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Fumbling Attempts at Relationships Archives

August 4, 2008

Pitched

Last week, Preity sent me a series of e-mails that went from interesting to scary faster than anything I’ve experienced recently. If you’ll remember, I’ve known her for awhile — so long, in fact, that she was a main character in this story before we were what you’d call friends, and definitely before she received an officially sanctioned Stan Has Issues™ fake name — instead, she got the less impressive Stan Has Issues™ generic description. Observant readers will also note that yes, we know each other personally, although obviously we haven’t seen each other personally in a few years. In fact, the bulk of our contact has been through e-mail, for no other reason than its convenience. We exchanged phone numbers while I was in L.A., we exchanged phone numbers once again when we reconnected after I’d love, and we exchanged phone numbers a third time that I don’t remember. So the phone never seemed like a scary thing…

…until now.

In general, I’m not a big phone-talker. I end up talking on the phone a lot, for long periods of time, by virtue of the fact that I’ve befriended people who ramble as endlessly and incoherently as I do, and by virtue of the fact that most of those people have either moved out-of-state or are just as lazy as I am when it comes to making a 20- or 60-minute drive, and by virtue of the fact that they’re too lazy/incompetent to just type it up in an e-mail (and are too lazy to read it when I do that). I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a double-edged sword. I don’t have any problem with the phone, but if given the choice I’d rather talk in person or write an e-mail.

This has worked pretty well with Preity, the only person with whom I’m currently on speaking terms who enjoys my long, tedious e-mails. She sends equally long e-mails with the added challenge of never, ever using paragraphs to separate her ideas. It’s not hard to read, but it makes it very difficult to reply. I always feel like I miss something as I scan the original while writing a response.

E-mail became a problem last week, because she had a pitch meeting coming up on Friday that she was ready to shit her pants about. For some reason — I don’t know if I should feel good about this or not — she believes I’m really smart, so she wanted to bounce some ideas off me and get some feedback. She asked me to play “studio exec” and try to assess not if the ideas were good so much as whether or not they’d make money. I flashed on William Goldman’s classic “Nobody knows anything” bit and thought, Hey, I am nobody! So I agreed to her little game, with some mild reservations because I feared I’d hate all of her ideas — whether they seemed commercial or not — and it would diminish my respect for her.

She wrote back, asking if I wanted to do this through e-mail or over the phone, but something about the way she phrased it made me think the phone made her a little uncomfortable. Even though I’m lazy and just wanted her to type up all the ideas so I could think about them — I hate being put on the spot, especially if the ideas were terrible — I decided to keep the ball in her court. She wrote again, saying the phone would be easier because her fingers would explode before she could finish typing the thousands of ideas rattling around in her brain. But, she added, she “didn’t know if our relationship was ready for that step.”

I honestly still can’t tell whether or not she was being sarcastic. My immediate thought was, “But I’ve talked to you in person dozens of times,” followed immediately by, “What relationship? Are we dating and I just didn’t know?” I did the long-distance relationship thing before, but at that time I seemed to have a clearer idea of where things were headed. This came so far out of left field, it seemed to come out of right field (in actuality, it was so far left it had traveled the entire circumference of the planet).

So I tried to play it cool by completely ignoring the bit about the “relationship,” smoothly saying, “The phone’s fine with me,” and giving her my number for the fourth time in our relationship.

After some more awkward exchanges about when the best time for this conversation would be, I played the waiting game. Normally, waiting for a phone call would have made me more annoyed than nervous, but she tossed out the “R” word, so suddenly it felt like a first date — an excruciating, long-distance audition for some kind of future dating in the event that I move back to L.A. I sat in silence and tried to get into a relatively zen state so the stress didn’t cave in my skull, and when she called, I felt a strong urge to just not answer and make up some elaborate, far-fetched excuse as to why I had to miss her call and never, ever call her back.

Instead, I picked it up…

After an initial “I haven’t actually heard your voice in three years” moment of unease, we slipped back into our old routine. It’s amazing to think we even had an old routine, but I had forgotten how easy she is to listen to. You heard me right: she’s one of those people who can just talk, and I’ll just sit there listening and not giving a shit that I haven’t said anything for an hour. Compare that to Lucy, who frustrates me when she won’t give me a word in edgewise after five minutes. It’s just a difference in personality or articulation or something — or maybe I’m smitten. I don’t want to entertain that notion, because, like I said, I’ve done the long-distance relationship thing before, and I really, really, really don’t want to fall into that again. So we’ll just say she’s a great talker.

We didn’t have a one-sided conversation, though. We could have with no problem, but she forced me into an active role — she pitched these ideas and wanted to know how I felt. Her ideas… I don’t know if I want to say “to my surprise,” because I didn’t expect badness and I wanted them to be good, but I do tend to plan for the worst. Anyway, most of her ideas were…really fucking good. Commercial but not retarded, dense but cinematic, and a few of them really brought out some passion in her. In defense of my fawning all over her on account of that whole “smitten” thing, while many of her ideas impressed me, some of them were kinda “meh” and one of them was a total dog.

Meanwhile, if this was some kind of dry-run phone-date, I flopped big-time. I had a hard time forming any kind of cogent argument for or against these ideas — I tried my best to stammer through my vague notions. Without having any clue what she intended to pitch, I couldn’t do any preliminary research. I just had to go with my gut, which said, “Awesome,” but chose not to elaborate.

The second and third rounds — after an hour and a half, she did a “I’ll call you right back” thing, which gave me a merciful piss break (I feel really weird about telling someone, “I’ll call you back in two minutes while I urinate,” although now that I think about it, maybe she had done the same thing but was wise enough to not give a reason for hanging up), then she came back for another hour, by which time I was on. She called again the next morning for another hour, and again, I felt much more confident and less like a tool.

But when all was said and done, I don’t know where we’re at. She told me multiple times — enough times to make me suspicious — to call her “any time.” I don’t want to make a mountain out of a knob, but I do like her a lot. Why do you think I stayed in touch with her? I don’t want to miss out on a possible opportunity, but at the same time, I really, really don’t want to end up in another long-distance relationship. I guess I can just keep playing it cool and maybe give her a call once in awhile in addition to the e-mails… Maybe.

The downside is, neither of us have a clue how her pitches went. I can’t/don’t want to go into details on all that, but she described the meeting and one casual pitch session with an assistant she knows, and in both cases, things seem a little strange.

Posted by Stan on August 4, 2008 5:33 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

Laurie

I’ve been friends with Laurie for awhile (now would be a good time to take advantage of the new Cast of Characters link on the sidebar), a friendship built largely on awkwardness and miscommunication. To wit:

When I first met her, I felt an instant attraction, so I asked her to go to the movies. Now, ordinarily, I could understand why, in film-student circles, this wouldn’t be instantly seen as a date. But when I asked Laurie, I could see from the contortions on her face that she knew what I was asking — she took the time to process it, then broke into a wide smile and said, “Yeah,” all fake-shy-like.

And then we never, ever went to the movies. Ever. See what I mean? It’s confusing.

The friendship kept going. Despite my inability to seal the deal (or even getting her to acknowledge there was a deal there to be sealed), I discovered she was a person I wanted to know. I also got involved with somebody else, so after awhile the romantic notions with her just dissolved like they did with Gina. We were just friends, like normal people, for a few years.

Then, I got on MySpace. Then, she found out I was on MySpace. Then, things got weird. Weirder.

She started to drop awkward comments on my MySpace page, there in public, for everyone to see. Things about how she missed me, but the way they were phrased (which I am not going to quote verbatim because I just Googled them and they’re comically easy to trace back to me) led me to the pretty clear conclusion that…she’s into me. For real.

But this just led to more awkwardness. She promised to call and didn’t; I promised to make definitive plans to see her and didn’t. After an ill-fated attempt to go to an Oscar party in a blizzard failed, we didn’t talk much anymore…

…until a month ago, when it started all over again, with another random comment, this one even more unusual and salacious than before. After calling herself “a fool,” she decided it was “imperative” that we get together. Written as if the world would literally crumble to pieces if we didn’t not drop everything and rush into each others’ arms, I elected to respond. I told myself, “This isn’t really worth the effort. I’ll respond, and if something happens, it happens. If not, whatever.”

Responding to the comment led to catch-up text-messaging, after which I didn’t hear from her at all. Out of the blue, a day or two ago, she sent me a private message on MySpace, explaining to me that her life has been hectic, she’s also unemployed, she’s had car troubles that needed taking care of, and she has neither forgotten about me nor of our plans to see each other. She closed by saying, “Just let me get things together, if you know what I mean.”

Somebody, please explain to me what that means. I don’t know!

But when the time I got this message, I was hooked again. I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s going to be a series of mishaps resulting in us seeing each other for maybe five minutes in the year 2008. And that’ll be that…

There’s just that small part of me that I can’t seem to kill, the one that listened to too much Cheap Trick as a lad and believes the main priority is wanting to be wanted. Even if it never gets to pivotal phases like “seeing one another on a regular basis” or “not crassly manipulating each others’ emotions” (I can’t claim she’s the only one guilty there), part of me is merely happy that there’s someone out there who wants me, even if it’s only for 15 alcohol-fueled sections prowling MySpace late at night.

Posted by Stan on March 17, 2008 5:52 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 14, 2007

The Hot Drive-Thru Girl

So there’s this burger joint I like to go to on the edge of town (I say that mainly because it sounds kind of cool and dangerous like a biker bar, but it really is on the edge of town). Since I’m not going to spend my own dwindling cash supply on frivolities like fast food, I rely on mooching off my parents for such things. Because yesterday I was overruled on our traditional Sunday artery-clogger, what with it being mother’s day and all, my mom felt oddly guilty* and offered to buy me lunch today if I went with her to get a haircut. I needed a haircut, but like most unemployed 25-year-olds living at home with a mother who just lost her job, when I need to go out and do something, I want to go alone.

Unfortunately, she needed a haircut, too. Even though I go to the cheapest imaginable place, I was sucked in by the offer of both a free haircut and a free lunch. We went together to BoRics and stopped at the burger joint drive-thru on the way home.

The girl at the pickup window was incredibly cute (and not just rated on the scale of drive-thru workers, who are not usually the cream of the crop, looks-wise). Even better: against all odds, she was giving me The Look. No, not that Look — the complete opposite. She was giving me that va-va-va-voom, look-at-the-cute-guy-in-the-car look, edging her eyes past my mom and trying to make eye contact with me. Rather than make direct eye contact, I tried not to move my head past the three-quarter-profile she saw, because obviously there was something she liked. After staring at myself in a mirror while harsh fluorescents beat down on my bleached skin, exposing every fault (major or minor), my confidence was shaken. I didn’t want to look at her dead-on and have her see what I saw and lose interest.

Oh, also: I was sitting in a car with my mother. In her old-lady Buick. It wasn’t like my old Buick, which I transformed from an old-lady car (literally owned by my 85-year-old great aunt for 20 years before it was passed down to me) to a bad-ass pussy wagon**. It was an old-lady car owned and driven by an old lady, and I was the passenger with the obvious family resemblance: the 25-year-old son picking up drive-thru with his mom at 2:30 in the afternoon. This was a humiliating experience on a number of levels, and I wanted it to end as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to make eyes back at her and catch a whiff of disappointment; I didn’t want my mom to say something that she thinks is adorable that is actually embarrassing. I just wanted to get the food and drive away as quickly as possible.

