Pretty Lady's Super Power

Darlings, Pretty Lady is feeling much better, though still a bit woozy. Thank you all for your very kind messages.

Having been wandering in delirium-land for the better part of a week, Pretty Lady hasn't quite caught up on all her desultory blog-visiting; thus she regrettably missed dear Brucie's Mutant Super Power Roundup. She is so disappointed that she is going to share her own personal super power with you now.

When Pretty Lady was in second grade, there was a boy in her class who spent most of the school year under his desk. Once when he was absent, a sanctimonious girl made an officious speech about how 'we all need to help Terry,' which made no difference in how we treated Terry upon his return. Terry, even then, seemed beyond help.

By the fourth grade, Terry had graduated to sitting on his desk, for the vast majority of time, but still did not do his homework or interact with other humans. Terry's intelligence test scores, allegedly, were Just Fine, so the teachers dealt with his 'stubbornness' by screaming at him. This made no difference in his behavior, so Terry eventually went to public school, where he was suspended for kicking a teacher who touched him.

This entire time, Pretty Lady did not understand why everybody was yelling at Terry. It was perfectly obvious to her that Terry was just like that. You did not converse with Terry, you did not touch him, you did not expect him to do the impossible, such as look you in the eye, articulate his words, turn in his homework, or take his hands out of his ski-jacket pockets. This was, perfectly obviously, beyond Terry's psychological and neurological capabilities.

Decades later, it came to Pretty Lady that Terry obviously suffered from some form of autism. She doesn't know what happened to him; he is either living in an alley next to the garbage cans, or a successful programmer. These are the only two possible options.

At one time, Pretty Lady found herself working the Information Desk at the main San Francisco Public Library. In practical terms, this meant that the cream of the craziest people that the craziest city in the world has to offer came streaming toward her in an uninterrupted horde, and presented her with their concerns. Pretty Lady found that she was able to tune into nearly every one of these people, discover their needs, formulate a plan, communicate this plan, and send them away with a purpose.

In short, Pretty Lady's super power is a capacity to empathize and communicate with crazy people. Also with old people, young people, sick people, terrified Chinese immigrants, angry people, psychotic people, strung-out people, belligerant activists, pathological manipulators, neurotics, and incompetent bosses--at least for two or three minutes. Long enough to formulate a mode of simple communication and inchoate understanding.

This super power of Pretty Lady's is not an unmixed blessing. Not only has it precipitated a great many Unfortunate Relationships, but it creates unrealistic expectations in potentially dangerous hangers-on. Ergo Pretty Lady's reservoir of stalker stories is unusually large.

Conversely, the only sorts of people with whom Pretty Lady is unable to empathize are the bland, smug, rigid, unimaginative, illiberal, and unempathetic--in a word, with the 'normal' people. She simply has no understanding of what it is to lack both passion and empathy. It sometimes seems to her that these people lack souls entirely; that they are mindless automatons carrying out their programming without consciousness or feeling.

Furthermore, it frequently seems to her as though these people regard the cultivation of empathy for others as positively immoral, as though understanding people were the same as excusing all dangerous, evil, or antisocial behavior. As though to make an effort to put oneself in another's shoes, even for a second, even for the purposes of communication, were to taint one's own character irretrieveably.

And Pretty Lady has no patience with this attitude. For to her it is perfectly obvious that 1) we are all children of God and 2) we are all in this together. Behaving as though it were within anyone's rights or abilities to revoke humanity from another human is hubris of the highest degree; it is usurping the rights of God.

Which is, most certainly, ungodly.

The Holographic Discourse

Pretty Lady does too have female friends!

It is something, probably, about the sheer fun of an inherently non-competative artist to communicate with.

This is exactly it, dear Boysmom, and Pretty Lady cannot understand why so many people cannot conceive of this particular notion of Fun. For it seems as though the very notion of Conversation as Fun and Art is unknown to most individuals in Modern Society.

Pretty Lady, of course, blames television. This has been her view ever since the day she endured an interminable brunch with a person who subjected her to serial re-enactments of daytime sci-fi TV shows from the seventies, and punctuated her performance with the extraordinary statement, "But why don't YOU contribute to the conversation?"

HELLO???!!!

Pretty Lady fears it is time to get back to the basics.

1) A conversation is not a performance, a monologue, or even an equal-time monologue swap.

