Heroes, Villains, and Princesses
The Good | Musical Interlude
With billions of people on this planet, people are always philosophizing about how, just on plain odds, many of us run the risk of being nearly identical. There are only so many ways to be an individual. Others box up our personalities for us, and we have clearly observable physical traits. We marry and reproduce and continue threads of similarity in our own backyards.
That being the case it never ceases to amaze me to learn about a human being once they’ve been “activated” in my life.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, to be activated means to be brought into your story. As one author noted, if you know and love a person you should be able to look into their eyes for more than a few seconds without the moment becoming weird.
Everyone else, you react, you look away, any number of things. Activated people maintain a gaze.
I can’t even tell you how many people have been my best friends and great loves that just months or years before were quietly observed, or were even enemies of a sort, before the one or two episodes of change that brought them into my inner circle.
My best friend in the world is one such activated individual. Our story? Our grand connection? I was sitting waiting for a free train ride to ride around the downtown of St. Augustine, Florida. While I conversed with my roommate, a man overheard the conversation thanks to a few choice words about a hometown he shared with this young woman. I sat with him on the train, we went back to his apartment, and spent the next few hours exploring our similarities. Over and done
It comes full circle now because that same individual has decided to start a blog here at unravel.today.com where he unwittingly demonstrates my example. Of all the ways you could possibly live, he has chosen, for now, the experience of being a person who writes about his musical preferences in the poetic styling of a full-body sensory experience. You could meet this person at a grocery store, on vacation, whether it be exchanging words or even a glance and could you guess that’s what he had under the hood?
Of course not, and that hidden potential for anyone to be anything is one of the fuels that lights the fire of curiosity for me and keeps me interested in life.
Who are you, and what is it that you do? Will you share it?
The Evil | Put your schtick on ice
Have you ever been attracted to a charming young man, only to find out he was a jerk just seconds after your relationship commenced? There’s a simple reason, and since it seems to be something of a secret, I’ll expose it for your benefit.
The nice guy playbook has been co-opted by the jerks. It’s bad for women because they are deceived and robbed of precious time. It’s bad for nice guys because any potential friendships or romantic encounters in which we might have engaged never see the light of day, because a disillusioned female has no interest in hearing and seeing the same thing over and over.
Heck, I’ve known girls who said they could live with a lie like that so long as the lie was good.
What happened is, nice guys were just going about their business, doing things and saying things as it came natural to them. Women found those qualities endearing, and for all their best efforts they couldn’t swing themselves over to forging a genuine relationship with nice guy.
This was actually fine at the time for both parties. The nice guys still got the contact and interaction they desired, and the girls received affection that wasn’t accompanied by getting physically beaten or yelled at in a drunken stupor.
The “bad” guys observed the attention, and didn’t like it. So they discerned the motions, and went through those motions, giving the bad guy the appearance of being tolerable. The girls were already into the bad guys, and wanting them, and that threw them over the edge. Now being civil and a good listener and doing sporadic romantic deeds didn’t need to be sincere because it was simply getting done - and this time by someone goofy-looking (”hot”) and flaky (”flaky”).
I don’t blame the girls. They’re jumping for what looks like a good deal, and be it taste or good judgement that escaped them, or simply primitive wiring that kept them from being attracted to the nice guy, they likely weren’t worth being with at the time for all their naivete. Seems rational if you’re in their shoes.
The guys, though? At the very extreme this type of guy can have no soul, no redeeming qualities of any kind and still get attention, even when only applying a few of the nice guy principles, and incorrectly at that. At its best they’re just annoying because they unfairly upset a natural order of awkward co-dependent behavior.
If you complain about them, people will say “Don’t worry about it, they’ll get what’s coming to them!”
They might not, but in my mind they still have to be them for the rest of their lives, and that’s punishment enough. It’s probably worse.
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