Musings on Life and Love

Photo by pmarkham via Flickr

I decided to do the online dating thing again. And when you’re doing the online dating thing, you get to fill in these little packets of personal information. One self-description that I invariably put down is that I can be a bit of a smart-ass. I put this down because… well, I’ve been known to make girls cry on the first date, so I feel that sufficient warning must be granted to all my potential suitees.

Not too surprisingly, I often get matched up with other alleged smart-asses. What does this mean when I meet up with these women then? Mostly, we spend a large portion of our time barbing back and forth in a proverbial urinating contest to see whose gluteus is more intelligent.

Unfortunately, some people don’t seem to understand the difference between being a smart-ass and being an ass. Hey, I admit it. I’ve had issues with it myself. (Again, I made a girl CRY. On a FIRST DATE.) To be perfectly honest, I still lapse occasionally… er, frequently from smart-ass to plain ass.

You see, there’s a fine line between sarcastic and insulting. Being sarcastic takes intelligence, a quick wit, and some amount of lucky timing. Being insulting is just the clueless person’s substitute for true sarcasm.

Let me tell you about an evening recently spent between two self-professed smart-asses:

We’re hanging out in my room. She happens to have a bottle of Diet Coke with her. She opens the bottle, takes a sip, then drops it and spills a decent amount of soda on my bed. I groan and say, “alright, whatever. Here, get up. I’m gonna change the sheets.”

She says: “Don’t worry, we’ll just cover it up. You can change them in the morning.”

I say: “Ummm, I’d rather just change them right now. I’m not gonna sleep on a Coke stain.”

[SSSSSKRRRRRRTTTTTTZZZZZZZZZZZZ] Time out. Read more…

Reader Jaberkaty made a great suggestion for an article:

What can friends and family do when someone close to them is going through a bad breakup?

Honestly, I don’t have the answers, and I doubt that any single person can. So, this might be the perfect opportunity to get some reader feedback….

For those of you who’ve been through a particularly emotional breakup, what are some of the worst things someone can say or do in an attempt to make you feel better? For me, “don’t worry, you’ll find the right person” always smacks of hollowness. I know they’re trying to help, but… honestly, no one can possibly know that I’ll ever find the right person, so those words mean nothing to me. Read more…

Image by Craig Jewell

Now that I’m single again, I’m trying to retrain myself to do the dating dance. I went on a first date recently, and the evening was pretty much a conversational ballet, the two of us daintily tiptoeing around each other with loaded questions and politically correct answers in an effort to figure out if we might actually like the other person.

As our dance continued center stage, behind the curtains I was casually browsing through my playbill of potential dealmakers and dealbreakers. Whenever she mentioned something about herself that I shared, my heart fluttered for a second, and I checked one off on my “good list.” Whenever she mentioned something about herself that I didn’t share, my heart muttered, and I checked one off on my “bad list.”

That night, I stumbled upon a Mega-Dealbreaker. One that superseded all the lesser, mere mortal dealbreakers. Within the rabid pack of dealbreakers frothing in my head, this one quickly established itself as the Alpha:

I can’t be with an absolutist….

I’ll be blunt. I hate camping.

I was born in Taiwan. In the glorified village that I lived for the first four years of my life, hot water and electricity were available—but by no means consistent. Spiders and geckos permanently punctuated the plaster walls, and plenty of venomous wildlife lurked outside. My father clawed our way up the socioeconomic ladder, practicing at three different hospitals and sleeping four hours a day. Because of his ambition, we were able to immigrate to the United States. By the time I was in high school, we lived in a plush Southern California home. Read more…

Image by El Nuko via Flickr

I hate breaking up with someone. I really do. Call me spineless, tell me to grow a pair, I get it. I just have this need to be the “good guy” (or at least deceive myself that I am). I feel better when I’m the poor sap who gets broken up with, rather than the a-hole who dumps an awesome girl.

To that end, I’ve come up with some pretty devious ways to get a girl to break up with me. When I’m ready for the relationship to end, but don’t want to pull the slow fade or just stop calling altogether (remember, I’m trying to be the good guy here), these devastatingly effective strategies get her to do all the dirty work for me:

I “become” excessively busy at work

All of a sudden, my workload surges exponentially. I’ve been given a new project. Or, I’m the newly-appointed office firefighter. Either way, I have to start working late most nights.

After a few months, she starts wondering if work matters more to me than she does. It does, of course. What she never realizes is that I don’t actually have to do all this extra work. I only take it on to get out of hanging out with her. In some cases, I don’t even have any extra work. I simply spend my late nights getting reacquainted with WebSudoku. Read more…

Image by Clipart.com

As the cliché generalizes so succinctly, breaking up is hard to do. Especially when you don’t know if it’s the right decision….

I would like to announce that I just experienced the most civil breakup in the annals of breakups. Seriously, if Gandhi and Mother Theresa had been an estranged couple, they wouldn’t have done a better job. It was a mutual decision, we both knew it was probably inevitable (even though neither of us wanted to admit it for some time), and we parted ways with the promise that we wouldn’t lose touch with each other. No bitterness. No hurt feelings. Nothing bad to say about each other. No sense of rejection or betrayal.

Easy, right?

