Today I had an actualization that I can only comfortably (or rather uncomfortably) describe as perturbing. Most of my epiphanies center around the basis of "Oh, you can see my black underwear straight through my tight, white dress," or "Oh, he came out at college? That explains why he was so fixated with my shoulders that time we hooked up," but this one today was no laughing matter. The thing that I realized today not only shook my world, but decimated my inner peace with a force that's off the richter scale.
It happened at lunch. I'd just gotten a new Blackberry after losing my previous phone in my usual weekend drunken stupor, so after days of Walden-like solitude I was back in technology's grace and finally able to contact one of my friends to hang out. After an epoch of separation (five days), we had tons to catch up on. Our weekends: what we remembered, what we wish we didn't remember, the guys who we prayed would remember our names, all the standard Monday lunch talk that we hadn't had yet since up until Wednesday I was basically living without running water, human contact, and HBO. But my new phone turned out to be useful for more than just texting my friends.
"Oh my god!" it dawned on me, "I can show you the gorgeous guy I hooked up with this weekend via my new Blackberry!" I typed and scrolled fastidiously while gushing, "Like seriously, he might be the most handsome piece of man I've ever seen. He's actually perfect. He's like, 6"5, but not lanky, he's totally ripped. Huge shoulders. And oh-my-fucking-god, his bone structure!! You could actually do trig problems using the angle of his jawbone. And he has these super strong cheekbones that accentuate his even stronger dark, bold eyebrows. Fuck, he has nice eyebrows. Facebook loading? Why is this taking so long?"
"Ooh, what's his coloring like?" My friend inquired.
"Oh, he's totally tan and has really thick dark brown hair. He's half italian! I forget what else he is, but we bonded so hard since both of our families come from Sicily! Oh yes, his profile loaded, look!"
The sight of his profile picture was enough to make me salivate and drool a sizable mote around our lunch table. My friend, on the other hand, didn't have the same reaction. She just stared at his picture in silence, all the while wearing a quizzical look on her face. Her silence made me go from giddy to nervous, so I asked her what she was thinking.
"He kind of... looks like you."
My instantaneous bewilderment was palpable.
"Well not like you, but if you were a guy then you'd look like him." She continued, while I inwardly wished she'd never started speaking, "Come to think of it, he looks like all the other guys you get with. You know, tall, tan, athletic, brown haired, big eyebrowed, visibly Italian."
"Wait, you're right. And furthermore, my only criticism of this particular guy was that I thought his teeth were too small, and I have fucking huge teeth!"
We sat in libido-shattering silence, just staring at my hookup's profile picture. Neither of us even so much as flinched for five excruciating minutes.
"Yeah..." my friend said, "that's really weird."
Despite my best efforts, I couldn't shake the conversation from my self awareness. It got me thinking, do opposites really attract? Or are the rules of attraction based on similarities? Like Lindsay Lohan during a therapy session, I inevitably traced my sexual disturbia back to my childhood. All the physical features that I'd spent my entire adolescence hating (for example, my debilitating height, my oversized eyebrow which eventually tweezed into eyebrows, and my prodigious teeth that practically rape whoever I smile at) not only did I learn to love in myself, but I also learned to love them in the opposite sex. All this time, has my apparent shallowness been a misdiagnosed case of narcissism? Given all the evidence, does this mean that I'm legitimately in love with myself? I guess this finally presents an answer to the age old question: "If presented with the opportunity, would you fuck yourself?"
No comments:
Post a Comment