Author Archives: andymac012@gmail.com

(Not) My Manic Pixie

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Dear, Probably Not You*

I wasn’t comfortable with the possibility that you were my manic pixie, because I wasn’t comfortable with the character. She pops into the protagonist’s life when he needs her most, then disappears just as quickly, or in some cases, gets left behind. It seemed more than unfair to relegate you to the position of a glorified foil. Having said that, there are parallels that are hard to ignore, like the intervention of fate: the dream girl is thrust into the protagonist’s life with an impossible-to-overlook sort of serendipity. Not only did you live 100 feet from my back door, but we met in a writer’s workshop, arguably the most romantic of platonic settings. I was forced to show you my heart and mind long before I showed you my peen, which was ideal, because if I had approached you under any other circumstances, you would have dismissed me outright as just another buttoned-down ding-dong trying to hold your attention while my already microscopic window of opportunity slammed shut. The workshop not only gave me a valid excuse to be in your orbit, but it also saved me from the worst parts of myself: namely, impatience and douchebaggery.

I had no idea how to get you, but I knew I had to try. In chasing a woman of your caliber, i.e., one I had no earthly right to attain, I was free to act in ways with which a sane man would have strongly disagreed. For example, asking you if you like to be dominated was probably the biggest risk I’ve taken in pursuit of the opposite sex. My sense of reason told me it was stupid, and my best friend told me it was creepy, but I just had a gut feeling that it was going to work.

Adversely, once I could actually call you mine, sanity was a must. Calmly watching you get hit on at bars was a regular strain on my self-confidence. I’d see some fuck put his hand on your back and feel the rekindling of old jealous embers. My pride wanted me to puff out my chest and my inner animal wanted me to mark my territory. Fortunately, a more logical part of my brain told me to calm the F down, to let you handle it, and that holding too tightly was a foolproof method for fucking it up.

Of course, our story isn’t a perfect comparison. There was no depression for you to pull me out of, no hurdle to inspire me over, and no prize to help me obtain. You were the prize. The hope of winning you over emboldened the best parts of me, and the fear of losing you restrained the worst. You motivated me to be a better man simply by being you.  It’s probably not the way you imagined yourself in the make of the manic pixie, but she’s a complex character, far too complex to be embodied by any individual. She’s spontaneous and mysterious, funny and fearless, and her confidence is not only magnetic but infectious. She is a mixture of all the women with whom we fall in love. I know that I once told you that I didn’t think I could fall in love with you, but I was wrong. You’re my manic pixie dream girl.

 

Footnotes:

*statistically speaking

I Am My Own Protagonist

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No one wants to be alone, but it seems like something worth getting used to.  I swear I’m not just being an asshole here, because I believe that everyone should hone the ability to be comfortable inside their own mind. You should be able to just sit there and think–without music, without television, without voicing whatever pointless story or conversational nothing you decided to fill your head with that day–because I promise that no one cares about it even a fraction as much as you do.  Okay…now I’m being an asshole.

You will never know what its like to be in my head, and I will never know what it’s like to be in yours.  While this fact of our existence does make us all unique little snowflakes, it also isolates us in that snowflakiness.*  No matter how close you are with someone, they will always hold something back. Which, when you think about it, is ideal. I can barely stand to be in my own head for an hour, let alone have unfiltered access to the thoughts of even one other person.  After hearing their free stream of impulse and perversion, you would never be able to look that person in the eyes again, and may even put a power drill in your ear to erase the memory.

The biggest byproduct of an independent mind is that the only person whose approval you need is you. Obviously peer pressure plays a role, but only insofar as it affects our opinion of ourselves. We only care what others think of us because it changes how we think of us; and if psychopaths have taught me anything, it’s that someone else’s disapproval can easily be rationalized as a selfish act on their part. (i.e. Dave thought you were being a self-congratulatory ass.–Yeah, well Dave is just jealous of how much smarter and more attractive I am.) As long as you can reconcile it with you, nothing else matters.

While this idea may be a bit frightening in regard to the fair slice of psychos and sadists in the population, it can be equally liberating for those of us that do have a conscience.  I like to be liked just as much as the next guy, but it won’t ruin my weekend if you don’t like me.  I am my own protagonist, and my dilusional optimism is essential to the success of my story. I’m sure you have similar feelings about yourself. Are you a tragic hero? A hopeless romantic? Or perhaps an oft persecuted martyr? Whatever your motives, you are the only character for whom the audience is always rooting. So, you need to learn to live with yourself.

