Let the Right One In

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles on the internet lately about what it’s like to be a twentysomething. The good ones tend to strike a balance between tough love and pep talk. I’m all for both of those things, but I don’t think any of the articles I’ve seen quite hit the nail on the head. That, of course, is because none of them were written by me. It’s time that we amended that.

High schoolers tend to be full of angst. Twentysomethings, in my experience, tend to be riddled with anxiety. There’s a difference. Most of us go through that Holden Caulfield stage when we’re fifteen or sixteen where we’re convinced that everyone is a phony and that nothing is “real”. There’s nothing wrong with that. The world is full of phonies, and it’s perfectly natural to look around at this fucked up world we live in and get bitter and cynical. I am bitter and cynical. I was bitter and cynical when I was in high school, and now that I am older, I’m still bitter and cynical. All that’s changed is that I have a bit more perspective. Sometimes, it’s actually a bit scary. It used to be that every time something bad happened, I panicked. Now, I tend to think, “What the hell, I can handle this.” Perversely, something seems wrong with that. I can’t handle everything. I am unbelievably amazing, but the world is vicious and cruel. I know that because I just finished season three of Game of Thrones and if you don’t know what happens at the Red Wedding, I’m curious as to how you’re reading this blog since you apparently live in a place without the internet.

Anyway, I’m getting really tired of people talking about young people like we’re all a bunch of entitled brats. I’m also tired of people talking to me like I just need to learn to love myself and I’ll get everything I want. This is the part where people start to settle into a groove–or at least, they try to. People I went to high school with are getting married to other people I went to high school with. I have officially reached the age at which I hang out with married people and their married spouses. Everyone is getting married on Game of Thrones. Oh yeah, and there were those SCOTUS rulings about marriage equality. No, I’m not fixated on this. Why do you ask?

The tricky part about progress is that the closer you get to your destination, the scarier the ascent becomes. You look back at all of the shit the world has thrown at you and wonder if the worst is still to come. (Hint: it is.) And that’s frightening. I’ve met a lot of shitty people in my lifetime. They all think I don’t get it, that I just don’t understand how the world works, but I know better. When I was a kid, a lot of adults told me that life had a way of sanding the edges off of your dreams, of making you realize that you should stop trying to change the world and just try to live in it. I think that’s bullshit. My ambitions are so lofty that they border on megalomania, and you might think that having to move back in with one’s father for the third time and get a job at a coffee shop to pay off $400,000,000,000 in student loans might crush one’s spirit, but make no mistake, I still intend to conquer the world someday. Maybe I’ll just have to serve really good coffee. All I know is that you will kneel before me I can do better than this.

I don’t know why I thought of this guy. Moving on…

I don’t really have the time or the energy to feel sorry for anything I’ve done. That’s why I’m wary of all of these “20 Things I Wish I’d Known in My 20s” articles or whatever they’re called. They’re all written by people in their 30s and 40s who think they remember what it was like, but are really just using hindsight to gloss over the parts that made that period interesting. Are we really that different from the Baby Boomers or the Generation Xers? I keep hearing about how young people think they’re going to live forever, but I spend most of my time trying to forget that I’ll never be this young again so that I can fucking enjoy myself. I have a vague idea of what I want. It gets clearer every day. And I will get it or die trying.

I think what it really boils down to is Facebook. Social media has instilled in us that desire to put on a front, to use every drama into an excuse to make passive-aggressive swipes and fish for compliments and use every triumph as an excuse to glamorize our own life more than it probably deserves. Hey, I’m not saying you shouldn’t go on there. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t treat people on social media any differently than you do anywhere else. I hate it when I call somebody out on an offensive or racist comment they made and they respond by saying that I shouldn’t get into arguments with people on the internet. Fuck you. I’ll get into arguments with anyone anywhere and anytime I like. I’m not trying to change your opinion; I’m just trying to understand why you feel the need to drag gun control into a discussion about gay rights.

One more thing before I go: I keep hearing a lot of talk about how “friendzone” is a sexist term, as it implies that a man (it’s always a man who gets friendzoned) is entitled to sex from a female friend just because he doesn’t slap her around or anything. That’s how the term is often used, but not, I think, how it was intended. I’ve known nice guys who have gotten into friendships with self-destructive women, then had their feelings hurt when she rebuffs them for being “too nice”. To their credit, they took no for an answer and, realizing that the woman in question didn’t have the self-respect necessary to recognize a genuinely decent guy when she saw one, sought out love elsewhere. There are some women who are just manipulative shrews who want someone wrapped around their finger so they can run to them when their bad boy boyfriend does something bad, and there are misogynistic douchebags who think not being a serial rapist is the same as being a good person. It cuts both ways, people, is what I’m trying to say.

