Wading in the Velvet Sea

‘One of the amazing things about Rachel was that I wanted to kiss her every time she was talking about something interesting, which was all the time. It was sexy.’

A great example of a PSI, a topic I’ve brought up with many people at work or in my family recently. They basically all say the same thing: ‘But that’s bollocks, mate!’ Well, they would if they were English. Instead, my mother tells me that my brother and I think too much about finding a girl. That and the hanging with the lesbians seem to be our recent downfall.

But it’s a not a downfall. That’s the point for Casey and myself, I think. Would we rather be cuddled next to someone at the end of the day? Perhaps. But our lives are far from complete without it, and we’re surrounded by our own Rachels who we can find sexy without us actually wanting to plant one on them.

You can want to kiss someone without, well, actually wanting to touch lip to lip at that moment. Or maybe ever. Here’s something that’s always bugged me: you can’t tell a girl you find her attractive without her thinking it has to mean something. Honestly, sometimes it just means that, at that moment, we think you’re pretty. I hate practicing self-censorship and let the girl miss out on a freebie compliment just cuz she might get that panicked, deer-in-the-headlights, ‘Oh Christ-on-a-Stick he thinks of me THAT way!’ look in their face. Either accept random compliments, or never, ever ask us how you look after you’ve dressed up. Just pick a path, and we’ll follow you down it. But you can’t have it both ways.

Anyways, another example in the dead-horse PSI category: sexy ain’t got nuttin’ to do with looks. OK, like 8% to do with the diamond stud in your navel. But like, that’s it.

‘Once you open your door to one person anyone can come in.’

The problem here, of course, is twofold. One, you’re not sure you should let people in the same door that you let the last, and two, you can’t always close out the people you maybe should.

Tough calls in both cases. In the first, there’s a type of survivor’s guilt when starting up a new relationship, unless the previous one didn’t last terrible long or you’re a horrible bastard. Not convinced it works this way, tho. I think you’re in the center of a room. Hey, lookie me in my Ryan Room. Hallo. It’s totally round, kinda like the Lance Bass room in the ‘Pop’ video, only my room doesn’t have Lance so it’s infinitely cooler. And the walls are smooth, until someone finds their way in. No two people find their way in the same way, and as such, the room adjusts itself slightly to the newcomer during their stay. Maybe there’s a karmic couch for one person, maybe another puts up a mental Bon Jovi poster on the wall. Who knows.

Point of the matter is, worrying about caring about Person X versus Person Y can’t be measured quantitatively, and qualitatively, it’s all apples and oranges anyways. The first time I fell in love, I had a cold sliver in the back of my throat. I knew, even though I’d never felt it before, exactly what it was. Haven’t felt that way again. Does that denigrate my other relationships because I never felt that? Hell no. (Mostly because that girl, like Fiona in ‘About a Boy’, was a ‘barking lunatic’. Whoops. My bad. Time to reboot the Ryan Room. You start again, but you don’t try to replicate, or to measure against the past. Cuz you’re not the same person at that point either.

In the second case…well, been there, done that, not only wrote the book, but did the 12-city signing tour. Whatcha gonna do. The hardest part is not only can your friends not help you out even when the signs are on the wall (or like, the blood from the fowl he sacrificed), but you can’t either. Call it the ‘Janet Livermore Syndrome’, after Bridget Fonda’s character in ‘Singles’, one of the most quotable movies of the 90’s. Feel a quote montage coming on. It’s welling up. Gonna get this out of my system and then move on, OK?

• Janet Livermore: Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature.


• Debbie Hunt: Come to where the flavor is. Come to Debbie country.


• Steve: I was just... *nowhere near* your neighborhood.

So, you’ve got JLS, which is not to be confused with the JLA, and I’ve just given everyone a reason to hijack the Comments for this entry. Damnit. You’ve got the JL…the syndrome, and you don’t know how to get out. I’d love to give you some advice, but if I had the answer, I’d patent it and hit the airwaves like the Juice Master and the dude who can rotisserie an entire wild boar in 18 minutes. Set it, and forget it! Two options, two ways to go. First one is: you stay a perpetual schmuck. Worst part about this avenue is, you know you’re a schmuck. You’re not living some fantasy life where you consciously think everything’s great, but then it turns out you’re supposed to lead a rebellion on Mars, and next thing you know, Sharon Stone is trying to kill you. (That’s for the ‘Put more ‘Total Recall References on Your Blog’ peeps.) The other option is’well, you wake up. No rhyme or reason to it. One day you just stand up, and boldly declare that you’re in fact Prisoner 24601. Or something like that. And you’re over, content, and back in your round room.

It helps to think of the day as units of time, each unit consisting of thirty minutes. Most activities take about half an hour. Shopping for CDs. Two units. Exercising. Three units. All in all, I had a very full life. Problem was…it didn’t mean anything.

Everyday, I have a certain amount of activity that I have to accomplish to justify, to myself, my share of the collective oxygen supply. If I don’t do them…well, I don’t turn into Dobby and beat myself senseless, but I do feel a bit queasy, that somehow, I didn’t make the most of the day as I could have. Thing is, often these activities add up to a week, a month, a season going by in a blur because I’ve micromanaged my life to the point where I can’t see the forest from the trees of my life, and I’m never, ever employing that metaphor again, and the less said about it, the better.

What do I do? I work at a job I can’t see myself doing in five years, I work out to prevent the eventual decay of my body, and I write for a website that one percent of one-tenth of one percent of the world may ever stumble across.

OK, so laying it out that way makes my life seem pretty…well, crap. It’s not crap, I have many other things that pass in and out of my life, but these are the things I do virtually every day, in some capacity. They form my biorhythms, and as such I get a bit throw if any of them are missing. Case in point: I planned on writing only two paragraphs since I was so sleepy, and here I am, 45 minutes later, still writing and wide awake. Odd, that.

It’s not for anyone else to assign me a fulfilling life. Yes, eating burritos three meals a day and never leaving the couch may not be as fulfilling as working for OxFam and building shelters on the weekend, but between these two extremes lies infinite shades of grey into which any of our can find our respective bliss. Some people enjoying partying seven nights a week, some enjoy working 100-hour weeks, others like to make up weapons of mass destruction and invade Middle Eastern countries…hey, whatever works, man. You GO with yo’ badself.

If I thought I’d never find mine, if I thought my life as is would stay static forever…maybe that would be a cause for some modicum of alarm. But I don’t. July 1st, 2003: it’s a stepping stone, a part of a path laid before me that I can’t quite see. I don’t feel I’m astray, and I guess at the end of the day that’s as sure as any of us can be…we don’t quite know where we are going, we somewhere in our guts, we trust our feet to lead us the right way. Then again, maybe I should listen to Mr. Hornby one last time:

‘I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and I, , I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.’
---’High Fidelity’