Sass and Spice: A Pastiche of "Wants"

In the words of the Spice Girls, "Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want." I want men to be more direct than they actually are so I know I'm not groping (or dancing) in the dark, only to find my way out (the exit sign glows in the dark). When anyone is tip toe-ing around me, seeming like they want something but not articulating what they want from me, it bothers me. It's like playing body language charades with passive aggressive people; I'm not well-versed in body language (and mind reading)... plus I don't want to guess. It's like working in customer service again: mister/ma'am, I can't help you unless you tell me what's going on. Throw me a bone please... or better yet, please toss me a Krispy Kreme donut; I crave sweet things :D.

Also in the spirit of "wants," Liz Lemon says what I'm not brave enough to say to men:

"I don't want to hurt you. But I'll tell you what I do want. I want someone who will be monogamous and nice to his mother.

Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960)

well, definitely not him.

And I want someone who likes musicals but knows to just shut his mouth when I'm watching Lost.

Gene Kelly in An American in Paris (1951)

Hot daaaaamn.

And I want someone who thinks being really into cars is lame and strip clubs are gross. I want someone who will actually empty the dishwasher instead of just taking out forks as needed, like I do. I want someone with clean hands and feet and beefy forearms like a damn Disney prince.

Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty (1959)

I think he likes what he sees.

And I want him to genuinely like me, even when I'm old.

Source

Ma and Pa Newman, probably in on some inside joke. cute :)

And that's what I want." (30 Rock Season 4, Episode 17 "Lee Marvin vs. Derek Jeter")

There are so many wants, needs, and desires in our lives. Is it possible for people to be content with this excess of wants? Are we setting ourselves up for disappointment, or is it good to be idealistic? I suppose asking what someone wants in life is a loaded question; I'm not entirely sure what I want either, but I do know what I don't want, and so perhaps I can filter out all the unwanted things and find out what are the things I do want in my life. "Want" is such a selfish word, but at least it provides some general direction or guidance for what works for people when it comes for them to make decisions. Wants are always battling the shoulds in our lives; but hey, it's a decision making factor. It's good to know what you want, and it's good to know what makes you happy, even if it's for five minutes.

Kyle Chandler: Love the Way You Coach

In anticipation of Friday Night Lights' final season starting soon, I've decided to pay a short and sweet tribute to Kyle Chandler. It's already great enough that there's some fantastic writing in FNL (best lame teen pick-up line ever: "I feel closer to God when I'm with you"), and then... there's Kyle Chandler, playing Coach Eric Taylor. Don't be fooled by his mesmerizing far-off stares and his puppy-dog eyes; that man will tell you what's what and what position to play in football... and how. As a firm, direct, honest, and wise (too many adjectives, perhaps? haha) coach, he not only wins his team's respect but also our affection/admiration for him as viewers. With a killer combo of being an awesome coach and great family man with endearing eyes and some pretty compelling speeches, how can you lose with Kyle Chandler in FNL? Answer: You can't. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

Chandler as Eric Taylor, dozing off on his tot's teddy bear.

Do you see a resemblance between the two?

Chandler in some puppet action

an earlier edition of Kyle Chandler in Early Edition

I love a man who reads ;)

borrowed words

Whenever I find interesting quotes that resonate with me, I jot them down into a notebook (that's it up there). It's like a diary - perhaps just as sensational to read, but a whole lot less embarrassing to revisit because it's mostly filled with borrowed words. These are a couple of my favorites this year, many of which have a very feminist undertone (haha). Enjoy!

