Sex & The City is rotting my male mind into a pile of loose ends; grey matter warped by cutesie, cleverly written puke. It’s not the fashion, the girl talk or the big sweeping drama that comes from an adult life in the city that is sickening, it’s the urge I get to be completely disgusted by romance, or more so, the need to dispel clichés.
Contemporary Hollywood has capitalized on both sides of romance: our need to be wooed and the realization that some people are just unwooable. For every When Harry Met Sally there is an updated Garden State/ Lost In Translation (or even worse, a Zach Braf fronted Last Kiss) that says love is such a mind fuck that we have to be content with the fleeting moments of joy we feign holding on to, because those moments will found the nostalgia that gets us between relationship A and relationship B. Those memories, the seconds of our lifetime in which we were happy are the jewels we treasure and the stock in which we invest our beliefs; that love is right and just and for all. The times between those blips are what justify our cold desperate bleakness. It’s the reason whiskey sales will never dip and ice cream will always find its self a regaled spot in corner stores throughout the globe.
Still if we find such value in those memories why do we shun their probability in our lives, until they have already passed? What proclivity do we possess toward desperation, such a drive toward despair that we run away from things that seem too perfect?
When I grew up, I felt that everything I wanted relationship wise, I wanted because it would make me happy and complete. I cried over girls not liking me because I felt that if girls didn’t like me, I couldn’t date them (logical, right?) and if they didn’t date me, I couldn’t get married and by not being married, I couldn’t be normal. Then as I grew older, and felt that normal didn’t exist, I believed that those things I wanted, that I felt everyone else wanted didn’t really exist either, and where just a mockery of the human condition; an exaggeration of what real people really needed. And as I sit here, I feel that for the most part, this is still true- but I am beginning, (perhaps out of a resurgence of self-imposed idealism) to think that while I deserve less, I want more. I want that goo-barf feeling, and I want the people around me to have these feelings too, because while its sappy, that sap is our blood. To be cliché is to be human.
On the same grounds that stereotypes have some factual justification, cliché are trite and boring and dull and pieces of Americana or whatever global cultures you hail from. Suck it up; we are that which we hate the most. Every quote used in an AOL/Myspace/ Facebook profile, every Catcher in the Rye/ Perks of Being A Wallflower book that shows your angst-ridden soul, or every (insert any album in existence) record that helps bubble your grief to the surface and remind you of why you relish your past positivity but shy from others is bullshit, and you therefore, are a bullshit artist. Clichés are only dangerous when used in excess, and I think that in the area of matter of the heart, the exception can be made.
Please vomit after reading.
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