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Once upon a whenever, I took my Boy Friend to see “Cats: The Musical.”
“Do you have any idea what the Hell they are singing about?” He asked during intermission.
“Not a clue.”
“Thank fuck. I thought it was just me.”
“A pussy cat sings about memories soon, I think,” I informed him.
“I’ve heard that before…”
I don’t remember too much more about the night. We had consumed bourbon for the entire drive to the venue, see. We were either drunk or Andrew Llyod Webber had tapped into a realm that we could not understand. Or both.
I only remember the event because I found the theatre tickets in an old purse. It triggered my memory and, I’m not going to lie, my first recollection was, “Wasn’t this the night I spilt my drink down my shirt as I walked in?”

My mother forced me to pack up my bedroom, so that she can turn it into a guest room, gym, shrine to my brother or all of the above. In laymen’s terms, I was instructed to ensure that there was no evidence left to insinuate that I ever resided in her house.
“What you don’t take with you, I am burning,” she informed me.
“I’ve heard that before…”
Suddenly, years of my life had to fit into a suitcase and anything inconsequential had to be thrown out. An easy task, one would think, considering everything in my life could be deemed inconsequential at the best of times. However, being somewhat Type A, meticulous and a hoarder, I had a lot of shit and decided to individually sort through every item of paraphernalia I had ever owned. My mind boggle’s at how I found the time to complete three university degrees, drink a small Asian nation’s quota for alcohol consumption and not only buy sock puppets but give them name tags and store them somewhere safe.

Because I am living by the increasingly proven theory that scotch is good for you, I ignore all of the supposed repercussions of excessive alcohol consumption damaging vital organs and, therefore, I have never considered myself to have irreversible damage like forgetfulness. Many people would disagree with that, of course. But to them I say, “No. I didn’t forget. I just didn’t care.” Then I pour them a scotch. Craziness ensues.
Filling through my possessions, useless crap I once upon a whenever thought that I desperately needed, I found triggers to memories throughout my life, some of which left bullet holes of regret, remorse or muscle pain from laughter.
I once owned a Chia Pet. It was dead, nine times over. But, I mean, you just can’t make that shit up.

I found, underneath piles of university documents, bills that someone else must have paid and discarded underwear, multiple photographs of ex-boyfriends. Apparently, somewhere along the line, I had not only taken pictures but given them a reason and stored them somewhere safe.
“Oh, I remember him!” I said while starring at an image of an oft-forgotten ex, who, ironically, may win the title for my longest relationship. He was stunningly beautiful and I spent the remainder of the day trying to work out why I broke up with him. Then I found pictures of the next ex.
“Oh. That’s right…”
The visuals put thoughts in my mind, which is all kinds of unusual, because I am not a porn type of person. I reminisced about all of the experiences and lessons I had learned between them and now. There had been a lot of heart ache, a lot of people who never had the invitation to be in a picture, and, now, I was in a position where I had to fit all of that baggage into one suitcase to go back to Los Angeles.

It can be hard trying to work out how to turn everything you have ever experienced into a positive one. Sometimes, we need triggers to be reminded that a lesson was actually learned. Because I am living by the increasingly proven theory that scotch is good for you, I blame all of my bad choices on its power. But, the truth is, everything that is in my room, or everything that has happened in it, made me who I am. The sock puppets, the photographs of the ex boyfriends, the stuff that you just can’t make up. But, maybe because it is actually all so inconsequential, everything fit into one suitcase.
For me to take back to my house in LA, where I will make more mistake, learn more lessons and, no doubt, get more baggage.

I wonder whether we can ever evolve past the bitterness we feel towards The Next Girlfriend[/Boyfriend]? I have. And while I don’t really want to toot my own horn as some sort of Darwinist aberration of nature, I so totally will.
Once Upon A Two Degrees Ago, I felt nothing but resentment for the girl who stole the heart of the boy I was in love with. Had I been nice with my monikers, I would have referred to her as a regular pickpocket. Instead, I believe, I called her a “Crack Whore”, or something equally as eloquent, and then dedicated [insert an embarrassing number here] hours to devising a personality for Her based on momentary meetings, pictorial evidence and a vivid imagination.
You better believe that I had a candidate for The Universe’s Most Wanted conjured up in my head, despite the fact that Her only crime was sleeping with the person who no longer wanted to sleep with me.
Bitch.

When I was seventeen years old my parents shipped me off to London, like I was a postcard, to live with an aunt I had only momentarily met. She was three billion years old, or similar, had basically been around since the dawn of time, and had remained single for the entirety of her life. I have a theory as to why. Part of me champions her independence. The rest of me completely understands why no man would ever choose to step within a five mile radius of her.
“It is a horrible day when you realize that not everyone likes you,” she told me one night over dinner.
“Recreational hazard?”
She explained, in the curse and arrogant way she conveyed everything from ‘We Need Milk’ to complex philosophical concepts, that one of life’s challenges was to accept that not everyone is a fan of Us.
“Some people will love everything you do, some people will hate everything you do. The rest, in the middle, have absolutely no impact on you.”
I was a teenager and, so therefore, believed that everyone in the world applauded anything I did. I was perfect, I was always right, I was young. Go Me!
But the essence of what she said stayed with me, even as a scare tactic, to stop me from evolving into her.

