyparts.  And I’m pretty sure that that’s gonna cost me a man card.  Here, have a dozen.  They’re good for ten cents off a coffee at your local Caribou franchise as long as you get the daily trivia question right), what the fuck does, “Some dude decided to stick his dick in a picnic table,” have to do with, “Women try to control men through their penises?”  I don’t know if anyone else has ever noticed this, but while a woman can be many things, a picnic table isn’t one.[3]  Let’s go see what the reason is that these two totally unrelated things are absolutely related, shall we?

It's because, in males more so than females, the sex drive is completely detached from the rest of the personality. The part of the male brain that worries about job security or money or social reputation or legal consequences has almost no veto power over the sex drive. You've heard guys say they were "thinking with their dick" or "I was thinking with the little brain" or "I took an order from Captain Bonerhelmet." That's what they're referring to.

Bullshit.

Bull.  Shit.

Bull.  Fucking.  Shit.

That’s the old…

Wait, hold on, I don’t think you got the point yet.

Buuuuuuuuuuullllllll.  Sheeeeeeeeit.

There we go.  Anyway, back to the post.

That’s the old “boys will be boys” excuse.  Us poor men are led about by our penises and just can’t do a damn thing about it.  So, really, when you think about it, we should get a cookie and a pat on the head for every time we don’t beat off in public or rape a woman who’s just trying to get a $20 at the ATM.  Because men just can’t be expected to think about the consequences, like when we buy $3,000 TVs when we’ve got an upcoming down payment on a house to think about.

And, hey, lookit that.  I'm up to four pages and I’m not even warmed up yet.  Looks like this one’s about to become a two-parter.

Sorry.

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[1]That said, I now want to go to Fort Worth and sit on the sidewalk on Berry Street across from the TCU campus, since getting some Fuzzy’s curb tacos sounds totally dirty.

[2]I have several.  If you’d like to hear them it will cost you a curb taco.  And, yes, I’ve decided to make “curb taco” an integral part of my lexicon.

[3]Unless you’re at one of those crazy-ass sushi places that serves the food on a naked lady.  At that point a woman is pretty much a picnic table.

Getting Carded, Part 2

I’ve got a friend who will regularly stop in the middle of something he’s talking about and say, “I know I’ll have to turn in my man card if I say this, but…” or, “Well I guess I have to turn in my man card,” or something to that effect.  My response to that is always, “The man card thing is bullshit, what’s on your mind?”

That should always and forever be the response to anything involving the terms “man” and “card” placed next to each other.  The idea of “manhood” as espoused in the man card concept is annoying when it’s something that someone else tries to push.  It’s insidious when it becomes a form of self regulation.  This is something with which I am all too familiar.

For those who haven’t been around these here parts much, I grew up in the Evangelical Christian community.  Or whatever you call it.  Because I grew up in the Evangelical church I am incredibly familiar with self-regulating behavior modification.  If you tell someone enough that “you’re not a good Christian if you do/don’t do X,” then threaten them with punishment for breaking that rule you can eventually convince them to watch their own behavior.  This pretty much explains the weird obsession Christianity seems to have with masturbation and using swear words.[1]  The penalty for not watching your behavior in Christianity, of course, is that you’ll go to hell.  Because Baby Jesus is super interested in how often you jack off and say, “Fuck.”  In fact, he’s so interested that he watches you do it.  All the time.

Apparently Baby Jesus is a perv.

The penalty for not behaving in a manly manner, of course, is that you won’t get laid.  This is why you, as a man who, because you are a man and men want to get laid, must always and forever and consciously be a man.  And how does a man know he is being a man?  When he’s behaving in a manly manner, of course.  Behaving in a manly manner is mostly a matter of always holding tight to one’s man card.[2]

Of course being properly manly isn’t as easy to define as being properly Christian.  The Bible says that all you need to do to be a good Christian is to pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” and make sure you don’t swear, smoke, masturbate, vote for a Democrat, or approve of anyone who is gay or has abortions.[3]  There is no simple manual to tell us in short, declarative statements what it means to be a proper man, unfortunately.

This, of course, means that we must identify a “man” according to what a man should not be.  Since the world consists of two and only two types of people, namely “men” and “women,” we simply have to figure out what a woman is in order to figure out what a man should be.  Simple, right?  Let’s try it.

Women are emotional and like talking about their feelings.  That means that if you, as a man, talk about feelings, or even acknowledge that you have feeling, you are being a woman.  That is a man card violation.

Women never want sex for pleasure, only for control.  That means that if you, as a man, ever don’t want sex or exercise any control over your sexual impulses, you're being a woman.  That’s a man card.

Women like poetry and art and the opera and that sort of boring bullshit.  That means that if you, as a man, want to go to a museum or really like “The Marriage of Figaro," you are being a woman.  Man card.

See how easy that is?  All you have to do is ask yourself no matter what you’re doing, “Is this what a woman would do?”  If your answer is, “Yes,” then you know that you are, by extension, being a woman.  If you’re being a woman then that means you’re not being a man.  So you might as well just hand in that man card and slip on skirt over that lacy pair of panties you just put on, bitch.

These posts are, ostensibly, a response to the ideas David Wong put into this piece at Cracked.  More specifically, this post is my reaction to “#2: We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen from Us at Some Point.”  He makes half a point, then makes a half-assed refutation of the argument he’s supposedly dealing with and then he just kind of…stops.  This is a huge problem.

See, every single male can remember the first time, when he was 5 or 6 years old, he showed his penis to a stranger and everybody started freaking the hell out. He can remember the first time he got in trouble for hitting somebody, for peeing in public, for trying to jump off some high object or set something on fire. All of the core male urges, all the suggestions whispered to us by Darth Penis, all of it gets us in trouble.

And, when we get nostalgic for the past, we always dress it up in some ridiculous fantasy like 300, where everybody is shirtless and screaming and hacking things with swords. We are fed this idea that at one time, this is how the world was -- all of these impulses that have been getting us grounded and sent to detention from kindergarten on used to be not only allowed, but celebrated.

I will admit that my reaction to this is mostly anecdote and only my anecdote.  I’ll further admit that if my experience is as reasonably universal as I think it is, the plural of anecdote is still not data.  But I have a really hard time with this entire line of argument.

The primary problem is that I have never in my life showed my penis to a stranger.  Hell, I’ve managed to avoid showing my penis to close confidants.  So there’s that.  And no one wants to see me running around shirtless and pretending to be King Leonidas, not even me.  Also, I got sent to detention exactly once that I can recall.  So perhaps I was simply better behaved than your average boy.[4]

I don’t think that’s the case, though.  I had a lot of friends who never did their best Calvin or Dennis the Menace impressions, at least not in my presence.  I can’t see any of my male friends trying to imitate the dudes on Jackass for any reason.  For that matter, I’m pretty sure that most of my friends think the guys on Jackass are complete and total idiots.

