In the midst of the attack of the Swifties, after the four hundredth person messaged me to inform me that I should be more supportive of women, you cunt, my roommate asked me how I handled the trolls. “I ignore them,” I offered. This is usually true, but not always, which I imagine is the same answer celebrities give when people ask how they feel about the tabloids running headlines on their five-pound weight gain. I’m sure someone has called Taylor Swift ugly and made her cry, based on the many sad songs she’s put out (although if they did it publicly, I can only assume the fans had them assassinated).
The thing about thinking you’re ugly is that at some point you learn to live with the self-hatred. When I was in college, there was a 0 percent chance I’d leave my dorm room without applying approximately eight layers of mascara, for fear that someone would spot my blond eyelashes and mistake me for an extraterrestrial. Last week I went to the grocery store—not the one across the street from my apartment, but the one three whole avenues away—wearing torn leggings I’d slept in, no bra, an inside-out crop top, and a part of a face mask. What happened between then and now? Laziness, mostly, but also I got tired of looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but a collage of my flaws. So I chose not to look, or rather, I chose not to care the way I used to.
You can’t change your face, at least not without some serious cash, and for the unhappiest of us, even that probably won’t make you like yourself much better. Studies show people who have rhinoplasty often regret messing with their faces. There are so many more things to worry about than a big nose and gaping pores—impending nuclear war, a growing economic divide, whether or not my upstairs neighbors’ space heater will kill me in my sleep—and in the end, our faces all turn into waxlike accordions and our bodies into useless bags of atrophied muscle and crumbling bone. If we’re lucky! We’re all going to die. There’s only so much time to fixate.
Eventually the Swiftian terror stopped. The teens moved on to attack some other unsuspecting journalist who dared say something derisive about Taylor ALISON Swift, an ICON. I made my Instagram account private and spent less time, but still too much time, looking in the mirror. Mostly I forgot about the flame-throwing fans and limited meltdowns over my physical appearance to the aforementioned jeans-shopping. Still, I kept the Reddit threads and YouTube videos on contouring bookmarked, just in case I accidentally said something mean in the future about Lana Del Rey, and the word ugly is alive somewhere in my brain.
Never doubt the power of a fan.
The Definition of Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results, but Why Not Give It One More Try?
A thing normal people know that I have never learned is that you should not shit where you eat. This is common wisdom, a warning repeated every time someone mentions a coworker or boss or roommate or best friend or best friend’s boyfriend or barista at the good coffee shop with that little pitch in their voice that indicates they want to fuck that person’s brains out. “Don’t shit where you eat!” the wise friend tells the starry-eyed idiot fully intent on upending their life. “Don’t foul your own nest! Don’t dip your pen in the company ink! Don’t shoot holes in your own boat! Don’t get your meat at the same place you get your bread!”
Hopefully, the horny fool takes that adage soup to heart and finds some available person to make babies with instead. But I will never listen, and will in fact insist on shitting all over my kitchen and everybody else’s kitchen until E. coli ravages my intestines and turns my human body into a listless pile of bloody diarrhea. Which, of course, I’ll also leave in the kitchen, where I eat.
I don’t know where I developed a habit of fucking all my friends. The self-help books I read in the stacks at the Strand say sexual perversions start to develop before the age of two, which is distressing for a bunch of reasons. Perhaps my brain wildly misinterpreted all the lessons George Carlin imparted on Shining Time Station, or maybe I picked up on Bert and Ernie’s special vibes, who knows. Whatever the root cause, if you are a man I spend a lot of time with—in my home, at my place of work, in my close and intimate group of friends—at some point I will probably sleep with and subsequently hate you.
The film opens the same way each time. I have an innocuous platonic relationship with someone in close proximity to me, and I rarely, if ever, think about them or acknowledge they have a penis I might like to meet. But time passes, our banter picks up a comfortable rhythm, I drink with them too late one night, and all of a sudden that mole I thought looked gross starts to seem sexy. They look at me too long for just a moment, tuck my hair behind my ears, maybe put a steadying hand on my back, say something like, “Are you okay? Do you need me to get you an Uber? Please don’t take another shot,” and that’s it. I’m hooked.
Not that I tell them I’m hooked, of course. First there is a period of infatuation. In this period, I pick over every single one of our interactions, looking for small moments that either prove to me my new object of affection is into it or reassure me that I am a disgusting trash person and this individual would much prefer to bone my best friend. I spend late nights studying his Facebook photos and his ex-girlfriends’ Facebook photos, google-mapping his childhood homes, and reading about how his third cousin twice removed saved a baby whale from certain death in the summer of 1986 in the archives of his hometown paper.
I detail every conversation he and I have to each of the friends I do not (in that moment) want to fuck. “Do you think he likes me?” I say as I present them with swaths of Gchat messages for analysis, presumably to their utter delight. I then fight them when they offer words of encouragement and refuse to talk to them if they give me bad news. And I think about this person constantly, keeping him in a corner of my brain at all times, carrying him with me when I walk down the street or go for a run or cry in the shower as I envision the moment in which he finally tells me he thinks I’m ugly.
