After all I can, to name a few, write, draw, design, paint, photograph, speak in accents, show the occasional fast-wit, punch through a wall, fence, read handwriting upside down, cite lines from movies with near perfect accuracy, operate a manual transmission, and as recently history will show...cook a pretty darn good turkey, among other things.
And despite my opinions to the contrary, I suppose it can be said that I am a hopeless romantic...
...with hopeless being the operative word in play.
If there was one thing I can concede from the failure of my marriage it is that when it came to trying to be romantic, for lack of a better term, I sucked at it. It's not anyone's fault but mine, really, and I do feel bad because my ex-wife wanted a husband who could provide that for her. But I was never really a guy who saw the point, to be honest.
It's not that I didn't want to try to be. I just wasn't good at it because my perspective on things for a very long time has been cynical, somber and realistic, and you can't really be a romantic if your outlook is so stiff and jaded. A romantic is an idealist at heart. They don't worry about what might happen because the mystery of the journey is the fun. It's a very Taoist outlook, actually, wherein the goal is understood, but if it is not attained then the process itself has still been worthwhile because it's allowed room for discovery, new understanding, and hopefully growth.
The first time I ever went on what could truly be classified as a "date" was my sophomore year of high school when I took my friend Stacy to Prom. Now being high school, awkward doesn't begin to describe what asking a girl you like can be first time out, and at first I didn't plan on it. But my brother Patrick and friend of ours, Nicole Morgan, decided they were going to give me a hand.
So we go to the library, where Stacy is busy studying. The plan is hatched and Nicole goes in, gets her, and comes back out, where Patrick and I are waiting. They then do this little back and forth routine and the time comes for me to ask. Now I was nervous as hell already, and being in actor at that time, I did good job adding a touch of histrionics to it in the delivery.
But ask I did, and accept she did. And while we never were anything other than good friends for the rest of the time we knew each other, it was the first time I just let myself go in anything resembling a romantic direction and it worked.
Fast-forward 20 years, and I'm sitting in the office of my college newspaper, hanging out with my friend Katie and when she gets up to go grab something from down the hall, I get an idea. Where it came from, to this day, I honestly Do. Not. Know. But I grab my iPod out of my coat, plug it into one of the computers, load up a song and when she comes back in, I summon up whatever chutzpah I have and ask if she wouldn't mind having a dance.
And I don't dance. Not one bit. I make Elaine from Seinfeld look like Fred Astaire.
But she accepted, I hit play, and for the next three minutes and change, that's precisely what we do in the middle of the office. It was silly, we laughed a bit and I'd like to think we both had a measure of fun, and when it was done, we went right back to what we'd been doing before.
I know there is a bit of a romantic in me somewhere, crammed into a corner of the house in my head dominated by more practical and taciturn emotions. It's there, nonetheless, and if anything it's just incredibly out-of-shape. Like "chop off the side of the house and airlift it out" out-of-shape.
I have to believe it exists for the same reason I cling to the idea that there enough love out there in the world for everyone. Even someone who's been so incredibly and seemingly.irreparably backwards as I have been for so long.
Because if it doesn't exist, then really, what is the point of wanting to be a better person in the first place?
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