rabbit blog Tuesday, May 15, 2012 CHILDLESS WHORES IN THE NEWS "How has [Obama] stayed so competitive?" David Brooks asks in The New York Times. "First, the Democrats’ demographic advantages are kicking in. The population segments that are solidly Democratic, like single women and the unchurched, are expanding." That's right! Childless, godless whores are keeping Obama's approval rating high. Because the Godless have no morals, and support the immoral in their reelection bids. Only an authoritative patriarchal figure can bestow some sense of right and wrong on his infantile flock. And God knows (and tells His flock often) that single women have no morals. Just look at how those vulgar heathens on HBO's "Girls" behave, pulling their skirts up and humping every Tom, Dick and Harry that wanders through their slovenly bedchambers! Goddamn it, I adore those heathens. No one takes aim at the entitled, delusional denizens of Manhattan's urban elite romper room quite like Lena Dunham. This episode where Dunham offers to have sex with her demented boomer boss, then threatens to sue him, then threatens to quit, and he can't stop laughing the whole time? Eerie, hilarious and also somehow totally realistic. How the fuck do they do it? Anyway, just feeling proud of the unchurched at the moment. 11:42 AM Thursday, March 15, 2012 MONEY, HONEY Money doesn't solve everything. I know that, but I can't stop thinking that it does anyway. Maybe a therapist could remind me that money doesn't solve everything... if I could afford one. But money isn't the path to happiness! That's easy enough to see. Just go to a really expensive restaurant, and look around. All you'll see are couples in expensive-looking clothes, sipping $80 bottles of Sauvignon Blanc and glaring at each other without speaking. If I could afford to go to a really expensive restaurant, I'd sit there, savoring a tasty butternut squash gnocci or a lovely halibut steak, and I'd look around and remind myself that money isn't the path to happiness, no sir! Life is short, that's the thing. You really have to live in the moment. I learned that from my life insurance agent, who encouraged me to seize the day by lying on my insurance application, claiming that my father died of natural causes at age 71, when he really died of a heart attack at age 56. Because life was particularly short for my father, the insurance company might guess that my life will be short, too, which means my policy will be very, very expensive. It's too bad, because I'd like leave my daughter plenty of money (with a note in my will, of course, making it clear to her that money doesn't solve everything and isn't the path to happiness), but to do that, I'm going to have to spend a lot of money, money that I don't have. But hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and even if there were, it wouldn't make all your problems go away. You might be a little bit less hungry, but unless there was also a free breakfast, a free dinner, and a free life insurance policy coming your way, what difference would it make? Besides, you could win the lottery tomorrow, and still be unhappy. I hope you do win the lottery tomorrow, in fact, just so I can tell you "I told you so" when you run around spending money and having fun with lots of nice wine and fancy cars and beautiful clothes that fit well and high-class hookers and high-grade cocaine. I'll laugh in your face when I see you, all tanned and relaxed from your weekend in Lake Cuomo, Italy, where you stayed up late dancing with George Clooney and some Argentinian pro soccer players and a Moroccan prince and some heads of state. Sure, you'll act like everything is going really well, but I'll see right through your facade. In a few years -- maybe 20 or so -- you'll get bored with all of the great food and the hot girls, you'll start to get depressed whenever you see the sun set over the Mediterranean sea or hear the faint pop of champagne corks in the distance. You probably won't know me by then, since I can hardly afford to meet you for coffee, let alone fly to Belize at a moment's notice, but if you did know me, you'd look to me for comfort and wisdom, and I'd chuckle softly and say, "Yep, I knew you'd take a hard fall sooner or later. In your case, later. But still. Money doesn't solve everything, buddy. Wish it did, but it doesn't." 10:52 AM Tuesday, March 06, 2012 RED LAWN Dear Rabbit, My brain is turning to Jello. What should I do about this? I also think that lawn gnomes are plotting against me. I see them everywhere, and they always seem to be staring at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have had that last meatball. Kevin Hughes Dear Kevin, It's true, you shouldn't have had that last meatball. It contained a probe designed by the conspiring lawn gnomes, or technically, Lawn Gnomes Against White Urban Professional Males. You see, lawn gnomes have, for years, suffered the oppressive stares of white urban professional males in silence, not wanting to bite the hand that feeds. One day, an elite marionette escaped from an elderly matron's home in Pasadena and organized the lawn gnomes nationwide. Although he was not, technically, one of them, the marionette had spent 20 years in the matron's library, slogging through The Communist Manifesto and other seminal texts, and recognized that the gnomes were inhabitants of primarily lower-middle-class neighborhoods, and could, therefore, safely conspire against upper-middle-class professionals without feeling that they were striking out against their keepers. And even if they did hurt their own keepers, the marionette told the gnomes, aren't all landowners just a part of the modern urban serfdom, the high capitalist patriarchy we each tolerate without question, kneeling on our little stools, gazing into the middle distance as petunias tickle our elbows? Fuck the man, with his high-nitrogen lawn fertilizers that make our little gnome eyes sting! Fuck him, with his incessant wasteful watering, and his army of poorly paid Mexican immigrants, armed with angry leaf blowers that burn fossil fuels and pollute the environment! Fuck him with his enormous car, big enough to provide shelter for a small community of gnomes! That's right! An entire community of gnomes could flourish in his car! A community of mobile gnomes! The marionette was a rousing speaker, indeed. And although the gnomes didn't really understand the part about urban serfdoms and high capitalism and patriarchs, they did really like the idea of mobile gnomes. They'd always felt something was missing from their lives, something vague and difficult to put into words. Maybe the real crime of modern life was that gnomes were no longer mobile! Gnomes ought to be mobile, after all! In days of old, gnomes roamed the land freely! No one is sure, but they probably did. Anyway, they didn't merely sit on toadstools for weeks, months, years without so much as a stroll around the neighborhood! The marionette wasn't pleased with this Mobile Gnome Initiative, and he came to regret mentioning that part about the SUV housing a whole herd of gnomes. The gnomes were to rise up and take down the man first, then they could roam freely! But the gnomes disagreed, so he broke with them and concentrated his energies on his speaking tour, which brought in astronomical fees and freed up more of his time for acting classes. Acting was his true passion, after all - all of this proletariat shit was just a sideline gig. At any rate, Kevin, I'm guessing you have some variety of SUV in your driveway, which is why the gnomes fed you that meatball with the probe in it. The first reported symptoms of the probe include nausea, dizziness, and a feeling that one's brain is "turning to Jello." Soon, I'm afraid, the probe will control your brain. Using a small laptop, the gnomes will program you to drive them across the country this summer (their preferred touring season), stopping occasionally at historical landmarks and Dairy Queens. The gnomes enjoy Southern Utah in particular, and are often spotted on some of the lower-impact hikes in Bryce Canyon and at Arches National Park. If you wake up in a few weeks in a Dairy Queen in Iowa with some chocolate-dipped cones and chili-cheese fries in your hands, far more than you can reasonably consume by yourself, you'll know that it's over, that the gnomes have won. Best of luck! Rabbit (Reprinted from The Rabbit Blog: Tuesday, June 01, 2004) 7:06 PM Thursday, January 26, 2012 HOLD THOSE PURSE STRINGS – TIGHTLY! Dear Rabbit, I have been following you blog for a long time and really enjoyed it when I was 20-something. When I first read "Pajamas with feet" I was child-less. A year after, I truly understood what you meant. Up until then, my life seemed vastly different from anything you wrote. Then, I began to believe that you could a good source of advice for me. All this happened and then I was too busy with a baby and thought myself to be a happy, and lucky person. But then, I don't know what happened or how it happened, my world crashed a year ago. I spent half of my life with my partner, been with him since high school. We had a child together after being married for roughly 10 years. One would think we know the inside and out of each other. He went ahead and invested all our savings, and maxed out my credit cards, and had massive debts and invested all of this in some scheme at his work place, and lost it. After my maternity leave, I took a year extra off , thinking we had savings. We had discussions about it too. All through this, he lied to me deliberately. Never explained how much deep shit he put us in. I went back to work in a different place with more flexibility (and of course, less pay) and pay based on fellowship which pays once every six months. Then, finally when his job was gone, last December, all of this came out in bits and pieces. He has no answer to what happened to savings, not paying even regular bills for last 3 months before that, my 6-month fellowship pay. We had our home phone cut off and car didn't have insurance, and behind house payments by 6 months. I was very very hurt and angry. On the one hand, I realize that I should have been more grown-up and taken care of my own affairs much more regularly. On the other hand, I think I deserved to focus more on the baby, especially when we worked years prior to that to make sure we will have that leeway before the baby came. But it is also difficult to explain to anyone why I was so hurt and felt betrayed. People have this easy way of understanding if there was an affair. It was much difficult to explain this loss of trust. My own mom thinks I should support him since he might have become depressed due to the loss of money. How does she not realize that it is not the loss of money and that he fucking lied to me about such massive debt and maxing out MY credit cards? Although his reaction was as if he tried to do the best for the family and that failed due to outside forces. Like it was a perfectly logical thing to borrow from credit card to invest. *head slap* So, all in all, I did what I had to do with respect to finances. I moved from my prestigious fellowship, prepared a budget, consolidated debts, moved to a new city where there are better jobs to both of us, worked from home and juggled the baby to save money on daycare and opened my first personal checking account with a different bank, that is not a joint account. But underneath it, I wonder if I should leave him after our joint fuck-up is fixed (It is 70% fixed now). I hate the new city, the weather, our new place, and hate not having my friends around, especially the ones with kids around same age as mine. I started a blog to write all those dark things anonymously. My mentor advised me to stick together, because it is family and I have a child who deserves both parents. I can see that my kid is very attached to his dad and of all the moves we subjected him to, he thinks his parents are his only friends in this world. Sometimes, I almost think of things being normal and I have to move on by forgiving him and getting over this anger and hurt. But, what if forgiving him only makes him think that what he did was alright? Most importantly, what if I slide back to this apathetic role on finances and being a nice little homemaker and dreaming of second child? It really scares me, Rabbit. What should I do? A Mom Dear Mom, First of all, here's my highly prejudiced opinion, for you and anyone else who's listening: Women should control a family's finances. Why? Because, in my experience, men are more prone to lying about money than women are. I know, I know, tell that to the man whose wife cheated and stole his money, blah blah blah. Almost every single woman I know, myself included, has had a man lie