2) Neither is a conversation a debate. Conversations do not have Winners and Losers. In fact, the essence of conversation is Win-Win, no matter how banal that phrase has become.

3) Neither is a conversation a mutual commiseration, whine- and blame-fest, with the conversees united in their disgust with the vile Powers that Be.

None of this will seem strange to Pretty Lady's friends, of course, but the sad fact is that Pretty Lady's friends are a rare and elite set of people, much as she strives for Universal Popularity. Because when these three verbal-interaction options are removed from the table, the overwhelming majority of Modern Folk seem to have nothing whatsoever to say.

In fact, most of them blow a mental gasket when Pretty Lady attempts a genuine conversation. Practioners of Non-Conversation Technique #1 are practically impossible to derail. They continue spouting inane jokes with an increasingly desperate gleam in their eye, and when Pretty Lady presents them with a direct question of a personal nature, such as "How have you been?" they issue some sort of meaningless wisecrack and scuttle away. It never, never, never occurs to these people to ask how Pretty Lady has been; she assumes that the subject of personal well-being terrifies them into complete mental paralysis. Such are the tragic results of being left at home during all of childhood with only a television for company.

Aficionados of Non-Conversation Technique #2 are mildly more interesting, but their company is ultimately brutal and nonconstructive. They are continually attempting to construct 'positions,' even entire 'identities,' not only for themselves, but for anyone else they find themselves exchanging words with. Their aim is to force their fellows into untenable 'positions' and inferior 'identities,' in order to demonstrate the untenability and inferiority of same, and thus establish themselves as both stable and superior.

Which is most tedious.

Pretty Lady needs not elaborate upon her feelings toward practitioners of NCT #3, as her views on Whining are extremely well-known, except to state that whenever she has confronted a career Whiner with their basic insupportability as a companion, said Whiner has been utterly, physically incapable of comprehending her statement. These people simply equate ritualistic complaint with Intimate Connection, and have never imagined anything else beyond it.

So, then, what IS beyond it?

Darlings, darlings all, EVERYTHING. Everything is beyond these three things; these NCTs are the prime obstacles to all the joy in the universe!

A genuine conversation is like a painting, a dance, and a hike up to the castle on the hill, all at the same time. It probes, it explores, it builds, it wanders. It experiments, tests, accepts, rejects. It speculates; it imagines; it reveals. It uncovers infinite reasons for allowing peace into one's soul. It is formed thusly by the meeting of minds which are both unique and perfect, it is the harmonious interference pattern which creates the hologram of the Universe.

One engages in such a joyful activity by 1) asking questions; 2) listening to the responses; 3) propounding notions; 4) allowing the other person to add, subtract, multiply or divide these notions as they see fit, depending upon their unique perspectives and experience. It is vital that no party be fixated on a particular outcome, i.e. convincing the other person of the rightness and unassailability of his or her position.

It is, of course, possible to arrive at desirable outcomes, such as solutions to problems, inner harmony, and Integrated Theories of Everything, via this process. The only requirements are that all parties involved be fully present, fully truthful, and fully willing to pay attention.

How to Leave a Loser

By this time, all of Pretty Lady's friends should need no convincing of her qualifications regarding the titular topic. Pretty Lady, sadly, is an increasingly renowned expert on Losers. The Losers she has known, moreover, are not a homogenous lot; nor do they resemble the garden-variety loser in superficials. You know the one I mean--the pot addict, the drunkard, the perennially unemployed, the spendthrift, the wife-beater. No, Pretty Lady's taste in Losers has historically been wide-ranging and exotic. This is partly the reason she has been able to convince herself that each successive Loser was not a Loser at all, but merely a misunderstood genius. Some of them were geniuses, in fact; this does not affect their essential Loser nature one jot.

So Pretty Lady believes it is best to start with the basics: how does one recognize a Loser, when one is entangled to the point where one's Loser radar is hopelessly snarled in a miasma of erotic enslavement, emotional attachment, intellectual fascination, and codependent rationalization?

The answer to this question is, realistically, one doesn't. Not until the time arrives. One's friends can point it out, one's family can complain, roll eyeballs, and disinherit all they like. A Loser-addicted lady will not even notice. She will regard it as her job to defend the Loser against his detractors at all costs; this is merely her duty as a Good Faithful Woman.

