My social calendar for the rest of the summer looks like this: Wedding. Engagement party. Wedding. Meet friend’s new significant other. Wedding. It’s that sort of summer, and strangely enough, it’s beginning to irk me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing any of the happy couples ill. I love it when my friends are happy. They are, after all, my friends. My homies. My doggs, yo.
In especially happy for my two friends who threw an engagement party last night in Accordion City’s Little Italy. It’s a Happy Movie Ending kind of thing — you could sum up the past five years as Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Realizes He Can’t Get Over Girl, Boy Wins Girl Back, Roll Credits.
This is not an easy feat. I’ve tried this twice over the past two years. One involved a cross-border/cross-country move, the other an equally life-changing offer. The result of both I’ll simply summarize as “craptacular”, despite the fact that I did everything right. (Really, I did. You can do everything right and still lose.)
So I raise a glass to my engaged friends: Congratulations: you beat the odds!
Sigh.
In the past week, I think I’ve been in three conversations (the last one being at yesterday’s engagement party) where someone has said “When will I ever find someone?” and the reply has invariably been “First, you have to give up completely. That’s when you find someone.” Experience — not just mine, but plenty of other people’s — seems to indicate that this is true.
After the past eighteen months of ridiculousness — some of it unbloggable, some of it referred to cryptically, some of it documented, one in particular being one of the most-linked-to personal stories on the Web — giving up is the sensible option.
Except quitting feels like…well, quitting. And it’s not my style.
To be honest, it’s the only annoying thing in my life at the moment. The rest of the time, I lead a pretty charmed existence. Flip through this blog’s archives if you don’t believe me. I really have nothing else to complain about, and that’s why complaining feels so wrong. “Why won’t she return my calls?” or “But I already have plenty of friends!” seem quite minor when a distressingly large fraction of world is wondering “Sell the cow, or sell the daughter?” or “The soldiers are coming, why won’t this cheap fucking AK-47 knockoff unjam?!”
Complaining sounds so ungrateful. So whiny. So emo rock.
Yes, the accordion does give me a little bit of a tactical advantage in these situations. I have looks, brains and charm on my side. And the situation isn’t as mysterious as this photo below makes it out to be:
But tactical advantages aren’t everything, otherwise Moxie would never be single.
Maybe I’m just a victim of “Pick Any Two” syndrome. It’s the old engineering maxim: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick any two.” I’ve often heard this one about dating: “Sexy. Smart. Sane. Pick any two.” Cory recently dropped this new one on me: “Hot job. Hot apartment. Hot girlfriend. Pick any two.”
Hot job? For a company and a CEO that the uber-influential Joi Ito raves about, and it starts a week Monday. Hot apartment? So hot it ended up on TV. That leaves…oh, crap.
Well, this too shall pass. Maybe in a future blog entry, I’ll be complaining:
July 5th 2004:
She’s at it again. I’m trying to get this particularly tricky bit of code on which Tucows’ fortunes depend to work, and she’s interrupting me all the bleeding time!
“Joey,” she says in her most sultry come-hither voice, “I’m wearing nothing but Cheez Whiz.”
“Dammit, woman, can’t you see I’m trying to work here?!“
Memo to my future self, six months from now
When you read this in the archives, be sure to say this to the cute girl sitting in your lap: “See sweetie, before I met you I’d completely given up all hope of meeting someone.”
Then cover her with ice cream and nibble on her bum.
Memo to my future readers and future blog historians, six months from now
See? I was the one who started the trend of using your blog to send messages to your future self.