Peggy Olson - Mad Men Season 3

film / television

"You're smooth. And charming. You turn it on like hot water from the faucet. But I've had measles once. Now I'm immune." -Linda Gilman, June Bride (1948)

"You're like an old coat that's hanging in his closet. Every time he reaches in, there you are. Don't be there once." -Desk Set (1957)

"The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings." -Kathleen Kelly, You've Got Mail (1998)

"You have set up a way of life that basically makes it impossible for you to have any kind of human connection. And now this woman comes along and somehow runs the gauntlet of your ridiculous life choice and comes out on the other end smiling just so you can call her 'casual'? I need to grow up? You’re a 12-year-old." -Natalie, Up in the Air (2009)

"I don't wanna make a career out of being there so you can kick me when you fail." -Peggy, Mad Men Season 3, Episode 13 "Shut the Door. Have a Seat."

Richard Burton

people

"He always thought that he had to do something about endangered species, forgetting that he himself was an endangered species the way he drank." -Billy Wilder on William Holden in Billy Wilder Speaks (2006)

side note: William Holden was an alcoholic. He drank too much and died from a blow to the head from a night stand.

"I'm not sure if it's a function of advancing age or just the times we're living in, but it's almost impossible for me to find complete external validation in any one thought, desire, instinct, or vision anymore." -John Mayer

"I feel like a discarded floppy disk." -moi

courtesy of Ms. Amanda

"He wanted the milk without the cow." -Amanda

"One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer." -Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor

"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love." -Leo Tolstoy

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder/yonder." -Amanda

 books / plays

"He is collecting pleasures and pains, gathered from his relationships with ballerinas and librarians, decent females without the right pheromones, and nut-balls. He is like a child learning what is too hot to touch, and he hopes all this experience will coalesce into a philosophy of life, or at least a philosophy of relationships, that will transform itself into instinct." -Shopgirl

"[Y]ou neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over - and it was not fear for what threatened me but for what might happen to you - when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in the future treat with doubly gentle care because it was so brittle and fragile." -Nora, A Doll's House

"I got to know you. You cured me of you." -Emma, One Day

Technology and the Single Girl

As we progress towards new technology, newer, hipper modes of communication are becoming increasingly impersonal. Face-to-face interaction would be ideal when you're trying to get to know someone; however, busy schedules or even physical distance become viable, prime barriers for a lack of personal interaction. When minimal face-to-face interaction occurs, what happens? My friend Amanda has suggested that "absence makes the heart grow fonder/yonder." But which is it? I've felt fonder and yonder with different men on various occasions before, but what tips the scale over from yonder to fonder or vice versa? Does someone feel fonder of someone else because that person is not readily available? Is it the idea of a chase that creates this (illusion of) fondness?

Before texting and the Internet, people resorted to telegrams, letters, and the telephone. If you look at mail correspondence, this is still considered as impersonal communication because there is a barrier preventing you from having direct, personal correspondence. A letter would have to go through a middle man, the post office, before arriving at its final destination. Certainty for a single girl, this whole waiting for a letter to endure a long physical journey to get to you is completely romantic and sentimental. The idea of a letter from a guy you adore makes you smile because as sappy as this may sound, he once held the letter you are holding, and plus he handwrote, or more like scrawled, the letter you are reading. You can't help but feel special - because this letter is for you and no one else.

Klara (Margaret Sullavan) reading a letter in The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

If a single girl regularly receives some kind of correspondence, such as letters, from her object of affection and suddenly that correspondence ceases, she can feel unwanted, abandoned, unnerved, or worse - inadequate. (Ladies, we don't need validation from men to be/feel amazing.)

Inbox empty. Better luck another day, Klara. Poor lady... don't cry, Shopgirl.

No one likes this kind of needy behavior of waiting for that other person to respond back, but many of us are guilty of waiting for an e-mail back or even a telephone call back (myself included) because our singleton heart craves attention and affection. It's nice to be wanted and/or needed. I'm a little old fashioned but men who are able to write beautiful letters, or at least attempt to handwrite a personal letter to their object of affection, are a dying breed. I wish this wasn't the case, but it is. Nowadays, men can steathily or awkwardly dodge unwanted females by plainly ignoring those girls' e-mails, ims, and texts with the reasoning that one isn't obligated to reply back immediately or ever to electronic/digital messages.