More than that, while I have hit someone and gotten in trouble for it, I didn’t take the “getting in trouble” part as a lesson that my manhood had been taken from me.  I took it as a lesson that actions have consequences.  Does that mean that I, as a fourth grader, was smarter and more mature than your average adult male?  Apparently yes, if the internet is to be believed.

I don’t think I was, though.  I think that we’re supposed to believe that all boys are trouble makers.  I think we’re supposed to believe that all men are simply boys who have grown hair in strange and fascinating places.  I think we’re supposed to believe, in short, that “boys will be boys” and, by extension, “men will be boys.”  If boys are boys and men are boys, then, who is the adult in the room?

Right, the woman.  Hence the next bit:

And then at some point, women took it all away.

A once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes has been replaced by this world of grumpy female supervisors looming over our cubicle to hand us a memo about sending off-color jokes via email. Yes, that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved. It doesn't matter.

The result is a combination of frustration and humiliation and powerlessness that makes us want to get it back in the only way we know how: with petty, immature acts of meanness.

I’m insulted by this whole thing.  Sure, he makes the lame refutation that “that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved,” but at no point does he explain how it’s skewed or why.    He just leaves it there.  “We blame women for making us be adults.  We shouldn’t, but we do, so we act like assholes.”  Well okay, then.  Let’s just wander away and see what’s going on over there, then.

Or, y’know, let’s not.  There’s something I don’t remember ever having or being involved in.  That something is “a once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes.”  Where is that world?  Who lives in that world?  And why, pray tell, is it so great in the first place?  And when and why and how did “grumpy female supervisors” take it away?  And what does sending off-color jokes via email have to do with any of this?  And is it possible for me to write more sentences that start with “And” and end with a question mark?

Apparently we don’t need to get rid of man cards as a concept.  We need to sit down with the male gender and have a long talk about the importance of personal responsibility.  It’s pretty self-evident, at least to me, that it’s a bad idea to take your penis out in public, to hit people, and to send off-color jokes via company email.  There’s probably a policy about that in the HR manual somewhere.  This realization that actions have consequences shouldn’t ever be a matter of saying, “Man, so-and-so is such a buzzkill.”  It should be a part of growing up.[5]

This is the important lesson I’ve learned: women don’t kill fun.  Life kills fun.  Actions have consequences and it does absolutely no good to say to women, “Waaaa, you’re trying to ruin my fun.”

The upshot here is that I am about to be 31 years old.  I’m also about to be buying a house.  I drive a 2010 Mazda 6.  I have a bunch of really fun toys.  My estimated monthly budget is a few hundred dollars lower than my monthly income and I’ve managed to do all of that partially by being fortunate, but also by not buying $3000 TVs just because I’ve got that kind of money lying around in my bank account.

I’ve managed to make these things happen because I do not give a flying shit about being a man.  I am far more concerned with being an adult.  My self-image as a man is a secondary concern.

That’s really what the whole man card thing is, too.  It’s an issue of crafting an image.  The crazy thing about it is that the enforcers of that image aren’t even women, either.  Watch one of those Miller Lite man card commercials.  Watch that episode of Scrubs where the man cards are a plot point.  Notice who issues or revokes the man cards.  I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the women.

It’s actually a neat trick when you think about it.  Men get to enforce orthodoxy and create a hierarchy, with the person who dictates who loses a man card placing himself as the alpha male.  And then they get to blame the whole thing on those mean, meddling women.

Meanwhile, I’ve never heard a woman demand a guy’s man card.  But I think I’ll have to deal with that in a different post.

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[1]True story: I went to see Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers at the fantastic Gruene Hall outside of New Braunfels, TX during June of 2010.  I had just gotten my iPhone and was using the standard notepad app to take notes.  The standard notepad app had a terrible habit I had discovered that very weekend of randomly erasing notes.  It was awesome.  I was trying to keep track of the setlist during the show and sometime around song 12 I popped the note app open and discovered that it had erased everything but the opening song.

This pissed me off, so I did what everyone does in this situation and complained on Facebook.  My status incorporated a couple of four-letter words.  Because, y’know, I was pissed.  And somewhat soused.  And I’ve been using four-letter words since the fifth grade.

The next morning I had a response from one of my former youth group leaders that started off with, “Nice swear words.”  He then followed up with the ever-so-useful advice to get a completely different phone on the Sprint network.  Because, shit, who doesn’t want to break their just-signed AT&T contract and trade in their month old iPhone 3GS for some random phone some dude suggested based on a problem with a single app?  So, basically, the entire response was massively useless.  I believe my response was a swift de-friending.  Also an eventual installation of Evernote, which works beautifully.

Incidentally, when I traded in my 3GS for my Motorola Atrix 2 last month I got the Android Evernote app, signed in, and all of my notes were right there.  But that’s neither here nor there.

But you don't want to hear about my app usage habits.  The point is that someone felt the need to police my speech based on his standards of what counts as correct language.  This is something Christians do a lot, especially in debate with non-Christians.  They think that it proves some sort of point and that they are more moral because they don’t say “shit.”

[2]Which is not to be confused with a penis.  This is not a veiled penis reference.

[3]The Modern American Christian translation of the Bible, of course.  This is the Bible that’s always cited by a Christian prefacing a statement with, “The Bible says…”

[4]I have taken to referring to my “tragically un-misspent youth.”

[5]I was at Fry’s two weeks ago looking for a TV as part of my “create a home office” thing.  When I lived in Texas my desk was in the back corner of my living room, which meant that if I wanted to watch TV while on my computer I just turned on my TV.  It suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore, so I either needed to get a third TV or not have a TV in the bedroom.  Either idea was equally valid, but since the whole house buying process has dragged on forever and ever I had some extra cash so I decided to see what was available, especially since it’s the time of year with TV makers sell off last year’s models to make way for the new shit.  I was just looking for a 26” or 32” TV.  Nothing big.  But I found myself standing in front of a 70” Sharp Aquos thinking, “That’s awesome.  I could get it as my main TV, then move my 37” to the bedroom and my 32” to my office and BOOM.  The TV was, like, $3,000, which isn’t that big of a deal in comparison to my current available resources.  So, yes, I easily could have purchased a 70” TV that day.  But then I wouldn’t have had as much money for things I need, like new carpet or paint or if it turns out the furnace in the house is on its last legs or to simply have spare cash lying around in case I need it for something next year.  Hell, I know I’ll be buying a new stove sooner or later, probably sooner.  Is a 70” TV more fun than a stove?  Yes.  Is a working stove more necessary than a 70” TV?  Hell, yes.