These infatuations can last for any period of time. Once I crushed hard on an editor after he took me out for drinks at a fancy rooftop bar, only to have it dissipate fully after two weeks of stalking his Flickr photos from 2005. Another time I spent a night unleashing the full power of my secret obsessive passion on the Instagram account of a close friend, and had forgotten about it when I awoke the next morning. And on one occasion I decided the manager at the clothing store I worked at was my soulmate and plotted to change my schedule to match his, only to discover about a month later that he was secretly sleeping with no fewer than four other employees, which was at least one too many for me to compete with.
These were brief fixations and yielded no results, a blessing in the case of my editor, and also probably my manager, if only for the sake of my vaginal health. I forgot about two out of the three mentioned above until I started writing this very essay. But if I let this infatuation period run too long, it consumes me, which is especially true if I find myself in close proximity to the object of my obsession on a regular basis, where there’s little room for distraction. Then these preoccupations have a habit of turning into intense ordeals that build up and up and up before ultimately deflating like a very sad balloon at a fair. A Sex Faire, if you will, but with no turkey legs, and in some particularly depressing cases, no sex at all.
The most miserable of these was the ten-month period of silent yearning I afforded a coworker. Some of that is detailed elsewhere in this book, but for theme’s sake, the crucial detail is that he sat across from me in our small communal open office, and I could not escape him and thus an attraction bloomed over time. When I first met him, I hated him—I thought he was obnoxious, annoying, and a perfect example of a Mediocre White Man. I dreaded having to work with him. It took several years of close regular contact and shared snarky blog posts for me to start sensing that all that head-butting made him feel like home, and that I had been waiting all this time for this, to find someone whose brain and face and nerve endings fit mine.
There were some conflicting issues with our long-term goals, since he wanted
to have sex with me so we could “get it out of our system” (his words), and I wanted to marry him and birth up to three of his children. At which point sitting across from him all day every day went from being a dream to a daily terror.
You’d think that experience would have been enough to turn me off on taking craps all over the cafeteria, but I am not a smart person. Not long after my coworker fed my main artery to the wolves, I decided to pursue a freelancer friend who had helped counsel me through my miserable dumb heartbreak. In fairness, this dude was hard to read. He made me dinner a few times, told me I was pretty, and showed up to my apartment with flowers one day when I was sick. “I’m the Joe Fox to your Kathleen Kelly!” he proclaimed, daisies in hand. One can only assume anyone referencing classic romcom material like You’ve Got Mail wants to bone, so I made a move.
He did want to bone, it turns out, but not enough to want to keep boning, so he dropped me, too, informing me over Gchat that he’d rather just be friends so he could fuck other women and not me. Shortly thereafter, at a beloved colleague’s going-away party, my boss announced she’d hired said freelancer as the replacement. I burst into tears. He took up real estate in my office a few weeks later, just a few desks away from nightmare coworker number one, and I suffered yet another year’s worth of workplace misery.
Surely by now a well-adjusted individual would seek out a nice Tinder stranger to marry, instead of digging her claws into yet another person who is located just feet away from her at all times. But as I have already pointed out, I am not smart, and I am nowhere near well adjusted. Having laid waste to my workplace like the ambulatory HR violation I am, I set my stupid sights on the next closest possible location: my apartment.
After my beloved Greenpoint apartment caught fire and thrust me into the pit of hell that is room-hunting in Brooklyn, I moved into a place near Prospect Park with two roommates. Unfortunately, one of these roommates happened to be a man, and it appears that for me men are like bags of chips—if you keep them in the house, I’ll eventually end up craving them and drunkenly shoving them into my mouth. When I met him, he was impeccably dressed, lived with two women, and worked for a fashion company, so I assumed he was gay and therefore safe from my maelstrom of thirst. He was neither of those things, it turned out. The day after I moved in, he fished a paper towel roll off a high shelf for me, and soon he hopped right into my love-and-sex-starved little head. I got stuck on him, wincing when he mentioned women he liked, blushing when I ran into him on the way to the shower before retreating to my room alone to marathon New Girl with my headphones plugged in so he wouldn’t suspect.
It turns out secretly lusting after your roommate is rather fun. As is true with having a work crush, daily interactions mean daily dopamine spikes, and in this case, there were quite a few of them. One time I came home sad after work to find my roommate on our couch watching music videos; to cheer me up, he put on bands that I liked, and we drank beer and did karaoke until late into the night. Another time, I came home and threw up on my bedroom floor, and he fed me water and watched Silicon Valley with me until I felt well enough to go to bed. It was nice to be given attention so regularly, and it made me less compelled to go out and find a stranger to fill me up instead.
But like all relationships built on proximity and convenience rather than communication and compatibility, once things got real, they got fucked. We made out one bourbon-filled summer evening, and we started sleeping together that fall, against the counsel of literally every human I have ever met and/or cornered in a bar. We watched movies together, made dinner, and talked about the future, but never our future, which lived somewhere behind an iron curtain neither one of us attempted to breach. And then, as the Wise Friends forewarned, one day that winter he came home and announced he had met someone else. I was trapped for months with him in the room next to me, waiting for his light to turn on when he came in late at night, or not to turn on at all.
