I wonder if my insatiable desire to do absolutely nothing is damaging my stock in the dating world. I was alarmed when I told a friend that I had grown too lazy to even thrust my hips during sex. Don't get me wrong — I enjoy going out, meeting people, having crazy nights. But I feel like legions of endorphins are released in my head when I accomplish that wonderful state of immobile nothingness.
This past weekend, it all became clear. My friend Shannon had her mom, aunts and sisters all in New York. She had to host them, take them around the city (a trip that included all the girls going to a male strip club called Hunkarama), and hit all the overcrowded tourist spots. As the weekend approached she complained about how horrible it was going to be. My response was:
"I'll make sure to text you my hourly schedule which will consist of sitting there doing nothing and deciding whether I want to get up to retrieve the remote or just watch whatever happens to be on out of sheer laziness."
"I hate you," she replied.
Seems like a lot people in my life want to achieve the state of nothingness. I grabbed breakfast with a friend of mine this past weekend whose roommate often has his girlfriend over. After breakfast, my friend stated: "Ugh, I just want to go back to that apartment and stare at the wall." His girlfriend was busy for the day, and he needed to return to his long forgotten mistress: Lady Nothingness.
I grabbed a coffee, and returned to my apartment to do a list of nothing things that consisted of reading about volcanoes, WWII, and the Roaring '20's on Wikipedia, watching History Channel and college basketball, and catching a terrible '80's movie on TNT in the middle then watching it from the beginning again right after. Wonderful nothing activities.
It dawned on me that if I had a girlfriend, maybe I'd be sprawled out on the couch in front of a Van Damme movie like a walrus. The sprawling would be fine, for I admire the graceful walrus. But, have you ever seen those walrus colonies? They are foul — they take over the entire island and create a foul odor. No, the key is to be a solitary walrus.
The evil thing in all of this is that men need to attract girls. Girls are smart and rarely shallow. They will go for a guy who doesn't look good if he has a good job, good head on his shoulders, aspirations—basically the opposite of the guy who seeks nothingness. I guess I need to figure out how to not look like I want nothingness. Maybe I'll walk around with roller blades in hand, wear a t-shirt that says I ran some 50K race (for charity too), keep a ticket stub from a SoHo art show in my pocket, or even stay in the café instead of getting my coffee to go (grumble).
Before you say I'm a total loser (call me a loser, but not a total loser), let me make a case for my quest for nothingness just being me enjoying my freedom. When I am lying there watching tv, or surfing the net to learn about the migratory patterns of grey reef sharks, it is symbolic of me doing what I want to do when I want to do it. I don't have a girl telling me to meet her somewhere, I don't even have the pressure of a pending call (remember—that nice portal of empty time as far as the eye can see?)
Perhaps I am not ready to have that girl be part of my life, or maybe I haven't met that girl. Every guy I know who has a girlfriend tells me how jealous they are of the fact that I can achieve emptiness whenever I want. Of course there are great things about being in a relationship, but maybe right girl right time isn't here yet for me.
Right now, I am living by the immortal words of Otis Redding:
"Sitting on the dock of the bay....watching the tide roll away...sitting on the dock of the bay...wasting time..."