The Art of the Third Wheel: A Tricycle Built For No One

As we get older and more and more of our friends get paired off, married off…or fake it REALLY well, you’re going to find a certain phenomenon taking place that becomes more and more…apparent.  Let’s paint a quick scenario for you: Your best friend from college calls you up and wants to go out and hang.  You agree to meet at your favorite bar for drinks later that night.  Time comes, you head down to the bar, and you notice your friend has gotten you guys a table…and is sitting there with her husband.  For a second your brains screams “What is HE doing here!?”  But you play it cool, smile and wave back.  Then you remember that you like the husband too.  He’s a nice guy, and a perfect partner for your friend.  You spoke at their wedding about how perfect they are for each other!  …and you were sincere!  So, what is this nagging, annoying sound in the back of your head that is making this situation seem so unpleasant?

That grating feeling you’re getting in the back of your temples is actually the squeaky sound of…The Third Wheel.  You have officially been relegated to becoming the superfluous, rusted out training wheel that was removed when it was time to ride the two wheeler.  Without meaning to, your friend has plunged you into one of the most awkward situations we single adults tend to dread.  And what makes it worse is that we know that the people across from us are not to blame!  We know that it’s our own perspective that is skewing the hell out of our emotional flight path into a metaphorical mountain.  We always feel as if we are the passengers on the ride, and not the pilots, even though that is often not the case.  So in order to make sure that our tour through the friendly skies of adulthood stay that way, let’s dissect this phenomena and how we can combat these areas of emotional turbulence.

Here’s the thing: You are truly happy to have these people in your life.  They are both wonderful people, and you just want to hug them and say, “I am just so happy for you!”  Their sweetness is endearing, and you always feel really welcome when you go to their house, maybe play with their kids, have a glass of wine as you cook dinner together.  But god help you, if you’re not in the proper mindset.  I don’t know, maybe you just broke up with your significant other.  Maybe you are feeling particularly lonely.  Maybe you’re just feeling sensitive because…oh, who the hell knows?  Do you really need a reason!?  The cause of this irrational emotional flip flop is usually because we see their happiness and we envy it.  It isn’t necessarily the actual relationship itself that we envy, but that look of satisfaction…of calm.  Because they will never again have to spend every free moment wondering if they’ll ever meet the person that they are destined for.  Meanwhile, you’re swimming in wedding invites from friends, and deleting dick pics / desperation messages from your latest foray into online dating.  So you find yourself bouncing back and forth between happy for them and angry / sad for yourself…and then it all comes out at resentment.  Maybe not at your friends, but they just happen to be there when that switch is flicked.

Alright, look…if you can be happy for your friends, then at least you haven’t fallen all the way down.  If you can’t see the joy in the world around you in SOME way, then believe me when I say that you have some serious work on yourself personally.  That empathy is what connects us to the rest of the human race, and if you aren’t happy for someone else, then that means that you aren’t happy with yourself.  This post isn’t for you.  I’ll cover how to get to that some other time.  So for those who still have the capacity to feel happy for others…with occasional bouts of frustration, here’s your advice.  Realize that the grass is always greener, and that your friends, while they are happy…have just as many problems as you do.  Possibly more so.  Because while you have to worry about finding someone, your problems are your own.  loneliness is actually a very easy problem to fix.  Mortgages, marriage problems, up to your neck in poopy diapers…these are less easy.  Any problems that they have are shared, and any children that they have only add to those problems exponentially.  Once they get over that loneliness by finding someone, the next anxiety that needs to be tackled is how to maintain and keep it.  And know this…to your couple friends, you aren’t being seen as a Third Wheel.  You are seen as a good friend, and a large breath of relief for them.  Believe it or not, they are probably living their single days vicariously through you in some way.  The “grass is greener” always cuts both ways.

The other problem you’ll probably come across, is that the Third Wheel dynamic lies a certain conundrum.  In those moments of loneliness, we spout our weakness to our friends.  Those friends will then say something that I promise we have all heard from someone in our lives.  “You’ll find someone, I promise” or its variation “There’s someone out there for everyone.”  At that exact moment, there is no phrase that that will make the Third Wheel axle squeak quite so loudly as this.  You will hear these words and every fiber of your being will want to scream out “LIAR!!”  There’s something about these phrases, when uttered at the precise moment of weakness, that will make us feel like we are 5 years old, and being patted on the head and placated.  As if you had tripped and skinned your knee, and you needed comfort…so you get a pat on the head and a “it’ll be okay.”  But you’re an adult now, and you know that those words won’t make things magically better.  That resentment that I mentioned earlier rears its ugly head.  How dare they give you such empty advice!  Can’t they see that you’re in pain!?  And all they have for your is a bandaid and some peroxide!?  Then they both look at each other, then look at you with that look that you interpret as pity.  Inside your brain  you can hear unspoken words “Why can’t he/she be happy like we are?”  …and inside you seethe because part of you wonders why they’re sitting there pitying you when they should be out there, helping you find The One.

Sigh…Perception is a deadly thing.  What did you think was GOING to happen?  That they were going to pull your partner out of thin air?  That somehow they were hiding your perfect mate from you until you hit rock bottom?  They’re using what they have to treat you.  And of course, it’s going to seem like an awful solution…because it is!  From your perspective, you got yourself a bullet wound, and they’re treating it with scotch tape and a prayer!  The thing is, that’s what happens when you’re being emotional and hyper irrational, and all they have to try and cure it is the opposite: Logic.  Until you realize that you’re being unreasonable, and that they’re trying to help you, everything that they do will just feel like they are throwing pebbles to stop up a river.  The only other way to quench this fire is to pour gasoline on it, and let it burn itself out after a blaze.  Yes, they pity you.  Know why?  Because chances are, they have been in exactly the same place that you are more times that they’d care to count.  They know that the majority of finding your perfect fit is luck.  Nobody knows how hard it is to be happy, than people who are happy now.  Cut ’em some slack.  All they can do is root for you while you do the leg work.  At the end of the day, it’s up to us to help ourselves in this situation.  No one can do it for you.  And let’s face it…if you see pity in their eyes, it’s probably because you’re pitying yourself.

Look…being a Third Wheel sucks, okay?  Nobody wants to feel like they are just there as decoration, or that they are superfluous in a relationship.  In some respects, Third Wheeling is really a variation on the Friend Zone.  You take a relationship in which you are really close to each other, but then someone else comes along, and the two of them go off and become a beautiful couple, and you end up feeling like you are picking at their table for scraps.  You feel that shift in the dynamic and your first instinct is to say “But…what about us?”  And just like with the Friend Zone, what we’re talking about is two different types of relationships trying to co-exist in the same space.  You may not have any romantic feelings for either of them, but you suddenly don’t feel that more intimate connection when it was just the two of you.  Like you’re intruding on THEIR space.

The difference lies in the fact that when you are the Third Wheel, the relationship itself hasn’t changed, merely our perception of it.  The dynamics, the aesthetics may have changed, but the core remains.  Whereas in the case of the Friend Zone, the very heart of the relationship changes whether our perception of it stays the same or not.  This is where how we approach being a Third Wheel still offers us hope that the relationship can still work.  First of all…understand that you’re in charge of being happy with yourself.  That one bit of perception changes everything else around it.  Second is realizing that your friendship with them sustains them just as much as it sustains you.  Even if you are not in the same place in your life, the different aspects that you each have gives the other hope for what’s to come.  (Unless you are a coke head, in which case…no, then you will probably not be giving any hope.)  Next is…learn to take advice when it’s meant well, without getting defensive.  It isn’t a critique on you, nor is it an attempt to seem condescending.  It is merely a genuine desire to be helpful in solving your problem.  Take it, learn from it…or if you think it’s not helpful, then you ignore it.  But always be thankful for it.  Lastly, it comes back to perspective again.  See both your relationship and theirs, and find out where they intersect.  Don’t look at it as two parallel lines that flow side by side but never interact.  It is one big relationship with many facets, but it doesn’t diminish what it is as long as the core is strong.

Just remember folks:Unicycle, bicycle, tricked out trike…a wheel all alone is just a wheel. It’s what it’s attached to that determines the ride.

The Badass Monologues: Short Guy Truths And Falsehoods – Debunking the Myth

Over the last year, I started hearing the term “Short Guy Syndrome” slung around like a bag full of cats, and I have to say that all the screeching and howling is giving me an ear ache.  So as a 5’1″ (give or take an inch) guy, I figure I’m probably the right guy to weigh in on the subject.  So first, let’s get a few things straight…  This syndrome doesn’t refer to “Little People” who are a category unto themselves, and have their own very distinct ideologies and branches of thinking.  What we’re talking about are men who are on the lower end of an arbitrary measure for what we deem as an equally subjective “average” height.  Those “short men” are then qualified as having a certain disposition; a mindset which has the name of a French Emperor named Napoleon Bonaparte associated with it.  Originally we called the Short Guy Syndrome, the Napoleon(ic) Complex.  Some of the fundamental personality traits associated with this is overcompensation, belligerent or angry behavior, social aggression, and the overall need to dominate with presence – in the negative way.  So before I start going through the truths and lies of being short, let’s take care of some of the misconceptions that seem to be associated with our boy Napoleon.

First of all…the guy was approximately 5’6″, which in those days, was fairly average.  And yes folks, that was without his boots.  If he put them on and had some kind of early French lifts in them, at the very most he would have been 5’8″ maybe 5’9″.  So the idea that he was short…well, maybe by modern perception, but is it enough to say that he was overcompensating for his height?  Probably not.  That’s mostly our modern perception of his behavior.  And while we’re on the subject…the man was an Emperor.  There seems to be this belief that Napoleon went to war to spread his ideologies out of his need to compensate for his height, letting many people get killed for the sake of his own ego.  That he dominated and exerted his will over other countries to prove his military might and prowess.  Alright, where the hell were my historians at when some idiot decided to name this the Napoleonic Complex?  Every culture in world history has had a leader, who at some point believed that their civilization was in the right, and others were in the wrong.  Spreading ideologies, exploring and conquering new lands is pretty much how the modern world came to be, so let’s not get this idea that Bonaparte was looking in the mirror one day and said to himself “You know what?  I’m feeling particularly short today…let’s go sack a city and make them adapt my beliefs.”  Yeah, he dominated other countries and people got PISSED.  That’s what happens when you win a battle or a war and say “Hey, here are some new rules and I’m the guy enforcing them.”  But guess what, kids?  EVERY conqueror, every dictator, every general, every winner of any battle is going to have the same damn thing thought of them.

Also, I’d like to point out that if spreading ideologies and conquering lands were indicative of height compensation, then France is a land of fucking giants.  Compared to the Macedonians, the Holy Roman Empire, Nazi Germany, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Tang dynasty, the Russian Empire…the French aren’t even a fucking drop in the god damn bucket!  You know where Napoleon basically spread his reign?  France, Spain, Italy, and maybe a part of Germany and Poland.  Alexander the Great conquered from the Balkans to India and I’m pretty sure per capita, Genghis Khan conquered more land than anyone.  By short guy logic, this means that these men must have been 1 foot tall.  Yet these men do not have this complex named after them.  And come on…in the Modern Age, the US and the British have fought more wars in a single generation than Napoleon could have in 50 lifetimes, and possess more global real estate than any other CONTINENT in the world.  By this logic, then what the hell are we compensating for?

Much like Custer, Napoleon tends to be remembered historically for his biggest loss, which was in Waterloo, which ended up negating much of his previous accolades (from a historic perspective).  It didn’t matter that he was one of the greatest military strategists the world had ever seen (even to this day).  It didn’t matter that he had a photographic memory and that he was one of the most intelligent human beings of his time (debunking a small person / small intellect myth…but I’ll get to that later…).  Nevermind that he was a charismatic leader who understood people, chose to surround himself with greater or equal minds, and had the ability to lead great (and yes, taller) men.  History tends to overlook these things because as the old adage goes “History is written by the victors.”  A lot of us don’t know that he was an advocate of the sciences, or that he spread both his own Code (the Napoleonic Civil Code) which became the base of many laws used in several western countries including the States.  Most of us don’t know that he helped spread the Metric System, and that he was a believer in religious freedom and equality at a time when Jews, Protestants, and Catholics all being treated the same was akin to witchcraft.  The French treat the man as a hero, and I’m not sure if it’s rightfully deserved or not…but what I can say is that based on what I know of his history, I’m not sure what wannabe pop psychologist decided to coin the term using his name.  All I know is…it stuck.  But my point here is…no general, no emperor, no king, no queen, no prince, no leader of man…has ever held a perfect win record.

So there’s your history lesson, readers.  So now let’s go onward to what we came here to talk about: being a short guy.  Now there’s tons of perceptions and stereotypes out there, and I’ll try to address them as subjectively as I can from my own perspective.  (And for those trolls out there, yes, the SHORT perspective.)  A lot of these ideas and tropes that exist are very “Chicken or the Egg.”  That is to say that it’s very hard to say which came first…the perception, the action, or the reaction based on the perception.  But let’s just take this one by one:

All Short Guys Are Overcompensating: Okay, so here’s the first in the Chicken / Egg series.  I admit that a vast majority of us have the tendency to project ourselves very drastically to our personalities.  Some positively and some negatively.  The negative overcompensation tends to be associated with emotions like anger or fear, and often times leads to aggressive and sometimes belligerent behavior.  The positive ones come off as confident…but OVERLY so tends to read as funny (as in, laugh AT not laugh WITH), annoying, or trying too hard.  But I’m not sure if these traits are in reaction to being perceived as lesser human beings in the social context, or they simply came to be as a result of natural evolution.  Although, you treat any group as a social outcast for too long and personalities will find their own ways to adapt to the situation in a fit of social survival.  So is this statement true?  Yes, but with some caveats.