Footnotes 

*Snowflakery?

Are You Sure You Want To Know?

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For those of you who have never been outside the country, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Other places are just like the place that you’re from, except no one understands you, most of them don’t like you, and you will get the squirts. To be fair, that last one is the only part I can guarantee. It may not happen immediately, but sooner or later, your dinner will come rocketing out the other side. The only real upside to travelling (in my own personal experience) is that it allows me to talk down to people who have not, i.e., you.

Despite everything I just said, you can learn a lot about yourself when you travel. For example, I do not like it. I’m way too anxious and sweaty to be in a country where they might as well be speaking Mandarin (and some of them probably were). I basically just volunteered to be a minority for a year. And no, I’m not saying I know what it’s like to be a minority, because as a semi-attractive white person, you never go full mino.*  That’s how you end up on the news without a head. You want small doses, like people staring at you because they’ve never seen a white person in person; or being the most illiterate person at McDonald’s–when even children are staring at you like you’re a moron.

My problem is that when chaos ensues, my first instinct is panic, which is not ideal when travelling alone.  I thought I left my wallet in a cab in South Korea, and before I had even checked all of my pockets, I started to consider prostitution, as reassurance:   “Calm down, Andy. You’re exotic here, bud. Start doing squats now, and that pasty little starfish of yours could feth a nice price. Everything is gonna be fine.”

Aside from panic being my default, I also learned that I don’t need to go places I’ve never been to see things I’ve never seen. That’s what the internet is for. The internet has everything:  pictures of volcanoes, people who masturbate for money, harry potter. It’s all there. Do you know what’s not on the internet? The panic you feel when you leave your wallet in a taxi that was covered in a language you cannot read. The surprise of finding out that the young lady you’ve been pumping drink into is not, in fact, a genetic female. Or the confusion in learning that that last piece of information is not necessarily a dealbreaker.  So yeah, you’ll ‘discover’ some things about yourself, but are you sure you want to know?

There are things I didn’t learn too (namely, their language). It’s not that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t have to. Because Korean is useless on 98% of the planet. It’s mainly spoken in two countries, and one of them is not a whole lot of fun. By comparison, English is arguably the most useful language in the world, a fact that I’m not sure we truly appreciate. These Korean kids are sacrificing their entire childhood to learn a language into which we put almost no effort. The only things I put less thought into are blinking, breathing, and getting boners. In that order. English is so useful that you could be a toothless yokel from the most illiterate state in the union, go to almost any part of the world, and at least get by. Even if it is just to say “hello”, “thank you”, or “please-don’t-cut-my-head-off” just before they cut your head off.

They’re not going to listen to you, but they’ll get the gist.

Footnotes:

*I know. Sounds racist, right. But minority is actually a statistical term, so I can shorten it as I please…dick.

Ghosting

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In its purest form, “ghosting” is a brutal thing to do to another person. I mean, it’s outright sociopathic. For those of you over 35, ghosting occurs when you’ve been going out with someone*, and you want to end it, but you also want to avoid confrontation entirely. So, instead of sacking up and dealing with your problems, you disappear.  You stop answering calls/texts, change your address, and you may even change jobs if you’re really committed. It is a total overhaul of your daily life simply to avoid a single uncomfortable confrontation. Now, this approach is super fucked up for a couple of reasons:  not only will it wreak havoc on the victim’s self-confidence, but will undoubtedly cause them to question their own sanity (i.e. whether or not you existed in the first place).

Granted, the more common form of this technique is not nearly so twisted as that; however, it is arguably just as spineless, if not more. At it’s most watered-down, ghosting has become just one more way for my generation to avoid awkward conversations. It begins when a young man asks a girl on a date from behind a keyboard, and the girl opts to reject the invitation, but doesn’t want to actually turn him down. So, instead, she does nothing. She ignores the invitation, and pretends like it never happened.**

I believe that this type of behavior marks the start of a downward spiral in the way that my generation interacts with one another: a pussification of the dating norms, if you will. We didn’t like how squishy our feelings felt, so we decided to automate the entire process. This approach makes it much easier to plead ignorance (or intoxication), so we can brush it off as one big joke, and retreat with our egos unscathed.  On the other side of it, avoiding confrontation because you don’t want to be mean is great in theory, but in practice, it’s a dick move. You are refusing to acknowledge another human being. Do you have any idea how disrespectful that is? Or are you just too wrapped up in your own arrogance to remember that other people also have feelings? You stop responding, and they’re just supposed to take the hint?

