Excuse me.

(Originally published 3/22/2006)

People make excuses for everything. As a collective body, we are resourceful and endlessly creative in the things we can conjure up when we fall short on a task or a commitment. Especially in America, where we love the blame game more than baseball. Our leaders blame one another for wars, terrorism, hurricanes, and blow jobs. Our reality television shows are houses full of wanna-be actors lobbing blame back and forth like hot potatoes. Kelly Clarkson said it best: "Because of You."

As children we adapt quickly to blame. It comes as naturally to us as digesting solid food or being afraid of what’s under the bed. We blame dogs for eating our homework. We blame our older sisters for taking money out of our fathers’ wallets. We blame a society that refuses to accept individual expression and free will when our mothers catch us walking around the living room in her favorite pair of red pumps (Wait. Is that one just me?). This failure to own our responsibilities and actions follows us into adulthood, where it tampers with our every relationship, from how we relate to colleagues, to our friends, to the neighbor next door whose paper we steal, and to the neighbor across the hall who we blame it on.

I’m the king of lame excuses. I have made excuses in an array of circumstances, from dodging work to cancelling dinner plans because I forgot "Will and Grace" was coming on. From avoiding helping someone move to not being able to pay for my own drinks, some of my better excuses are as follows:

"My iron is broken."

"I need to get online and look for sweaters."

"It rained yesterday."

"I have to look for the remote control."

"I’m studying for the MCAT."

Although quite well known for making excuses and delegating blame, I am not a big fan of hearing excuses (or taking blame for that matter). I work in Human Resources and hear excuses and blame on a daily basis.

"My boss hates me."

"I can’t come to work because my hamster ate four of its babies last night."

"I was kindly asked to leave my last job after an elaborate map of the building and a copy of ‘The Anarchist’s Cookbook’ were found in my desk. I was doing research for my screenplay."

I’m no fan of being handed a turd of an excuse within a social setting either. Recently, someone handed me the King Kong of all excuses, the poke in the eye for all of us single people out there trying to keep our heads above water: The "I don’t wanna date anybody right now" excuse.

This excuse, when standing alone, could be considered legitimate and respectable, understandable, purely honest. However, 99% of the time a single person hears this from someone they have any interest in, it takes on a whole new meaning. Translation: "I don’t wanna date YOU right now (or ever, truth be told)."

In hearing about this particular person who said this to me and his many dates since, I began to contemplate the complexity of that excuse. I decided to ask a good friend of mine famous for handing out this excuse to boys like they were trick-or-treaters at his door on Halloween night. This conversation occurred in a bar, of course.

"Why do you tell people that?" I asked.

"Because I don’t wanna date anyone right now," he replied.

"But you’re lying. You date people all the time."

"Yes," he agreed, "but I don’t wanna boyfriend."

"OK," I concurred, the urge to be defensive rising up from my gut, "but do you think it’s necessarily fair to the people that you go out with that might actually want to date someone?"

"Well, I’m very up front about it."

"So you tell them that before you initially ask them out, that you’d like to spend time getting to know them but under no circumstances will this ever go beyond one or two weeks, even if you fall head over heels in love with them?"

He began to squirm, as if I was one of the boys he’d tried to feed this excuse to.

"Well, no. I don’t say it like that. And I usually say it around the third date."

I considered this. "So, basically it’s just a crappy excuse. When you tell someone this, what you actually mean is that you are looking for a boyfriend, just like the rest of us, and you gave this boy three chances to make you like him and he couldn’t do it. It’s a defense mechanism. You think that by saying this to someone that you have some sort of control over the fact that you haven’t met anyone either. Is that it?"

"I need another drink."

The "I don’t wanna date anybody right now" excuse is nonsensical and I believe it to be true about as much as I believe in OJ’s innocense or Paris Hilton’s IQ. Dating is painful, excrutiatingly so, and nobody in there right mind would bother doing it if they didn’t want the end result to be a relationship. It would be like voluntarily choosing the agony of a root canal when all you really wanted was a haircut. So, to all those out there fond of this excuse, your own little WMD case to launch chaos and havoc on unsuspecting innocents, go f*ck yourselves. You’re all just as confused and frustrated and defensive (and yet still just a little bit hopeful that there’s someone out there) as the rest of us.

"I don’t wanna date anybody right now." Yea? Well, you should’ve told me that before I bothered having my shoulders waxed AND wasted a Saturday night making mindless small talk when I could’ve been hanging out with my friends. You’re paying for dinner, *sshole.