Think of It, A Secret Engagement

If you haven’t read Siblings or Dating, go back and do that. I’ll wait. If you have, distract yourself with this while we wait for everyone to catch up (doesn’t it kill you that she hits that note at 2:06 completely wrong? Paul would know if it’s flat or sharp, I have no ear for music. I just know it sounds terrible.)

Everyone back? Great.

Shortly after the dating rumors started swirling around the workplace, helped considerably by Paul’s coy attitude whenever anyone asked him about me, we went out to lunch (fuel to the fire, I know). As we sat in the restaurant, we heard a voice over the loudspeaker squawking “Barb, walnut salad for Barb! Don’t you want your salad, Barb?! Barb, your salad is getting cold, ha ha, hurry up Barb!”. I have never worked in such a setting, so I guess I don’t know what working there does to your psyche, but it’s not like not having been in someone’s shoes has ever stopped me from judging before.

Also don’t like muddy boots on my table, or douchebags.

 As we stared at each other, wondering WHY ON EARTH this was happening as a harassed Barb as hustled through the crowd to take what she had thought was a healthy and inoffensive lunch order, red faced and mumbling apologies that she just couldn’t get there fast enough to shut this woman up, an idea was born.

Paul looked at me, wide eyed, and said “If I proposed to you in public, would you say yes?”. Time stopped, my eyes filled with tears, and I managed to whisper a soft “Yes, of course” as I trembled with mirth. I immediately envisioned this unpleasant woman shouting “Anya, future husband for Anya! Don’t you want your man, Anya? Anya, he’s not going to wait around forever, haha, hurry up!” and Paul standing at the counter with a ring stuck in one of their free dessert samples.

More foolish than it is adorable.

Like all plots hatched between us, it got out of hand quickly. Soon we were calling to mind the very worst public proposals we’d seen on the internet, and making them worse.
“What if I had them call out your name at Panera and like put it in your soup?”
“And then I could start choking on it, or swallow it whole and watch you freak out, or throw it away! And you’d have to start fishing through the trash for this big-ass fake diamond. You could demand that the employees help you, or come back the next day in a panic because you didn’t want to ruin the surprise!”
“Let’s just name every disgusting food related thing that people do and then take it a step farther, like I could try to force the people at Qdoba to put it in your burrito while they’re making it.”
“I should only accept like eighty percent of the time, so you’ll never really know when you’re going to get rejected so you get realistically nervous. And we’ll involve as many strangers as possible so they’ll have to try to console you.”
Etc.

If I really wanted to commit, it would come to this.

We started coming up with scenarios that featured song and dance, near death experiences, the mall, reality television, local news, rollercoasters, puppies, allergies, dramatic rejections, two way proposals, sister wives, you can see how this got out of hand. Every terrible thing that has been done, we want to do worse (but really more like better). “The key to our internet fame!” we crowed on our walk back to the office, musing on the many truly awful and saccharine videos peppering the internet. Fuck heartfelt, this will be hilarious! People will laugh, they’ll cry, they’ll feel bad for you or me or both of us!

Reflecting on the downright glee we felt about making what amounts to a parody of all the public engagements we’ve seen makes me wonder about what it means for our damaged psyches. We try not to make lone ventures down the path of self discovery too often, fraught as it is with dangerous and unflattering visions. That is an adventure reserved for daily joint excursions into the land of “Oh, man, we’re pretty fucked, aren’t we? Shall we blame nature or nurture today?” (sorry I’ve been on a travel metaphor kick lately). But what does it say about us that this rash of public proposal videos that we assume other people take to heart, is basically the next version of planking in our minds?

Camels are fucking crazy, you doubly stupid planker. I hope something terrible happened in the immediate aftermath of this photo.

 
Aside: I fucking HATE planking! The only thing worse than humans planking is babies “planking” which is just their parents taking a picture of them laying in a weirdly stiff position, which could arguably be a cause for a visit to the doctor, rather than a photo shoot. I even googled “animals planking” to see if I could find a tolerable example, and guess what? They don’t do it! Because they’re not fucking stupid. All of those animals that people label as planking are just sleeping. And worst of all is people planking on animals. Ugh.

Best case scenario it says we’re intensely private people about the moments in our lives where we would be making a lifelong commitment to another, and so it’s hard to believe in the sincerity of those whose priority seems to be on creating a scenario that will attract the most YouTube views or go viral rather than on creating a deeply personal and intimate and safe moment for the person they love most to make (or not make) a commitment to them. So deep and thoughtful.

