all null and void
Tonight a friend asked me if I’ve thought about OKCupid as a way to meet people.
“That’s funny,” I said. “I actually woke up thinking about OKCupid this morning.” Specifically, I woke up with Lloyd Dobbler in my head, in 2014, saying “I’m not gonna meet somebody like Diane Court on OKCupid."
And that’s perhaps not fair to online dating. I know people who have met amazing people through online dating. It’s not that you can’t meet amazing people that way. For me, it’s more that the meeting, rather than the person, would be different, would be too foreign to me. I don’t want the expected questions that come when two people meet with the clearly established purpose of evaluating each other as potential partners.
In Say Anything…, Lloyd says that he’s "looking for a dare-to-be-great situation,” a situation that exists outside the expected structure that his guidance counselor wants to usher him along. (She ultimately accepts that Lloyd is living his life in a way that’s true to him and simply says, “Hang tough, Lloyd.”) I can’t see myself playing the online dating game, existing within the expected social boundaries of what it means to “date” someone. In his introduction to A Lover’s Discourse, Wayne Koestenbaum says that Barthes “valued nuance not because it destroys the system but because it escapes the system.” Lloyd says “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed.” In his own way, he wants to escape the system. In my own way, I do, too.
Koestenbaum also writes that “Barthes, like any writer, wants contact.” And I thought again of how Adam in Only Lovers Left Alive sends his music out into the world, though he cannot fully take credit for it, because, like any creator, he wants contact. I want contact, too.
Kafka said that books “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” but so much “art” and entertainment today functions not to serve as the axe for the frozen lake but to reinforce the ice, to distract us and insulate us from a depth of emotion and thought. And some people get very upset when you suggest that perhaps having real thoughts and feelings about entertainment (or about anything) is an okay thing to do. Masha Tupitsyn has written that “There is simply no place for real, and therefore radical, heartache in this culture.” Lately I’m so frustrated by all the distractions and all the pretending, the pretending we’re okay when we’re not.
People sometimes tell me that I seem younger than my age because I have missed out on years of my life. And maybe there is a kind of youthful rebellion in me now. But I’m not young in the sense that I’m now the person I would have been at 25 if things had been different. I am who I only ever would have been having spent as much time isolated from myself and from others as I have. That’s what’s brought me here. That’s what’s made me see the world this way. Maybe that’s what I’m now rebelling against. The years are all there. I carry them with me.
Notes
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