The first time a girl verbalized her hatred towards me, at eighteen, I had to take a moment to process it. Which was difficult to do. I was sleeping with her ex-boyfriend at the time and, I’m not going to lie, didn’t have many hours left to do anything else.
“Why would she…It doesn’t make…Just because I’m…?”
I was perplexed over her behavior and vowed never to repeat it in my own life.
Then, of course, I had my heart broken and subsequently made Voodoo Dolls of the girl who happened to be able to do what I obviously couldn’t. It was Her fault, I reasoned, that I was sad. I mean, doesn’t it make sense that I would be with Him if She didn’t exist?
No. No. Not at all.

It was while plotting the demise of a girl I didn’t know that I started to think that, maybe, I should be a little bit rational about the whole process. Maybe, you know, that I was wrong. I went to the source of logic in my life, but when Jack Daniels didn’t make anything positive happen, I sauntered over to my dad.
“Did he make a promise to be with you forever?”
“No.”
“So what are you shocked about? He moved on. Get over it.”
Get Over It. The concept, literally, had not occurred to me before. I’m not going to lie, it was so much easier to blame the stupid bitch for ruining my life. But, by gosh, it was more rewarding to just evolve past the entire scenario.
I threw out the Voodoo Dolls, which possibly wasn’t the smartest decision I have ever made, considering, and created a new attitude for myself rather than creating a personality for someone who, probably, had just the same goals and fears as me.

After recovering from the epidemic hatred towards The New Girlfriend, I felt a lot happier. A lot freer, really. I had no animosity towards Her for many reasons. One of them being that I could anticipate what she was walking into. So, when I started to receive hate mail based on a connection to the male She hated, I took a step back and reassessed the scenario.
It is a horrible day when you realize that He is someone’s ex-boyfriend.
The image of perfection you have conjured up in your head can be squashed by evidence from a random girl who, simply, hates you for sleeping with someone who no longer wants to sleep with her.
The theory goes that guys don’t give a shit about any of this nonsense. They move on. They get over it. But girls, with all of our emotional brilliance, will lay blame on the person who has replaced us. It is, after all, easier than just accepting that He does not want us anymore.

Some people don’t like to acknowledge that we evolved from monkeys. And some people don’t like to acknowledge that people move on. The presence of animosity in either situation is completely and utterly useless because, why be angry about facts? The reality is that people change, some for the better and some for the worse, but, at the end of the day, it has nothing to do with You. They may not like you during the process but, I’m not going to lie, that isn’t the worse thing that can ever happen.

When personalities were being assigned, I think I had passed out before the “maturity” portion of the ceremony. I firmly believe that ‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button’ is a documentary or that F. Scott Fitzgerald anticipated my life.
“She will be born with a concept of right and wrong, she will take on responsibilities, but eventually, she will give it all up to blow bubbles and have cigarettes for breakfast…”
The older I get, the younger I become. Every time a new number is added onto the twenty-one years I insist I have been alive, my mind becomes fascinated by anything that should really only amuse the seriously young or the mentally retarded. I have actually argued, passionately, that I would prefer to have cigarettes for breakfast than, say, have a baby. At eighteen, people thought that was cute. At twenty-five, I am the only one still standing.

I can’t fathom what it will be like when I am thirty. But, then again, I prefer to believe that such an age doesn’t really exist. It is just a cruel joke told to us to scare us into getting a job or getting dressed.

When you’re a teenager and your friends start having babies, they are considered to be ignorant, stupid and wasting their life. When you’re in your mid twenties and your friends start having babies, you are considered to be ignorant, stupid and wasting your life if you are too hungover to wipe your own ass let alone anyone else’s. About two years ago, my friends started to get married, have some baby friends or, at least, get into those relationthingys. I mean, I think it was two years ago. I have been chasing my own tail the whole time so dates are a little scattered.
When I was a teenager, I was in a serious relationthingy until I was twenty-one years old. I cooked dinner (total lie. I ordered dinner from restaurants. But the point is in the essence). I did the dishes. I woke up when my alarm told me it was time to start the day. Everything I did was completely understandable to the outside world, it was all considered to be mature, right and responsible.
“That will probably be the longest, most sound relationship I ever have,” I have told Him, now a friend who has not only grown apart from me but grown up.
I am not sure what happened between then and now, but lets just say that I got more excited over my new beanbags than any expectant mother would get over a new baby friend.

I was about to start building a fort in my lounge room, so that I could drink scotch in a safe place, when I found out that my London Girl Friend has a joint bank account with her boyfriend, more people from my high school class are having babies and somewhere, people my age have jobs and so can’t actually build a fort at midday on a Friday.
Surrounded by pillows, I had to stop and think. Partly because I was hideously hungover so the sheer labor of the task was exhausting. But also, I had to consider,
“Am I making the right decisions in my life?”

As a society, we usually align ourselves with similar minded people. You don’t find too many right-wing republicans in West Hollywood, for example. My immediate social circle includes my LA Boy Friend, a twenty-eight year old who has the kind of life I want to have when I grow up. Lots of phone numbers, lots of sex and very few responsibilities. There is my twenty-four year old Boy Friend who builds forts with me and has the individual freedom to get on a plane and visit me in any country.
“People with jobs can’t do this,” he had alerted me.
“Job? Whats that? I don’t understand. Use it in a sentence.”
The hoards of other people who wake up on my beanbag, or in my bed, share my attitude that age is just an illusion and we discuss the concept of maturity while eating Happy Meals. Like how nature is a self-correcting system, it is a self-validating evolution of fun that would actually become extinct if any of us were to procreate.

