This is a guest post by Kid Strangelove. Kid originally published this article at his own blog, but he deleted the site a while ago so he could focus on other projects. He asked me if I’d be willing to re-post some of his articles on my blog and I said yes.
“Dude, that knife shit is weak!” my friend shouted out as his health bar was slowly being eaten alive. “Pick any other team and I’ll wreck you.”
“Or you could just wreck this team. Just a thought. What’s the matter, you mad that you’re losing to a scrub like me?”
Good old fashioned video game shit talking: there are few things in life that are better. Friends were laughing, drinking a concoction Mountain Dew and cheap vodka for $10 dollars a handle, passing the controller, and having a good time. In October of 2002, my friends were complaining about the newest woman in my life.
Yep, good old Spiral was about as much woman as I could get in 2002, but she was quite the catch. I was finally starting to beat some of my friends in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, solely because of her.
The games and shit talking would go on well into the night: no one had anywhere to go or anything to do the next day, because this is how we spent our Friday nights. Welcome to college at one of the premier science and engineering schools in the U.S. Welcome to Georgia Tech.
As I looked around that night, there were about seven to ten of us in the lounge area of our dorm. Everyone was social, everyone seemed pretty well put together and fun; there were no lonely basement dwellers. We were as diverse as you can get: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, American and foreign-born, religious and not religious… good at Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or not.
But all of us had one thing in common: there were no women in our lives and no potential to get one. Because in this institution of higher learning with a 72% male to female ratio, such nights were not uncommon.
But the dream never died. “I can’t wait to get out man, we can make so much money after graduation, we’ll be total ballers.” “Yeah man, this shit is temporary.” “Dude, the real world is gonna rock.”
Fast forward to 2013.
My day is interrupted by a phone call from a buddy of mine, one of my college friends from ages ago. We shoot the shit on life, travel, gaming: the usual. He is still mad that when we once played a game of Madden, I changed his entire offensive line to scrubby backups while he wasn’t looking.
“I’ve been catching up with some of the guys from back in the day,” he said. “Did you hear about Chang? He’s engaged. Good for him.” Chang was one of the later additions to our gaming crew. Good kid. So I went to Facebook to check out what he was up to.
His girl was… disappointing. Overweight, weird face, just not aesthetically pleasing. Maybe she had a sparkling personality; I don’t know. Just another name added to the list of people who claimed that one day they would be ballers with all the ladies, but didn’t live up to the hype.
I scrolled through my Facebook friends list with “Georgia Tech” as a filter and the same story played out over and over. A sexless dude with an overabundance of smarts and ambition is now the spitting image of the beta male: poorly-dressed, holding his overweight girlfriend in front of the Eiffel Tower or other generic vacation spots, a shadow of his former self. No one became the entrepreneur they dreamed of becoming, but many are engineers doing pretty well for themselves (at least I hope so, engineering should pay well).
At least he looks happy. Or is he? At what point does someone’s mind snap? At what point does he stop chasing pretty girls and look at the girls that are close to him? Is it normal? Are they crazy for settling down? Or am I crazy for trying to live some sort of fantasy? I don’t consider my wants and needs to be terribly fantastic. And yet a few days ago, when I remarked on Facebook how silly it is for a girl to have an Amazon Wish List on her OkCupid profile, a friend of mine responded with the following:
I don’t know why you’re so upset. It sounds like she’s capitalizing on a gender inequality the best way she can. You can either have equal female companions, or you can have gorgeous supermodels who deliver amazing blowjobs but demand fabulous spoiling in return. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. I’ll begin taking your incredulous attitude seriously when you start dating normal women instead of mythical icons.
According to her, I was chasing “mythical icons.” That can’t possibly be right. I’ve just always had a thing for, you know, attractive girls and I expect them to act like good people. That’s not mythical, is it? Well, according to her, it is. And according to my old college buddies, it is too. Maybe I’m the crazy one.
“You need to find someone that loves you for you,” my old roommate blurred out. We’d been talking about TV shows when he suddenly blurted that out. He was on drink number two, so alcohol was not to blame for his strange comment. Yes, the same roommate I’ve written about before, the one who moved in with his older, unattractive girlfriend. That Sunday he posted a picture of a gigantic paleo brunch—eggs, bacon and steak—prepared by his girlfriend. It looked absolutely delicious. Maybe I’m the crazy one.
For some weird reason, I stumbled onto some articles about Mark Zuckerberg. This kid is a billionaire and is a huge part of why today’s world is the way it is. In 2002, he was also probably in the same place we were: playing video games and drinking shitty booze from plastic bottles. Oh, he’s married? The world’s youngest self-made billionaire is married? Pics, please!
Oh.
Maybe I’m not crazy after all.
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