On the way home, I started thinking: this is a girl who is seeing me at my absolute worse. I’m being carted around by my mother like a drunken, shiftless loser, and she knows that. I am a fat pig who, on occasion, orders a bacon double cheeseburger and large fries on a Monday afternoon, and she knows that. And despite taking my disgusting order and witnessing me on the Mom-mobile, she was still looking at me with an encouraging degree of lust.

While this could (and probably will) end with me being named in a lawsuit involving food and pubic hair, I can’t help but think this is some kind of opportunity. Good or bad, I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into Fortuna’s wheel spins, but it seems fortuitous that on the same day I get my new, improved “job-interview-ready” haircut, I both receive a call from my most promising job lead in months and discover a girl looking past my gut and my mom and saying, “I want me some Stanbeef.” Am I leaving the “crushed dreams” phase of life and moving on to “settling for less”?

I sure hope so!

*Which is funny because I totally didn’t care about where we ate. I just tossed out a suggestion and was shot down. It’s not unusual.
**Note: despite the overall coolness factor, this car only managed to get me to second base.

Posted by Stan on May 14, 2007 5:41 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

January 10, 2004

Exes on a Train

I’m not fatalistic by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes coincidences occur that make me sort of shudder, briefly contemplate the nature reality, and then dismiss it. One such fortuitous incident happened on Thursday night, after I got off work. I walked down to LaSalle Street, as I always do, and waited for a train.

The fun thing about this subway station is that right as you get off the escalator onto the platform, you’re in a prime position to leap into the first car of an O’Hare-bound train. Normally, that’s what I do, because then when I get down to Cumberland, again the train is right next to the escalators, so I can just hop off and then zip along to my car without having to wait for the enormous throng of people to get onto the escalators before me. I’m not a big fan of standing around pointlessly. If I’m going to stand around, it should be for a good reason, such as leering at women.

I’m digressing, though. On Thursday, I didn’t stand near where the first car stops. What I did, which was very unusual and perhaps driven by a subconscious that pays a little more attention to the surrounding world than I consciously do, was go down a little ways. The thought I had, one I’ve been having for weeks but never did anything about, is that the first car is always much more crowded than other cars, so I should get on somewhere in the middle.

As I went a little ways down the platform, I stopped between two women, neither of whom I particularly recognized. The one to my left ignored me, which is not unusual; the one on my right turned around to look at me.

It was The Ex.

Suddenly, events from my horrible life went flashing through my eyes, as I was certain that this was the end for Stan.

She looked different than she used to, which — in conjuction with the thick parka — is why I didn’t recognize her. Gone was the pink dye job I had last seen on her; she was no longer wearing the startling pale-face almost-goth make-up she used to wear when we were dating. She didn’t even dress like she used to when we were dating; she was wearing an almost trendy pair of pre-rolled jeans*, a plain pair of shoes (as opposed to the menacing boots she always enjoyed), and a nondescript black parka. She wore a silly denim hat on top of her head, and her hair — which she dyed black again — was extremely short, almost dykey.

She went conservative on me! Why didn’t she give me a call?! Oh, wait, I remember.

When she saw me, her eyes — I swear to God — lit up and she actually smiled. SHE SMILED AT ME. WHAT IN THE HOLY NAME OF FUCK HAPPENED TO HER?

“Hi,” she said softly.

I nodded stoically, creating the most likely unconvincing illusion of supreme manhood, and said, “Hi.”

And that was it. I didn’t address the changes in fashion, style, and attitude, though I wanted to. She didn’t apologize (although Lucy insists she should, I’m still not convinced that she was entirely in the wrong), and I don’t think either of us wanted to catch up on the events of the past year. I thought about being really mean and actually asking about her band, but I didn’t think it was appropriate.

We stood uncomfortably next to each other for a little while, and then the train showed up. We got on and, although there was plenty of seating (see, the middle-car theory works!), we didn’t sit next to one another.

The train blasted off, and I noticed that before we even got to the next stop, she had gotten up and moved to a different car. I’m not sure if she was uncomfortable or upset or overwhelmed or what, but I think I can safely assume I am responsible for her switching cars.

The reason why this seemed like a creepy sign of horrible fate is because on Wednesday night, I had dinner with a girl that I’ve been attracted to for most of the semester and, for the first time in the history of Stan Has Issues, it went well. And then The Ex, full of arousing changes and all smiley, shows back up in my life and manages to fuck me all up.

Not that I’d ever think of any sort of reconciliation, and I’m sure that’s the furthest thing from her mind, but I can’t help getting all retarded and wondering if she popped up and made me question reality for some grander reason. Like, for example, the Controller of the Universe, sitting in his little cabin in the woods, is trying to say to me, “Hey, remember that girl you went out with? Maybe you should think about what happened with this other girl and just assume she’s crazy.”

Should I do that? No. Why? Because I’m not retarded. Okay, I am, but not beyond the hope of help. But, as instructed by The X-Files, I question everything and trust no one, and consequently I start creating cosmic conspiracies where mere coincidences exist. Then, I dance.

*I don’t know anything about fashion, so this may not make sense. What I’m trying to say is that the cuffs of her jeans were rolled in a stylish way, but this was not done by her; they looked like they were stitched that way.

Posted by Stan on January 10, 2004 2:52 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 31, 2003

Malicious Glee!

Not too long ago, I cried and whined to Lucy when I found out The Ex was in some band. A few months later, I found out that the band broke up, and I said, “Tee-hee,” but it never really resonated. I think this was because I still assumed that, even with the band broken up, she was still sleeping with all the former members (hehe…members).

Well, as it turns out, the information I received was somewhat inaccurate. As it happens, a site I read about local music indicated that the band is still in existence. It turns out that this band is missing one member: The Ex.

That’s right, the band didn’t break up; the Ex just got kicked out. This news fills me not only with an unhealthy amount of malicious glee but also the near physical sensation of pleasure. I thought this made me unhealthy, but quick consultation with people who are better at life than I am leads me to believe that this is a perfectly natural response.

I feel guilty for reveling in her utter failure, but the guilt doesn’t making my enjoyment go away. In fact, it makes me want to do really things like call her up and say I heard she was in a band and when are they playing next. And masturbate.

Posted by Stan on December 31, 2003 11:29 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

October 14, 2003

Back on the Dead Horse

I had one of the worst mornings in recent memory today. I woke up to pitch blackness. Sometimes this happens. My alarm clock is a piece of shit, and I’m too cheap to buy a new one. The consequence is that it will randomly go off in the middle of the night, even though it’s set for 7 a.m.

But this wasn’t one of those mornings. It actually was 7 a.m. — it was pitch black because enormous thunderheads had completely blotted out the sun.

Now, I like the rain. I really do. I like to stare at thunderstorms, I pray for tornadoes (because even though they almost never touch down anywhere near me, they really shake things up storm-wise), and I love the sound of the rain.

But this really threw me off, because my eyes hadn’t adjusted and I couldn’t see anything in the house. My parents decided not to leave any lights on for me before they left to work, so I stumbled around by feel, got myself some coffee, and promptly spilled it all over the couch.

This could have, and by all means should have, been a catastrophe, but we bought smart. My mom and I bitch incessantly about how uncomfortable this couch is (it was much better in the store, and we had already sent two back because they were uncomfortable), but it has this miracle stain-protecting fabric that causes any sort of pigmentation to just roll off of it. I don’t pretend to understand the science behind it; I was just happy that I didn’t have to expect a beheading when I got home.

So, I went to take a shower when I saw an enormous spider sauntering across the hall. Now, I’m (1) insane, (2) slightly obsessive-compulsive, and (3) deathly afraid of any creature that is 1/1000 of my size, so my immediate reaction was this: (1) shriek loudly, (2) nearly vomit, and (3) run back into my room, grab the pair of pants I wore yesterday, throw it over the spider, and dive onto it, hoping the enormity of me and would crush the nefarious arachnid.

I left the pants just laying there. I didn’t want to pick them up and discover that the spider had somehow gotten away. That would haunt me. No, seriously.

So, I got ready for the day and left at the normal time, stupidly not allowing an extra 15 minutes for what traffic reporters call a “rain delay” (ho ho!). Consequently, my 25-minute drive turned into a 45-minute drive, and my 40-minute train ride turned into a 60-minute train ride. As I’ve already mentioned, I get to class obsessively early, so I wasn’t late, but I was still going nuts about only being 15 minutes early as opposed to the normal 45.

Now, last week we were forced into groups to discuss the character bios we had to write (this is my screenwriting 2 class, incidentally). I got paired with a nice guy, who is also in my script analysis class, and a really attractive girl with low self-esteem. I sort of hit it off with the girl, and I was disappointed when she hadn’t shown up by the time class started.

She did show up about half an hour late and sat down next to me (good sign). She even said “hi,” despite the fact that another student was in front of the class pitching and she should have remained silent. I started to casually glance at her legs when I noticed her cell phone sitting on top of her open purse. It was on, which was odd because most people turn them off. She must have had it on “vibrate” or “silent,” that wily go-getter.

She got called up to pitch, and I really liked the script she came up with. Like I said, I read her character bio last week, and it was good, but she really had no idea what story she wanted to tell — she just wanted to create an interesting character and allow the story to be built around the character. Sigh. A woman after my own heart.

Then, I struck on inspiration. See, in most of the writing courses here, they have what’s called a “first reader,” which is pretty self-explanatory, but if you’re a total idiot: one student in class reads your work “first” and vice-versa. (The theory is that it’s important to get as many different perspectives as you can, but not every student has time to read 20 scripts in a week, so you only have a first reader, plus the professor.) So, say I told her I wanted to be her first reader because I really liked her script idea. And she agreed. And that gave me license to call her incessantly and essentially stalk her until the end of the semester.

It’s a winning plan, but there’s one caveat. While she pitched, I kept glancing at her phone for no other reason than being a snoop, and I noticed that she actually was receiving a call. A call from someone named Clint.

Shit! She had a boyfriend! Or possibly just a friend. But, no, she’s too attractive to be single. He must be the boyfriend. But, hey, that’s never exactly stopped me before, so all is not lost.

Then came another hurdle: During the break, I asked the professor, who hadn’t mentioned first readers since the first day of class, “Are you gonna assign us first readers?”

“No,” he said, “I decided to drop that from the course.”

“Fuck,” I thought.

So, my plans were dashed, although I concocted a plan in the same vein on the way home. I thought I could just call this girl and tell her I really like her script idea and that, even though we’re not really doing the first reader thing in class, I’d like to read it and give her feedback. And then I’d give her the option of reading mine and doing the same. Then, there’s the factor of me doing this because I want to, not just because I have to.