It is right, responsible, even, to occasionally take a step back and view your life from an objective level. I firmly believe that other people exist only to challenge us and force us to consider if we are making the right choices for our own life.
If other people didn’t have babies, I wouldn’t know for sure that I would rather poke myself in the eye than have a miniature version of me.
If other people didn’t have traditional relationthingys, I wouldn’t be certain that I was not built for such an endeavor, thereby building a fort of noncommittal reasoning around me.
And if I didn’t live my life like Benjamin Button doing a cameo in ‘Groudhog Day’, other people wouldn’t know that they do want the baby friends and the relationthings and all of the other stuff that is aligned with traditional maturity. I can’t fathom what it would be like to not have the insight of other peoples decisions to help us define who we are and what we want. If I had known that at eighteen, life would have been even more fun between then and now.

My mothers friends tried to wake me up to the ticking of my biological clock but I hit the snooze button.
“Oh, you will have children eventually,” they insisted.
“Do you not think that I have, maybe, spent some time considering this? I didn’t just go, ‘Kids a stupid’ and have a drink.”
(Total lie. I did. But then I started considering the proposition in reverse.)
“Maybe when you are older?”
I lit a cigarette, called it breakfast, and basked in how great it is to feel twenty-one and getting younger.

If my dog could talk, I would probably kill myself. The four pound ball of lovable fluff knows almost everything there is to know about me. And as he is a poodle, I have to assume that he would be a gossip if his breed were to morph with human qualities to produce an entirely new stereotype. I have told him everything that I am thinking, anything that I am feeling and, subsequently, fear that his first words would be,
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”
Toby, the puppy, has known what I have thought about boyfriends, or wanted, for months before they were even really aware of my existence. He is the most knowledgeable dog in all the land. It is his inability to communicate that keeps it all a secret.

Humans can be categorized as, essentially, idiots. Morons, really. No matter who you are, someone, on this planet, will that that you are an idiot.
“I met this guy tonight. He was a total retard,” someone may have once said. “His name was Albert…Albert…Fuck, what was his last name? Eisteen? Estein? Something like that.”
Communication has a lot to do with this. As a species, humans have a fairly good way of working things out in their heads, mentally perfecting an idea or rationalizing a feeling. But it is fear, and nothing more, that prohibits them from articulating the discovery to anyone else. We are too scared to honestly say the words that we thought up in the first place.
Language was invented for a reason. But it seems like We haven’t worked out what said (pun intended) reason actually is. Which, considering that words were invented by humans, is an oxymoron. Once upon a Neanderthal, we needed them to get some trade, a little bit of slavery on the side and to tell someone to put the fire out after they had discovered it, etc, etc. Now days, we need it to text message. Same, same but different, really.
Like everything else, language obviously evolved and so now we have words like “fuck” and “cunt bucket” that so eloquently describe any complex emotion we are feeling. And then we throw in an Emoticon for good measure. Kudos us.

“Say What You Mean And Mean What You Say,” is so easy to just say.
“I fucking hate you,” or “I love you,” is, obviously, effortless to verbalize. If the recipient is a blank brick wall or a mute dog. But if the listener just so happens to be one of those living, breathing, thinking specimens, you know, people, saying words has a double meaning. Because the person is going to consider them, make a judgement on them and, possibly, respond to them. The wall and the dog just accept. The avid listener computes and forms an opinion about you. Which is almost an oxymoron. But certainly is terrifying.

My LA Boy Friend is in a unique position to be smart enough to act dumb. He knows, exactly, what a girl wants to say to him, but unless she says it directly, he will not give her the benefit of having his behavior act as assumption.
“You know what I mean,” girls will say to him, thinking that such a phrase is a translatable analogy for, “Be my boyfriend.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he responds.
Of course, he has this conversation on an almost daily basis. The jury is still out as to whether it is caused by his popularity or gender assigned ignorance.
His point, a valid one, is that if someone doesn’t have the bravery to say exactly what they mean, thereby taking a risk, why should he provide an answer to the subtext?
“If I want to be your boyfriend, you will know about it,” he says. “I am not being quiet because of fear. I am silent because I wouldn’t mean what you want me to say.”

We feel like an idiot when we don’t get what we want. What is stupid, however, is that we prefer to believe in mind-reading before utilizing the language that actually does work. Relationships fail, ostensibly, for one of two reasons: mis-communication or failure to communicate at all.
We think they know when we fucking hate them, we think they know when we love them and we are led to believe that a simple glance will translate to, “Be my boyfriend.”
It would be horrible to live in a world where subtext didn’t exist. But it is worse living in a reality where people don’t just get over themselves and say what they mean.

I was talking to my dog, trying to explain to him the latest developments of my life, and he looked at me with understanding that had not come from anywhere else.
He was either saying, “I get it,” or, “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”
I wasn’t too sure. Either way, I am sure that he knew I was acting like a stereotype. I wished so much that he could speak so that I could get a response. But then I wondered, why not just say what I was saying to the dog to the person it actually concerned?
To not would make me a moron. Which would be, incidentally, an oxymoron.

I have often wished that I was a wallflower. A quiet little image who hangs in the corner during a gathering like an obedient and observational painting. A Monet, if you will. Instead, I’m like something Picasso painted, looked at it and went, “Fuck, even I think that is too much.”
I will never be the person who overcomes shyness with quietness, who says “No” to a party or who knows exactly when to stop. I am an observer, sure. But I seem to be able to make a lot of noise while I watch, providing a soundtrack or static to every scene I am not even in. Kind of like how I can just walk into a perfectly clean room and it suddenly becomes messy. Shit just falls off the walls when I am around. Chaos ensues.

