“I don’t want you to do the dishes… I want you to WANT to do the dishes.”

Ok keeds.

Let’s just say, hypothetically speaking, that you’d want your man to bring you flowers more often.  You know, try a little harder… actually woo you.  So you say, “honey, why don’t you ever bring me flowers?”  You might have a talk about it and, lo and behold, the next day what does this oh-so-thoughtful man do?  He brings you flowers.

[studio audience]: Aww.

As much as you might want to believe that this was purely an act of attentive consideration on the part of your beloved, you may be plagued by the nagging feeling that he just got you flowers because you asked him to.  Wholly unromantic.

This is the crux of the whole deal.  Most women want their men to be thoughtful enough to act on their own… and when they aren’t, they muster up the courage to mention it or have a “talk.”  Doing so, they risk giving up the element of surprise, which was the whole point of the thing in the first place, and suddenly the gesture doesn’t taste as sweet.

Ladies, we know as well as you that if you nag us enough we’ll eventually cave and do what it is that you’re nagging us to do.  But that isn’t what you really want, is it?  You want us to WANT to do things for you.  You want us to be considerate of your feelings, to be thoughtful, and put your happiness above our complacency.  Here’s how that conversation goes:

“Babe, can you help me with the dishes?”

“Sure… just let me finish this (level, quarter, inning, afterschool special)”

“Please, honey?  Let’s just do this real quick and you can get back to your thingy.”

“Ok, just give me a minute.”

“If you help me now, it won’t take as long and you’ll be back before you know it…please?”

“Yeah… why don’t you get started, and I’ll pop in when I’m done.”

“Fine. (sigh) Forget it.”

“No, I’ll be right in, ok?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, really, just one minute.”

“Whatever.”

“Ok fine, I’ll do the farking dishes…”

“No. I don’t want you to do the dishes.”

“You just said you did.”

[wait for it...]

“I don’t want you to do the dishes.  I want you to WANT to do the dishes.”

Guys, at this point, just shut the hell up.  What most of us don’t realize in this situation is that it’s a Lose-Lose.  The damage is done.  You cannot possibly win this argument.  It’s true, nobody really wants to do dishes.  But what she’s asking is for bigger than dishes.  She’s asking you to care about her enough to want to make her happy.  It’s a big-picture thing that applies to the big things as well as the little things.

I find myself, yet again, in the stereotypical female position of all things romantic.  Having been recently burned by love, I’m reluctant to get into any kind of romantic relationship right now.  The woman who did the most recent singeing has thrown herself on the mercy of the court and wants me to give it another try.  After calmly yet firmly explaining my position to her, she replied:

“What do I have to do…?”

Ahhhhh…. so.  The plot thickens.  I’m not gonna say I wasn’t tempted to make her hop on one foot and bark like a dog… a really big dog… but I digress.

I could run down the laundry list of things, in an almost Survivor Challenge way, that might bring me back to the table, but basically, it boils down to: You shouldn’t have done what you did.

Bottom line:  I don’t want her to do any of those things.  I want her to want to do those things on her own.  Or maybe more accurately, I want her to do things not to win me back, but as a statement to the universe (and to herself) that that’s not who she is anymore; that she regrets what she did and that she genuinely wants to square things with the universe first, knowing that by doing that she is putting faith in a world that will eventually bring her to where she wants to be.

Or, she could build herself a time machine, go back, and talk some sense into that girl who was on the verge of fucking things up with possibly the best guy she’d ever date.

As a parting gift to both the ladies and the fellas, I offer this suggestion:

When she brings up the talk about getting her flowers, resist the urge to do it right away.  Get out your calendar/palm pilot/blackberry and write it down a week, and then a month, from the day she brought it up.  Let some time pass, let her forget (a little bit) about the conversation you had.  Better yet, don’t even make it flowers.  Make it something that shows you know something about her that no one else knows.  Most importantly, let her know that you are capable of surprising her on your own.

My vote goes to the better actor

“They” used to say that Politics is show business for ugly people.  Although I don’t consider myself in “show business,”  I think I get what “they”‘re saying.

It’s a good thing that the internet affords you the opportunity to catch up on the events of the day because I’ve been watching the DNC speeches on YouTube and I’ve decided how I plan to select whom I will be voting for this November.

I will be voting for the better actor.

