“ We should all turn off our televisions and close our laptops and go outside and move our limbs and play with each other and laugh and smooch and wrestle, because we are all going to be dead in what will seem like 45 minutes and we are going to stay that way until the end of an infinite number of forevers. Have a great weekend!”
I first saw this photo on my friend Kristin’s blog and it’s stuck with me ever since. I think I might have even posted it before, but I had some thoughts about it that feel fresh to me, so maybe I didn’t say them already. Whatever. That doesn’t matter. Here’s something else that doesn’t matter:
The photo is said to be famous bullfighter-turned-activist Alvaro Munera during his final performance, but it can’t be him because his last bullfight didn’t end this way. Munera’s body was demolished by a bull that also left him paralyzed, and he was an unrepentant toreador before that moment.
It doesn’t matter who this guy is. It doesn’t have to have Munera’s story attached to make it a powerful image. It doesn’t even have to be real.
This is the depiction of a man who’s had some kind of pacifistic epiphany - he stopped trying to kill the bull and the bull stopped trying to kill him. Or maybe the bull had the epiphany first, and when the bullfighter saw that the damn bull wasn’t fighting him back, he realized that he would be responsible for the destruction of an innocent creature and that led him to realize that every bull who ever fought a bullfighter was innocent, too. This made him unable to continue.
This man is in the process of having a staggering moment - he had to sit down in the middle of trying to kill a giant, dangerous animal. It’s a point in his life that alters the curve he had graphed for himself when he took up his profession. It’s a moment of revelation and alteration and growth and evolution, a punctuated emergence into a new life.
This is what makes me want to write. These moments interest me more than any other in anybody’s life. These moments - when the growing plant breaks through the soil - make me excited about stories.
The Nice Guy and the Friendzone
A common fallacy in discussions about Nice Guys who complain about being Friendzoned is personified in this blog post: Lamenting the Friend Zone:
That because you’re nice and treat her well, she therefore owes you at least one opportunity to present yourself as a viable sexual candidate, even if she’s already made it clear that this isn’t what she wants.
This is a critical misunderstanding of the psychology of the Nice Guy.
He doesn’t think you owe him anything, and he doesn’t consider your lack of interest in him as your failing. A Nice Guy who gets Friendzoned hates himself. He thinks you, the woman, are a superior being. He thinks that he needs to be nice to you and do things for you and compliment you and that’s will make you interested in him romantically. This is why Nice Guys always complain about how girls always fall for the Asshole, because the Asshole is not nice to her and doesn’t treat her as a superior creature.
The Nice Guy becomes a Nice Guy because he doesn’t understand how attraction works. In a fair and just world, girls would fall in love with the boys who treated them well. The world doesn’t work this way. Instead, it defies logic. He sees the girls go for Assholes.
The Asshole is confident and dangerous. He might not like her back. He has other girls interested in him. He doesn’t focus his laser of unrequited love at one person. He does fun things and doesn’t care if the girl comes with him or not. He has a life. Sometimes the Asshole is a real asshole, but he doesn’t have to be. By the Nice Guy’s metric, anybody who doesn’t worship women as a superior creature is an Asshole.
The other issue is this: sex is not the Nice Guy’s motive.
He’s a romantic. He wants Love, not sex. He thinks that A Woman In Love With Him will fix all of his problems.
In summary, this is what a Nice Guy thinks:
1) women are better than men.
2) women don’t really want sex (they pretend to, to get Love)
3) women love Assholes who are mean to them
4) Assholes use women for sex and withhold Love
5) Sex is scary but Love is the Best Thing Ever
CAVEATS:
- there are some Nice Guys who get angry and dismiss women and get pissed off when their niceness leads to a friendship and not Love and obsess about sex instead of love. Some Nice Guys can oscillate between these two motives, but it’s rare.
- there are Assholes who are real assholes
- there are women who are attracted to Asshole man because he treats her badly, but it’s not common enough to justify the Nice Guy’s obsession with the Asshole
- there are probably some deep psychological or sociological factors that create Nice Guys, but not enough commonality among them to make for a glib blog post like this one
People who dismiss science fiction as juvenile escapism show an immense ignorance.
This video is a commercial for a fake product that is actually a commercial for a movie, but its being science fiction doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful, mature and engaging.
The evidence is stronger and stronger that dogs and humans evolved together, and the process continues.
Dogs are stinky-breathed, over-shedding little shits but they’re also, in a quite literal sense, the best friends our species ever had.
(via smartcookies)
I saw this on the floor of my therapist’s office and it made me think a few things, so I took a picture of it so you could see it, too, and maybe understand why it made me happy.
This is a sticker from a Polo shirt. It’s the kind that retailers put on clothes in department stores so a customer can tell what size the shirt is without having to pull it out of the stack to see the tag. The person who buys the shirt is supposed to peal off the sticker before wearing the shirt, but sometimes people forget.
It’s a sticker from an XXL sized shirt, which is pretty big. Somebody with a shirt that size is almost certainly overweight.
There was a fat person with a brand new shirt in my therapist’s waiting room.
Seeing this made me happy because it is evidence of a sick person getting better.
Buying a new shirt is one of those symbolic things we do when we don’t really know when we’re doing it, and in this case I think it’s a person who is tired of being miserable all the time. He got fat because depression made him do things like not exercise and eat a lot and stay inside and avoid people and then getting fat just gave him another reason to be depressed and all that stuff piled on top of him and he didn’t know how to get out. Maybe he didn’t know for a long time.
But he decided to make an appointment with a therapist, because he didn’t know what else to do. He realized he couldn’t get better on his own, so he went to a professional who could help. He bought a new shirt because, to him, it was a new beginning. He wanted to make a good first impression, sure, but he actually found himself feeling hopeful. Maybe he didn’t even know he was feeling hopeful, because it had been so long since he felt good about anything, so it manifested itself in a trip to Macy’s. I’ll bet he doesn’t even wear an XXL, but he’s so self conscious and so unwilling to tempt a shame spiral that he bought a size he knew would fit.
As a guy who’s been through those dark, terrible woods and even still occasionally goes back to visit once in a while, I know how they can feel endless and insurmountable. The guy who wore that shirt had found, finally, a path that might help him out, too. That’s something to celebrate.