to her about finances. With a few of my friends, the guy was hiding a mountain of debt and singlehandedly screwing both of them without admitting it. Time after time, I've seen it happen. We'll get to the lying part later, because you're right, that is the biggest issue as far as your marriage is concerned, and it makes sense that you feel hurt and betrayed and wary about it. First though, let's talk about your finances. It sounds like you've taken some control, but let me come out and state the obvious: you should be the one controlling every penny, with an allowance from his salary for him. If he doesn't agree to this without protest, then you're right that he has no idea just how egregious his past errors were. He may have been trying to protect the marriage, but in doing so, he came close to destroying it. What really bothers me, though, is where you ask "what if I slide back to this apathetic role on finances?" What the fuck are you talking about? I have so much compassion for you in every other dimension of this problem. But the fact that you can project forward into a future where you stop taking responsibility for money and LET HIM DO IT AGAIN makes me a little queasy. How can you even imagine that? Listen to me very closely: You are responsible for your family's finances now. If things go south, you're to blame. Your husband, who's bad with money and has a lying problem, screwed things up. You didn't know. NOW YOU KNOW. If you let him take it over again, or even handle a single thing until your trust is restored, that's on you. Learn all the goddamn passwords and account numbers, write them all down, put them in a safebox on your desk, take on the whole goddamn job and do not look back. You think you can't nurse a second baby and pay bills? Bullshit! Don't be a loser. Does some part of you believe that managing money is naturally a man's job and he's a pussy if he's not dealing with it? Because that couldn't be less true. Managing money is quite naturally a woman's job. Um, have you ever noticed how spaced out men are? They're distracted, forgetful motherfuckers. I've dated one guy out of maybe 20 who was extremely detail-oriented and careful with money. So your husband fucked up. You take on the responsibility, you let him relax a little, and you're playing to each of your natural talents. But if you keep shoving his failure in his face without doing the job yourself, if you do half of the job and micromanage the other half? You're torturing yourself and him. Why? Do you want to be miserable, or do you want to get on with your life? He's letting you down if he doesn't allow you to handle ALL of it, and you're letting yourself down if you don't commit to it, excel at it, and take pride in it, without this mealy-mouthed horse shit about sliding back into being passive. If you slide back into passivity, then you're choosing misery over happiness. OK. Onward: Lying. I have a lot of compassion for how hard this part of it is. What you need to explain to your husband is that lying will ruin a marriage faster than anything else. My husband used to tell me small lies, when we were first married. He had been married before, and had some idea that you couldn't be married without just appeasing the other person in a kneejerk way while thinking whatever corrosive thoughts about them you wanted to. Understandable approach, considering what a bossy intolerant human I am, right? And yet, if you each have your rotten attitudes thinly veiled by full-of-shit words, what's that? That's not a relationship, that's a domestic drama scripted by Raymond Carver. You have to find ways to tell each other the truth. It's tough right now because you don't have a lot of good will towards him, so he has trouble saying anything true, because he assumes he'll get clobbered for it. My hunch is that you're furious, but it's coming out in these blanket tirades about how he's to blame for absolutely everything in your life. I think you have to continue to say, calmly, even when you're not furious "I'm just so angry at you." He needs to see how it hurts you, how the anger plagues you and you don't even want it to, but it's there. But then when it comes to the present, you have to deal with the facts on the ground rationally without making it all his fault. I'm thinking you're suspicious that he'll never admit that what he did was totally fucked, and that he'll never change. He's suspicious that you'll never forgive him if he ADMITS that he's a big asshole who fucked up and that's a fact, period point blank. He needs to admit what he did, and you need to hear him admit it – all calmly, when neither of you is pissed off. And from that point forward, I think you have to be a little bit softer in your approach. You have to say, "I accept that you fucked up and fucked our lives in the process. You made a mistake. The most important thing is that we don't lie to each other anymore." If he can admit that the lies were terrible for you and him, and commit to not lying, then that's a new marriage right there. You start over. Your part of it: Be someone he doesn't want to lie to. That means not jumping all over him the second he tells you the truth about some small mistake he made. That means not conjuring the fact that it's all his fault every time you're angry. That also means not blaming him for where you live now. You cleaned up the financial picture by pushing both of you to make sacrifices. That was smart. Don't leave him because you're in the wrong city and have no friends. That's really not his fault – it's just where you had to go to fix things. If you blame him for everything that goes wrong with the two of you from here on out, you won't have any relationship at all. He'll believe that lying is the only way to handle you, and eventually he'll start cheating, too – another consequence of living that Raymond Carver double life. As long as he admits that he screwed up and he can talk calmly about the importance of honesty, you should try to open your heart to him and tolerate your new circumstances. Join a mom's group, take a class. Just force yourself to meet some people. Once you patch up your finances, then you can reconsider moving back to where your friends are. You think bailing on him and moving back there alone is the answer? I don't think so. I don't blame you for wanting a quick escape to the despair that you feel was not your doing. But what I see, with limited information, granted, is a marriage that needs to be rebuilt. You've rebuilt your finances but you haven't rebuilt your marriage yet. If he's accepting his share of blame, if he's admitting he was wrong, if he's talking about honesty, if he's open-hearted, if he's ok with you managing the money, if he works hard, if he's a good dad, if you love him somewhere deep down inside, I would not leave him now. Instead, I would cut him some fucking slack. I would ask him to write down every account number and password, and I would tell him that he doesn't have to stress out about money anymore. You love him, that's your gift to him. All he needs to do is be honest and kind and admit his mistakes, and you will reward him with your own honesty, kindness, and humility. Now let me tell YOU the truth: Something about that "what if I get passive again" comment makes me think that now that he's been to blame for a giant failure, part of you is prepared to make him a scapegoat for the next big failure. Don't do that. Set aside your anger, go to him with an open heart and start to map out a thriving future together as a family. You two can be so happy together, you can have another baby, you can have everything you want. You have to stop panicking and blaming and just start believing. I think if you come to him with love and kindness and acceptance of his flaws, a new human being will blossom before you. Please write back with an update (or a rebuttal!). Best wishes – Rabbit 10:24 AM Tuesday, January 24, 2012 WELCOME TO MORNINGWOOD FARMS! People often write to me when they want to dump someone or move somewhere new. I'm a good Move Somewhere New consultant because, unlike many people, I don't believe that you'll just pack up your stupid problems and relocate them to a new place. Many times when you move, you forget to pack about half of your stupid problems. You arrive at your new location and you start unpacking your piles and piles of baggage and voila, half of your problems aren't even there anymore. So easy! And I'm a good Dump Him consultant, because there was a time when I dumped boyfriends at about the same rate that bored rich women redecorate their guest bathrooms. To be clear, in most cases I dumped men who were obviously poised to dump me, even if it might've taken a few more months in my aimless-stoner-in-residence program until the bastards were actually prepared to move out. But can you blame them? That residency had some serious perks. The Morningwood Farms Aimless-Stoner-In-Residence Program Our two-year residency in a ramshackle bungalow at Morningwood Farms affords program participants a rare opportunity to smoke fat bong hits and enjoy late-night televised sporting events while savoring home-cooked meals prepared by the house chef (who is also the on-site housekeeper, therapist and fluffer). Residents are also invited to take advantage of our weekly lecture series. Lectures are given on a wide range of topics, including "Why I'm The Best Thing That Ever Happened To You," "The Countless Ways You Disappoint Me On A Minute-By-Minute Basis," and "Things You Should Never Say To Someone When They're Weeping Inconsolably, Particularly If You Want To Continue Living In Their Ramshackle Bungalow Rent-Free, Motherfucker.") As much as I enjoyed forming these young, impressionable lumps of clay into old, resentful lumps of clay and then releasing them into the wild, where they might continue to productively leech off society and/or elderly relations, eventually I grew tired of wearing so many hats – lecturer, weeper, dreary noodle slaving over a hot stove – and soon resolved to trick some gainfully employed man into creating a Moody-Dipshit-in-Residence Program just for me, preferably with a lifetime term. It worked. Praise Jesus! And without a doubt, the Moody Dipshit Residency is just as rewarding and magical as I hoped it would be. But... I still have to do laundry, which is fucking bullshit. I also have to keep earning money, which I find irritating in the extreme. Another disappointment? I don't get to redecorate my bathrooms as often as I used to dump my boyfriends. Let me tell you about my bathrooms. Yes, I have more than one -- thank sweet Jesus Lord God almighty on high in heaven for that! One bathroom has bright red walls and a black sink and a black toilet. It's exactly the sort of bathroom you'd expect to find in a bar that fancies itself hip but is maybe a little less hip than it thinks it is. You see this bathroom and you think that maybe junkies owned my house before I did. But that's not the case. The rest of the house is pretty normal -- except for the other bathroom, which features dingy cream-colored wall-to-wall industrial carpeting and faux-wood countertops the likes of which used to be found in your finer Hardee's fast food restaurants. Luckily, I don't care about bathrooms. I'd rather spend that $8000 on a three-year supply of great cheeses, expensive boots, good music and beer. (Oops, now I'm in debt.) In fact, I'd sooner install a waterslide in my backyard than spend money on making my bathrooms look less stupid. Those are my priorities, dig? Which brings us to your priorities. Your top priority right now should be to send me a request for advice that has nothing whatsoever to do with your bad boyfriend and/or the fact that you still live in your scrappy hometown among your insane relatives. (Full disclosure: I dearly miss my scrappy hometown and my insane relatives.) Rabbit will answer your letter immediately if you are: * wondering what to do with the rest of your life * wondering what the point of doing anything with the rest of your life is * wondering why so many people speak primarily in clichés * wondering why only dying people, true artists, and Stephen Colbert have anything interesting at all to say * wondering why you're so lonely * wondering how to start your own happy-go-lucky-slut-in-residence program * wondering why your children shouldn't watch 3 hours of television in a row right now while you finish this really good book you're reading * wondering why you never had children * wondering why you never married that happy-go-lucky-slut-in-residence you once hosted, back when you were young enough and hot enough to reside with happy-go-lucky sluts * wondering what to do with your evening * wondering what the point of doing anything with your evening is * wondering why your mother never loved you enough * wondering if you should go back into therapy * wondering if you might not save money on therapy by writing to the Rabbit first Write it down. Send to rabbit at rabbitblog. True happiness and/or complicated, long-winded answers are almost yours! 