A little more or less

The Story of Record Cake

Once upon a time I had a really, really good friend that we’ll call Marvin.

I have lots of friends, so the friend part isn’t really the story. 

Anyway, Marvin was a guy and I happen to be a girl. Marvin also happened to have a girlfriend. We’ll call her Betty. I met Betty on a few occasions, but Marvin insisted that Betty didn’t like me and she thought there was something going on with us. There wasn’t.

I find that it makes it incredibly awkward to hang out with your guy friends’ girlfriends when you know they don’t like you hanging out with their boyfriends and suspect you have ulterior motives. 

Let me interject that I’m the kind of person that brings in chicken biscuits from out of town because your favorite biscuit place closed down their local locations. Or maybe I’ll bring you coffee mug emblazoned with your favorite team and filled with M&Ms in their colors just because I had a layover there. I’ve even been known to ship Kroger brand tea to a friend who has moved to a land without Kroger because she’s convinced it’s better than anything else in her market (even though I suspect it’s just one of the few tangible ties she has to her childhood). I’m not saying this to brag, because it’s really a selfish act. It makes me happy to make my friends happy. 

Because of said desire to do random things for people, it’s not really surprising that when Marvin and Betty broke up right before his birthday, I showed up at midnight to usher in said birthday with a cake, decorated to look like a vinyl record, a nod to his treasured collection. His cake was, of course, subsequently posted on Facebook, where Betty saw it. 

Betty, like me, enjoyed tweeting. One day, as I cyberstalked Betty to see if there were any good breakup posts, I noticed that the conversation between she and her friends seemed to be discussing me, my dinner and anything else I had offered up to the internet. They were convinced I had been sleeping with Marvin and blamed me, in part, for their break up. I even had my own hashtag. #recordcake

I bumped into Betty a lot over the next few months. Apparently, we had a lot in common. After a few near misses with her friends drunkenly calling me out, one night I decided to try and talk to her. Slowly, the way you might approach a wild bear if you were so inclined, I walked up to her in a crowded, dark bar. 

I explained to Betty that nothing had been going on with me and Marvin and told her I hoped we could at least be civil, since her new regular hangout out appeared to be my “Cheers”. Betty agreed and we became Facebook friends. 

I’d send her the occasional message letting her know I was thinking of her in the time after her mother passed away and she offered to cook me dinner and bring me books and trashy magazines after I had surgery. Soon we were making plans for concerts and celebrating birthdays. When my car was demolished by a tree in a storm, she was there to pick me up that night so I could watch a playoff hockey game and drink a much needed beer.

I think everybody on both sides is a little impressed at how close we’ve become. Everybody but Marvin, that is. As it turns out, Marvin was exacerbating any actual tension between the two of us and was probably the only one that thought we shouldn’t be friends. Our regular bartender might actually agree on that point just because we are a lot of t-r-o-u-b-l-e when we want to be. 

Last night I found out that Betty had reprimanded a guy in a bar last week when I wasn’t there and he’d said I’d be pretty if I lost weight. She’s a pretty awesome friend like that. Marvin, on the other hand, is now married, which I’m genuinely happy for, and quit talking to me last December when he decided to get serious with the new lady. 

As for why I’m changing a handle I’ve been using since 1997, I made a promise to myself that I was going to be a lot more open with my writing and using my name isn’t going to work. My life is ridiculous nonsense and deserves to be treated as such.

The point of all this, if there is one, is just that you shouldn’t hold stupid grudges against, and otherwise judge, cool people just because somebody else tells you you should; and you shouldn’t let people, even your friends, get away with hurting your feelings, either. That, and I think it’s pretty cool that I had my own skanky girl, home wrecker hashtag.

Fame Whoring and Objectification

Yesterday I saw a video of Courtney Stodden (17yrs old) and her loving husband, Doug Hutchison (51yrs old). Courtney, in typical fashion, is dressed in a tiny red bikini and sits precariously on Santa Doug’s lap while she rocks around and gyrates in what I must naturally assume is a desperate attempt to keep from falling off his lap and into the snow. Brrrr…

Courtney is such a generous girl that she offers to turn the tables and visit Santa instead this year. She wants him to experience the full effect of Christmas and lets him know that she wants to slide down his chimney! What a sweet girl. 

In all honesty, I have no idea why they happened to be whoring themselves out to paparazzi and whoever else was unlucky enough to be nearby on this particular day. Maybe it was for their first Christmas card as a married couple, but I digress. 

I fully understand that her parents gave permission for Courtney to marry her soul mate at 16, but this is disgusting and it still involves a minor. Even if they were filmed by bystanders as the couple participated in a photo shoot, the pictures would still be considered to be sexual objectification of a 17 year old girl. Her parents may have signed off on her getting married, but I don’t think they signed her up for underage porn. 

I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t get why the objectification of children is meeting such little resistance in society these days. It seems that children today are racing to get to what they perceive as adulthood (which seems to manifest itself in the form of skimpy clothes and babies at 16) and too few people are stepping up to remind them that they aren’t going to have any idea what to do with adulthood until they’re much older. My God, I’m 33 and I still don’t have the hang of it all the time. 

I wish everybody would just stop pushing kids to grow up so quickly. I, for one, think my childhood wasn’t long enough to begin with. 

If We Only Knew Then

I found this older post written by John Mayer. It made sense then and makes even more sense this week as I close a chapter of my life. 

I wish that when I was younger I could have met my current self. We would have sat down at a coffee shop so that I could explain life to young me in terms that only we would understand. It would have saved me a lot of hardship.

You can listen to all the sage wisdom you want, but things only make sense when you can explain them to yourself in your own words. For instance, I’ve been told for three years that Breaking Bad is the best show on television, but only after I watched it was I able to tell myself exactly why everyone was right. Other truths I know now that I can explain them: that I’m not missing any crucial information and that poker really isn’t all that fun; that heartbreaks do fade but they take about a year longer than you expect and by the time they do you really don’t care about it enough to notice; and above all else, life is simpler than you think.

I used to think that life was an intricate series of levers and pulleys, buttons and switches, Mexican standoffs and hostage negotiations. As I get older I realize that life is more Netherlands minimalist than Jackson Pollock. The problems don’t get fewer, and in fact they grow in number, but the way I index them in the database is different. More problems get filed under fewer category headers.

Things are getting simpler, and it’s making life better. Here’s the cheat sheet:

People want to be liked. We all crave attention and affection and we all reject shame. When we get embarrassed we send a thug version of ourselves to the forefront to do our fighting for us. We’re at the top of the food chain just under fear. We don’t want to be in a relationship to hear the words “I love you,” we want to be in a relationship to say the words “I love you.” We want to feel needed, and exceptional and we hate feeling insignificant. We want to ace a hearing test. We are binary creatures; if we’re the plaintiff, we want to win every dollar. If we’re the defendant, we want guard every penny. We want to make more money than last year. We don’t want to get cancer or die in our cars and we want the same for our loved ones. We go out on weekends to try and have sex while trying not to get punched in the face. We drink so we can be ourselves and not mind it so much. We’re desperate to be understood. We want to know someone else has felt it, too. We hate being judged unfairly. We want to make the person we heard wasn’t all that into us change their minds and admit they had us wrong. We want sunny skies with a chance of killer tornadoes, just to keep music sounding good. We take hours upon hours to admit to self consciousness. We don’t know exactly how to pleasure each other. We just want love. In any and every form.

(via jhnmyr)