Mind Your Own God Damn Business

-CFB-

I was driving to a nearby town the other day to turn in a subbing application for their district.

It’s not a drive I make very often. The last time was when I was working for the local newspaper, covering the local baseball team. As I was driving, I kept remembering more and more things about the drive; It had been autumn, I was nervous, and I had been on the phone, having a memorably strange conversation with the girl I was dating at the time.

It had been the conversation where she had wanted to know if we were “dating” or “going out”.

I’d like you to all join me in a moment of silence to remember one of the most tragic periods of my life. It was about this time about three years ago. During this time, I made one of the worst decisions of my life.

It all started with my first blog. I enjoyed that blog, but it brought me unspeakable pain and suffering.

Good Food, Good Feelings, Where Did I Go Wrong In Life?.

There was my little legal foray that started with me sharing all of the comical yet highly illegal hijinx that happened at my place of employment and ended with me pissing off an old employer and landing an article in the local newspaper about the dangers of foolishly posting information on the Internet. If you google my name, the first link is to the newspaper article. The second is to an employee’s blog, raving about what an untrustworthy shit head I am.

Then there were all the times that I put information that I shouldn’t have into the blog that resulted in angry friends and girlfriends.

But worst of all, there was the engaging, conversational, hilarious and often simultaneously touching and thoughtful style of writing that I used. It was this incredibly entertaining prose that won the heart of a girl that I would go on to date for several months, and would then go on to heavily regret dating, except when I was swapping dating horror stories with my friends or writing blog posts.

I have written about this train wreck of a relationship at great length, but never in THIS blog, so I need to hash it out again. Here’s why: I constantly repeat myself.

Also, I sometimes forget about all of the really insane things that she did. Have you ever had one of those moments after a relationship where you remember an event that you just shrugged off when it happened, but thinking back on it, you realize how completely inappropriate and crazy it was?

My entire relationship with this girl was like that.

I think that almost all of it can be attributed to one thing.

Blade handling some motherfucker who has, regrettably, decided that he should attempt to ice skate uphill.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I recently reread “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” by Chuck Klosterman. In his very first essay in the book, he claims that he will never be able to be satisfied in a relationship, and neither will most adults. He says that this is because pop music, romance novels, romantic movies and television have skewed the idea of what a relationship should be into an unrealistic, impossible thing. He argues that after several hundred hours of watching Sex and the City, Listening to Coldplay and watching John Cusak movies, we’ve had it beaten into our heads that relationships are intense, all-encompassing, effortless roller coasters. We want someone to stand outside of our house with a boombox like Say Anything, or to come along and take us away from our horrible life like Pretty Woman, or to sweep us off our feet and protect us from Werewolves and Vampires and eventually impregnate us with Wesley Snipes.

Don’t think I forgot about that.

The first time I read that essay, I thought that it was kind of dumb.I thought Mr. Klosterman was being kind of melodramatic for the sake of writing an interesting essay where he could have an excuse to rag on Coldplay (Something that I can always get behind, even if I don’t agree with the logic).

I don’t feel that way anymore, for two reasons.

The first is that most of the people I know that are in what appear to be healthy relationships talk about how much work it is to keep things in good condition. They enjoy their relationships, but they aren’t the effortless joyride that the movies make them out to be.

The other reason is this girl.

Uncontrollable Rage.

There are a lot of different things that could’ve explained her behavior. She could have been lying about her age and actually been 13. She could have been an idiot savant who knew a lot about behavioral neuroscience but was otherwise developmentally stunted. I think that the problem, though, was that our relationship didn’t play out like an episode of Sex and the City, and that was incredibly confusing and infuriating for her.

Let’s go back to that phone conversation about if we were “Dating” or “Going out”. I’ve told people about this conversation before, and the first thing that they ask me is “What’s the difference between those two things?”

The answer is that I don’t know, and neither did she. I asked if it had something to do with dating other people, but apparently it didn’t. She was convinced that there was a difference, but she was unable to articulate to me what it was.

My suspicion, though, is that it was this: While we were “Dating” (which I guess is apparently the more casual of the two), I was allowed to act like me and have the small idiosyncrasies that all of the boyfriends in Sex in the City do before they fully commit to whoever they’re seeing on the show.