3:54 PM Tuesday, January 17, 2012 SCUMFUCKERY UNLIMITED Dear Rabbit, I don't know you from Adam but I liked your columns in Suck a very long time ago and I need advice, of both the friendship and the job varieties. Here's the situation: My best friend is studying abroad, professionally (this is not a thing where she is in Spain for a semester because she is 19 and in college, she does this for a living). She sits around and thinks about things she likes to think about and then people are like "you are smart, let's hear some more about these awesome things you like to think about!" I used to be a student too, but I'm not smart enough to do that sort of thing and get people to pay for it, which is the name of the game. So I envy her a lot. My friend is generally smart and has her shit together. I live where I grew up and I have a scumfuck job. If I told you what I did you wouldn't answer the letter or would tell me to fuck off and die right now, so just imagine the scumfuckiest, lowest thing you can do, like being a professional rapist of baby pandas or tying grandmas to railroad tracks, and we'll agree that that's it. Anyway, part of me is like, yeah, I should quit my job. But my job pays well. It doesn't pay money-raining-down-from-the-sky well but it's the best salary that I'll ever get (I know this because I have been in other professions and gotten half the salary for twice the work--also, all the other professions that I used to work in are now dead). This is the only job I've had where the boss is like "buy yourself a new car!" Part of me is like yeah, I want a new car, even though I don't actually earn enough to get a new car and I wouldn't even buy a new car if I did. But I like the idea that someday I could possibly have a new car, even if I have to be a scumfuck to get it. I have my shit together to a certain extent, but not to the extent where I'd trust myself striking out on my own, doing something that doesn't involve a regular salary and an insurance plan. So I think about being a scumfuck a lot. Is anyone really any better than anyone else? I mean, you might have a job making zithers or whatever, but you're still letting bad shit go on and not doing anything about it, right? Letting those baby panda rapists roam free while you're making your zithers? Maybe there isn't anything you can do about it. But in that case, why not just do it yourself and be rich, or at least rich-er? Most people aren't zither makers or whatever anyway,* most people work crappy, boring, soul-sucking jobs, so why not work one that makes more money? There's no reward for working a shitty job that makes less money but is slightly less morally culpable or whatever. Besides, now that I've done scumfuck things, I can't just waltz back into the non-scumfuck state of being because being a poor student or working as a yarn weaver or whatever is more emotionally satisfying than being a scumfuck. I'll still be a scumfuck, and karmically deserve cancer or at least having my legs cut off or something along those lines. This isn't just a question of being kind of dissatisfied with what I do, I'll always be disappointed in myself for doing what I do now, and on some level I think I really do deserve to be punished. Then I think that perhaps I am overthinking this and maybe I'm just making myself out to be the worst person in the world, because I'm bored (my job is also boring, but that's beside the point). Maybe all this stuff about morals is bullshit? On the Hannah Arendt level of things, yes, what I'm doing is wrong. But on the human level, the level of my friends and family, if I quit everyone would just think that I was stupid and start worrying about what they'll say if I ask them for money. This is where my friend comes in. I try to talk to my friend about this. I'm all like, hey, I have something to talk to you about cause we've known each other forever and I want to know if what I'm doing is super wrong or just kind of wrong, but when I try to talk to her about it, she is like ew, that's gross, I don't know anything about your moral problems, I am a student and don't know about that shit. I don't have any other role models because I'm not religious and my family has fucked-up priorities, so man, this is the worst! I just hate her now and want to kick her in the face. Then she starts talking about all the stuff that she's doing that's interesting and new and similar to the stuff that I used to like to do, and then I want to DOUBLE kick her in the face. Then I want to kick myself in the face, for being stupid and petty and wanting to trot around Abroad while I really should be repenting for being a scumfuck. OK, so here's the advice I need: 1. How do I keep doing my job, even though I think what I am doing is wrong? I kind of have to, because I have to eat and stuff, and because I'm a bad person and greedy and don't want to take a pay cut and also I'm pretty lazy, so the odds of me getting anything else that I like better or pays better are really low. I can't think of anything else I'd rather do (that's practical for me to do, at least). Most likely I would just end up being broke and asking various people for money and being called an ugly dyke that nobody wants to be around**, which I don't want to go through again. Plus there would still be scumfuckery in the world, it would just be somebody else who was doing it, and I'm too lazy to actively combat scumfuckery, anyway. So I should keep on keeping on, right? 2. How do I not kick my friend in the face (figuratively)? I want to still be friends with her, because we've been friends for ages, although I kind of wish she wouldn't be friends with me because I always thought she knew her shit and therefore would call me out on my scumfuckery. Also, I really want to be doing what she's doing but I can't, due to being lazy and all that nonsense I already stated. But that's not her fault! P.S. Feel free to suggest anything, I mean, you could suggest I throw myself off a cliff and I'd be like "OK, I deserve that," but skip the therapy suggestion. I've done it already, it obviously didn't work or I wouldn't be writing this letter. * I'm assuming zither-making is a labor of love, although maybe it's done by slave labor in Chinese zither factories for all I know ** this had nothing to do with actual dykery, but was the end result of living in my parents' house while being broke and jobless and trying to have a girl talk-style chat about a Significant Other, they really are not the kind of people you want to ask for advice on anything because you are just going to get a heaping helping of crazy (they are very willing to offer cash for plastic surgery, though) Signed, Overthinking Dear Overthinking, Let me get this straight. Your job is morally reprehensible and it's tormenting you. You live where you grew up, among insane people who don't understand you, are wary of giving you money, and call you an ugly dyke when the chips are down. Your smart, sane friend, who senses that you're defensive and resistant about your shitty job, tiptoes around this issue in order to protect your feelings, because she knows that it would be severely obnoxious for her to tell you your job sucks and you should quit it. Still, she's the one you want to kick in the face. Even though you're obviously someone who's smart enough and charismatic enough to be successful in plenty of different kinds of careers, you are actively choosing the worst possible life for yourself: a hauntingly unethical career with no real future in a town you don't like filled with crazy people and apparently not that many friends and no love. You didn't mention friends other than the far away one. Do you maintain friendships? Do you respect anyone around you? You didn't mention love. Do you ever date? Are you interested in love at all? You didn't mention what all that money actually gets you. Do you get any lasting joy out of the money you make? What in your life brings you happiness? You're afraid of change. You don't trust yourself to handle it well. You picture yourself asking people for money. You have such a defeated view of yourself, of what you're capable of, of what's possible. It's obvious enough why you hate your friend, who approaches her life in the exact opposite way. And look, maybe she's awful. I'm willing to imagine that. But you didn't mention it. Of course you don't want therapy. Any therapist is going to slowly, gently prod you to change everything. The slow, gentle prodding probably makes you nuts, and yet if that therapist said, "You have to get off your ass and change everything. You hate yourself and your life," you'd walk out and never come back. Your friend knows this, too, so she doesn't challenge you. She values your friendship. You value her friendship. Stop pulling her into this – you'll need her for support once you change a few things. You hurt yourself every fucking day, when you get up and go to a fucked job among fucked people in a lame town filled with confused blood relatives. You are keeping yourself in constant pain. Is it really worth it, just to dress well? You think you're going to miss eating really good sushi that much? I don't think so. You think you'll have to borrow money from people constantly? Why? What about spending next to nothing? You think living in a small, cheap place is going to make everything else in your life bad? It sounds like everything in your life is already bad, so what's the worry? This noise about being just as damned a year from now, when you're not working your fucked job, is horse shit. You stop that job today, you're less damned. Period. You're starting over, and building a life that actually has some promise built into it. People sometimes say, of dating someone who's not right for you, "The right plane can't land when the wrong plane is blocking the runway." Well, the right life can't land when the wrong life is blocking the runway. None of the things that your letter implies that you want – love, good friendships, happiness – will be yours until you're living in a way that you feel good about. Right now, you're attracting scumfuckery and insanity and ugliness in your life. When you quit that job, the whole world opens up to you. You have to be brave. You have to change everything. You have to use the internets to find an apartment, a job, friends and love. It's so much easier than it used to be. I don't give a shit what you do next, but you probably have a few possibilities in mind in spite of yourself. Something about going back to school, apparently. Taking out loans, getting a waiting job for a few years, living somewhere cheap – these things will feel great to you, because they mean that you're pointed somewhere. Right now, you're pointed at hell. Start by getting in good shape and saving all your money and researching schools and jobs and towns. I don't give a fuck if you don't know a single person where you're moving. You need to learn to trust yourself. You will join some shit. You will look up a few groups to join, whatever fits. Recovery? Support group for major life changes? Running club? Whatever. I don’t' care that you hate that stuff. You will find a place that's cheap, you will learn about your new town, you will decorate your new small crappy apartment with sentences written on pieces of paper and tacked to the wall: "The future is mine. I am not the same person I was yesterday. Love, friendship, happiness are all waiting for me. I just need to open up and let them in." I know, just reading that is fucking depressing. I don’t care. You need to read those sentences and believe them, every morning. Everything you want can be yours, but you have to get the fuck out of dodge and redesign your whole life. Say goodbye to everyone, pack up your stuff, go, do something new. Do you really want to live the way you're living now forever, and then die? What's the point of that? You haven't given me a single good reason to continue on your current course. So change everything. Every. Single. Fucking. Thing. You can do it. The whole world is waiting to help you down this new path. Magic will start happening, the second you change course. You are at the shining new beginning, you are at the most exciting point in your timeline, right now. Can you feel it? It's breathtaking, it's beautiful. It's all yours. Good luck. Rabbit 6:45 AM Friday, January 13, 2012 THEY HATE ME. THEY REALLY, REALLY HATE ME. Dear Rabbit, My second novel has been getting