The Dream Girl is Just a Fantasy And Other Narcissistic Musings
These things ring false to us because we want these stories to be grounded in reality. There's supposed to be a difference between gritty dramas and sci-fi fantasy. Watching a movie like "Lord of the Rings" - we don't ridicule it (well, maybe) because an army of giant trees fight demons because we've come in with a ready-made suspension of disbelief.
With that said, I think it's time we began treating romantic comedies - especially all of Judd Apatow's recent movies - with the same suspension of disbelief. Because let's face it - Seth Rogan's pudgy slacker-nerd scoring Barbie doll blonde Katherine Heigl in "Knocked Up" is about as realistic as a hairy midget using a magical ring to save the world from evil.
This situation is about as realistic as Michael J. Fox going back to 1985 in a Dolorean.
I say this partially from personal experience and I say this because one of those experiences happened last night. Let me explain.
Jen was my dream girl. But when I say that, I don't mean that in the distant idealistic way that some people talk about so-and-so celebrity being their dream girl. I mean she contains about every quality I could hope for in a girl (except liking me, I suppose). She is smart, witty, outgoing, down-to-earth, beautiful in an understated way, and successful in a creative-type job. She lives in the Wicker Park/Bucktown area so she has somewhat of that hipster/artsy indie rock girl appearance and persona...the thick rimmed glasses, long straight bands, kitchy accessories, etc...but she doesn't have that same condescending elitist attitude and forced quirkiness that a lot of hipster girls wear like a cloak. A vintage store bought cloak at that.
She also is the lead singer of an all-girl punk rock band (think The Donnas) yet she mostly played introspective acoustic folk. And despite the hipsterish exterior, she seemed very much still the popular sorority girl who loved the Dave Matthews Band. It was this very intriguing dichotomy about her.
Anyway, there she was...this beautiful, wonderful puzzle...and then there's me - broke, marginally employed, chubby, scruffy, only a modicum of personal style...Sure, I suppose I have a certain kind of roguish charm (and self-depreciating humor!) but I'm not exactly dream guy material myself. But I convinced myself somehow that I had a chance after our first conversation...I guess because we ended up talking for an hour straight and seemed to have a chemistry of sorts.
That's when the flights of fancy took me....After we set up our first date, I halfway considered wearing fake glasses because she mentioned she liked guys with glasses and beards. But no, I was going to just be myself. I was firm on that. Instead I came to the bar dressed like an 80's metal guy with a long blonde wig, black bandana, aviator glasses, studded leather gloves - I was sort of a poor man's Axel Rose/Bret Michaels. Wearing this to a hipster bar in Wicker Park may sound ridiculous but then again I once wore a skeleton mask all day to college classes in the middle of April and once wore a suit and a baseball cap and ran around my apartment complex with a friend, yelling at people to stay away from Yams. So, maybe I was being myself in a way.
Luckily, she seemed to be amused when I walked in and sat next to her looking like i just got done covering "Look What the Cat Dragged In" in a bad cover band. She ended up talking for three hours and then topped off the night by playing Ms. Pac Man and enduring an assault by a drunk couple...one who kissed my hand, the other who tore off my wig and urged me, ironically enough, to "be who you really are."
Alright, I kind of wish I was Axl Rose circa 1987
I thought to myself, "Wow, if this girl endured all that and wants to see me again. Maybe I hit the jackpot!"
Soon I found myself thinking about her a lot and doing ridiculous things/gestures I thought she might find fun or charming. I quoted her randomly for a cover story I was writing about feng shui of all things, thinking she'd love to see her own name in print. Also, when I heard that she was working on redesigning Marshmellow Peeps, I sat down and sketched eight funny "Chicago Peeps" including ones wearing Cubs hats and drinking beer for Wrigleyville and others decked out in S&M gear for Boystown. My plan was to give them to her the next time we'd meet up.
When she asked me to rewrite her band's bio...I spent almost 2 hours carefully crafting something I thought she'd like. I even ended up taking a blank postcard I'd gotten from Alaska last summer with Muskox's on the front, and wrote her a note from the perspective of the Muskox's...as if they were sending her a family portrait. I know.
These aren't things I usually do for women I barely know, I'm actually infamous for a lack of romantic gestures, but these was just something about her- some ineffable quality that compelled me to be so compulsive. Speaking of which, I wore a suit and tie at the Rainbow Club for our second date - this I explained with that I had "grown up a lot since our first date." Went to rehab, cleaned up, got an adult job. And again, this date seemed to go extremely well, too. She thought my Peep drawings were great, and she bought me drinks because of the band bio I had written earlier that day.
John Cusack's ridiculous romantic gestures always work because he's John Cusack.
At the same time, I had no real idea how she actually felt about me except that she seemed to be having fun, she stayed and hung out with me for several hours and at the end of night as we were parting she asked me if I wanted to go to a party with her on Saturday night. I was excited she asked me, but I had a fantasy baseball draft that night so I was able to talk her into hanging out Friday night.
Friday night was my one of my most favorite dates ever. We met at her place for a glass of wine and then walked to the Trap Door theater to watch a play called The Beastly Bombing a religious and political satire so over the top it makes Saturday Night Live look like Sesame Street. I was in high spirits though...I blurted out "Phil Collins!" when the masked actor warming up the crowd asked for nominations into some sort of musical enshrinement. During the play, we both could not stop laughing at this middle aged Jewish looking guy who had this stunned, slack jawed expression frozen on his face for a good 15-minutes during the ridiculous anti-Jew parody song.