More likely we’re just vicious fun suckers who not only have serious doubts about the viability of marriage and trust in this day and age, but also have a strong aversion to people who think they are some kind of special snowflake for forcing their friends into forcing their future fiancee into the spotlight of internet fame so that how cute/thoughtful everyone else thinks it is can substitute for the feelings of the person in the situation who actually matters, thus cutting like eighty percent of the time and effort they have to put into *thinking* about it and basically clocking the hours it takes to *organize* as a measure of its worth. That sounds about right.

Thoughts?

-Anya

Enlisted

We’re in the business of judgment here, but it’s not all because we’re self obsessed, or bored, or whatever other excuses people who are judging others for judging come up with. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes we’re judging people for our own protection. A wise person on a reality television show(!) once said “Expectations in relationships are premeditated resentments”. Believe me that’s not the kind of insight I’m looking for on a Sunday morning when I just want to lay around and digest the banana bread french toast with peanut butter I shouldn’t have made or finished but it’s too late now, can’t escape those delicious calories or that stinging one liner.

It was literally the only thing on TV, I swear. Every other channel was broken.

As I soaked in other peoples’ pseudo-therapy and the wisdom (or results of a Google search for “therapy phrases”) therein, I thought about the way that we here at Mind Meld struggle heroically to keep ourselves from having expectations of people, because they obviously can’t actually be relied upon. Isn’t it always the case that people pleasantly surprise you by doing silly things like “being there” or “telling the truth” or “bringing you breakfast in bed” until your car/dog/grandfather dies and they decide you’re not fun anymore and then vanish and before you can turn around they’re in Aruba getting married to some trick they always insisted was too stupid to breathe consistently without putting sustained thought into it? Oh, just me? Great.

We’ve discovered the key to avoiding situations like that is to choose one of the following options:
1) Completely avoid all people, all the time (ideal, but nearly impossible)
2) Avoid meaningful relationships, cultivate shallow ones like the weeds that they are (one of us is really good at this)
3) Attempt to have meaningful relationships, but refuse to be surprised when they fuck up and instead just bundle them into a mental box put them on a list. (one of us tries to do this and occasionally succeeds).

He gets us.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one person to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, it is only right that they go on a list.  (Thomas Jefferson, if you’re reading this, I really think you should have said “bonds” not “bands”, it would have worked much better for me, and would have been just as touching and powerful). So Paul and I were eating lunch a couple of weeks ago, and I said “Ugh, he’s on my list. Isn’t he on your list?” Clearly looking for a “Yes, obviously, your judgment is impeccable and we are one in all things”. What I got was a fairly blank stare followed by a “List? Like is he one my shit list? No, I wouldn’t say that.”

A: Well he’s definitely on my shit list.
P: Wow, that’s pretty harsh.
A: What do you mean?
P: I just wouldn’t say that he’s that terrible. I mean yeah, that’s really annoying but I don’t think it warrants shit list.
A: What are you talking about? Do you even know what a shit list is? It’s not like he’s on the blacklist!
P: What is the black list? What are you talking about?
A: It’s like worse than shit list, but not quite “dead to me”. Like McCarthy era, you’ll never work in this town again, but not like FBI hit list.
P: Ok, what are all these lists? What’s the actual hierarchy? I need examples.



A lunch hour and a half later, we came up with Definitive Guide to Categorizing the People In Your Life Who Suck (All of Them), and it only took four categories! For your personal use:

Fallen Out of Favor: This list is reserved for the people in your life who you thought were okay, but have been mildly fucking up lately. The Overzealous Hire, who was a fun, young, breath of fresh air until she started inserting her rock climbing/hot yoga/art gallery trips into every goddamn conversation. Your co-worker who became pen pals with a convicted rapist. Your going-to-the- bar-is-the-extent-of-our-friendship friend who thinks sea otters eat nuts (like almonds! Honestly...).

"We are not amused."

These people have irritated you lately, but give them a few days and they’ll probably be fine. Maybe you just need to spend less time with them. Maybe after your ill conceived and ill timed diet week is over you’ll be less grumpy about their bullshit. But maybe (likely) it’s not on you. Maybe they’re just really shitty, and are going to continue to make their way down to...