Short Guys Are Angry: I mean…wouldn’t you be if you were treated as less than a man everywhere you go?  Have you read an online dating profile and read “short men need not apply?”  Read article after article about how short men are less likely to find love and that it’s an evolutionary thing?  Honestly, it’s not as if we don’t have our reasons.  And obviously, my blog tends to wander the gambit of all of my emotions including anger…but honestly who doesn’t?  Saying “All short guys are angry” is like saying that “All humans breathe air.”  All of us get angry from time to time but it isn’t our defining characteristic.  They are called “emotions” and it is our response to interpretations of different stimuli.  If people claim that we’re angry all the time, then you have to kind of ask yourself exactly what it is in the situation that is creating the context for that anger.  You know when I hear this particular phrase the most?  After somebody says (writes, Tweets, posts, etc) something derogatory about a short guy and then the short guy defends themselves in an angry fashion.  You call a tall woman an Amazon, a portly man as tubby, a blonde an idiot, or spit out a racist name…guess what?  Those people are going to get pissed.  We don’t have the exclusive rights to this emotion, folks.  It’s just funnier to the immature if you picture a red faced child swinging his hands in the air and screaming obscenities than to realize the shallow emotions that made you verbally upchuck your superficial leanings.  So is the statement true?  No more so than for every other marginalized group that exists out there…in other words, the entire human race.  And for those who would say that this segment sounds angry, I’d like to point out there’s a thin line between passionate and anger.  Which brings me to:

Short Guys Are Immature: Ah yes…the term that seems to be growing in popularity to disparage us short guys…”manchild.”  I do love a good new derogatory term.  I can actually say that this term is patently untrue.  When you’re short, man or woman, we have the tendency to behave more maturely because, as I mentioned earlier, short people are viewed as “children” or “child-like.”  Ask any short woman who has been picked up when being hugged by someone, or a guy who has had their head patted like they were a “good little boy.”  I’m not sure if this was a perception reaction or if it was just false since the get go, but either way, maturity has a lot to do with how we handle the things that life throws at us.  Short men have the tendency to have been given more opportunity to overcome a more varied set of unexpected curveballs than some of their taller counterparts.  But like all generalizing statements, a lot of the time, it’s exactly that…a blanket statement that has nothing to do with the majority.  Many of us are mature, many of us are not.  Ask me at 20 and ask me at 30, you’ll get different answers, but that’s true for any height and any gender.  So, like the Angry statement…the point is pretty much moot.  We all have the capacity to be one way or another.  Why compartmentalize it into a characteristic of a certain type of person?

Being Short Is a Disadvantage: Let me tread carefully here.  Being short is not a physical disadvantage unless you are relating it to something that necessitates being taller.  It is not a physical handicap, it is not a genetic abnormality.  At the most it may be a recessive gene.  It is not a social disadvantage either unless you treat it as such.  That is when your own personal perception of yourself comes into play.  If you play into the part that the world sometimes thrusts at you, then yes, you may find yourself the wounded gazelle near the pack of hyenas.  But most of the time, if you yourself don’t see it that way, it has no effect in the long run.  Is it a romantic disadvantage?  Yes.

It Is Harder For Short Men To Find Love: I said it before and I said again but being short is a romantic bullet hole in the leg.  It can be overcome with confidence, but attaining that confidence is like trying to tame a wild lion with soft words and a sirloin steak necklace while bleeding from aforementioned bullet hole.  This is mainly due to the fact that the romantic disadvantage comes not only from your own perception of self, but combining that with the preconceived notions that we are trying to debunk here.  Unfortunately, it is an ingrained perception that short is not a desirable trait to have for the male.  It’s difficult to change the way much of the world sees us.  The most common argument is that women are conditioned to want tall men based on evolution.

Tall Men Preference Based On Evolution: Let me argue the point and then you can go ahead and say what you will.  We are a social species and therefore we evolve socially, and have long surpassed the point in which we need to evolve physically.  Why?  We have the ability to alter our surroundings to make it so we can survive.  However, if being small were an undesireable and unsuitable human characteristic, then by Darwinism and Evolutionary standards, the small and short would have already been weeded out leaving us with nothing but giants in our midst.  But we don’t, so it could be that being small is not necessarily an undesirable human characteristic in the grand evolutionary scale. (Neither is being big, just fyi.) Okay, so let’s tackle it from a human to human standpoint.  The argument that I hear most often is that the woman likes the man to be taller because the human hind brain sees them as a better protector, provider, hunter, and warrior.  Mkay.  Well first of all, that’s such a big pile of manure that if I had a garden I could mulch it for a decade.  Look…the hind brain is a SUBCONSCIOUS desire for these things.  Most women and most men who take issue with height are keenly and most definitely CONSCIOUSLY aware of their preference and why.  They may not voice it out of fear of looking like asshole, or because saying it out loud is taboo, but they all know why.  How do I know this?  Because we aren’t lizards and we aren’t primates, kids.  We are human beings which means that while somewhere deep in our DNA may be coded this fantasy gene sequence…that isn’t what rules us.  It is our brains.  And while there are similarities between a monkey’s brain and a human one, a human’s brain is able to reason.  The hind brain theory came from rationalizing this behavior, but really it’s all a bunch of bunk.  To put it simply?  You’re following your privates, Private.  Consciously, at that.  You want to know the real reason?  It’s simple.  Gender roles.  There.  I said it.

It’s such a can of worms, but no matter how far we come in equality, the long established gender roles are what has been tying us back to who has to be the taller in the couple.  Traditional heterosexual couples have traditional heterosexual tendencies in terms of preference, which is influenced by social convention.  As I mentioned before, we are a social species living in a social world.  Therefore, as the environment of the social world changes, our social values change.  Wanting taller men isn’t evolutionary at all, but it’s what we see every day.  We rationalize this behavior, but just as the fashion industry and the film and tv industry has influenced our idea of beauty, our judgment of height is equally influenced by these same things.  Advertisements advocate tall and thin beautiful women which links weight AND height into our measurement of beauty.  The majority of men when compared to those women are taller and more muscular than those women which influence what they are supposed to want.  Even on television, the classic television tropes for families have stayed pretty much the same with the man being taller and bigger, the woman being smaller and shorter.  That has been the norm and establishes what we perceive to be our measure of desire and beauty.  Of course, it may have a small bit to do with evolution, but nowhere near as much as people are claiming it to have.  My point is…if you want to follow your sex organs, then follow it…but let’s not blame our monkey brains for something that we know we control.  Preference means you have control…you just choose not to.  Alright…moving on.

Correlation Between Height and Intelligence: I’ve heard this go both ways.  Short people need to be smarter because they are not as big and strong, OR short people have less intellectual capacity based on their smaller size.  Both horse shit, and anyone who believes that should be shot out of a cannon and into an active volcano.  I’ve met tall doctors, and short idiots.  I’ve met tiny scientists and giant oafs.  There are people with skulls thick enough to crack coconuts who have photographic memories, and people whose heads are as big as a watermelon who couldn’t find a doorknob if they had their hand on it.  I don’t care how big or small you are.  Stephen Hawking is 5’7″ and being in a wheelchair, paralyzed, with a head the size of a peanut is still one of the smartest people on the planet.  There is no such thing as a unified rule that governs the exact state of intelligence in any human being, and if there is, it certainly has nothing to do with height.  At my height, that would make me either a blazing idiot or a certifiable genius and I am neither of those things.

Look folks…I’m not trying to defend myself here or make women want to date me.  I’m pretty comfortable being me, and I know many women in my life who love me for who I am.  I have friends who accept me, and my height hasn’t ever really kept me from doing anything that I ever wanted to do.  All I’m trying to do is de-mystify this whole bullshit stigma that seems to follow around being short.  Tall or short in the grand scheme has the importance of your toenail clippings in your garbage can.  It means nothing except what it simply is.  A method by which something may be measured, but it is our own human nature to assign social value to it.  And that’s what it means to live in a social world.  We decide our self worth by assigning values to these arbitrary characteristics and somehow we rank ourselves in relation to others.  That is our new evolutionary scale…and quite honestly we need new fucking values because in my humble opinion, it is built of cards on a bed of sand.  Hopefully I managed to shine some light on some of the truths and lies that you’ve known about the short guy.

But then again…this is all coming out of my mind so at the end of the day, you’ll have to figure it out for yourselves.  Love to you, my readers.  Happy Valentine’s Day.  And hey…if you get a chance, give the short guy a shot.  Might surprise you. – AB

Comfort vs. Complacency: The New Year Edition

So here we are in the New Year…like the previous year only…newer.  See?  It even still has that New Year smell.  There is still that unmistakable fragrance of unfounded optimism and fragile intentions.  And there’s another thing that seems to occur at this early stage of the year, and that is that new relationships are tested.  You always hear some of the grizzled, war-beaten relationship experts say “Don’t get too comfortable.”  This is where that expression starts to show its meaning.  But before that, let’s look at three general new relationship levels.

Many relationships tend to start in one of three time frames.  First is the Valentines Day crowd.  These couples tend to establish themselves anywhere from New Years to Valentines Day, most likely urged on by the threat of spending Hallmark-Stock-Rising-Day all alone.  I’m not saying that these couples don’t love each other or that they don’t have a fighting chance.  I’m just saying that having the day looming over us, tends to have an encouraging effect on roping a significant other.  So if they get together at this point and still are together in the New Year, they are just about in that 1 year mark for the relationship.

Second grouping is what I like to call the Summer Lovers.  They’re having a blast.  (Yes, that was a Grease reference, sue me.)  These sun worshipping, GTLer’s are all about getting together at the beach or the bbq and just having fun.  They pair off and just continue into the fall and winter cause…well, why the hell not?  It was fun in July, should be fun in December, right?  Just replace beaches with mountains, tanning with skiing, and boardwalk with ski lodge.  So given that they are still a couple, the second grouping has been together now for about a half year.

The final groupings are the couples that get together during the holidays.  There’s something about that magical time of year, where we are constantly thinking about the other people in our lives to get them something that they want.  We want to spend time with all of our family and friends…well basically, there’s a lot of love in the air, and we need to channel it! (That sounds vaguely Freudian, but moving on…)  There’s something tantalizing about giving ourselves over to the spirit of love that seems to pervade the air.  These guys are your newlyweds…the honeymooners.  They are the ones who have been together for just about one month.

Alright, so I painted you the scene…but what’s my point?  Fact is, it doesn’t matter if you’re a one year veteran or a newbie couple…we can all fall victim to the classic trap that is Complacency.  The timelines and sample couples I listed above are really representative of the relationship milestones that we’re all faced with.  No matter how long you’ve been together, the one thing that is essential is the ability to keep trying.  A little bit of effort goes a long way to maintaining the bond that’s been established, but we have the tendency to believe that love should be easy.  At the very least, we believe that maintaining it should be.  I mean…once you fall in love with someone and they with you, the hard part should be over, right?

It shouldn’t be too hard for our newbies to maintain their relationship, but even at the one month mark, things can start taking a turn if the couple isn’t checking themselves on occasion.  One month is plenty of time to do all the normal things that a couple does, or to share in some common interests.  Sooner or later though, that’s just not enough.  The problem that tends to arrive in this first month is Entitlement.  Nothing stops a relationship colder than the idea that you deserve a relationship in which you don’t have to work for it.  Almost every working relationship that I have been a part of, or have seen up close, has had a strong foundation built on hard work.  It’s supposed to require more effort to stay together in the beginning, because…well…there’s really nothing holding you together.  You haven’t really built a framework for what you want, so it’s not surprising that at the first sign of adversity, the whole thing will come down like a house of cards.

Entitlement tends to mean that one or both members in the relationship believe that they deserve the connection without having to work for it.  They are trapped into thinking that due to past circumstances, or their own superiority has somehow earned them the right to being happy without any effort.  Hate to burst that bubble, kiddos…but that is lazy ass, complacent behavior that will have you being an 80 year old bachelor.  Hope your 40 cats don’t eat your corpse.  Love is supposed to be hard, otherwise what the hell is the point.  Nothing good, strong, wonderful, passionate, loving, or lasting…has ever come to somebody sitting on their ass and not trying.  Sure, we all look at celebrities who seem to have walked off a wedding cake topper, and it all seems effortless, but I promise you, that as long as you are a human being, there is a lot of effort being expended somewhere…even if we can’t see it.  It doesn’t matter if you’re pretty, rich, sweet, handsome, or smart.  If you can’t show those aspects in their positive light with effort, you’re just a self absorbed egotist.  So for those lazy asses who are so comfortable that they don’t even try, here’s a message: You deprive people of hope, so get off your entitled ass and show some effort.  I know you’re tired from working.  I know that he/she is asking a lot of you.  But god damn it, if you want something, act like it.  …usually that would be followed by a quick palm upside the head, but you’ll just have to settle for a verbal one.  *SMACK*  Got it?  Good.

Second group, my Summer Lovin’, half year folks…raise your hands up high.  Alright, so you guys had a pretty good run so far.  You passed that first hurdle and established a stronger relationship.  And for the most part, the summer is full of activities that you can do outside, which increases the number of things you can do together.  So there’s a strong showing by this group…but then we reach the second hurdle: Routine.  Now Routine is a bitch, because there’s a fine line between comfort and complete laziness at this point.  When two people share a common interest, it’s really easy for us to automatically go to that activity as our “go-to” for dates.  After all, she likes movies, you like movies…where’s the problem?  There isn’t one.  At least, not really.  But the trap lies in the mindset, not in the activity.  Why did you choose to go to the movies?  Are you going because you like spending time cuddled up watching a movie?  Or are you going to the movies because…well, what else is there to do?  Once you get into that mindset, it sets a dangerous precedence for future dates.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going to see a film together, or staying in, popping some corn, and watching HBO while curled up on the couch.  The key is the motivation behind the action, not the action itself.