And for those who care about such things: I ended up spending $380 for a 32” Samsung LED TV at HH Gregg.  That’s, like, $50 less than the really good deal I got on my 32” Samsung LCD TV in spring of 2010.  TVs is cheap these days.

Getting Carded, Part 1

If I ever meet the guy who invented the man card I plan on punching him in the face.  With my fist.  Actually, I probably won’t, since that would be assault and the man card fucker totally isn’t worth jail time.  You know what is worth jail time?  Pretty much nothing, that’s what.

Anyway, the man card.  It’s a stupid thing.  It’s mostly an annoying thing, especially in those stupid Miller Lite commercials where they take some dude’s man card for drinking a different kind of light beer.  Because nothing says, “I’m a masculine hunk of manhood,” like drinking shitty, mass-produced beer.  Beer should not be a masculine/feminine thing, anyway.[1]

The man card has become a sort of self-regulating thing amongst men.  It’s incredibly fucking annoying to have to deal with this and pretty much requires a certain level of abruptness in its handling.  Because all the “man card” does is enforce a specific idea of what a man actually is based on really dumb and transitory societal rules.[2]

A few weeks ago I was out with friends.  There was an extremely cute redhead there and I was talking to her.  At one point a Matt Nathanson song came on and I was all, “Hey, Matt Nathanson.”  She was all, “Oh my god, I love Matt Nathanson.”  And I was all, “Dude I was totally at the show he did at the Riviera last summer,” and she was all, “I was in the front row.”

We had what I like to call “a Matt Nathanson moment.”[3]  For those keeping track, I was having a conversation and connecting with an attractive redhead.  I’m a huge fan of redheads, even more the attractive ones.  It’s kind of a thing.

My buddy was sitting there and he said, “You listen to Matt Nathanson?  I’m taking your man card.”

I turned, looked at him, and said, “Shut up, dude.  The man card is bullshit.”

This, I think, is the only appropriate answer to the man card issue.  It’s just an attempt to enforce a certain set of behaviors or values that belong to the category of “men.”  So, for some reason, “men” aren’t supposed to like Matt Nathanson or the music of Matt Nathanson.[4]  That means that if I, Geds, like the music of Matt Nathanson then I am not a “man.”

Of course, there’s also the issue that while the attractive woman was talking to me about Matt Nathanson she was not talking to my friend about, y’know, acceptably manly things.  So I think there’s a certain level of competition in the whole thing.  Because if we’ve learned anything from reruns of Saved By the Bell, it’s that girls see relationships as the outcome of a round of combat, or a battle of wits, or an embarrassing '80s sweater/feathered hair off.  They will watch two men fight and then pick the winner because we all still live in caveman times.

And now here I find myself in a bit of a bind.  I’ve written one page of text and two pages of footnotes and haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of my original intentions in this post.  I’m also pretty sure that I’ve already gotten completely off-track, so I think I’ll go all multi-part series on your asses.

Sorry.

But, just to create an illusion of continuity, the thing that’s gotten me thinking about this is this piece by David Wong at Cracked.  It’s one of those things that starts really well and goes completely and totally off the rails by the end.  Basically, I read it and was in total agreement with items 5 and 4, then in total disagreement with 3 (but not for the reasons you might think) and partial disagreement with 2 and 1.  Part of the problem is that only points 5 and 4 are actually related to, and in support of, the title of the piece.  Ironically an article that's ostensibly about women becomes almost totally about men at the end.

Hence, post.  Erm, posts.

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[1]True story: I went out on a first date with someone last year to a brewpub.  I proceeded to order a wheat beer of some sort and a chicken wrap.  She ordered an IPA and a cheeseburger.  I pretty much pointed out that this was not how things are supposed to work according to standard relationship gender roles.  ‘Twas hilarious to everyone involved.

She was also the only person I’ve been on multiple dates with since, well, since Amy, pretty much.  So I guess that means that, at least for some people, such things as “demonstrations of manliness based on really fucking stupid criteria” are, well, really fucking stupid.  And, um, no.  No relationship developed.  Why?  Because any relationship requires two people.  When one of those two people is me that means that one of the people is actively attempting to cause the relationship to fail for no damn good reason.  But that’s a story for another day.  Maybe.  Probably not.

Actually, it is kind of an interesting thought experiment.  What it boiled down to was that she was more into me than I was into her.  The reasons for that, at least from my perspective, were entirely valid and based on a complete lack of emotional engagement (and, honestly, a sense that she wanted to immediately jump into something to which I wasn’t sure I wanted to jump.  On many levels that whole thing actually did reverse the traditional rom-com gender roles, which is kinda funny).  But, again, the party that wasn’t engaging was me, and I tend to think that's at least partially because that’s what I do in general.

I’ve realized in the last few weeks all my bullshit criteria and rules and whatnot of dating aren’t actually worth spit and there should be one and only one criteria worth paying attention to: is this person worth caring about?  But that’s part of a much, much larger discussion of how people interact and is wedded to a whole set of other thoughts I have that start from my realization that religious affiliation as a sorting hat for friendship is the worst possible mechanism.  Except possibly sports fandom.  Or what bands you follow.  Basically, it’s that you aren’t friends with or in a relationship with a checklist.  So someone who is a yes in every checkbox might be someone you can’t stand and someone who hates everything you like might be your absolute favorite person in the world.

That, then, gets back around to a critique of online dating as a thing, because creepy-ass eHarmony founder guy and his scientific surveys can’t really predict why people will like each other.  The sooner we stop thinking science can the better off we’ll be.  I think.

But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

[2]Unfortunately I think the man card, or at least its popularity, needs to be blamed on Scrubs.  There’s one episode where Dr. Cox hands JD three man cards and takes them away whenever he does non-manly things.  Much of the humor of that show was built around JD doing non-manly things according to Dr. Cox’s assessment and then Dr. Cox calling JD by girls’ names.  I love Scrubs and I think that it was set up in such a way as to make sure that Dr. Cox was seen as a broken man who should be emulated by no one, ever, at any point, but JD wasn’t exactly depicted as a hero, either.

[3]This is a moment that occurs when two people connect over the music of Matt Nathanson.  Also, note, too, that he plays a 12-string guitar.  That's not an instrument played by just any dipshit trying to impress girls in a coffee shop.

[4]Part of the problem is that he seemed to take the “get songs played over the closing credits of shitty WB chick shows” route to fame.  I’ve been listening to his music since some time in 2005-2006.  He suddenly busted out all over the place after Some Mad Hope blew up overnight in 2008 or 2009 because he was suddenly on TV soundtracks (at least, as best I can figure out).  Other than hearing one of his songs on an episode of Scrubs, though, the only time I’d hear him would be playing over the ending credits of primetime soaps marketed to teen girls.  There’s nothing wrong with this particular route to fame, since money is money and people making money for doing what they’re good at isn’t exactly something I begrudge.  But it immediately pigeonholes him as a guy who writes that kind of music for the teen girl audience.