bad reviews and it's making me crazy. My first novel was widely praised, so I've just been stumped by this. This novel took me 5 years to write. I was so proud of it, but now I'm second-guessing myself. I can't write. I can't think. I feel like I'll never write another word for the rest of my life. I talk to my therapist about it, but she just says the usual things, buck up, get back on your bicycle, etc. It doesn't help. I just hate everything I try to write. I can already imagine the bad reviews in my head. Do you have any advice here? I feel like I'm losing it. Blocked Dear Blocked, I understand how you feel. Writing an online column for Salon for years meant chomping down a generous platter of criticism every single day. There was a time when I'd start to write my usual strangeness, and a voice inside my head would say, "Write something that'll please them on the comments pages. Write something dry and self-serious that won't stir up any shit." And guess what? I didn't want to write something dry and self-serious, so I found myself struggling to write anything at all. There's a difference between learning from criticism and resolving to please more people. You can carefully evaluate feedback and criticism and improve your writing with it. But you can't use it to mute yourself. You can't use it to downshift your talents. Maybe 70% of the people out there aren't all that fond of what you do. But the other 30% may just be unreasonably fond of it. They may not be able to find anything like it anywhere else. They may truly savor your words in a way that they don't savor anyone else's. We're taught to believe that someone else will tell us when we're good enough. Personally, I think I had a few teachers pump me up early on, and I ran on those fumes for a few decades. Not that many people, even when they love your writing, will say that. Plenty of people will tell you what you're doing is shit. And while I'm the first to say that there's an awful lot of crappy writing out there, you sort of have to trust your own instincts regardless. What else is there to do? Watch out when you start to make it, too. Because the more glory you bask in, the more attention you get, the more copies you sell, the more detractors and haters will be out there, waiting to strike. That's part of the deal. Not only that, but if you're really loving the positive attention to an almost unhealthy degree, you can bet that the negative attention will take the legs out from under you. The more freaked out you are by a bad review, the more likely it is that you were propping up your ego with praise and becoming a little more self-obsessed than is reasonable or healthy in the first place. Think of Norma Desmond, Scarlett O'Hara. You live by the sword of vanity and ego, you die by it. Whenever I find myself obsessing about bad reviews or nasty comments, I have to look closely at myself and ask what else is going wrong in my life. Have I fallen into some unproductive ego hole? Do I trust my own voice anymore? There are things you can do to find your sea legs, writing-wise: Read more. Free write for a half hour every day. Force yourself to start 10 new novels, and then choose which one you like the best. But most of all, you have to believe in your appeal as a writer. I don't care how good you are. That doesn't fucking matter. All that matters is that you believe. And that belief isn't up to someone posting in the comments section, or reviewers or your spouse or your therapist or anyone else. You're the only person who can do it. No review, not even a terrible one, changes a goddamn thing. If you're talking about your terrible review constantly, you're reminding people that someone says you suck. You must suspect that you suck, or you'd never fucking remind people of it. But you work hard, don't you? You hold yourself to a pretty high standard. You do believe in your talent, don't you? So what the fuck? Basically, obsessing about a bad review is never about the review itself. It's about something your mom or dad said to you as a kid. It's about some past injury that you have no other way of accessing. It's about some compulsive reaction you have, some voice in your head that says you're worthless. Whenever you mention your bad review, you're really trying to talk about whether or not you're a worthless, talentless sack of shit. And look, to be fair, every writer spends about 10% of their time convinced that they're useless. In my personal experience, the more talented, smarter writers seem to spend more time in this state than the less talented ones. The question is: How do you want to live? Because beating yourself up or whining and winging about your legacy isn't going to get you any more love. It's not even cathartic. You're just hurting yourself. You're repeating some old pattern, where you throw a fit and hope that someone will demonstrate that they love you enough to give you love, to clean up after you, to love you in spite of great flaws. It's pretty narcissistic. I feel for you, though. I've been there. And maybe no one ever did step in and take care of you when you really needed them to, as a kid. So you're still in pain over that. I'm not one to say: fuck you, get up, move on. I know how that kind of grief can overtake you. You deserved to have someone take care of you as a kid. Today, though, you're the one who needs to care. You're the one who needs to say: "Fuck it. I believe in my work. Everything I write will be entertaining and weird and flawed. All I can do is keep writing. I love writing. I sometimes think that I don't, but I do. I love it because I'm fucking good at it. I don't need anyone else to tell me that. I'm going to be a writer for the rest of my life, because I love to write." It's a luxury to write. We're very, very lucky that someone will let us do this. Maybe you'll never get another good review. Maybe you'll write one shitty novel after another. Who the fuck cares? Who are you, anyway? You were supposed to be the next Hemmingway? You were supposed to be the next Updike, the next F Scott Fitzgerald, the next Jennifer Egan, the next David Foster Wallace? Just be who you are. Do what you do. You know what makes even great writers miserable? Obsessing about their fucking legacy. You might not be proclaimed one of the Great American Novelists, but at least you won't be reduced to thinking about your place in the so-called canon. What a horrendous waste of time that is. The world is filled with talented unknowns. Thinking that you're special because your shit is popular or praised? Get over yourself. You got lucky. All that matters is that you believe what you write is special. And that you dare to write great stuff, and accept that half of it will be horse shit, every single day. Write something self-pitying and outrageous and unhinged. Write something melancholy and defeated. Write about a novelist who thought he was special, and then some bad reviews almost killed him. Because ultimately, even if you're anointed the greatest living author, no one else cares nearly as much as you do. You're the only one who really, really gives a fuck. So please yourself. Write what you love. Rabbit 10:49 AM Saturday, November 19, 2011 My paperback comes out on December 6th, the perfect gift for all of the childless whores, Mr. Flinchys, reformed Catholics and grumpy former cheerleaders in your life. I loved the hardback cover, but I think I like this one even more. I'm a little bit worried about the baby who lives right next door to that volcano, though. Speaking of families in peril, I'm working on my first novel right now, which is about a family being torn asunder because, in the parlance of progressive preschools, some of them are making bad choices. As I strain to describe the family's bad choices, I can hear two little girls downstairs engaging in hand-to-hand combat over a green magic marker. The big one loves drawing ladies in fancy dresses who are clean and style their hair, unlike her slovenly mother. The little one likes to draw potatoes with stick legs named "Mommy" and "Daddy." They both love "The Wizard of Oz," dance classes, and scratching each other's eyes out. Potato Daddy is frying them eggs for breakfast, while two bad dogs loudly lick their bowls clean. It's cold and foggy outside, which is truly a blessed state of affairs here in the Southland, where we long for drizzly rains and chilly winds the way the rest of the country longs for unrelenting, tedious sunshine. 7:57 AM Friday, November 18, 2011 JUST CALL ME FRIENDY Dear Rabbit-- Been an ardent reader of your blog for some time now, and thought I'd finally take the plunge and write in with a problem that's been plaguing me since, well, since this young lad realized he was never going to get the love that most sons receive from their mothers, and, as a result, it was most important that he venture out into the Big Wide World as soon as humanly possible, and try to find said love (and, in thereby doing, "validation") in some kind of successful, loving relationship with another woman--indeed, any other woman at all. I remember you wrote, quite a while ago, a post that detailed your encounter with a stuffed animal (puppet?) named "Friendy" (in my mind's eye I see him perched on a car dashboard, staring back at you sitting in the backseat... I can't recall precisely, but it seems like this might've been how your post described your first meeting with the guy). And how, after hearing his name for the first time (from the couple that owned him), you thought, "Wait, what? Friendy? Who names their stuffed toy Friendy?" And then, as you wrote, much like "El Guapo" or any of these other marvelously sticky character names, it just glommed onto you somehow, and you found it impossible not to think about this little fellow (or at least his name, and the notion of it) for quite a while after. Well you weren't alone in this mild obsession, Rabbit. I remember reading this post of yours, years ago, and I must confess, like the most infectious of Mozartian earworms, it's stuck with me, followed me, ever since. (Well that, and, for whatever reason, your keen observation from long ago re: Jonathan Franzen looking like kind of a dick in his book jacket photo for The Corrections. But, hey, considering how unassumingly nebbish he came off on Bill Maher the other week, I think we can forgive him that one.). And indeed, there is a very specific, very real reason I've been unable to shake this idea for all these years. You see, I. Am. Friendy. Allow me to explain. When I first meet a girl, I am never, ever immediately attracted to her "in that way." I mean, OK, sure, I can see or meet women and think, "Yep, wow, she really is quite PHYSICALLY attractive" (I feel like one of the guys from The Big Bang Theory, breaking it down like that), but honestly, physically attractive or not, my M.O. has always been (and this is not by choice per se, it just seems I'm hardwired this way) "Well then--ahem ahem--she looks to be a pretty girl, sure, with a nice smile, etc etc--but let's see who she IS, first... Let's find out more about her, let's see what she has to say, let's see how she actually acts, what she actually does, before we (I seem to be using the royal "we", here) make up our mind as to, irrefutably, whether we actually like this girl or not..." Now, I always thought (damn you logic!) this philosophy actually made the most sense (particularly jibing with my rather Buddhist notion of "If something looks like X, I can almost certainly guarantee you it's nothing at all like X, but Y instead..."