Plus, the professor’s kind of an ass, so if I, like I do in almost every other semester in at least one class, join with her (and others) in a personal vendetta to rid the universe of said professor, we’re fighting a common enemy. And she’d welcome my feedback because I’d seem that much smarter than the professor.

And, obviously, the rest would be history.

But, of course, this is all my fantasy happy play world of make-believe right here. In reality, it won’t work out nearly that well. In reality, she’ll have a boyfriend and be incensed by the mere suggestion that I read anything she writes, and she will sic her menacing, 6’ 4” hunk of muscle mass and bulk-up powder on my unsuspecting, doughy ass.

Actually, that sounds more like my fantasy unhappy world of paranoia.

So maybe it’s worth a shot. All she can do is say no. Well, saying no is the first of many horrible things she can do, but the possibility of being murdered in cold blood by such an attractive woman only strengthens my resolve.

Posted by Stan on October 14, 2003 3:39 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

October 9, 2003

Spillage

The thing you have to understand about me and this new girl I mentioned a little while ago is that we both have foul tempers. That’s why we get along so well. It’s also why we don’t get along well at all. We’re a strange pair, she and I, her and me. We’re also not a pair at all anymore.

See, that was sort of like Dickens, except I’m not paid by the word — I just ramble incoherently.

I originally wrote a long entry detailing our dramatic break-up, but since it got a little tedious and I really (deservedly) come off as the bad guy, I figured maybe it’d be best not to shatter my humble readers’ opinions of me and decided not to post it. So, here’s the short version: I turned down sex, or at least something nearer to sex than my usual thrice-daily masturbation routine, and said something bad about a poem, at which point we shouted at each other and then agreed it would be best if I left. I attempted to make amends, but to no avail. Officially, I imagine, we are over.

But that doesn’t stop me from making an idiot out of myself in front of her. No, nothing can prevent my god-given, constitutional right to do that!

See, this morning, as is part of my normal morning routine, I went down early, loaded up on coffee and donuts at Dunkin’ Donuts, and sat in the cafeteria of the film building, staring at the light pedestrian and vehicle traffic on 11th Street. Actually, I’m usually reading, but sometimes I get distracted by 11th Street. I find pedestrians interesting. I also find parallel parkers interesting, especially when they do it in a tow zone (“Gee, if I turn my emergency flashers on, they’ll think I had an emergency that lasted nine hours!”).

At one point, I saw this particular new girl walking down 11th. She, like most of the people walking down the street, looked in through the windows and got an eyeful of Stan. She furrowed her brow, possibly remembering my comment about her poem, and I imagine she planned to ignore me until I attempted to wave at her. I wasn’t going to do a goofy, bombastic wave — just a subtle hand-motion that would allow me to acknowledge her without coming on to strong via the power of meaningless greeting actions.

But, see, here’s something you may or may not know about me: I lack depth perception. My eyes, in the words of my highly competent ophthalmologist, “don’t work good,” and consequently I cannot perceive what the French often refer to as “the third dimension.” I see everything flat, like a movie screen. I bump into nearly everything: walls, doors, doorways, people, lightposts, muthafuckin’ frontas, and so on. In my fitful efforts to grasp objects without first looking directly at them, I often end up grabbing air.

So, it shouldn’t really be surprising to note that, when I raised my hand to make my subtle wave, I instead knocked my cup of coffee over and spilled it all over the table. I clumsily attempted to grab the cup (which only made it worse, as I just pushed it and caused it to roll off the table and onto the floor) while at the same time guarding my book and backpack from excess moisture while at the same time trying to look up at this girl and smile to indicate that, yeah, I’m a dumbass and gosh, it’s hilarious.

When I looked up at her, she had stopped and was staring at me like I was the most pathetic human being she had ever seen. It wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten that look, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I tried, as I trundled my fat ass to the opposite side of the table to grab the coffee cup, to wave at her, even to motion her to come over and talk to me. Her look changed subtly into one of pure, unmitigated anger. I gathered she was declining my invitation. She sighed visibly — in fact, I could almost hear it through the glass — and continued walking.

I got about 450,000 napkins and wiped up the mess I made, all the while half-expecting (that’s the optimistic, or stupid, half of my brain) that she’d come around the corner and help me clean it up. But that didn’t happen, obviously.

So ends another of Stan’s pitiful attempts at relationships.

My mother, who objects to me talking to anyone of the opposite sex but is calmly resigned to the fact that I’m apparently sleeping with every woman I know*, so she sometimes, when she thinks it’s the right time, tells me that I should always learn something from a relationship.

Strangely, I learned two things, despite the brevity of the actual relationship:

1. Never turn down sex when it is offered by a woman. It is a rare and glorious opportunity, especially if she’s sober at the time.
2. Never insult the poetry of a woman, no matter how bad it is. This is especially true if you couldn’t do any better.

*Not true, but damn, I wish it were…

Posted by Stan on October 9, 2003 2:17 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

October 8, 2003

The Ex’s New Style

I passed The Ex on the street yesterday. She’s dyed her hair a bright red-pink sort of color. She looks like an idiot.

As I passed, I was going to point and laugh at her like the mature and responsible adult I am, but she averted her gaze like a woman on the streets of Riyadh, so I didn’t say anything at all.

I think she was trying to hide her face so I wouldn’t know it was her. But I did know it was her. Know why? Because I’m not completely retarded! (I am close, though.)

I think this hair-dyeing thing was a good idea. As a direct result of it, we have reached a new and critical phase in our relationship: the “completely ignoring one another” phase. This has to be easier than the “humiliate each other in public” phase.

I hope so, anyway.

Posted by Stan on October 8, 2003 5:44 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

October 6, 2003

That Lab Assistant

You’ll be happy to know that while most of my blog this summer was occupied by me writing about sexual fantasies with women who had no interest in me, I was still playing the field and actually attempting to find a disinterested woman who would be too lazy to fend off my advances. Which brings me to a tale I’ve never related: the story of the blonde chick in the lab.

This girl was cute and smart and completely not into me at all. Still, I wouldn’t let go. I told nearly everyone in class that I had the hots for her during my two-week effort to figure out what the hell her name was. As it turned out, nobody in my class had any idea what her name was, and they were all highly amused by my schoolboy crush on her.

Furthermore, I kept bumping into her outside the lab. I’d see her on the train, around the building, et cetera, and my natural inclination was to assume that this was some sort of serendipity. Therefore, if I pursued her, everything would work out and I’d live happily ever after.

In short, I’m a moron.

Still, I thought it’d at least be good to know her name. I mean, if I’m going to attempt to ask her out or something, it’d be kind of embarrassing if I got her number, called her, and then her roommate answers and I say, “Uh, can I speak to…um…you know, the blonde one?” Know what I mean?

So, since nobody in my class knew who she was, and none of the random people I knew in other classes knew her name, I had to craftily find out from the other lab assistants, when the blonde wasn’t working.

(At this point I should interject that the smartest thing to do would have been to simply ask the blonde herself what her name was. “Oh, I didn’t catch your name,” for example. But this was a weird scenario. This wasn’t my normal “Jesus I wanna fuck you” or “Wow I think I might be falling in love” deal — it was a sixth-grade, sweaty-palms, aw-shucks, beet-red-faced crush. I’d get very shy and wiggly for absolutely no reason whenever she was around, and I found my mouth cottoning up whenever I tried to say anything to her. In short, I did think of this, and I did want to try it — I just failed over and over.)

So, one afternoon when the blonde was not working, I attempted to do some reconnaissance at the lab counter. Two other assistants, a Big Guy and an Italian Dude, were working. Being that the lab was pretty much my exclusive hangout for most of the summer, I knew all the lab assistants and they knew me. It was very relaxed, and I felt safe approaching them with my question.

I said, “You know that blonde who works here in the morning?”

They both nodded.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

The Italian Dude had his back to me, but the Big Guy grinned at me. He said nothing, but his eyes said, “Wow, way to not be subtle.” I imagine the Italian Dude had a similar look.

It would take a lot of cleverness to get out of this jam. I continued talking. “Yeah, she said I had film back.”

Wow, that was stupid. Anybody could give me film back at any time — it didn’t need to be the blonde, and if the blonde herself had said I had film back, she would have given it to me right away. Both of the guys knew that, so they both looked at me like I was a jackass, which I am, and the Big Guy said, “You need to know her name to get your film back?”

“Uh…” I explained, realizing they were essentially mocking me. It was gentle ribbing, to be sure, but it was still somewhat humiliating.

“You know we can give it back to you, right?”

“Uhh…yeah, I knew that,” I said, playing it off. “Of course I knew that.”

The Italian Dude just started giggling and turned back around. I felt retarded.

So, a few days later, one of my friends from class (I referred to him as The Jock in my initial description of the class, so we’ll go with that) approached me and said, “Guess who likes you?”

As I mentioned, I’d already told everybody in the class about my crush in my efforts to find out her name. So, he was just kidding around. My response was a very effective, “Shut up.”

But then he responded, “No, seriously, I heard them talking about you.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I thought. “That can’t possibly be good.”

“She has a boyfriend, though,” The Jock continued.

“What? How do you know?”

“Because she said, ‘I have a boyfriend,’” The Jock replied.

“Oh.”

“But she still likes you,” The Jock said.

“Huh?” Obviously, I was genuinely surprised by this.

“She said you’re cute, and that she’d go out with you in a second if she wasn’t involved.”

“Really?”

“No.” The Jock was a bastard.

“Oh.” A beat. “What did she actually say?”

“She said you were funny,” The Jock said.

“That’s encouraging,” I said glumly.

“I guess,” The Jock said apathetically and moved on.

So, a little later on, I approached the blonde for one of the many reasons we generally have for bugging people in the lab. It was very awkward, and as she helped me, she said, “My name’s Julie, by the way.” She was about as subtle as I was.

“Oh, right,” I said. “I thought it was.” I had no idea.

“I heard you like me,” Julie said, like we were on the playground in fourth grade. She was mocking me.

“Well,” I said, “I think you’re cute. I don’t really know you well enough to ‘like’ you.”

“Were you gonna ask me out?” she asked.

“I was gonna,” I explained, “but I found out you have a boyfriend, or whatever. Oh well, no biggie.”

“Yeah,” Julie said noncommittally.

We shared a hideously awkward moment, and then I said, “So, uh, would you have gone out with me if I’d asked?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

AWKWARD.

That was about the end of that. After, Julie and I essentially resumed our student-lab assistant relationship and never spoke of my crush again. I always felt awkward around her, even though I think she got over it pretty quickly.

Posted by Stan on October 6, 2003 12:15 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

August 28, 2003

Why I No Longer Actively Pursue Relationships

I met the future Ex a little over a year ago. A general education require threw us together; otherwise, we probably never would have met. Okay, maybe we would have, but it’s somewhat unlikely. She’s a music major; I’m a film major. We don’t really mix well, or at all, even though I used to be a music major.

Like most women, I was immediately attracted to her because she was intelligent, articulate, and witty. Also, she was hot. Really, really hot. Absolutely stunning. Beautiful to the degree that one could successfully argue that I was extremely lucky to be dating someone so attractive, it will never happen again, and I was foolish to give her up so easily.