So it doesn’t matter that I was listening to him before that happened.  It doesn’t matter that I’ve never in my life seen a single episode of Gossip Creek or Gilmore High (I did, however, once sit through a couple epsiodes of of Everwood for some reason.  Oh, wait, no, I remember now.  There were two reasons: Emily VanCamp and Sarah Lancaster.  Also, probably, boredom, which I'm assuming was exacerbated rather than assisted by watching Everwood, since I remember exactly nothing about it, save attractive women and the fact that I should probably be embarrassed by this whole parenthetical thought.  Sarah Lancaster, of course, went on fame in the role of Gift Shop Girl on Scrubs.  And she was on some different NBC show or other, too, but who really keeps track?  Emily VanCamp now stars in some show I've never watched and that I only know because someone bought ad space on Chicago bus shelters and I'd walk past an think, "Hey, that's that hot chick what was on Everwood.") or whatever he’s now associated with, someone who doesn’t know me hears me mention Matt Nathanson and he’s like, “Dude, what?”

Again, I do not begrudge Matt Nathanson his success, no matter the route.  I get the general impression that he’s one of those people who you can genuinely say deserves every good thing he gets.  But I dunno, maybe he goes home, takes off his public persona, and rapes kittens or something.

In Which Geds Tries Speed Dating. Hilarity Does Not Ensue.

There are various parts of the Chicagoland area that I refer to as “black holes.”  They’re places I know of and could probably place adjacent to other parts of Chicagoland if forced, but they’re also places I know fuck-all about.

I decided I was going to attempt the whole speed dating thing in one of those black holes.  Basically, I heard that it was happening and I realized, “Hey, this is gonna be happening two days before Valentine’s Day.  That’s a Dancing Monkey Project post waiting to happen!”  So I signed up.  I didn’t actually really want to do it, but that’s kind of the point of the Dancing Monkey Project, right?  I’m supposed to “get out of my comfort zone” and all that bullshit.  Also, it was apparently a thing for charity, so I could do the Dancing Monkey thing and help children or homeless people or something.  I wasn’t entirely clear on the end goal of that one.

So, yes.  Speed dating.  Dancing Monkey Project.  Black hole.  This is not a good combination of things.

This particular black hole was a big north of the area I jokingly refer to as “my old stomping grounds,” which is the Brookfield/La Grange area, where I lived before I moved to Dallas.  I’d driven up in to the area, but from there and not the west.  Still, I thought I knew where I was going, so I was all, “Who needs a GPS or Google Maps, really?”

This was my second mistake, my first being, y’know, signing up in the first place.

Fun fact:  there’s a town called Northlake right around where North Avenue and Lake Street intersect.  I’d always thought Northlake was, like, up north somewhere, probably around Northbrook or North Haverbrook.  I did not know it was where North and Lake met, but that totally made sense.  Also, there’s a town called Stone Park just east of Northlake.  I’d never heard of Stone Park before.  This whole bit about discovering the existence of heretofore unknown (to me) towns whilst not using any navigational aids, by the way, might be at clue as to what’s going to happen.

I got lost.  There was a traffic accident-aided traffic detour involved that really didn’t help.  Because I did totally know the route I was supposed to take.  I got a little thrown when I couldn’t take said route.

This lovely combination of events gave me plenty of time to think, however.  If you want the short version now, I’m calling off the Dancing Monkey Project.  If you want the long version, well, it’ll be in the next paragraph.  So you might as well stick around.

The Dancing Monkey Project is a hilarious idea for someone who isn’t me to do.  It’s really that simple.  Alternately, it would be a hilarious idea for me to turn in to a book of some sort at some point in the future.  It’s not a good idea for me to be, like, doing as a thing.

Basically, if the goal of going out and meeting people is to, y’know, meet people, then I need to be going out and meeting people without, “Hey, I’m going to blog about this shit as soon as I’m done.”  That changes my behaviors and my end goals.  And, really, at this point my goal shouldn’t be to have a bunch of stupid experiences, as that’s a giant waste of time for me.  And since the Dancing Monkey Project was supposed to get me out and away from the stupid experiences and meeting people…

Um, this is getting really confusing.  Perhaps I need a bulleted list.  Or, at least, I should start from another direction.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  The goal of the Dancing Monkey Project was to get me out doing different things and, therefore, getting different results.  But intentionally picking dumb things for the purposes about going out and doing dumb things and then writing funny shit about them actually means that I’m looking to do different things that create the same results as before, which means that eventually the Dancing Monkey Project will just be doing the same things over and over again and getting the same results over and over again.

So I’m not doing it any more.

And I don't feel like I've cheated anyone out of anything, either, since nobody's bothered to drop anything in the tip jar, anyway.  And, y'know, my goddamn blog, my goddamn rules.

I'm going to leave it up, though.  The picture amuses me to no end and it's not like anyone's using it.

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Also, it occurred to me that if, by some random miracle of life, the Dancing Monkey Project resulted in me meeting someone, I’d then feel compelled to write about that.  I’m not sure that’s the key to a good, stable, long-term relationship.

So, basically, the Dancing Monkey Project was a form of self-sabotage.

This realization does not surprise me, actually.

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Meanwhile, it's not like I have a shortage of social opportunities in my life.  By my count, I have crap scheduled at least 17 of the 40-odd days between now and April 1st.  And I'm still trying to hold down time on the ever reducing chance I'll be buying a house by the end of February.

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Oh, so, on the subject of self-sabotage:

A couple posts ago I told the story of my grandmother’s attempt to get me to hook up with some random Norwegian chick.  That part of the story ended with my grandmother convincing (by which I mean browbeating ) me to at least talk on the phone with the girl.  So that happened.

The conversation started out in a predictably awkward fashion.  To wit, the girl had no fucking clue who I was.  My grandmother has been trying to sell me on her for, like, five years.  Apparently her parents mentioned me to her, like, once in passing relatively recently.

This was actually a good thing, since I knew she had absolutely zero investment in this cockamamie scheme from the get-go.  As such, I explained to her that my grandmother had been trying to get me to hook up with her for five years and wasn’t taking no for an answer and, yeah, the whole situation was super awkward for me.

I did not tell her that my grandmother had described her as “kinda homely looking” and “not the skinniest girl in the world” or whatever.  I did mention that her main selling points were “nice to old people” and “Norwegian.”  Because that’s funny, I don’t care who you are.

