(First published at mikealvear.com)
"Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac." I'd like to pretend that I'm wildly smart and that I learned this from having studied one of the world's greatest philosophers. But I'd be lying. I know this because it's a line from a Madonna song. I have not studied Socrates, but I know my Madge.
I don't know why human beings are so drawn to things that reject them. Animals don't even bother obsessing over stuff that they can't have. It's basic human instinct to want things you aren't supposed to want. And the guaranteed way to make someone want something is to deny them that. If you've ever experienced a preacher's kid's Freshman year away at college, exposed freely and suddenly to things like booze and sex, then you know exactly what I mean.
Rejection is a vicious thing that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I often think that the reason I never got into politics wasn't my seedy past or lack of ambition, but my overwhelming disdain of rejection. I avoid it all costs and always have. A guy in a bar has to practically be reciting a poem about me and giving me access to his credit cards before I'll safely assume that he's looking at me. I don't like rejection, and if I even slightly detect its possibility, I turn and walk away.
But rejection, like most horrible things in life, is unavoidable, no matter how masterfully you try to avoid it. Stand-alone rejection is bad, but a drop of lemon juice on the paper cut that is rejection is being rejected by someone that you never in a million years expect to be rejected by. Once, when I was about 23, I asked a less than attractive guy in a bar if I could borrow his lighter. His response? "Not interested." I was dumbfounded as he walked away, having been sucker-punched by rejection. This happened to me again very recently when I was dumped by someone that, by all definition, wasn't playing at my level.
How I got myself into a situation where I was dating someone considerably a league or two beneath me is similar to a conversation I recently had with my friend Annemarie about pink eye.
"Maybe you have pink eye," she said when I told her about my right eye being red and swollen for a few days.
"How do you get pink eye?" I asked.
"Fecal matter."
"Yours or someone else's?"
"Does it matter?!?!"
It doesn't matter how I wound up there, but I was. I was totally into a guy who, in my normal universe, I would've been the one handing out the walking papers. Granted, I'm no prize goose. But I know enough about myself, my life, and the things that I can offer someone to know what's marketable and what's not. I've been rejected before, but normally when that happens the issue is more of an understanding than a sadness. "Yea. You're right. You probably can do better."
I spent a longer amount of time trying to bounce back from this having had happened than my normal pace, and I couldn't figure out why. I had dumped (and been dumped by) cuter, funnier, richer, and smarter men and was always fully recovered in time for the next big party. I'd convinced myself that I'd fallen in love. But my friends convinced me otherwise.
"You got rejected by someone you're better than," was their consensus. But just because something happened that wasn't supposed to happen, like George Bush being president, it didn't make it any easier. Along with it came the normal self-doubt, self-hate, and pure grain misery that comes with being dumped by someone that by all definition is entitled to do so. I guess it boils down to another basic human reaction. Simply put, no one likes being told "no."
You can't dodge rejection. You can't bob and weave through life hoping to miss that punch. So I took one on the nose this time? I'll survive. I'll live to date someone else. And even though it's impossible to know whether I'll get dumped again or if he'll dump me, you can guarantee that either way, he'll be a higher quality ex-boyfriend than this last one.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Goodbye to my Grandma.
I'm endlessly fascinated by the concept of family. Those or you who are kind enough to follow my writing know that I think a lot about the people from which we come and how they shape us into the people that we are. Given that I think very highly of myself (another thing that my "fans" would know), it's obvious that I have no regrets about the batch of humans I sprung from. They not only made me who I am, but they also implanted in me a belief that has served me very well in my complicated life: that if you associate yourself with good people, then you in return, whether you like it or not, will wind up a good person. I've written before about how I've spent my adult life duplicating that feeling of familial closeness with those I'd consider to be friends. This can specifically be found in the November 2008 archives of my blog in a piece entitled "We are Family!"
I wrote that piece after my grandmother threw herself what my family jokingly referred to as her "fake wake." She paid for a family reunion, gathering her loved ones from all over the country, and we spent three days together in a Mississippi hotel. When the weekend was over, we gathered outside of a restaurant and she gave a speech with her oxygen tank in tow. I remember her saying something that was hard for this man who doesn't feel like he'll ever grow up to hear. She thanked us all for coming and told us from behind her tears to love each other, that we were family, and even though that moment might be the last time that some of us ever saw each other alive, to always appreciate where we came from.