Oh, and guys…STOP TAKING THE HINT, YOU GIGANTIC PUSSY.  Stand-up straight, and ask her out in person. Make her turn you down to your face. You may not get a date but you will earn her respect. And honestly, you don’t even have to listen to the whole thing. Once she says “Oooh I think you’re a really great guy” or some version of it, you can tune out. It’s safe to say that whatever comes out of her mouth after that is not going to be good news. Just make sure you maintain eye contact, especially if she’s actively trying to avoid it. Let her squirm. It’s good for both of you.

Footnotes

*Or “talking to someone” as my generation has so concommittally coined.

**Yes, I understand that guys do it, too. However, I write from experience, and given the gender ratio of my current town, the perpetrators are almost exclusively female. Feel free to reverse the roles to fit your own experience.

Jealousy: Envy’s Psychotic Younger Sister

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Mountain life seems to bring out the crazy in people. Whether it’s the altitude, the isolation, or just the general lack of oxygen; it seems like every single one of us is doing their damndest to hide at least one massive character flaw. I had the misfortune of running into a gentleman* recently who was so jealously possessive of his ex-girlfriend that he stalked her like a rabid, yet loyal rottweiler that no one had the heart to put down. Obviously, this kid suffers from some sort of inferiority complex** that left a gaping hole in the place where normal people keep their self-confidence. Although I did feel sorry for him, his behavior was so repulsively unacceptable that my sympathy was often overshadowed by an intense urge to punch him. Plus, he just has one of those faces.

Part of me still pities him, but a larger part of me can’t help but want to smack people like that; or people who say things like, “But he’s different,” or “She wouldn’t do that to me.”  I hate to break it to you, hon, but “No, he isn’t,” and “Yes, she would;” especially, if you’ve been acting like an asshole. The moment you start trying to control someone else’s actions is the exact same moment you start to lose their respect, and you deserve every ounce of the pain that’s coming your way, because you’ve failed to grasp a very basic aspect of the human condition:  there is only one person in the world that you can truly control, and that’s you.

I’m not saying there aren’t people who love you implicitly and would burn themselves with a cigar lighter before letting you down, but those are your parents, and even their love isn’t guaranteed. I am saying that if you don’t want to die cold and alone, you need to excercise some self-control.  Yet, certain emotions can drastically impair that self-control, with jealousy being the most frequent offender. She can be a slippery bitch if you don’t snuff her out as soon as possible, kind of like Medusa, if instead of turning you to stone, she turned you into a short-tempered asshat with a talent for losing friends. Jealousy is a parasite, and if left untreated it will bring your sanity and your sex life to a screeching halt, just like syphillis.

It always starts small (jealousy, not syphillis):  a compliment here, a late night text there, or perhaps just an inconsistency in their affection. Now, pay attention because this is the important part: once that seed is planted it can only be killed by logic and reason; otherwise, that little fucker will grow like a magic beanstalk until it has wrecked your entire world. The problem here is that human emotions are irrational by nature; so, instead of arriving at the most likely conclusion, our imagination begins to entertain every possible conclusion. To prevent this, you need to think clearly. For example: “Of course my girlfriend isn’t sleeping with the UPS guy, because that is both psychotic and logistically impossible.”

Unfortunately, the line between logic and lunacy is not always so easy to spot. Who among us hasn’t been driven crazy by the thought that our signifcant other is interested in somebody else?  If you approach that question rationally, the answer is “yes”, of course they’re interested in other people. Aren’t you? Are you really such a hypocrite to expect your girlfriend to only want you when you have eyes for several others? There are 7 billion people on the planet, and I promise you, that you are not that special. It’s natural to have romantic feelings for multiple people.

When you inevitably find the one you like most, the important part is to hold on loosely.  Don’t try to tell them who they can hang out with, or undermine their self-esteem in order to improve your own, because that’s not love. That’s manipulation. Most people think of love as finding someone they can’t live without, but that dynamic has more in common with an opiate addiction than a healthy relationship. Real love is finding someone you can live without, but would never want to; and then recognizing that out of all those millions of people, you are the one they chose, and you are the one they continue to choose every single day, so you should probably shut the fuck up and enjoy it while it lasts.

Footnotes

*Did I say gentleman? I’m sorry. I meant childish piece of shit.

**My money’s on micro-penis.