Common Interests

So, here’s something that’s been bothering me lately: The “Obscure Common Interests” fallacy. Broadly defined, it is the erroneous notion that two strangers should enter into a relationship with each other solely on the basis that they happen to both enjoy something that most other people do not.

Let me clarify this idea with an example: “Hey, you like comic books, too? We must be soulmates!” Granted, this is not something most people would say explicitly, but it is an internal thought that is not far removed from the rather dire overt expressions of interest that one often sees in some fan communities.

For, indeed, it is within fandoms that the Obscure Common Interest fallacy can be most easily found. It’s the obscurity thing. If you replace the words “comic books” in the above example with the word “tacos,” you’ll get what I mean. Everybody loves tacos, so much so that even the most imaginative relationship-seeker would be unable to bring themselves to suggest that a shared appreciation for them would be a viable basis for a personal connection.

But where obscurity reigns all bets are off.

The problem is that shared common interests are only a small part of what makes a relationship happen. It can certainly help, but some parts are more important than others–and knowing the stardates for each episode of TOS hardly rates. A vastly more important part is sheer physical attraction.

Like hell, you say? What kind of shallow, cynical, selfish world am I suggesting we live in, here? Well, relax–it’s not as bad as it sounds, okay? Now hold still while I gently shove this into your brain.

You can have a relationship based solely on mutual physical attraction (at least for a while). You can have a relationship based solely on greed for power or money (at least until the kids are able to get the will changed). You can even have a relationship based solely on mutual desperation (at least until something better comes along). But it is very, very unlikely that you will be able to forge a relationship based on a shared interest in Battlestar Galactica if the two of you can’t stand to look at each other naked.

It can of course be wonderful to have a relationship with some who shares your esoteric obsessions. But that can’t be the only thing; you can make friends out of fannishness, but there’s got to be other stuff in the mix if you’re talking romance. Stuff like sharing the same sense of humor, or other compatible personality traits.

And don’t forget: In general, in mundane life, most relationships grow out of a pair of people’s mutual desire to bone each other. The rules don’t change just because you’re in a hobby shop or at PAX. I mean, yes, people are turned on by a wide variety of things, but the number of people in the world who will respond to your casually rattled-off list of Dalek-operators with an enthusiastic cry of “Take me now, right here on this pile of anoraks!” is pretty low.

I’m not saying you’re ugly. Nobody’s saying that. There are lots of reasons that someone might not want to sleep you. People are weird. However, avoid the temptation to blame them for it. It is not their fault. Sleeping with somebody that you’re not attracted to is hell, and it is a basic human right that you don’t have to. You are a good enough person to respect that, even if it leaves you high and dry, okay?

If the realization that you are no more likely to meet the love of your life at a Star Trek convention than you are out in the normal world is getting you down, buck up little ensign. I said it’s not as bad as it sounds, and I meant it. Since shared obscure interests are off the list of sure-fire relationship fodder, the good news is that the person you will spend the rest of your life with doesn’t have to be someone who is also in to your fannish obsessions. This should be especially heartening for fans of Space:1999 and Sonic the Hedgehog cosplay, but it means a richer, more vibrant world for everybody. It does mean that you might have to put up with listening to endless monologues about America’s Got Talent or Eurovision or whatever, but we could all stand to be a bit more open-minded about these things anyway, right?

And another thing: knowing that mutual obscure interests do not much tilt the odds in your favor when flirting with someone should also help with knowing when to back the hell off.

I’m not just talking to fen, here, by the way. I’m also talking to those people out there who feel an overwhelming desire to force together any two people they know who just happen to both own Babylon 5 t-shirts. Hey! Much like this post, that sort of thing is reductive and condescending, okay? Quit it!