I’d be the one making that argument, by the way.

Being antisocial, or “shy” as Lucy insists, I spent the first several weeks of class being my usual, non-participatory self, casually making pathetic moon eyes at The Ex. Like most women, she didn’t seem to notice or acknowledge my existence. As usual, I didn’t take any great effort in making sure she was aware of me. I forced myself into the mindset that relationships were a waste of time; too much effort expended for something that doesn’t mean much in the end. That’s antisocial, right? Not shy?

One day, I got to class early, and I was waiting for the elevator when The Ex, a guitar strapped to her back, showed up. We exchanged mild pleasantries, but that was it. It was nice to know that she actually recognized me from the class. She got off on a lower floor for some reason.

We didn’t say another word to each other that day, but when I sat and read on one of the benches on the 10th floor, I put something together in my head. I had noticed that, every Tuesday (the class was Tuesdays and Thursdays), she showed up extremely early with a guitar. On Thursday, she was generally late and guitar-less. I put two and seven together and realized that she was most likely taking guitar lessons, or at least doing something with the guitar before class, but the important thing was that she was there early.

I thought, if I started showing up early on a regular basis every Tuesday, I’d end up running into her, and I could strike up a conversation with her about the guitar. I’ve played since seventh grade, and I know a whole assload about a lot of music genres, so I figured I could at least fake my way into creating a meaningful dialogue with her.

So, the following Tuesday, I arrived extremely early, sat on a bench near our classroom, and read while I waited for her. She showed up, smiled at me as she walked briskly past me to the vending machines, and normally that would have been the end of said chance encounter. However, I was feeling extremely audacious (that’s a synonym for “stupid,” right?), so I decided to very subtly approach and engage her in conversation.

She had gotten a 7-Up from the vending machine and drank it as she stared mindlessly at a bulletin board listing various apartments for rent, movies to screen, and/or bands to join.

I happened to randomly see an advertisement for a band I liked, who were apparently performing locally in a few weeks.

“Oh, wow,” I said, trying — and failing — to sound very cool. “I should go catch that show.”

“Yeah,” she said apathetically. Strike one.

“So,” I tried again, “you play guitar.”

“Yeah,” she said, her tone brightening slightly, but not much. Ball one.

“Yeah, I play, too,” I said.

“Actually, I just started taking lessons. I’m not very good.” Strike two.

“I’ve been playing since sixth grade,” I explained, trying not to sound braggardly but failing. Foul-tip. One ball, two strikes.

“You must be good, then,” The Ex said, arching one eyebrow.

“I guess,” I said smoothly, redeeming myself for the unnecessary bragging earlier.

“Cool,” she said, returning to her former apathy. If I didn’t think I was good after playing for eight years, her tone indicated, I was not worth her time. This is the craft of the music-business major. She was scoping my talent, and when I denied having much, she immediately became disinterested.

I decided to go out on a limb. I really had nothing else to lose. My awkward, failed attempt at flirting was getting me nowhere, and she doesn’t like lovable losers like me. She likes men of action, I decided, so she’d respect me for asking even if she turns me down.

“Wanna have dinner with me tonight?” I spat out abruptly. Oh, Jesus, tonight? Why did I specify a time frame? She’s never gonna —

“Why?” she asked, genuinely baffled. Possibly a foul, possibly a home-run. The refs are arguing it out with the first-base coach and the left-fielder. This could be a game-losing play.

“Uh…” I explained. “I have a class after this. In the evening. And I usually, you know, go to dinner in between. Since I’m down here. And usually I’m alone, but I like you, so I thought maybe, I dunno, if you want, you could just eat with me. To keep me company or whatever.”

Wow. That was awful.

“Sure,” she said, half-grinning. I’d get used to that amused look of hers. I’m apparently pretty amusing, even when I’m serious, and especially when I’m yelling. I’ve inherited from my dad a gene that causes me to become completely incoherent and illogical when I get angry, and I’ve inherited from this area a 1930s-gangster-like vocal affectation whenever I get mad. No human can take me seriously when I’m angry, which just makes me madder.

But I digress…

Long story short, we had dinner, we sort of hit it off, and she agreed to have dinner with me again the following week. It became a semi-regular routine, and although it was more friendly in nature than “dating,” it was what the French call “the beginning.”

Things progressed rapidly, though. The class was winding down, and I thought — as is the case with most Columbia commuters at the end of the semester — that we’d stop seeing each other by the end of the semester. Not because we don’t like each other enough to maintain a friendship. It’s just a gradual thing. People get busy, and when you don’t even share a class in common, the gradual grinds to a halt.

Being antisocial, this is the life for me! However, I didn’t want to lose The Ex at the semester’s end, so I did something very brash. After what would have probably been our final dinner together, I said, “I’m going to ditch my class and walk you home.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” The Ex responded.

“I know,” I said.

“You realize I live 30 blocks away, don’t you?” she asked. “I usually take a cab.”

“I could use the exercise,” I said.

“You sure could,” she said. Zing. “I’m taking a cab, though. I’ll meet you there.”

How romantic.

“Come on,” I pleaded, “walk with me. We can talk more, assuming I don’t collapse.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

Huh. That was easy.

So, we walked to her apartment, and she was not exaggerating about the 30 blocks (actually, she was underestimating) and continued our conversation about all that pop-culture bullshit we both enjoyed so much. I feigned love for bands I only casually like, and she did the same, and we talked about movies. She was much less interested in the movies, but pretended to be excited because she knew that was my thing.

We stood on the front stoop of her apartment, which was actually just an old house that had been transmogrified into two one-bedroom apartments.

“Well,” I said, “I’m probably going to go to class now. I guess.”

“You really didn’t have to walk me home, you know,” she said.

“Yeah, well, we were having a good conversation,” I said. We weren’t, really. It was a trivial conversation in the restaurant, and it was still trivial while we walked home.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Well, I’ll see you—”

That’s when the brashness took over, and I slid my arms around her waist and rammed my tongue down her throat. She resisted for a second, but apparently my tongue has wily powers, because she softened almost immediately and her tongue took evasive action.

I’ve spent several years training in classical voice, so I have pretty good breath control. I thought it would impress her if I could shove my tongue down her throat and maintain my ability to examine each of her fillings without being the first person to come up for air. I’m not sure if it impressed her or not, but she was the one who leaned back and ended our kiss.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

Not really the ecstatic response I was expecting, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as my last kiss, which went approximately like this:

Me: (kissy-face)
Her: What the hell are you doing?
Me: I thought you wanted me to.
Her: I have a boyfriend!
Me: Be that as it may—
Her: (smacks me on face)

“Can I call you tomorrow?” I asked The Ex.

“Um,” she agreed.

“Nevermind,” I said, pulling out of the embrace so I could stare down at my shoes like an idiot. “I’m sorry. I should…I’ll just go now.”

“No, it’s not that,” she said. “I just…I wasn’t really expecting that.”

“I know. I should really get to class,” I said.

“Give me a call,” she said. “It’s cool.”

“Oh,” I said, internally breathing the heaviest sigh of relief in the history of relief-sighs. “Yeah, okay.”

She smiled awkwardly.

“I guess I’m going to go now,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, and I perked up at that.

“Yeah,” I said.

I left at that point, hopped on the train (The Ex doesn’t take public transportation — it frightens her), and made it for the last hour of my shitty class.

I did call her the following day. We spent the night together, and although nothing particularly juicy happened, we did make out a lot.

After that point, it seemed that we were somewhat unofficially dating. We started spending the vast majority of our time together, and she attempted to ingratiate me upon her circle of idiot friends. It was a nice, if utterly failed, gesture.

Basically, for the next few months, I followed her around like a lost puppy. I’m not really a take-charge guy, and she actually thought of interesting things to do. Were it left up to me, we would have spent every night hanging around her apartment, watching Buffy reruns. I didn’t mind letting her completely dominate the relationship.

Believe it or not, I was her trophy guy. She’d introduce me at certain functions as if I were some sort of god of humanity, and she was very lucky to be with me. This was a somewhat confusing confidence booster. Apparently, I clean up well enough to vaguely resemble a human male, and I suppose I’m smart and witty when I’m supposed to talk. That’s the way she felt, anyway.

Throughout the course of the relationship, I didn’t really feel used, necessarily. It’s hard to explain my feelings. I guess I felt like I was unnecessary. She just sort of had me around so she could say, “Look at my boyfriend.” She’d store me in the closet and trot me out when I required an introduction, not unlike Viki from Small Wonder.

Not that I minded, really. It made many social functions mildly uncomfortable, despite her attempts to put me at ease. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this reading my blog, but I’m sort of neurotic and paranoid. It’s a chore putting me at ease, and if The Ex has one fault that probably ensured the demise of the relationship before it even started, she wasn’t really up to that task.

I’m not saying, really, that she had to, or that she’s a failure as a person or a girlfriend because she couldn’t. I’m just saying that, after awhile, it would have been hard to deal with going out all the time and being put into awkward social positions. And, for me, any social position that involves talking to humans, especially when I don’t know them, is pretty awkward.

So, let’s flash-forward to the fall of aught-two. We’d spent a nice summer together, we went back to school, and that’s when I really started staying over at her apartment. She lived in Wicker Park, and I live in the suburbs, so it just made life easier for me. And for her, too, I guess. Heh-heh-heh.

I had more clothes at her place than at my house, I had bought doubles of all my toiletries to keep at her apartment, and most of my DVDs, CDs, and other shit of that ilk were all over there. We shopped together, we ate together, and so on and so forth. It wasn’t long before she came up with this suggestion: “I think you should move in.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” The Ex said. “You practically live here as it is. Wouldn’t it be easier for you to not have to go home all the time when you need stuff? And you quit your job, so it’s not like you have to keep going back for that, which I figured was the only reason why you were even still living at home. And it’s not like I’d make you pay rent — it’d be like it is now, except more of your crap will be here and you wouldn’t have to go home.”

“Hrm,” I replied. “Let me think about it.”

Meanwhile, my brain had exploded. Sure, it would’ve been easier, and it was an innocent enough suggestion, but a word kept flashing in front of my eyes in bright neon: COMMITMENT. No matter how innocent it seems, no matter how convenient it is, moving in with a girlfriend is a fairly big commitment, and I wasn’t sure it was one I was prepared to make.

Sure, things were nice, and they would have been nicer if I had all my shit at her apartment, instead of spread out between two residences. And it would have been nicer to have to commute for 20 minutes instead of 100. And it would have been nicer to be, as my dad so eloquently puts it, shacking up with someone more vital than a loose fist.

For all the niceness, though, things were going a little bit fast. They had been from day one, which maybe was my fault. I made a bold move, I took us to that first step, and while all the subsequent steps had been spearheaded by The Ex, they were immediately approved by me. Too fast for me or not, I’m pretty hard up, so I am not going to turn a woman down. Hear that, ladies?

I expressed most of my fears, somewhat hostilely, to the group of acquaintances I was currently associating with. I needed to vent, and they were there. So, I vented, and they listened. And one of them told The Ex.