--and hence, I never, ever trust first impressions, or appearances in general...), this idea of: get to know the girl, get to really feel out her character, her likes, her interests, her passions, what she wants to do in life, and THEN, if that's all well and good, THEN (and only then) do I start to think, "Hey, you know, I've known this girl for a few weeks now, or a month, or two, or whatever, and I think I really kind of like the cut of her jib... I could see us going places together. Doing things. Having adventures. Making our mark on the world. And being a hot-as-shit, kick-ass, romantic-as-all-hell, 'I'm-so-jealous-of-that-couple-I-want-to-BE-THAT-COUPLE!' couple to boot..." And right around the time all this is starting to occur to me, in my mind, is always, inevitably, without exception, right around the exact same time that said woman in question, is, alas, relegating me to-- THE FRIEND ZONE... (And as we all know, once you've been banished to the Friend Zone, there is never, ever, any hope of escape. Ever...) I could give you countless examples from the past 10 years I've spent in New York City, surrounded by women that, after having gotten to know them for a bit, every now and then, it occurs to me that, "Hey, we'd make a really amazing couple, don't you think?" But generally speaking, the pattern goes something like this: we meet, we have an immediate connection, we spend all this time together, we have so much common, we effortlessly talk for hours and hours, we want to do the same thing(s), in the world, we want the same thing(s) out of life, we're so great together, sooooooo... I say, after making my case (sometimes subtly, sometimes not): "Have you never wondered: why we aren't together...?" ("We're so great together--why DON'T we add sex and love to this equation?") I mean, you're single, I'm single, you keep bemoaning the fact that you're single, all the while describing your perfect mate who, last I checked, just going down the list of "Things you're looking for in a man" obviously seems to be me, and yet, whenever this comes up (it's happened at least a few times, over the past 10 years), said girl in question looks up at me with startled wide eyes, completely flummoxed, and says, "Oh, you're so nice and sweet and sweet and nice, you know, and you're right, you're totally right, we would be so great together, BUT--I can't date you, I know you too well, now. I LIKE you too much. Sooooooo..." (i.e. "You are one of my girlfriends, now, you just happen to be a guy. And in keeping with that, let me tell you all about this total asshole I just had sex with last night...") And that's the end of that. (And no, it's not a looks thing: I feel pretty confident in stating that I'm at least as decent looking a fellow as any of these other guys the girls are hooking up with--clearly then, it's much more of an attitudinal / energetic issue we're dealing with, here...) As I mentioned above, growing up, Mom was never there, never cared, yadda yadda yadda, and so it was always really quite important to me--an absolutely priority, in fact--that I be liked ("LIKED!!") by women. But here's the thing, dear Rabbit: here's the Big Secret that I'm starting to suspect: women don't have sex with men they like. They're FRIENDS with men they like. Women have SEX with men they don't like. (Forgive me, I'm all about the caps today, for some reason...) Every time a woman near me has a rolled her eyes at a man and said, "God, I can't STAND him, what a douchebag, what an asshole, he's so DISGUSTING..."--this, more than anything else in my experience, is the single most reliable indicator that the girl is going to have sex with the very guy she's complaining about, and usually within the next 5 to 10 minutes at that (and I know I'm going to hear all about it afterwards)... And me: I'm sitting there thinking: you know, I don't want to, I really, really don't want to, but I'm actually starting to identify with that Recovering Nice Guy post from the Best of Craigslist way back when... All of my male friends swear that not all women are like this, that I'm just not meeting the right girls, that I need to keep looking, that there ARE good ones out there... (My response: "On some vague, abstract, intellectual level I know you must be right, and yet... I've been actively dating in NYC for 10 years--so, where are they?") All my female friends swear that if I just continue to be my authentic self--my "nice and sweet and sweet and nice" self--the right girl will come along, will magically appear, and we'll live happily ever after... (My response: "But you're dating a horrible douchebag asshole who you complain about incessantly--shouldn't I, then, NOT listen to what you're saying, but instead actually COPY the behavior of the guy you're dating, so I can be like him, and get the girl too?" Of course, as you can imagine, that one always goes down so well, with the ladies...) And so I turn to you, gentle Rabbit--fearless Rabbit. I need your help. I don't want to be Friendy anymore--I don't want to be the nice and sweet and sweet and nice perennial Nice Guy who's surrounded by female friends (many of them beautiful, extraordinary women--though certainly I can't always vouch for their taste in men--and every now and then one of whom I'd love to take it to the next level with, and date) and yet who, inexorably, always ends up trudging home and sleeping alone at the end of the night (and it's clear that as long as I continue to simply "be myself"--as they all recommend--this is what I'm going to continue to get...). But at the same time, the thought of going out and deliberately playing up the douchebag / asshole factor right out of the gate--or what so many women of NYC have oft oh-so-lovingly referred to as "edge" (as in, "That guy has no 'edge'...!!")--really does just make me a little bit sick... (Or perhaps there's some magic sweet spot I need to hit in between? But then, I don't want to turn the whole meeting women / "making a proper first impression" thing into a video game, like: "Shit, almost had it that time--just up the douchebag 2% next time and you'll totally be in the zone...!!") (sigh) Advice? Your friend, Friendy Dear Friendy, I have to warn you, I have sharp claws today. Not because I'm pissed off or hungry (claws for slashing squirrel faces in half, claws for digging up dead stuff to eat). I have the kinds of sharpened claws that a cat might use to injure a shrew, then bat it around in the garden for a few hours until it dies of exhaustion, exposure, dehydration and despair. Sorry about that. So look, I'm going to be honest: I'm already a little bit bored with your exhaustion, exposure, dehydration and despair. I'm particularly uninterested in the ways that these feelings get translated into the excessive use of ellipses, and the repeated, clichéd narrative concerning women who like assholes instead of liking super-swell guys like you. The ellipses and the super-swell-ness of you combine to make me want to tag and track the nearest douchebag. Your golly-gee, "I sure like to get to know a girl's real-live personality before I take it to the next level" thing makes me hungry for the flavor of meat Chiclets that decorate the chestal regions of the most dismissive, high-fiving, preppy fuckwads in the universe, the sorts of dickrats that wear banker shirts and carry signs that say "Occupy A Desk," the sorts who inform you that of course the future wifey will stay at home with the little ones because "someone has to be there to cut up the apples." You, with your nicey-nice whining over all those other guys who get tail, make me want to fuck the enemy. Don't believe the really wonderful hot girls who are your bestest friends, who keep telling you not to change a thing about your super-swell, delightful personality, which is so great for trips to the museum when the hot guy they're fucking can't make it because he's fucking someone else who enjoys condescension and big, fumbly bear hands and tiny pea brains and slick mouths with bubble gum goo stuck in the corners. You should change some shit. First of all, stop it with the ellipses and the all-caps (OK, fine, I do it, too) and the run-on sentences (also guilty there, but that doesn't mean you should be). You express yourself too much, too often, too wordily. You have something to prove all the time. You are hopelessly insecure. Paradoxically, this insecurity, caused by your bitch mother, is what I like about you the most. Let me dare to say that this is highly lovable, and rare: a man who is very, very insecure and knows it. Yum. Delicious. We try so hard to get men to admit that they're insecure, so when we can find one who admits it? Delirium. BUT. You should not express your insecurity via 1) poor syntax in gushing, praise-filled emails to pretty besties, 2) bad Backstreet-Boy style choices like shoulder pads, jaunty hats, annoying facial hair, fancy cowboy boots, 3) know-it-all behavior, 4) envious, wordy deconstruction of assholes who get laid, 5) constant availability and supportive talk offered up to said besties. Instead, channel your insecure energies (Note: Don't get rid of them! Don't deny them! Channel them. We love them. Channel.) into 1) working out your chestal region vigorously (it's soft and squishy, I know this, I just know it), 2) writing your feelings down in some type of journal thing, 3) going to therapy once a week, 4) doing yoga or meditating 10 minutes a day, in the morning, reminding yourself that you're not bad, you're not messing up, you're not doing it all wrong, you're worthy of love, etc. Now, in telling you that you're bad, messing up and unworthy of love, I do run the risk of playing the same role that your bitch mother (and that little voice in your head that stands in for her when she's not around) does/did. This is why good therapists won't tell you to lose the shoulder pads and stop moaning about the douchebags who get laid like a wilty piece of girl lettuce. But, you see, good therapists will also never ever ever ever ever ever get you laid. I will. Instead of waging this nonstop campaign for yourself (Me Fucking You! 2012!), with longwinded talk of how you're a great guy but great guys get screwed over, you need to start leading with your flaws, the real flaws that you fear make you unlovable (but, paradoxically, actually make you more lovable. I mean it.). I know you're feeling angry now, you're thinking, "I don't talk like that, I only did it in my letter to you, Rabbit!" But it's there, buddy. It's always in the room. Trust me. And there's something non-specific about your devotion to these beautiful ladies, too. They know that. You'd be happy with any one of a number of them. That's how it starts to sound when you don't get laid much and you don't have any real standards for whom you'd like to romance beyond "one of my hot lady friends." No one wants to feel like just another chick who's hot enough to fuck. That's the twisted thing about becoming The Friend. (I won't say Friendy because Friendy is meant to be much more comfortingly asexual than what you describe. The whole point of Friendy is that Friendy doesn't even want to fuck you. He's busy, he's taken. He's just your buddy.) When you're The Friend, you expose your own lack of standards and even as you listen, listen, listen and support, you make the other person feel invisible because she suspects you just want into her pants. If you sat there like a douche and said "I want into your pants," she might ascribe more passion to your motives. You might seem a little dirtier in a good way. Instead, you're the pal who would like to fuck her, or anyone, really. That's about as unattractive as it gets. Now, believe me, I know this is not your fault. This is just how being The Friend for too long evolves. Instead of selling yourself hard, praising yourself to high heavens, going on and on about what you know and don't know, (and also saying too much about the many people you'd like to sleep with, which, even if you don't do, you imply, trust me), you need to pull back and be straight about your flaws. You need to get picky. You need to say, "I'm too insecure for you." And then resist explaining. Say, "I overthink everything. That's not your style, and I definitely want to be with someone who overthinks everything, too, or I'll go nuts." See? Your old message to women: YOU'RE TOO GOOD FOR ME. The new message to women: YOU'RE PROBABLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. This is not about hating women, or putting on a front, or being a dick. This is about the truth. The truth is, you dislike these friendy buddy pal hotties of yours. Why? Because half of them aren't even as cool or as thoughtful or as interesting or as soulful as you are. Right? Come on, just admit it. As much as you want to fuck them, only one or two are really compelling enough, and even then they'd probably get boring. This is why the undercurrent of your whole letter is about fucking. You are saying, "I just love girls, I don't think about getting their panties off for sooo long." But underneath that, there's this: "Goddamn it, I want some pussy" thing going on. That conflict? It's. Not. Attractive. Why is it unattractive? Because anyone will do. These women know that. It's also unattractive because it's inaccurate. You are currently advertising the opposite of the truth. You're trying to SEEM confident, but you're not. You're trying to SEEM like a great guy, but in fact you're more driven by fucking girls than the douches who are actually out there fucking girls all the time. I would suggest that you advertise the truth. You are an insecure person. You are currently interested in friends, and also in fucking. You like hanging out with fun people, sure, but you're not going to waste your time on women who have no appreciation for complicated men whose mothers were really fucking mean to them. See? In fact, the next time you try to say that a) you're great or b) you know this about that and that about this or c) you're going to make someone the best boyfriend ever, I want you to try saying this instead: "I don't know. You seem nice, but I have a pretty complicated, neurotic mind, thanks to the fact that I didn't get enough love as a kid. I'm not sure that's really the kind of thing you're prepared to grapple with. And it's good to recognize that, because I'm at a point where I won't waste my time with anyone who isn't really enamored of complexity and deep, deep insecurity and darkness." Please note: these are not actually pick-up lines. They're ways of repelling people who prefer simplicity and empty-headed douchiness. Now let me be clear: Many many people DO prefer simplicity, shallowness. That should be the actual cliché. Women don't like dicks, they like people who are as stupid as they are. And also, really smart women don't want men who make them feel aware of themselves in space. The nice thing about a confident man is that he makes you want to work hard to get his attention. Unconfident men give you too much attention, which just feels undeserved most of the time. I'm not saying that there aren't some serious pathologies in the mix here. But the confidence part – that's not about general-purpose confidence. It's about having a little swagger around your flaws, and giving up on the hard sell. It's about having standards. It's about cultivating your pickiness. And it's about puffing up your chestal region. I know I'm shallow. So are all of these adorable girls you spend time with. Really, your plan is so easy. 1) Work out way too much, with extra attention to the torso. Make your torso exceptional. 