My mother called me today and, as it turns out, that indeed was the last time that I would see my grandmother alive. After having fought for eight months in a hospital, she decided to check herself out and let go. Her mind, miraculously still in tact up until the very end, was made up. 82 years, two husbands, five kids, nine grandchildren, and thirteen great grandkids later, she felt it was time to move on. She told her children that she didn't want a funeral because, as I mentioned earlier, she already had one.
In the Spring of 2003, I woke up one Saturday morning at the age of 26 after having cried myself to sleep the night before. I was miserable, living with my mother, working a dead-end job, in a dead-end relationship, and feeling, well, dead. Something had snapped in me between falling asleep the night before and that very moment, and I could no longer foresee living another day knowing that that particular present was my eternal fate. So I decided to move. Those first few waking moments of that morning are ones I can't clearly recall. Basically, I was being pulled by something else, whether it was fate or severe depression. I scrambled about my room to find a pen and a piece of paper. Then I put the names of a dozen cities into a hat and randomly pulled out the name of one. I marched downstairs and announced to my confused mother nursing a Virginia Slim and a cup of coffee that in six months (and despite having never even been there to visit) I was moving to Chicago.
Those next six months were rough. I took a second job, equally as crappy as my other one, to finance the move. And although I was trying not to, I desperately still wanted the guy I felt I was running away from to beg me to stay. Something else occurred over the course of that time too. For the first time in my entire life, no one, not my friends or family, had any confidence in me whatsoever. They thought that what I was doing was reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous. And although they could all tell that my staying in Memphis would equate to a world of personal troubles for me, they found it impossible to support me. That is, everyone except my grandmother.
About two weeks before my set arrival date into Chicago, I began to panic. I was moving to a city where no one knew me, where I had no job or family, and I almost changed my mind. I was desperate to leave, but I was terrified that I'd fail. I was talking about this to my grandmother who lived a few doors down from my mom and this fear manifested itself into concerns over money. Although I'd saved up a bunch, what if it wasn't enough? What if I fell flat on my face financially before I ever even found a job? And my grandmother casually mentioned to me that I should ask my grandpa, a retired successful businessman, not for a handout, but a loan.
So I did. But he made me go back and write up a loan proposal, highlighting my monthly bills. Then he made me go back and revise that written loan proposal when I'd blindly failed to factor in the cost of unforeseen yet unavoidable expenses, like groceries. We decided on an amount and a payment plan. It was then that I had all of the resources that I needed to leave. All that was left was the courage to do so.
In 2006, my grandfather died a few days after I'd flown home to say goodbye. He could no longer talk and was almost unrecognizable from having been sick for so long, but his eyes lit up when he saw me standing over his bed. He squeezed my hand but I said very little because I didn't want to cry in front of him. I foolishly thought that him seeing me cry would scare him, as if he didn't know he was dying up until my tears let the cat out of the bag. When I left the room I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Had he and my grandmother never given me that money, where would I have been? I had found such happiness in Chicago. I became the type of person that for one reason or another Memphis hadn't allowed me to be. I was a good person. I was a happy person. And I wanted him to be proud of me.
My grandmother pulled me aside that day and I tried, while sobbing, to express that gratitude. She told me that his lending me that last bit of money for my move was a decision that they'd both agreed upon long before I wrote up that silly proposal. She said that they knew I was good for it. After my grandpa died, I kept making payments to my grandmother and eventually paid off that debt. It was one of the brightest moments of my life when all of those checks cleared. That's when my grandmother told me how proud of me they both were.
We are who we are because of where we came from. I'm goofy and selfish because of my father. I'm likeable and scatter-brained because of my mother. I'm kind but defensive because of my sister. And I'd like to think, considering that we've now lost them both, that I'm trusting and strong because of my grandparents.
