Okay, I started this early, and I'm ending it early. I'm not ending it because I can't keep it up, but I'm bored with it. By now, you get the point: Things can be so lame they're cool, because The Coolness Continuum dictates that.
And those "things" can include things that aren't things at all, like "emotions." Emotions are not things. They're... something that's not a thing. And the lamest of all emotions is "love."
Love is, as an emotion, hopelessly lame. There are cool emotions, emotions that are just perfect the way they are. Like "happiness." Nothing wrong with "happiness." Happiness is awesome. Happiness makes you laugh along with the thing Joel McHale says. Happiness lets you walk with a bounce in your step. Happiness helps you get out of bed in the morning.
Another cool emotion? Righteous indignation. This one is underused, but is very cool. It's not just being indignant, but righteously so -- so smack, there, in the description, you've got permission to feel indignant because your indignance is righteous.
How do I know, by the way, that "righteous indignation" is underused as an emotion? Because there's no emoticon for it. Emotions that don't have emoticons are underused. But I will remedy that because I will create an emoticon for "righteous indignation." And here it is:
: ( )
That shows the befuddled, astonished feeling that we get when someone does something to cause our righteous indignation -- say, when you have two people who pull into an aisle in a parking lot and it's one of those parking lots where the spots are not slanted, so you can really enter from any direction, but one of them (let's say me, just for kicks) is going the opposite of the conventional, accepted way, and the other one (let's just say it's another driver) is going the way most people go through this parking lot, and both of them know that's what's going on, and a guy is pulling out of a spot, and this lot is very crowded, and the one driver who is going the wrong way (hypothetically, me) lucks out because the backing-out-guy angles his car to cut off the other car (hypothetically, the other guy), and the backing-out-guy might have done that just because the first driver (remember, we're pretending it's me and this is not based on any actual incident in any actual Best Buy parking lots on any actual recent weekends) pulled his car a little close and made the backing-out-guy pull the other way, so then the first driver swoops in and takes the spot in defiance of everything that's good and decent in our community, and that first driver justifies his behavior by, in his mind noting that he's got twin Babies! with him, which he thinks if the other driver saw the other driver would understand why everything just happened that way.
Let's say that happened. The other driver, hypothetically speaking, could feel a righteous indignation over his loss of the parking spot, and could send a furious text message with the righteous indignation emoticon:
: ( )
And that would be a great way to handle it. Much better than hypothetically flipping off the hypothetical me.
Back to love, which is totally lame. Totally completely lame. Look at Valentine's Day, if you want to know how lame love is. Lace. Pink. Hearts. Poems that don't rhyme, or, worse, poems that do rhyme but still suck. Love inspires the lamest part of humanity to rise up. To rise up, look around, and declare things in overblown hyperbole, usually with glitter and roses thrown in. We fall in love and we start acting as lamely as humanly possible, so lamely that we really should be forced to live underground for years until the shame blows over.
We write poems or songs or, if we're not creative ourselves, we make mix tapes. Or used to. Nowadays, I expect kids just IM a playlist to the person they're "hooking up" with. But in the olden days -- 2004 -- we expressed our love creatively and very very lamely. Like this:
Note: I know that was not made in 2004. That's just an example of how people used to display "love" in days of yore.
I was no better than Barry Manilow -- and no worse. I play piano and guitar and have done things like played "True Companion" for Sweetie on the acoustic guitar. I also made her a mix tape of songs that expressed how I feel about her and included "True Companion" and also, for some reason, included "Bell" by Mike Oldfield. (No, I can't explain that to this day.) I made a card for her with photos of us together and inspiring quotes about love from famous philosophers like Jennifer Aniston.
Love brings out the 13-year-old girl in all of us. Love makes people in their teens draw hearts on their binders and in their 20s write their own atrocious wedding vows and in their 30s pick out cards with snippets of songs in them and in their 40s renew their atrocious wedding vows and by the time they're in their 50s, they know better and stop that stuff. Love makes us pretend to like "The Hills" or makes our Sweeties hypothetically try a shot of tequila at a Hard Rock Cafe in Puerto Vallarta even though those Sweeties don't really drink all that much and certainly don't want to drink tequila. Love makes us do dumb things like that.
And those "things" can include things that aren't things at all, like "emotions." Emotions are not things. They're... something that's not a thing. And the lamest of all emotions is "love."
Love is, as an emotion, hopelessly lame. There are cool emotions, emotions that are just perfect the way they are. Like "happiness." Nothing wrong with "happiness." Happiness is awesome. Happiness makes you laugh along with the thing Joel McHale says. Happiness lets you walk with a bounce in your step. Happiness helps you get out of bed in the morning.
Another cool emotion? Righteous indignation. This one is underused, but is very cool. It's not just being indignant, but righteously so -- so smack, there, in the description, you've got permission to feel indignant because your indignance is righteous.
How do I know, by the way, that "righteous indignation" is underused as an emotion? Because there's no emoticon for it. Emotions that don't have emoticons are underused. But I will remedy that because I will create an emoticon for "righteous indignation." And here it is:
: ( )
That shows the befuddled, astonished feeling that we get when someone does something to cause our righteous indignation -- say, when you have two people who pull into an aisle in a parking lot and it's one of those parking lots where the spots are not slanted, so you can really enter from any direction, but one of them (let's say me, just for kicks) is going the opposite of the conventional, accepted way, and the other one (let's just say it's another driver) is going the way most people go through this parking lot, and both of them know that's what's going on, and a guy is pulling out of a spot, and this lot is very crowded, and the one driver who is going the wrong way (hypothetically, me) lucks out because the backing-out-guy angles his car to cut off the other car (hypothetically, the other guy), and the backing-out-guy might have done that just because the first driver (remember, we're pretending it's me and this is not based on any actual incident in any actual Best Buy parking lots on any actual recent weekends) pulled his car a little close and made the backing-out-guy pull the other way, so then the first driver swoops in and takes the spot in defiance of everything that's good and decent in our community, and that first driver justifies his behavior by, in his mind noting that he's got twin Babies! with him, which he thinks if the other driver saw the other driver would understand why everything just happened that way.
