SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

WARNING: Great minds think alike. Apologies to Subway Gal for creating this back-to-back chick flick theme of the weekend. I guess we’re all just that into it.

Last Saturday, I found myself in the apartment by myself, bored and craving a hearty meal with some good company. It seemed most of my friends had Valentine’s Day plans. Lame.

Hungrier by the second and unwilling to settle on eating my last can of Trader Joe’s Turkey Chili, I called up my friend Will, formerly known as the bro-crush, to see if he wanted to grab dinner and some drinks. No answer. I sent a quick text, because I hate leaving voice mails. No response. At 12:05 a.m., approximately one pint of pork fried rice and six hours later, Will finally called me back.

“What UP, son?!?!” he asked.
“I’m watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Hulu and eating peanut butter from the jar. What are you doing?”
“Hot. Nothing. I’ve been watching TV all night. I’m bored as hell. Want to get drunk?”
“Uhhh. I don’t know. I’m kind of tired. I called you like six hours ago, when I felt fresh and motivated to make bad decisions.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just…I dunno. It was Valentine’s Day.”
“So?”
“Well, the thing was, you called right after I’d seen this commercial for He’s Just Not That Into You, and it kind of made me think. I thought it best that we didn’t communicate on Valentine’s Day. You know, so I didn’t give you mixed signals or anything.”
“Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah. Though now that I say it out loud, it sounds kind of. . .dumb. So, you wanna get drunk?…Don’t puss out on me…”
“No, you know what? YOU pussed out on me…which, by the way, is an absolutely vile expression. I hope you have a horrible, lonely, boring night.”
“You getting your period?”

I hung up in a fury.

I’ve tried to ignore He’s Just Not That Into You in the same way that I ignore Valentine’s Day. I don’t have a problem with it, I’m just not that into seeing it. But this little exchange with Will was too much.

I’m all for a good chick flick. Personally, I’m a bit more into the period pieces, specifically Jane Austen adaptations. But anyone who reads the blog is probably aware of my Dirty Dancing obsession and I have a particular soft spot for Bridget Jones.

However, lately I’ve been beaten down by the modern-day chick flick. It’s giving me a bad name. I’ve run into more than one guy that assumes because I’m a young single girl in New York, I must pray to the god of Carrie Bradshaw every night. “Oh, you write for a blog? So you want to be like that girl on Sex and the City, right?” Not exactly.

And now, I encounter a close friend concluding that I must be starved for love due to the universal message of female insanity that He’s Just Not That Into You promotes.

An important disclaimer: I can’t really speak to the movie and whether it’s good or not because I haven’t seen it. However, now that I’ve been directly affected by its commercial presence, I can’t help but feel resentment towards it. I don’t like being cast into a role. Even the title of the movie bothers me, because it’s directed towards You, the viewer, rather than self-contained. It demands that I relate to the subject matter, telling me that this movie is about myself just as much as it’s about the characters on the screen.

To be fair, I cannot forget the third party involved in this situation: Sir William. He’s Just Not That Into You isn’t entirely to blame. It’s worrisome that this friend of mine was so easily brainwashed by advertising. While he’s never going to go see the movie, he bought into the message of the 30 second ad: girls are complicated, misguided, desperate creatures and all of them want to find true love right now. Which in turn led him to find a new, disturbing message: she’s just that into you.

Great.

It makes me wonder if there are many guys out there that are drawing similar conclusions. This could account for the erratic behavior that MMB described in her post this week. Still, for me to make that kind of generalization about the male population would be hypocritical, given that I’ve just spent hundreds of words writing this declaration of female individuality. At the end of the day, this comes down to a single conflict between two people: Will and me.

Will called up the next day, slightly confused, and asked if we could please “still be friends.” I said that “I’d like that.” We met for dinner that night after the Valentine’s Day Massacre. That evening was filled with a kind of magic that only exists between two people who finally admit to one another, “I’m just not that into you.”

Photo Credit: WashingtonTimes.com