I had no idea she had been told anything, but apparently one of those goons took it upon himself to let The Ex know how I feel, so maybe she’d back off a little.

Like every other Tuesday, I got out of my Fiction Writing class at 5:20, and I was expecting The Ex to be waiting for me with open arms so we could watch the second Buffy episode and eat dinner.

I got up to her apartment, opened the door, and she stood in the kitchen (the front door is right off the kitchen), eyes fixed on the door. Scowling.

This was not good.

“Hi,” I said, timidly entering the apartment. I shut the door behind me and tossed my backpack on the floor. “What’s wrong? You look sort of up—”

I hadn’t noticed until right then that her arms were behind her back. This was an unusual stance for her. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her with arms behind the back.

I figured out why soon enough. She raised her right arm. In it was a porcelain dinner plate, which she immediately hurled in the general vicinity of my head. I have slow reflexes, so I didn’t duck or anything until long afterward. Fortunately, her aim is about as good as my reflexes, so she overshot it and the plate exploded over my head. I grabbed my neck to prevent any shards of dinnerware from lodging in one of my many important blood vessels.

I assessed the situation succinctly: “What the fuck?” I noticed she had her arm behind her back again, which led me to believe she also had more dinner plates.

“You don’t want to move in with me?” she asked levelly. This was eerie. The levelness in her voice did not match the rage in her eyes. It was like being in the eye of a storm.

“I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just need to think for—”

“Chris says differently,” she said.

“Chris is an idiot! You’ll listen to him before you listen to me?”

“In this case, yes,” she said. “You seemed hesitant from the start.”

“Of course I’m hesitant,” I said. “This isn’t exactly like buying a new lamp.” This was sort of a dig, since the previous weekend I had introduced her to the magic of Ikea, and she spent approximately three decades trying to choose the lamp that would best reflect her personality. She ended up getting one that vaguely resembled a frog. I never figured out why.

“Oh, fuck you!” she said.

“I think I should leave now,” I decided.

All The Ex said was, “Yes.”

The truth was, while plate-at-head-throwing was a bit extreme, our relationship had been overwhelming tumultuous, probably because we’re both crazy. It seems like it was pretty normal, overall. We had fights about normal, stupid shit. They just happened to be insane, over-the-top shouting matches about normal, stupid shit that doesn’t really mean anything. But I wouldn’t complain about it because, for one thing, I like fighting, and for another, the good times (and there were many more good times than bad) were so much better than the shitty times and the fights and so on. Its goodness nullified anything negative about the relationship.

If I could relive the entire relationship again, including the evening of painful plate-wielding, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Of course, as Austin Powers says, that train has sailed.

After that night, she calmed down a bit. We met, had dinner, and she officially dumped me. I officially tried to convince her to still see me, but she said something that still stings: “I can’t deal with you.” I guess it doesn’t really seem that cold, there in print, but man, in the context and in the tone in which she said it, it was just harsh.

We tried to reconcile again a little later, and went out once, but in the end she simply decided to shout at me for several minutes before I hung up on her.

She never called back.

Posted by Stan on August 28, 2003 10:29 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

August 26, 2003

Life Careens Out of Control

Last night, The Ex appeared on Instant Messenger. Although our long-standing policy of not acknowledging one another’s existence unless it involves public humiliation has not prevented me from removing her from my Instant Messenger buddy list, I just can’t seem to totally drop her from it. So, there she sits, at the very bottom. Maybe I should create a new category for ex-girlfriends whose screen names I have. Or maybe I should take her off altogether.

At any rate, I did what I generally do when people sign on: I checked her info. This is a sort of OCD tendency I have. The info rarely changes, but I still feel the compulsion to get info anyway. Check the profile, check the away message, etc. Normally, hers says nothing.

Last night, it said something. It had a link to a website. A website for a band. A band in which she apparently plays an instrument that she had never, during the course of our torrid five-month attempt at a relationship, expressed an interest in playing. All the other members of the band are men. They are all more attractive than me, which is really not as difficult a feat as one might initially think. They have better teeth, they have better hair, they have better skin, they have more tasteful attire. She’s in a band full of pretty-boys making a concerted effort to not be pretty. And they write better songs than I do.

I immediately leaped to the most obvious conclusion: she is sleeping with everyone else in the band. Logical, no? No, not logical. But it left me with the burning, unnecessary desire to win her back. It’s not because I actually want her back. We had some irreconcilable problems, which will actually be the subject of this Thursday’s flashback (there, you have something to look forward to). It’s more that I don’t want her to be with any of these junior Calvin Klein thug motherfuckers.

It’d also be quite the ego boost if I managed to win her back from one of those guys. While I do realize that it’s not always a physical thing that attracts to people, and in this case, I’d say it’s definitely not, it would be nice to know that I can win a girl back based on the strength of my curmudgeonly personality and my endearing ability to point out every other human being’s shortcomings while largely ignoring or downplaying my own.

This is a bad idea, however. As if I didn’t realize it, it was pointed out to me by Lucy, who expounded, “You’re a fucking idiot.”

“Right,” I responded, fully aware.

And here’s where things got tricky. She said, “Remember when I always used to get back together with my ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” I said. I remember the 378,232 times they broke up and got back together. It made life fun. I started running underground bets on the length they would stay apart.

“How did that make you feel?” Lucy asked.

“Uh…not that good,” I said, adequately summarizing my feelings. I had to wonder, though, what that line of questioning actually meant. I decided I was reading too much into it.

“Well, yeah, now you know how I feel,” she said. Was I not reading too much into it? Surely that was an indication that, being that we get so worked up about one another’s humiliating relationship groveling, there must be something deeper working its mojo between us on a subconscious level.

Nah.

“You can’t go back to her,” she said determinedly. “She has a lot of problems. She needs to grow up. A lot. And you have no guarantee that she’s done that.” This was true, I supposed. When I explained the details of the relationship decline between The Ex and me, Lucy decided that I had done nothing specifically wrong. In fact, everything I said and did was right. She was the one who was wrong — The Ex, therefore, had to pay. In blood.

Lucy just thought, and managed to convince me, that The Ex was immature. She couldn’t handle things, partly because of a lack of experience with men, partly because she was not old or curmudgeonly like Lucy and me. It was bad all around, and me going back to her — or trying to — would be even worse.

“I guess she does,” I agreed, “but I still love her.” This was not an inaccurate statement.

“Yeah, well,” Lucy said, “you should try and stop that.” Echoing a similar sentiment I had expressed to her awhile ago when she was contemplating going back to her ex-boyfriend yet again. It’s amazing how she can spend so much time pretending like she doesn’t listen or doesn’t care, but Lucy manages to remember every damn thing I’ve said to her.

“I know,” I muttered. “I guess I wasn’t really all that serious. I mean, maybe I should go to her show —”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Lucy said.

“But I feel like I should support her,” I said. “I mean, yeah, it’s sort of frustrating that, you know, her life has actually gone on without me, so in that sense I want to set fire to her house. But in the sense of not being crazy, I feel like I should go and let her know that I hope she does okay.”

“Oh, that’s a great idea,” Lucy said, rich with sarcasm. “And then, when she tells you she’s sleeping with the drummer, you can break down and cry in front of her and get down on your hands and knees and beg for her to take you back, because you’re so fucking supportive of her new life.”

“That’s the plan,” I thought of saying, but I shut up. Lucy was stressed for unrelated reasons, and she was yelling at me, which I deserved. I didn’t want to interrupt her and incur that wrath, too.

“You shouldn’t see her again, if you can help it,” Lucy said. “Ever. You shouldn’t be the guy to make any kind of move. She dumped you, and she did it very stupidly, so let her go. If she wants you back, she can come to you.”

Right. That’ll happen.

“You don’t need to support her,” she went on. “You’re not that guy anymore. It’s not your responsibility, and don’t pretend like it is because you think you want to get back together with you. You should just let her go.”

Yeah. I should, and I really haven’t. I mean, sure, I’ve moved on to other failed attempts at failed relationships. I’ve gotten wrapped up in Gina, who I’ve realized, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t really as important to me as I’ve built her up to be. She’s a great friend, and I find her attractive, and there’s really nothing else to it. This is mostly because I’m hung up on The Ex, who wants my heart on a plate and would like to eat my children as dessert.

The Ex is not really the type of person I should hang myself up on. She’s a rusty meat-hook of doom, to use the worst metaphor I’ve ever subjected my loyal fan to.

Yet, I am hung up on her. To a maddening extent. One could argue that I should go to her concert, because something will happen, and either it’ll get her out of my head or it’ll make things infinitely worse. I either get to move on or embed the rusty meat-hook further into my gangrenous back.

Then again, time heals all wounds, right? Eventually I’ll move on, and I’ll stop being in this emo funk, and then the two readers I have now will run away in droves, scouring the LiveJournal community for somebody whose life is as angst-ridden and pathetic as mine. And we don’t want that, do we?

What I’d like, in the fantasy world that I prefer over my actual life, is for some woman to just show up, like in a really shitty Nora Ephron movie, and make me forget about The Ex altogether. Drive that demon out of my subconscious and make me a forward-thinking individual commitment to the growth and development of the company. I mean — the relationship.

But, as we all know, that’s never going to happen. I can bury The Ex as far down as possible, but she’ll always be there, ruining my life.

One could argue (“one” being “Lucy”) that dating The Ex was the worst mistake of my life, but I don’t think so. Of course, things aren’t exactly peachy-keen, but I’d like to believe that they’ll get there.

I’m trying to get them there, anyway…

Posted by Stan on August 26, 2003 1:04 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

August 14, 2003

The Pussy

Regarding my current, whiny situation with Gina, I have been told many things by three people, but one sticks close to what I actually believe: “Stop being a pussy and make a move.” It makes sense. Either that, or I could continue being a pussy but at least shut the fuck up about it so as not to irritate or alienate my dear and gentle reader. But no, I decided that today was the day to make a move. Or, at least, to make the preamble to making a move, setting up a situation so that move-making will be in my favor.

The only problem: I made it on the wrong person.

I got down to the lab around 9:30, when it opened, and checked to see if my film had come back. It hadn’t, so I flirted with the blonde in the lab for awhile before wandering around to steal donuts from the orientation spread. I called Gina, who had just gotten out of the shower and informed me that her alarm was set for PM instead of AM, so she wouldn’t be down until around noon.

Damn.

So, I called Lucy, who I knew wouldn’t be awake in any sense of the word, and left a message indicating that (1) my film wasn’t back yet and (2) I was not bound to any set class schedule, so if she wanted to go out, that’d be cool. I walked to the bookstore down the street and wasted some money on a Hubert Selby Jr. novel. He was recommended to me by my Fiction Writing professor, but the writing style still makes me want to die. The book is decent, if you can get around his style choices (I am trying to). I can see why it appealed to her, though.

Eventually, Pothead showed up and told me she was going to be editing. She was looking even more super-hot than usual, and I was about to wipe the drool off my chin and follow her when I ran into my professor in the hall.

“Hey, Stan, what up?” he said. Seriously, he talks like that. He does the same blatant white-man-trying-to-act-black schtick that I’ve done since high school. I think that’s why he throws around words like “genius” and “brilliant” when he grades my bullshit projects.