They Say The Heart Of Monoculture’s Still Beating

Do you remember any part of the past fifteen years? If so, you might recall somebody mentioning that we now live in a highly fractured entertainment environment. The prevailing notion was that our popular culture, once a vast monolith of consolidated culture comprised of three television networks and single-screen movie theaters, had begun to slowly shatter into a million billion niches, each capable of holding only a dozen or so highly specialized fanatics at a time. We were all supposed to become so engrossed in our own peculiar, esoteric interests, that we would eventually lose the ability to talk to one another, since we no longer shared any common entertainment. Thanks a lot, Internet!

Or… maybe not?

What if I described for you a man who was incapable of naming more than one title in the Hunger Games series? A man who isn’t entirely sure what a hufflepuff is. Who hasn’t been to a movie theater since, oh, I don’t know, whenever it was that Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released. A guy who can’t afford the really good cable package that everyone else seems to have, and therefore is beginning to suspect that A Game Of Thrones is some sort of soft-core “Skinemax” series that a bunch of hipsters have ironically decided to take seriously, but he can’t actually prove it. (And also believes–but also cannot prove–that George RR Martin manages to type up his novels despite the full-on erection that must constantly be getting in his way.) A man who thinks Girls is one third of a really old Motley Crue album.

Why, I do believe you’d say this hypothetical man (ahem, yes) is out of touch. Which raises the question: out of touch from what?

A-ha, MONOCULTURE! It was you all along!

Er… that’s not quite right is it?

Because it isn’t just mass culture–it’s also the fractured, fractal culture that was there all along. There’s been fanzines and samizdat and specialist mailing lists, and midnight movies, and underground booksellers, and subculture since the dawn of mass culture. It’s just been hidin’ sorta. The Internet made it easier to find, is all–but mass culture is still alive and kicking! Look how weird it feels when you talk to someone who doesn’t know much about it.

Niche interests didn’t–and probably won’t–kill our shared enjoyment of big, mass-market entertainment. Because you can have both! You can do obscure things and popular things at once! You do not need to live two lives to do those things! I mean, do you have any idea how much money the Hunger Games made? Do you really believe that, out of all the people who went to see that movie, there isn’t at least one person in that group who doesn’t collect handmade erotic thimbles, just to pick a hobby at random? Of course there is! Of course!

I’m no sociologist. And I know that human culture is varied and changes over time. But it seems like there will always be a few big things, and a whole lot of little things, to be interested in. Or, at the very least, we’re probably going to be stuck with that arrangement for rather a long while yet. I mean… probably. I don’t know. I’m pretty obscure myself, after all.

Drowned In The River Devotion

There are people in this world who are sometimes accused of hating popular things simply because they are popular. Perhaps you’ve met some of them. Perhaps you are some of them. Or, perhaps you are simply a person of good taste, and what passes for popular entertainment these days is, according to your highly trained palate, garbage. Or maybe you’re like me.

I tend to be repelled by anything that generates really, really fulsome praise. It often looks like I don’t like popular cultural works, but I swear that’s not the case. I mean, yes, this attitudinal affliction of mine does mean that I gave super-popular Harry Potter a miss at first–but it also means that I veered away from the highly praised, but widely ignored, Donnie Darko. I don’t care how many people like something; what’s important is how deeply they like it.

This doesn’t mean that I’ve never fallen in love with a work of art, or a cultural expression, or a media franchise. (I invite you to read my extensive writings on a little TV show called Doctor Who, if you doubt my bona fides, and if you can find them). The reason I recoil from works that attract a devoted, cult-like group of followers has nothing to do with any inability to give my heart to them. Rather, the problem is that I know all too clearly what it means to be that kind of fan, and it scares the hell out of me.