If you’re doing it because you enjoy being curled up next to each other, and don’t want judgmental eyes on you during expressions of PDA…then okay, I get it.  If the motivation behind staying in is because you just couldn’t think of anything better to do, then there’s a high possibility that you’ve fallen into a routine.  Even “Routine” isn’t all that bad as long as it’s mutual and you both enjoy it.  But from there it’s a very steep and easy road down into the canyon that we like to call the “Rut.”  Now a rut comes in many different forms and can go from the depth of a pothole, all the way to Black Hole of Despair.  The deeper the rut, the harder it is for you to climb out of it.  It’s so easy to allow ourselves to get comfortable in that space because it’s so simple.  There’s very little that you need to maintain or take care of…I always compare it to a cozy studio apartment.  But the thing is…once you are in a relationship, that little space just isn’t going to be enough.  On occasion, you have to check yourself to make sure that you aren’t doing something simply for the sake of doing it.  The expression “But it’s what we always do” is your downfall, and should never be uttered by either side of the couple.  That isn’t to say that you can’t have a wonderful routine…just don’t get caught in a rut, and always remember to ask yourself “why am I doing this?”  If the answer comes close to “what else is there”, start packing your shit.  We’ve officially hit the end of the line.

And now we get to the 1 year veterans.  This is the ultimate hurdle.  The one year mark symbolizes a make or break moment for a lot of relationships, no matter how secure.  Here, it’s really not about the length of time that determines whether it ends or not…it’s actually the change in the year that becomes your biggest nemesis.  There’s something about a New Year that makes us want to take stock and change ourselves.  For lack of something concrete to change about ourselves, we take a look at our relationships. This is where couples start giving out scores in the Relationship Final Exams.  And let me tell you…when we start a new year, we are ruthless about our grading.  A 70% is just not considered passing any more.  Why settle for satisfactory when we’ve already established higher expectations?  Sorry, my pupils, but Professor AB already knows that you can get an A if you try.  Why should I let you skate by with a C-?

At the 1 year mark, it’s when we accumulate all the complacent moments from the relationship and we take an endoscopic look at what it means for the future.  A…State of Your Union, if you will.  We take those lazy tendencies you’ve shown us this past year, and stick it under the microscope and analyze the crap out of it.  Why?  Because a new year is a perfect excuse to change something.  And if your so called “better half” is the weakest link in that equation, then there’s no reason to keep them around.  Plus, a year is really just about as long as most people are willing to put up with something that isn’t working, and honestly, that’s only if you are relatively patient.  Most of the time, the majority of people will kick a person to the curb much earlier on, but because you develop a stronger foundation, we are prone to give our partner the benefit of the doubt.  But that only goes so far.  There is a strong thinking that “We gave it a full year and it’s just not working.”  That timeframe is appealing to us because it ties everything up in a neat little bow, and it gives us limits for how long we’re willing to stick it out for our partners to really figure it out.

Look…I’m not saying that we can’t be comfortable in our relationships, okay?  Particularly ones which have strong bonds tying it together.  Complacency though, is an entirely different entity which tends to manifest as disinterest, lack of passion, and an overall lack of thoughtfulness for our partner.  And particularly when we hit this 1 year milestone, we are more inclined to adopt a “grass is greener” policy to our relationships.  What’s keeping us here when there is clearly nothing that is gravitating us to this spot?  Sometimes it’s not a lack of gravity…sometimes it is the strength of that gravity is simply not enough.  The longer the relationship the more weight we carry, but at the same time, that force dissipates over time.  Unless we replenish this bond from time to time, it weakens and eventually falls apart.  I’m not trying to be negative here, but it is a cautionary tale.

My longest relationship I ever had lasted for five years.  Truthfully, I would say that the relationship really only lasted 3.5, because at some unspoken time…complacency started to take shape.  And I’m not going to pin the blame solely on her, or even claim that she was the one that became complacent first.  It’s not something that appears suddenly…or if it was, we weren’t able to identify clearly when it first took place.  The longer the relationship, the harder it becomes to distinguish between what is comfort and what is complacent: what is routine and what is a rut.  What I do know is that one day I realized that she didn’t try as hard to look nice for me when we went out together, even though I did.  That led to resentment towards me because it made her “look bad.”  Other examples: even special outings tended to be on a schedule, almost routine.  If we went to go see a DMB concert the summer before, we did it again the next year.  And sure, that was fun for us.  Sex became sporadic, and towards the end of it, we would try some…pretty outlandish things just to see if we couldn’t cram that spark back into something that, we both knew, was pretty much dead and flatlined.  But for that last 1.5 years, we stayed together.  Why?  Because the alternative was to completely start again, and we got so deep into that rut that the complacency…became comfortable.  And that is just something that you want to avoid like the Plague.

Keep in mind that no matter where you are in the relationship, new or old, these traps and situations still exist.  It’s just that the longer we stay, the harder it becomes to notice it when it arrives.  After all, comfort is tempting.  It’s so secure and warm.  It’s there and we want it to always be there.  But the minute that we take it for granted, it turns its ugly head to laziness and complacency real quick.  Ultimately, it’s important to keep checking with yourself and with your partner.  Notice the signs, and get out when you can.  All relationships are essentially symbiotic where two people’s needs coincide and are being met.  The minute that one side doesn’t get it met, the other side will sense it and stop meeting the needs of the other.  From there it becomes a slippery black diamond slope into laziness.  Just don’t get trapped there.  After all…it’s a new year…and the sky’s the limit.  Cheers.

New Years Resolutions: The One Promise You’ll Almost Always Break

For New Years Eve this year, I really didn’t do anything special.  It wasn’t because I didn’t want to do anything, or be with anyone.  But honestly I find myself caring less and less about the actual activity of watching the clock strike twelve.  I love a good party just as much as anyone else, and believe me when I say that I enjoy a good alcohol induced makeout, followed by my usual awkward attempt to coax an inebriated young lass into my bed for her first mistake of the New Year.  But whether it was the exhaustion of everything that has happened this year all catching up to me, or just because the thought of starting my year with a hangover that rivaled the movie of the same name, I just decided to stay in and take stock.  And as I sat on my living room couch with a “Das Boot” full of Yuengling, pondering if Ryan Seacrest was actually a cyborg, I started to look back at 2013 with a degree of fondness.  For me, it was a pretty interesting year overall.  Some of the highlights included performing in three large scale shows and being promoted at work.  Also a blossoming friendship with Belle, which turned into dating, which turned back into friendship, and now hovers in a state of a deep loving friendship / mutual obsession.  I have to say that 2013 really didn’t treat me badly at all.

As for the resolutions I made at the beginning of 2013, I think I did pretty well.  One thing was for me to get in better shape, and although I can’t say it was all intentional, I definitely kept my end of the bargain.  This was primarily due to doing so many shows this year and my patented Tech Week Diet™.  That is to say that I did intend to lose the weight, but it wasn’t because I concentrated on it that I lost it.  Ergo, while I kept my promise, it wasn’t because I made the resolution that I ended up keeping it, so I’m not sure if that should count.  Another resolution I made was to do more shows, which I definitely kept in spades for 2013.  But the only thing I did was audition for these shows, and it was only because they said “yes” that I was able to do them.  I really had no control in the matter other than the conscious decision to audition for them.  So I suppose I can give myself partial credit for that one.  Then there was my goal to write more on this blog, which is really the only resolution that I fully kept this year.  Without a doubt, I definitely wrote more this year than I did in 2012.  Yay me.  Finally there was the unspoken “find love” resolution, which really has been a life long search that halted for 4 years while I dated my now ex.  While my romantic love with Belle did not flourish, I regret absolutely nothing about the time that we did, and we still maintain a very unusual type of love with each other.  I always joke that we have a very unhealthy healthy relationship (or a healthy unhealthy relationship).  So while the dating aspect didn’t extend itself beyond 2013, I still see it as a big leap forward for me in the sense that I got a modicum of confidence back, and it’s always nice to be reminded that you can still be thought of as appealing.  I can’t thank her enough for that, cause honestly that was a gift I didn’t see coming.  Once again though…this all came about when I had completely forgotten my resolutions I had set forth in January, and it was in no way due to something that I tried to control.  In fact…the less my brain was involved, the better off I was.  To summarize…my final score was, out of the 4 resolutions I made, I fully kept 1, and partially kept the other 3.  Not a bad score overall.

Having said that, when the clock struck midnight leading to 2014, and I watched Jenny McCarthy tongue-rape her New Kid On the Block…I wondered what 2014 had in store.  Granted, I had a few minutes that I felt lonely as I sat in my empty apartment, but after flipping off Seacrest and rocking out to Billy Joel’s performance, I felt pretty at peace.  This was definitely a vast improvement over my previous New Year of wallowing in a pit of self loathing, and binge pity drinking alone, so once again I found myself proud of myself for becoming just a little more mature.  Then it was time to come up with my resolutions for 2014, which I had been thinking about for the better part of December.  As I tend to do with my resolutions, I tend to type them out on my computer.  So as I was typing them down, I found myself wondering what the hell it is about that clock striking 12 on New Years that makes us believe that we have a clean slate.

This isn’t meant to be bitter, but flipping the calendar to the next page doesn’t wipe away everything that happened the month before, otherwise we’d be yelling “Happy New Month!”  But somehow when we get to the big 00:00 of a New Year, we erase that chalkboard of all the mistakes and problems we made the previous year.  We’re somehow absolved of all the sins of the previous year like a mass purging.  Personally, I think it has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that it’s just a lot easier to schedule changes from 1/1 instead of 5/8.  We’re obsessed with the semantics of it because we like to have a measurable limit of expectations to achievement.  For instance, if your resolution was to get into shape and you went to the gym until February 18,  you can say that you followed through on your resolution for 1 month and 17 days.  But if you’re anything like me, you forget your resolution within weeks of making them.  It doesn’t matter that I write them down, it doesn’t even matter if I tape them up all over my apartment.  I don’t even care if I staple them to my forehead and write it so I can read it in the mirror.  If I don’t decide to follow them, then it’s nothing but an empty promise.

Don’t get me wrong though…this never stops me from actually making resolutions every year.  I’m just as guilty of the “OMG it’s midnight on New Years!  I must change NOW!” mindset that everyone else seems to adopt.  Some of it is the fact that I’m part of the immediate gratification generation, and I feel the necessity to create big changes within myself and do so on a timeline.  And I think the other aspect is that because we want these results quickly, we know for certain that we have a very limited attention span when it comes to following through.  You see, the majority of us have a very narrow window of opportunity to change ourselves.  We always tend to start the year off with a bang.  It’s like watching a first time marathon runner take off at a sprint when the starter pistol goes off, and then collapse about a mile down the road due to lactic acid build up and hernia cramps.  Our generation is horrible about pacing.  We see a goal, we make a bee line for it, and tackle the obstacles in our way like a linebacker in the Superbowl.  But because of this, when we get setbacks, or when our timeline gets pushed back due to unforseen problems like work becoming busy, or pulling a muscle because we tried to workout too intensely at one time…we get discouraged easily.  That momentum dies out and we fall short of our goal as inertia and gravity pull us down to the earth.

Sometimes we reassess our goals, and sometimes we conveniently forget our resolve.  Afterall…it’s not as if skipping gym days will kill you.  Well…at least not today (unless you are morbidly obese and your arteries look like the highway after an overturned garbage truck flips over).  And soon, that resolution becomes nothing but an empty promise, because really there’s no threat to maintain it.  If you don’t keep your resolution, so what?  It’s not as if you become a failure as a human being, it’s not as if life is going to start sucking, and it’s not as if the world is going to stop spinning on its axis.  And that’s why I don’t really believe in a resolution, per se.  I think it’s high time that we abolish the notion of it.  I don’t even really like the idea of “goals” because it implies that we need to somehow keep score.  I want to think of these things as “Hopes” for the coming year.

Hope implies that achieving something will make us happy.  Also it doesn’t give a definitive concrete deadline for making something happen.  What I want people to start doing is, instead of letting whether we get to our goals or not determine our success or failure, I just want them to see how far or how close we can ultimately get to what we hoped we would become.  I want us to be able to look back on December 31st and see what we accomplished with pride, instead of checking behind us for all the things that we simply did not achieve.  I think the key to being positive, moving forward, and being thankful is precisely this.  We still have a measurable distance towards our goals, but ultimately the only thing motivating us is ourselves.  A lot of us don’t do well under even our own ultimatums.  So the best thing we can do for ourselves is allow ourselves the time and the patience to be happy at our own pace, and don’t let the goal line itself get in the way of your own satisfaction on a job well done.  Sometimes it isn’t about crossing the finish line but everything we see and experience along the way.