I have always maintained that no person has the right to tell another person who they can or cannot speak to. This absolutism I am known for has bitten me in the ass on various occasions, most notably during every relationship I have ever been in.
Although, to be fair, it wasn’t ‘talking’ to another person I had to worry about. It was fucking other people that eventually became the problem.
Thus, the unfortunate situations I have found myself in, where I loudly wail, “Again? Really? How much sex do you honestly need?”, is really the repercussion of my stance on personal freedom. Cheating is a small price some occasionally have to pay for liberty. I think William Wallace alluded to that in one of his speeches.

If someone was to take my land, they would be, kind of, actually, taking away my freedom. See, my LA apartment is the first house I have ever had in my life where I can make the rules because it is mine.
“Anything goes,” I told every guest who stumbled through my door during the initial days of residency. “Shoot up in the corner for all I care. Just don’t burn the manuscript and we’re all good.”
“Oh. Sorry, I spilled bourbon on your rug. I’ll clean it up.”
“No, no, no. It adds character!”
This liberalism I am known for has bitten me in the ass on a particular occasion, because my building manager is the Caesar to my Spartacus. And every time I have received a noise complaint, I have wondered what the ancient slave would have said in response. Would he have argued his way out of the situation, accepted it or just reiterated his name over and over again?
The noise complaints bothered me from day one, as the most liberal little hovel in West Hollywood may be an area for debauchery and more sex than one honestly needs, but it is also the barriers of a quiet little Shire. The wallflower in my life of organized and observational chaos. So being told not to speak at all didn’t make sense. Furthermore, it was unfair.
But what really upset me was, for the first time in my life, someone was telling me who I could and could not speak to. And unless I wanted to move (I don’t), I had no choice but to obey. I felt like those people in a really demanding, intrusive relationship who can’t breakup because of kids or a financial stake in the cat. Or similar.

As I have watched the majority of people I know navigate their way through relationships with conditions and clauses, like they lease their heart out to the most attractive tenant. I have always awaited for the evictions with eagerness because I like to see someone rise above another person and say, “No. Sorry. Not cool. You can’t control me.”
It just so happened that my landlord telling me to Shut The Fuck Up correlated to a time when other people in my life should have been saying it to other people in their life. A cul-de-sac of oppression, really.

I was raised with the philosophy of, “You can’t control other peoples actions. But you can control your own reaction.” This may be why I have high-fived some cheating ex-boyfriends.
When I was told to not speak after ten o’clock at night within the walls of my own house, the hours where I am known for being the most vocal, I didn’t yell or scream in response. I wanted to. But it would have made my point someone redundant. Instead, I thought about what my landlord was saying, and started to really consider the concept of being considerate towards other people. And then wondered why other people aren’t forced to apply the same philosophy in their every day lives and relationships.

If a boyfriend ever told me what I could and could not do, I would laugh at him. If an ex-boyfriend did the same thing, I would laugh even louder. Before ten o’clock at night, obviously. I would hope that they would have the same reaction in the event that I had the audacity to limit their liberty as an individual. I would never accept someone I am sleeping with, or in love with, telling me what to do. So, I had to ask, why will I accept a landlord?
Sometimes we have to weigh up what compromise can gain us. Sometimes, if you bend your behavior or adhere to a rule that you don’t agree with, you actually get more freedom. Like land. Or, in the case of West Hollywood, a small studio apartment where cockroaches are determined to become roommates. In relationships, however, giving up freedom for love still sounds ridiculous, an oxymoron by definition. If you really love someone, you should loudly declare it otherwise allow them to quietly go about living their life. Any grey area of supposed control is, really, just going to allow chaos to ensue.

I conceded to my landlord that I would be quiet, a wallflower, on the condition that the cockroaches were evicted. Other people in my life, however, did not exercise their power as people and tried to work within the barriers of irrationality where people feel that they have a right to control another person, where opinion matters, where no one realizes that Shutting The Fuck Up is a deafening silence with dignity.

I am not what one would call a “girly girl”. I don’t do my hair and didn’t even own a hairbrush until eight months ago. I roll my eyes when I hear talks about feelings and pump my fist when someone suggests a game of beer pong. And, to me at least, skirts are, really, about convenience more than style. I have been called the son my dad didn’t completely envision and the daughter who doesn’t, exactly, exist.
“Why can’t you just pretend to be a girl?” my mother has asked.
“I prefer to think of myself as an overgrown child, genderless, if you will.”
I have girlie aspects, sure. I’ll gloss the shit out of my lips. I’ll swoon over an email full of Jared Leto pictures. And, occasionally, I will have a glass of champagne. If the scotch has run out.

My mother has bribed me, on numerous occasions, to be her daughter. She wanted someone to have cups of tea with, while discussing Bold & The Beautiful, before an early-afternoon shopping spree. I really, truly, do have sympathy towards her for ending up with me. Through trail and error, we have found that blackmail is the only way to enhance my girly side like mascara does to eyelashes.
“Let’s get manicures and pedicures this weekend,” she suggested while doing one of those girly little dances that Michael Flately obviously copied and made into a world wide phenomena.
“I would rather poke a fork into my eye.”
“Pleeeeeeeassssssse?” She begged.
“I…I…Just….Just…Can’t do it. I am sorry.”
It isn’t the slave labor or the illegal immigrants that bother me. Hell, I hope to be one one day. They are cool. It is the concept of sitting still. For hours. While someone touches my hands and feet. I can’t. And have never been able to see the enjoyment in such an endeavor. Call me crazy, but touching my body parts has always been, well, foreplay. The neurological pathway of instinct was cemented years ago. It is something that I am obligated not to sit still for. So my brain just explodes when a little Korean woman is at the end of my leg, making everything feel quite good, if it wasn’t for the fluorescent lighting and Mariah Carey DVD serenading me.
“What if I promised you a bottle of Jack Daniels in return for coming to the salon with me?”
“Ohh, woman. You know how to hit me where it hurts.”
“And you can drink a little bit of it while we are there.”
“SOLD!” To the lady in the pink pajamas with rollers in her hair.

