I need The Boss playing in my living room too...

(On the plus side, if this is me in a few years, chicks will still dig me.)

Yep, in a turn that moves this blog more and more towards scary, LiveJournal-esque territory, I’m going to take a break from rants on reading, movies, The OC, and talk about my dating life.

Don’t worry, it’s just a phase, and once I get it out, we’ll return to your regularly scheduled rants.

(Side note: if you’re looking for me to make jokes about the ATF and the ninja, sorry, it won’t happen. I waited too late and all the good jokes have been made. I only wish some PhD student or someone else that was at UGA in 1999 or 2000 would draw a cartoon relating the event to former Red and Black columnist John “the Ninja” Ninjawan (you know, the guy that did the cartoons prior to the Mack Williams era).)

But basically, I’m doing this for free psycho-analysis. Also because I can, and it’s one of those thoughts/discussion-stirrers I wanted to share.

The Set-up: in High Fidelity we’re presented with the protagonist bemoaning that, in one way or another, all his relationships were based on the pattern of his first, barely pubescent relationship with Alison Ashmore (which really sounds like the name of a girl who would go onto work in Vivid Video films, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

And eventually, after reading the book multiple times and watching the DVD even more times, I’ve become convinced that the book/film’s thesis is at least somewhat true for me.

It’s not true of every relationship (that goodness for that), but for the big ones…well, you decide.

The backstory: in elementary school I was more or less Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes, sadly some readers may be too young to remember this cartoon strip) and she was my Susie. (I can't really get into what this implies for you deprived young'uns, so see what Wikipedia can tell you.) The main differences were that I actually studied (and gained semi-freak show attention for reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy in fourth grade) wheras Calvin failed anything non-dinosaur-related (which meant basically: everything) and Jessica had blonde hair instead of brunette.

It was terrible little boy puppy love crush stuff (I won’t get into real detail but here’s one tidbit to make fun of me with later: when the INXS song “Never Tear Us Apart” came on I would day dream about slow dancing with her to it.

I know.

Don’t even say it.

Seriously…I’ll stop writing

(See...told you.)

Ok, so perhaps I had it coming.

Anyway. That part never happened.

On with the story, as John Barth would say, s.v.p.?)

But, the thing to keep in mind was this was late 3^rd grade, early 4^th grade, and while I may have been three to ten months older than my friends (ripe for dumb peer pressure, which would repeat later when I claimed that the reason I was a little older was I failed preschool, rather than explain that my late August birthday presented my folks with the dilemma of having the youngest kid or one of the oldest throughout school and they figured the older one’d have a better shot, because smart kids were ridiculed in middle school) it was the age of cooties and I could not dare admit that yes Jessica, I did have a crush on you.

Plus, there was another guy.

Kirk Cameron.

(my 4th grade rival had a best bud named Boner)

I hated Kirk, and would actually watch Growing Pains with plans to watch what he did so I could either rip on him the next day, or worse, try to emulate him (note: at no point did I try and convince any of my friends to adopt the nickname “Boner”, which still ranks as one of the absolute poorest choices in sitcom sidekick names ever.)

And but so the point was I liked her, but never really told her how I felt. Worse, I would rip on things she liked, and sometimes her, because somehow I thought that would get her to like me.

Dumb plan, I know…but hey, I was young and stupid.

Fastforward many, many years.

I thought, like many people, that I’d been in love before, much like a kid who had never ridden in a car thought 45 miles an hour is fast. Then at 23, the real thing jumped up and kicked my ass.

Long story shortened here: I fucked up and it didn’t work at, and the root cause was my not explaining how I felt at the right time. But in many ways the point didn’t sink in, because I managed to fall in love again, and despite assurances from many friends, and Katy herself, that any attempts to be more than really good friends was dumbassery of a high caliber (note: they didn’t actually use the word “dumbassery”), near the end things were going great and…I didn’t talk to her.

Why does this happen? Without The Boss jamming out in my living room, I’m still not sure…I haven’t had (or taken) the chance to have it happen again, but I do know in the previous years there was combination of much lower self-esteem for me coupled with a pedestaling of the other party. (Example: in a moment of mania that probably would qualify me for at least some good couch time with a psychiatrist, I had a brief moment where the chief reason I was scared to go along with Katy’s urges to move to Boston because I was convinced that she would wind up dating Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, because he was far better for her than me. Crazy? Yeah, but I think love qualifies everyone for at least fifteen minutes of Nurse Ratchet.)

What can I say, I was young and stupid.

And sure, it’s been a handy crutch to avoid it happening again by not letting the L word (well, other than the show…Sarah Shahi is hot) rearing its ugly head (note: this is April’s Obscure Living Colour Song Lyric…you will be quizzed.)

(Gratuitous Sarah Pic)

But lately I’ve also been sitting around missing the closeness, the “being extremely content just sitting on a couch together” as they called it on Scrubs moments. Then I have to go watch porn and act like a cock asshole because it really does sound cheesy.

(And dangerous…actively seeking to fall in love seems to me like a sure fire way to ruin things before they start, but that’s another set of stories.)

Ok, we now return to your regularly scheduled OC analysis and book rants already in progress…