“Nothing,” I said sheepishly. I explained that I was waiting for Gina, who at that point was supposed to arrive at any moment (I stopped caring when I saw Pothead, however — I am a horrible monster), and my film hadn’t come back yet, so I wasn’t editing.

“Oh,” he said, half-caring. He was pretending for the sake of the fact that he likes me. He didn’t really care, though, and I have a tendency to ramble (obviously), so I think he got sort of bored when it took me seven minutes to explain what I just explained in one sentence. “Well, have fun.”

“Right,” I said, chuckling.

He kept going, but then stopped and whirled back around. “Hey,” he said, and immediately I knew that he had pretty much rehearsed this entire scene in his head. Maybe that was another reason why he didn’t care. His entire intent was to ask me the following question: “Remember when we did those comment cards?”

No, really, he asked that question, and it does lead somewhere.

“Yeah,” I responded. About three weeks ago, he had us write, on a half-sheet of paper, basic comments regarding the course and what we have learned so far as film majors.

“You didn’t happen to write something about how this class has made you lose all motivation to become a filmmaker?” He paused, and I had nothing to say. “Did you?” he said with more urgency.

Still, I had no response. It sounded like something I would say on a bad day. I’m not really big on the production or directing aspects of making movies. I’ve always been a writer, pretty much. I don’t enjoy the controlled chaos, the responsibility, or the headaches that come with being a producer or director. I just want to write, get paid, and go back to bed.

I didn’t remember writing anything like that, though. I was pretty happy and caffeinated at the time we filled out those comments, so I think I probably mixed my usual blend of sarcastic hilarity with some genuine comments about the quality of my education.

I told him, “I don’t really remember what I wrote. It doesn’t really sound like something I’d write.”

“Oh,” he said, and his face sort of fell.

“I mean,” I decided to elaborate, “I’ve always been more of a writer type. I’ve always said that. I just happen to like writing dialogue a great deal, which made me want to write screenplays, which made me go to film school.” This is essentially true, although I find myself diving more and more back into fiction. I do love dialogue, and I love the way people speak, but I also like creating a completely artificial, imagined visual. You can’t tap the imagination with film like you can in books (actually, you can, you just don’t see it much, but that’s a whole other rant).

“Right,” my professor said, “I realize that.”

“I just don’t like production. I don’t like being in charge of everything. Maybe if I had an actual crew or something, or if I was actually good at it —”

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short like that,” he cut me off, the bastard. “You have much more talent than you give yourself credit for.”

That was a somewhat unexpected compliment, and I appreciated it. However, I am awful at articulating appreciation in words, so I said, “Hrm. Well, let’s see how my five-minute turns out.”

“Even if it turns out bad,” he said, neglecting to add “like your two-minute,” “you can turn it into something good, I’m sure.”

I wasn’t so sure, but he was being very pleasant, so I didn’t want to shit all over his complimentary statements. “At any rate,” I said, “it wasn’t me. I’m not really sure of anyone in class who it might be.” This was basically a lie, and I knew the only person it could be: Fellow, whose two-minute film was a disaster and who is borderline incompetent technically. His film had a good idea behind it, but it was so poorly executed, none of that really mattered.

Plus, he had told me that he no longer had any ambition to be a filmmaker as a result of this class. Not as the result of a vendetta with the professor or anything like that — just, the complexity of the class and the reflection of his real-world abilities have shown him that this just is not his thing. It’s a reasonable assessment, not unlike the one I made in Production I, which made me drop the “directing” part from my concentration.

I didn’t say anything to my professor, though. I’m no snitch, unless it’s something really serious, like if Fellow had said, “Gosh, this class makes me want to commit suicide. Where did I leave my gun?” Actually, in this particular case, I’d probably nod with understanding and attend the funeral.

Also, I wasn’t sure if the professor would give Fellow an enlightening pep talk or a reprimand. He seems more like the enlightening pep talk type, but if he was forced to show these comment cards to his superiors, he may be getting in trouble as the result of loss-of-ambition comments, and therefore it may be a reprimand, or at least a stern lecture.

I went on my merry way, and I bugged/hit on Pothead for awhile. Like most women, she’s completely uninterested in me, but she finds me hilarious, so I get to gawk at her and say amusing things and so on. I’m basically a modern court jester, which is depressing when I think about it.

About half an hour later, Gina finally arrived. We talked about a bunch of shit, and I watched the “dailies” of her five-minute film. It looks amazing. You can tell she’s a cinematography concentration. If my film looks an eighth as good as hers, I will be happy.

Then, we three — myself, Gina, and Pothead — discussed a rager that is supposed to be going on tomorrow. I was wondering if anybody had been called about it, because I hadn’t, but I always have the paranoid (and accurate) suspicion that I’m purposely being left out. Neither Pothead nor Gina had been called, and they both thought they were being left out, too. Now you see why I’m attracted to them. Hotness + paranoia = dream woman.

Pothead said the party was too late, so she wasn’t going. I told Gina I had no interest in going, but I’d go with her if she wanted, too. Remember the secret theory I had the other day? I thought it would be a really great idea to put that theory into action tomorrow at the party. See, it’d all work under the same set of circumstances: we’d both get too stoned to drive, and we’d have to crash at the apartment where the party is being held (which is kosher), with sexy results.

But Gina said she didn’t particularly want to go, either, and she had to work until 8, and probably the last thing she would want to do is go into Chicago for a party she won’t even have fun at. A woman after my own heart, I maintain. She did say she would call if she decided to go, because I’d probably be the only other one not drinking/smoking up, so we could keep each other company. Mmm-hmm.

About 10 minutes after this conversation, Lucy called me back. She summed up her needs fairly succinctly, “Leave right now. We are going out.”

“Okay,” I responded. I said my goodbyes to Pothead and an amused Gina (Gina knows quite a bit about Lucy, and the fact that I’m so whipped by somebody I’m not even dating is a constant source of mirth and hilarity to her), and I hopped on the train and came back home.

Lucy and I ran some errands together and had dinner. Somehow, our conversation turned toward failed relationships, a subject I’m somewhat of an expert on, and I spent an hour or so acting as therapist. The surprising thing was that her situation is almost identical to mine, which made me somewhat suspicious, but I managed to actually give her halfway decent advice that I can’t follow myself.

Isn’t that always the way? I know how to fix all of my problems; I just can’t bring myself to do it. For some reason, I like the chaos. Lucy said almost the exact same thing, though. Apparently, several guys have confessed their eternal, undying love for her in recent months, and she refuses to date them, citing the fact that they will sort of be like willing slaves, which would be cool for awhile, but it’d get boring after awhile. Relationships need conflict. Not an unhealthy amount, necessarily, but enough to keep things from being completely dull.

Of course, based on all the stuff she ranted about, I summarized the way she felt pretty aptly. I was proud of that. No details, however. Fuck off, sluts.

She said, “I’m afraid I’m just going to marry somebody, just to settle. So I don’t have to think about it anymore.”

I thought about that for a second. Right now, the way I feel, I’d be lucky to just marry some random girl. It’d be like a shortcut, and I can sidestep all the bullshit of actually having a relationship. Plus, my relatives wouldn’t keep putting two and two together and assuming I’m gay. Or, if they did, they’d at least be proud that I did the right thing and entered into a marriage of convenience.

I think it’d be nice, though, to marry somebody like Lucy. Not to date them, or have any of the weird relationship crap, but just marry her. Like, we’d keep the exact same friendship we have now, but we’d add an official license and sex to the equation. Of course, the rational part of my mind is aware of the fact that nothing is ever even remotely that simple. Also, considering how often we get on each others’ nerves, and I mean really get on each others’ nerves, we wouldn’t actually be able to have any sharp implements within a 10-mile radius of our house.

It’s just a bad idea. I mean, it’s great and practical in theory, but in practice, I guarantee you it would end with three column inches in the obits that end with “…before turning the gun on himself.”

Finally, I responded. “Hey, you wanna go to this party tomorrow and get stoned?”

I probably shouldn’t have said that.

“What party?” she asked.

I explained.

“Yeah, I’ll go.” Strangely, we had spent about 20 minutes talking about how they should legalize pot, because (in Lucy’s opinion) it’s much more fun and probably safer than alcohol or tobacco, but the thing that keeps her from smoking up constantly is the legality of it. I actually agreed with her stance on this, though she didn’t agree with my stance that marijuana should be legalized, but tobacco and alcohol should be illegalized. I thought she was going to stab me with a fork. See what I mean when I say we get on each others’ nerves?

“Cool,” I said, although I immediately realized the dangerous line I’ve begun to tow when I invited Lucy to this party.

See, I do have some feelings toward Lucy, but it’s pure lust. I love her as a friend, in as platonic a way as Plato loved Socrates (wait, bad example). I think she’s a wonderful person when she isn’t pissing me the hell off, or when she isn’t making me feel guilty for pissing her off, and I really like being with her and so on, but that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t have any flowery feelings that make me melt into an Amelie-esque puddle of emotude.

I do, however, find her extremely attractive, and she thinks I’m terrifying and fat (she is correct). But I guess you can see why it’d be nice to enter into a marriage contract with her. We basically get along as friends, and I really yearn for her to plunder me sexually. If that isn’t marriage-worthy love, I don’t know what is!

I think I may have written this on my blog before, but maybe I haven’t. If not, I probably should have, as it has pretty much become my mantra of late:

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

Subconscious sabotage, man. I don’t really know if my subconscious knows what’s best for me, but let’s hope that it does, since it seems to be the one steering the ship at this juncture. Every time I think I consciously know what I want, I do nearly the complete opposite and invariably make things worse for myself. For awhile, anyway.

Right now, I have a few options options. One is to absolutely insist that Gina come to the party and tell Lucy that I am not allowed to invite outsiders to our class party, so she can’t go (this would be what the French call “a big fat lie”).

Another is to confirm that Gina can’t go to the party, bring Lucy along, and risk the horrible ramifications in the event that something actually happens.

A third is to simply not go at all. Tell Gina I won’t go even if she does, and tell Lucy that it’s a Columbia-only affair. And then hide under my bed.

And the final one that I can think of is that both Gina and Lucy will come to the party. Gina and Lucy have both expressed an interest, to me, in meeting one another, even though they both know and/or fear that they’ll hate the other. So, they can meet, and in a Twilight Zone twist, they’ll both take some bong hits and end up in a hot den of lesbian love. Or, more likely, everything will become extremely awkward and I’ll have to run home. And then hide under my bed.

I’m thinking the smartest bet, considering my situation, is to either drag Gina to the party, or if I absolutely can’t, just not go.

So, I guess I’ll be bringing Lucy.

Posted by Stan on August 14, 2003 11:00 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

August 10, 2003

How High

I got kind of stoned last night. It wasn’t really planned, but I’ll get to that. I’d been thinking it’d be good, just for the relaxation. I’ve been so stressed this summer, and not just because of my class. Of course, every time I thought, “Gosh, I need the ganja” (yeah, I usually do think in those terms, believe it or not), I also thought, “But I’ll only feel all right for an hour, and then I’ll just feel more nauseous, paranoid, and confused than usual.” And that’s not really cool. But that first hour is nice.