What is it that happens to us when we stumble upon a thing that speaks to us, that reaches into us and plucks at our hearts? I don’t mean the process of merely liking something; I mean full-on fannishness. It’s not exactly pleasant, is it? For me, it generally leads to a kind of fugue-state, where for a time my thoughts begin to center upon whatever object of devotion I’ve managed to latch on to. After being exposed to a truly compelling fictional wonder-world, mere reality becomes an ash-gray purgatory in comparison. If there are philosophical elements to the work, existential dread sets in. In extreme cases, psychosomatic symptoms can follow, taking on the form of a kind of low-grade flu. Of course, these feelings subside and the mundane world reasserts itself, and the howling void of obsession begins to iris down into a more tolerable gnawing, and life goes on as before. But the gnawing never really stops completely.

Okay. I don’t really know if that’s what it’s like for other people, because this is not something I’ve ever talked about with anybody, but that’s what it’s like for me, sometimes. Admittedly, it’s not an event that occurs very often, it’s just that I’m too old, too tired, and I’ve been through this process too many times to want to start it all again with something else. The problem is that you never know what might set it off. Excessively devoted fans are a red flag for me, though. If they got so taken in, what’s to stop the same thing from happening to me?

Take The Hunger Games, for example. People have been lavishly praising that book series for awhile now, and their recommendations have occasionally reached some pretty extravagant heights. That kind of devotion sets off my warning systems. Too many wild-eyed “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS” people have gathered around the series for me to seriously consider looking into it. (It’s a real pleasure to read a review of it that can praise the book without hitting the “OMG YOU GUYS” threshold, let me tell you.) I’m just not ready to commit to making myself sick over something at the moment.

I realize that I might sound either a little too paranoid about all this, or that I might be coming off as a bit of a basket case, but it’s not all black and white with me, though. I am capable liking things quite a lot before the dread and obsession sets in. I’m just a bit leery is all. Generally, when I’m worried that I might get a little too into something, I’ll circle around it (and read all the spoilers), and eventually decide that I’m capable of having a healthy relationship with whatever it is. And, 999 times out of a thousand, it turns out okay. Sometimes, it even turns out that I just can’t even get into the thing. (Like Harry Potter–I tried to like it, but I just didn’t enjoy it.) It leaves me feeling silly for ever worrying about it.

But I don’t need another Final Fantasy, or Doctor Who, or Watchmen, or Love Boat in my life right now. I haven’t the energy.

I’m so, so tired, you guys.

The Swear Barrier

It is generally accepted that adults, when they are among other adults, will sometimes swear. Not nearly as much as kids do when there aren’t any grown-ups around, but still. If you live long enough, you develop some swearing habits; probably the most popular of these is the way most people instantly say “shit” the second they drop something. In public, most of us try to cut back on the colorful language–you never know who you’ll offend. Behind the closed doors of your home, however, it’s often a free-fire zone for swears. At least it is at my house.

Work, on the other hand, is weird. I’ve been working in offices for most of my career, and I still haven’t figured out when swearing is appropriate, because on the one hand, you’re in a semi-public space, while on the other hand, you are not really mixing with the general public either.

Well, you’re still probably not supposed to swear, I think,  unless you pick up the signals that tell you that it’s totally cool if you run your filthy mouth about some bullshit or something. But those signs can be hard to pick up on.

Does your boss curse like a sailor? Well, that doesn’t mean a thing. It might be a tacit approval of a general air of Nixonian casual invective, or it might be a demonstration of your boss’s supreme superiority over his lowly minions. He can swear, if he likes. Meanwhile, you get sent to sensitivity training, and your poor victims end up in counseling.

There’s an art to knowing what you can get away with in swearing, as there is with anything else. It is an art I have not mastered.

I worry about offending people and seeming unprofessional. Also, I don’t really listen to people, so I never know if the person I’m talking to has called someone else (or me) a crab-fucker, lately. The end result of this is that I almost never swear at the office, unless I’m being fired for some reason.

The lack of cursing has it’s disadvantages. For one thing, life is still as frustrating as ever, so the occasional exclamation is called for. Being unable to swear when stress or misfortune strikes is awkward, and makes a person sound like either a pirate or a grizzled prospector. To give you some idea of what we’re talking about, I have stooped so low as to use the word “dagnabit” unironically, on more than one occasion. A fine example of frontier gibberish it may be, but it makes a person look like a ding-busted fool, if you catch my drift. Or, to put it another way, it makes a man look ridiculous, because we all know that swearing makes you look cool.