So let us re-frame the question. What does one do when the love and light of one's life, that misunderstood genius, that special individual that only You are capable of understanding truly, that flawed god in human form, is turning your life into a thoroughly ungrounded roller coaster of increasingly infrequent blissed-out highs, punctuated by ever-deepening troughs of screaming misery?

Now I've got your attention.

A hallmark of Loser-addiction is the circular nature of your interactions. Well Pretty Lady remembers those tequila-soaked 3 AMs, the maudlin renditions of "Take a Pebble," the angst-ridden confessions of hopeless attachment, the reconcilatory passions, the snuggling amongst a mound of blankets. Well she harks back upon those hung-over dawns, with Coke and lime, beef stew and tortillas for breakfast; after this the contemplative, healthful explorations of hidden Spanish ruins in the rain. Even better does she recall the sudden moments when her lover abruptly disappeared, because he was entertaining yet another woman Pretty Lady hadn't heard about. A new one, an old one, they were all the same in the end.

Or the surprise visits from the Zen monastery--no expense spared on ten-year-old whiskey, the healthful jogs on the beaches, the deep conversations on esoteric matters, the grocery shopping, the impromptu dinner parties, the hijinks in the bathtub--followed by months of enlightened Zen silence.

Or the mutually supportive, mutually beneficial partnership--the Friday evening dates at Home Depot, the renovations, the potting of plants, the mutual massages, the outdoing one another on maternal clucking and cooking of healthful meals, the sushi splurges, the relaxing weekends upstate, mutually worn out from such mutually harmonious hard work. If it weren't for those periodic, rage-filled, irrational, abusive rants upon the evils of marriage, the lobotomizing effects of spiritual practice, and the basic sexual undesirability of Pretty Lady, a mutually satisfying relationship might have continued indefinitely.

So then the question becomes--when one of the Losers described above has worn you to a hysterical shred, when you must break the cycle or die, but you are still hampered by the fog of irrational yet overwhelmingly compelling attachment, what do you do?

Leaving town is a good option. Seriously. Leaving the country is even better.

If this is not possible, remember this axiom: It is not possible to change another person. It is only possible to change oneself.

The one immutable characteristic of a dyed-in-the-wool Loser is that he cannot bear personal growth. He creates these cycles of artificial drama because they create the illusion that something is happening, while allowing him to remain mired in his own battered infancy of the spirit. Not only can he not countenance genuine change in himself, he cannot endure it in other people.

So if you, his adoring punching-bag, make the choice to become a healthier, happier, more functional person, the overwhelming likelihood is that he will make it easy for you to leave him, by leaving you first.

If you find yourself shackled to a Loser, then, you must start with a simple action geared to your own personal benefit. You may join a gym or sign up for a yoga class. You may join a book club; you may take an independent holiday. You might decide to spend four hours a day arbitrarily ignoring your Loser. You could clean the clutter out of the corners of your apartment.

Once you have gotten into a few of these habits, the balance between you and the Loser will have subtly shifted. You will have a glow about you; you will not be so susceptible to sudden yankings upon the heartstrings. The Loser will not like this. He will yank harder. He will pretend to capitulate to therapy; he will throw one of his bi-annual 'I'm-going-to-quit-smoking-tomorrow' parties. He will dramatically jettison one or two of the less-consequential Other Women. He will write a thoughtful letter from the monastery. Anything to lure you back into the cycle.

You will, of course, be lured. But you will not cease going to yoga class. Eventually you will become so balanced, healthy, and centered that you will calmly ask the Loser to stop treating you like a psychic spittoon.

It is then that the yoga will come most in handy, because this request will cause the Loser to lose his shit. He will claim that you are an irrational, hysterical mess. He will make dates with five women in one week. He will sign up for a six-month Zen intensive in the Mojave desert. He will, in effect, cast you into the deepest soul-wrenching trough of screaming misery that he has ever done.

And you will look around the trough, think, "This looks familiar. In fact, I'm getting sort of bored with it," and climb out.

Fetching the Dictionary

Pretty Lady is delighted that her fan base tends to be Persons of Quality. She feels that she must be doing something right, to attract such a number of earnest ladies and gentlemen, desiring to become better ones. Thus, perhaps, she is preaching to the choir when she hauls out the dictionary, for a precise definition of one of the most under-considered words (in her opinion) of both the current and previous centuries.

integrity n 1: an unimpaired condition: SOUNDNESS 2: firm adherence to a code of esp. moral or artistic values: INCORRUPTIBILITY 3: the quality or state of being complete or undivided: COMPLETENESS syn 1 see HONEST ant duplicity 2 see UNITY

Pretty Lady's extensive personal experience has led her to the empirical observation that if you haven't got this, you're screwed. Pretty much.