So what are my “Hopes” for the new year?  Well for one, I hope to get toned.  A friend of mine once asked me “Well…why do you want to get into shape?  Do you want better health?  Or do you want to just look good naked?”  And I realized that depending on that goal, my measurable distance will be very different.  I think I had decided that I wanted to tone up what I had, and as long as women didn’t run shrieking or men didn’t try to harpoon me when I took my shirt off at the beach, I’d be good.  This year I do kind of hope to get to a point where a woman would find my body desirable when some clothing is removed.  So in response to my friend, I’d say a little from Column A and a little from Column B.  I also hope to work more intensely on my writing, with my ultimate goal of getting my first rejection letter from a publisher within the year.  (Yeah, you read that right.)  Belle and I want to do our first Mud Run together, which is definitely a concrete goal, but this ultimately is part of my larger Hope, and that is to have more adventures this year.  Right now I’m off to a pretty good start since I’ll be going to LA in January to go see my other plant, and I’ll be going to Japan in February.  I also have several other outings with Belle planned and also looking forward to working on a show.  And yes…maybe love.  But truthfully the less I think about it the better.  The one thing about that particular hope that I’ve learned is that my brain is the biggest obstacle to my heart, and that sometimes it’s important to tell my mind to go take a siesta.  So this one is a genuine “hope”, but I think I’ll just let it be that.  There’s nothing worse than love that comes about because you feel like you’ve been cornered into it.

No matter what though, I just want to look back on December 31 and say to myself, this year was everything that I had HOPED it would be.  And for you all…I wish that this year is everything that you hope it will be.  Cheers, readers.

The Height of the Problem: Advice from the Short Guy

(Getting this right under the wire for 2013…)

So it’s been a while since I did a “short guy” post and talked about height…which is pretty impressive for me.  The thing that prompted this post was actually when I was looking through my Dashboard and seeing some of the searches being done that brought people to my site.  Phrases like “Is 5’1″ too short for a guy?” or  “Dating impossible for short men.”  And I’ve noticed that things like this appear now, more often that not.  It drives a dagger into my heart every time I see something like that because I realize how many guys out there are so bereft of hope in the dating world that they’re forced to turn to the internet for advice.  The web…a place which has given a sounding board to hate mongers, bred trolls, and lit the fire for flame wars…and you want to take advice from it?  Are we so desperate to gain acceptance, and to be viewed as a romantic option that we attempt to feel justified by complete strangers?

…well…yeah.  I’m not condoning the behavior, I’m just saying that the behavior exists.  And I can hardly criticize people for doing something like that when I’m essentially making a daily affirmation every time I write one of my short guy blog entries on here.  If you’re looking for a guy to tell you that “it gets better”, then please proceed to your nearest exit.  What I’m here to tell you is that “it gets better IF you work at it.”  Yeah, you’re right.  Short guys have to work for it.  Hell…not even just short MEN, but short women too.  And I’m guessing that being a tall woman holds just as many problems on occasion based on preconceived gender roles and expectations.  And I apologize if I leave you out when I write about this issue.  Please feel free to comment on your own experiences in this thread.  I just don’t know how things are from your perspective, although I can certainly imagine it.  So here’s just a few words to the wise about being short:

– Anger Solves Nothing –

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t or can’t feel pain.  When a girl tells you that she’ll “always be your friend” when you really like her, and she shuts that door in your face…it’s like getting stabbed with a corkscrew in the heart and having it pulled out.  But that’s true all across the board.  Height doesn’t have anything to do with any of that.  We just think that we have a reason, and we cling to it because our own insecurity is a great way to rationalize behavior.  Somehow in our minds, if we can justify the reason we weren’t chosen, we somehow make it easier to bear.  It doesn’t.  ..but I’ll get into that in a moment.

Here’s the main reason why short people aren’t allowed to get angry…and that is that we carry a stigma to begin with.  Unfortunately, it’s true.  We are forced to live with the idea that being angry is part and parcel of being short.  Because of that, any time we feel emotional, any time we feel angry, there is a societal perception that this anger is normal behavior for a short guy.  Don’t believe me?  Go Google “why are short people so angry” and then go click on the Yahoo Answers link.  (Here’s the link for anyone who wants to go direct: HERE)  Make sure you read the comments to see just how stupid people are.  And people wonder why we get angry.  But that’s the thing…because of idiotic trolls, and bigoted immature children, anything that seems even remotely angry is either marginalized, dismissed, or compartmentalized into the rantings of a short guy getting mad for being short.  So anything that we feel suddenly has to be well thought out, well worded, humorous, somewhat self-depreciating, and just controlled all round.  Our feelings must be justified, and even that doesn’t guarantee that some emotionally stunted 30 year old won’t try to mock your pain.  So what do we do?  We mask it.  Pretend like it doesn’t hurt.  We put ourselves down, poke fun at ourselves, and try to fool everyone into thinking that none of this bothers us.

And if you do this, you are considered a “good sport” or a “cool guy.”  And in reality the only thing you want to do is hit something.  Hard.  Look folks…there’s a reason that for the longest time I had to do physical activity like martial arts to control my rage.  I covered it in my “Wrath” post, but I was wrestling that demon to the ground with good old fashioned brute force.  I had to take it out in action in some way, where I wasn’t looked at as if I was your typical angry short guy…when people saying shit like THIS was fueling my fire to be exactly that.  It wasn’t until I realized how much energy I was wasting focusing on this negativity that I learned to step back from it.  To soften my gaze at these poor deluded individuals and just walk away.  Like any good flame war, it can’t really start if you don’t keep supplying fuel to the fire.  A digital flame can’t exist in a social vacuum…so ignore it and that spark will just end up soaking itself out.  You’re right…it’s not okay for them to say things like “Short men should die” or that “Tall women aren’t women.”  I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t let it bother us.  It’s just that fighting these things head on only feeds the attention seeking, social media whores.  It doesn’t actually change the dynamic and the fundamental issues of dealing with any kind of prejudice.  The ways in which that can be done are usually through the paths of least resistance.

– Cunning Linguist –

As an example…language is an excellent indicator of how society tends to express our morality.  Take the word “belittle.”  I don’t think you need to be working for Oxford or Webster to figure out where the word came from.  Belittle, meaning to “make light of.”  Essentially, it means to treat something as something small and unimportant…to dismiss something based on its lack of merit, and even to mock its significance.  The word “little” in this word, contains a lot of the negative meanings that people associate with being short.  To belittle a person is in many ways, the very thing that short people rally against.  Words like “marginalized” implies inefficacy and unimportance.  It’s essentially meaning that something of significance is forced into a very small space (margin) and in so doing, becomes impotent.

Expressions like “making mountains out of molehills”, is another great example of how we see the small as being unimportant.  Even the word “less” tends to be worse than “more”, with the latter of the two carrying more significance.  A speech writer knows that “more” carries greater weight and importance than the word “less.”  The same goes for the word “small” and the word “big”.  Please don’t misunderstand.  We need these words in order to ascertain physical properties, and I’m by no means dismissing the fact that they are necessary terms.  What I mean to say is that the words themselves have adopted a morality that originally wasn’t there to begin with, because human beings started to apply their own views and projected them onto the vocabulary.  If you call someone “little man” or “giant woman”, the words themselves are really only applying the physical characteristics, but it’s ourselves that engage the meaning to the phrase.  The problem always comes in the context in which the words are used.  Using the word “little” or “giant” to a person is unnecessary because that’s really only pointing out something that’s obvious.  What you’re really trying to do is placing yourself in a higher position than the other person, and applying social context which keeps you on the superior social high ground.

In a lot of ways, this comes from a fundamental lack of ability to communicate.  It used to be that you could make eye contact with a person across a room, make the approach, and speak to them clearly while looking them in the eyes.  Hell, we even managed to not invade their personal space while doing it.  Nowadays, we find it necessary to avoid looking at one another, mumble incoherently into our shirt, and resort to calling out a person’s obvious physical characteristic followed by “dude”, “lady”, “girl”, “guy”, or “person.”  So maybe because of this sudden ineptness we can’t seem to interact properly with other human beings without the stupid remarks.  I mean, it’s very possible that the offending person doesn’t mean any harm with his words.  Maybe we, as the listener apply our own morality to what we’re hearing and become offended too quickly.  Well…I’d honestly like to believe that, but I’ve seen the look of contempt and superiority on too many faces to think that this is all a coincidence.

– Secure Security –

In our case, the best offense is a good defense.  Any bully knows intrinsically how to spot a person with an insecurity.  In some ways, they have an acute understanding of human weakness and prey on it like any good predator tends to do.  To make sure that we don’t chum the waters, we must be ever vigilant to be as secure as possible.  I said this in an earlier post (I forget where), but you need to understand that you can’t pretend to be secure, you actually have to be it.  Bullies and superficials tend to have an uncanny ability to be aware of even the slightest chink in the armor, and we tend to manifest our weaknesses subconsciously.  Sometimes it is our automatic reaction to certain words (such as the language I mentioned earlier), or it could be our natural and reflexive defense mechanism like poking fun at ourselves before someone else can.  Even when we’re not being bullied, it’s still never a bad idea to see if you are really comfortable in your own skin.

Security is really easy to fake to ourselves, but tends to be transparently clear to others.  And as such, we have the tendency to do things like over state our own security to others, only making it painfully obvious that we are actually not.  So then the question becomes…how do you be something that you clearly aren’t?  How do you stay calm and make sure that when they call you “little” or “tiny” that you don’t fly off the handle?  Well…this is what I tend to do.  Make your life about something else.  Like your parents told you since you were little…there ain’t no such thing as a perfect human being.  “No shit”, you say.  So being as that’s true, why focus on the imperfections that you don’t have any control over?  The people who make fun of you, or reject you for some superficial reason all have flaws in the fact that they are superficial.  You just have to say to yourself that you were born this way…what’s their excuse?  And it’s true. You can’t control your genetic make up, but you can change your perspective.  And really…what are you supposed to do?  Apologize for being born?  Are you really so insecure about your height that you actually wish your own non-existence?  That isn’t a lack of self-esteem, my friends, that is a vacuum.  You’re not even at 0, and went straight into the negatives.

Alright…you know what you do?  Next time that someone calls you a “runt” or says something stupid like “out of the way, little man”, allow yourself to get angry.  Let it fill you to your brim.  Let vengeful words fill your brain along with the image of you donkey punching them right in the taint.  Let that rage take you right to the cusp of a Hulk-style rampage…but never let it show on your face or your body.  Let it occur for a full satisfying second.  Then realize that the complete stranger mocking you probably has a social problem.  That their personality is transparent and that their insecurities are even greater than your own because they absolutely HAD to vocalize their own superficial superiority.  Feel content in the knowledge that these people shout at the rain because no one sees them the way they want to be seen, just like you.  Then take a deep breath, turn, look them straight in the eye and give a half smile.  Let your eyes fill with a mix of pity for them and contentment with yourself.  From there, what you decide to say is up to you.  In every situation there is a proper response that will deflect the whole thing and kill the conversation cold.  It’s best to keep a sense of humor about it, but that doesn’t mean you need to demean yourself.

Look…heightism exists.  Fight it head on, change the fundamental nature of the world, kill the source, change yourself, ignore it…whatever you want to do is alright so long as you’re happy with yourself.  The problem is that humans are social creatures and we exist in a social spectrum.  We allow ourselves to have our happiness dictated by arbitrary standards, set forth by other people who we have no connection to.  And this is a shift that has only occurred recently due to social media, where previously unheard voices gain opinions on what should or should not constitute your own happiness.  Hell, on any given day there’s 400 people out there who know what you had for dinner and form opinions about you based on what you had.  There are suddenly hundreds of thousands of people out there who have an opinion on what color ribbon you should have in your hair, how you should reprimand your child, or what beautiful is.  And it is shoved right into our faces, every day, even in the places where we don’t normally expect to find it.  Maybe you read an editorial in the lifetime section of your favorite magazine and find the writing particularly opinionated.  Maybe the news or celebrity gossip shows do a piece that hits close to home.  Maybe you posted up a status on Facebook and you got blindsided by a response that you never expected.  Point is…your happiness and personal satisfaction isn’t any of their business.  It’s yours.  Only you can tell the rest of us what keeps you happy.

As for confidence…that comes with time.  Trust me.  I spent a lot of my time from my teens to my twenties hating myself over things I had no control over.  It wasn’t until I realized my strengths that I managed to muster up my courage.  It wasn’t until I knew who I was that I became comfortable being myself around members of the opposite sex.  The height thing…like I said at the beginning…it sucks.  It makes dating harder and makes staying the confident course that much more difficult.  You have to work at not being bitter when you suspect that the reason why the girl said “No” is because societal constructs and antiquated gender roles tell us that the man should be taller than the woman, or the woman shorter than the man.  You have to work to have mental fortitude when people assume that you’re weaker just because you’re smaller than they are.  And at the end of the day, you let it be about who you are.  The skills that you have.  The things that you can do and the people you have in your life that no one else in this world can duplicate.

Some faceless Twitter dweeb, who believes that they became famous because their favorite star “followed” them, says something offensive.  So what?  Yeah, it hurts that they said it, but honestly, how does that person even pertain to you?  Do you believe that they wield ANY power that you yourself don’t?  Do you think that they set what the truth is and isn’t?  No.  And any person that is in your life who would take their word over the truth that is in front of their eyes doesn’t deserve to see.  Love is hard, folks.  It doesn’t matter if you’re short or tall, fat or skinny, light skinned or dark.  It’s a god damn war zone out there no matter who you are.  The people who make it about these arbitrary standards…it proves only one of two things: Either they’ve never been in love and don’t know what it is, or been foolishly mislead to believe that these things matter in the affairs of the heart.  Pity them at the very least for the fact that one day their fragile ego that hasn’t been tempered by years of emotional conditioning, will shatter like an egg shell.  And the strong ones…we hold out.  We hold out for that love that beats all others that can support a mountain.  Peace and love in the New Year, folks.  The best is yet to come.