But sometimes "strong" isn't even a powerful enough word to describe my grandmother. Once at Thanksgiving when I was a teenager, I overheard her snap back to her first husband during an argument after he told her to go to hell, "I'll see you there!" Up until just a few years ago, she often wrapped up her day with a strong scotch. She was educated during a time when most women weren't, and had a lifelong thirst for knowledge that led her to being more computer literate and internet savvy than I was. She had a unique take on the world, leaning more towards a belief that almost everyone goes to heaven because, based on her observations, weren't most of us already in hell? She didn't care that I was gay, but she cared that I was a Democrat. I spent just as much time fighting with her about Hillary Clinton as I did my Obama-supporting pals during the 2008 Election.
When you come from good people, you duplicate good people. You build a support system no matter what your lot in life that replicates the one that reared you. Your passions are the same, as are your hopes and your fights. And that all starts to click more as you get older. You catch yourself doing or saying something and you freeze in your tracks because you're acting like an authority figure from your own childhood. Tonight as I write this, sad for my mother that she's taken the biggest hit of grief in her life, sad for my aunts and uncles and cousins and sister and all of those great grandchildren, I somehow still find some admiration underneath all this hurt. Strong up until the very end, my grandmother called the shots and went out her way. She's definately one authority figure from my own childhood that I hope to find myself mimicking in later years.
Maybe I was never able to fully explain how grateful I am to my grandparents for not only believing that I'd succeed in Chicago, but also for helping plant in me the things to look out for in others when you're trying to build your own family. Without their values, their commitment, their efforts, I wouldn't be who I am today.
Hopefully someday I'll get to where they're going. And over a nice, strong scotch, I can thank them then.
I wrote that piece after my grandmother threw herself what my family jokingly referred to as her "fake wake." She paid for a family reunion, gathering her loved ones from all over the country, and we spent three days together in a Mississippi hotel. When the weekend was over, we gathered outside of a restaurant and she gave a speech with her oxygen tank in tow. I remember her saying something that was hard for this man who doesn't feel like he'll ever grow up to hear. She thanked us all for coming and told us from behind her tears to love each other, that we were family, and even though that moment might be the last time that some of us ever saw each other alive, to always appreciate where we came from.
My mother called me today and, as it turns out, that indeed was the last time that I would see my grandmother alive. After having fought for eight months in a hospital, she decided to check herself out and let go. Her mind, miraculously still in tact up until the very end, was made up. 82 years, two husbands, five kids, nine grandchildren, and thirteen great grandkids later, she felt it was time to move on. She told her children that she didn't want a funeral because, as I mentioned earlier, she already had one.
In the Spring of 2003, I woke up one Saturday morning at the age of 26 after having cried myself to sleep the night before. I was miserable, living with my mother, working a dead-end job, in a dead-end relationship, and feeling, well, dead. Something had snapped in me between falling asleep the night before and that very moment, and I could no longer foresee living another day knowing that that particular present was my eternal fate. So I decided to move. Those first few waking moments of that morning are ones I can't clearly recall. Basically, I was being pulled by something else, whether it was fate or severe depression. I scrambled about my room to find a pen and a piece of paper. Then I put the names of a dozen cities into a hat and randomly pulled out the name of one. I marched downstairs and announced to my confused mother nursing a Virginia Slim and a cup of coffee that in six months (and despite having never even been there to visit) I was moving to Chicago.
Those next six months were rough. I took a second job, equally as crappy as my other one, to finance the move. And although I was trying not to, I desperately still wanted the guy I felt I was running away from to beg me to stay. Something else occurred over the course of that time too. For the first time in my entire life, no one, not my friends or family, had any confidence in me whatsoever. They thought that what I was doing was reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous. And although they could all tell that my staying in Memphis would equate to a world of personal troubles for me, they found it impossible to support me. That is, everyone except my grandmother.
About two weeks before my set arrival date into Chicago, I began to panic. I was moving to a city where no one knew me, where I had no job or family, and I almost changed my mind. I was desperate to leave, but I was terrified that I'd fail. I was talking about this to my grandmother who lived a few doors down from my mom and this fear manifested itself into concerns over money. Although I'd saved up a bunch, what if it wasn't enough? What if I fell flat on my face financially before I ever even found a job? And my grandmother casually mentioned to me that I should ask my grandpa, a retired successful businessman, not for a handout, but a loan.