At best, your co-workders with think that you are some sort of religious fanatic. At worst, they’ll come to believe that you’re some other kind of weirdo. Worse yet, it’s awfully hard to break out of that character passed a certain window. If you’re at some place for a couple of curse-free months, everyone’s going to assume that you’ve started cracking up if you suddenly take up swearing.

When starting a new job that might be okay with profanity, in small doses, trying throwing out a few hells and damns–you know, start small. That way, when you someday call the head of the sales department a motherfucker, people won’t be so shocked. I mean, you want them to be a little shocked. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Help The Awesome

Okay, so I’ve been seeing links to this piece by Jesse Thorn, where he provides a ton of advice on how to achieve your goals. If you’ve managed to avoid reading it up to now, I’m going to spoil it for you. Here’s part of the ending: “If you’re talentless or lazy, none of this will work. If you’re talentless and lazy, you’re particularly out of luck.” Followed by some riffing about how, deep down, you’re probably not lazy, so it’s okay.

Annals Of Alienation 12

One afternoon, several years ago, I experienced an epiphany. It suddenly occurred to me that it had been a very long time since I was last in a relationship, and even though I had been trying to find a new one, I had not actually managed to do so–and perhaps, I never would. I had to admit, when I considered the balance sheet of my pluses and minuses, perpetual solitude was seeming more and more likely the more I thought about it.

Part of getting older is learning to let go of the dreams and fantasies of youth, sometimes because they are unreasonable, and sometimes because, no matter how mundane they might appear, you just can’t make them work for some reason. It seemed to me that relationships were turning out to be in the second category. So, knowing that, what do you do with the rest of your life?

Too Drafty

Strike while the iron is hot, they say. Sometimes, you hear people say that about ideas. The theory is that it’s best to start working on something during that first flush of enthusiasm, getting as much done as possible while you’re motivated, because if you wait, you might not feel like putting in the necessary work, and the whole thing just fades away. I don’t know if this is valuable advice or not, but I do know this: By my projections, by around 2017 I’ll have as many unposted “drafts” as I do actual posts on this here blog.

While it seems that I don’t post an awful lot, it would be wrong to think that I’m not constantly writing posts. A lot of them just don’t get finished. I either never get to the end of them, or I go back to revise them and think, “Nooooooo, what have you DONE, don’t post that!” Which is not so bad, I think. But I never delete them, either.

The problem is that I keep thinking that I can someday go back and save them–which is ridiculous. In order to do something like that, I would need to work a lot harder than I do, or I’d need to be a lot better of a writer, which… is not a very likely future outcome.

Just seeing the sheer number of abandoned drafts on my screen is an enervating experience. Even when I log in to WordPress with fiery enthusiasm, that list of misfits stops me cold for a second. What am I going to do with these, I think to myself. I can’t finish them. But I can’t just delete them, either.

I should really be doing the latter, but it’s just too easy not to. They’re not taking valuable space in a desk drawer, they don’t have to be boxed up and shifted when I move or rearrange my furniture, they don’t bother me when I’m logged out of WordPress, so they don’t inconvenience me enough to overcome the propensity I have to never throw anything away.

At least, they didn’t used to. Now, I’m starting to get a little sick of looking at them whenever I’m here.

What’s funny is that I am a pretty ruthless reviser. Every essay you’ve ever read here (I’m not counting the “short” posts, which I don’t even proofread before posting) used to be at least twice as long in first draft. I don’t know why I work that way, it’s just what makes sense to me. But, while I am happy to lose material from anything that eventually gets published, I have a hard time deleting a post that doesn’t work in toto. Somehow, that’s different. I guess that polishing something for other people to read is acceptable to me, while blinking something else entirely out of existence is not.