I’d like to consider myself someone who keeps his finger on the pulse of current events, but let’s be serious.  I don’t know shit.  I forgot that the DNC was even going on this week…til I saw people mentioning it on their facebook status.

They aren’t just up there making it up as they go along.  They have their speeches written for them by other people… they know when to really attack a line or build momentum with a particular cadence or sentence structure.  They are up there feeling their audience and trying to illicit a response… they hope to take people on a journey.

Some people talk about acting as “pretending to be someone else.”  I’ve always thought differently about it, and I’ve gotten into some heated discussions about it with a few barroom ignoramuses.  I don’t pretend to be someone else.  My job is to figure out what is real, truthful, and honest about a character and where that character and I intersect.  Then I can play that character as a real 3 dimensional human being.  It’s not about pretending to be someone who is different from you, it’s about finding the essence of someone, what is universal about their experience, and how they are affected by the human condition.

Very simply (and somewhat technically), if they don’t sound like they are saying these words for the first time, they’ll lose me.  A lot of Shakespeare’s speeches are rhetorical: stating a thesis, then providing various perspectives that shed light on the different aspects of that idea.  At its core, a good political speech is not that far off.

I want to be inspired, moved, caught up, invited to look in on an extraordinary event in one’s life, and to be affected.  That makes for a good night of theater, and we should, at very least, expect that much from our president.

Seeking: Gay Couple for Marriage

I took a bag of clothes to goodwill a couple weeks ago.  Spring Cleaning in August.  Downsizing.  I figure  if they’re just sitting in my place gathering dust anyway I might as well give them to someone who will actually wear them.

I just might never get married. So if the government says I’m entitled to it and I’m not gonna use it, I might as well donate my legal right to marriage to someone who will.  Like, perhaps, a gay couple.  They’d get more use out of it than I would, and seriously, who wants a dusty, cobwebbed marriage taking up space in their storage locker? Not this guy.

Besides, a lot of people are hating on marriage lately, and maybe they’re right.  Marriage used to be a business contract, either to bring together two families or to combine wealth.  And these days half of all marriages end in divorce anyway, so what’s the big deal?

The thing I know is this:  I don’t need a piece of paper with my signature to know that I want to spend the rest of my life with someone.

Here’s the rub:  I haven’t gotten to that point with someone so maybe I’ll feel differently when all is said and done.

So if my straightness gives me a privilege I’m not gonna use, I might as well donate it those less fortunate than I.

Takers?

Boy Loses Girl

Every romantic comedy has it.  It’s a staple.  They meet, fall in love, then it all goes awry.  This is where the fork is.  In romantic comedies, you take the road where they get back together.  In unrequited love stories, somebody dies.

The movie Stranger than Fiction describes comedy and tragedy like this:  Continuity of life vs. inevitability of death.  Love either gives you life or it takes it away.

There are stories of unrequited love all over the place: Romeo & Juliet, Cyrano, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Moulin Rouge…

In that last moment they have together, they often realize that their love was there all the time, but they just never cashed in and now somebody’s dead.  I’ve always been curious about the fact that we never get to see what happens after “happily ever after.”  Nor do we get to see what would have happened if Juliet woke up before Romeo finished his speech, or if Cyrano had taken some other road to see Roxane.  Who’s to say that they wouldn’t eventually get sick of each other and end up one of those unhappy couples that sit staring off into space wondering what could have been.  I guess that’s not the point of the story and it’s just easier to believe that they were soul mates and the rest of their lives would have been filled with bliss.

Gerry Legister, in his poem “Futility,” writes:

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that
Wasn’t supposed to ever let you down probably will
Exposing your secrets sworn on silent hill.

You will have your heart broken probably more than
Once and it gets harder to heal every time.
You will also break other hearts Too,
So remember how it felt when yours was broken.

So for all their yearning and tortured love, it’s a pretty safe bet that these fictitious couples would eventually piss each other off.  Maybe their love is strong enough to bring them back together, maybe not.  I get that we’re supposed to “love like you’ve never been hurt,”  But isn’t that akin to not being taught by experience?  If you follow this logic, you’d have people standing at stoves around the world burning their hands off because they are ignoring the simple lesson they learned the first time they got close enough to singe that top layer of skin.