Let's say that happened. The other driver, hypothetically speaking, could feel a righteous indignation over his loss of the parking spot, and could send a furious text message with the righteous indignation emoticon:
: ( )
And that would be a great way to handle it. Much better than hypothetically flipping off the hypothetical me.
Back to love, which is totally lame. Totally completely lame. Look at Valentine's Day, if you want to know how lame love is. Lace. Pink. Hearts. Poems that don't rhyme, or, worse, poems that do rhyme but still suck. Love inspires the lamest part of humanity to rise up. To rise up, look around, and declare things in overblown hyperbole, usually with glitter and roses thrown in. We fall in love and we start acting as lamely as humanly possible, so lamely that we really should be forced to live underground for years until the shame blows over.
We write poems or songs or, if we're not creative ourselves, we make mix tapes. Or used to. Nowadays, I expect kids just IM a playlist to the person they're "hooking up" with. But in the olden days -- 2004 -- we expressed our love creatively and very very lamely. Like this:
Note: I know that was not made in 2004. That's just an example of how people used to display "love" in days of yore.
I was no better than Barry Manilow -- and no worse. I play piano and guitar and have done things like played "True Companion" for Sweetie on the acoustic guitar. I also made her a mix tape of songs that expressed how I feel about her and included "True Companion" and also, for some reason, included "Bell" by Mike Oldfield. (No, I can't explain that to this day.) I made a card for her with photos of us together and inspiring quotes about love from famous philosophers like Jennifer Aniston.
Love brings out the 13-year-old girl in all of us. Love makes people in their teens draw hearts on their binders and in their 20s write their own atrocious wedding vows and in their 30s pick out cards with snippets of songs in them and in their 40s renew their atrocious wedding vows and by the time they're in their 50s, they know better and stop that stuff. Love makes us pretend to like "The Hills" or makes our Sweeties hypothetically try a shot of tequila at a Hard Rock Cafe in Puerto Vallarta even though those Sweeties don't really drink all that much and certainly don't want to drink tequila. Love makes us do dumb things like that.
So love is lame. And it's indescribably cool at the same time. A while back, I mentioned that "love" is treated differently from all other emotions in that only with "love" do we say stuff like I think I'm in love rather than just I'm in love.
Why do we say that? Because we elevate love to a pedestal, as something different from all other emotions. We put Love way way up there above all the other emotions -- Love rules over all the anger and sadness and confusion and contendedness and Galatication (an emotion I made up specifically to describe how it feels to be watching Battlestar Galactica keep getting awesomer and awesomer while also in the back of your head knowing that it's going to end, and wanting it not to end but also wanting it to not eventually stop being awesome and suck because it went on too long). Love is something better, something lamer but also way better.
Love is better because it makes us do all that silly stuff. Nobody ever wrote a poem because they got mad over a parking spot. No one in the history of the world has sent someone flowers simply because they were feeling confused. We don't have a whole holiday to celebrate optimism. A box of candy does not convey respect.
Love is also better because it's more complicated. Anger is anger. Get mad at your boss because he insists, periodically, that you stop blogging and do what he pays you for, and that anger will be identical to the anger you feel when you realize that The Boy has beaten you to that last piece of leftover pizza. Different in degree, maybe, but the same feeling.
Love's not the same. Love differs. The love you feel when you go into your Babies! room at night to check on them and they're sleeping all splayed out like little starfish and you can't help yourself from reaching in and patting them on the head because you just want to touch them one more time that night, that love is completely different from the love you feel when you turn around to look down the aisle at the woman who in a few minutes will stop being your girlfriend and start being your wife. The first love is soft and cuddly and breathing quietly. The second love takes your breath away with its beauty and makes you tear up even years and years later when you write about it on your blog. Love is complicated that way. And cool that way.
And love endures. All other emotions fade away. Eventually, you'll forgive The Boy. Eventually you'll forget about the parking spot. But love is in it for the long haul. Love can overcome any number of socks left on the floor. Love rolls over little bickering arguments and flattens them into a mere bump in the road. Love ignores all of those things in the long run and makes you promise a trip to Paris. Love makes it easy to stop for milk on the way home and while you're there grab a couple of muffins because you know she likes those kind of muffins and they're there. Love would make you throw yourself in front of a train for that other person, and if you'll do that for them then love makes it really easy to let them watch their TV show.
Finally, Love is cool because it is the only emotion that operates while you sleep. If you've ever woken up to realize that in the middle of the night you rolled over and hugged the person next to you, then you know what I'm talking about.
That wraps up Lame/Cool Month; Monday, TBOE will be back to business as usual. But to recap, we covered all these topics: Nonfiction books about lame/cool topics., music that was brought back by the two greatest forces for social change in the world, e movies your kids make you watch but which turn out to be pretty good because of the songs in them , TV shows you wouldn't guess are so cool, guys who should be on TV more, superheroes who can't be gotten rid of, food that defies Newton's laws, this guy, places you can take the whole family and they'll actually have fun, and my ideal pet, this other guy, a song you can't live without hearing.
And The Banjo.
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