Heretic Pride

I’m a bit of a fool, and I know that, and I’m at least smart enough to know that, sometimes, David Ruiz isn’t the best person to come to for advice. I get that. I kind of like that, actually, because then, at least things are always kept interesting for me. Once, I actually considered getting myself caught in a situation that I had worked so hard to avoid, simply because I thought it would be a really funny story to tell later on. 

But moving on: I am a fool sometimes in the things I find irresistibly attractive. The other day? I told a girl she couldn’t hate on some people because they had a different taste in music than her. She said “Yes I can, that’s part of hating.”—

SWOON.

 —I consider myself an expert hater, so when this girl dropped a bomb on me like that, I could only be filled with respect, admiration, and attraction. 

I know, ridiculous. 

Once, I think I was ready to ask a girl to marry me because she knew Bob Dylan’s full name. Another time, a girl was drinking straight cranberry juice at a party at my place and, when I asked her why she was refraining from alcohol, she told me “I have a bladder infection” and then winked at me. Yeah, that. The worst? Once, a girl played “Sea of Love”—the Cat Power cover—in my room, and I actually went out and bought a guitar and learned the song and then three years later, when our lives somehow miraculously collided again, I played it for her, and that’s another story all together, really. 

Where is this all leading? I’ll tell you—

I am never going to be in an environment where I meet this many women again on a constant basis in my entire life. College Pt. 2: Colleger. Not only am I in an active environment for new people, I’m also meeting the best of the best. Stanford graduate students? I think it’s safe to say that, if these people aren’t at least going somewhere, they’re driven enough to think they are, and that’s attractive—drive, motivation, mother-fucking life goals. 

To be honest, I’ve never, ever, cared for dating people that I’m not absolutely crazy about. Have I done it? Of course. Sometimes you fall into something and then, whoops!—didn’t know this would happen. But that doesn’t mean I ever necessarily saw any point in it, cared for it, or even enjoyed it more than half of the time. 

Where I and most of my age-group disagree: Dating someone that you already know you can’t see yourself with in the long-term is both stupid and wasteful. That saying?—You need to kiss a few frogs before you meet your prince? Only if you’re an idiot. I’ve heard a lot of people try to explain dating to me as “fun,” in an attempt to legitimize when they’re dating people of obscene mediocrity, and I don’t really understand how being with someone who isn’t even up to your standards can ever be fun. 

Further, I think it’s actually a little offensive to be with someone you don’t respect, in that, this person could be the best possible match for someone, but isn’t for you, and whenever you talk about him/her in person, those words don’t match who that person could be for someone else. Just because I’m not madly in love with a girl doesn’t mean that girl isn’t perfect for somebody else, and it doesn’t give me the right to talk poorly of her. And this isn’t to say that I’m actively insulting her when talking to my friends, but it’s still very disrespectful, in my eyes, to not be able to express elation for someone whom I have, in some essence, masqueraded as being important to me. If she isn’t as important to me as our status assumes it to be, then it is my responsibility to take away that status. 

I’ve always been in love with the idea of marriage, and I know that I put far too much stock into, but I think what I see in it is something so astronomical and wonderful, that I can’t help but find supreme adoration—it’s just too big. I especially enjoy marriage because it is one of the best ways to say “There is something more important than me in my life.” I like the idea that we’re vessels meant to carry bigger things than we can understand, I like the thought that I can fill inside of me something that I can never express because the millions upon billions of years of evolution still have yet to develop a set of words that can even start to resemble, let alone fit, what I have inside me. I like the image of a union that can only be separated by death. I want to paint one in which we’re above it. 

Now the tricky part—I obviously have standards that may exceed logic, whoops, my bad. But whatever, I’ll get hit by that ton of bricks when I meet it. The bigger problem is that I want a girl who obviously has her life on track, who wants to do something, to be somebody, to, dare I say, want to change the world, at least in some small way. Awesome! So many women at Stanford want to do just that! Unfortunately, we all want to do the same thing, and are so driven that I find it difficult to expect anyone to give up their dreams to be with somebody. I want to be a journalist. What if my wife wants to be a structural engineer? Do I seriously have to expect her to drop what she’s doing and travel with me while I report around the world? Does she expect me to take a boring 9-5 job so I can be close to her, in a more stable environment? 

My friend told me that the goal isn’t to ever get in the way of someone’s life, but that eventually, you just become one another’s life, and things work out mutually. 

I’m on a bigger internal trip than usual. This one is a god damn doozie.