The Seven Deadly Sins (Part 5): Gluttony – Feed Me, Seymour. Feed Me All Night Long.

Considering my physique, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time in my life when I didn’t love food.  My mother is often fond of telling the story of how, as a toddler, I was an extremely fussy eater.  Apparently, I refused to eat on several occasions, and my parents were concerned that I wasn’t getting the essential nutrients I needed.  I’m the eldest child, so having been born first, my parents had no real idea of how to raise a kid.  Basically, I was the guinea pig.  Their main reaction to anything that I did that was out of the ordinary was: “Oh dear god, we can’t let him die.”  We forget though that we all have innate survival instincts that lay dormant.  Even though I didn’t eat much, it didn’t mean that I wasn’t hungry, just that I wasn’t hungry for what I was being given.  They found out later that I snuck downstairs early in the morning or late at night, opened the fridge, and dipped my finger into a pat of butter and licked that.  They had no idea until one morning they finally noticed a series of conspicuous looking tiny fingeprints on the stick.  I have no idea who noticed first, or whether the reaction to it would be as I pictured in my head, with my father reaching with his butter knife to have a toasted english muffin and realizing, “Honey, do we have elves living here, or is our son secretly eating fatty milk products?”  According to my mother, I must have been craving calories, and innately figured out that the butter would serve as a sufficient ration.  It’s cute to think that my infantile brain could have justified my consumption, but personally…I just think I was French.

As a kid, my diet really didn’t get any better.  I didn’t like tomatoes which meant that I didn’t like pizza.  I would just eat the crusts because even the cheese was touching the sauce.  I never had ketchup on my fries or my burgers.  I just wasn’t a fan of condiments in general.  Mustard was too spicy or too strong a flavor so I tended to avoid anything that wasn’t salt and occasionally pepper.  I wasn’t a fan of Japanese foods aside from the obligatory bowl of rice, mostly because I didn’t like using chopsticks.  I couldn’t hold them properly with my short stubby fingers, and I got tired of being corrected of their usage by mother.  I ended up maliciously stabbing my food on the ends and ate everything on what essentially became a skewer.  …she didn’t like that.  Like any young child, I also was in the habit of not enjoying any vegetable except potatoes, and even then I’d only have them french fried or if I must…mashed.  And because of this rather odd assortment of likes and dislikes, my diet became, well…typical for a teenager.  From the young days of being a skinny kid with a big head, I suddenly became the chubby kid from eating nothing but high fat, high sugar foods.

Then…I was forced into the wilderness.  Well, to be fair, it wasn’t as if anyone pointed a gun to my head and told me to march.  But it was my psycholgist’s wishes at the time, for me to gain confidence by overcoming adversity.  Oh, if I could have only thanked him by beating him with the canoe I was forced to carry on my shoulder for 4 weeks.  Each night was rehydrated food, with the consistency usually reserved for infant mush or badly congealed oatmeal (we ate that too).  And with my food supply being bullied out of me by a small group of big racist kids, my daily meals started to consist of trail mix and cheddar cheese that had started to go a little white.  That was just about the time I discovered that I actually enjoyed eating blue cheese.  It didn’t even ruin my stomach at the time since my body was so thankful for anything that wasn’t oatmeal or granola.  And truthfully, with all the fiber I was putting down, everything from my stomach to my intestines were pretty much made of kevlar.  By the time I came back from that camp, I was ready to bite the head off of a live fish if it came down to it.  My parents barely recognized me at the airport with all the weight I had lost and all the muscle I had gained.  And god bless my mother.  The first thing she asked me when I came home was what I wanted to eat for dinner, to which I replied red meat.  I just wanted something I could sink my teeth into that wasn’t designed to have me in the bathroom an hour later.  So that night we had a cookout on our backyard deck.  Before I had gone into the wilderness, I couldn’t stomach bell peppers.  There was something in their flavor that I just couldn’t get over, and I never touched them when they came out as part of the food.  So I really couldn’t blame her when my mother looked in bewilderment, as I took a huge heaping helping onto my plate and proceeded to devour it with gusto.  “You’re…you’re eating peppers?  But you hate peppers!”  And I remember chewing a mouthful of sweet red and yellow peppers that had been charred on our grill, and it was almost as if I hadn’t even realized what I was eating until that point.  I just shrugged and said “I guess I was hungry” which really didn’t answer her unspoken question of what triggered this new found willingness to try something I had already earmarked as a “No”.  All I knew at the time was that it seemed really stupid to not eat something when I was hungry, when just a few days prior, I had been fighting for a fistful of Grape Nuts.

After my first stint in college, I became a townie in my college town, working 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat.  It wasn’t unusual for me to eat a single meal a day to try and cut my living expenses down, and because I worked in a restaurant, that one meal usually consisted of whatever I could scrounge up at work, or whatever was leftover at the end of the night.  When I could afford to buy my own food, it was grilled cheese sandwiches and orange juice.  I spent a lot of my time feeling malnourished and starving.  That was why when I went back to living with my parents while I went back to school, I suddenly didn’t have likes and dislikes for food.  I never realized how thankless I had been for the food that I was allowed to eat until I was starving every day.  It’s amazing what motivates you when you aren’t able to eat the things you want to eat when you want to eat it.  It seems like such a trivial thing, but when you’re unhappy with life, sometimes it’s those moments that make all the difference.  So after an experience like that, I decided that I’d never take it for granted again.  I ate everything.

Nowadays there isn’t anything that I won’t try at least once.  A definite far cry from when going from smooth to chunky peanut putter was considered straying from the norm.  I want to try everything, and if there’s a portion of something that I want on that table, then you can bet your ass, I won’t hesitate to take the last piece.  But I’m definitely not what you might call gluttinous.  I understand that my table is meant for sharing, and that eating with a group of people makes the food taste that much better.  I enjoy feeding people as much as I like to be fed.  I know what it means to give up the last morsel because I know what it means to be hungry, what it means to truly relish something as precious as flavor, and that feeling that we have is what will differentiate whether you become a glutton or not.  Because to be a glutton in essence relies on a core characteristic of being selfish.

And now we get to the meat and potatoes of it (no pun intended).  Gluttony is all about over indulgence (greed) towards something that we want more than anything.  We ignore everything else in our path, sacrifice people and their feelings to obtain that which WE want.  And when we do get what we set out for, there is no such thing as moderation.  The thing is, that alone does not make this particularly a sin, at least not in the modern context.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting, not even in excess…as long as you put forth the equivalent work to get your hands on it.  Gluttony, in essence is Greed + Sloth combined.  That is to say, taking something that one hasn’t earned and then hoarding it away from others.  In addition, compared to the other sins, it isn’t just the thought of the action, but the actual act itself.  In other words,  you aren’t just thinking of consuming and filling yourself with greedy thoughts, you are actually doing the consuming. By applying the act of selfishness on top of these factors, we trivialize the effort of others, and thereby their feelings.  What remains is a kind of despair…the feeling that I think most of us are familiar with: Life isn’t fair.

The Nice Guy (NG) tends to have this trait in spades.  Whether it be selfishly hoarding a woman’s attention by any means necessary, or looking at the male competition and applying a selfish value to them to justify their own inadequacy.  The NG could utilize things like aggressively pronouncing his self pity to get the attention he desires, but does so purely for selfish reasons.  And any attention the NG receives is hoarded away, and gives them great satisfaction.  Much like being a “glutton for punishment”, it is entirely possible to be a “glutton for attention.”  In fact, this act is far more common in that attention tends to be paid immediately, and satisfies the need for immediate gratification.  This is also a selfish act in that it requires no real empathy for the other person.  It is ironic that NG’s tend to think about their own emotional or physical well being over the other person (or thinks about the other person only as it pertains to how it may benefit the NG).  Most NG’s are oblivious to the needs of the other person and subconsciously chooses to ignore any of the incoming indications that the other person may want something else.  Again, as I stated before, sometimes a blind laser focus on what we want can be a beneficial asset.  It is when this focus becomes the status quo and requires no effort that we start to encroach on dangerous territory.  It’s a fine distinction between being tenacious and being obsessed.

Often times when people become obsessed, especially over someONE, we sacrifice the needs and feelings of the other person, just so that it fits into the things that we desire.  It’s like forcing a square peg into a round hole, and inevitably when we try to do these things, we end up breaking the mold.  We don’t acknowledge the worth of the other person, and instead we superimpose our own values over the other person’s desires and needs, just so that we can get our way.  A good guy…no, a good PERSON has empathy to combat this instinct.  We have the innate ability to place ourselves into the shoes of others (metaphorically speaking), and see the world through their eyes.  This appreciation of another’s needs and desires and still being able to be adamant over your own, is the real method by which we form lasting relationships.

Speaking of which…there are also the NG’s who go to the extreme on the other end of the spectrum.  That is to say that they sacrifice their own wants and needs in order to hold onto their relationship.  While this may SEEM to be a selfless act, the motivation for their sacrifice is purely for selfish reasons and therefore still makes it a gluttinous act.  While killing off that instinct to try to get what you want may seem like a good idea, we almost always subconsciously project the things we aren’t getting onto others.  This manifests in many ways like self pity or passive aggressive behavior.  Unlike the previous example, by using this method, the other person in the relationship must take control and apply attention to making sure the NG is getting what they really desire.  So while the methods differ, the outcome is the same.  Being able to place yourself in the other person’s shoes does not mean that you need to wear them until they break.  Again, with a sufficient amount of empathy, an observant person would be able to understand the difference between compromise and sacrifice and the effect that each has on themselves and others.

So…how does this apply to me?  Honestly, I was once the latter type of NG.  My last long term relationship failed in many ways because I sacrificed too much, and killed off too many parts of myself.  In turn, the person I was with assumed that I didn’t have needs, and therefore translated that to a lack of passion.  It became…complacent (a word that causes shudders through any relationship).  While I myself am extremely empathic, as time wore on, that empathy was not given mutually, and it became…tiresome.  At first, I was very keenly aware of her needs and I tried to fill them…and I believe that I succeeded.  If I hadn’t, then we wouldn’t have stayed together for as long as we did.  But, eventually that empathy wasn’t returned, and slowly the effort became work.  Without reciprocal action, it was like throwing stones into a bottomless well.  Sooner or later I just got sick of seeing it from her side…but I realized after our break up that some of the fault lay in my all too flexible nature.  I gave up too much of myself, and didn’t fight for the things that should have been important to me just to keep a relationship that was broken.  And because of that experience, I use it as my cautionary tale.  I learned after the fact, the importance of staying true to myself…and that wanting something is never a bad thing as long as you work at it.  That doesn’t make us gluttons, it makes us good.

Off to the next circle!  Two more to go!  (Yes, I know there is irony in the fact that my Gluttony post fell on Thanksgiving…and it may seem ironic to say it now but…HAPPY THANKSGIVING: Go stuff your face!)

The Seven Deadly Sins (Part 4): It’s Not Easy Being Green…With Envy

The first time I remember ever being envious of someone was when I was about 8 years old.  I didn’t know how to swim.  I could be in the water as long as my feet touched the ground, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would want to voluntarily submerge themselves in something they couldn’t breathe in, and partake in an activity that you could potentially die doing.  But then I saw kids who would splash around and play with the other children their age.  I’d see parents who would beam with pride as their offspring took their hands off the kick board and scrambled their arms and legs in a spastic doggy paddle.  “So what?”  I remember thinking.  “What makes them so great that they can swim and I can’t?”  “What’s so fun about splashing around in the water?”  And I sat on the concrete perimeter of the pool, making up excuses for why swimming sucked, while dipping my feet into what I could only imagine being a combination of urine and chlorine.  I remember silently sulking as I watched other kids have fun.

Roller rinks became the bane of my existence in elementary school.  Seems like every body in every grade wanted to have a roller skating party.  And everyone in my grade was invited to go.  Not wanting to be a social pariah, I showed up…not for the roller skating, but for the mini-arcade next to the snack bar, and the free pizza and cake.  It seemed as though EVERY kid in my grade knew how.  I was only in fifth grade and I was already nostalgic for my “younger days” when we’d have a bowling party, and everyone rolled the ball “granny style.”  And as I leaned against the divider watching kids go around in circles, and laughing as if they were having the time of their lives…I knew I had to try.  I wanted to be one of those boys who held the hand of the girl that they liked and went around, laughing and smiling.  I wanted to be able to roller limbo or do that cool backwards skating that I saw some of the more advanced kids did.  I wanted to have fun like they did!  Even after I saw one of the less experienced guys take off down the straightaway and plow into the concrete divider not being able to turn, I still thought that I wanted to do it.  So I strapped those clunky things onto my feet, and used the divider to pull me towards the entrance to the rink from the rental booth.  I think I managed to put both feet onto the waxed floor before I face planted…but I can’t remember.  Might have been only one foot.  Shit, I may not have made it on there at all…look, I know I made it to the entrance of the rink, ok!?  All I know was that the next thing I remembered, I was being wheeled to the boys room to staunch a bloody nose.  To my credit, there was no sobbing.  After all…I had my dignity.

Nothing good comes out of being envious of other people.  It really doesn’t.  But when we’re young, we’re so prone to this particular sin.  Least, I know I was.  I remember wanting to learn guitar because all the cool kids could do it.  My father even bought me one for my 12th birthday that I still have in my possession.  A beautiful rosewood acoustic that still gives off amazing tones after all these years.  Unfortunately, one of the fundamental problems I had was that my fingers were so short that I couldn’t stretch my fingers out over the frets to make some basic bar chords.  But I tried for several months, trying to up my dexterity of my short stubby fingers, but still hitting that invisible ceiling of ability.  There were some days I tried until my fingers cramped up, just so I could stretch them across 3 frets.  I recently tried my hand at it again, and noticed I could get some of the chords now, so further experimentation will be needed.  But when you’re a teen, and you want to be like the cool kids…realizing that you’ll never be able to because you can’t pass a hurdle makes you quite envious.