2) Get a therapist. 3) Write down your many, many, many feelings instead of telling dumb girls about them. 4) Make a list of the traits you really want in a woman, and don't tell anyone about what's on the list, and don't settle for less. 5) Write down every lame thing about you, that you fear will prevent women from loving you, ever. (Don't include "squishy torso," or "pushover," or "secret pussy hound," because you're going to fix that.) These are, perversely, exactly the things that a smart, good, complicated women will love you for. That and your nice torso. Believe it. Make it your religion. 6) Every single fucking time you meet a woman who seems flinchy about insecurity, turn on a ticking clock in your head. She has a few seconds to prove that she's capable of appreciating a complicated guy whose mom was a fucking asshole, and then you're out of there. No hard feelings, of course. I'm sure she's great. Be nice about it. Just explain that you're probably a little too dark for her. Or she has sort of a reductive mind, but you like a mind that seeks out complexity. That's great for her, though. You wish you were simpler sometimes, but you don't want to waste her time or yours. Genuinely try not to be condescending about it. See? You're extremely nice and polite and honest about yourself, but you're not wasting your time anymore. That's ALL. You think that's what you're doing right now, I know, but you're actually sort of a dick right now – just not the sort that ever gets laid. Don't skip the working out part. I can't say that enough. It will build your confidence. I'm sure you work out some. Work out more. You need a boost. Women you know now need to see you differently. You need to see them differently, too: they're people who are wasting your fucking time, that's all. You don't even like half of them that goddamn much, have you noticed? Be good to yourself. Love yourself. I feel for you, the mean mom thing. That's a tough one, really really tough. It's also interesting and lovable, and you will find a beautiful, smart woman who makes up for it, and then some. You will be adored, truly. I know this. (Read all about what a pathetic needy slob I once was [and how I dug my way out of it] here.) You will be loved from your head to your smelly feet. Milk a little style advice from one of those shallow whore friends of yours before you blow her off forever. Go on a good shopping trip, and encourage said friend to be brutal. Get a haircut that a gay man approves of. Stop trusting your instincts about your body, hair and clothes, and start trusting them about your fucking soul, which is sick of hiding behind your tedious neurotic machinations. Bear your soul, motherfucker. Drag that sick, rotten thing out into the goddamn sunlight, honky boy. Make people squeamish with it. You will be loved, loved, loved, more than you can even handle, once you do. Oh, and then, when some smart woman loves you? It will feel unfamiliar and weird, like she's trying to trap you. This is true because your mother didn't love you enough. When your mother didn't love you enough, not-enough-love feels romantic, and plenty o' love feels alienating. You will need to fight the urge to flee, in other words. (That's where the therapy comes in. Start now.) I happen to know that, thanks to me, you're about to arrive at a land where wise, funny ladies throw their naked bodies at you. Enjoy! Remember, you have standards. Pick that really exceptional, sensitive, funny one. Then the work really begins. Good luck! Sorry about the claws. As any bad mother would say, it's for your own good. Rabbit 9:15 AM Tuesday, October 11, 2011 THE END OF ALMOST EVERYTHING Hi Rabbit. I wrote to you a year or so ago and you were nice as all hell to me. Thank you! I told you about my sister and her history of abuse and my desire to kill our stepfather. Not your area of expertise, I know, but I think Dear Abby's dead by now (dear God I hope she is or it's the goddamn apocalypse, finally!) and I liked your funny tv reviews, so why not entrust you with my family's deepest shame? It made sense to me. Also I loved your book and how forgiving you were to your parents. Unless I really misunderstood that shit. Annie Proulx once told me I was a reader of lesser ability. Which made me laugh out loud. So there's that. Well. At that time, I'd been with my partner for nine years, we were trying to have a baby, I was happily plugging away as a copywriter, and my shit was together. I loved my wife and we had barbecues with our wonderful friends in our beautiful yard. We collected rocks on the beach and were perfectly-matched Scrabble opponents. We drank red wine and loved each other. I thought. Everybody wanted to be us. Including me. Until last March. We came home from work on a Friday evening to get ready to go to the theatre. The theatre, for Christ's sake. I remember mentioning we should get dressed up because it was opening night, and she said she had to tell me something. I thought maybe she didn't have anything to wear (you know how chicks are) or that her mom wanted to go to Azteca for the 900th time in a row that Sunday. If only. She told me she wasn't happy and that she was leaving. Shock. Rabbit, if you'd given me a list of a thousand highly unlikely things that could possibly happen in the course of human history, I would have put her leaving me at the bottom of the list. Hundreds of places under her mom agreeing to go out for pho. Seven months have gone by. Tonight I'm sitting alone in my tiny shitty apartment, watching Paranormal State on Tivo. I still don't know why she left. She said she wasn't happy. That's it. Not happy. She's told all our friends I saw it coming. I didn't. She's living in our house, dating someone she hooked up with on craigslist, being social, being happy. My life has come to an end. I'm just surviving. I've almost driven off a freeway overpass twice. Only the thought of my little nephew has kept me from killing myself. I'm seeing a shrink and taking a cocktail of meds three times a day. My work life is hell, a constant, harrowing effort to keep from screaming at everyone all the time. I've alienated my best friend because of my anger and negativity. I can't imagine loving or trusting anyone ever again. My sister isn't speaking to me. I don't do my laundry. Why am I writing this to you? I don't need advice. There's no advice for me. Keep going, exercise, quit drinking, get therapy. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I'm writing to you because I feel so alone, and sending this to you feels like not being alone for half a goddamn hour. I guess now I can eat whatever I want on Sundays. I can go anywhere and do anything. My life should be a do-over. But I had everything I ever wanted, with the exception of kids, and I'll never get it back again. I'll be 45 next month. There's nowhere I want to go, nothing I want to do. The Vanilla Swiss Almond in my freezer goes untouched. I have no interest in sex, no interest in writing now that I have the time and space. No interest in anything. I'm going to send this, embarrassed at its needy futility, because not sending it would make my nothing feel like less than nothing. So...sorry about that. Best to you and Hen and Bunny. Sinking PS Oh shit! And LinkedIn.com somehow sent you an invite from me. Also to my psychiatrist, my therapist from five years ago, the clerk who runs the convenience store in my office building, my landlord from eleven years ago, and a bunch of potential employers I've sent resumes to in the last decade. Among others. Please ignore it. Christ. Dear Sinking, First of all, I always ignore LinkedIn. I wouldn't worry about the disgrace of that one. Here's when you should worry: your Facebook account is hacked and suddenly your account is asking every single friend of your friends to be your friend (as well as sending strange and embarrassing links and requests to all friends) and when these prospective friends visit your page to see who the fuck you are, you've got multiple postings about being horny, liking midget porn, getting a "vitamin D injection" from your husband, etc. While obviously you have to admire the flair of those who signed up to be your friend in spite of (or because of) these things (130 of them, in my case), there's still that sad sensation that you've just demeaned yourself to thousands of acquaintances and strangers. Ultimately, this is social media we're talking about. These are the interwebs. Taking them seriously, worrying about the impression you're making there, is tantamount to preferring misery to happiness. Likewise with lingering on Twitter on days when you're allergic to other people and their opinions. Dumb. Might as well just drop acid and hop on a city bus so you can twitch and cough and swallow drily among smelly, indifferent strangers. My question is, do you want to be on that city bus anyway? Would you like to be happy or would you prefer to live like a zombie, haunting regular people with your rotting flesh and your hunger and your pain? Why didn't she talk to you, try to figure out how to stay happy within the relationship? Did she try and did she fail? Did she see you as her oppressor? Did she worry that you couldn't handle it? Here's what I think, and it's probably going to sound like the kind of thing you hear from bad parents and bossy therapists who don't love you enough (or can't pretend to empathize even when it's professionally wise to do so), so steel yourself. You say your lady left for no good reason. But she left and you fell apart, and now you say you have no reason to live. Maybe she couldn't see sharing a life with someone who couldn't live without her. I know that's absurd to hear, and I suspect she has her own share of problems, but here we are, and I think you need to hear it. It sounds mean, but it's really not. Because if this is where you land without her, that means you need to be here. Oh god, now I'm really going to sound punitive, but stay with me: This sliding off the map into hell, taking drugs, seeing therapists, sitting alone in your crappy apartment, haunting your old life like the walking dead, telling people you're miserable and it's all her fault (as I suspect you might be)? This is a giant, potent, delicious, bittersweet gift. A goddamn blessing, it is! Existentially speaking, you should be dancing in the streets and thanking the imaginary gods for this one. Your happiness with her was unsustainable, because you are unsustainable. She knew that and bailed. Or she sucks. Maybe a little of both. But let's focus on first principles, here. She doesn't matter. This isn't what your barely-empathizing therapist will say, of course. Professional empathy, bleh. Like cuddling up under a thin blanket of horse shit to keep warm. Yes, I grasp its inherent value, when you have parents with empathy chips missing (goddamn you, Jennifer Aniston, for making this metaphor common fucking usage for me). I am certain that you need the pharmaceuticals right now, too. I'm not shaking all of that off – keep it. I'm just trying to encourage you to disrespect it enough to see the blessedness