The Shit List: This is the list people mean when they say “You’re on my list!” (Did no one else’s mother do this constantly?! How embarrassing for me). These people have moved past Fallen Out of Favor, and have been consistently ruining your day for awhile now. Your roommate who used the rest of your shampoo, and this is after she left ALL of her breakfast dishes just SITTING AGAIN, the fucking dishwasher is RIGHT THERE, and it makes your parents think that your apartment smells terrible and you’re an irresponsible child. And she and her boyfriend had that fight last night that kept you up the night before a final exam, whyyyy did you ever agree to live with her? These are the people whose constant habit of disappointing you is starting to get boring. You start saying “Of course...” in a tired voice. They could recover at some point, clamber their way out of this Shit List Pits and hike through the dense woods of Fallen Out of Favor Forest, managing to ascend the twin peaks of Respect and Love in the elusive Esteem Mountain Range. But more likely they’re working their way into the Valley of...

The Blacklist: These people are never coming back from what they’ve done. Maybe you’ll still speak to them when forced, maybe you even maintain the illusion of an acquaintanceship in the interest of politeness (happens to all of us), you may even forgive. But you will never forget.
Maybe they were supposed to be your best friend and they fucked your love interest. Maybe they just couldn’t promise that they wouldn’t, given the chance.

Maybe they told you that if you convinced your father to confess, he would just be sent to the Wall, but they beheaded him instead.

Regardless, they suck. They’re never allowed back in the inner circle, no matter what they do. You can’t trust them, you’ve learned your lesson. Maybe you had to be burned a few times, maybe more like six hundred times, but you’re done. You just keep them at a distance, they’re not like those other people. Those people are...

Dead to Me: I think most reasonable people have at least one person in their lives that deserve this designation. These people killed thirteen puppies in cold blood. They lied to you for months, they cheated on you and then dropped off the stuff you had in their apartment with a pair of the new girl’s panties wrapped around your toothbrush, as if you would have ever used it again anyway. You’re not necessarily out to murder them, but you wouldn’t save them at even a minor inconvenience to yourself. In fact, you might go out of your way to NOT save them. Your family and friends know better than to mention their name in your presence, because they fucked up HARD. You’ll never speak to them, you’ll never acknowledge them, they’re dead to you.

There’s your weekly window into my head! Feel free to vent if you’ve got anyone along the spectrum that’s killing you lately, and if anyone wants to develop a Levels of Anya’s Regard boardgame with the pits/forest/mountains, I’m totally interested.

-Anya

The Eternal Question

I’m going to share with you my eternal question, which bears no relation to the one posed by jaunty old Hamlet.  Some form of this question has kept me up many a night (before I discovered the wonders of Ambien), where it became a tool I utilized to torture my brain over the actions and intentions of both myself and others.  Of course, nothing is ever straightforward with me, so I’m going to provide you with a situation to frame my query.

"I just wondered why in Hamlet 1 everybody has to die."

You have a lot of friends.  I say friends, but really, you just know a lot of people that want to be friends with you, you probably don’t actually like many of them.  And really, most of them probably think that you’re more than kind of an asshole, which you are, but they’re too enthralled by your good looks and charm to not want to spend time with you.  Regardless, you’re surrounded by fucks.  You have to admit that even those on your list of people who can do no wrong are flawed in their own special ways, and just because you have come to accept these imperfections, you aren’t necessarily completely okay with them.

Let’s take one of the assclowns you actually like.  We’ll call her Grace.  You’ve known Grace for a long time and she’s fairly decent.  You can trust her to make your significant other feel welcome, without trying to fuck them.  You can talk to her about current events and movie musicals of the 1960s.  And when you go out, she doesn’t dress like too big of a slut and she usually doesn’t puke.  What more could you ask for?

"It's like they're just people I work with and our job is being popular and shit."

However, as it was once eloquently stated, “Nobody’s perfect.”  Grace has a rather unfortunate character flaw, being that she is a bit of flake.  And by “bit of a flake,” I mean that she is one of the most unreliable people that you know.  She’s habitually late for work, which doesn’t really affect you, but her tardiness extends to all of her other appointments, including getting together with you.  There’s fashionably late and then there’s Grace.  You spent two hours waiting for her to show up to her own birthday last year, after you had already told everyone to get there half an hour later than you told Grace.  Everybody was just glad that she showed up period though, because she’s also extremely guilty of last-minute cancellations and making plans to make actual plans, but then never calling you to cement those plans, which she probably would have ended up cancelling anyway.

The thing is, Grace is so damn earnest that you have an usually difficult time at staying upset with her for very long.  So when she calls you up to tell you that she feels like you haven’t talked in forever and she really misses you and she LOVES your new Facebook profile picture and that you should never stop wearing navy and that the two of you NEED to go out and buy navy things or any colored things at the Banana Republic and Gap sale this weekend and then you should totally have an Arrested Development marathon before the new season comes out on Netflix, you know that she genuinely means all of the things that she says.

Navy bluth, amirite?