Of course not. The breakup was still an agonizing, gut-wrenching decision. Because, when it came to making that decision, we didn’t have a reason to break up… or a tangible one, anyway.

The truth is, we got along incredibly well. Read more…

Image by Clipart.com

Friendship. It’s so many wonderful things. It’s caring. It’s affection. It’s laughter and inside jokes.

It’s also the last bastion of the freshly dumped. After all, how many breakup conversations include the phrase, “can we just be friends?”

So why do we go along with such a “request”? Are we that desperate? Do we get so attached that we’re willing to settle for friend status just to stay in someone’s life? Take the story of Jackie:

Jackie is a strong, independent woman (usually). She is also the victim of a recent breakup. Robert, her live-in boyfriend of three years, has decided that he needs time to “figure things out.” He still wants to be friends, but he needs to take a break from the relationship.

Jackie reluctantly accepts this arrangement, and the two continue to see each other once or twice a week, essentially at his discretion: she makes herself available when he calls, and only sometimes is he available when she calls.

Months pass, and Robert still hasn’t figured out what he wants. Though Jackie makes a few half-hearted attempts to date other men, not surprisingly, these dates go nowhere. She continues to pine for Robert.

So, why does Jackie put up with Robert’s wishy-washiness? Perhaps a better question is, what is going on inside Jackie’s brain…. Read more…

The status update. The tweet. By whatever name the latest social networking site calls it, it’s how we all keep in touch nowadays.

Unfortunately, some people just don’t seem to understand the process, posting updates that are completely inane or completely inappropriate.

If you suspect that you might be such a person, then I am here to help you out. The next time you have a potential comment you’d like to post, just follow these simple steps:

First, read through each criterion below, and score points as noted. Then, tally up your results. If your final tally is above 0 points, post away! If your final tally is below 0 points… mmmm, yeah, you might want to go ahead and rethink the comment.

Okay, here we go:

1.      The comment has something to do with a stroke of luck you just had: +2 points

2.      The comment has something to do with a stroke of genius you just had: +10 points

3.      The comment has something to do with a stroke you just had: +30 points

4a.    The comment has something to do with your last medical visit: +3 points

4b.    Your last medical visit was to a proctologist or gynecologist: –10 points

5a.    The comment has something to do with a bodily function: –5 points

5b.    Your last bodily function was performed accidentally: –10 points Read more…

Jake, Dennis, Lisa, Evan, and Krista, circa 2001

After Jake’s death, his family and friends were left in shock. (Although… that last sentence could probably be filed under the category of “excruciatingly obvious.”) In the months that followed, I found myself grasping for lessons I could learn from all that had happened. It was my way of finding therapy.

That was when I had to face the truth. That was when I realized I hadn’t been completely honest with myself. Because, when I said “that guy was my friend”… well, that wasn’t quite the case anymore.

Yes, Jake had been my friend… years ago. But the truth was, we had drifted apart. In the year leading up to his death, I spoke to him maybe five or six times. When we talked, it felt just like the old days, and I never stopped referring to him as a friend. But, we were nowhere near as close as we had been.

It was only months before he died that I started seeing Jake out swing dancing again (that’s how we knew each other). I remember thinking how cool it was to catch up with him. But I never made much of an effort to renew the friendship that we used to have. That was the extent of our reconnect: we saw each other at the random swing dancing venue, and we hung out and we chatted. Read more…

Katie, Dennis, and Jake, circa 2000

Today would’ve been Jake’s 30th birthday. As a tribute, I’d like to share a lesson I learned five years ago….

On April 4, 2005, at approximately 1:00 AM, my friend Jake Faust was pulled over by police officers while driving past the Golden West Hotel in downtown San Diego. What happened over the next few minutes remains a controversy to this day, but somehow, Jake ended up getting shot three times in the chest. The incident was reported all over the local news.

Two nights after he was killed, Jake’s friends arranged a candlelight vigil in front of the hotel. Unfortunately, I had been out of town, and by the time I found out about Jake, I had already missed the vigil. Still, I wanted to pay my respects, so I raced back to San Diego and headed downtown on my own the next afternoon. As I drove past the hotel, I could barely make out the small gathering of flowers and candles on the sidewalk. They seemed an almost insignificant speck in front of that massive building. Even after I parked, even as I walked towards the memorial, it all looked so small and trivial. Many of the candles still burned, and there were plenty of people walking along the sidewalk. But no one gave those flowers and candles more than a passing glance. Read more…

Image by Clipart.com

Have you ever wondered if other people think you’re annoying?

We humans have this innate desire to classify things. We like to pigeonhole each other and make snap judgments. We segregate into extroverts versus introverts. Right-brains versus left-brains. Movers versus shakers, crazy-haha versus crazy-cuckoo, innies versus outies, prongs versus sockets. We have Rorschachs and Kierseys and Meyers and countless ways to catalog each other. Even online dating sites have started pinning their matches on personality typecasting.

I, for one, am concerned that the Stereotype Express is about to barrel itself over a cliff, sending us all to a fiery, prejudiced death. Of course, I still want to hop aboard. So I am hereby announcing my own system of human classification to the world. I call it the Dennis Hong Annoyance Scale (DHAS). Using this ingenious assessment, we can now quantify how annoying people are based on two simple factors: how hot they are, and how hot they think they are. Read more…