11:29 p.m. - 2007-01-25
Being Liked and Other Lame-Ass Motivations
As I mentioned, a big feature last semester, not to mention much of my time at Berkeley, was an unfortunate crush. Although I do not regret the feelings per se, I look back at a lot of the things I did and cringe, by which I mean I think of things I did yesterday and cringe. For reasons beyond my comprehension, my voicemail only occassionally responds to my password. Last night I managed to access it for the first time in months, and as I went through emptying the mailbox I came across a very old message from the unfortunate crush. I kept it. This makes me pathetic. I think, or at least I hope, that this is still within the acceptable parameters of pathetic. It may be pathetic, but there's nothing wrong with it. It's a private little pathetic that I can chuckle at, for the most part. I like to think that most of the pathetic things I did regarding the crush were like that. I can defend the stupid, dumb, shmoopy, pathetic moments, at least to myself, and make peace with them, which is important to me. I am someone who does not like the idea of emotion being wasted. Seeing the beauty in someone is not something to be ashamed of, or mourned.
However, there is one moment in my list of cringeworthy actions and omissions that always gets me, one that I think of with shame, with anger at myself. It was something that I was ashamed of right after I did it. It's something that maybe a lot of people reading this aren't going to get, although that statement implies that a lot of people read this, which simply isn't true. It is nevertheless something that I think of in anger, a mistake that I am angry at myself for, in a way, repeating this evening.
Before I begin, however, I will do what every human being in such a situation would do: I will lay at least part of the blame on someone else, namely my crush object himself. We'd been hanging out a while, and my feelings of "Wow, I really want this guy to be my friend" were beginning to change into, "Shit, I want to rip his clothes off; this is not going to end well, is it?" We were in my car, talking about boys, likeyedo, and he admitted to me that he was a sucker for flattery. He said, and I'm almost quoting here, that he loved being pursued, that any guy could get him into bed provided they compliment him enough. This was the gist of his statement, including the get-him-into-bed part.
There were two thoughts that I had upon hearing this. I am not sure which one came into my head first. I think it was the thought that I am prouder of, but that might be my memory playing tricks on me. So let's say one thought, the one I am less proud of, was "Was that a hint?" I am less proud of that line because it was part of the general pattern of "Let me try to guess what he's thinking before I consider my own needs and desires," which is an unhealthy pattern that got worse over the next, oh, couple of years. The other thought was, "That's kinda pathetic. Actually, that's really lame."
Sorry, babe, if you ever read this, but I actually do think that's kinda lame. I still totally want to make out with you, though.
Let me make something clear: I never, ever want it said that I think that hopping into bed with someone for very little reason is a bad thing. I have done it many a time myself. It's just that, well, when I fuck a guy it's because I think he's hot, or I'm bored, not because I want him to make me feel beautiful. In fact, and I can't believe I am confessing this, there is little that turns me off more than a guy who can't shut up about how beautiful or hot I am when we're fucking. I know I should be grateful. I know I should take the compliment gracefully. I know that low self-esteem probably has something to do with why I don't like it. But when it happens, I have to bite my lips together to keep from saying, "Shhhh! There's no talking in sex!"
I will say, though, that one time I said to a guy, during sex, that I was glad I'd met him earlier that afternoon. He said, "Me too. You're fun!" And THAT, gentle readers, is what I call a turn on.
So, for a long time, I refrained from serving up a compliment to the crush object. I think I had a romantic notion in my head that I would be different, different from all the other guys, and that this difference would somehow make me special. Lame, I know, but it's better than what I'm about to relate. Then there came this afternoon when he gave me a compliment, quite a big one, which definitely had me, inside my brain, banging my head against the wall because it was such a perfect thing to say that my heart totally melted and I was a gonner (aggravatingly near-perfect moments happened A LOT with this dude, but that's a whole other entry). The conversation continued, and he expressed anxiety over someday being on the job market with The Mutant.
When I call this person The Mutant, I am not being perjorative. I call this person The Mutant because they have superhuman graduate student abilities: able to leap tall dissertations in a single bound, that sort of thing. The Mutant is one of the most obviously intelligent people I've ever met, in addition to being really cool, generous, and fun to be around, when The Mutant isn't moving at the speed of sound, winning teaching awards and reading the entirety of the English literary canon in a single afternoon. I would be terrified of being in competition with The Mutant for a job. I wouldn't get it. Moreover, the crush object wouldn't get it, even though he is at least as smart as I am and much more dedicated as a student. No one can beat The Mutant. It would be like trying to arm wrestle Superman. Even if you won, which you couldn't, you'd have defeated Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Yet I told the crush object that he could take down The Mutant were they competing for the same job. And as soon as I said this, I felt like an asshole and wanted to throw up.