So I did. But he made me go back and write up a loan proposal, highlighting my monthly bills. Then he made me go back and revise that written loan proposal when I'd blindly failed to factor in the cost of unforeseen yet unavoidable expenses, like groceries. We decided on an amount and a payment plan. It was then that I had all of the resources that I needed to leave. All that was left was the courage to do so.
In 2006, my grandfather died a few days after I'd flown home to say goodbye. He could no longer talk and was almost unrecognizable from having been sick for so long, but his eyes lit up when he saw me standing over his bed. He squeezed my hand but I said very little because I didn't want to cry in front of him. I foolishly thought that him seeing me cry would scare him, as if he didn't know he was dying up until my tears let the cat out of the bag. When I left the room I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Had he and my grandmother never given me that money, where would I have been? I had found such happiness in Chicago. I became the type of person that for one reason or another Memphis hadn't allowed me to be. I was a good person. I was a happy person. And I wanted him to be proud of me.
My grandmother pulled me aside that day and I tried, while sobbing, to express that gratitude. She told me that his lending me that last bit of money for my move was a decision that they'd both agreed upon long before I wrote up that silly proposal. She said that they knew I was good for it. After my grandpa died, I kept making payments to my grandmother and eventually paid off that debt. It was one of the brightest moments of my life when all of those checks cleared. That's when my grandmother told me how proud of me they both were.
We are who we are because of where we came from. I'm goofy and selfish because of my father. I'm likeable and scatter-brained because of my mother. I'm kind but defensive because of my sister. And I'd like to think, considering that we've now lost them both, that I'm trusting and strong because of my grandparents.
But sometimes "strong" isn't even a powerful enough word to describe my grandmother. Once at Thanksgiving when I was a teenager, I overheard her snap back to her first husband during an argument after he told her to go to hell, "I'll see you there!" Up until just a few years ago, she often wrapped up her day with a strong scotch. She was educated during a time when most women weren't, and had a lifelong thirst for knowledge that led her to being more computer literate and internet savvy than I was. She had a unique take on the world, leaning more towards a belief that almost everyone goes to heaven because, based on her observations, weren't most of us already in hell? She didn't care that I was gay, but she cared that I was a Democrat. I spent just as much time fighting with her about Hillary Clinton as I did my Obama-supporting pals during the 2008 Election.
When you come from good people, you duplicate good people. You build a support system no matter what your lot in life that replicates the one that reared you. Your passions are the same, as are your hopes and your fights. And that all starts to click more as you get older. You catch yourself doing or saying something and you freeze in your tracks because you're acting like an authority figure from your own childhood. Tonight as I write this, sad for my mother that she's taken the biggest hit of grief in her life, sad for my aunts and uncles and cousins and sister and all of those great grandchildren, I somehow still find some admiration underneath all this hurt. Strong up until the very end, my grandmother called the shots and went out her way. She's definately one authority figure from my own childhood that I hope to find myself mimicking in later years.
Maybe I was never able to fully explain how grateful I am to my grandparents for not only believing that I'd succeed in Chicago, but also for helping plant in me the things to look out for in others when you're trying to build your own family. Without their values, their commitment, their efforts, I wouldn't be who I am today.
Hopefully someday I'll get to where they're going. And over a nice, strong scotch, I can thank them then.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Lost in Space.
(First published at mikealvear.com)
I grew up during the peak of the Star Wars fad and had I not been genetically predisposed to favor my He-Man toys over my Chewbacca action figure, I might've paid more attention to space. I only knew of it what they said about it at the beginning of Star Trek, that it was "the final frontier." Space was something confusing, big, and daunting. Who needed it? Well, as it turns out, most of us do.
Actual Space, the space above us where the sun burns and galaxies collide, is a complicated mass of mathematics and physics. I have spent most of this year studying a microcosm of space, the space that exists between humans. Although not quite as overwhelming and endlessly possible as actual space, the space that human beings require can be just as complicated and is equally affected by numbers and science.
