You don’t.
Happy Thanksgiving y’all. I hope you get to have some yummy turkey (wish mine was fried)!
PS - Mamba totally sucks at Fantasy Football….or does she?
Archive for the 'Love' Category
Twenty-two years ago I was too young to compare my all-time favorite movie characters to see which one would be the ideal mate. I was a little young for that kind of thing but there was always a clear winner in my mind. So what if I didn’t really get the whole boyfriend-girlfriend-love-hate-sex thing? I knew who I’d rather, and haven’t wavered from that choice since. I thought I’d run down my comparison of the two characters, and see if I can find out what, exactly, draws me to one over the other.
Let’s start with Ferris.
How much fun is Ferris Bueller to be around? The guy’s got a whole gamut of tricks up his sleeve to make adolescence super-fun, like pre-recorded doorbell greetings and the ability to convince the school principal that he was your dad and get you out of a boring class so you can spend the day cavorting around the windy city. He’s audacious, cunning, persuasive, and spontaneous. He has the wherewithal to not only coax his best friend off his death bed to join you, but also (albeit apprehensively) to coerce him into taking his father’s precious Porsche for a joyride. He’ll show you the best time of your life. He’ll shock you with his ability to upstage the headliner of a major parade, take you to a museum, to a fancy restaurant, to the top of the tallest building in town, all the while maintaining enough composure to steer clear of the powers that be that may just ruin your great time. He’ll make you think that all of this deviancy is okay simply because “look how much fun you’re having!” And you’ll believe him. He’s shameless, brazen, loud, hysterical, proud, impulsive, lighthearted, entertaining, creative, clever, and flattering. He’s more fun than any 17 year old ever to walk the earth. And you love him.
He’s also embarrassing, crass, loud, cunning, sly, self-centered, lazy, arrogant, bold, spoiled, and overbearing. He gets whatever he wants, whenever he wants. I suppose some people would be envious, like Cameron. And girls like Sloane love to be with him because they are the female equivalents. See, the problem with Ferris is he’ll make you think he’s loyal, and he very well may be. For now. All it takes is a couple of bikini clad women sunbathing and Ferris stops in his tracks like the Road Runner. He’ll make you think he’s serious about you, that he wants to marry you and have little Ferrises, but deep down you know he’s not really serious. He doesn’t really have any ambition to do anything except party like it’s 1999. (In 1986 this was still a big hit.) Hell, he probably won’t even graduate if he doesn’t stop skipping school all the time.
Enter Lloyd Dobler.
You probably don’t even know who Lloyd Dobler is and how amazing he thinks you are. Lloyd admires from afar for a long time before he musters the guts to give you a call. This call only comes after he sat 5 tables away from you in the mall cafeteria and told all his friends that you had a “date”. Mind you, Lloyd is the guy who has lots of girl-friends, none of whom are, or ever will be, anything more than friends. You won’t know it, but he’ll be pacing around the bathroom while he talks to you, and he’ll talk so much that he’ll convince you to go out with him, even though you are convinced that you’ll never have a good time, but you think what the hell. He’ll be polite to your father, and to him, every detail of the evening will be a big deal. He’ll be generous, sacrificing his own inebriation for the sake of the safety of the entire party. He’ll check on you every so often to make sure you are having a good time, but not in a creepy, suspicious way. In a caring, respectable, and attentive way. You’ll start to find him quite charming and not at all how you initially judged him. He’ll open doors for you, kick glass out of your way, visit your dad in jail for you, drop everything and move to Europe for you. He’s a family guy. He’s ambitious. And when you push him away, like you know you will, he’ll wake you up at the crack of dawn and blast that oh-so-romantic song that you first made love to.
Some might say, “Hey, he also might be the guy that can’t do anything without you. He might be the kind of guy that gets upset when it’s “girls night out”. If you’re in the bathroom too long he might come in and ask “what’re you doing?” He might read your email over your shoulder and be jealous of everything you do without him and whoever you talk to. Maybe he’ll ask you to throw out all of your old photos and memorabilia.
Lloyd Dobler? Naahh. Well, at least I hope not.
The thing is, if I look at Ferris and I look at Lloyd, and I try to picture each of them in 20 or 30 years from where the end of their flicks left off, it’s really tough for me to picture Ferris as a man with a wife and kids. Lloyd, on the other hand, well, I imagine him and Diane living in some duplex in London, sipping tea and watching the little ones play hopscotch or some shit.
Question is, what do you think?
You’re still here? It’s over. Go home. Go!
It’s been 18 days since I last posted anything. Too long. I’m sorry, Internet! Just as I was getting on a roll and had 2.4 of you taking a look here every day or so, POOF! I’m gone. If it makes any difference, I have a reason. A really, really good reason:
DB moved out.
I will not, at this time (maybe ever) go into the sordid, awful, juicy details of it all. I will not entertain the Why’s, How’s, and What Happened’s. That wouldn’t be right. It’s too new, too fresh. I will say that I’m happy to be watching the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance right now instead of the Giants game, but that’s certainly not something that contributed to the current situation.