What do you want from me, unused drafts? I can’t fix you! Stop looking at me like that with those puppy-dog eyes!

That’s enough hemming and hawing, I think. It’s finally time for me to ditch these boat anchors. Time to clear the decks, especially of stuff that is too heavily reliant on seafaring metaphors (I don’t even like boats, for crying out loud). Time to be ruthless, and cut out these digital freeloaders. Pah! Who needs them!

Besides, WordPress saves everything in the trash bin anyway, right?

Don’t Beat Yourself Up

Self-flagellation has it’s place. In moderate amounts it can be a bulwark against over-confidence or arrogance. Every now and then, we need to someone to point out our flaws in a brutally honest way, because it’s sometimes the only way to cut through all our coy rationalizations and deliver the message that whatever it is that we’re doing wrong is not funny, or cute, or acceptable–it is something that needs to be dealt with. Sometimes we all need a good metaphorical ass-kicking. And sometimes the only person who can deliver it is yourself.

As with everything however, too much self-criticism is detrimental. In extreme cases, it can lead to such a deep sense of self-doubt that it becomes paralyzing, or crosses the line into self-hatred–which has its own pitfalls. But we can deal with that some other time. (We surely will.)

Self-flagellation can also be employed to nefarious ends, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.

Excuse Me

There’s a fairly common social tic that has its roots in self-flagellation: Sometimes, when people seek to justify feats of minimally bad behavior, they will often imply that those feats are the result of a generalized flaw of character. I know I shouldn’t have had that second slice of cheesecake/bought those shoes/stayed up late watching cat videos–I’m so bad! Or, I was going to go to the gym, but I’m just so lazy.

And that’s fine. We’re all lazy sometimes, or selfish, or gluttonous, and it’s good that we can acknowledge those things about ourselves. It keeps us sharp, and if we ever want to embark on a course of self-improvement, we’ll at least know what parts of our personalities we should work on.

But there’s a line. We’ve all heard people gleefully cop to hurtful acts, only to sweep them aside with a giddy declaration of badness: I spread a nasty piece of gossip–I’m so bad sometimes! As if it were some congenital ailment over which they have no control. As if dickishness were a sporadic, untreatable condition, like herpes, that just flares up from time to time.

Beyond trying to excuse the occasional hurtful word or action, there are those who use self-flagellation as a means to justify their entire hateful personalities. If someone ever tells you that they’re an asshole, take them at their word. And then run away. No matter how fun they are to be around, sometimes, that gets real old, real quick–especially when they get around to pointing that cannon at you.

Reverse Psychodrama

Fishing for compliments is also a fairly common behavior. (e.g: I look terrible–No, you look great!) Again, it’s self-deprecating, but not harmfully so. We need the occasional compliment to keep our heads on straight, and there are plenty of people in this world who can’t be arsed to deliver one without being provoked. Or, perhaps it would be more charitable to say that when we fish for compliments, what we’re really saying is, “I feel a little vulnerable right now, and I could use some reassurance.” It’s not a crime to do that every once in a great while.

But of course some people get carried away with it. Their constant need for reassurance sends the message that they probably do not hold themselves in that high a regard, and that’s a tough personality trait to deal with in others. You may love them dearly, but Christ it is exhausting.

It does get worse, in some cases. There are those who demand a constant stream of reassurance from everyone around them, and they use self-flagellation to get it. They say, “I have this flaw,” and they expect to hear, “No, you don’t really,” in response. After awhile, the self-attacks these users employ start to lose their effectiveness due to over-use. Their victims may start to suggest ways to repair those flaws, which is the exact opposite of the uncritical regard the users are after. So they ramp it up. It doesn’t always escalate to tearful midnight phone calls or threats of suicide, but it’s been known to happen.

Why Am I Hitting Myself?