And when she ends the conversation saying that she just needs to check when she’s working before you settle on a day for your shopping/Tv binge and that she’ll text you tomorrow or maybe Wednesday if she can’t get to the store until then because she has tomorrow off but she’s supposed to hang out with her sister who’s such a complete pain because she just broke up with her boyfriend and is just miserable to be around but is still her sister and everything and that regardless she’ll definitely be texting you tomorrow or Wednesday, you know that she fully intends to do it, you’re just not surprised when you don’t hear anything from her until the next week.

The other thing about Grace is that she flutters around seemingly unaware of her flakiness.  From Grace’s perspective, all of these people, events, and things are constantly being sprung upon her and she can’t help but feel like she’s trapped in this hurricane of situations that are all out of her control and that she’s always one step behind, desperately trying, but failing, to get everything together. She is genuinely surprised every time she overextends herself and leaves you hanging.

At least she left you hanging at a restaurant with a decent wine selection.

Of course, you know Grace.  You know that she’s just involved with too many things and that she sets herself up to fail by creating all of these obligations for herself that she couldn’t possibly all meet and that she is just spread too thin among all of them.  And that her time management fucking sucks.  Because of how heartfelt everything Grace does is, you forgive her time and time again for this flaw.  And sometimes it really hurts because it makes you feel like you’re not important to Grace, who’s supposed to be one of your few really good friends.  You’ve known each other for a long time, and she’s been there for you during some pretty dark times.  That, along with all of the things that you have in common should be more important than the fact that she doesn’t always follow through, right?

You give Grace slack because of her ignorance of her weakness.  You tell yourself that she doesn’t know any better and that if the day ever comes where she is able to take an honest look at herself and accept that she has too much shit going on and needs to prioritize certain things and make commitments to the things that matter and learn to say no to her desires and those of others, that she will actually do it.  To say that Grace is ignorant of this means that you’re also saying that, however intelligent she may be, she has a somewhat crippling lack of self-awareness, which means that she might be equally blind to her greatest strengths and her biggest desires.

Get it together, girl!

You also excuse Grace’s behavior because you yourself have a pretty major character flaw.  Let’s say that you always date the wrong kind of person.  Specifically, you end up dating people who you know are incapable of making you happy.  They have nothing in common with you, or at least nothing important in common with you.  They share none of your deepest dreams or aspirations and you would never dream of having them read your favorite book, because you know that they are incapable of taking anything away from it.  Unlike Grace, you’re completely aware of what you’re doing.  You know that you keep dating these people because they’re there, because it’s simple and easy and it temporarily helps you forget about how alone you feel, while simultaneously making you feel even more alienated by the lack of meaningful connections you have with other people.  Despite being aware of your self-sabotaging dating habits, you continue to them.  Self-awareness has changed nothing for you, other than kind of making you hate yourself.

So, what’s worse: To be oblivious of a major character flaw or to recognize it, yet do nothing to change it?  What good is knowledge when it fails to change any negative behavior and only gives your more heartache?  Is it indeed easier to forgive ignorance or in doing so, are we just infantilizing someone who is supposed to be an equal?  Which is more difficult to witness in others?  Which would you rather be stuck experiencing yourself?  Deep shit, I know.

-Paul

Siblings or Dating

Scenario: You are riding the bus downtown.  I know that you normally would never be caught dead on a public bus, surrounded by all of those stains and smells of unknown origins (not that discovering the source would make any aspect of them any better), but in this scene, you are.  It’s rather irrelevant why you’re trapped in this derelict vehicle, but that’s not going to stop me from theorizing.  Maybe you were trying to walk off that Almond Joy you splurged on at lunch and thought better of it halfway home, or perhaps you’re working on a revolutionary bus culture ethnography. Good luck EVER getting a job that will pay you to do that, amirite cultural anthropology students?

Anyway, you’re on this bus.  You’re seated on the right side, about halfway back.  You’re squished into the window, trying to avoid the invading thigh of your neighbor, who has been inching into your bubble since they first sat down.  I say they because you have no idea what gender your seatmate identifies with, and there is no way you are going to turn your head to discover any more details about this individual and risk the possibility of a conversation with this creeper. Literal creeper, creeping toward you. Not that this has ever happened to me.

The dirty, tinted windows offer a poor view of the already poor exterior sights, so you stare ahead.  You can’t help but notice the couple sitting in the row directly in front of you, who are engaged in an animated conversation.  They are obviously quite well acquainted with each other.  From where you’re sitting, they each appear to be thin and they share the same shade of hair color.  They sport mirroring smiles as they exchange a playful banter over the events of the previous evening.  As you crush your body even closer to the window, you find your face involuntarily scrunching as you ask yourself, “Are they related or dating?”