We actually did end up having a very pleasant conversation.  She spoke in a regionally-Evangelical dialect of Christianese and told me about her overseas missions trips.  I dropped the occasional casual curse word.  It wasn’t going to go anywhere.

But at least it’s over now.  So now you know the rest of the story.

Well, until my grandmother tries to browbeat me into round 2.  Or disowns me.  Whichever.

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Also, apropos of absolutely nothing, one big thing on the list of things that annoy the fuck out of me about the iPhone is the lack of truly useful repeating calendar events.  I have a lot of stuff I do that happens on, say, the fourth Tuesday of every month.  My old HTC Tilt did that just fine.  The iPhone?  Not so much.

Does anyone have any idea why the hell Apple doesn't have that functionality?

How Not to Deal with the Single People In Your Life

I’ve managed to almost entirely avoid that annoying stereotype of being increasingly-not-young and yet also not-increasingly-attached.  Nobody really tries to set me up.  It’s nice, really.  No blind dates.  No, “She’s got a nice personality.”  None of that garbage.  It’s nice.  My family and friends largely let me do my own thing without assuming they know better than I what I should be doing with my life.

This isn’t to say that it hasn’t happened.  It’s just that it’s happened twice.  Unfortunately one of those times has been a five year long odyssey of slight annoyance.

It might shock my readers to learn that I’m Norwegian.  I mean, partially Norwegian.  It’s not something I talk about since, once you get past the Vikings and the rather cool Norse storytelling tradition, there’s really nothing to talk about in re: being Norwegian.  Mostly it’s awful food made almost entirely out of lard and potatoes and, well, I can’t think of a second thing.[1]  Also, to a native English speaker all of that awful food actually sounds like -- or at least contains a syllable or two that sound like -- things that you don’t want to actually eat.  It's like the terribleness advertises itself.

My grandmother, however, cares about being Norwegian.  She’s a member of an organization that mostly sits around and does Norwegian things and/or talks about Norwegian things.  The people involved are mostly old enough to be my grandparents.[2]  It’s also, as many such organizations are, a group that exists in order to perpetuate itself.

As someone who has sat around in a lot of meetings in which the conversation goes to, “How do we get more people to care about this in order to keep this going?” I often take a step back and ask the question, “Why would anyone want to join this group?”  My answer for the Norwegian folks is, “I have no freaking clue.”  It amounts to a bunch of people sitting in a church basement eating bad food and talking about being Norwegian.  You have to really give a shit about Norway to want to do that.[3]

Anyway, as it turns out, I am also a member of this august organization.  My reasons for being a member involve getting signed up before I was old enough to realize I don’t give a shit about Norway.  Ever since then I’ve been getting their monthly magazine, the occasional newsletter, and a lot of junk email.  So it’s basically like signing up for a JCPenney’s card, but with more Norwegian-themed crap and less Ellen DeGeneres.  I don’t really have to care about it, it’s just a thing.  However, I will say this: if you’re forced to choose, go with Ellen.  She’s fun.  And married to Portia de Rossi. And it’ll apparently piss off conservatives.  Some of whom might be crotchety old Norwegians.

But you don’t want to hear about the group dynamics of Norwegian-themed organizations.  Or, hell, maybe you do.  Leave something in the comments and I’ll seriously consider working up a post on group dynamics.  It’s one of those things that actually does fascinate me.  But I’m not here to talk about Norwegian group dynamics.  I think.  Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh, yeah, my grandmother.

About five years ago my grandmother got it in her head that I totally needed to meet this one girl.  Her reasons were as follows:  1. She’s Norwegian.  2.  She’s nice to old people.  3.  She’s the daughter of my grandmother’s friends.  If you’re not already as excited as I am about this girl I don’t know what the fuck to tell you.

Oh, yeah, also, I was still kinda-sorta seeing Her at the time, for some variety of “seeing” and “still thinking for some damn fool reason it might work out.”  My grandmother didn’t like Her.  You might think that means my grandmother is an astute judge character, since, y’know, She’s kind of a bitch.  But it’s kind of like…well, it’s kind of like Ron Paul.  Yeah, he wants to end foreign wars and I, also, want to end foreign wars.  But Ron Paul’s reasoning is totally crazy-go-nuts and not really connected to any sane stance on anything.  And, yes, I just compared my grandmother to Ron Paul.  I’m okay with that.

One thing you need to know about my grandmother is that she’s really big on expectation management.  Another thing you need to know about my grandmother is that she doesn’t know how to do expectation management.  Shortly after learning that the girl in question was Norwegian and liked old people I got an actual description.  As I recall, it boiled down to, “Well, she’s kinda homely looking,” and, “She’s not the skinniest girl in the world.  She’s a bigger girl, really.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “Holy shit, an ugly, fat chick who loves old people?  Sign me up!”  I have, however, known my grandmother for a while.  What she was attempting to do was set up a scenario where we’d meet and I’d discover that the girl was actually significantly more attractive than I’d thought and I’d be all, “Yay, grandma!  Thanks for introducing me to this totally amazing person!”[4]

Alas, my desire to meet a fat, homely girl who’s main advantages involved being Norwegian and nice to old people was very low.  I mean, I still thought I had a chance to make things work with a not-fat, pretty girl who was a bitch to everybody at and was probably of British descent or something.[5]  Hey, a guy’s got to dream big, right?

I ended up getting to sidestep that bullshit from time-to-time.  My grandmother was still trying to push it even after the girl moved downstate somewhere.  I’m sure that she was harboring plans about how it could still work out while I was living in Texas.  It was a minor annoyance, but in the grand scheme of things it was the only thing of that sort I had to deal with other than a brief period when I was in Texas and one of my friends decided to try to hook me up with someone she knew and I was all, “Nope, not interested.”

Over the last month the whole thing came to a head, though.  My grandmother managed to introduce me to the girl’s parents in January.  They liked me, so my grandmother decided it was time to really push things.  She very nearly managed to get me and the girl in the same room a couple weeks ago, but I avoided it almost entirely by accident.

So my grandmother accelerated the process.  She called me, gave me some crap about how the parents really liked me and she wanted to meet me and would I want to meet her.  My response was, “Not really.”

At that point my grandmother browbeat me for about five minutes, convinced me to at least talk to her on the phone (and by "convinced," I mean, "Convinced me that it was the only way to get the fuck out of the conversation"), and then ended by telling me that I’d better not screw things up.  Or else.  I’m assuming that the “or else” means, “Marry this girl or you’re out of the will.”  Fortunately I wasn’t expecting anything, anyway.