A large part of many childhoods was spent trying to figure out how to avoid being punished–you know, aside from actually choosing not to do things that would inevitably provoke a disciplinary reaction from the local authority figure. Often, covering one’s tracks was the preferred method of avoidance. Other times, we resorted to fibs, prevarication, brazen lies, or the framing of our peers and siblings. But what if they had you dead to rights? Well, when a child is truly busted, there’s always the tactic of being really, really sorry.

I broke a window, once. And in the hours between the initial act and its eventual discovery, when my dad got home from work, I had managed to work myself into such a pitiable state of fear and remorse that I actually managed to avoid a beating–a rare win for me.

It is amazing how often adults will try to use this same tactic, not to avoid violence (which would be understandable), but merely to escape any accountability.

You can usually see it the aftermath of the discovery of infidelity. “Okay! So I cheated on you, but can’t you see how torn up I am about it? Look at all these tears! Don’t be so angry–I feel like shit (about the thing I chose to do), don’t you think I’ve suffered enough?”

While it at least has the distinction of being less heinous than a few other defensive maneuvers (“It’s your fault I did this; you deserve this,”), it’s still mighty ugly. It’s one thing to be sorry. It is quite another to expect that your remorse should in any way shield you from the emotional repercussions of your actions. However much you may desperately want to be forgiven, forgiveness is like another person’s love. You can’t demand it, you can’t insist upon it, you can’t marshal your resources and push through and take it by sheer force of will. And it is a sad and terrible thing to try to win through wheedling, cajoling, or severe self-debasement. If you’re sorry, say you’re sorry. But accept that the person you’ve hurt is going to have to figure out their response on their own. And it may not be the one you want.

And who knows? If your first reaction is self-flagellation, you might come to find out that you’re doing a completely unnecessary penance.

Isn’t This Where We Came In?

But isn’t self-flagellation an important tool that we need to keep ourselves honest? Yet the balance is so, so hard to achieve. When we find out we’re being too hard on ourselves, this self-same trait can become yet more fuel for the fire of self-resentment, but without it we become complacent.

If you feel overwhelmed by your own self-criticism, it may be time to seek out professional help, assuming you can find a therapist who isn’t hell-bent on drugging you into a stupor. You really need the assistance of an outsider. Trying to analyze your self-doubt with your own self-doubt can result in a downward spiral that leads nowhere good. Self-flagellation has its limits.

You might need someone else to do it for you, for awhile.

Someone who is  sworn to a code of professional ethics, though. Someone who, upon learning of your situation, doesn’t start rubbing their hands together, whispering the word “Jackpot!”

Heart Day

So: It appears to be Valentine’s Day again. Whatever, it’s cool. I think people in relationships deserve to a have a day in which to throw their tenuous connection to another desperate human being into everybody’s faces, since they’re normally so discreet and timid about it the other 364 days a year.

I don’t really have a good Valentine’s Day story to share about my own past relationships. That’s partly out of respect for the other people involved, but mostly I can’t think of any in which I come off looking like anything other than a mediocre partner. I like a certain amount of distance in a relationship, and assume that others do as well: “I should call her–but wait, it’s only been two weeks. Jeez, give the girl some space.”

Instead, let’s talk about  other people’s relationships.

One weekday, a few years ago, I went to an Italian restaurant for lunch. It was in a not-very-well-known wine-producing region, off the side of a road, surrounded by a picturesque stand of trees. It was an okay place.

As I sat there, waiting for my food, I started discretely checking out the other tables, and I slowly began to notice something. There was a distinct, but subtle, Twilight Zone vibe emerging. It was a growing sense of weirdness–the cause of which seemed to be just below a conscious level of awareness.

At the table nearest to me, there was a couple. They appeared to be married. The man was somewhere around fifty or so. He was tall, thin, and had a salt-and-pepper beard and hair thing going on. He had Caesar-style hair cut. The women he was with looked to be in either her mid-to-late thirties, or possibly early forties. Long, mousey brown hair. She was shorter than her date, with wide hips and glasses. I don’t think it’s too much of a jump to suggest that the first preset on their Mercedes’ stereo was an NPR station, but the most common sound in the vehicle was likely either jazz or a baseball game.

