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 My little brother, Jem

 Author:  Topic:  Posted:
Jan 21, 2002
 Comments:
Last night I got together with an old friend to get utterly smashed, gossip, talk shop and generally reconnect.
diaries

More diaries by chloedancer
State of mind
It delights yet dishevels me...
Your possible pasts
A troll worthy of muse status, believe it or not...
Hating the idiocy that is my job today...
Paradigm Shift
State of Mind Redux
Divination al? Peanuts
Relational Dissonance
The universe is speaking to me...
Hard Truths
Got my escape route planned...
Impending Career Change
El Dia de Los Muertos
I am so completely enamored
Home for the holidays? No! Send my body home!
Harrison's Last Laugh
Dare ya, osm! Here's your chance to prove your devotion!
A Beautiful Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Anthem
Reality Check
Why I enjoy being a girl
Way back when, he was a sullen 16-year-old who was utterly bored with a semi-privileged upbringing and I was a 19 year-old offbeat spitfire hangin' with the University's C-Sci and Engineering crowd; it's hard for me to believe that almost 20 years have gone by since then. He's the man responsible for giving me the best compliment I've ever received ("Damn! You've got more curves than God intended to put in one place!"); my bi-polar twin star in the universe of IT, the first person I ever tripped with and my all-time favorite partner-in-crime. I've even mentioned him before briefly in this esteemed realm.

I'd thought that he was my little secret... but last night during our boozy chatterfest I learned otherwise. Truth be known, I'm still horrified.

I've heard the quote before, even seen it around a time or two, but never paid even the slightest bit of attention to the attributed source...

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and BSD. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
Even Shoeboy, notorious in his own right, seemed impressed to learn that my Jeremy is, in fact, that Jeremy; Jeremy's also the person I'd personally recommended as the candidate of choice for Shoeboy's old job, oddly enough.

The fact that he's infamous isn't what's bothering me... What's popped my little paradigm is the fact that Jem's just another goddamned g**k. What's even worse is that he's someone other g**ks argue about. Color me clueless...

He used to my friend who just happened to work in IT that was my antidote to the "g**ker-than-thou" crowd; I thought he was different. Now it just feels like it did when I learned that there isn't really a Santa Claus after all and I'd just rather not have been made aware of either of these truths, all things considered.

       
Tweet

More Jealous Than Impressed (none / 0) (#1)
by Peter Johnson on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 11:20:23 AM PST
Other than Rusty Foster, nobody quotes me in their sig.

BTW, that morons.org link is a perfect example of why g**ks have such a bad name.

Excessively literal minded, incapable of taking (or even recognizing) a joke, arrogant, anti-social and just plain obnoxious.

Know what I used to do to kids like that in Junior High? It wasn't pleasant.
--Peter
Are you adequate?

Careful where you tread, big fella... (none / 0) (#2)
by chloedancer on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 04:59:59 PM PST
Your admitted jealousy might give me cause to start thinking of you as a just another goddamned g**k, too; that would likely put a major cramp in my pursuit of carnal delight with you, if ya know what I mean.

 
Man, if more chicks were like you... (none / 0) (#3)
by luisa on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 05:18:20 PM PST
I would totally have more chick friends. Anything I know of you is based entirely on adequacy postings, and the sum is cooler than ninety percent of the women I have ever known. You come across the way women ought to be and rarely are. Stunning, the gems one can uncover occasionally on the internet.


no kidding (none / 0) (#4)
by nathan on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 05:50:44 PM PST
Not to mention I'd get laid much more often.

There's a certain sort of girl who loves to have you cater to her pretensions. Tell her that she's brilliant; tell her you never thought of it like that before. Even if she is genuinely insightful and creative, she (like everyone else) will have a lot of moments where she's not, and that's when you pounce. There's no older trick than flattery. Smart people are often vulnerable to it because, as people who often find themselves outsiders, they have an immense stake in their own self-image as smart people.

Women have joked about how men take themselves very very seriously indeed. There's a certain sort of girl who's much the same way. As a teenager, she read middlebrow literature without quite grasping how soppy it was; if she's a bit older, she remembers those days with a red face and reads overearnest manifestoes instead; if she's out of college, it'll be midrange sushi, midrange Chardonnay, and competence in the office. Anyone with eyes to see will be able to make sport of her by taking her to a piano recital or an Albee play; by switching from chivalry to modern mores at calculated intervals; by quoting judiciously from well-known sources; by knowing when to let her be the smart one (this makes you "endearing.")

This kind of emotional manipulation is the major subject of Wallace's tour de force Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Read it for your own self-protection. Yeah, any woman worth her salt will see through the act - if she really wants to - but by then it'll be a tad late.
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.

Ladies, if only you knew how easy it is to play on that string.
--
Li'l Sis: Yo, that's a real grey area. Even by my lax standards.

 
The difference between men and women (none / 0) (#5)
by chloedancer on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 06:04:40 PM PST
when it comes to friendships is this: If a man gets mad at you, he'll yell at you, you'll yell back, and in five minutes' time it's over and you're back-slapping each other and keep rolling along as the best of buddies. If, however, a woman gets mad at you, she'll continue to smile while she waits (sometimes even for years to pass) for the right moment to twist the knife in. I simply prefer my friendships to be at face-value; life's so much easier that way.

While I can't speak to why the average female ends up the way most do, I do know one truth about me that seems to have made a difference: my Dad and my brother were pretty much responsible for raising me; my Mother was really out of the picture by the time I hit my pre-teen years due to chronic MS and organic dementia. While I do honestly believe that my Mother was a tremendous woman prior to the escalation of the disease's effects, I have also come to accept that I may have ended up with a different mindset just because the men in my family had more to do with my upbringing than would have likely been true otherwise and I think I have a greater range of capabilities because of this.

It's also true that most of my female friends were raised similarly for whatever reason (most were the only girl in a family with several sons and a few were raised in single-parent families with the father as the head of the household). If you seek out that type of woman, you might be able to raise the percentage of women friends in your life.

 
chloe dance the tables (none / 0) (#6)
by Anonymous Reader on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 06:46:39 PM PST
chloe just like me

L'andrew was a beautiful man, (none / 0) (#7)
by chloedancer on Mon Jan 21st, 2002 at 10:42:19 PM PST
ain't no denying that. What's surprising is that Adequacy's own Shoeboy bears a slight resemblance to the legendary Andrew Wood... Go figure. Jem should be jealous of him, truth be known. ;)

(And, just to thwart RoboSerf before he jumps all over me for that, I'd like to remind him that Einstein had it right: "You have to accept the idea that subjective time with its emphasis on the now has no objective meaning ... the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent." Ha!)

The French Quarter is a place where my soul lives well; in five years of living there, I'd only dance tables during Southern Decadence in the gay clubs 'cause doing the "sexy female thang" is a joke to me and even as a bonafide woman, I still call it "doin' drag." I can sing It's Raining Men and Lady Marmalade along with the best of 'em.

 

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