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Why am I writing about this?  I mean, other than the fact that the whole thing is vaguely amusing and it gave me a chance to make fun of Norwegians AND the English AT THE SAME TIME?  It’s because this is actually a fairly good example of a serious problem those of us who are single face.  As such, this is addressed to you, well-meaning friends and relatives who want to set the singles in your life up.

This sort of shit puts the set-up-ee in a really bad position.  Those of us who are single are usually single for a good reason.  In some cases it’s because we want to be.  In some cases it’s because we’re picky.  In some cases it’s because we’re totally fucking crazy and no one wants to date us.  It kind of depends, really.  In general, we know why and we know what sort of scenario would be required to cause us to decide to stop with the single thing.

You do not actually know what that scenario is.  You might think you know.  Hell, you might think you know better than I do exactly what I want and need.

You don’t.

Unless you have sat down with your single friend and had a long talk about what they’re looking for and what they want all you’re working from is your assumptions and observations.  That’s not enough.  Especially since, for the most part, the thought process of someone trying to set their friends up is limited to, “Hey, John is single and I like hanging out with John.  Jill is also single and I like hanging out with Jill.  I’d bet John and Jill would make a great couple.  Then we’ll do couples shit together and it will be awesome.”

You’ve now put both John and Jill in a bad situation.  See, the likelihood is that John and Jill won’t actually end up liking each other.  It might be that John is a Christian and Jill is a Buddhist.  It might be that Jill reminds John of that girl who totally broke his heart in the 8th grade and it’s just too weird for him.  It might be that John eats his French fries with a fork and that totally weirds Jill out.  It might be that John is terrible in the sack.  Who the fuck knows, really?  My point is that there is a whole constellation of failure points out there and a comparatively small collection of points of possible success.

Now you’ve made hanging out with you in the future really awkward for both John and Jill.  You’ve also made it potentially awkward for John and Jill to both come to your birthday party.  Moreover, if things get really acrimonious, chances are that you’re going to end up having to pick a side.

Meanwhile, John and Jill are also your friends.  So there’s a good chance that they’re both going to feel really bad about telling you, “No, I don’t want to be set up.”  They might do it just to make you happy.

So while you’re thinking, “I’ll bet John’s going to be so happy that I set him up with Jill,” he’s thinking, “Ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck, there’s no chance this is going to end well.”

This has been your handy advice for the care and handling of your single friends for the day.

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Oh, for the record, if you really DO think that John and Jill would get along famously, try to introduce them without the baggage of expectations.  Invite them both to your birthday party.  Make sure they meet.  Then get the fuck out of the way.  If there’s an interest they’ll figure it out.  If there isn’t, well, that’s life.

It’s really not that hard.

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[1]I’m even worse than Rick Perry in that respect.  Wait, are we still making Rick Perry jokes?

[2]This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with that age bracket, per se.  As a storyteller I mostly hang out with people a generation or two ahead of me whilst engaged in storytelling-esque things.  The thing about storytellers, though, is that age often translates into skill, experience, and a lifetime of looking at the world as a storyteller.  In short, an old storyteller is still a storyteller, which often makes the storyteller fantastic.  An old Norwegian is, well, an old Norwegian.

Remember that thing about Norwegians mostly being known because of the Viking thing and the terrible food thing?  Yeah.  Old Norwegians are kinda cranky.

[3]I do not give a shit about Norway.  Several years ago I declared myself Scotch-Irish on the flimsy pretext that we don’t actually know my dad’s ancestry and my love of redheads, Irish rock music and, well, scotch, probably meant I was Scotch-Irish.  I proudly proclaim my adopted heritage any chance I get.  Occasionally I cuss at the damned English.  Mostly just that bastard Colin Firth, though.  He knows what he did.

[4]And if you think for even a minute that my initial reaction wasn’t supposed to be, “Yay, grandma!” you’ve never met my grandmother.  I’m sure there was some thought in her head that she wanted me to meet someone special and all that BS, but the main thought was that she wanted to be the one to make it happen.  Which, for the record, was a huge part of the reason that grandma wanted me to drop Her and get with the Norwegian girl.  Like I said, right attitude, wrong reasons.

[5]The wee bluidy sassanach!

Fixation

Go to the corner of Clark and Washington in Chicago[1] on pretty much any given weekday and you’ll see this guy.  He stands there holding up a sign that indicates he’s on a hunger strike.  He wears a vest that says he’s been on said hunger strike since 2006.  The vest also says he’s an outlaw wanted by the FBI.  That part always makes me giggle, since I’m sure that the FBI wishes all of their wanted outlaws stood on busy street corners holding up signs to the effect whilst weakening themselves through not eating.[2]  Really, criminal underclass, that’s just polite behavior.

The guy’s reason for his wanted-outlaw-on-hunger-strike status is that he hasn’t been given any visitation rights whatsoever for his child since, apparently, 2006.  Every time I see him I can’t help but think that there’s probably some sort of correlation between him being the sort of guy who can stand on the street corner in downtown Chicago day after day after day after day engaging in silent histrionics about his lot in life and being the sort of guy who’s not allowed to be around his children.  This is obviously armchair psychoanalysis of someone I’ve never once talked to, but there has to be something in that story about how the dude is creepily obsessive about things and has no sense of proportion and is also not allowed around his children.  He could also be some sort of pathological liar or something.  Again, I don’t know.  I tend to ignore the dude.

The last time I walked past him I found myself thinking about another guy I know.[3]  I met him several years ago and ended up talking to him a lot, because he’s the sort of guy who will stop you and make you talk to him for ten minutes.  The subject is always, always the same.  It’s about how his ex-wife is an emotionally abusive bitch who took his kid from him and won’t let him have visitation rights.  One time he even pulled me aside and told me the statistics about child abuse.  They apparently skewed pretty strongly to the direction of men = gentle, loving, and unfailingly kind, while women = emotionally, mentally, and physically abusive crazy people who probably shouldn’t be around children at all.

Eventually I learned that there’s a term for that particular guy: Men’s Rights Activist.  He would color my interactions, such as they’ve been, with MRAs since then, especially after I learned that the stats he threw at me weren’t even an example of lying through statistics so much as they were an example of flat-out lying.

Other people I know also know that second guy.  Through them I recently found out he wrote a book.  I briefly handled the book, what was extremely obviously self-published, but I didn’t read it and don’t want to.  I was told, however, that he refers to himself time and again in said book as a nice person and a kind person and a patient person.

I was also told by someone that knows me and that other person that his stories of his crazy ex-wife reminded them of me and my beloved stories about crazy girls.  A year or so ago that sort of comparison would have bugged the shit out of me.  I’d rather not be compared to that guy, since he’s obviously an angry, overly fixated individual who wants the world to know that his problems aren’t his fault and everyone else is out to get him.  I’m not like that at all, since I’m, y’know, me.  And I’m different.  Because I said so, that’s why.