That’s all for now. This video sums it up, really.

Shelves

I could really use something like this in my home.

I asked for a bookshelf for my birthday, and my parents pointed out–fairly–that since I would be moving across the country in a matter of months, it would make more sense to get settled in there before worrying about furniture. Now I live on the East Coast, and have moved around quite a lot since arriving in New York in May. I’m hoping my current place lasts. It’s a small room, but totally liveable, and I couldn’t help but notice upon moving in that it has just enough space for a bookshelf. Since I don’t have any other way to store my books besides leaving them in their cardboard boxes and my parents got me a $200 gift card for Pottery Barn for Christmas, I think it might be a good idea to buy my own shelf now. If nothing else, it will give me something to browse when I’m bored.

On another note, I just failed a class for the first time. It’s a course that I’ve bitched and moaned about on this blog before, and ultimately, I’m not sure what I could have done. The teacher wanted me to read her mind. She stifled discussions whenever they threatened to become interesting and basically insisted that we repeat all of her ideas back to her verbatim. Whenever I tried to take things in my own direction, she insisted that I wasn’t answering her questions, which is stupid, since I answered them explicitly, but in my own words, and with my own take on the subject. Overall, she wasn’t a horrible teacher, but one whose perspective on education was fundamentally incompatible with mine. And strangely enough, I’m not that angry about it (not that angry, anyway). She was just…small-minded, that’s all.

I just saw Zero Dark Thirty and thought it was great. As a writer, I have always been fascinated by the intersection between fact and fiction. The Hurt Locker, the previous film by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, was sharply criticized by war veterans for its inaccurate depiction of military protocol. I’ve read some of their complaints, and I find them convincing, but not especially relevant. The Hurt Locker is more about the psychology of its main character than about whether or not he could get away with all of the shit he pulls in real life. That his loose cannon behavior not only lands him in trouble, but doesn’t net results should put to rest any claims that the film is nothing more than a cop movie set in Iraq. Zero Dark Thirty, I’m guessing probably takes some liberties with CIA procedures as well and streamlines and dramatizes certain events for the sake of storytelling. But based on what I’ve read on the topic (and again, I’m not an expert, just curious), it gets more about interrogation tactics and the hunt for Bin Laden right than, say, the Die Hard movies get about police work. (I know next to nothing about computer hacking, but even I could see that Live Free or Die Hard was pure fantasy.) The controversy on this one appears to stem more from a skewed sense of proportion than anything else. Bigelow and Boal are not on par with David Simon in their journalistic eye for realism, but they are not making vehicles for Stallone or Schwarzeneggar either.

I generally find it effective, when attempting to conquer large problems, to start with the most manageable and seemingly insignificant changes. It’s like the old Chinese proverb about the journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step. So I tend to ignore people who tell me I’m focusing on minor details and not seeing the bigger picture. The big picture is the minor details, people. That’s all I have to say on that topic for now.

I’ve spent much of my break so far sitting around. It’s necessary in order to remind myself why the fuck I work so hard during the semester. I fail at almost everything I set out to do, so it’s a relief when the only stakes at play are whether or not I’ll get around to doing my laundry tonight. (I won’t. Too much useless crap to read on the internet, and I still haven’t finished reading A Clash of Kings. And speaking of reading, I’m thinking my next book will be one that I was assigned for my statistics course during the semester, but didn’t get around to. My professor strongly encouraged us to read it, and I’m just such a good student that I think I might. Pity I don’t get extra credit for that.)

It’s easy to get loneliness get to you, although after a while, you start to live with being a “lone wolf”. My mother referred to me as a loner once, which surprised me, since I really don’t think of myself that way. It’s not my fault that my friends never want to join me in doing the things that I like to do. I’ve watched nice guys get “friendzoned” in their romantic pursuits, and while it sucks and is, in some cases, the result of manipulative and selfish behavior on the part of their female friends, guys should remember that most everyone needs a friend whom they can comfortably believe will not try to fuck them. Sex is, as one of my favorite websites pointed out recently, a necessity, but not a right. It’s unique that way. I guess guys should, you know, focus on making themselves fuckable rather than finding someone to fuck (or however the cliche goes).

Most of my good friends are straight guys. They’re adorable, but that’s about it. I try to keep a nice balance, though, and surround myself with a diverse mix of people. At the same time, I remember not to categorize them. It’s complicated, but I’m getting better.