Golden Rules, Terrible People and Repayment

The Golden Rule is bullshit. You should never do unto others as you'd have them do to you. Always overcompensate. Face the fact that the majority of the people that you meet will disappoint and let down, they will be narcissistic, self-destructive and oblivious. They will tell you what you want to hear and then tell the world everything you'd hate for them to. The majority of us are flawed terrible people.

If you want a rule to go by that will always lead you to the moral high ground, try this- "Treat these assholes better than they'd ever even dream of treating you." It means that at least initially, at least to begin with, go out of your way to not expect that every smile will be returned. It means attempting to put aside your own flawed terrible state long enough to give the benefit of the doubt where it might not be deserved, the support that wasn't asked for or the forgiveness that wasn't warranted. Treating someone as you'd like to be treated is like giving someone a birthday present with a note attached listing your own birthday and desired gift. It's a constant exchange of Kindness that's really just an inefficient way of getting someone else to give you what you could've just given yourself. Whether it's validation, or love, or a pony.

If you want to do good then do good, but do it with the knowledge that realistically, the majority of the people you do it to will not be willing, or able or interested in repaying that goodness. And realize, that no matter how much good you do, you aren't necessarily a good person either. You likely received a lot of treatment that you did not repay in kind. Whether from ignorance or apathy or obliviousness. We rarely do, cause we're just flawed terrible people when it comes down to it.

So shoot for something higher than expectations. At least the realistic ones.

Missing Person

My ten year reunion is coming up and it's forced me to realize that the one person I would want to fly down to California to see, to sit around in an awkward rented room getting drunk and talking about the last ten years with, isn't going to be there. And maybe one of the reasons that I'd want to see him so bad is because he's the person I haven't seen or heard from in years. Maybe it's because he's the person who didn't get to graduate college and enter into these first few years of attempts at adulthood that the rest of us have. 

Maybe the reason I'm so interested in hearing about the man he became is because he never got to become him.

He would've been the life of the party. He would've made the flight worth every penny.

Because I don't want to hear about the new jobs and the marriages and the babies. I don't want to watch a whole bunch of almost-thirty year-olds attempt to impress each other with how much they can "party." I want to laugh at the fact that whether we want to admit it or not, we all ended up adults. I want to sit off in a corner and judge the people who made high school suck, to indulge my resilient angst with someone just as witty and sarcastic as I am. 

I miss you Julien. I miss who you were, but even more than that. I miss who you would've become.

My Love Affair With Awkwardness

I've always thought that I was more prone to awkwardness than other people. That I just sort of attracted it to me, or let's be honest, unwittingly initiated it. Looking at it now though, I think it's more that I just don't actively avoid it like most people do. Situations that I know are bound to be a bit uncomfortable for me and/or everyone around me are more interesting. I'm less sure of how I'll react, the outcome's harder to predict, there's just so many more variables involved. And the biggest thing- it's likely to be a situation I've either never been in before or one I've at least never thought out with my usual variety of "what-if"s and corresponding "and-then"s. 

But my real love of Awkward is that it has rarely if ever really let me down. It's made for some of the best stories I'll ever have to tell, and has made so many friendships, relationships and experiences more meaningful and more memorable for it's presence. Awkwardness is what gave me my sarcasm and my openness, my comfort in our companionship has let me be the person that said the things that I might have held back and do so many things I might never have ever done without it.

When it comes down to it, making friends with Awkward has been about accepting the parts of me I'm never 100% sure other people will accept. And they're kind of some of the best parts of me.

Best case, fucking up and revisions.

I don't always see the good in everything, but I do have a talent at always seeing the potential. All of the potentials, the best and worst case, the likely and the far-flung. I live in a world of what-ifs. With each new person and each new experience, I play out where they could go, what they could lead to, all of the repercussions they might cause. And it might sound like something that would make me cautious and hesitant, scared for all of the bad things that might happen and the hurt that might be incurred. But that's only half of real potential. Because just like every choice, friend, promise, or move I make might turn out to be a mistake, they might not be. They might prove to be the best call I ever made.