Or I wanted to be better at sports…particularly soccer which I had played all throughout elementary, and I had always thought I was good.  When I was a kid, I was great at defense and a lot of kids had a hard time getting by me.  I took a little bit of pride in that.  That was until I didn’t make the team 4 years running in junior high and high school, and after a while, I just stopped trying.  I ended up taking PE classes where it was me and two other kids, and we played handicap badminton…which by the way, is just about the saddest fucking thing in the world to see.  There is probably nothing quite so pathetic looking than 3 teenagers hitting a shuttlecock over a lopsided net, and not even bothering to keep score.  And I won’t even begin to start to tell you how many times I was jealous of people who were taller…because let’s face it, there are days where I still have to place a hash mark next to that friggin’ tally.

It could have been peer pressure, or maybe it was just a case of the grass being greener on the other side of that white picket fence.  But no matter what, this sin in many ways defined who I am today.  Envy or jealousy causes you to harbor resentment towards someone else for what they have, that you believe you yourself lack.  Whether that’s true or not is purely speculative, and could be completely founded on irrational assumptions…but Envy is one of those sins that is based mostly on perspective.  Not ALL of it mind you.  If your friend has a million dollars and you have 20 bucks to your name and 100k of student loans to pay…then there’s no perspective about it.  Your envy is based on actual data.  They have more, you have less, and there is concrete evidence to support this claim.  But a lot of this particular sin revolves around things that are less tangible, or not easily attainable.  In the immortal words of a con man I used to serve at the bar, “No matter how broke you get, take comfort in the fact that there’s always money to be made somehow somewhere. You just gotta figure out how to get yourself a piece.”  But ability, talent, personality traits, physical traits, sex, love or even a life…well these are things that don’t normally come with your 401K and health benefits.

This sin defined me in so many ways leading all the way up to my first stint in college.  And looking back on it, Envy is one of the reasons that I realize I couldn’t climb up onto even the bottom rung of the social ladder.  I think that it has everything to do with how we see ourselves, and when we are envious, that moment is revealed to us.  The minute that you are envious of someone, you immediately assign yourself a worth.  This worth is purely based on your own perspective, and is often less than what it should be in reality.  By being envious of someone else for what they have, you are assigning a worth to them that is clearly higher than your own.  If not on them as a person, you are saying that the person you are jealous of exceeds you in some particular aspect.  This…isn’t a healthy way to live your life, because how can you have any sense of self esteem when you have already claimed to be inferior?  At the heart of it, you have to believe that you are at least EQUAL to everyone else.  Granted, the world doesn’t make it easy, but if you can’t place yourself on even footing with everyone else, then on top of feeling inferior, it becomes impossible to really know someone else.  How can you be friends with someone, thinking the entire time that you are not good enough?  Mutual respect, acknowledgment, friendship, (and yes NG’s) even love means to understand that the person across from you has good and bad traits, traits in which they excel and they are mediocre…and still accepting it.  If you live your life envying the things that you supposedly don’t have,  you always keep other people at arm’s length, and why?  Because you don’t think that you’re good enough.

For the Nice Guys…there is no sin that plays a larger role in motivating their behavior.  THIS is why you can’t cross over to the other side, and this is what is holding you back.  Envy plays such a large part in a NG’s behavior.  I mentioned in my previous Sloth post, how I saw on some comment threads under Friend Zone themed memes and blog entries, a tendency to lash out quite venomously about the subject.  There seems to be a resentment towards the women for choosing men who weren’t them, and a equally vehement resentment towards the men they chose.  If you can’t see that this behavior is based on jealousy, then I have a couple of spare tickets on the Reality Train.  The resentment towards the guys who aren’t them, I can almost understand.  I don’t condone it, but I do understand it.  What we see here though, is the epitome of bitterness based on envy.  Why isn’t it me?  What does this guy have that I don’t have?  And then you start going down the list of characteristics in which they excel and you believe yourself to be below standard.  You rank yourself compared to them and find yourself lower.  Most of the time, the common practice of the NG is to blame physical differences.  Things that they don’t believe they have any control over, and in essence, absolving themselves of all blame.  WRONG!  Thanks for playing, kids!  Enjoy your parting gift of being kicked down the dating ladder!

I don’t even need to begin to tell you why the NG’s failed, right?  I mean it should be painfully obvious?  Good!  Moving on.  Then there’s the bitterness that I DON’T understand.  I mean, seriously, I don’t get it.  The NG’s who blame the women for not choosing them.  The resentment comes from the envy, but has misguided itself towards the person of their affection!  It’s like aiming a missile at Iraq and hitting Iran!  How the hell do you miss by a country!?  What, are you going “Meh…close enough”!?  (That’s my political humor for the day.)  Envy has misaligned your trajectory, my dear NG’s.  To tell you the truth, you shouldn’t be aiming that bitterness at anyone, not even yourself!  Along that line…

I think it’s important to understand that someone’s exceedingly good points, don’t undo YOURS, nor does it mean that their good qualities outweigh yours.  People tend to forget (myself included) that the real value of a person comes from what they do with their ability, not what they simply have in their possession.  All this tends to lend itself to is resentment.  Beauty doesn’t outweight brains, talent doesn’t outweigh personality.  We are a products of genetics and our surroundings, and a host of other variables out there.  We can’t conceive the number of patterns and differences that exist between us, so what good does it do anyone to compare each other to assign our worth or someone else’s?  At any given time, our worth is constantly fluctuating, and in our best moments our stock can skyrocket…and in our worst we can plummet into recession.  The majority, if not ALL of us live in the middle.  Maybe the peaks are set higher for some people, but proportionally, the falls may be just as tragic.  They have something you lack, well conversely, you have something that they lack.  No matter how many common experiences you have, no matter how long you’ve known each other, you will always be two different people and in that, you will always lack something, and they will also lack.  You will excel, just as they will excel.  You probably just won’t lack or excel equally in the same things.  And if you ever meet someone who excels in an area you lack…don’t envy them, but embrace them.  Chances are they will help to make you better and you to them.

See, there’s the other aspect of envy that I find sinful.  It dismisses hard work, and this is where Envy and Sloth intersect.  There are some that are born with natural born talent in something.  There are some who come to this world knowing exactly what they are meant for, as soon as they are able to grasp the concept of a future and destiny.  But without hard work to nurture that talent, then everything is simply wasted.  What we tend to envy is the final product of that hard work.  But because, on average, we don’t see the progression and the nurturing of these qualities or talent, we tend to believe that these characteristics came without any cost.  When we see a talented guitar player, we don’t see the late nights of icing their wrist to combat carpal tunnel, or the bleeding bandaged fingertips.  When we see a gifted pro athlete, we don’t see their grueling physical training sessions, their daily maintenance rituals, or their rehab when they get injured.  I always blamed my short legs for the fact that I couldn’t play soccer, but I never saw how hard the others guys tried to make the team.  I never saw the bruises on the knees or legs of the people who were good at roller skating.  I never saw how hard it was to try and get those kids to swim.  All we see…is that final product, and we want THAT, not everything that came before it.  And the fact is, nobody excels in being something without hard work, dedication, and sacrifice.  If you are envious of only the final product, then you dismiss all of what came before.  And if you are envious of even the entire process, the hard work, and all of it…then there is nothing stopping you from working hard to try and get it too.

You see, NG’s…you see the end result which is the fact that the woman chooses another guy over you.  What you didn’t see is the hard work the guy may have put into making himself into someone attractive FOR this particular person.  Just as I mentioned above, the right guy is the guy who has worked harder than anyone to be better.  I don’t doubt that they, like you, have had their moments where they had to battle with the big green monster known as envy.  But at some point, they channeled the energy they could have expended being bitter, lamenting their own poor fortune, into refining themselves in some way.  I always say that a person who achieves real love with a person, has probably suffered an equal amount of heartache.  Never doubt that the Right Guy has been rejected more times than the Nice Guy has ever known.  Besides…if you are truly Nice, then being so shouldn’t cost you anything, nor should it be considered hard work.  So why is it that you don’t spend the energy that you KNOW you don’t need in that area, into some other aspect of yourself that you know you do?  If you are so certain that you lack in something (even if you don’t), then instead of crying into the proverbial milk, why not try and improve these things?  Even if you don’t see the results right away, there’s no doubt you’re trying to do better by yourself.  And it’s certainly a much more conducive way of spending your energy than to lash out at others, and pitying yourself over something you have no control over.

As for how that relates to me…at some point I learned all of this.  I know that I’m a good guy, and confident in the knowledge that at some point I will find someone who will love me as I am.  With every new heartache, with every new failed attempt, I learn.  I grow.  I mean…sure it hurts sometimes, and I stumble as I try to traverse my own life.  Sometimes I fall spectacularly, and it takes me a good amount of time to get back up.  But I do.  With every setback, I try to figure out why I couldn’t get to where I was trying to go, and I try to improve upon it.  There’s nothing wrong with taking several tries at something, even if you never get it right.  With each step, I know I get better, and closer to the target.  It doesn’t mean that I don’t want what others have.  But what’s important is to distinguish the feeling of “I’m never going to get it” with the feeling of “I don’t have it right now.”  The key to being better at anything is to not expend your own precious energy on desiring what others have.  If you have to want for anything…try to want the opportunity to work hard towards something, not just that final product.  And just remember that the prize without the journey is not really a prize at all.

See you all in the next circle!

The Seven Deadly Sins (Part 3): Sloth – “BABY…RUTH…!?”

Sloth is the third sin that I’ve come across in my journey.  While it is the name of a furry adorable monkey-bear, and also the name of the Rocky Road ice cream lovin’ mongoloid Fratelli brother…it is also a sin that tends to creep up on us.  And honestly, after the disaster of a time in the Ring of Greed, it’s almost a relief to be able to lazily stumble through the Circle of Sloth.  That’s what this sin is really all about.  Laziness and complacency.  It doesn’t just have to be physical either.  It can be spiritual, emotional, or even mental.  We should never underestimate the human potential for cutting corners when we think that something is difficult.  The other thing that I think makes this sin very interesting is that it isn’t just about the failure to act, but failing to act even with the knowledge of the correct course of action.  To put it simply…you know what the consequences of your inactivity means, and what it could mean if you potentially DO act, but you simply choose not to.  What’s the motivation?  Fear, issues with confrontation, the potential for an angry exchange, gunshot to the face…I mean, it all becomes justification.  It’s really all about being too lazy to act.

Sloth is really based on that one assumption: This shit needs to be easier.   And that one assumption will lead to things like inactivity, entitlement, bitterness against adversity, or sheer apathy.  I’ll come to each of those in turn, but let’s start with some examples.  Physical laziness is pretty easy to define and simple to spot.  Here’s how it works for me.  I decide one day that I am tired of being a blob who eats junk food like it’s my job (hey, that rhymed!).  I know that I need to eat better in order to get healthier and I even know how to cook it so that it’s delicious.  I am also aware that I need to start to exercise and have the tools inside of my house to not even have to GO ANYWHERE and work out.  So knowing all of that, having the tools at my very fingertips…I choose to buy a 10 piece McNugget meal (large of course), and sit on my couch and watch Deep Fried Masters on Destination America.  Let’s hit another example that involves my couch which will illustrate this point even better.

I’m lying on my couch and finally get into that me-shaped groove that I’ve developed in my cushions.  I hit it in such a way that my body is perfectly cradled with a perfect view of my television set.  There’s only one problem.  The television remote is on the coffee table at my feet end!  Oh, the humanity!!  And then comes the epic struggle within my mind of whether or not I should sit up, sacrificing my beautiful nest to grab the remote so I can watch what I want.  And this becomes a real actual dilemma as I wonder to myself if I can use my feet like chopsticks to pick the remote up and deposit it near my head without dropping it on my face.  I know that if I sit up briefly, grab the remote and go back down, I could very easily return to a similar position in about 2 Mississippi’s.  Can you imagine!?  Being too lazy to be comfortable!!

So there are two examples of my own physical sloth.  And to be perfectly fair to myself, while this sin is definitely present in me, there is a fine line between lazy and leisure.  Considering the hours within the day that I work and the intensity in which I work them, I don’t believe there is anyone out there who knows me, who would behoove me a little leisure time.  In fact, most of my friends who know my life would probably call in a bomb threat into my work just so that I could sleep in a few hours.  Ironically enough, the reason why I hadn’t put this post up earlier was largely in due part to me being too busy to finish writing this, and proofreading it.  So physically lazy, I ain’t.  But as I mentioned earlier however, Sloth becomes about the choices we make to stay inactive.  In the examples I gave above, I would have been better off by choosing to act, but instead chose to remain inert.  And when this sin is active within me, the magic question pops into my head: Why does it have to be so hard? (And yes…that’s what she said.)  This is where the resentment against our own adversity begins, which is one of the main tenets of Sloth.  When I say adversity, that could mean anything to the individual.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be something epically challenging.  Often times it only has to feel that way for Sloth to really take a grip. For some people, getting out of bed feels like climbing Everest, and for some people climbing Everest is like getting out of bed.  It’s honestly just about perspective.

