Often it seems to me that while my life goes on, life changes drastically for everyone else. Does everyone feel this way? For instance back in junior high school I had a good friend named Bill who moved away and was able to call me several years later because he remembered my parents number, and of course I still lived there. I started the post with often and not always because recently my life has changed drastically along with most of my friends, albeit in different ways. It seems that no one (including myself) ever knows how anything is going to work out for me, whether it be jobs, school, relationships, or anyting else. Stopping short of teen angst, however, I will instead choose to view this for what it is, and be happy with what I have. as a later part of this post I do want to include a "chapter" from a novel that I am attempting to write. As of yet it has no genre classification, maybe I'll save that until I finish the book. But to the readers of this post, whoever they may be, I must admit that the chapter (as well as the book) will turn out to be much more autobiographical than I ever intended, and if you think that you recognize yourself and find yourself offended, all I can say is its the way I look at things, don't take it personal. I say that if you are one of my friends. If you aren't one of my friends, what do you care? You won't find anything patently false. One further note to prepare you, I also found this to be a bit edgier than I initially expected.
“Even the women who are attracted to me don’t want to date me.” This was the thought that brought him to the precipice. Little did he know that this was a turning point, and how he dealt with this particular insight into his own life would drastically affect later decisions that he would make in his life, especially decisions about women. Rather than becoming embittered, resentful, or homosexual; the thought struck him as funny. Because of the way that he viewed his life, classifying this statement as funny simply made sense to him; because when it came to the inconsequential in life, he always wound up getting screwed, in a comical, slightly ironic sort of way. The things that didn’t matter to him all that much, except on a superficial level, always seemed to end with that ironic twist, and this, he felt was what fine tuned his sense of humor throughout his (comedic) developmental years. If it were an athletic contest he would be the victim of the massive comeback or the completely improbable upset. When it came to strangers, his appearance often lead to a misunderstanding of who and what he was, he found it easy to intimidate those he didn’t care to intimidate while those whom he would have preferred to scare shitless managed to dismiss his strong personality.
He got used to laughing at himself and the situations he found himself in because it made life easier, but also because he genuinely thought that the incidents were funny. At a time when comedy was becoming increasingly more vulgar and raunchy, he came to believe that true comedy relied on the unexpected, the ironic, and most importantly, the blatantly sarcastic. Vulgarity and raunchiness were reserved for more delicate situations that as a whole were funny, but the parts consisted more of taking a persons expectations and ripping them a new one for it, once again the unexpected. Thus cursing became the ultimate exclamation point of a funny conversation, not an every other word affair. Strangers rarely heard him curse, although they found it easy to believe that he did.
“Is that funny?’ is a question that many people ask. “Why is that funny?” however, tends to be a whole other matter, one seemingly reserved for the college male with slightly above average intelligence. Those stuck in the college male mindset (see: Hollywood) often favor vulgarity a raunchiness for shock value, for press time, and for whatever other reasons that Hollywood does this. His life was driven by both of these questions, as well as a third question that was more complex and perhaps the most vital to the sense of humor that developed in him: “How can I help people?” This most often manifested itself in a spiritual aspect. His faith, he would tell you, was strong; and for the most part it was, but he also felt that it lacked practicality. Which is to say he felt that he had trouble manifesting his will to help people.
Thus the development of his humor came about in such a way that he felt he could help people by making them laugh. He was not the first to have this thought occur to him, but because of the unique sub-culture that he grew up in, the humor came in a different flavor than most humor. Thus when “Even the women who are attracted to me don’t want to date me,” rolled through his brain very early on a Friday morning, he stepped up to the precipice of a long a bitter life, and wisely chose to take himself less seriously. His faith told him that the woman for him was out there somewhere, perhaps he already knew her, and perhaps he didn’t. His faith also told him to expect the unexpected, and that perhaps in a divine effort to make his faith grow, she would not be out there, that he must be ready to accept that the only thing he really wanted might be denied him because of the priority problem that this could create with the faith.
His feelings for women ranged from admiration to lust, and he was perhaps the first to recognize in his own mind the way that he tended to attracted to women on different levels. It was easy to say that a woman was hot, or that a girl was cute. It was quite another matter for him to admit that when his full-blown attraction meter went off was when he knew a girl was smarter than he was, and he thought that she was hot. The mixing of the juvenile and the intellectual again struck him as funny, perhaps in a way that it could only strike him as funny. Thus when the precipice of a life of bitterness was approached it came when he was thinking about “the one that got away.”
