After a brief holiday hiatus, we’re back!
We hope you all had a fun/great/safe/fun New Year.
Now now now, fair warning, this entry is going to be all over the place. My brain is a bit fried from too many flutes of champagne and/or designer drugs over the past couple of weeks, so bare with me.
Word on the street is they’re making a movie version of “He’s Just Not That into You.” Last year, a female friend had me take a glance at the book in order to confirm that the male proffered information within it was true. It was straightforward and to the point without abandon, and she was kind of bewildered when I confirmed her suspicions and said, “Yea.”
Now, 21st century romance is in this sordid, really fucked up state of existence, and I have a few ideas why. Playing the game as a 20-something-year-old always seems alot harder than it is when you’re actually up to bat, but I’d blame the whole thing on this sort of detached, escapist romanticism cultivated by popular media over the past 20 years.
Kids born in the 80s were subjected to these unrealistic expectations of how male-female relations were supposed to pan out at a really early age, and the culprit is Disney movies. Shit made the 90s generation soft. Now, fairy tales, romantic movies, TV shows, etc. have always had their place in popular culture dating back to who-knows-when, but what sets the Disney generation apart is that a) it was when TVs became prominent enough to take over the role as the surrogate parent, and b) they were the first generation to have a shared media conciousness through it. The majority of young women I’ve encountered between the ages of 19-28 has had a good chunk of their romantic perceptions altered by what I’d like to call “The Little Mermaid Complex.”
The Little Mermaid Complex has, for better or worse (definitely worse), infiltrated several aspects of the collective female conciousness even if you’ve never seen the movie. In the movie, you’ll notice that Ariel’s fate is 99% predetermined by the various crustaceans, sea gods and octopussies around her– in short, she has no free will. Every aspect of her life eventually gets taken care of, whether that be finding love, standard of living, etc. There’s the illusion that she’s in control of what she’s doing (such as when she goes out and collects forks and stuff), but really, these actions have no baring on the eventual ending.
In essence, the plot can be summed up as so:
Ariel wants to be part of another world, and through magic is able to become a part of it. However, her real identity is masked, and it’s only when this reality is revealed that you realize she can never really be what she wants to be. Then of course, magic changes everything again, and she lives happily ever after, feet and all.
And the poisonous thing about all this is that it creates this faux illusion in our own subconciousness that everything will eventually be taken care of– the illusion that things just “fall into place.” And that’s not really how it works. The little Mermaid complex is prevalent, in everything from the money mongering juggernaut of Twilight to the even more juggernauty Sex and the City.
(Now now now, for those of you who think this entry is getting a bit too mysoginistic, you can just replace Little Mermaid with Aladdin and Sex and the City with Entourage and you’ll have the same thing, except for dudes.)
What I’m also saying is that the current state of dating for 20-something-year-olds is hard because it’s been wired into our hardware that we need to find prince or princess in order to be happy, which isn’t the case (if only because there are only so many princes and princesses to go around).
We all wish we could be Aladdin or Ariel, but the fact of the matter is we’re probably more like the crab or the monkey. This subconcious self-ordained protagonism is making alot of people really lonely, desperate, or places them in unfulfilling or damaging relationships if only it’s because it’s what they’re supposed to be doing.
Gag. Magic isn’t real. Do work son. Do work.
// Caspian De La Sanchez
Magic is real though, listen to Michael Jackson….
To go through life knowing that there is not that perfect someone for you, kinda seems like a dull drum ho hum lifestyle. Okay, look… magic killed a president, and granted there are fundamental differences between fictional magic and real magic you can’t denounce its viability. Without the hope of magic sparks between people, and the magic that happens when the lights go out, humanity ceases to care. We lose our passion and drive to want what we can’t have. Sometimes that means putting ourselves in bad positions, and bad relationships; but without the action of doing so we can never really learn from it.
I personally know of a fellow who went into a relationship hoping for the best to turn out, put all of his chips in the basket, and all of those other metaphors, but things didn’t turn out as planned. Sure his life/sleep/friendship/gaming/cycling/guitarrrring stumbled and faltered, but without taking that leap he would have just had another regret or what if.
Yes his story is exactly what you were talking about, and his story clearly mirrors what you have spouted. But without the hopes of magics… hearts wouldn’t flutter when amazing people enter the room, or at least the air of amazingness.
So I leave you with this… why not keep those magical powders, and bougie drugs; after all, all they do is bring you to that awesome state where true love, false hopes, and hopeless dreams run rampant.
After all, what is humanity without heartbreak?
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