So how does this all apply to me personally?  Honestly?  Well as I just said, the physical doesn’t apply to me, so now we come to the meat and potatoes of it.  This really has more to do with mental and emotional Sloth, and I think in a lot of ways plays a really large part in the overall quality of interaction with other people.  I relate everything back towards this idea of the Nice Guy as we’re wandering the depths of Hell, so let’s take a look at this idea.  The expression “Nice guys finish last” has been a bone of contention for many years based upon the premise that the phrase is untrue.  The reality is that this isn’t a myth, just a simple case of mistaken identity and mislabeling.  It’s the difference between Nice and Good.  Nice is a surface personality, and Good is a fundemental.  But more to the point, part of the personality that embodies this so called “Nice Guy” tends to be a measure of emotional Sloth.  If you surf the web a little bit, you can find tons of memes based around being placed into the Friend Zone.  And if you are like me and check the comment threads through Facebook or something of the like, you might see a trend of extremely bitter malcontents who expound in no subtle terms, of how these self proclaimed Nice Guys get thrown into Friendship Land by these evil women.

What amazes me about it is simply this…these so called NG’s are essentially claiming that being nice in some way entitles them to something beyond friendship, when in reality, nice is just a common courtesy.  You’re supposed to be pleasant to be around, you jackhole.  That doesn’t make you a catch, it just means that you’re better than the bitter drunk at the end of the bar whose wife just left him for a yoga instructor.  If not being picked by someone is enough to send you into a bitter spiral of blaming the other party, then all we see is that the pleasantries were all an act.  The one characteristic that you claim to have that defines who you are is nothing but an easily broken facade.  So here is the first element of Sloth: a lack of trying to better oneself based on a feeling of entitlement.  There is often a school of thought where you will find that NG’s will expound on their own virtues, saying that they believe themselves to be of Grade A caliber in many aspects.  Like dating site screen names that say things like “SexyBoy390” or “HotAss427”, I can assure you that if you have to tell other people that you have it…you probably don’t.  And if you need to tell someone that you ARE something…then you probably ain’t.  Most of the time, these are things that the NG’s believe to be the qualities that women are looking for, and as is often the case, they are usually misleading themselves.  This also displays an enormous lack of self awareness as to our own strengths and weaknesses, which leads to another element of Sloth…a fragility of the psyche.  Being a nice person for the most part isn’t a prerequisite for dating, but it should really be a prerequisite to being a decent human being.  I don’t fault the people who teeter on the brink, as I often do, sometimes appearing manic as I smile at one person and snarl at another.  We’re not one thing all the time, and we certainly don’t always FEEL the same way from moment to moment.  But at the end of the day, my niceness is a product of who I am as a person and it characterizes me fundamentally.  It’s not something that I can compartmentalize in myself, because part of what makes me unique is my sense of obligation, and my overall demeanor towards everyone…not just members of the opposite sex.  This, I turn to my strength because I don’t apologize for being who I am, even if on occasion I try too hard to please.  I’m aware enough of it in myself to the point where if I feel the need, I can scale it back.  Other people I find, lack that sense of self awareness, and can’t seem to provide maintenance to their emotional selves.  Why?

Because as I mentioned above, there is a brittle fragility in a person who is too lazy to look at themselves.  The REASON for it could be the fact that they fear what they’ll find when they do, but the end result is a acute lack of action towards bettering one self.  The “Why” in this case does not matter as much as the fact that this Sloth is not overcome.  NG’s delude themselves into believing that the status quo will work eventually, even though the evidence points to the contrary, because to fix it requires a great deal of emotional fortitude, and the ability to take a metaphoric punch to the gut when realization hits.  Changing yourself for the better is never an easy process.  If it were easy, we’d change personalities like we change clothing, and we’d never be sure of who we are at the core.  (It’s like high school all over again…)  Solid personality…being GOOD and not NICE is facing that adversity of change and meeting it head on.  It’s really all about perspective.  As I mentioned earlier in the post, some people look at getting out of bed like they look at climbing Everest, and vice versa.  The difference is simply this: when you ask yourself the fundamental question of “Why does it have to be so hard?” you are ready with the answer…”Because nothing worth getting should ever come easy.”

So, Sloth isn’t really a sin that I think I’ll ever really have.  Fundamentally, this Sin and I don’t go together because it simply isn’t in me to sit on my laurels.  Maybe it’s because I’m never satisfied with myself, or maybe it’s because I’ve never seen myself as ideal and I never will.  Maybe it’s because I have lived too much of my life being overlooked, and hard work is the only thing I know that I can see working (which is a problem in itself, but I digress).  Regardless of why, I don’t think I’ll ever stop pursuing becoming a better person…because it’s just not in me to give up, and it’s just not in me to stop trying.  I’ll see you all in the next Circle, kids.  C’mon Dante, let’s roll.

The Nice Guy Conundrum: “Is That Okay With You?”

I have something to confess.  I’m…(sigh)…I’m a Nice Guy.  Thank you…thank you, it means a lot that the other people who know my plight and have been there themselves have welcomed me into the fold.  But…I don’t know how it happened!  I just woke up one morning and realized that I was…Nice!  I never asked for this!  All I wanted was to love and be loved!  Is that so wrong!?  Last week I had the urge to be Nice.  Like…really Nice.  My ex who I’m really good friends with wanted to go see Sex and the City 3: Let’s Talk About Shoes…and I almost said “Yes!”  Thank god, I called my sponsor right away and he talked me down from that ledge.  I…I hit rock bottom and I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.  But now these meetings have helped me, and I just wanted to say, I’ve had established boundaries for one week now…and it feels good.  (applause)

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had support groups like that like with AA?  NGA…Nice Guys Anonymous.  Obviously, the above was just a dramatization, but being a Nice Guy has become akin to being a social pariah in many ways.  I should know, being one of them.  The expression of “nice guys finishing last” obviously didn’t come out of thin air.  I think what it came down to is that we needed someone to blame for our romantic misfortunes.  But it wasn’t just that.  It was that somewhere along the way, we lost what we once were.  We gave up this coif of power and adapted socially and romantically to become the thing that other people wanted.  So we became Nice.  And as we went along we realized that something was not working in our favor.  Once we pinpointed what the problem was, it was all about breaking down the cause.  What I’m going to do today is analyze the phenomenon and the bits and pieces that make up the rise of the Nice Guy, and hopefully how to fix what social evolution has twisted about.

First of all…what is being a Nice Guy?  I used to define it as someone who is polite and pleasant across the board.  An overall good person who places the needs of others before themselves.  Someone who simply does the right thing all the time.  So some people are asking what the problem is, and some of you have already ascertained what some of the problems are before we begin.  So let’s break down my definition.  “Nice and pleasant.”  In the face of adversity, the Nice Guy keeps a cool head and is polite, kind, even pleasant to be around.  …unfortunately, that tends to translate socially to simply avoiding any kind of confrontation.  You back down too easily, or you don’t engage at all.  I’m not saying to become a hot head that punches someone’s lights out if they ask you for a quarter.  But even in an argument, you too easily acquiesce to another person’s desires or point of view.  Basically what this shows someone is that you either don’t value your own opinion, or you have no opinion at all.  I mean this only in the sense of your shared reality.  If she likes Lady Gaga and you don’t know her body of work, that does not reflect poorly on the Nice Guy, only that the two of you don’t have similar music tastes.  These superficial aspects are areas of negotiation.  I’m talking about things like…how you feel about her.  That’s the kind of thing that you simply must know.  There should be no hesitation, no looking away from her eyes.  You. Must. Know.

“An overall good person who places the needs of others before themselves.”  I recently listened to a seminar which stated that there is a definitive line between being a Good person, and a Nice person.  And a lot of it has to do with the second part of this definition.  Placing other people’s needs before others goes along the previous definition’s problem of not valuing yourself.  One of the perennial problems of the Nice Guy mentality is that “I don’t care about my needs.  What is hers?”  These guys don’t realize that not having their own needs met tends to project that need onto the woman he seeks a relationship with.  Essentially, it applies pressure to the woman to fulfill whatever need he is ignoring.  Not just that, but not acknowledging your own needs and not communicating them tends to manifest in other ways.  Desperate men are men who are on average, nice guys who don’t have their physical or emotional needs met.  Now, in some cases, there are relationships where one side takes what they want from the relationship and gives nothing in return, preying on that desperation.  This is an abusive relationship and if you are in one, leave the computer now and pack your shit.  Moving in with your mother for a month is a far cry better than continuing your current existence.  In the grand scheme of things, what these men are doing is placing an enormous responsibility on the shoulder of the women to help carry some of their own emotional baggage.  A word of advice and take a page out of the TSA handbook, don’t leave your baggage unattended and always be responsible for your own.

“Doing the right thing all the time.”  Now there’s a suspect phrase if I ever heard one.  Whenever you see this phrase please keep in mind that there is a difference between doing what is nice and doing what is correct.  When you act or react in a nice manner, it’s not always the correct course of action for you.  You are just doing something in such a way to minimize the damage to others, but may be hurting yourself in the process.  (BTW: if you let the damage be done to others in order to minimize the damage to you, then that is doing the asshole thing.)  This goes back to the first part of the definition in that you don’t really value your own feelings in something that you are clearly engaged in.  Doing the correct thing means that you understand your own boundaries and feelings and you don’t compromise on it, and you honestly take the best course of action for both yourself and others.  Sometimes that decision will be hard and even painful, but avoiding the confrontation to spare someone the hurt is not always the best course of action.  I’m not saying that you can’t be both nice AND correct, but that you need to understand the difference so that it doesn’t become a pattern of behavior.  Avoiding the hard choices doesn’t make you nice…it makes you brittle.

These are some of the key problems with being a modern day Nice Guy.  So…how did we get here?  Now, there’s a lot of webpages, blogs, self help seminars that cover this issue.  I subscribe to the idea that the Nice Guy evolved out of an aspect of Social Darwinism.  That is to say that over the course of the last 50 years or so, our base nature as men has had to adapt to the social climate.  Up until the major American feminist movements of the 1960’s, there was much of men’s treatment of women that was deplorable.  Even still the idea of women’s suffrage through the 19th Amendment wasn’t fully ratified in all 50 states until the last state (Georgia) allowed it in 1984 (almost 64 years after it was passed).  As women gained more and more voice both in the political, legal, and cultural levels…men started to realize that the world around them was changing.  Up until that point, under the oppressive patriachal structure, the negative aspects of men weren’t vocalized or made public.  It wasn’t that they weren’t there, they just didn’t have a spotlight shining on it.  Now, women rightfully demanded their proper place standing shoulder to shoulder with these men.  And in the modern age, while there are still several aspects of the culture that lacks, equality between the sexes has come a long way.

That VERY brief history lesson aside…men suddenly realized they could no longer exist purely in their misogynistic ways.  Don’t get me wrong…even now, a lot of guys try.  But through this process, a new form of man came about and that was the one we call now as the Nice Guy.  Take a young boy in an average home, who is raised by his mother (who is no longer yoked with the strong patriarchal shadow looming overhead).  The boy is taught to respect and treasure his mother, and his mother in turn tells him to treat women with respect, love, and with the utmost kindness and care.  This in many ways is the antithesis of the way that she herself was raised and so the mother finds it important to drive this point home.  The boy starts going to school in which we are taught to control our baser male impulses, scolded and reprimanded for acting in dominant fashion.  We are all equal after all.  Play nice, be NICE.  As an adult we take those things that we learned and the things we experienced and try to apply it romantically and sexually.  So we do as our education and our mothers had always taught us…treat women as equals, to be loved and respected, to be NICE.  And suddenly…POOF.  The Friend Zone, the apathy, ignored.  And we sit there and we ask ourselves…”What did I do wrong!?”  “Are you ok!?” “Did I upset you!?”  Then the frustration and confusion all bubbles over into “But…but I love you!”

During this stage of change, many men have lost that spark in the midst of the transition.  We didn’t even know that we lost it until it was far too late.  That Nice Guy attitude of non-confrontation, of a softer / gentler man, of a man who bends over backwards to please the women in his life, the SENSITIVE MAN…it suddenly became so bland.  So easy.  We lost what made us desirable somewhere along the line.  And I think it’s high time that we start taking those things back, don’t you?  I’m sure much of the women in our lives would agree, long as we leave the misogyny back in the 1800’s where it belongs.  So what are these lost qualities and attributes?  Well…

First of all there’s Non Verbal Communication.  We, as men, used to be able to project how we feel outwardly in such a way that we were an open book.  Not only that, but we used to be able to read these signs in women.  Whether it was because men became complacent in the digital age, or it was because we are still trying to adapt and shift our perspectives to the new female paradigm, there is currently a woefully incompetent non-verbal vernacular on the side of men.  A perfect example of Non Verbal Communication was what both men and women like to call The Stare.  The connotation sounds like the piercing gaze of a psychopath, but in reality, this was just a way that men were able to communicate with women that they were the object of their desire.  I always equated it to a cross between the look a boy gets on Christmas morning when he gets exactly what he wants, and the animalistic gaze a man gets when his desire seems to shoot out like fire from behind his eyes.  It was a crystal clear indicator that a man was not only interested in a woman, but also a non verbal way of saying, “You are everything I want, and I want it now.”