of this blessed motherfucking catastrophe. I'm not doing that bad thing where you're supposed to thank the Lord for your cancer here. You don't have cancer. You were the one who was emancipated, from someone who didn't love you enough. How good was that going to feel, once you had a baby? I'll tell you what, having a kid with someone who's indifferent is nothing less than torture. There but for the grace of the imaginary gods go I. Meanwhile, your lady becomes like a prosthetic limb, fucking up your gait, because you depend on her and she's not really there. Don't confuse the whole life you built (garden, theatre, Scrabble, red wine) with that person. She suspected you were an Unhappy Person, either because you are and need to address it, or because she has a simpler, less complex grasp of the tragic nature of existence than you do. Who the fuck cares, really? SHE GONE. What you have left is what you always had. Scrabble and red wine are easily transplanted. Yes, I know, you're not in the mood. You miss her. You don't feel like breathing anymore. Yes, you're clinically depressed. Oh and also, you've been abandoned by someone you thought was your one salvation from being an unlovable freak for the rest of your life. Isn't that how it feels? She supposedly accepted you and your damage and now she's with other women. Oh, sure, you play the victim sometimes, maybe, um, because you were literally victimized by your demonic stepfather. Some people are better at Scrabble than they are at appreciating the rich landscape of scars left on a terrorized child. So you're negative. Gee, I wonder why you're so fucking negative? Let's stop right here for a second. Let's talk about American culture, how we feel about negativity and mourning and victimization. How we feel about anger. How we feel about someone in their shitty apartment, not wanting to do anything. The way we look at someone like that and say, "She's a loser, because she's not out there riding her mountain bike and joining match.com and taking a big bite out of the ripe, juicy ass of life with razor-sharp teeth!" You're watching shit on Tivo and your lady is high on life, so obviously you're the asshole. I don't mean to romanticize your suffering anymore than you already are – actually, let's see, you're not hungry, you don't want to do anything. You're not romanticizing shit. But where you are IS ACTUALLY PERFECTLY ROMANTIC. More romantic than Scrabble and red wine. ANYONE CAN DO THAT! You have been stripped of everything. You are a newborn baby, cold and alone and soiled. You hate everything. (Little known fact: babies love everything, yes, unless they're alone and soiled, and then they would kill you with their bare baby fists if they could.) You feel enraged and also empty. You are bereft, adrift. This is the beginning of your golden age, in other words! You have just as little as you had before she left, because she wasn't really into you and your story and the richness of what you have to offer, that's very different and very layered and very complex and not for everyone. EVENTUALLY you will find someone who savors these many, many layers that you have to offer, someone who embraces the light and the dark, the good and the bad and the ugly, someone who loves detailed storytelling and loves passionate confusion and even loves deeply held resentments. You will trust and love because it will be obvious that this person was formed from clay in order to appreciate you. YES, IT HAPPENS. And if they disappear, that means you were meant to walk, on bare feet, over coals. Maybe you're in training to become some kind of messiah? A guru? Who the fuck knows? The point is, you haven't met someone who really matches you yet. YOU HAVEN'T, OK? Maybe she seemed that way, but she was pretending. People do that, you know. They like to match our weirdness so they pretend. Again, with Americans: not a very poetic people. Not fully engaged in the beautiful and disturbing folds of existence. We like salty, buttery things. We like smiles and high fives. Sadness, dark pasts, looming complexities? No thanks! It looks delicious, really, but I'll pass! FUCKING HONKIES, you know? You're a really good writer, smart, great sense of humor. Just tell your story. I know, millions of people are doing it, how cliché, too much work, too depressed. But this is one path out of total darkness, and if you're ever, in your whole life, going to do this, you're going to do it right now. Make this into your thread of hope, because it's productive and it’ll feel good. You can't just watch TV. You can write a little, then watch TV as reward, though (and you'll enjoy the TV that way). A little work, a little reward. That's all you do. Go read Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning." Yes, you can also just break rocks in the yard. You can dig ditches all day. I'd suggest doing something that's just as hard: writing down your story. It's hard. Write an essay about one part of your hellish past, then write another. I'll read them, if you want. Oh, and make sure they're way too negative. Lean into the bad shit that no one likes. Write about the fact that no one likes it. Address the things you feel self-conscious about, in the text. This is how you find the good ideas in the mix. You can always go back and pull back on the darkness – that part is easy. You put too much in, in order to find what's there. See, just thinking about this is exciting. I'm excited to read your sloppy, self-pitying work, right now! It's a good first step. Write down a schedule, right now. Include 2 hours of shit you don't want to do. 1 hour of walking, 1 hour of writing, maybe. Maybe some fucking yoga, with happy people. Blech, poisonous! It'll feel stupid and terrible. You're not even close to being able to do yoga right now! That's overachieving and plus you've always hated yoga. That's why you do it. But I am telling you this: You must do 2 hours of work (outside of your job), that you don't want. Also? ½ hour of talking to someone, anyone. If you have no friends left, write what you would say to someone on an anonymous blog. I would suggest just kissing your best friend's ass and apologizing (even if you don't 100 percent mean it, because Americans demand that we apologize for being what they see as losers. Fuckers! Just do it, though, it's What People Expect) until she/he can stand you again. Then you try to focus on listening to this or that friend talk. Draw them out. It's good for you . Be generous, even though you feel like a shell. You MUST build on whatever shabby relationships you have. You simply must. This is part of your work. So now it's 2.5 hours of work. OK. Outside of the 2.5 hours of work, I want you to indulge in something you vaguely, almost enjoy, like TV, for exactly 1 hour. No more than that. Not three hours of TV, not even on the weekends. Understand? After that, you write in a Gratitude Journal (I know, I know) you write down one or two things you're grateful for: the blanket. The sunrise. The hilariously bitchy yoga instructor. Your sister whom you love even though you're not speaking. The producers of Paranormal State. Something, or a few things. Then, right before bed, I want you reading for 1 hour. If you fall asleep while reading, so be it. If you need to fill more hours, then you can rent old movies you haven't seen yet,1 per weekend, and you can read more. You can also work more, if you feel like it, but mostly I want to see you doing the minimum every day. That's the important thing. Now, granted, I know you don't want any of this. But as long as you're miserable, you should accomplish something. And what you don't know yet is that YOU ARE a red hot nugget of pure potential right now. Because you're in extreme pain, but you're not about to die. This is the one time in your life where you can achieve anything under the sun. This is when it happens. Your whole brain can be rerouted, thanks to this trauma. You can start to feel grateful for the darkness, the bad things that have happened, including this abandonment, instead of just feeling muted and vaguely contemptuous. You can own who you are, and discover glorious new paths to happiness, instead of cobbling out a series of distractions and dependencies that will make you feel almost normal (as you have done in the past). I shouldn't have to say stop drinking, because you know you have to stop drinking. Write about wanting to drink, if the drinking is a major thing. Just don't drink. And if it's a major thing, then add a weekly visit to AA to your list. Above and beyond all of that, don't think too much. Don't focus on her. Don't tell yourself that what you're doing is good or bad. Try to be more like a dog. Smell stuff, look at stuff, observe. When your Bad Head does what it does, stop it. Just say: No, not this. Move to something else. It's best not to indulge the Bad Head, except when utilizing it for work or therapy. It's good to learn how to turn the Bad Head off and simply move. Whatever "cause" you want to attribute to your current state, your Bad Head problems existed before and they're chronic. Notice, I am making a distinction here between poetic, emotional appreciation of and romanticizing of darkness, which is about leaning into the experience of living, and a neurotic, torturous, incessant grinding-of-gears. Don't grind your gears. Don't think of solutions or wonder what your ex is doing or conclude that you're fucked or hate yourself. Give up on circular thoughts ("you're doing this wrong, your writing sucks, look at what a failure you are," etc.) and encourage universal feelings ("I feel sick" "My heart is beating fast." "I feel exhausted and disillusioned" "All humans on earth are doomed to suffer."). Tie your feelings to your overall experience, then write it down. If you're just flogging yourself, shut 'er down. Not with drinks, though. OK, now I have to do my own work. Please follow my very concrete instructions and report back in one week. If any part of my advice sounds like me making the whole thing your fault, because you're bad, because you're damaged? NO. That's your Bad Head talking, that's not me. You're facing a great opportunity, that you helped to create, that's all. You're here because you really need to be here. That's not a stigma, that's you being special, like [Insert Your Favorite Semi-Depressive Artist Name Here]. I have faith in you, Sinking, and I like the cut of your jib, even as it disappears beneath the waves. You were meant to do a lot more with your life, that's all. Some imaginary god recognized that you were hiding away from the world, in your cozy home with your smart-but-not-quite-soulful-enough lady friend, and it wanted to rip you loose and throw you into wilderness, where you'd have to claw your way up a sheer cliff to feel how strong and divine you are. Right now you're laying on the ground, weeping, cold, waiting to decompose. But there is a lot of love for you out there, hanging in the air, waiting for you to breathe it in, to feel it, at last. And that imaginary god is waiting for you, very patiently, and knows that things are about to get interesting. Rabbit 9:15 AM Monday, July 11, 2011 HOW TO BECOME A GREAT WRITER Dear Rabbit, I read your fantastic piece for the NYT Magazine, and as an aspiring writer, I have to ask: where (and how) did you learn to write like that? Aspiring Dear Aspiring, Well, it's a pretty simple process, really. It begins at the dawn of time. BANG! Matter is created out of thin air, while God looks on skeptically, feeling a little bit conflicted about the whole thing. Maybe He should've created something a little different. Rocks? Hurling through the dark void of space? It doesn't seem that promising, and He wants to just erase the whole thing about 50 trillion times over the next 13 billion years. Still, He tries very hard to resist the urge to destroy the universe. He goes out and gets fall-down drunk on boxed wine instead. Eventually, one of the rocks grows some ooze capable of reproducing itself like a really nasty bacterial infection. The kind of ooze that likes the ooze equivalent of Australian-themed steakhouses and Vin Diesel vehicles thrives while the ooze that enjoys the ooze equivalent of underlining lengthy passages in good books becomes vexed and lonely and fails to procreate. This process repeats itself until you have lots of fit, enthusiastic monkeys putting on dusty, bloody versions of "The Fast and the Furious" for screeching crowds, while the director, a self-loathing specimen with very little arm strength and bad vision, laments the contrived nature of his creation in a dark corner of the cave-stadium. One lady monkey disagrees, mostly by backing that ass up into our sad little friend, who at first thinks his elaborate