On Americanizing Quétinbec: less crying & latent homosexuality, more YouTubesby Horrible Gelatinous Blob 04/19/2010, 2:32pm PDT
Note: I wrote this on my flight back to Honolulu.
So I'm back from my trip to the mainland. I visited USC, Duke, and William & Mary before blowing off Georgetown and heading down to Tampa with my best friend from high school for four days. I also went to my brother's First Communion in Atlanta.
Los Angeles was by far the coldest place I visited. Highs of 64. I was fucking freezing. What the fuck is that bullshit? It's also filled with people who are incredibly high-strung for no real reason. I'm not sure if I've just been in Hawaii so long that I've become pathologically laid-back, or if everyone really believes that every single issue in their lives is so impossibly dire. Why so serious?
Fell in love with a girl, Quétinbec-style. She's a Bulgarian law school student who's going to Stetson who immigrated to the US at 12, holds down two waitressing jobs in addition to law school, and drives both of her parents to and from their individual jobs with the family's single car on a daily basis. To be honest, she has that stereotypically severe Eastern European face along with a Rachael Ray-style body type. Generally speaking, I like my white girls hotter and with less self-esteem, but she's bubbly and witty and smart-mouthed and just ten pounds of charm in a five pound bag. Personality goes a long way. On our last night out, we got hammered on Red Bull and vodka and tequila(?), got a little touchy-feely, and our parting bisous turned into something more extended. It was one of those super-enjoyable, almost perfectly formed memories with an unexpectedly low guilt ratio. My only real hope is that I can be strong enough to resist the temptation to try to recreate/extend it if and when we ever cross paths again.
I've always been an incorrigible flirt. I can't help it; it's so much fun. I'll flirt with any female from eighteen to eighty, single or married, unaccompanied or escorted, straight or gay. What I didn't realize until this weekend is that I completely lack the ability to tell when the other person has moved from harmless flirting to serious come-on. Or rather, I need a clear and unambigious physical signal; otherwise, I don't even entertain the possibility.
I'm totally immune to pollen, but recycled plane air starts my nose running in no time.
My already shaky belief in the institution of marriage was further destabilzed when I learned/realized that every single married person I know has experienced infidelity within their marriage. EVERY. ONE. But with the exception of my parents, they're all still married, so I don't know. It really depressed me, though.
On a related note, I wanted more for my friends. My best friend from high school, Friend A, dropped out of college after a single semester fourteen years ago and has worked for the company his (now deceased) father started ever since. For all intents and purposes, he intentionally got his girlfriend pregnant in order to settle her down before she drank herself to death. Now he has two adorable kids, a wife who had to have a hysterectomy and no longer desires a physical relationship with him, a job where he'll always be second banana to his older brother, and a bowl every night before he goes to sleep. Don't get me wrong: for the most part he appreciates what he has, and I know that he loves Mississippi and would never want to leave. But he's a few months older than me, and to see him still into the same repetitive electronic dance music that he was into eleven years ago, doing the same goofy hand dances, just older and fatter...I wanted more for him. He's capable of more. He'd be happier doing more.
Likewise, I've known Friend B since high school, but it took the perspective of living in Hawaii for eight years to realize just how completely and profoundly Mississippi fucked him up. He's Chinese -- born in Taiwan, immigrated to the US before school age -- but because of his family's dysfunction, he imprinted on his surroundings in Mississippi as the ideal to achieve. He married the second person he ever fucked (he would have married the first if she hadn't dumped him), had a kid, lived in a trailer in Starkville for a while, got two degrees from Mississippi State, moved back to Jackson, had another kid, doped the first kid to the gills on ADHD medication for no other reason than it made her easier to manage, discovered his wife was cheating on him and didn't divorce her, and now he works as a manager in a foodservice provider warehouse. Dude's not a genius, but he's tenacious and not easily discouraged. If he had grown up in Hawaii, he would be driving around in some riced-out Honda, fucking a variety of virtually identical Asian girls, working for some local company where he would be on the fast track to upper management. Not to say that that's a significantly better life, but...I don't know. He could still settle down early with an ugly white girl who is going to cheat on him with a mechanic at the Pontiac dealer, but at least he'd know that there are other viable options to explore.
Modern Romance is a really funny movie. If you like Albert Brooks, anyway, and I do.
Soundtrack for the trip: Quickie Mart, Brain Salad Surgery. Mash-up DJ from Shreveport, although he reps New Orleans. I'm eh on the vast majority of mash-ups, mostly because they tend to ride a good idea into the fucking ground, but this is the proverbial tits.
I hadn't seen my father in more than three years before he showed up unannounced at my mother's house the day before I flew back to LA. I could really write for days about this, but a very wise man once said that all men have father issues. So let me just say that he gave me a gift: a lead crystal paperweight with swimming sea turtles etched into it. Some worthless tourist tchotchke he got from some aquarium somewhere. Aside from the fact that it's an excellent reminder that my father has absolutely no idea who I am, that fucking paperweight got my bags searched every single time I went through airport security with it. Thanks, Dad.
Wow, that wasn't where I wanted to go with this. Here's something Friend A showed me. It might be a little too sophisticated for the Caltrops crowd, though.
A new thing I've discovered about myself is that I find large eyes on women attractive. It's something that appeared out of nowhere a couple months ago, but now I see it everywhere. Has this ever happened to you? I find it disconcerting to have a whole new thing I'm into. At my age, I assumed my quirks were set. Apparently not.
So I think I'm going to the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California!
