SeeingEyeBlog

My luck has been consistently down when it comes to meeting a girl I like who is NOT attached to someone. More to the point, I’ve had an unusually long streak of girls who want to go out with me who were attached, married or otherwise. And I’m sick of it. Why do I have a happy valentines day message on myspace from a girl who’s dating someone else? In fact, what is she doing on the computer on valentines day if she’s with someone? I don’t intend any offense, and she’s a nice girl. It’s just an easy example of what’s been happening a lot lately.

What is with this generation of women? They seem to outnumber men in their non-committal attitudes toward relationships. Everywhere I turn I find myself attracting women who don’t seem to have a hard time reconciling their boyfriend or husband at home with a yes when I ask them out. And sometimes they’re the one asking me out, and it’s only later that I find out about their significant other. Did the last generation of women burn too many bras for their own good? Have they answered the question “Are men necessary?” with a “Not really”? Whatever happened, they have certainly tasted some kind of perceived freedom during women’s liberation, and from my experience, it’s gone to their collective heads. And now we’ve got intelligent women walking around virtually asking for sex without much semblance of a relationship. Do any of them seriously think that is sexy, and/or desirable? That appeals only to a man’s most base desires, and although we men would all on the surface rejoice in the steady stream of no-strings sex, deeper down we find it repulsing huge waste of time and money.

If I didn’t want to acknowledge individual responsibility, I’d say my self control comes from the fact that I’m a man, and as a man in a patriarchal society my freedom to be non-committal was my birthright, just as it was to my fathers and their fathers for millennia. As such, the taste of that freedom is not as fresh and intoxicating as it is for women, who are just now tasting it for the first time in fifteen thousand years. Therefore, the differential between the sexes regarding the potential to exercise our sexual options now favors women. It results in a reversal of some typical stereotypes, namely, men (like me) being more docile and loyal. I’d say that if I fell for it. Being faithful to a relationship is not a passive trait, but one of the most active things a man can do, even though there are few outward manifestations of it. Inwardly though, it requires discipline, which is a responsibility decidedly individual.

So the next time an attached woman says yes to a date with me, I’m going to ask her about the guy who’s either waiting for her to get home or at work making money to help buy her that dual-income, no-kids, non-fat-mocha-latte lifestyle. Don’t hang yourself with the bra your mom tried to burn, honey. Remember who puts up with you when you’re on the rag, crying as you watch Extreme Makeover. We are your emotional rocks. Acknowledge it and embrace it, you’ll be happier that way.

I am now convinced that the last dealer ever to deal me a card was named Brad. It’s not that I don’t like playing cards or the excitement of winning big money. It’s how utterly pissed off I get when I lose any amount of money, whether it’s mine or not. Tonight my mom was winning in blackjack and gave me $100 in chips and insisted that I sit down and play. I had been standing and watching, having a very good time being the good luck charm. (Everyone with me won at least $400)

Brad, the dealer, swept in my $100 in chips inside of 5 minutes, and I was betting and playing the right way. I won three hands and lost thirteen. Since this money was gravy from my mom’s winnings, it was essentially play money that I was betting. I should care less if Brad the dealer takes it all. It’s not even my money. What I don’t understand is how my blood pressure and pulse skyrocketed after I got up from the table.

I tried to mask my contept for the entire idea behind casinos. I’m too talented and intelligent to believe I’ll ever get something for nothing, or that the odds ever change in games of chance. I might be old-fashioned, but I prefer to receive either a good or a service for my money, and I know that the services I provide will eventually be worth over $100/hr, which will make me a millionaire, before I’m thirty if I made the odds. The casino certainly wasn’t doing me a service by making me share my personal space with the dregs of humanity who walk around with walkers and/or rolling oxygen tanks, who are slowly embalming themselves with the tar and formaldehyde in their cigarettes, and giving me a sore throat with their second hand smoke. Get the hell away from me you bunch of losers.

Unable to mask my contempt, I took a walk to find a bathroom, thinking it would render upon me some kind of peace. All I found were more angry thoughts and bitter memories, all surfacing at the same time with an overwhelming ferocity to them. Random, disparate, dismal memories from all phases of my life, all being forced on my psyche by some force wishing me ill. And again, all I had done was lose $100 of what was essentially play money.

I’ve been working 16-hour days lately and today I had a well-deserved day off. I was in San Diego at my parents’ house so I had access to television (I work in entertainment but don’t have a cable subscription in LA). I watched some show on Discovery about the way things are made, and this episode featured apple juice and violins.

It is lamentable that automation and modernity have all but done away with quality craftsmanship. The fruits of our labors can rarely be embodied as a tactile product with a 500-year lifespan (I don’t know any luthiers, and many guitars are made in automated mills anyway). In previous generations, a man could create a magnificent instrument in his humble workshop, and live on essentially bread and water, with fruit or vegetables seasonally. Nowadays we work in offices with little to show for ourselves, and eat any kind of food regardless of season.

It’s interesting to speculate about the 16th century craftsman eating an apple at the end of harvest season, who, finishing a violin as he eats, may only have crafted two more violins by the time the next harvest offers him his next bite of apple. The apple and the violin were worthy of much higher appreciation when it required that much patience to enjoy them.