It occurs to me that if you replace the word “experience” in that last paragraph with the word “fear,” it reads the same.  I’m not suggesting that all experience is fear, but maybe a few of those things that experience has taught us to avoid are things we should consider trying out again.  Get back on the horse, so to speak.

The question, then, becomes: Where is the line?  Where is the point of no return?  I think that, more than anything else, is what determines a comedy versus a tragedy.

The joy and sadness of owning a queen sized bed

My new thing is sleeping with a pile of clean laundry in my bed.  There’s just nothing like rolling over covered in socks, or the panic of finding a pair of your own underwear against your cheek.  There just isn’t.

I’m on Day 3 of laundry night and I fear it may never end.  I am rather proud of myself, however, that the dirty laundry has not yet infiltrated the clean laundry.  And the ironing board and iron are standing prominently and willfully at the foot of my bed.  I’m considering making them a permanent fixture.

Well, time to go do something other than fold.

Adam Sandler – 2, Wile E. Filipino – 0

Recent events in my personal life have left me junk-punched. I’m walking it off.

Idle hands are the devil’s playground and, apparently, idle brains are his coloring book. So to quell the onslaught of thoughts that have me renting a flat in the Dark Place, I’ve turned to my dvd collection. I’m starting to regret selling Nacho Libre to that used dvd place, cuz daddy needs some escapism.

Maybe that’s not what I need, but it’s definitely what I want. The time for wallowing is over. Time to move on to watching the Big Bear speech from Swingers over and over and over.

[Note: a very special thank you to all those of you who have sent me an encouraging word or seven. The last time this happened to me I didn't have too many friends to lean on and it's great to know that at least something has changed in the last year.]

Today, the movie of choice was 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore and the long and short of it is that I cried like a little girl watching her balloon fly away. This is not the first Adam Sandler movie to make me weep in the last month. The Wedding Singer did me in a couple weeks ago.

There’s a certain kind of catharsis that happens with watching a romantic comedy. I’ve even been tempted a few times to turn movies off during the “Boy Loses Girl” section, just to give myself a dose of reality. But there’s something to be said for having faith that, in the end, everything will turn out for the best.

At first glance you’d think that a Sandler movie might not get too deep, but I realized today that this movie encompasses almost everything I believe about love. It’s in the things you do, the choices you make. I want, one day, to wake up in the morning and spend my entire day getting someone to fall in love with me and knowing that she spending her day getting me to fall in love with her. Then I want to go to sleep and wake up the next day and do it all over again. I want to protect her from the things that scare her or are potentially hurtful to her and feel safe knowing she wants the same for me. I want every kiss to feel like a first kiss. Is this a lot to ask? Yes. But since when did love become ordinary?

You and your “Family Restaurant” can shampoo my crotch

I feel I’ve neglected to mention that I got my lip pierced about a month ago. Maybe it slipped my mind. It’s not exactly blog-worthy news, but it provides a context to this entry here, so I wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page. So. About a month ago, I got my lip pierced. Are we good now?

The higher ups at the BGSC reminded me of the rules: no visible piercings except one earring in each ear, and a small stud in the nose.

“After all, this is a family restaurant.”

So now when I go to work, I have to put a band-aid on my face to cover up the piercing. I can’t take it out yet because it is too new and will start to heal back up. So I submit to you the following story:

You’re going to your favorite restaurant. You get a table, and the server walks up. He’s got a band-aid stuck to his lower lip that suggests that maybe he has some horrible gash underneath or he’s possibly been struck with his yearly herpes outbreak. This person will be bringing you drinks, serving your food, breathing in and around your personal space, touching the things that you will be consuming. Add to that the fact that when he talks, his lips move a lot so the band-aid is starting to come loose and flap around a bit. Is that band aid gonna end up in your food? Is it gonna drip nasty bodily fluids all over your coconut shrimp?

or is it as simple and benign as he has his lip pierced and you can’t tell because there’s a farking band-aid covering it up?

The other day, I was standing with one of the female servers and I happened to have my arm around her waist. Another male server just happened to be walking up, trying to squeeze past us to put in an order at the computer behind us, so as we moved to get out of the way, one of the managers walked by and said:

“That looks really bad. The three of you standing there like that. This is a family restaurant.”

I honestly don’t know how much of that statement was in jest, and how much was serious, but it made me wonder what that phrase, “family restaurant” means.