They say that actual space is relative, like time, and so indeed is human space. People need space, although at varying degrees. I spent two months living out of a suitcase in two of my friends' living room. One of them needed little space at all and the sight of my unemployed ass sitting idly on the sofa when he got home from work was a welcome one. The other friend required much more space, actually the specific space in which I'd been sleeping, and he jumped for joy when I finally moved on and he was able to reclaim the couch as his.
Human space can be trickier than even the most confusing Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking book. Unlike deciphering the distance between planets, you never know exactly how much space a human needs. New relationships are a doctorate level study in space. You spend half of your time trying to figure out when it's appropriate to call, to text, or to ask to see that person again. You don't know if your perception of space is the same as theirs. What if they require more distance than you do? And if they do, then what does that mean? Do they just simply like to take things slower than you do? Or are they orbitting around someone else's sun and you're just some loser supernova dying in the distance?
Trying to describe how much space you require in a relationship is a lot like trying to describe your own genitalia. You know exactly what yours looks like. You know it inside and out. However, words will inevitably fail you should you have to describe them. And like your own genitalia, space is just something that is always there. But you never really feel the need to discuss it with anyone unless it is immediately threatened.
Space is a science. And like all sciences, there is an underlying element of math. Human space is no different. The space that we need is our own unique algebraic equation where X equals the numbers of times you think you were in love divided by half the times you let somebody down multiplied by the number of times your best friend banged your boyfriend. And like the formulas that make up actual space, at first glance the numbers in human space look random, jumbled, and meaningless to the point that you'd rather give up than try to solve it.
Just as that geeky junior high school science teacher we all had tried to do, we try to make ourselves understand space. It's not easy. And many of us will fail. But at some point we have to grasp the beauty, and the power, of space.
Live long and prosper.
I grew up during the peak of the Star Wars fad and had I not been genetically predisposed to favor my He-Man toys over my Chewbacca action figure, I might've paid more attention to space. I only knew of it what they said about it at the beginning of Star Trek, that it was "the final frontier." Space was something confusing, big, and daunting. Who needed it? Well, as it turns out, most of us do.
Actual Space, the space above us where the sun burns and galaxies collide, is a complicated mass of mathematics and physics. I have spent most of this year studying a microcosm of space, the space that exists between humans. Although not quite as overwhelming and endlessly possible as actual space, the space that human beings require can be just as complicated and is equally affected by numbers and science.
They say that actual space is relative, like time, and so indeed is human space. People need space, although at varying degrees. I spent two months living out of a suitcase in two of my friends' living room. One of them needed little space at all and the sight of my unemployed ass sitting idly on the sofa when he got home from work was a welcome one. The other friend required much more space, actually the specific space in which I'd been sleeping, and he jumped for joy when I finally moved on and he was able to reclaim the couch as his.
Human space can be trickier than even the most confusing Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking book. Unlike deciphering the distance between planets, you never know exactly how much space a human needs. New relationships are a doctorate level study in space. You spend half of your time trying to figure out when it's appropriate to call, to text, or to ask to see that person again. You don't know if your perception of space is the same as theirs. What if they require more distance than you do? And if they do, then what does that mean? Do they just simply like to take things slower than you do? Or are they orbitting around someone else's sun and you're just some loser supernova dying in the distance?
Trying to describe how much space you require in a relationship is a lot like trying to describe your own genitalia. You know exactly what yours looks like. You know it inside and out. However, words will inevitably fail you should you have to describe them. And like your own genitalia, space is just something that is always there. But you never really feel the need to discuss it with anyone unless it is immediately threatened.
Space is a science. And like all sciences, there is an underlying element of math. Human space is no different. The space that we need is our own unique algebraic equation where X equals the numbers of times you think you were in love divided by half the times you let somebody down multiplied by the number of times your best friend banged your boyfriend. And like the formulas that make up actual space, at first glance the numbers in human space look random, jumbled, and meaningless to the point that you'd rather give up than try to solve it.
Just as that geeky junior high school science teacher we all had tried to do, we try to make ourselves understand space. It's not easy. And many of us will fail. But at some point we have to grasp the beauty, and the power, of space.
Live long and prosper.
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