I'm sure most people would read that and say, "That's it? That's the thing you are most ashamed of about this? You gave some dude a compliment?" I know it seems out of proportion, but here's the deal: were I saying what I really felt, I would have said, "Yeah, I wouldn't want to go up against The Mutant, but hey, The Mutant can only accept one job, or at most six. You're smart, and you'll get your own job." It would have been honest and expressed sympathy. Instead, I gave a compliment which I didn't believe, in order for my crush object to like me. I was just like every other guy, worse because I knew going in the potential effect. I had given him genuine compliments before, and I would again, but that one was fake, and I still growl at myself inside. Grrrrr.
I did something along those lines again tonight, for stupid reasons. I was at a meeting of local artists who were all getting together because Austin had received a grant from the NEA and was trying to figure out how to divide the money. This was a very preliminary meeting, and it annoyed me. The guy leading it was something of a busybody, the kind of person who wastes your time by taking a few minutes to tell you how behind schedule you are. The discussion was organized in such a way that we wound up talking about abstracts rather than concretes; we talked about how Austin is full of wonderful people rather than talking about how to build affordable, accessible art spaces. When various groups gathered to give their reports, there was a lot of praising of the abstracts, though.
I brought up one point that I felt was legit, which was that there was a weird tension (although I didn't call it a tension) between the desire to make art free to the public and the desire to earn a sustainable living making art. What I wanted to say and didn't was that it was troubling that everyone had to go to the general and abstract (the people, the environment, etc) to name assets to the Austin arts community, and no specific institutions were named. Instead, I said something that I cannot even repeat. Seriously, it makes me sick to my stomach. It was so sycophantic and lame and was totally designed to get people to like me. I still feel nauseated. I had to work out this evening to get the tension out.
Okay (this is embarrasing): I said there was a lot of love on the board, and that this was important. I was trying to say that this would be a selling point when confronting city councils, etc, that it showed an investment in Austin itself that would justify the awarding of funds, but by the time I got there I was so ashamed that I had gone congratulatory instead of critical that it was all I could do not to jam a pencil in my eye.
Ugh. I really hate myself sometimes. To make matters worse, the people who I talked to afterwards felt the same way I felt, that the meeting was heavy on the bullshit. Maybe, if I'd said what I wanted to say, real things might have gotten done. But I chickened out, because I wanted to be liked.
"Like." The word is, funnily enough, my most common phatic tool, the word I use in pauses before other words come out. I have been called on my overuse of it before, once by a prof, much to my chagrin. It's yet another reason for me to hate the word. One of my other very frequent uses of the word is to describe my high school experience. I typically tell people, when they ask about my experience, that I wasn't popular, but I was well-liked, meaning that I didn't hang out with the in-crowd but people didn't give me trouble and tended to be happy to see me. I was never really happy in high school, though. I only really knew what happy was when I left. The word came back to me in Berkeley. I felt well-liked in Berkeley. Being well-liked, however, is very different from being loved, and I can say that among my friends from Penn and from Austin, I feel loved.
If this sounds like a condemnation of my friends at Berkeley, or high school for that matter, it isn't, and I will tell you why right now. My mentor at Penn, Vicki Mahaffey, was the first to force me to confront what should be an obvious facet of the word "like," that it ties feelings of fondness with feelings of similarity. There is not a big linguistic leap between "I like you" and "I am like you." The word is, on some level, incompatable with difference, with, haha, incompatibility. So when I say I felt well-liked, I mean that I think I was cutting out parts of myself to be who I thought other people would want me to be. Liking can mean being so scared that someone else might leave that you turn into Cinderella's stepsister, cutting off toes to fit into a glass slipper. Which is almost as lame, but not quite, as sleeping with someone just because they keep telling you that you're pretty.
This is a tough habit to break. It is suprisingly easy to be liked. Just think the words "I want to be liked" and "I want to be loved" to yourself. One sounds reasonable, the other egomaniacal, at least to me, even though anyone in their right mind wants to be loved, because if being liked implies, at least to me, an incomplete picture, then being loved implies more of a whole one, seeing what is unlikable (whether that means unsavory or merely incompatible), and still getting the warmth inside when you're near someone. That's a good thing. We all want that, but being liked is an easy trap to fall into. I fell into it again tonight, even though I had promised myself I wouldn't do such things anymore. So I am making myself a little mantra to say to myself in such situations: the more I try to be liked, the less I like myself. That has nothing to do with being gracious, considerate, or generous, all things that I try my best to be every day. It has everything to do with saying something nice when it takes saying something nasty for good things to get done, or saying something nice just to get someone in bed. The more I try to be liked, the less I like myself. I more than like it. I love it.
Incidentally, if you ever read this--and you know who you are--just because you can't compete with The Mutant doesn't mean you aren't hugely intelligent, because you are. I wouldn't have wanted you if you weren't. You are also unbearably sexy, need serious work on certain social skills involving flirtation, a wonderful teacher, have stupid hair and no lips and the potential for greatness, really hurt me when you dropped a ball I really needed you to pick up, say really lame shit on occassion, and you are someone who, just sometimes, not all the time, I miss horribly and wish I could hold. That might, and it might not, be love. But it certainly isn't liking.