First off, I challenge anyone to find a restaurant where the serving staff doesn’t flirt with one another. Second, I’ve had tables notice that our GM is quite touchy-feely with the female servers, and they were bothered by it enough to ask me about it.

In our increasingly paranoid attempts to behave “appropriately” for the sake of others, aren’t we just trying to be more average? And why do we do this? To instill in the minds of children that the people who are different from them are meant to be marginalized. Instead of teaching our kids that those who look different from them are still human beings that should be respected and understood, we’re demonstrating that only one kind of person should be accepted.

Are you worried that my lip piercing will have people walking out of the restaurant in disgust? Saying things like, “Can you believe that server with that piece of metal in his lip? Seeing that just ruined my whole dining experience.” And how many times have you looked at a couple walking by the lake holding hands and thought, “My god, will you look at that blatant display of affection between those two? Such behavior should be reserved for the privacy of their own home, provided they don’t have sexual intercourse out of wedlock.”

In the immortal words of Mr. Miyagi, “Walk on road, hmm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later get squish just like grape.”

I refuse to be average, middle of the road. Not only do I refuse it, I feel as though I am incapable of it. If my uniqueness offends you, then feel free to visit your local Family Restaurant. I hear they’re all pretty average there.

Where are all the good men dead…in the heart or in the head?

I find myself at an all-too-familiar crossroads.

“Maybe you’re too nice…?” Suggested a friend.

OH, yes, I need to be more of an asshole to keep women from cheating on me. Forget who I am and what I stand for… I should compromise that if I want a girl who’ll stick around.

You know, ladies, for all your bitching about how there are no good men out there you don’t seem to realize the fact that you (collectively) have created this situation. I’m not saying that men are relegated to the role of victim here, after all, we make the choice. What I’m saying is that it’s hard to choose the road marked “good guys” when experience has taught you that its fraught with confusion and heartbreak only to end up at the exact same crossroads a few months or years later.

We all know that the whole Good Triumphs Over Evil thing is not always the way it goes down. We live in a world where corporate shadiness is rewarded while NPOs who are doing the real work are getting their funding cut left and right. So maybe it’s not so cut and dry.

I’ve had girls tell me that I’m “too good to be true” or that they’re “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Look, I get it. It’s a rarity to find a genuinely good guy sometimes and when you have one it might make you a bit suspicious. But isn’t that just making some innocent dude pay for the mistakes of your past boyfriends? And in the meantime you’ve introduced a whole hell of a lot of doubt into the core of this guy’s being: They start to see all these great girls with these asshole guys and they start to think, “what does she see in him?” or worse, “Maybe I’m too nice…”

For me, it boils down to faith. You gotta have faith in yourself that you’re a good guy and you shouldn’t have to compromise your integrity just so you can end up acting and talking like every other guy. You gotta have faith that there’s someone out there in the world who will appreciate you and what you stand for while keeping their lips, hands, and other related body parts to themselves. You gotta have faith-ah, faith-ah, faith-ahhhhh…

So, ladies, stop stepping on our necks and then complaining we aren’t out there. Every good guy gone bad was created by you in some way.

I find myself at a familiar crossroads, but I know that the road I haven’t tried only guarantees me unhappiness. At least with the one I’ve already taken, there’s a chance that it won’t go the same way next time. And that chance, however slim it might feel at the moment, is what makes it worth it for me.

Hey, Universe…

…Shut. The. Fuck…Up.

I don’t need you gettin’ all up in my grill about shit.  I’m not the one who needs to learn this.  I get that you might be underlining your point, and that essentially, my point is your point, but if I needed a hype man, I’ll let you know.  So stop it.

Fine.  A scene from Pinter’s Betrayal in acting class today was a bit on the nose, even for you, but really, haven’t I embarrassed myself in front of enough people this week?  Then you had to slather it on with that little comment about how Garbage Collectors are being called Refuse Technicians and how labels and politically correct technicalities are bullshit because, ultimately, those dudes are still picking up shit off the street.  Nice.  Kick me when I’m down.

Look, I get that I don’t always listen to you, Universe, but is all this shit really necessary?  I’m the one who agrees with you here.  If you wanna bug people, bug the ones who don’t get it.  They’re the ones that need to hear it, not me.  I get it.  I agree with you.

So just leave me the fuck alone.

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