EVERYONE'S QUICK WITH THE ADVICE
Everyone's got advice for me these days. One secret of life that I've had to learn painfully is: be careful who you listen to. People are quick with bad advice even if they mean well. Good advice comes from people who've thought a lot about what you're thinking about. You usually have to ask for it and be in a position to take some bruises. Ex-girlfriends, oddly enough, are good to solicit from. Especially if you've pissed them off at some point, which I inevitably do. During that period of hating your guts, they will have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about what a horrible person you are and cataloging everything you've ever done wrong in your entire life. This on a level that you're worst enemies couldn't even begin to compete with. Lucky for me I'm pretty much a total jackass. So there is a weath of intricate knowledge of my personal inabilities and flaws shared by a variety of women. Furthermore, because I'm so used to taking critisism from them, I don't mind it. And they love you, you know, that's why they were so mad at you in the first place. I went to lunch with my ex-girlfriend who has a quick british sense of humor and her friend in the industry I'm thinking of getting into (the industry that is, not her) At some point, they discussed me in third person as if I could only understand american and not british:
Friend: Do you think he's good enough?"
Ex-girlfriend: "Never stopped him before."
Ha ha. Hmmm, I thought it was funny if you don't. I'm very happy to have friends and girlfriends that are frank with me. I would be ten-times the rich kid asshole I am otherwise.
I'm beginning to think there are lots of secrets to life; people just don't talk about them much because they're terribly disappointing. Always negative-- what you can't do--they're hard to appreciate. One of them is that the only people who really know what they're doing are lunatics and cowards. The rest of us are never quite sure. Scholarship isn't a process of gaining more knowledge as much as it's a process of increasing the visability you have over the endless knowledge that you don't have. Kind of like funnels in high school. You get down on your knees and start gurgling away but, just as you start to make some progress, some asshole from your track team sneaks his hand up starts pouring in a forty of budweiser. You drink until you lose it and blow beer all over the kitchen. I remember Chris Perry's face up there holding that beer with a crazy grin. He was out of his mind on LSD with pupils like shotputs, cocking his head around like a madman.
I wonder what happened to him and Andre. I wonder if high school kids still get fucked up and jump down elevator shafts. I wonder if they narrowly escape death by ripping all the skin off their hands. I doubt it. Probably they just stick to being obnoxious. There is a standard set of mannerisms developed by rich kids to deal with the world around them. It's employed heavily by those in upper class private and boarding schools. The recipe is 8 parts narcisissm and 2 parts Pseudoliberal-Aristocratic-Racist-Intellectual-Soliloquy. It's a long term but it has a catchy abeviation. It refers to a charatible contibution that one makes spending a part of their time thinking about other people. This might include serious policy discussions between 16 year olds on what's wrong with the black community. Or frequent contributions to a general algorithm used to size people up by race and geographic background. Paris Hilton, for instance, went to a somewhat infamous school for rich kids that couldn't get into the more difficult high schools in new york. When she was on SNL, Tina Fey said they took bets as to whether Paris would ask a personal question of anyone on the cast like "how are you?" Most of them lost when she suddenly took notice of Maya Rudolf and asked, "is she like italian?" Poor Paris. We are more similar than I'd like to believe. I'm sad she's such a dick. I think women like that meet so few female friends or boyfriends that challenge them, so they become cowards and totally isolated from a support structure of role models and criticism that would promote more dynamic behavior. I blame her wimpy boyfriends and crummy immature idiot entourage who let her act that way. Who don't care enough about her to risk their relationship with her to question anything she does. It is good to have friends that care about you enough to speak to you frankly and who you care about enough to listen to. I'm very happy to have them.
Posted on Friday, November 17, 2006, 03:08 PM