That’s not the weird part.

I was slowly beginning to realize where the peculiar sensation I was feeling was coming from. And then suddenly, it was as clear as glass. I took a good, hard, rude look at the table next to them. And there they were.

No, wait. There they were.

A near identical couple–as near enough as to make no difference. Another silver fox, another set of friendly, child-bearing hips. Another pair of glasses. Another brown cardigan. Another Mercedes with a child’s car seat in the back.

I rubbed my eyes. I took off my glasses and tried again.

What were the odds? I wondered. What where the odds that a couple and their doppelgangers would decide to visit the same restaurant, at the same time, on the same day? Pretty remote, I thought. And yet, it was so.

I turned my head to look at the table behind me, on some Fortean hunch. And there they were. Again.

Things went a bit swimmy, but I craned my neck around, finally taking it all in. In this small restaurant, on this strange day, I counted six virtually indistinguishably similar couples. If they all had to go to the bathroom at the same time, I wondered if any of them would end up back with the people with whom they’d arrived. To be fair, I’m sure they all had distinct personalities and varied outlooks on life, but if the ensuing conversation involved a discussion of someone named Madison’s progress in Gymboree, the swtich up might not have been noticed for a couple of hours at least.

In my heart, I know that the world is a teeming menagerie of unique and heterogeneous individuals–a vast array of diverse human beings representing every imaginable physical configuration. But no, not at this restaurant.

The thing I found so uncomfortable about the situation wasn’t the stark evidence of reality’s own copy/paste hackwork; nor was it the realization that, even though I am normally out of place in most places, I was especially so in this particular locale. It was the fact that all these similar people had to know that they were all currently drinking wine and eating brushcetta whilst surrounded by their own virtual clones.

Empathetic as I am, I could not get a bead on what they must have been feeling. Did they find it comforting to be with so many people who were so similar to themselves? Was it an assault on their sense of hard-won individuality? Were they too relaxed and centered to even notice? Being a rather neurotic sort of man myself, I had plenty of discomfort to go around, if they needed it.

I suspect that yes, they probably did notice. And I also suspect that, if they really cared to think about it at all, they probably found it harmlessly amusing. The easy, confident satisfaction they all seemed to radiate implied the kind of serenity that would remain unmarred by such inconsequential happenstances. They would all go home to their golden retrievers and leather couches, and probably not even remember the scene.

But I would remember. I would gnaw on my bread stick and my marginal, fringe existence, and remember. I would be comforted by the fact that the contentment that each of them had found was rare, but not unrepeatable.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

How I Didn’t, Part 1

Introduction

Part of growing up is learning to say goodbye to an almost infinite number of alternate futures. No lifetime is large enough to contain everything we want to do–there’s a lot of things we’ll never achieve simply because we don’t have the time. And then there’s the stuff that we never had a chance to accomplish because of the innate physical or psychological limitations that we weren’t even aware of when we first started out. Depending on how self-aware we are, it’s possible to spend your whole life moving from one unpleasant realization to the next, watching one unrealistic goal after another crumble into frustration and wasted effort.

At least, these are some of the things that have happened to me. I don’t think I’m so unique as believe that other people haven’t gone through these experiences as well. I suppose it’s possible that there are some folks out there who were born with a singular dream, who worked at it, and who achieved it. However, I also suspect that even the most successful folks in the world have one or two pathways that they would have liked to have explored, but had to be abandoned in order to get where they eventually got.

While I might not have achieved a whole hell of a lot in my life, I have certainly left behind a large number of foolish dreams and plans that all seemed like good ideas at the time. This series then, is a collection of tales that explore how I managed not to get to various destinations that I’d aimed to reach. In other words, this is how I didn’t…