wet dreams have becoming a waking hallucination. Alas, just a few months later, our little friend is trampled to death by a woolly mammoth because he can't see more than a few feet in front of him and he's not very good at running fast or paying close attention to monkey warning sounds around him. In fact, at the moment of trampling, he was picking dirt out from under his monkey fingernails and contemplating the impossible void at the center of even mundane daily activities. Goodbye, sad monkey friend! Several million years later, your parents meet and love/hate each other. You are born, and you love/hate yourself. Your loneliness leaves you with a drive to write. For about 10 years, your writing is just a way of feeling a little less lonely. You write really stupid shit, and you don't like it, but what else can you do when you're feeling sick inside? Eventually, though, you need a job and you can't think of anything that seems worthwhile to do aside from writing. Yes, you are a self-indulgent, self-important little worm of a man, aren't you? I completely agree. So you write a lot. And as you write, you ask yourself, over and over, really, what's the fucking point? Aren't plenty of good writers out there already, doing exactly what you are working so hard to do half as well? Aren't they making next to nothing? Do they have real glory in their lives, or are they just pathetic like you are? Why do you have to be so fucking self-important anyway? Why can't you just be a doctor like your brother, or an accountant like your sister? Then you could afford to eat at Australian-themed steakhouses, like they do! What you want, more than anything in the world in that moment, is to eat a fried onlion the size of your head, along with three cold beers and a small salad with blue cheese dressing and a medium rare steak and a little loaf of that soft wheaty bread with lots of butter on it. But you keep writing instead. In your writing, you oscillate between being bold (which you invariably regret and feel shame over) and playing it safe (which other people seem to prefer, but which puts you to sleep). Even though you get paid (next to nothing) for playing it safe, you are occasionally bold. You persist in enjoying your boldest work much more than your safe work, so you continue down a bold path. Why just cobble sentences together reasonably well? Why not actually say something that's worth hearing? Oh Christ, how fucking self-important, that thought. Yes, I hate you, too. Who wouldn't? You are fully justified in hating yourself with a white-hot passion. Year after year, you consider your work marginal. You fight the urge to destroy it, though, mostly by going out and getting fall-down drunk on boxed wine instead. Many years later, at around the time you start to become painfully aware of the fact that you're weaker and uglier and more feeble than you've ever been in your entire life and that it's all down hill from here, you read something you wrote and you think: "That's good stuff. I'm pretty goddamn good at this, in fact. Maybe. Or maybe not. Probably. Sort of." You feel good about it for about 3 minutes. (13 minutes if you've been drinking.) Meanwhile, God is still looking on skeptically, wondering if he should trash the whole thing and start over. The End! Rabbit 7:34 AM Sunday, June 05, 2011 THE DUMPENING Dear Rabbit, I have read your blog for almost a year, and I have always thought to myself 'I will probably need to write rabbit' every time I read your replies to those in need. In other words, in the back of my mind, I knew that 'disaster' would strike in the near future. I realised tonight that the 'future' is now. I finished reading your book yesterday. I am convinced that I'm stuck in the exact same place as you were during your 'my future husband wouldn't do this' phase of your life. Let me give you some back-story. About a year ago, I met a guy that I thought was interesting, mysterious, totally sexy and above all- totally not right for me. Being the 22 year old girl who decided life was too short, I decided to give this guy a run. Along the way there were moments where I thought we would be together forever, they were rare, but they lingered. For the most part, I just happily went along with the excitement of a new relationship and didn't think to much about the future. I did know that he has major commitment issues in terms of the thought of marriage,but it was not like he didn't want a steady relationship with me either. I knew he was ambitious, but I didn't know he would leave the country a year later. Half way through the relationship, he told me that he wanted to leave the country, without any plans to return. I was shocked, but told myself that a) it wasn't going to happen b) it wasn't going to happen anytime soon c) i would be prepared for it if it did happen. I was wrong in all of the above. The reality is d) he's actually leaving in 2 weeks, I've known about it and tortured myself over what to do. To him, long distance is just pointless, and I agree that it's one of the most painful things to do in a relationship, especially when there are no long-term plans to be together in the future. But in the back of my mind, being the hopeless romantic that I am, I secretly hoped he would turn around and say to me 'no, I think we should give it a shot, we shouldn't just throw away our whole relationship without even trying.' It didn't happen. I guess I'm just trying to illustrate the point that preparing for disaster is really an impossible task. My friends comfort me that 'well at least you saw this coming', but it does not make me feel one bit better. Worse still, I think some of them expect me to be OK with this imminent break-up, BECAUSE i saw it coming. I'm puzzled as to why I'm not doing better this time round too? I knew this was not my future husband to be, because there were just too many incidences where disgusting behaviour was displayed on his behalf, but yet it's still so hard for me to admit that I was so so so foolish to tell myself all these lies, just to feel temporary happy. It's just so sad and pathetic, and I can't believe I've gotten to the point where I see my boyfriend as this self-centered, stingy, uncommitted jerk, yet I still don't have the courage to break up with him before he leaves. I sort of just wanted it to pan out naturally and let the relationship die once he left (romantic again). Here I am, one week to our 1 year anniversary, trying to make the plans perfect, and he does not even give a shit. He's too busy worrying about packing. I have never felt so foolish in my life. Rabbit, how do I recover from all this stupidity? I'm starting to question my own judgment, rationality and intelligence. I cannot believe that I've wasted a whole year of my youth on this prick. How do I gain my dignity back? Yours truly, Foolish One Dear Foolish One, Right now you're suffering because this story isn't ending the way you'd like it to end. You want some control over the ending. You can't stand that he doesn't care, but you're obsessed with the notion that you can do something to make him care before he leaves, and then he'll send you love letters once he's gone, magically redeeming the last year of your life and making it possible for you to sally forth without him. You don't want to spend your life with him, you just don't want to feel like he wouldn't kill to spend his life with you. I'm making it sound a little shallow, but anyone who's felt this way (almost any woman you ask) knows how painful it can be to cling to the last few moments of a doomed relationship, trying to change the way the story ends so that you don't have to pine forever. It's easy, when you're young, to be consumed by the idea that you can control the way things unfold. Your boyfriend's feelings are malleable: you can change them! You just have to come up with the proper strategy. And even if he skips town without much fanfare, you're betting that he'll miss you so much that he'll be heartbroken. He'll beckon you to join him! And you just might, even though... you know he's totally wrong for you, he doesn't care that much (even if he temporarily thinks he might), etc. Your friends aren't all that sympathetic because your suffering is partially self-induced. It's understandable, mind you. I did this kind of thing a lot in my 20s. Many women do. But you're making a choice to suffer right now. You already know he's wrong for you. You're angry at him. You feel like he doesn't appreciate or love you all that much. And yet, here you are, kvetching over the last days of disco. It's time to simply break up with him. That means no teary goodbye (demeaning, anyway, since he won't be crying), no fare-thee-well sex (also demeaning), no pledges to write or send photos or whatever. Just call him and say, "You've already moved on. That's ok. You're not that invested in this relationship, not JUST because you're moving, either. That's ok, I guess I'm sort of over it, too. I find myself wishing that you loved me more, but that's probably just my ego talking. I wish you the best in everything you do." Yeah, sure, I'm oversimplifying it. But when you look back on this in five years, or even five months, you'll oversimplify it, too. You'll say, "I was wasting my time with that guy. He wasn't into me for the last half of our time together, he just didn't know how to get out of it." And then, since you're very young, you could end up doing the same thing again. But look, the next time you have to break up with someone, or the next time it's clear that someone is trying to slowly but surely break up with you, you probably won't take it quite so badly. The shitty thing about break-ups is that, the first few you go through are always insanely difficult, no matter how much you like the person you're breaking up with. After that, you start to say, "OK, I've done this before. It's not that bad." You'll remember that the bad part actually comes BEFORE YOU BREAK UP. You're in the bad part now. Why not just get out of it? You're mourning something preemptively, which is torturous because you're still trying to hang out and be lovable and convince him of something -- your essential value as a person? Fuck, it all sounds so ridiculous, so how do we fall into these traps? Your essential value and appeal have nothing to do with him. You take every slight as a sign that you're not good enough for him. That's why you won't get out of it now. You keep waiting around for some little gift, some little crumb, to make it clear that you do have some value, that he just isn't seeing you clearly. But really, in the big scheme of things, who cares what he's seeing? He doesn't care about you that much, for whatever stupid reason, we don't know. Why bother trying to figure it out? I'm pretty great and I've been dumped at least a dozen times, by all kinds of different men, some hot, some not hot at all, some smart, some not nearly smart enough, some nice, some not all that nice. They didn't like me enough. Why was that such a heartbreak? Because I suspected that there was something wrong with me, that I was, at my core, someone who didn't deserve to be loved. I was too needy and too weird and too talkative and too intense and too critical. And I was a pain in the ass, for sure. Don't get me wrong there. But did I have a big fucking problem that would prevent anyone from ever accepting me for who I was? No. The big problem was my suspicion that I had a big problem, period. Once I decided: "I will only consider men who accept me for who I am, pointy, intense edges and all", then I could fucking relax, and dump people who needed to get dumped. Mostly what I did after that was, I refused to spend time with anyone who encountered the weird or heavy shit I said as inappropriate. When people reject you in little, mundane ways over and over -- well, you either think, "Yes, I suck, I should change this," or you think, "Um, you don't like me. We probably shouldn't spend any more time together." Dump the guy, and feel good about it. Then resolve to spend time only with men who really, genuinely are predisposed to enjoy you, exactly as you are now. That doesn't mean that you can't improve yourself. Just don't get stuck on the idea that you need to be improved in order for someone to love you. The only thing you need to improve is your ability to stand up for yourself and accept yourself for who you are. You are already lovable, believe me. You are already radiant and interesting. Call the dummy, break up, and then step out into a new world and breathe new air. No one else gets to tell your story for you, from now on. Everything gets better from here. Best, Rabbit 4:05 PM all contents © the rabbit blog 2001-2012

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