This bullet point "essay" by Ned Hepburn is kind of brilliant.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult because women get hit on all of the time, in every way imaginable.
- Men are inherently lonely people because our defaults are either fucking or fighting related (not counting sleep; eating, obviously), and the New York City default is all about ‘survival’.
- Combine the two previous bullet points and you have a recipe for disaster; a city full of angry dudes at half staff trying harder and harder at a game that women become increasingly bitter at ever being involved in it in the first place.
- I don’t know what it must be like to be a woman in New York. It must be really difficult / freeing / one or the other, but not both.
- Last night I was outside of a bar, and this woman dropped something from her purse and kept walking. It was one of those “buy 9 get the 10th free” things and I figured she’d want it back so I tapped her on the arm and tried to hand it back to her. “You dropped this”, I said, and she gave me a look as if I had just vomited shit out of my eyes. She didn’t take the damn card. This was in front of five people.
- Her friend saw it and whispered “Don’t worry, I’ll take that”, but holy shit, how bitter can someone be when they drop something and someone tries to hand it back to them?
- Perhaps its got to do more with the human condition.
- Perhaps we are all just very, very lonely and defensive. We are all just monkeys still with money and guns.
- That’s what I initially thought.
- But then I saw a guy fingerbang his girlfriend over her skirt while at the bar, and it made me think.
- Perhaps there are two types of men in this world:
- 1. Guys that fingerbang people at bars, and
- 2. Guys that don’t.
- I looked around the bar and saw everyone else just stand around, waiting and wanting to be looked at. Men, women, everyone.
- Perhaps we’re just looking for a hole to fill. I mean that metaphorically.
- Or I guess the other way, too.
- The human heart doesn’t want to be bitter. The brain does not want to be angry. These are not our default settings. These are switches and dials in our heads that have taken years, sometimes decades to change that way. It’s easier not to remember those original settings. It’s a lot easier to become what the world wants you to be, instead of making the world become what you want it to, which takes years, years, years.
- Positivity is a marathon, not a sprint.
- It’s just that these people have made many smaller decisions, split second ones, hundreds of them, to ignore that and turn the other way.
- It’s a lot easier to focus on your own problems and project them.
- Which is why I think she didn’t want to take her card back, because she thought I was trying some sort of maneuver.
- Which is worrying in and of itself, because it’s just a card, lady. It’s not a proposal nor am I trying to fuck you.
- Which, I guess, made me feel kinda sad for her
- And people like her
- Who look at an exchange like that and their take home is “Stacey, this guy outside the club tried to hand me something!” “Oh my god!” “I knooooow!”
- And they don’t look at it any other way and chalk it up to their “Well I Never!” category in their head
- And that whole cycle just breeds loneliness.
- And you see people walking down the street hand in hand, and you wonder how they did it.
- I guess through just ignoring everything I’ve just said, right?
- It’s like that Bret Easton Ellis line “People are afraid to merge”, except he was talking about people on the freeway, really.
- And I’m just talking about a lady dropping something on the sidewalk.