Most of my female friends are, what I like to call, masculine. They are strong, independent, opinionated, drunk and louder versions of me. Although some of them do have boobs. So they have me beat there. We have conversations about hook ups, we have competitions about hook ups and we rarely get hung up on anything that could be even remotely considered girly. There is no bullshit, no superficiality, yet, occasionally, we will have a cry to each other. If the scotch has run out.
For three hundred and sixty three days of the year, this never bothers me. My Nanna told me years ago, “Never complain about living in a man’s world. Just be the best of both worlds.” I took it to heart and wear my heels with boys shorts proudly. But on the annual morn that I have to buy bras, because, apparently, society insists that I do with no regard for the word “Concave”, I resent only being born with the desire to see penises. Boys will never understand what it is like having to buy something to wear under your clothes. Sure, they have underwear. But has anyone, really, ever heard a girly girl say, “You can see that guys boxer shorts,” and then get turned on? No. I rest my case.

Bras are not made for girls who don’t have boobs. Which, I have to admit, makes perfect sense. It isn’t Victoria’s secret that we don’t need them. But it is well known that we are expected to wear them. Any time I have even bothered to try and find something to wear on my…pecs[?]…I have wanted to just get drunk and go wherever the day takes me.
“Can you, please, at least pretend to be a lady?” my mother begs.
“Well, lets see.”

One of my favorite hobbies, besides drinking, smoking and sex, is to watch people try and not laugh. When something funny, or at least ironic, is happening but it would be inappropriate to laugh at the situation. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, just come bra shopping with me in about three hundred and sixty days.
“Can I help you with anything?” the sales lady asked, interrupting me from my Blackberry poker game.
“I need bras.”
She looked at me. And then bit her lip, looked away and, I’m sure, pictured a dead relative or something to prohibit laughter from ruining her sale.
“OK….” she sounded as reluctant as I had been about the mani/pedi’s. I’m not going to lie, I wanted to offer her some bourbon for her troubles.
We walked through aisle after aisle of laughable options. Despite the fact that every garment was so colorful, frilly and girly, I wouldn’t wear it even if it did fit, I couldn’t wear them as the only appendage of mine that was ever going to fit was my head.

“How is it going?” my mother called because she was ostracized from the occasion.
“I think I have become dinner table conversation for the sales woman.”
The only person in the room working on commission was running around, desperate to find something that would only ever be decretive anyway, and I returned to my Blackberry to Google bars I could wallow in come afternoon.
“Excuse me,” she interrupted again. “Have you tried the children’s department?”
If I was a girly girl, I would have cried.

The Interweb is full of misleading information. Take porn, for example. 
“Real girls don’t do that,” I have told my Boy Friends. 
“They will eventually.” 
“Sure. If persuasion by saturation actually works.” 
The real world is no different, really. My Nanna, if she wanted knowledge in her youth, really had to search for it. Today, I couldn’t be fucked to even catch a bus to go to a library. I’ll believe anything if Wikipedia has enough citations to convince me that it is true. This makes information, somewhat, cheap, as it was once a virtue reserved for the people who truly wanted to know. Today, it can be something to do while the porn downloads. Few people are an exception to this rule, even if they don’t get off on watching a cum shot to the face. But, the point is, it is embarrassing to realize how many people refuse seek enlightenment despite the fact that it is, actually, so readily available. 

Anyone can believe anything. It is the easiest thing in the world to do. My Boy Friends genuinely believe that a long jump cum will eventually be the seasons new missionary position.Some girls are convinced that wedge sandals are flattering. And, more so, people have a tendency to believe that they are right. About anything. And everything. 
“I insist,” we say. 
“I am stubborn,” we insist. 
“I know for a fact,” we stubbornly insist. 
People who say the words, “I am wrong,” are, usually, heralded as epitomizing humility and harboring humanity in the most unique and purist of ways. I remember the day I realized that the such an attitude should not be in the minority. That it didn’t take bravery to admit ignorance. That the whole idea was stupid by definition. I was watching Beverly Hills 90210 on YouTube at the time and Dylan told Brenda that he had made a mistake, that his motives were wrong, that he should not have fucked Kelly over the summer. My epiphany probably should not have happened over an illegally downloaded soap opera, but I am not too proud to say that is how it happened. And, that is the point, if you are open to be proven wrong, you will welcome influences from every angle. 

I recently had an idea.
“Maybe I am wrong about everything I have ever thought?” 
I was starring at a blank wall at the time and was telling The Prettiest Boy In The World my theory on love and relationships. Suddenly, I stopped, slunk in to a ball and realized that while I was telling someone else to fuck other people, I had fucked myself. I felt like a walking, talking version of Wikipedia, a proposer of information but an expert on nothing. The idiot of an idiots world. My epiphany happened because the reason why I was insisting upon a hypothesis was so wrong, so wrong that it became though-provoking. Just like nineties television. I knew that I believed in the end result of what I was saying, that I did not believe in monogamy and that it had no baring on my definition of love, but the personal content of such a conclusion was a busload of bullshit. I was insisting on something because, as far as I was ignorantly concerned, infidelity was an inevitability in my relationships. My experiences had been saturated with such an idea and, so, I persuaded myself into thinking that they were right. 