Anyway, Gina and I sort of manufactured this party out of thin air, so we could shoot the “party” scene in her film. Normally, the way this would be done on a rag-tag independent film would be to bring in prop liquor, prop pot, etc., and shoot all your stuff with everybody faking it. Unfortunately, the party had started about an hour or two before we even got there, so it was a little bit difficult to control the circumstances.

We actually pulled off the shots, and it seemed like everybody was having fun despite the fact that it was roughly 180 degrees and extremely bright (goddamn lights).

Now, I don’t really smoke weed often. The last time was after a Weezer concert in Milwaukee, which was about four months before they released the green album. I don’t really remember when that was, but it’s been a few years. And the last time I had smoked up prior to that was, um, eighth grade or so. Like I said, I don’t do it much.

I also didn’t do it last night. My point, and I do have one, is that I have an extremely low tolerance, so the contact buzz that I got was pretty much more than enough to even make me have trouble driving home. It felt all right for awhile, as per usual, but by the time Gina dropped me off at my car, it had gotten to that weird point.

I was going to call Lucy before I left. This was a stupid idea, and I sort of knew it but mostly didn’t care. I figured I’d talk to her for a little while, and then hopefully I’d be all right to drive by the time I got off the phone with her. She didn’t answer, though, so I left a basically incoherent message and asked her to call me back.

I was not entirely okay to drive, but I drove anyway, mostly because I’m retarded but partly because I was a bit stoned. I kept stopping at stop signs in the middle of the intersection. It’s nice that Gurnee Mills was empty and there are no stop signs on the expressway. Otherwise, that could have caused problems. Every time the road curved, it was like some magic trick of physics. I was utterly stunned by it. And I almost careened across three lanes of traffic to make a stop at the Wendys oasis on the way home.

In short, I almost did several stupid things but was not quite stoned enough to actually do them. I guess that’s a good thing.

At the party, I contemplated manufacturing a really ridiculous situation with Gina. See, she took me over to her house before the party so she could feed her dog, who is adorable, and she explained that her parents were out of town. My reaction to that was “Hrm.” Then, she said her boyfriend had to work the morning shift, so he wouldn’t be at the party and would probably be at home, asleep, by the time she finished. My reaction to that was “Hrm.”

I thought to myself, at the party, “Golly, if I smoked a joint, I’d be too high to drive myself home, and she’d probably offer to let me stay at her place. Overnight.” That cued the funky wah-wah music of porn in my head. A big Part B to that is that if I ended up doing something stupid, making a clumsy, Torgo-esque pass, I could just blame it on the weed and we could move past it without making an issue.

See, my theory is that she wants me to make the first move, but I’m afraid to because, you know, what if she doesn’t? Then, I’ve ruined the friendship. The trick is to be under the influence of some illegal substance or another, because then if you make the pass and she digs it, you’re in like flint. But if she gets all repulsed and shoves a bowl of dog food into your face, knocks you unconscious with a Buddha-shaped bottle of Kahlua, and then calls the police, the next day you can call her from your cell and explain that it was just the pot.

It seemed like a great plan, but I didn’t go through with it. I didn’t want her to lose respect for me because I (1) smoked pot and/or (2) made foolish passes at her while under the influence. It was bad enough that, while I was all relaxed and completely unconcerned with pretty much anything I am usually concerned with, I pretty much spent all of my time staring at Gina’s breasts. She was wearing this spaghetti-strapped tanktop, with no bra, and every time she bent over (which was often, since we were moving equipment all over the place), I unabashedly stared at her breasts. I think I have the tan line memorized.

I don’t think she noticed, really, and if she did, I guess she didn’t care. She had to have noticed, because I’m 90% sure my mouth was sort of hanging open and was almost to the point of drooling with idiocy. My entire face must have read, “Ooh, breasts.”

At this point, I will reiterate the fact that keeps occurring to me: I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I feel like a sort of unwilling participant in my life. I hate that feeling, but there it is.

Posted by Stan on August 10, 2003 10:38 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

August 8, 2003

The Long Day

We’re allowed to reserve cameras for two days a week, but the tricky thing about the summer is that the film cage is closed on Fridays, so if you reserve on Thursday, Friday is a freebie (in the sense that it doesn’t count as one of your two days) and you don’t have to turn the camera in until Saturday morning.

You can also do what they call “scamming.” They’ll hold reservations until a certain point in the day, and after that, any Joe Schmoe with no reservation can show up and say, “Give me a camera” and get it, assuming they have the equipment (they do in the summer).

I stupidly forgot to take any of that into account. I was planning to shoot my five-minute on Wednesday, so I reserved the camera for Tuesday, when I had class, so I would be able to start earlier on Wednesday. That means I used up my two days already. I blew my wad. Which meant that I had to be to school at 9 so I could drop off all the equipment. Which meant that I’d be wasting pretty much a full day sitting around until class.

It would have been smarter, in retrospect, to scam on Tuesday and reserve Wednesday through Friday, so I would be able to just drive in on Saturday morning (it takes about 20 minutes on Saturdays, as opposed to the usual 45-60), drop the shit off, and go home. No muss, no fuss. Too bad I’m an idiot.

So, I called Gina on Tuesday night, and she agreed to meet me in the morning, so we could hang out while we waited for class. We were both finished editing; we just needed to lay off the films to VHS, which takes approximately as much time as your film takes to play. What would we do with the remaining four hours? Gina decided it would be a good idea to fill it with awkwardness and confusion.

See, she keeps saying things that confuse me. Granted, most things women say confuse me. Usually, it helps when they solidify their points by throwing things at me. I can often tell what, exactly, they mean by the heft of the thrown object. But Gina is too nice. She doesn’t throw things, and she doesn’t seem to ever get mad at me. This is sort of a new thing, since I generally have driven myself into a rut wherein I make various women angry at me at least once a week.

At any rate, confusion. She’s begun talking extensively over the past few weeks about breaking up with her boyfriend. She never really cites specific reasons why, and she always stops herself and says something to the effect of, “Why would I ever break up with him? He’ll do anything for me.” I can’t help but wonder if maybe she wanted that at the time they began dating, but now it’s sort of old.

I also can’t help but wonder if, perhaps, the increasing closeness of our relationship is causing her to think about these things. Perhaps my sense of husky aloofness attracts her. She puzzlingly complimented my sense of humor the other day. I was telling her some things about The Ex and how she sort of got tired of me for one unspecific reason or another.

Gina said, “But you’re so sarcastic.”

“Yeah, I think that probably had something to do with it,” I said.

“Well, I couldn’t imagine that,” she said. “I think a sense of humor is the most important thing possible, and yours is great.”

This, to me, being somebody who attempts to be amusing semi-professionally (and mostly fails at it), was akin to her saying, “You have the most enormous and beautiful male sexual organ I have ever seen, and my first boyfriend’s was eight inches!”

But, see, that’s the thing. She knows that about me. She knows that if she compliments either my humor or my writing, I will be her willing plaything until she gets sick of me and dumps me. I am not really fickle when it comes to the ladies (nor should I be). I just have a desperate need for approval, and if they dole out said approval, I’m theirs.

Anyway, yesterday, Gina kept saying little random things about dumping her boyfriend. And she got somewhat obscenely irritated when I told her I had a bit of a crush on one of the girls in the editing lab. Not like a “By gum, I think I’m in love” sort of thing — just a minor, flirtacious, “Golly, I admire her chipmunk smile and her not-quite-emo-but-still-thick-and-black glasses and her shortness.”

I told Gina about that, and I said, “I think when the semester ends, I might ask her out, since I probably won’t see her again after this class.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gina snapped. She’s never snapped before.

“Why?” I said.

“Well, for one thing, you don’t even know her name,” Gina said.

She won that round. It’s true, I don’t know her name. Still, that’s easily rectified. I could say something clever, such as, “Hey, what was your name again?” Problem solved.

But was she being overprotective as the result of a sense of jealousy, or was it just because she knows me, and she knows I’m borderline retarded, and I’ll pretty much ask out anyone who gives me the time of day, even if they’re paid to give me the time of day? These are the things I’m not certain of.

I tried to sort of gauge her level of jealousy by telling her a story I recently heard about one of our other friends. It basically told a similar story to what I believe our situation is: two people feel a mutual attraction, one of them was dating someone else so they kept their distance, but now one of them has decided to inform the other that she’s fallen in love with him, and she wants him to dump his girlfriend.

I’m not really saying our situation is as heavy as that — it’s definitely not love, if it’s anything — but it is a similar situation. Gina’s reaction to that was not nearly as garish, world-weary, or well-informed as it normally is. I would have expected her to say essentially what the guy in that story thought: that, yeah, he feels the attraction, too, but it’s proximity based, so he doesn’t want to fuck up a good thing for a relationship that will fizzle out as soon as the summer session ends.

Normally, this is the sort of logic that Gina attaches to a situation. This time, though, her reaction was very different: she grew quietly sullen, and her only response was that the guy needs to assess his real feelings about this girl and make a decision.

It helped only in the sense that it didn’t rid me of the impression that she wants to dump her boyfriend in favor of me. It’s still too soon to say or do anything stupid, but I get the impression that she’s sort of sticking with her boyfriend because I don’t get off my lazy ass and make a move. I’m going to spend some more time trying to gauge that before I humiliate myself more than usual.

I also went to Lucy’s house for a little while last night. I told her what’s up, and she gave me some pretty solid advice, I think. Her take on it was that, assuming I’m reading her right (I’m probably not, but I’d like to think I am), Gina’s pretty needy if she isn’t willing to take the risk of being single for more than a week in order to take a chance on somebody like me, especially when it’s almost completely unlikely that I’d say no.

Of course, I suppose I could understand it. I’ve loudly expressed my unwillingness to get into a relationship after my last one; this is partly true, but mostly stated so that Gina would constantly fear that I’m trying to make a move on her. It’s understandable that she would want the security of a guy who provides her with quite a bit of financial and emotional security.

I don’t really know what to think about it. It’s turning into a melodramatic mess of high school proportions. That’s one thing I’ll give to The Ex: our relationship was pretty normal and basically lacking in drama, and when it was over, she let me know in her own special way. And it was pretty much over after that; no muss, no fuss.

Until the few occasions I’ve bumped into her.

Or the two weeks she put me on unofficial “Oh-Jesus-he’s-going-to-do-something-stupid” watch and kept following me around during my classes.

Okay, so that mess took up most of the morning. It was followed by three or so hours of class, during which we watched and discussed most of the class’s two-minute films. Mine was easily the worst. I hate it a lot. However, the professor seemed to “get” it (which is really the most important thing, since he’s grading it), and I did get some nice compliments from the other students. In comparison, though, mine was a dog.

If anybody’s interested — and I’m sure most of the 8-bits crew will be — I can rip it.

After that, I pretty much went home, then went to Lucy’s and watched the unbelievably terrible new Ren & Stimpy, and then went home and collapsed.