Characterizing her as “the one that got away” isn’t even really accurate, as he himself would admit, perhaps a more accurate turn of phrase would be “the one that he almost got a chance to have a chance with, when in reality he never really has much of chance.” I know that sounds confusing, I think I got confused thinking it, but stick with me. His attraction to her started in much the same way that all college attractions do, he had a freshman class with her, and even though he never spoke to her that year, he definitely admired her from a distance. At this point she was only “hot” and not causing the attraction meter to explode because he didn’t know her. Then came the sophomore year where he had some mutual friends with her but never really said more than “hello.” All the while he was laughing at himself for his junior high swan song that was being set up. Then of course the inevitable happened as she started casually dating one of their mutual friends late in the school year when people like him finally got motivated enough to do something. Then came the junior year, a discovery of a common major and the foundation for a mildly affectionate friendship. The relationship he had known about (the mutual friend) had ended at the end of the last school year, so he was poised to strike, and when he finally decided to strike, (he struck four times, striking out each time with a polite no thank you) alas it was already too late, she had met someone over the summer, but he was completely unaware of this development and when he found out he promptly (to put it mildly) felt like a braying jackass. He had broken one of his own rules, albeit unknowingly. His rule was you never ask a girl out he is seeing someone else no matter how serious. But he was confused because he felt like she had known what all of the conversations were about (conversations that would cause the attraction meter to reach unmatched heights), why he was curious about her, etc. Something else struck him as odd about the situation too, he was at least 75% sure that she was, in fact, mildly interested and that had only recently changed because word was that she had only recently started dating this other gentleman. And so came the title “the one that he almost got a chance to have a chance with, when in reality he never really had much of chance.” Needless to say that he had some trouble clearing this of his mental palate, and this task was made more difficult what with constantly seeing here because of the similar classes and the identical majors.
I feel like its important her to point out that, other than possibly being slightly unhealthy for him mentally, there was nothing weird about this. He was simply in over his head with attraction before he really got his feet wet, thus the slight mental problems (if you even really wanted to cal them that). It definitely pissed him off that he could not just get over it and forget being attracted to her; but as someone very wise once said, “you cannot control who you are attracted to anymore than you can control who they are attracted to.” So when he thought about her out of the blue he would bludgeon himself with reality, and even try to exaggerate reality so that he could help himself get over her. But even the phrase “get over her” would have made him mad. He would have claimed that there was nothing to get over. He told himself that and several other things that summer before their senior year. He told himself that she would probably be engaged by Christmas. He told himself that once they graduated he would probably never see her again. No matter how much he battered himself with this, he couldn’t get her off of his brain. A random mentioning of her hometown in a novel he was reading, and other such preposterous, hilarious crap kept him from writing her off. He was proud to say that he never lusted after her, at least the way he understood lust. He kept himself from examining what it would be like to be with her sexually, instead when he couldn’t turn his thought to other things, he thought about how nice it must be to be in a relationship with her. This capped off with a brief experience with another girl at the end of his junior year laid two thirds of the framework for the statement, “Even the women who are attracted to me don’t want to date me.” The other third even he would discuss except to his closest friends, and never fully. Perhaps the easy way to say it is that his earlier romantic experiences were such that at one point he struck for convenience rather than true attraction and in so doing had, in many different senses of the phrase “fucked up.” Speaking of friends you may be asking, “just where were these friends?” The fact was he had good friends, great friends really; one of the only real benefits of the sub-culture that he inhabited. He loved his friends. If a person actually made it to the point that he would call them a friend, he loved them unconditionally and would do anything for them if he could. Anything. And thus his friends, who were busy dating, having steady girlfriends, and even getting married, put inadvertent pressure on the situation. He was abundantly happy for them, but it forced him to think about his own romantic situation more and more, and that always led to “the one that he almost got a chance to have a chance with, when in reality he never really had much of chance.” It was a vicious cycle and this story is about that cycle and the humor that was always there, through every situation that allowed him to get through it.And if anybody knows anything about writing a novel, let me know so that I can improve this crap. I hate to keep apologizing, but I swear this is the last one. This is not intended as a "poor pitiful me" kind of thing, I'm simply working to express myself more professionally, and to try and let some things go that irk me.
Love you all, take care.