I think it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with bad choices than to live with the regret of the ones you never made. Life is about learning, and learning comes in large part from fucking up and just trying not to fuck up in the same way again. People can tell you the fire's hot, but you never really know the heat until you feel it for yourself. I live in a world of what-ifs, but not out of second-guessing and careful planning. It's out of a love of all of the things that could be. There is no reason to do anything half-way, if it's a good decision you'll only realize a portion of it's benefit, if it's a bad one you'll be able to avoid that fact for a little longer, but at some point you'll have to admit it and deal with it. Better to start learning from it sooner than later.

Our important decisions, the ones that really shape who we are and what we do, they aren't things to be taken lightly, but neither are they things to avoid at all costs. They can be remade, altered and tweaked, they can be edited to fit what we need. But if you never put any letters on the page you'll never know what revisions need to be made.

my ENTIRE life, the football player and playing victim

There is nothing more humbling than reading poetry you wrote at 14. Trust me, I just found a notebook full of it. A notebook covered with angels, since that year also included my failed attempts at adopting my friends' enjoyment of both youth group and Jesus. It's the old "well, everyone else is doing it" teenage story. Except that being the super-focused judgy kid that I was, the drug- and drinking-related peer pressure was prefaced by the Jesus Is Awesome kind by a good five years. Yeah. There's a reason my parents weren't concerned with me not having a curfew.

Though if you believe the predictable rhyme schemes of 15 year-old Amy, there was clear cause for concern. Because for the nearly two years this notebook covers I was madly, totally, completely in love. Like "I will never forget you my ENTIRE life" in love. Writing poems with titles like "Shattered", "Letting Go", "Grieving" and "No More Words" (which may have been a bit premature- it's followed by at least 20 pages of more). I mean, I was in love with this guy people. And not the kind of shit girls write before they give it up to a guy, it's the kind of stuff that fuels the creation of suicide pacts. Maybe not the ones that get followed up on, more the kind that get talked about late at night during the recurring "Nobody understands us" commiseration, but still, intense.

So the weird thing is that I have no idea who these were written about. Or if they were even written about the same guy, or if the guy actually existed anywhere besides my hilarious early attempts at profound depth. Absolutely. No. Idea. I remember my high school crushes: the football player, the guy in Texas, the awkward but entertaining friend, the guy I ended up dating for a minute or so years later. And I hope, for both their sake and mine, that it was none of them. 

But my pride aside, I know it was probably about all of them. Or at least the idea of them, which likely came from my thoughts of myself at the time. I mean, I was a middle class white kid from a stable (if broken) home, who got straight-As and worked at Baskin Robbins... maybe I just needed something about my life to be a little fucked up. Needed something to blame my blossoming teenage (now "twenty-something") angst on. I needed adversity, to be the victim of something beyond my control. So I played at love like other teenagers play at rebellion or popularity. I guess I could've chosen worse.

It's weird thinking about how many things changed in the years that came after this notebook. The boys I really fell for, the heartbreaks I really went through and all of the stuff that happened in between. 

Then there was the realization that not every poem needs to rhyme. That may have been the biggest discovery of all.

Past selves, afternoon beers and epic failures.

I think I'm still holding myself up to the standards that my sixteen year-old self set. The self that didn't understand how awesome a beer on the front steps in the middle of the afternoon can really be, or the luxury of not needing to own a pair of heels at 27, and especially not the joy of letting work take only 40 hours of my thoughts a week. If that. She was awesome, and I owe her everything, but that girl was guided solely by the hopes of everyone else and the knowledge of her own potential. I may not have learned all that much since I figured out how to drive a car without injuring myself and others, but there is one thing that I have realized, if painfully gradually. Having potential is a broader and less important thing than everyone seems to think. The ability to be good at, or as or with something doesn't mean any of it's needed to be good at life. If it comes down to being really good at one thing and investing all of myself into being It at the expense of all the small joys and even epic failures that make life really Life, it just doesn't seem worth it. Focusing on a single promising ability limits the possibility of finding out about so many lesser ones. Ones that might not make me any money or gain me any notice but could potentially be exponentially more rewarding. 