Once we moved on to “Going out” (the more serious of the two, I think), I was supposed to drop all of the behaviors that I had previously displayed that weren’t specifically done to make her happy. This was the point where I was supposed to send flowers and sweet cards every day and quit my job so I could move to her little one bedroom apartment in Michigan. I unfortunately refused to drop a lot of those behaviors – I wouldn’t quit my job, I wouldn’t leave my friends and family, and I wouldn’t move to Michigan. Have you ever been to Michigan? It’s probably not the worst place on earth, but it’s certainly not an attractive enough destination to convince me to abandon my friends, family and job for a girl I’ve been seeing for a couple of months. No teenager ever says “I’m sick of this town. I’m picking up and leaving all of these shitheads behind. When I make it big in Lansing, Michigan, they’ll all be sorry!” (Oh, and did you see the NCAA basketball finals last night? North Carolina won. Do you want to know why? Because Michigan sucks.)

At the time, I just thought she was just crazy, but in hindsight, I realize that she was just angry and confused because I wasn’t acting like Mr. Big.

Also, she was crazy.

One time she tried t get me to understand how she was feeling about our relationship by making me watch an episode of Sex and the City.

Another time, she called me, so I called her back. She didn’t answer, so I left a message. She called me back eight hours later, furious that I had only tried to call her back once.

She frequently told me about one of her last boyfriends, who had thrown shit at her when they fought and left little “love notes” on her car that said things like “My dear little whore, call me”. She was mad that I wouldn’t do things like that.

She sent me a myspace friend invite. I didn’t accept it quickly enough, and so she got mad, withdrew it and sulked. As an added bonus, she wouldn’t tell me why, so I got to spend a week dealing with her being angry and then curtly responding “Nothing. Everything is fine.” when I asked her what the problem was.

And who can forget how frequently she would “accidentally” drink a handle of some sort of hard liquor and then spend the rest of the night puking all over the place? I think that about 50%-60% of the time that I spent in the same state with her involved this behavior, which I previously thought was reserved for 16 year olds and alcoholics. Awesome.

This post was originally going to just be about what a disaster my relationship with this girl was because she thought that relationships were supposed to work like romantic comedies, but as I’ve thought about this, I was to blame, too.

Here’s another staple of romantic comedies: The main character spends the entire movie pining over the dreamy captain of the football team, or the bitchy head cheerleader, but they realize five minutes before the credits roll that the girl they were going to make presentable for the school dance on a dare or their nerdy, bookish friend that has been there all along is the one that they’ve really been in love with the whole time.

I think I was trying to make her into the nerdy friend. I was trying to convince myself that I had been dating the really hot but kind of mean head cheerleader, and the girl who could really make me happy had been right there the whole time. Sure, I wasn’t attracted to her, and she was only kind of interesting to hang out with, and she was several hours away by plane, and she forced me to watch Sex and the City, to explain her feelings, and I will never forgive her, or that show, that stupid fucking show, but if this had been a romantic comedy, it would’ve closed with me snubbing the head cheerleader and dancing with this girl instead at our senior prom.

Well, there are two problems with this.

First of all, the nerdy friend always has self confidence issues. I’ve been the nerdy friend once or twice, and I’ve also tried to date the nerd. Whichever one of us is the nerd spends the relationship convinced that the other person doesn’t actually like them, and then spends the entire time analyzing everything that happens, convinced that everything is a snub of some sort and proof that the other person isn’t actually committed to the relationship. You’re not ignoring their myspace request because you forgot, it’s because you’re ashamed that you’re dating them. If you get too quiet at a social outing, it’s because you hate everyone there and hate being there. Eventually, the other person gets sick of everything they do being scrutinized for malice, and things end.

The other problem is that a lot of times, the nerdy friend isn’t the someone you’re attracted to, no matter what the latest teen movie tells you, and they’re just as hard to deal with. The secret that the movies don’t tell you is that the nerdy friend can be just as nuts as the hot, mean girl. Crazy isn’t just reserved for attractive people, and, conversely, there are plenty of really calm, cool attractive people. Ignore this, and suddenly you’re dealing with somebody that you’re not that into, and they’re still starting fights with you over myspace and the alarming lack of sticky notes on their car accusing them of being a whore.

Lesson learned. From now on, I am basing my relationship decisions on one show and one show only:

Mr. Belvedere.

I'll be honest. I've never actually seen an episode of this show. I don't even really know what it's about. That's not going to stop me from using the lessons it teaches to pull a lot of tail, though.

Figure it out.