This brings me to the second point…Activity. You can call it what you will: Pulling the trigger, escalation, timely stimulation…  Basically, the idea is that we are slowly becoming sedentary creatures that don’t act upon our impulses when given the “Go.”  Part of this goes back to the inability to read the non-verbal communication: the flags that women raise when they are giving the OK to men.  The other half of it in many ways comes from a man’s fear based on historic rejection.  That is to say…we’ve become too friggin’ fragile.  It used to be that rejection was a common thing…a rite of passage that men and women had to get through in order to become functional adults.  But whether it be the idea of being all inclusive in school activities (which is not a bad thing, per se), or having too many options in which we don’t have to interact with each other directly in the age of the internet, the Nice Guy in many ways, lives in fear.  He’s afraid to do something that may upset the delicate balance that he has constructed for himself in his mind.  But putting it realistically, he chooses inactivity because he does not want to get hurt.  He places his own emotional well being first, in order to try and stay secure, choosing to hide his feelings rather than face them.  And the emotion that suffers most due to this phenomenon is Passion.  I don’t think I even have to tell you why this is important, right?

Honesty.  When did we stop being true to the things we want?  Not being honest with our desires is another key component for the reason for the decline in Activity.  It’s almost as if we believe that our desires aren’t a good enough reason to act, or again, we fear that moment when those advances towards those desires are rebuked.  And in many ways, this is due in part to the fact that whether it be sex, love, work, or play, we fear what happens when we fail.  Our minds are capable of showing us such truly horrific and fantastic things, that our imagined failures can terrify us, and our fantastic successes can intimidate us.  This all comes back to being fragile, when we as men should be built of sterner stuff.  Showing emotion is okay, but there comes a time when we as men must be honest with our intentions regardless of the fallout, and not act as if we are made of sugar like a breakaway bottle.

I barely scratched the surface of the aspects that need to be fixed, and I’m sure I’ll come back to each of these in turn.  In closing…I’m going to leave you with some personal advice on how to stop being a Nice Guy, and start being a Good one.  First…stop getting into your own head.  I’m more guilty of this than anyone I know.  I’m an intellectual, but when it comes to being Nice, it is the single thing that will destroy me when it comes to taking action when I should.  I overanalyze to the point where my mind is capable of talking myself OUT of anything that is beyond my comfort zone.  So do what I do…start talking yourself INTO things.  Most things that seem out of reach require self-motivation, but the rewards are absolutely amazing.  Don’t make excuses, and rather use that nervous energy and harness it into bettering yourself.  Second…change your perspective.  For me, this was the thing that I was most successful in, and that was to change my mindset when it came to fear.  Men…we have an intimate relationship with rejection.  Biologically, socially, evolutionarily we must be the ones to put ourselves out there when it comes to courtship.  Once you begin a relationship, the dynamic can go back and forth, but the initial move should be yours.  If you’re nervous or afraid of the reaction, just think this way: it’s never All or Nothing.  Every experience no matter how small, trivial, grand, painful, wonderful is something to learn from.  We always get a little bit with every interaction, and sometimes we get a lot.  The key is to use any rejection in life as an instrument for change.  Third is just be honest with yourself.  If you want something, don’t compromise and don’t try to hide it.  Have well established boundaries as to how much is negotiable and how much is not.  What that shows is what your conviction and values are. 

Along that line is the last thing I’ll talk about today…value yourself.  Value your feelings, value your own worth, value your opinions.  I have the tendency to do as others tell me, and this is very much an aspect of how I grew up.  I was raised in such a way that I always felt that I had to do things for others.  Why?  Because in many ways, I never knew my own worth, so I ended up determining my value in how I could help others.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sooner or later it becomes a pattern of behavior where you do things for others without really considering your own feelings.  I know for me, I just end up going “No, it’s fine. It doesn’t really bother me.” when it really does.  But I try not to think about it, but in the end, that’s really just repression, and the inability or unwillingness to engage in conflict.  Value is what establishes confidence, your morality, your identity.  Realize your worth and don’t waver from it.  If you have the choice in the matter, do what you love and don’t do what you hate.  (With work, it’s usually more like if you can’t do what you love, love what you do…and do it well.)  Nice guys don’t finish last, folks.  They just need to run a little further.  – Peace

Defeating the Defeatist: Quit Your Bitching (A Badass PSA)

I remember the approximate time and  the exact place that I had an acute epiphany about the way the world worked.  Like most bits of knowledge that are attained through self reflection, the wisdom that was gained was glaringly obvious and something that a 7 year old would yell “DUH, STUPID!”  But that’s usually the way with uncomfortable truths.  This was shortly after I had gotten kicked out of my first college, and I was working in the same town as a delivery boy / restaurant manager / bar back.  (I had no idea I was such a masochist, but here we are.)  I was sitting in my basement apartment, in my living room on a futon couch that pulled out to a futon bed. (Although I had not put it back to the couch configuration in about a year, so it was a god damn bed.)  I had two lamps in the apartment, usually only one of them was on, and it had snowed the night before which almost completely blocked off all light from the little basement windows.  The walls were rough concrete, caked with layers of white-ish yellow-ish paint that made me wonder if I were in an asylum. (probably not a stretch there)  There was an entire bedroom off of the living room that I didn’t even use except to store my comics and boxes that I had never bothered unpacking.  Looking back on the apartment, I now realize that it was also probably illegal since there wasn’t a secondary exit in case of fire.  (Thanks Home and Garden Channel!)  So had there been an actual fire that led to the front of my door, my only way out would have been through the small basement window, which would require the spine of a Russian gymnast to get out of…although in retrospect, had there actually been a fire, I have no doubt in my own sense of self preservation, that I would have Macgyver’d my way the hell out of there.

Depressing, right?  Wait, it gets worse.  I remember I sat in front of my Power Mac computer on my desk, which was also in the living room, playing a text based online role playing game.  For you modern nerds and nerdettes out there, that means that the game was played entirely with words and had no pictures or videos.  So as I sat there on my God given day off, eating slightly warmed up pizza which I had taken home from my restaurant, playing my game for hours, interacting with the people on the other side of the screen.  Now, this was a text based RPG, so in essence, you had to speak and act in a manner that was consistent with your character.  The whole idea was to create your own backstory and become that character, whether it was based on yourself, on someone else, or someone else completely contrary to who you were in real life.  So while I played this game, I would chat with these people on AOL’s instant messenger, going back and forth about the real life stuff while the interaction within the game would go on. (I was either good at multitasking, or I had multiple personalities…jury is still out.)  That was when it happened.  A young woman (I’m assuming she was a woman) I was playing with typed to me on IM’s: “My god, you are really depressing!  Stop complaining and go do something!”

Now let me put this in perspective for you.  In my mind, a woman I really didn’t know, who theoretically shouldn’t have been that much better off than I was, just told me that I was depressing!  I just got a digital smack right in my face!  I didn’t know how to respond so I started reading my own IM’s to this woman to figure out what made her say so.  At this point, my silence must have been freaking her out because she started to apologize for her strongly worded message.  But as I read through, I realized…GOD, I REALLY WAS DEPRESSING!  It was message after message of me bitching about my lousy life, my shitty apartment, how lonely I was, and woe is me!  And I shared this with someone who was virtually a complete stranger!!  What the crap was wrong with me!?  You could practically feel the shockwave from a sonic speed facepalm in my apartment.  So with the giant hand print on my forehead, I typed back to the woman: “Thanks.  I needed that.  I gotta go.”  Without waiting for a response, I clicked off the program, signed off Messenger, got changed, and headed out.

That long ass story now leads me to this point.  Up until that point, I waited for something to come.  Not only that but I complained about it.  I claimed it was everyone else’s fault for not seeing me the way I wanted to be seen, or to be liked the way I wanted to be liked.  I wanted so much but tried so little.  And you know what?  After I got up and decided “fuck this feeling”…everything in my life started getting better.  I stopped complaining about the bitter truth about my own life and focussed on positive things.  I gained interest in things, started realizing my strengths, my passions.  Hell…even the game I played, I interacted deeper than before.  And then I started to see the results, slowly but surely.  People started to want to come to me.  It’s amazing how that works when you stop asking yourself “Why don’t people like me?” and just showing people that you are likeable.  And since I suspect that I am not the only person who had hit this point in their lives (or IS there currently), I want to offer some advice on how to get out of a funk.

1) Don’t constantly friggin’ talk about it.  If every word out of your mouth is about your miserable life and how miserable everything is…then it is just an unrelenting stream of problems that are coming out of your mouth. Even a mountain gets worn down by a constantly flowing river.  I’m not saying that you aren’t allowed to complain, okay?  You should have the right to vent to the right people as long as they allow it.  But for each new problem, I basically adopt the “hit it and quit it” philosophy.  You get one time to complain about your shitty condition, and that’s it.  Anything more than that is extraneous and offers absolutely no new information except the fact that your life sucks.  If you have a big problem, and each day there’s a slight variation on the condition…doesn’t matter.  From the side of the listener, there is no difference between the problem you had, and how the problem changed.  All it tells people is that you are a sinking ship, and while you don’t intend to take the passengers with you, most people would prefer to abandon ship before your boat hits an iceberg.  And while we’re on the subject…

2) With the invention of social media it’s really easy to reach a large number of people at one time.  Things like Facebook or Twitter will shout out your problems from the rooftops with a 300 decibel speaker attached to your own personal mic.  Remember that that’s a privilege and not a right.  I say this with love, because I’ve been guilty of this more times than I can count, even recently.  But what you learn is that the whole “woe is me, alack and alay…” crap is really tired and really annoying.  You know what happens when you post that stuff on Facebook?  That’s right, it only gets multiplied by however many friends you have on your list…and believe me, the more you bitch, the more that number can dwindle.  Why?  Cause readers don’t have to take that crap.  They can just skip over to the funny cat pictures, hilarious memes, pictures of loved ones actually enjoying their lives, status messages of hope / joy / enjoyment!  Why would they read about your “I’m stuck in rush hour traffic” status messages?  Even if your friends are nice enough to read it, it stops getting funny and starts getting worrisome REAL quick.  Balance, people, balance!  Happy people like people who are happy, not someone who needs constant reinforcement and sucks away at their energy like a vampire through the screen!  Just remember that social media was designed to get you to be social, not to give you a sounding board for all your angst. (That’s what a blog is for.)  Temper your FML / WTF messages with some good ol’ LOL ones and you’ll be golden.  (avoid following: #mylifesucks #whitepeopleproblems #ithappenedagain)

3) Don’t become accustomed to BEING A VICTIM!  Look…if Shrek has taught us anything, it’s that even the Damsel in Distress gets freaking tired of playing the victim all the time.  Why?  Because it’s like the “Boy Who Cried ‘Oh Fuck!'”  Sooner or later people are going to stop caring and leave you to your fate as if you deserved it.  ESPECIALLY if you are perfectly capable of helping yourself, and believe me…WE KNOW.  We all can tell the difference between a person who is whining for attention and someone who sincerely needs to be helped.  Look, I get it…shitty, awful, terrible things happen to us.  And when they do we all want to be treated well because lord knows we NEED IT.  The problem is though, that there’s a difference between being emotional support and being an emotional crutch.  The difference?  You kick out a support and the building comes tumbling down.  You kick out a crutch…well, you’re just an asshole and the guy on the ground is gonna be really pissed.  It’s when we get used to always having our feeling justified that we stop trying to move on our own accord.  It feels good to have people worry about you, care for you.  But that won’t lead to anything except pity, annoyance, and sometimes resentment.  If you keep throwing a pity party, don’t be surprised when no one RSVP’s.

4) For the love of god…do not blame other people for your own self inflicted misfortunes.  Blame is reserved for actual offenses like getting stabbed in the pancreas, being robbed by a Mexican drug mule, being forced to dance the Macarena at a wedding…NOT imagined slights. You don’t get to blame your friends when you talk about how lonely you are sitting at home in your apartment eating Hot Pockets and watching reruns of Big Bang Theory (god, I love that show…), and they don’t treat it like a four alarm fire.  You don’t get to blame the girl for not liking you when you never even bothered to find out what she majored in in college…or even if she went to one.  You are not allowed to blame a guy when they didn’t read your mind about what you wanted when you gave no indication.  You certainly don’t get to blame people on FB when you complain for the 14th day in a row about how early you have to get up for your job.  (FB friends who read that, please do not all say “I told you so” at once…I may go deaf.)  See how there’s a pattern here?  Any of these situations there is control that can be taken and people don’t!  Instead we bitch and whine compulsively because on some level…we crave that attention.  It’s like being coddled as an infant, only you are a grown up now and are capable of reason and thought.  I know…it’s our cross to bear.  But if we have to treat you like a child, then we’ll never look at you as a romantic possibility.  If you’re always crying that you’re lonely, then no one’s ever going to want to take you out.  And if you are a buzzkill, then people will just want to avoid you like you had a broken leg during the zombie apocalypse.

Most of us just don’t want to feed into this victim mentality because as your friends, we just want you to be happy. But we also need you to go out there and try to help yourself. There’s only so much of “I’m lonely” that we can take before we just want to scream “THEN GO OUT AND FIND SOMEONE!!” into your face like you were a broken down drive thru window that keeps getting the order wrong.  The actual logistics of making yourself happy is not really that difficult.  Unhappy?  Go make yourself happy.  Don’t know what makes you happy?  Go find it.  Don’t know where?  Start looking.  Don’t have eyes?  …okay, maybe life’s a little shittier there…  Ahem.  POINT IS…never admit your own defeat.  Because honestly that’s where you’re going to lie.  If you depend on others to motivate you for living your life the way you want to, then…Here.  Have a shovel.  Dig deep and lay down cause sooner or later they’re going to get tired of carrying you and your options will be to quit your whining and walk, or to keel over and die.  I’m not trying to be harsh here, kids.  But when the biggest complaint you have in your life is that you aren’t happy…then you just have to realize that there’s someone out there in dire straits who will probably tell you “Quit your bitching and get out there and get it.”  Just…stop getting in your own head.  Get happy.  Whatever, whoever, however.  – Peace