Posted by Stan on August 8, 2003 9:47 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 20, 2003

The Incredible Waste of Time

I have to stop skipping my politics class. Of course, I say this knowing full well that there are only two sessions left (yay for having Memorial Day off!), and one of them is the final, so I definitely can’t miss anymore. But, you know, I’ve been skipping it for two perfectly legitimate reasons (ha!): (1) I pretty much enjoy my sad life of following around The Crush like a lost puppy and being surprised that she still wants to talk to me, and (2) I really, really can’t stand being in the same room with The Cheat without having any allies.

And in my politics class, he’s the one who has all the allies. Every time I get in there and want to bitch about him, I feel like I’m in a Twilight Zone episode where he’s the king emperor of losers who are interested in how Bon Jovi set up their amps.

So I’ve been cutting class. The prof doesn’t seem to give a shit. I’ve seen her on my way out the last two times, and she’s just said “Hi” to me like it’s no big deal. Maybe she sees me following around the sole attractive girl who is willing to talk to me and understands. I really don’t know.

At any rate, like I normally do, I went to my humanities class. I was pretty excited when I saw The Cheat’s Girlfriend, but no actual sign of The Cheat. My elation was not long-lived, however, because he showed up shortly before class began. But class became a little unusual, as The Workhorse and I made a completely passive attempt at rebellion.

The Workhorse has, for the past two weeks, had a “no talking” rule in effect with regards to The Cheat, but it hasn’t been a very effective form of passive resistance, because The Cheat doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, anyway. It would be more effective if I had done that, because apparently I am his best friend now.

But we decided it’s time to do something bold, something different, something The Crush insisted we do and we both listened because, as we have discussed, we both have crushes on her. When we were asked to shove ourselves into small groups to discuss portions of our weekend reading, The Crush insisted we form a group with her.

This is abnormal; usually, she goes into a group with a couple of other girls, and The Workhorse and I form a group with The Cheat and The Girlfriend. That’s how we ended up doing our midterm project together. That’s how it’s been since the beginning of the semester. But not anymore! The Workhorse and I changed desks and shoveled ourselves into a group while the stunned and baffled Cheat and his complacent and apathetic Girlfriend looked on.

“Well, fuck you, too,” The Cheat said, defeated. I actually kinda felt bad because they were two, cut loose into space, with no real group. And nobody wanted to join theirs. It reached a point where The Professor pleaded with other groups to donate one or two people to form a group with them. I was pretty close to giving up and joining their group, to take a hit for the team, when The Professor volunteered two others.

After class, I cut politics again (hence my seemingly disconnected rant at the beginning of this entry) and decided to keep The Crush company while she edited her Image Design film. I recall the pain and torment of editing by hand, alone, in a darkened room, bored out of my mind, so I figured it’d be worth the effort to keep her company. Plus, honestly, it’d be more fun than politics.

So we wandered down to the film building, checked out editing equipment, and tried to find a room in which to edit. Being that it’s getting close to the end of the semester, most people are editing like madmen, so most of the spaces were filled up. We found one nearly empty room, and we discovered it was nearly empty because (1) a class had just gotten out and (2) another class was meeting in half an hour. So she just bummed a projector off some guy to watch her footage. It turned out pretty well.

In my wanderings around the fifth floor, I kept seeing The Filmmaker wandering around like a dope, as always with camera, tripod, and lighting kit in tow. And half the people on the floor kept recognizing me as “the guy from The Filmmaker’s film.” I had no idea I was famous among Production I students, but I guess that’s the price you pay for giving such a well-rounded (by which I mean I am overweight) performance.

Since we couldn’t find an editing room, The Crush decided to check out her slides. Apparently another part of her Image Design project was to tell a story using photographic slides, so she needed to check them out, arrange them, and make sure they weren’t all assed up by the people in the film cage.

She asked me to wait outside one of the lecture halls, which apparently had a lighted table (I have no idea if there’s a technical term for this or not) so she could examine the slides. She said, “I’ll only be a minute.” At this time, I was already mildly bored. To be honest, manually cutting and taping film always gave me the sort of ghoulish rush that solving quadratic equations gave me. I am not particularly good at either, which is why I think I have such a tremendous feeling of victory when I do it, even if I am doing it badly or incorrectly.

Standing around is slightly less exciting. Especially when you’re standing outside a lecture hall, like a dope, holding all of her editing equipment, thinking that this is the longest minute of my life.

It was actually more like ten minutes. I stood there, somewhat enjoying the fact that, despite how irritated and bored I was, I was doing something pertinent to help The Crush. Finally, she came out and whispered, “I don’t know how long I’m going to be.”

“Okay,” I said, and she shushed me. My irritating, booming voice would apparently disturb the guy in the lecture hall, who I just thought was rambling incoherently.

“Listen,” she whispered, “do you have to go or something? I mean, I could just take this stuff. You shouldn’t have to stand around like this.”

“Well,” I said, glancing at my watch. It was almost 1:45, the time my politics class was supposed to get out. She shushed me once again, so I decided maybe I should actually whisper. “This is the time I normally leave, so I could go.”

“Do you want to go? I mean, I’m just checking these slides. I’m not going to be editing or anything because I guess there isn’t any room. I’ll just come in Friday and try to get it all done,” she whispered. “I was just going to go home after this, so you really don’t have to stand around waiting for me.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering why her statement was filled with so much of the backstory that I left out. I guess I must have embellished that a little because I’m too lazy to go back and fill in the plot holes.

She shushed me a third time, and I started to feel like a tool.

“Let me take that,” The Crush whispered, taking the split and take-up reels out of my hands. I grabbed the MovieScop (it’s foreign, so it doesn’t get an “e” at the end) and handed it to her.

“I’ll see you on Wednesday,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“Hey, are we still doing that registration thing?”

“Uh…” I had totally forgotten about the registration thing. A week from Monday, we were both going to get up at the asscrack of dawn and meet in the film building for summer registration, so we could guarantee slots in Production II. I was in charge of providing the coffee and donuts. Also, I had completely forgotten about it.

I had assumed, over the weekend, that it was a waste of time. As I understood the paperwork I’d received, getting clearance for online registration for the fall meant that I was cleared to register, from home, for late summer registration, late fall registration, and add/drop for summer and fall. I didn’t think it was necessary to get up at 6 a.m., on the first day of what would be a short and irritating summer, so I could shower, hop a train, get coffee and donuts, and sit around for two and a half hours waiting for registration to actually open.

But, hell, I was gonna do it. The Crush was gonna be there. I’d be an idiot not to. Or possibly I’d be an idiot to. Or possibly that sentence was terrible.

After I used the “uh” to grapple with such thoughts, I whispered, “Yeah, we can do that. It’ll be fun.” I realized later on that this registration thing would be the perfect way to get her contact information (yeah, I still haven’t done that yet), because I’d need to call or possibly e-mail her to straighten out the details of “the registration thing.”

“Cool,” The Crush said. “I’ll see you later.” She waltzed back into the lecture hall.

I went home.

Posted by Stan on May 20, 2003 11:54 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

May 4, 2003

Why Women Make Me Die

When we left off, I was hanging in perilous female limbo in a McDonald’s located at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Jackson Boulevard in beautiful Chicago, Illinois. It is Monday, April 21st, 2003, and I have just received some pitiful advice from an acquaintance I have taken to calling The Cheat.

“So then what happened?” you ask with bated and somewhat foul-smelling breath.

Nothing particularly interesting. But I’m going to write about it anyway, because I can.

What happened was this: I finished lunch and left the McDonald’s. I started walking down Wabash to the film building, because I needed to register for summer classes so I can graduate sometime before 2008.* As I walked, I started to think about what The Cheat said about getting women’s numbers not because he was desperate to get involved with a woman, but to prove that he could.

Suddenly, that overwhelmingly stupid perspective on things seemed downright enlightening. I never have been one to just randomly walk up to a woman and try to get her to go out with me, based purely on the fact that she looks attractive to me across the smoky and dank dwelling in which we are both seated. There are two reasons for this:

1. My appearance is frightening to other human beings with functioning eyes. Therefore, I need to break some kind of terror barrier to get a woman to acknowledge me as the ruggedly masculine hunk of beef that I am. I usually do this with my disarming charm and my impeccable and often irritating wit (and believe it or not, once in awhile it actually works).
2. A girl sitting across a bar does not exactly scream “relationship potential!” to me. Sure, it is possible she’s sitting in a bar for the same loser reasons I am sitting in a bar, in which case we’d be perfect together. But that’s unlikely.

But, when I thought about it, if there’s no real intent behind my actions, if my goal is small enough, maybe it is worth the effort of going up to a random girl and flirting with her. If I stop thinking, “Gosh, I probably won’t want to marry her” and start thinking, “I wonder if I could get her phone number,” I’d keep my mad flirting skills honed while at the same time proving my self-confidence until I become what every man aspires to be: an ADD case who cheats on his girlfriend.

Epiphanies like these are what keep me out of the good schools.

So I was deeply mired in these thoughts when I realized I could see, through the magic of what little peripheral vision I have, a girl standing next to me. She seemed attractive, although it’s difficult to tell when she is squished up in the recesses of side-vision. I thought it might be a good idea to turn, confirm the attractiveness, and possibly say something witty.

So I turned, confirmed the attractiveness, and said, “Man, this is a busy street.”

SCORE!!!

She smiled nervously. Clearly, I wasn’t a hobo, which I supposed played in my favor. “Yeah,” she said, her voice as nervous as her smile. Or maybe she was just irritated.

“Do you go to Columbia?” I asked, trying to raise the complexity of the conversation.

“Yes,” she said. This was good, because now I could start bitching about any number of horrible things that are wrong with our school, and she would immediately agree and enjoy our newfound rapport.

Instead of doing that, I said, “I was just going down to 1104 South to register for summer classes.”

“Oh yeah? Me too.”

Cool. We were going to the same place, which — unless she decided to cross the street to avoid walking near me, which hardly ever happens anymore — meant I would have an excuse to walk with her for a few blocks, and maybe even wait in line with her to register.

“Are you a film major?” she asked. This is a common question at Columbia. Not to discriminate against the many other fine majors one can choose at our school, but you’re either a film major or “not a film major.” Either that, or I have the greasy, unkempt look of a man destined to be behind a camera for the rest of his life.

At any rate, I replied affirmatively, and she explained that she was a Fiction Writing major. This gave us something somewhat legitimate to talk about.

“I was thinking of changing my major to Fiction Writing,” I said, and I actually was for reasons that aren’t particularly relevant right now, “but I want to graduate sometime before the end of the decade, so I figured I’d better stick with film.”

“Ah,” she said, and smiled (not nervously this time).

Right about this time, the light changed, and we started crossing the behemothic intersection. We kept on talking as we walked down Wabash, and we actually got along quite well, despite the fact that most Fiction majors are pretty loopy. She was actually grounded somewhere in this plane of reality, which made my conversations with her seem a lot less like a William S. Burroughs convention.

Eventually, we reached the film building and both got into the registration line. We continued talking as we waited, when I spied across the room something so overwhelmingly e