When it comes to the telephone, especially before cell phones came along, one often pictures a single girl waiting at home next to the telephone. It is such a depressing image. Imagine the time wasted on waiting for a jerk who said he'll call but he won't. Why do we have such a passive image of single females waiting? There is a double standard that women aren't supposed to make the first move when it comes to dating men. Honestly, I initiate things anyways. I know it comes off as "unlady-like" but you know what - sometimes men don't have the nerve to make the first move. Women should give men a little push, and if that little push doesn't work, you move along to another guy. It's all trial and error. I refuse to wait for one guy too long; I'm not getting any younger, and it's not like that guy is going to grow another pair of balls anytime soon (plus, that would be really disgusting).

The good thing about talking on the phone is that even though you can't see the person you're talking, you can hear the tone of that person's voice and so there's a smaller chance of misinterpreting what that person is saying. Flirting via the telephone is always fun. It's a great way to be coy and indulge your object of affection and yourself with some witty repartee (which I love). I'm sure phone sex occurred way before that term was actually coined as well.

split screen telephoning between Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959)

some telephone action in Pillow Talk remake Down With Love (2003)

I really doubt that any guy would do push-ups with a phone on his shoulders, but whatev - it's the movies.

Then along came the Internet - with instantaneous e-mails and instant messages. Instead of face-to-face interaction, it's you and the screen with text sent over not so long ago. Since it's an impersonal form of communication, many people feel like they can get away with typing certain things over the Internet that they normally wouldn't be able to have the nerve to say in person. No one likes confrontation and so the Internet removes that fear behind possibly saying something confrontational or inappropriate. Guys can easily flirt with single gals with a keyboard and a mouse, without witnessing those girls' possible looks of disgust. Getting rejected online reminds me of what George said in You've Got Mail (1998): "Well, as far as I'm concerned, the Internet is just another way of being rejected by women."

 

Inappropriate e-mail messages from Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001):

 

Although communicating over the Internet is impersonal, there is that advantage of being able to freely react to messages uncensored in the privacy of your own personal space.

As far as instantaneous communication goes, sometimes technology encourages people to become rude, insensitive human beings, by doing something as brutal and impersonal as breaking up with someone over a text:

 from Up in the Air (2009)

Notice that the date sent was two days before Valentine's Day.

I realize that I kept on harping on the impersonal side of technology, but technology is a double-edged sword: the great thing about it is that you can receive instantaneous messages from anyone all over the world; however, there's that person-to-person interaction that is completely priceless that you can't experience by receiving e-mails, ims, and texts.

I'll leave you with the following quote:

"The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings." - Kathleen Kelly, You’ve Got Mail (1998)

It was a quote I kept on thinking about maybe a year ago. It's something I will never say to this one person I know, but that person kind of brought me back to life with a whole lot of nothings online when I was going through a very dark time. It was an unintentional doing on that person's part, but I am still grateful for all those nothings that meant something to me.

Yours, Mine, and Not Ours

Is it wrong to get freaked out by the words "we" and "us" when used by someone you're seeing or dating? To avoid confusion or any guessing games, this hasn't happened to me recently, but it has happened to me before. In high school, while waiting for a ride back home, I mentioned to an old boyfriend that he would have cute kids if he ever had any, and he agreed with a "yea, our kids would be cute." Our kids. Our kids?? OUR KIDS?! First of all, I don't understand why my high school self would even suggest, let alone talk about someone spawning mini versions of themselves; I blame teenage hormones. Secondly, did the word "our" scare you, too? Because it sure did for me, even as a high school sophomore. I think I covered up my horror with a half-hearted smile, which he probably assumed was a mutual approval for the possibility of "us" breeding mini "us"es.