The important thing to observe, as you are contemplating the three sub-definitions of this deep and mysterious word, is that all three of them apply equally, in consideration of character. One must be, at the same time, sound, incorruptible, and complete. Also honest. Do not forget honest. One must first be honest with oneself, before one can be so with others.

But hang all of this philosophical exploration. What you really want to hear is the juicy details of why Pretty Lady didn't marry any of those jerks.

Much has been made of Pretty Lady's Terrible Taste in Men, but little consideration has been paid to the details of this terribility. Pretty Lady has one Achilles flaw--she can't STAND being bored. She requires a partner who keeps her on her toes. She prefers the company of one curly-headed anarchist who traipses the hills of Mexico with random blonde women, airily spinning theories of psychology and social philosophy off the top of his head, to a truckload of Wealthy and Upstanding Echo Chambers. This is NOT because she has an abiding interest in anarchy, or hiking, or compulsive womanizing; she just needs to be intellectually challenged. To be Predictable, with Pretty Lady, is to be Toast.

So Pretty Lady went from the Social Activist S/M Bondage addict, to the Emotionally Abusive Buddhist Monk, to the Curly Headed Womanizer, to the Angry Atheist. All these men had three things in common--enormously high intelligence, a habit of thinking outside the box, and a fractured psyche. The third element was what torched the relationship. One cannot relate wholly to another person when one is busy avoiding oneself.

This does not have to be so.

You see, friends, the true personality of an individual never adheres to stereotype. The nature of a human is to be deep and contradictory. The difficulty comes in when one attempts to rigidly adhere to a code, any code, while roughly suppressing most of one's psyche, or ignoring it, and letting it atrophy. This is the true reason for those hordes of automatons who parrot the party line ad nauseam, whatever party it might be--Democrat, Republican, Fundamentalist, or "yes, dear." These people are simply too lazy and frightened to think, and Pretty Lady despises them all.

None of these are in present company, she trusts.

No, the trap Pretty Lady has consistently fallen into is to get engrossed, not in the complications of a smart fellow earnestly trying to understand himself, but those of a smart fellow, seriously messed up. Avoidance of one's own deep mental fractures can provide, roughly, a year and a half's worth of fascinating and labyrinthine tangles, before the tape starts its repeat loop. It is not a coincidence that a year and a half is roughly the half-life of Pretty Lady's relationships.

So what to do? How do you tell which complicated, striving young man is worth the effort, and which is a bright but avoidant loser?

Pretty Lady postulates the Occam's Razor:

petty adj 1: having secondary rank or importance: MINOR, SUBORDINATE 2: having little or no importance or significance 3: marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies: SMALL-MINDED

When Pretty Lady looks back over her life, the first Red Flag has always been when somebody got petty with her. When the Angry Atheist refused to visit her apartment because parking might be difficult, despite the fact that parking was equally difficult (and earlier) in his neighborhood. When the Curly Headed Womanizer walked too fast on the way to the theatre. When the Pretty Narcissist barked at her for folding back the last page of an ancient science magazine. When the Psychotic Ex threw a tantrum because her friends talked about something that didn't interest him.

Pettiness is a sign of avoidance. Because when someone goes nuts over which movie to see, a stain on their clothing, an aversion to feathers, it is never about that. It's about some huge gap in their mental landscape which they are desperately trying to conceal. It's about a deep-seated fear of commitment, an unwillingness to assume responsibility, low self-esteem, poisonous envy, or existential terror. Petty people are dangerous. They will throw you into the jaws of their dragons, in order to avoid slaying them themselves.

Which is unutterably foolish, because then they are left with the dragon and without Pretty Lady, who makes a profession out of coaching people through the basics of dragon handling and slaughter. But one must never equate "intelligent" with "rational."