People can be convinced of anything. Even if one adamantly doesn’t want children, for example, talking to the mother of the person you are in love with will shed a new light on the concept of procreation. It creates a good case for creating people, as some of them turn out to be pretty good. I don’t want baby friends. I have heard every argument to the contrary and remain unconvinced of their value in my life. I have enough unwanted phone calls as it is, I don’t need to add Child Services to the list. But, the point is, new perspectives are enlightening and, even more so, necessary. They force one to think about the choices they individually make, whether they are founded in reality or if they exist for superficial reasons. If a positive end result is supported by rational intentions or just insecurities. Being challenged on what you believe may be the best thing in the world. Even better than sex.
Babies don’t come from self-reflection, see. 

I immediately indulged in a lot of soul searching to find out if I had convinced myself of something based on misinformation. My life felt like a living, breathing Wikipedia and citations were necessary to validate the propositions I was putting forward. 
I couldn’t insist. 
I couldn’t be stubborn. 
I couldn’t know for a fact. 
But I could challenge myself, and ask myself questions that I truly did not want to know the answers to. It was embarrassing to realize how unenlightened I was about myself. I always thought that wisdom went hand in hand with age. That It would get easier as I got older. But as I know less and less as more years pass, I can’t help but remind myself that George W. Bush, for example, indulged in cocaine as a teen. He started wars as an adult. It doesn’t take an encyclopedia to understand the disparaging effect age has on those who refuse to seek self-reflection. 

Knowledge is, essentially, defined as truth, belief and justification. Knowing oneself, however, is harder than getting on a bus and going to a library. Being honest in your own mind is incredibly difficult, as we have an amazing ability to convince ourselves that the justifications are true. But, a lot of the time, they are not. We simply prefer to live in ignorance and they get angry, or upset, when something doesn’t go our way. Only then do we ask, “Why?” Knowledge answers that question, and can provide an epiphany long before the world wide web you have created for yourself crashes. It is just like when porn overloads your computer, really. We can feel smug if we have knowledge, but at the end of the day, being saturated with self-awareness makes us real.

There is a nursery rhyme that goes,
“There were three in the bed and the little one said ‘Roll over, Roll over’. So they all rolled over and one fell out.”
Obviously the writer of said jingle never had an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend. Because anyone who has an ex knows that the fall out has nothing to do with Them disappearing.
I was an ex-girlfriend once a upon a time, when my boyfriend(s) decided that they wanted to live happily ever after without me. Hindsight suggests that it was a good decision, possibly the best they ever made. I was a horrible person to be around, disproving my theory that the worst thing that could happen to anyone was to date me. The worst thing that could happen to anyone was to break up with me.
“I just don’t care,” The Johnny said to me one night after I had tried to make him by telling him about my horrible day/previous nights dream/dinner menu/or similar. “I am not your boyfriend anymore.”
Shit, I remember thinking. The bastard is right.
I spent subsequent months searching for someone to care about me because, apparently, I was even too much for Jack Daniels to handle. I almost fell out of bed when I realized that I was the only person applying for the job.
“It sounds so simple,” I remember thinking. “Why didn’t I think of this earlier?”

There is a song that goes,
“Breaking up is hard to do.”
Obviously the writer of said ballad never had to get over a person. Because it is fucking hard. The break-up is the easiest bit. A walk in a damn field compared to having to accept it.
“I don’t want to date you anymore.”
“Shit.”
The following days, weeks, months and, even, years are like a nightmare, one that no one else, essentially, cares about.
“Just get over it,” They say.
“Oh! Just get over it! I hadn’t thought about that…”
Like it is that simple.

I dwelled on my failed relationships for [insert an embarrassingly large amount of time here] because, during those years, it meant so much more to me than not having someone to have sex with every night. And that was a big fucking deal on its own. Luckily, I found a way to combat that rather quickly. But I didn’t know of any way to deal with the hurt, the rejection, the loneliness, the longing and the unrequited and [seemingly] unconditional love that I was feeling. I was, literally, alone. The people who loved me didn’t care because they thought I was better off on my own (obviously, they don’t know what it is I do on my own) and the person I loved was the one person who genuinely refused to listen. Which, obviously, made me angry. And, often, drunk.

There are, apparently, seven stages of grief. I have thought of making a counter argument to that, theorizing that there are, at least, four hundred and twenty seven million components. But then I realized that, no, there are just seven, and I was repeating the half a dozen infamous steps over and over again like I was on a StairMaster to Hell. Depression and anger are horrible to have to deal with, and almost worst to have to be around.
“I only need a month to deal with this,” I remember my Girl Friend saying on a night she was suddenly single and a day before I was leaving for Europe.
“Thank God I am going away,” I remember thinking.
But the worst thing that can happen to anyone is denial. The stage that starts off the whole process and won’t allow a single bit of acceptance through until all other five levels are accounted for. A roll call that can take days, weeks, months and, even, years.
“I can’t believe [he/she] did this to me,” may be the most frequently spoken phrase in the English language next to, “Hello”.
“I just can’t deal with this,” comes a close second.
“Life goes on,” is the one we call a cliche.

There is a phrase that goes,
“Life is what happens when you are making other plans.”
Obviously, the writer of such prose had tried to date me and got distracted. Because it isn’t until we look back in hindsight that we realize that life was happening while we were trying to make it happen in a way we envisioned. It isn’t going in the wrong direction. Not acknowledging it all is just us looking at it from the wrong angle. Trying to get my boyfriend back was once the diversion. Life was the lessons I refused to think about in the interim. It sounds corny, cliched even, to canonize reality in such a fashion. But then I remember the times, say, I have tried to have breakfast with The Prettiest Boy In The World [official name] because I am dying of a hangover - sorry, starvation - only to find the the cooking of the bacon was the most nourishing part. I don’t remember a single meal. But I will never forget the steps leading up to it.