Since I’m being introspective about things these days I took that comparison in stride and I actually thought about it.  The fact is that there are things I have in common with that guy.  There are things I have in common with the crazy dude who thinks the FBI is out to get him due to his child custody issues.[4]  There are things I have in common with the MRAs and the Nice Guys of the world.  It’s important to recognize what those things are and how to not be that person.

Before I go on, however, it’s important to bracket off a thought.  There are actually people who have a raw deal.  There are men out there who have gotten screwed by the justice system in custody hearings.  There are women out there who have taken the kids and run for the border.  There are guys who have been screwed over by genuine bitches.  It happens.  Life sucks like that sometimes.  My intention here is not to minimize that.  My intention is to point out, though, that I don’t think that it happens nearly as often as those poor victims of abuse at the hands of crazy bitches would have you believe.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a, for lack of a better term, matrix of beliefs/attitudes/qualities that go in to creating one of these guys.  In no particular order:

Self-absorption/narcissism
Self-deception/cognitive dissonance
Passivity
Obsessiveness/fixation
Helplessness
Black-and-white categorization
Externalization of blame and responsibility

Basically, it works thusly: guy meets girl.  Guy decides that girl is the greatest thing in the world.  Guy hopes that girl sees the same thing about him.  Guy sits around and waits for girl to realize it.  Eventually guy decides girl won’t realize it and decides that means that girl, like all girls, is a total bitch.

I also genuinely believe there is a certain type of woman who recognizes this personality type and takes advantage of it.  I think some are actually calculating bitches who use men, but others just kind of do it due to their own particular set of emotional issues and/or damages.  As such, I think there is a germ of truth to the passive guy’s whole, “Women are just bitches who want to take advantage of me,” thing, because they’re more likely to find themselves in the thrall of bitches who want to take advantage of them.  It’s a bit of a tautology, but I don’t think I’m just making that up.

That’s where the Pick-Up Artist/Nice Guy dichotomy comes in to play.  Take a Nice Guy and let him stew in his own juices of failure and lack of sex long enough and he’ll be ready and willing to flip that switch from “passive” to “aggressive” (or, really, “passive/aggressive”) and that “helpless” switch to “asshole.”  That black-and-white categorization means that they’ll think there are two types of men in the world: Nice Guys Who Never Get Any and Jerks Who Get All the Poon.

You stay in that place through self-absorption and self-deception.  You are right and don’t need to change and everyone else is wrong unless they disagree with you.  The only way to fix that is through honest self-assessment and realization that the world is a lot bigger and more complicated than you want to think it is.  That’s a tough thing to do.  It’s also a lot less satisfying than just saying, “Women iz bitches who be out to get me.  Fuck them.  Literally, if possible.”

Anyway…yeah.  Those are some thoughts that I think are important to put on paper.  Or, um, computer screen.  They also lead directly in to a bunch of honest self-assessment I’ve been doing for the past few weeks that I kind of want to articulate in the near future, especially since a lot of it then transfers over to the Dancing Monkey Project and my increasing realization that said project might actually be a really, really bad idea as conceived.

In short, I think it was meant to solve one problem in a way that actually probably creates and/or reinforces another problem/series of problems.  The problem it solves is more of a symptom than an actual disease.  So, uh, yeah.  Hopefully I’ll be able to explain this in a way that makes sense.

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[1]For the non-Chicagans out there, Clark and Washington marks one of the sides of Daley Plaza, also known as “across the street from City Hall” and “that big public plaza what has the Picasso statue.”

[2]I just got a brilliant idea for the next season of Burn Notice!  Are you reading, Matt Nix?  Also, if you are, I’m sorry about that whole thing with The Good Guys, dude.  The show had major flaws, but it was deeply enjoyable, sometimes in spite of itself.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go listen to some Foghat.

[3]I am going to be as circumspect as possible in this description, so be warned.

[4]Y’know, the more I think about that, the weirder it seems.  Unless his child custody stuff actually stems from a federal indictment I have no fucking clue what the FBI has to do with anything.

Because I Can't Leave Well Enough Alone...

If I’m going to stop doing this, at the very least I don’t want to leave on a note of, “Here’s a shitty post and because I wrote this shitty post I’ve decided to stop writing posts altogether.”  That’s just friggin’ sad, really.  And it kinda reeks of sour grapes or giving up or something, so there’s that.

Anyway, there’s this shitty post.  Now, the post is, in and of itself, fairly poorly written.  Also, too, it’s not intended to just say, “Hey, look at me, I’m an asshole,” but it’s exactly the post I would have written if I were trying to do that.  So at least I’ve learned that all-important lesson.  The idea behind the post, however, isn’t something I have a problem with.  As such, I have no intention of walking it back, but I do feel the need to contextualize the point and, in contextualizing, hopefully make the point I wanted to make but without writing yet another shitty post.  Because, y’know, craftsmanship.

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One of the questions I stop and ask myself from time to time is, “Why?”  I find I tend to do things on autopilot a lot, so if I’m just doing something for the sake of doing it I occasionally re-evaluate.  This is especially important to do when I hate what I’m doing.

When I started my Online Dating series I started asking the, “Why?” question, since it’s pretty freaking obvious that I hate online dating.  This is a corollary to the larger issue that I hate dating.  So in asking, “Why the hell am I doing this online dating thing,” and getting the answer, “Because it’s the easiest way to engage in the act of dating,” the next question is, “And why am I trying to engage in the act of dating?”

That question is far more interesting, since the answer is, “Fuck if I know.”  The follow-up, then, is, “So why are you doing it?”  My standard answer is, “Because I want to stay in practice in case I ever decide to take this seriously.”

And here we have a problem.

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I like being by myself.  I’ve basically built my life around being isolated, but adjacent to humanity so that I can wander out of my isolation from time to time and say hello to the world.  One of the reasons for this is that I don’t really much like Public Me, which is a problem that has stymied me for quite some time.

Public Me is loud, obnoxious, self-serving, and tries way too fucking hard.  He’s a throwback to my old days as the Fat Kid who was trying desperately to be accepted and approved of by the rest of the world.  I don’t like him very much, but I’ve never really been able to get rid of him.  I have toned him down quite a bit, which is nice, but, again, I want him to go away.

The awkward, baffling thing here, though, is the other people seem to like Public Me.  He’s apparently funny and personable these days, and memorable in what seems to be a good way.  I can’t really go too deeply in to this as, again, I despise Public Me, so I have no idea what people see in Public Me.  I think of him as someone who tries way too hard to force jokes that don’t work and dominates conversations just because he doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.  I regard (possibly as a bit of wishful thinking) myself as someone who is easily forgotten, but I’m apparently the only one who does so.  I suspect there’s a reason for that.