Anatomy of Niceness

Pretty Lady is a bit tired of hearing that women will "claw their way over a dozen nice guys to get to the jerk." (I don't remember where I read this, but somehow it sticks in my mind.) On some level, there is a bit of truth to this statement; the woman's virtue of compassion, when taken to the extreme, leads to co-dependency. Thus when a swarthy, moody gentleman is lounging in a corner, exuding misogyny, cynicism, and alienated anomie, the Good Woman will immediately spring to attention, and swarm her way over to heal the devil's wounded soul. This is unfortunate, but it is the Way We Are.

However, in my experience, it is simply not true that Nice Guys always lose out on the goodies. Pretty Lady admits that her own taste in men is terrible. She has always been the first in line to soak up abuse from a moody stranger. However, her terrible taste does not extend to her male friends. She could name you a dozen bright fellows off the top of her head, with whom she has shared many a late-night study session, bourbon and anchovy pizza, art opening or tractor pull, who are Nice Guys par excellence. Many of them were also, in college at least, pimply-faced dweebs with the sexual magnetism of a doorknob.

This dweeb factor did not, however, prevent a single one of them from drawing the attention of one or two of the classiest, brainiest, most quietly beautiful and nurturing women on the market, and marrying them before they turned thirty. No, the women did not swarm; if you want swarming, get a tattoo and an alcohol problem. But classy women are not fools. They appreciate quality when they find it.

The thing is, women have Intuition. This means that they will frequently overlook what is staring them in the face, but things that are hidden will be sensed immediately. So it goes that an openly philandering, rage-filled hoodlum will always incur a second glance, but a mild-mannered milquetoast whose smile hides a smouldering resentment, insecurity and hostility toward women will give her the creeps. She'll feel vaguely guilty about it, but she will flee.

So, gentlemen, all you self-defined Nice Guys out there who cannot get a date, it is time for some brutal honesty. Look yourself in the mirror. Ask yourself this question: am I truly a Nice Guy? Or am I, deep down, a Smarmy Twerp?

Let me elaborate. A Smarmy Twerp is prone to whining. He claims that he is nice, he is kind, he is a Good Listener; but if he were really listening he'd know that truthfully, he's Not Her Type. A Smarmy Twerp will be unctuous toward everything that is female and has a pulse, and glom onto the first one who is polite to him, no matter how little they have in common. A Smarmy Twerp is prone to lie to himself--about his looks, his intelligence, his income, his motives. He will talk to anyone who listens; he will talk, and talk, and talk about things which are inappropriate and boring to his audience. If he listens to a woman, it will likely be to commiserate with her sufferings, and thus bring the topic back round to whining about himself.

A large number of Smarmy Twerps of my acquaintance have been, consciously or no, setting themselves up for failure and rejection. It is important to understand when a woman is Out Of Your League. Being, dare I say, somewhat brilliant and rather striking myself, I have noticed that there are two types of men who ask me out; those who are roughly in the ballpark and very, very brave, and those who are too dumb to have a clue. Men who are reasonably bright tend to be intimidated. Do not think this is arrogance; I have lived awhile. I know.

Just as many a policeman is, deep down, a wannabe criminal without the nerve to face the consequences, many a pseudo Nice Guy is a creep without the guts to admit it. If he woke up one morning with Mel Gibson's face and Vin Diesel's charisma, he'd be the first to line up the bitches and start sowing a crop of fatherless children. He's usually a closet chauvinist; if he didn't believe that women were inherently inferior, he'd never have the nerve to pat the elbow of a woman whose I.Q. and social station is two standard deviations above his own.

One of the things I've noticed, having passed the age of thirty, is that I am now swatting away men in their fifties and sixties by the truckload. They're not distinguished professional widowers with a house and an IRA, either; they're dim non-starters with potbellies and bad teeth, who will assuredly be dependent upon Social Security for the bulk of their retirement plan. It's as though they assume that any single woman over thirty is on the "clearance" rack, no matter how many princes she spurned in her prime. Yes, lovely younger women do marry potbellied old geezers from time to time. But take a look at that potbellied old geezer's bank account, and be realistic. Money and power are sexy; being chained to an impoverished loser is not.

Gentlemen, please get a clue. Women are inclined, by nature and culture, to be polite. It is a rare girl who will say to a man's face, "I'm out of your fucking league. Get a life." We will be sweet; we will say we are busy, we will claim to be brokenhearted, we will laugh prettily and smile wistfully when we decline your charming invitation. If you hate us for doing so, that is your problem. But take a good hard look at your own soul before you blame us.