We journeyed back to her place and got ridiculous....playing a "Roxanne" drinking game, I played fake guitar to "Easy Lover" and other hijinks ensued until it was time to hit the Pontiac Cafe for Live Band Karaoke. (Which is amazing by the way)....We danced and sung the lyrics to other people's songs while we waited for our own - she growled "Everlong" by Foo Fighters while I broke out a raucous version of "Interstate Love Song" by STP.
The bar was about to close around 2 a.m., so I escorted back to her place...where I admit there was some awkwardness as we stood on her front porch while I tried to conjure up the courage to possibly kiss her. But she said she was tired and sort of dismissed me and I was left hanging. But she still insisted I come to her party tomorrow night if I got back into town in time.
Alas, the next night after my draft I texted her and didn't hear back. I called around midnight, and again no answer. The next night I emailed her about the feng shui article and a few other things. (Yeah, playing cool is not my strong suit I'm told). What had happened? It was almost all I could think about on Monday (It doesn't help that I have a nearly mindless job). Finally late Monday I got a call from her and her voice sounded...strange. Tired. Distant.
She had gotten the postcard and realized we had wildly different ideas about each other. "I didn't feel a spark," she said without going into too many details. But once she did, I had one of those quick flashes of memories...sort of like the end sequence to "The Usual Suspects"...where I could piece together the signs that she felt that way that I chose to be blind to before....The fact that I was contacting her 90 percent of the time...the fact that she hurriedly hug me to preempt a possible kiss...the fact that when I sat down on her couch she deliberately didn't sit next to me and instead sat in a chair several feet away....the fact that she didn't want to do a duet in karaoke despite my insistence. It all made sense now.
A spark. A spark is all she wanted and here I was trying to set a fucking forest fire.
Of course, it was probably just because I'm a fatass.
Either way, I'm blaming Apatow.
Jen was my dream girl. But when I say that, I don't mean that in the distant idealistic way that some people talk about so-and-so celebrity being their dream girl. I mean she contains about every quality I could hope for in a girl (except liking me, I suppose). She is smart, witty, outgoing, down-to-earth, beautiful in an understated way, and successful in a creative-type job. She lives in the Wicker Park/Bucktown area so she has somewhat of that hipster/artsy indie rock girl appearance and persona...the thick rimmed glasses, long straight bands, kitchy accessories, etc...but she doesn't have that same condescending elitist attitude and forced quirkiness that a lot of hipster girls wear like a cloak. A vintage store bought cloak at that.
She also is the lead singer of an all-girl punk rock band (think The Donnas) yet she mostly played introspective acoustic folk. And despite the hipsterish exterior, she seemed very much still the popular sorority girl who loved the Dave Matthews Band. It was this very intriguing dichotomy about her.
Anyway, there she was...this beautiful, wonderful puzzle...and then there's me - broke, marginally employed, chubby, scruffy, only a modicum of personal style...Sure, I suppose I have a certain kind of roguish charm (and self-depreciating humor!) but I'm not exactly dream guy material myself. But I convinced myself somehow that I had a chance after our first conversation...I guess because we ended up talking for an hour straight and seemed to have a chemistry of sorts.
That's when the flights of fancy took me....After we set up our first date, I halfway considered wearing fake glasses because she mentioned she liked guys with glasses and beards. But no, I was going to just be myself. I was firm on that. Instead I came to the bar dressed like an 80's metal guy with a long blonde wig, black bandana, aviator glasses, studded leather gloves - I was sort of a poor man's Axel Rose/Bret Michaels. Wearing this to a hipster bar in Wicker Park may sound ridiculous but then again I once wore a skeleton mask all day to college classes in the middle of April and once wore a suit and a baseball cap and ran around my apartment complex with a friend, yelling at people to stay away from Yams. So, maybe I was being myself in a way.
Luckily, she seemed to be amused when I walked in and sat next to her looking like i just got done covering "Look What the Cat Dragged In" in a bad cover band. She ended up talking for three hours and then topped off the night by playing Ms. Pac Man and enduring an assault by a drunk couple...one who kissed my hand, the other who tore off my wig and urged me, ironically enough, to "be who you really are."
Alright, I kind of wish I was Axl Rose circa 1987I thought to myself, "Wow, if this girl endured all that and wants to see me again. Maybe I hit the jackpot!"
Soon I found myself thinking about her a lot and doing ridiculous things/gestures I thought she might find fun or charming. I quoted her randomly for a cover story I was writing about feng shui of all things, thinking she'd love to see her own name in print. Also, when I heard that she was working on redesigning Marshmellow Peeps, I sat down and sketched eight funny "Chicago Peeps" including ones wearing Cubs hats and drinking beer for Wrigleyville and others decked out in S&M gear for Boystown. My plan was to give them to her the next time we'd meet up.
When she asked me to rewrite her band's bio...I spent almost 2 hours carefully crafting something I thought she'd like. I even ended up taking a blank postcard I'd gotten from Alaska last summer with Muskox's on the front, and wrote her a note from the perspective of the Muskox's...as if they were sending her a family portrait.
John Cusack's ridiculous romantic gestures always work because he's John Cusack. 