When I started to realize that the boys in my life who had chosen to go down the yellow brick road without me were not horrible people who owed me anything, I stopped projecting grief onto them. I stopped making them feel guilty. I stopped accusing them. I stopped being angry with them. And, eventually, I accepted that they, also, had a life. There were just smarter and had acknowledged that fact long before I ever bothered to. I could apologize to my ex-boyfriends every day, for the rest of my life, and they would still never understand my remorse for being such a horrible person for an embarrassingly long time. But I don’t. Because I just changed my behavior and that involved no longer harassing the people I love(d). I became friends with them, I met new people and I realized that I know longer had to define my self worth by their interaction with me or their rejection of me. It sounds like such a simple thing, something that isn’t even worth thinking about, but if it was, the number one dinner table conversation starter would not be, “So, I have this crazy ex…”

I would love to be trapped in a room with the girl who invented monogamy. I am enlightened enough to assume that it wasn’t a man.
“Just the one? For what? Forever? You’re shitting me right? That is a horrible theory. Be gone, idiot. Next! What did you say? Speak up. The earth is flat? OK. Now, here is something plausible.”
Man invented marriage, sure. But he invented it to be a polygamous experience for Him. That little detail got lost in translation somewhere between The Book Of Genesis and Bridget Jones’ Diary. In fact, there may be a direct correlation in the price of hair salon appointments and the amount of men who have given in to the gravity of monogamy.
“If I have to pay for my wife to look hot, at that price, I am only going to be able to afford one. Fuck My Life.”
History books may recall it a little differently.
Before I ended up eating the monogamous woman out of sheer frustration of hearing her voice, I would ask her questions about Why she thought that happiness was only ever truly acquired if it was with one person, forever.
“You have hundreds of pairs of shoes,” I would explain to her. “But you search for just one person to make you happy? That is exhaustingly illogical.”
I own thousands of pairs of shoes.

My first real relationship lasted almost three years. I have frequently told Him that it may be the longest relationship of my life. The next one made it to one year. The next, six months. And then three months. Everything else has been a night here, a weekend there. A pattern definitely formed in direct correlation to my increasingly opened mind. By the time I figure out the Meaning Of Life, I predict that I will be having sex with people before I even meet them. Which, if nothing else, will save me from having to go through the horrible pre-coital conversations that are ever so time consuming.
“Do you want to have sex?”
“Sure.”
It is exhausting.
During the four relationships that actually resemble the traditional concept of what one is expected to be, I have retreated within myself and done everything in my power to end it. If nothing else, the decrease in longevity proves that I got better at being worse with age. Aside from the hours of eleven PM to seven AM, I always felt incredibly uncomfortable if I was in a relationship, like I was trapped in a room and was going to end up committing an unthinkable crime out of sheer frustration that I wasn’t doing what made sense to me. No one who dates me will ever have to buy me an engagement ring. But they may need bail money.

I decided to give single life a try for a while, to see if polygamy in its most literal form was what I had been searching for since my time as a zygote. Every waking hour became instantly happier, with freedom stretching out in front of me as far as my eye could see. And, then, even once It got to the horizon, it didn’t disappear like it was falling off the earth. It just became completely circular, the perfect shape.
And then I met The Prettiest Boy In The World [official name]. I was worried that my theory had come to bite me in the ass.
“Fuck My Life,” I thought. “Now I have to go and meet someone completely and utterly perfect.”
I told Him that if he ever wanted to hate me, dating me was the quickest way to make it happen. Then went about my life, moving around the world and through beds, trying to find the meaning of life. We talked, we emailed, we became the unofficial poster children for Skype, and then The Prettiest Boy In The World [official name] moved in to my world. Trapped in my one-room house with just me. We were either going to kill each other or kill my theory. So I had to put my thinking shoes on and find a third solution.

Scientists devise theories and test them on a daily basis. They don’t know if condoms actually work, for example, unless they actually test them. In theory they are a great idea (maybe?), but their success is undetectable until someone gets pounded and no baby friend arrives nine months later.
When The Prettiest Boy In The World arrived, I had to pound my theory and see if, after two years of devising My Perfect Concept of a fauxlationship actually worked in reality. At that point, the earth was still flat. I needed to orbit it to find out if the world, really is, round.

Few people change the rules of relationships. Every single one is different, of course, within the context of the conventional. But the actual rules that make a relationship identifiable to the outside world are exactly the same. Love, intimacy, monogamy.
Unless you’re mormon.
Or a rock star.
An exhaustingly fascinating paradox.
If monogamy makes one happy, if abiding by the pre-conceived rules of male-female interaction, the guidelines all mapped out by Bridget Jones, is what is wanted, then I can get excited for another person. But I can’t get excited when people get into traditional relationships and then bitch about them. Complaining about being stuck in a world with just one person.
It is challenging, thinking outside the box. Sometimes, doing things that appear exhausting to the outside world even seem implausible to you. There is a gravitational pull, when you are laying next to the person you love, to do what seems to have been successful for so many other people. But just because there is another person in the room, does not mean that you have to forget what makes you happy. If unabashed freedom is the very definition of euphoria to you, falling in love should enhance that, not compromise it. You can be you, do what you want and still explore all of the amazing characteristics that thinking the world of someone has to offer.
Once upon a time everyone thought that the world was flat. That seemed like the right way to think. If that was proven wrong, maybe being trapped by the limitations of monogamy being normal could be to?