The answer should be so simple, right?

This is a favorite game of mine to play, (along with its more disturbing modification: parent/child or dating) but also what I am always secretly hoping that others are wondering about Anya and myself.  You see, our hair is quite close in color, we share the same eye color (the superior blue), we are both relatively thin, and each of us feature the average height for our respective sexes.  However, if you were taking deep, solid look at us or spent a lot of time with us, you would start to notice our physical differences.  While we both do have light eyes, Anya’s somehow remain bright and clear, while life has drained the once vibrant color from mine.  Anya has clear, ivory skin and I have some definite witch undertones.  And along with her delicate features, my mother once described Anya, saying, “she has a nice symmetrical face, it’s not like ours.” In fact, it’s quite possible that she has a portrait hanging somewhere in the upper reaches of her attic, where her own witchy undertones and the toll life has taken become readily apparent.

Just possible.

At a glance, you probably are more likely to see the similarities, so I do understand how people can become confused, just as I do with strangers in public places.  However, when I play this game, it’s done in a lighthearted way, purely for my own amusement.  I am just a passing spectator and the game is definitively ended by the couple when they perform some kind of act to solidify the nature of their relationship (for example: referencing their joint parents or kissing. To be fair, they could complicate it tremendously by doing both).  If in our brief time together, I cannot determine what they are to each other, then I move on with my own life and go about my day.  I do not EVER ask the couple.  After all, it’s just a game.  I don’t really care about the answer, nor do I think that those are the only two possible explanations of the couple’s relationship.  To confront these people, that I don’t know very well or I would have no reason to ask, would be completely bizarre and inappropriate and nobody would ever be so awkwardly forward as to do so, right?

"I know it's none of my business, but..."

Apparently I’m the only one who feels this way.  Rewind to senior year of high school.  Before school, Anya and I would sit along a wall with a few of our friends (and with more than a few people who thought they were our friends).  I was usually in a desperate frenzy to finish the homework I hadn’t done the night before and Anya was usually ranting about one or another of the many incompetent teachers/administrators/secretaries/counselors/security guards our school had provided us with.  Because of the position of our wall, the English and foreign language teachers would pass us on their way from the staff parking lot to their classrooms.  

One morning, our foreign foreign language student teacher (not a typo, she herself was a foreigner and was also on the wrong side of 35) stopped to chat with us.  It started off as a typical awkward teacher/student-out-of-classroom conversation, but then shit got weird.  Suddenly, she interrupted the exchange with, “Okay, so you guys boyfriend/girlfriend, yes?”  This wasn’t something we were used to being asked by a teacher, but the question itself wasn’t too crazy.  We both smiled and shook our heads to signal that we were not.  “Okay,” she began, the wheels visibly turning in her head, “then you are brother and sister?”  

With a momentary sideways glance at one another, we silently exchanged our internal reactions of, “Did she just..?  WHAT THE FUCK!?  Is this real life?”  We then choked out a forced laugh and ensured her that we were neither dating, nor siblings, just good friends.  She looked at us suspiciously, like we were lying about one of them, before finishing the original conversation and heading to her classroom.

We're telling the truth!

After doing our best to unpack the incident, we tried to chalk it up to her being a kooky, older foreign lady.  Fast forward to our present job.  Our office is mostly made up of older people, with the majority of our co-workers having been there for more than twenty years.  Anya and I spend our breaks and lunches together, so people were speculating about our relationship from the first week I worked here.  Because I have nothing better to do, I encouraged them, by name-dropping Anya to the right set of ears or with the use of a well-placed hand on her back.  I would then giggle about how clueless everyone is with Anya and my boss, Spent Supervisor, because I am a child.  After working here for months, one co-worker came up to my desk at the end of the day, just after the start of the new year, and asked, “Okay, I’m just going to be nosy here.  You two are together, right?”  There was no question of who she was referring to, so I pulled out my usual smile and denial.  She looked at me in disbelief and quickly came to the conclusion that we “MUST be brother and sister.”  Not really posed as a question.  I attempted to correct her and again explain our platonic life bond, but she was too confused to absorb any additional information.

There’s probably something to glean here about putting people into boxes and making assumptions and the possibly unhealthy relationship between Anya and me, but I’m already over our agreed-upon word count limit, so feel free to take away whatever you wish.  I shall continue half-assedly playing the game with strangers and I will keep hoping that Anya and I are asked, “Siblings or Dating?” many times in the decades to come.

-Paul