Regina Spektor's "Us" 

I remember dating a guy who would often start sentences with "we" as in "We should go to the..." or "We need to..." You should probably know that that he did this within the first two weeks of meeting me. When did you and I become a "we," when did we become a couple, a unit, Siamese twins joined at the hip? Also, why was I not informed about this? I didn't get the latest "we" newsletter that announced our "we"hood. That's another problem I've had with men before. Some of them don't think it's important enough to consult me before announcing our couplehood to other people (way to jump the gun, boys!). If there's an "us," then maybe communication is in order about this new commitment called "us." It's like this one song my friends in middle school used to listen to all the time called U + Me = Us by 2gether. Sure, grammatically you and I would have to equate to "we" or "us" but notice that there's that conjunction + (plus or and). The conjunction there signifies some kind of mutual agreement or acknowledgment that a certain couplehood exists and commitment most likely fits somewhere in that equation as well. I apologize if I sound completely adverse to the idea of relationships because I really am not. It's funny because men often complain about how confusing or complicated women are, but it's the same thing the other way around; as a woman who's had experience with men, I still find myself wanting a translator for what men say or do. It would be wonderful to find a guy who has the balls to be direct and not torture me by saying something like, "I like you. Let's go steady."

Luff or Lurve

Jack Lemmon in Luv (1967)

 

"Love is a four letter word." And it's one of those enigmatic bombs in life that continues to confuse me and play with my mind. In Annie Hall (1977), Alvy tells Annie, "Love is, is too weak a word for what I feel - I lurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?” A play I read a while back on a plane ride from New York called Play with Tiger (1962) mocked the idea of love when Dave told Anna, “It’s lurve, it’s lurve, it’s lurve.” Even the Bible has a whole entire section on the concept of love:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NIV)

My question in regards to this biblical definition of love is: are any of us really that pure when we do love nowadays? I know I’m anything but perfect (I’m probably this instead) and will never embody the kind of sheer purity that’s described in the Bible’s love passage. As of now, to me, love is acceptance and loyalty, knowing a person’s flaws and trying to be understanding. There is a major difference between platonic love and romantic love (a.k.a. being “in love”), but I’m only going to be focusing on the latter. Have you noticed that the English idiom/phrase “fall in love” starts with the word “fall”? To me, this phrase conveys that falling in love deals with letting your guard down and suddenly becoming emotionally vulnerable to the person you’re falling in love with; maybe that’s why people are “weak in the knees” when they fall in love.

Movies and songs project different types of romantic love, some of which are a bit too farfetched for my taste. For example, one of the most ridiculous movies on “love” that I have ever seen is Love Story (1970), which turned out to be a commercial success when it was released. Its most famous line, also its tagline, is “Love means never having to say you're sorry”; that is probably one of the most b.s. lines I have ever heard on love.  In the beginning when you first meet someone and you realize it’s (romantic) love, it might be a magical walk on Cloud 9, but for the most part, it demands for both parties to work at making their relationship survive. If people change as time goes by, their relationships also change as well and so it does take work for someone’s romantic love to last. Contrary to Love Story’s concept of love, I think that love is dependent on having great communication between the two people who are in love, so the idea of not conveying you’re sorry to the person you love is a completely idiotic idea. If you can’t manage to say sorry to the person you love, then that’s one big reason (out of possibly many reasons) for you to not deserve the person you love. Love isn’t always raining puppies and roses; like for many things in life, sometimes bad things have to happen for good things to come. What comes up must come down.

I feel like the word “love” have been overused so much that sometimes people or probably the media have sucked the meaning out of it. Instead of a nice juicy grape, love is some dried up raisin. I often wondered if love was like milk – it has an expiration date and at one point or another it will turn sour. Perhaps I’m way too young to be cynical about the concept of love. I’m know my opinion on “love” will continue to change, but I’m half hoping that love turns out to be something like wine – it’s something that gets better with old age.

I can only hope that if I ever get married, I’ll be as happy as Ma and Pa Newman here:

Source

I’ll leave you with this quote that I encountered when I watched The Last Station (2009), a movie that I’m not exactly enamoured with (but I do think this quote is fantastic):

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.” 

–Leo Tolstoy