Public Me spends his time at war with Private Me.

I like Private Me.  Private Me is quiet and contemplative.  Private Me can go weeks without talking to anyone outside of required interactions.  Private Me really would be forgotten in a crowd, since he’d probably show up, talk to no one, then leave having made no impression on anyone.

There are a few people in this world who have met Private Me.  He basically only comes out in one-on-one interaction with people I know well and manifests as a guy who can sit in the corner and talk about basically anything for hours on end over coffee or beers.  For the most part, though, he hangs out and watches the world.  This is the nature of being private, after all.

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Public Me and Private Me share interests and experiences.  I can’t imagine how they wouldn’t, really, since this isn’t an issue of multiple personalities or any such thing.  One of those interests, it should surprise no one, is Trickster.  The difference is that Private Me wants to study Trickster while Public Me wants to be Trickster.

Trickster, when it gets right down to it, is kind of a dick.  He is selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.  All he cares about when interacting with the world is the question, “What can I get out of this?”  If it helps someone then that’s great.  If it hurts someone that’s great, too.  What matters to Trickster is that he gets what he went out to get.

This is why I was fascinated with N.K. Jemisin’s treatment of Trickster as a young boy.  Ultimately, Trickster is immature, interacting with the world on a circumscribed level where all that matters is how everything stacks up in the win-loss column.  He’ll play fair, but change the rules.  Imagine Trickster as playing an endless game of Calvinball with the world.  Calvin is, for all intents and purposes, Trickster anyway.  Hobbes is the adult world, gaining the occasional upper hand but never actually winning because he’s always trying to win the last game or even the last minute of this game.

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I never took the whole online dating thing seriously.  It was all just a way to actually avoid dating entirely.  Basically, I was playing a game and the rules were, “Meet crazy women, use them to justify not making any sort of commitment. “  Unfortunately, from time to time I managed to run across women who didn’t understand that was the game I was playing and were actually decent human beings.

How does someone who is operating from a disingenuous position deal with someone who isn’t without causing a great deal of destruction?  The answer to that, I do believe, is, “That’s not possible.”  While I recognized that this was both a possibility and a problem, I continued to play my little game of Calvinball with complete strangers.  The only explanation for this behavior that makes a lick of sense is, “I am selfish, self-absorbed, and cruel.”

I do not like thinking of myself as a person who has such qualities.  The only way to stop being an asshole is to stop being an asshole, I suppose.  So the only way I can stop that in this specific case is to stop all dating-related activity completely.  All I’m doing is using the women I meet as story fodder, after all.

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That might seem extreme, absurd, even.  But when the question, “Why?” leads to unexpected places the follow-up inevitably must be, “What do you want, instead?”  I answer that question overwhelmingly with, “To be left alone.”

It’s a mug’s game, then, if you’re the sort of woman who makes the mistake of deciding you want to date me.  Chances are good that you’ll meet Public Me.  If you, for reasons that completely escape me, decide you like Public Me, it won’t end well, since you’ll be attracted to the me that I can’t stand.  The more time you spend with Public Me the more I’ll see how far I can push before you push back or leave.  This probably seems remarkably immature.  There’s a reason for that: it’s the whole Trickster/child thing.  On one level I’ll want to push your buttons to amuse myself.  On another level I won’t know how to break it off and I’ll basically try to make sure you leave because that’s a win according to my bizarre little game of dating Calvinball.

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There’s another follow-up question that must be asked: why don’t I just get rid of/redirect Public Me?

Believe me, I’d like to.  Private Me, it shouldn’t be surprising, doesn’t do well in public.  Public Me simply manifests when the need arises and I have very little recourse in dealing with that other than saying, “I’m never going out in public again.”  When it gets right down to it, Public Me is a big ol’ defense mechanism fueled by insecurity.

Fighting that by never going outside again seems like a lousy option.  By the same token, it doesn’t seem like a lousy option, since I don’t mind being alone.  Thus I live in tension.  At the moment I simply do not know how to resolve that tension.

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A friend of mine who knows me well enough pointed towards an alternate and/or complementary explanation for my conundrum.  It basically boils down to the notion that I have a pretty long history of running afoul of manipulative and controlling women.  He also pointed out that I’ve been mostly seeking stability for the last few years and women are not at all a source of stability for me.

I find the latter part of that fascinating.  I instinctively want to avoid the former, though, since it basically sounds like an Argumentum ad Bitches Be Trippin’, and the Argument from Bitches Be Trippin’ is usually the first (and last) resort of the misogynist scoundrel.  It has a certain amount of explanatory power, however, especially when combined with the Public Me/Private Me dichotomy.

I don’t have a good history with women who don’t treat me as a child or like shit, basically.  The ones who haven’t have historically also not really wanted much of anything to do with me.  As such, this has left me with a fairly binary categorization of women as either interested in me and not worth it or uninterested in me and possibly/probably worth it.  The interested and not worth it category then breaks down to cynical and manipulative or crazy and desperate.

Thinking on it, I’m not surprised in the least that my two somewhat long-term relationships, Ashley and Amy, were with the cynical and manipulative type, while my abortive dating attempts since 2008 have mostly been with the crazy and desperate types.  Ashley was the first one who seemed to give a shit, but she was also a cheater who flagrantly manipulated me and even after I broke it off with her and said some astonishingly horrible things in the process still tried to reconnect with me on a schedule I could almost set my clocks to every year for the next nine years.[1]  Amy…meh, I’ve talked about her enough.

After that there’s a collection of oddball characters I’ve enjoyed telling stories about from the safe remove of time and space.  Tossed in there, though, are a few genuinely good women who didn’t seem to care much for me or who were unavailable for one reason or another.  On some level it’s bad luck or bad timing.  On some level, though, it’s also self-fulfilling prophecy.

In this theory, then, Private Me becomes the only real person I can genuinely trust when the chips are down.  So Public Me’s games of relational Calvinball are just there to protect me and keep me solitary while I attempt to figure out how to make it through life.  This creates a whole new set of problems.

Basically, I’ve been running around and creating chaos in the lives of others.  Either I can decide to stop being a giant dick and actually try to meet someone with best intentions or I can throw my hands up, say, “Fuck that noise,” and go with a life of solitude.  The latter is actually rather attractive, but it’s really something that requires a certain level of commitment.  Otherwise I’m just playing games and it’s other people getting hurt by them.

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[1]The final (I hope) round of that came with her trying to start the dialogue by telling me that no one knew me better than she did and no one cared about my like she did.  NINE FUCKING YEARS OF ALMOST MINIMAL CONTACT AFTER I TOLD HER TO FUCK OFF AND DIE.  Let that one sink in for a minute.