There is a part of me that still chides myself for not going to law school or pursuing a career in government. But she barely knows how to drive, and I'm hoping that if I show her all of the awesomeness that is out there to see and experience without heels and 70 hour work weeks and a rush to go and get and be, she'll eventually come around. 

She's a pretty smart girl.

Fixes, Padding and Illogical Trains

Not everything needs to be fixed, changed and made better. Some things just need to exist in their flawed state, so that they can either make the perfect form seem like something worth achieving or prove that broken is just as viable as the alternative. Depending on the perspective of the observer. 

It is when things that want to break start crashing against the things nearby that they need to be softly padded. It is one thing to break yourself, it is another to willingly break others. Self-destruction is an act of will, destruction not initiated by the crushed object is another thing entirely. A murder suicide is not about Romeo and Juliet when there is no illogical train of romanticized events leading to it. It is a choice and a lack of choice. Selfishness will never be sacrifice, and poets, despite their ability with words and phrasing, will never change that.

A ton of babies, capes and penis exemptions

I think my cat is cooler than a lot of babies, also at least some toddlers and arguably quite a few teenagers. But definitely a ton of babies. Part of it is that he's an especially awesome cat but a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm just pretty unimpressed in general with babies. They don't emerge as something cute, they're just varying degrees of red and alien-looking, yes, even yours, despite what all of your friends and blood relations may have said. It wasn't born cute and it didn't look like either of you half as much as it did a B-movie extra-terrestrial. This is just a fact.

Now I am not saying cats are super awesome. I am happy with owning just the one and even when he "goes off to college" as one of my friends (who clearly also has similar appreciation for their feline) put it, I'm not totally sure I'll get another. It'd be like the plots of those movies where the super awesome kid passes away young and then the kinda sub-par sibling has to spend their lives trying to measure up. They always pretty much fail at achieving awesome, which is understandable since they were sub-par all along, but still kinda sucks for them you know? Don't think I could put a cat through that...

But anyway, what I AM saying is that being forced to look at countless baby pictures and lie to you all about how adorable they are and how much their little alien slits resemble your eyes is not cool. Not everybody digs this sort of interaction and a lot of us send out pretty clear signals about it. (Hint: asking my friends to share dead baby jokes on my facebook page was not a sign that I'm overly interested in your living one). For future reference, unless you and I are what we would both consider to be "close friends" I'd also prefer to not be involved in wedding planning, prolonged conversations about any guy you are seeing/sleeping with/stalking who I haven't heard of before/met/ever showed interest in hearing about, anything related to your diet, something you read in a magazine better known for sex advice than news, your moisturizing routine or anything else that is asking for running sarcastic commentary but not open to receiving it. For both of our sake just avoid this sort of stuff. If it's all you have to talk about, just avoid talking.

I'm not totally anti-kid-convos. Come back to me when they're smearing their poop on the wall, saying awkward things in public, learning dirty words for the first time and generally being the Most Awesome People They'll Ever Be. These are the golden years I totally want to hear about. The ones where they demand to wear their cape to school (if you're an awesome parent they should own AT LEAST one cape). For all the times they knock over/set fire to/ lose something and totally deadpan a lie about how they had nothing to do with it. Bonus points if an imaginary friend is involved.

But until then? Yeah, cooing and mumbling gibberish has never really been my style. At least not sober. So until they do something besides eating, crying, pooping and looking weird how about you just treat me like any of your dude friends and just avoid the over-sharing? It's sexist you know, to subject me to all this awkward forced baby banter when everyone with a penis gets an automatic exemption. But that's another rant.

I think it's a clear expectation. I don't show you pictures of my cat and make you sit there pretending he's the most adorable amazing thing you've ever seen. And he knows how to shit in a box, eat on his own, rarely cries, and is super fluffy... know anything that lacks those characteristics of awesomeness? Sure ya do, it's probably shitting in it's pants, crying to be fed and looking a little ET-like right now. All of which you are documenting with even more pictures of for all of us lucky enough to be considered "close friends".

I'm sure I'll love any little alien I produce much more than my cat. But I won't expect you too. Just sayin'.