Anyhow. Have you ever wanted to listen to something, or watch something, but didn’t have access to it? And then the moment you stop thinking about it or you forget there it is? I had that type of experience this week.
As dorky as it may sound, I am a HUGE Friends fan.
Seen every episode, kick ass in the Trivia Game, all that shit. I don’t care. When I met DB (again) three years ago, he hated this about me. He taunted me every time I would watch it. Over time, however, I started to notice that HE would be laughing along too! I would bust his chops and he would give me the brush-off. Only in the last six months have I heard him say, “If you would have told me I would like this show 2 years ago, I would’ve slapped you.” (Not really, of course.) We recorded reruns on the DVR. And watched them daily. We even downloaded the first season and had a marathon one Saturday because he wanted to “see if there were any he hadn’t already seen” (all manly-like). I still think he just wanted to watch each episode in order from the beginning.
DB started to know little details about the characters and their plotlines, it almost got to the point that he remembered more than I did! He would ask me how the series finale ended, but little details escaped me. I would always say, “Oh they’ll show the rerun anyday now.” Mind you, my DVR probably records three different Friends reruns each day, one would think that the chances are pretty high that in three years we’d catch The Last One, no?
No. The Last Episode never aired. Not until Tuesday night that is, the night that DB left. After I was alone, I sat on the couch, checked the list, and there it was.
“The Last One”
I mean, what are the chances of THAT? I watched it, of course, but told my DVR to “Save Until Manually Erased.” You know, just in case.
My boyfriend (commonly referred to on this blog as DB) and I went to high school together. We did not date in high school; we were not high school sweethearts. We weren’t even friends. In fact, I could probably count on two hands the amount of words we exchanged in four years of roaming the same hallways. I did, however, have a huge crush on him. I was the cheerleader and he was the bad boy. The bad boy that was in most of my classes. The bad boy that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. The bad boy that I used to giggle about with my girlfriends and the same bad boy that wouldn’t give me the time of day. DB was my high school fantasy.
After high school I can honestly say I didn’t even so much as hear his name mentioned, unless it was me bringing him up during a drunken night of reminiscing with my best friends. It was as if he had ceased to exist.
A few years back, I was in Manhattan and had just caught the subway in a last ditch attempt to get on the last train to Jersey before rush hour. (I try desperately to avoid stressful, crowded places because I feel like I don’t move fast enough for most people’s liking. But I digress.) As I sat down to catch my breath I looked to my left and about three feet away there he was. DB. And he was looking back at me. We recognized each other instantly, and I remember wondering whether the smile on his face was a result of him seeing me after all these years, or if he had caught the smile from me since I know I was grinning ear-to-ear. (Or, of course, if it was an instinctual reaction to my inherent sexiness; aren’t I oh-so-modest?)
After a bit of awkwardness we got to talking, and not only did I miss the train I had been so desperate to catch, I sat in the middle of Penn Station during rush hour and had a beer with my high school fantasy. How things progressed from there is material for another blog post, but needless to say it all went well.
A month or so later I was having martinis with some girlfriends when someone decided to ask what each of our Most Romantic Moments Ever was. I think it was my friend Perm that brought it up; she was getting married soon and all, I Want To Talk About Love And Shit. Anyway, in the middle of her story I started laughing so loudly that everyone stopped talking and looked at me. I was laughing, I told them, because I thought it was both funny and sad that I did not have a Most Romantic Story to share. Little did I know that my story would happen just the very next evening.
That next night it was raining and cold. DB came to visit and we were trying to watch movies on the couch, but the rain was pelting louder and louder against the windows in my living room, and it was getting harder to hear the television. DB gave me a look, a look that you give someone right before you’re about to tickle them or chase them, a kind of “I’m Gonna Get You!” look. I shrieked and turned toward the door, which is when DB grabbed me by the waist, turned me toward him and kissed me. He picked me up and carried me barefoot down the stairs outside to the cold, wet rain. He ran me into the middle of the street and kissed me, that good (really good) kind of kiss. Think The Notebook, or Gone With the Wind-style. A grab-your-face-and-tear-your-shirt kind of kiss. And he stood there with me in his arms barefoot as we both got drenched and he kissed me like it was his very last kiss. It was at that second that knew that I was having my very own Most Romantic Moment Ever, and I couldn’t wait to share it with my friends. I felt giddy for the rest of the night.
A couple of weeks ago, DB and I were talking about when we first started dating. I brought up this moment, this moment that girls fantasize about and laugh about and gossip about, and told him for the first time that I thought that moment was the Most Romantic Moment of My Life.
He didn’t remember it. AT ALL. Seriously, he had no recollection. I’m not even kidding.
Gotta love the difference between men and women, for if I had brought up the first time I did a striptease for him, you bet your ass he’d remember every move.