These were three big nightmares of my own making, but there’ve been others along the way—college friends, journalist friends, friends of friends, friends’ siblings, coworkers, coworkers’ siblings, interns—that I’ve pinged on or slept with or made out with in the dark on a crowded dance floor, leaving a trail of havoc in my wake. I am roasted on the regular for these exploits. I am routinely punished. I have been uninvited from parties, left out of group hangs, and ejected from some social circles altogether. But I’m also under the impression that this wasn’t always such a gasp-worthy fetish. Once upon a time, it was normal to click with the people you met in the wild and loved most. There was a period in history in which folks married their high school sweethearts, secretaries, bosses, neighbors, third cousins, very best friends. Never forget that Sally wifed up with Harry in the end.
But in 2018, we date online strangers to avoid the kinds of complications that come with fucking someone you know. With a stranger, your lives are not yet intertwined, and so there are no real feelings to hurt or friendships to irrevocably ruin. If you don’t like someone, you never have to see or hear from them again, and there’s a whole cadre of other anonymous men and their skydiving photos to dig into whenever you need someone new. When you hop into bed with a stranger, you aren’t required to follow up. When they sleep with other people, you don’t overhear them bragging about it in the office kitchen. When someone ghosts you after a couple of dates, they don’t even know you yet. They can’t possibly be rejecting you for all the reasons you already know they should.
For me, though, proximity is a drug. The closer you are to me, the more time I have to decide all the little things about you that I hate are actually worthy of my admiration. Like Jason Alexander in the World’s Worst Film™ Shallow Hal, I see everyone else’s flaws as a reflection of my own. If your eyes are too close together or your hands are too small or you say “between you and I” or have bad taste in bagels, I see in you my small eyes, short legs, buckteeth, frizzy hair, communication issues, fear of commitment, fear of airplanes, fear of mice, loud voice, dumb accent, bad opinions, bad taste in music, bad habits, general impatience, untidiness, laziness, picky eating, overeating, overdrinking, lack of interest in international politics, reluctance to take criticism, reluctance to take edits, general narcissism, and all-around horrendous personality.
I’ve heard many women say they’ve turned inadequate men down because they deserve the best, but I know I deserve the worst. And so when I meet a stranger who embodies even the slightest faults, I’m quick to assume all my defects are catching up to me. I don’t make an effort to see the good in any of my Tinder dates, because to do so would require me to go on more dates, and I’m already convinced your speech impediment is punishment for my stupid lisp. I don’t need you to make me hate myself more than I already do.
But if I know you, there’s plenty of time, in my pining for you from afar, to transform your improprieties into beacons of attraction. When you’re stuck in my face all day, when you live permanently in the far reaches of my peripheral vision, your compulsions become cute and your blemishes a turn-on. Since you didn’t enter my life as a potential suitor, the pressure’s off; instead of fearing you like me only because you are as worthless as I am, I have the chance to win you over, which will prove to you and myself that despite all my foibles, there’s something in me that’s good enough to warrant your time and affection.
And then of course, there’s this: if you have decided to befriend me, have suffered through my bad takes and bad habits and still choose me, then I have nothing left to hide from you. I am able to believe that you like me for who I am, despite the bad things or perhaps even because of them. There is a risk with the strangers, flawed or otherwise, that the minute I fall for them they’ll see through me, hate me, torture and leave me. My friends know I’m contrarian and always late; they know I refuse to eat vegetables and bring my own bread to dinner parties, that I have no core muscles and that one of my eyes gets lazy when tired. They know I demand too much from other people and not enough from mys
elf, and yet they still stick around.
Ergo, when I conceptualize sleeping with a friend, I don’t fear they’ll dispose of me the second I reveal all my dark spots, which makes it easier to take the plunge. Of course, this changes when I actually do jump in, since it turns out people can care for you and still not choose you. No matter how many of these platonic-turned-not friends tell me they think about me constantly, they adore me, they’d jump in front of a car to save me, when I ask them to show me, they’re out. And then I’m forced to reckon with this: perhaps even the people who love me most will never love me enough, and it will always be this way.
Still, I keep trying—to date strangers, to date my friends, to date my friends’ friends, to sit alone in my apartment and think about dating the dude with the cute dog I bumped into on the staircase—just in case. Maybe I will once again take a dump in my dining room, but do so in just the right corner of the trough that I’ll manage to spare myself the intestinal bacteria this time. To be fair, it hasn’t killed me yet.
Friends Stick with You Through Thick and Thin, Unless You Have Bedbugs
The other night, an acquaintance of mine threw a surprise party for her boyfriend. I had a bad cold and had just gotten back from an out-of-town weekend where I spent too much money, so I figured I’d go for a drink, give them a hug, and head home. But my hot friend’s hot twin brother showed up and announced he was “maybe” breaking up with his live-in girlfriend, so I drank four Fernet and Cokes and tried to make out with him. Then I went home and went to sleep, and when I woke up at two a.m., I got out of bed and threw up on the floor.
Good Things Happen to People You Hate Page 7