I have a friend who won’t have sex with the lights on. Which must really be a bitch when she gets horny during daylight hours.
“I don’t want him to see my body,” she explains.
“But…but…he’s…like…already…kind of…oh…what? I don’t understand the question.”
When I am on top of a guy, even in the dark, I kind of assume that he knows what he is dealing with. Fluorescent lights are not exactly needed to highlight your flaws when someone is close enough to be inside of you. Seeing the fat isn’t going to change the fact that he is touching it. Subsequently, I accepted many years ago that if I wanted to have sex, I would have to accept that a boy would be able to see my flaws. Not long after, I realized that if I could actually get him into bed, some jiggling thighs were, obviously, not going to be a problem. He had made his peace with it by that point. Clothes don’t hide our physical imperfections that well.

When I moved into my own house, I started to spend a lot of time naked and was really excited by all of the things that one can do in the nude other than have sex. Who knew?
Cooking chicken nuggets, smoking while relaxing on a beanbag, reading a book, vacuuming and talking on the phone are just some of the things that became more enjoyable if I stopped hiding behind clothes while hiding behind closed doors. Subsequently, it helped my weekly laundry chore and I wondered why nudity had not yet been marketed as a Save Water initiative.
The Prettiest Boy In The World [official name] arrived at my door step spontaneously on a day that I had decided to crack open the flannel and turn the light off on my body. Despite the fact that he has seen me naked on numerous occasions, I stopped writing my novel and doing the dishes sans fabric because his presence was distracting enough. Choosing an outfit for the day is far less time consuming than what I inevitably end up doing if someone else is in the room during one of my naked spells. Him being on the other side of the apartment would be the biggest buffer I ever had while naked with someone, even with the lights on, so my flaws would have been diluted by distance. But, still, it just isn’t sexy to watch someone sweep the floor or pick up dog shit naked. And so I covered up and wore more than just a smile.

Having a boy living with you makes you realize how insignificant physical imperfections actually are. The personality we hide behind closed doors is not light sensitive and is, therefore, always on display. Having a person present isn’t enough to make us dilute our behavior after about…the third hour of living together. Fat thighs or cellulite is nothing compared to an emotional tantrum or having your true opinion heard at seven o’clock in the morning. Every morning.
And then there is the eating ice-cream out of the tub for breakfast.
And the bad music you have to admit to loving.
And the beauty regime that proves that the homeless chic look you have been perfecting for years is, in fact, natural.
The fact that anyone would waste time worrying about what someone thought of their outside astounds me. Sex with the lights on is the easiest thing in the world. If not the best. I mean, how else do you fuck at the beach? It is only when you are revealing your true inside that you really feel naked.

I threw a tub of ice-cream at the sink and marched into the bathroom to hide from The Prettiest Boy In The World [official name] while I cried because I could not easily get the plastic off the tub lid.

If ever there was proof needed that a fat kid lives inside of me, this was probably the best evidence anyone was ever going to get.

Of course I behaved this way in front of The Prettiest Boy In The World [official name]. I am always effortlessly perfect for the ones I find ugly or downright flawed. My emotional tantrum was not, exactly, because I could not get to the Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked ice-cream fast enough (Aside: It would, however, be totally justified if it was. Maybe even more so. It is that good. An orgasm in a box, if you will). Mental and emotional exhaustion from writing a novel fully clothed had left me feeling completely exposed and, subsequently, I became overwhelmed when the fat kid could not put her head directly into the tub like it was a trough. I did not preview this side of my personality in the eight hundred hours of conversation leading up to cohabitation with Him. I seem to have left that out.
“I don’t want to see this,” he was no doubt thinking while I stormed around beanbags, looking for a cigarette and something I could punch. Like a pillow. Or a pile of laundry. Or a person.
It was like being flat chested and wearing inserts to a bar, only to have a boy find out that clothes can, actually, hide imperfections before the lights are turned out. The door was open and the truth had flown out. Sometimes, I am not perfect.

When I go to the gym to ensure that my ass does not fly around the room during sex, I get intimidated by the sheer size of the strong men lifting weights heavier than I will ever be. But it is nothing compared to being emotionally strong. When you are someone who rarely breaks down, who helps other people through their trapped ice-cream crises (or similar), the preview that you are human is intimidating on the inside. You can be someone who, for three hundred and sixty four days a year rationalizes every event and circumstance, finding a lesson rather than a reason to cry. But on the one day you reveal your humanity, it can be over something so ridiculous, so mundane, that it appears to be irrational. You cry because someone stopped drawing Bambi and accompanied it with sad music. You bawl your eyes out because you put your shoes on the wrong feet. Or you become hysterical because the ice-cream isn’t already in your mouth. It is so hard to shine a light on the side of yourself that is hidden from everyone for the majority of time, because what if they can’t deal with it? Anyone can accept a little bit of cellulite. But few can accept Who we really are. That is why it is so special when you find someone who does.

Letting people people inside of us is a daunting experience because, during the process, we are bound to learn via reflection that we are not who we thought we were or claimed to be. Just like no one wants to turn on the lights and reveal fat cells, no one wants to drop the facade like it is a bath towel and reveal vulnerabilities. It can make or break a relationship with someone, as they are going to discover the true You, so in the event of rejection, they are rejecting who you actually are not who you pretend to be.
And then, of course, there is the eating ice-cream out of the tub for breakfast.
And the bad music you have to admit to loving.
And the fact that you are a human.
But sex on the beach, surely, makes up for it?