Murder in the Burbs

I'm living in the suburbs now, and in turn, life has become quite suburban-like. I moved in about a month ago. About two days in that I was living with all Mormons: a revelation that would catch most off guard, but I'm never one to turn down a good cultural experience... I have a whole fleet of Mormons back home, and in the case that Joseph Smith really does have it right, I would like to believe they will come to my defense. I made the Mormon discovery over delivery pizza, the most sacred of all meals. Ever since, it's been a bit of a Desperate Housewives situation, as little issues and secrets from the suburbs have bubbled to the surface between casseroles and freshly made cupcakes. It's not like anyone has been killed or anything, well, yet... but there's always room for those kind of things to happen. But, again, that's not to say that the first month hasn't been eventful or at least taken some getting used to.

Back home in Tennessee, my neighborhood was hardly suburban. Most of the scandals that occurred involved my neighbor sneaking up behind our house and shooting a turkey, which then followed with my dad physically attacking him... so on and so forth, no big deal. Our neighbors up the street had two German Shepherds named Hydro and Codone, which my dad convinced me were the names of two 70s sitcom characters. But more on them later. At my last apartment, we lived in the Arlington "hood" which, considering the overall archetype of Arlington County, is more like where most of working class America lives. There were a lot of quinceaneras that happened at the park up the road, and my roommate got his window busted in once... but we decided that was because no one in the neighborhood liked him. But the suburbs... that's uncharted territory for me. Imagine my surprise as a family biking down the street stared me down as I was rapping Holy Grail quite loudly in my parked car. In the suburbs, people expect better things out of you, namely... not singing Jay-Z songs with your windows down.
My first run-in happened just days after I moved in. I was smoking in my front yard, all Ryan Atwood-style as the local Marissa Coopers watched from their windows. I didn't think it was a big deal, until I realized that there was no where to put my cigarette butts. I would finish off one, and then lay it in the gutter so that it could... I don't know... disappear or something. Unfortunately, that didn't work. A couple days later, my roommate came to me and said, Um, I don't know if you smoke or something, but the lady next door stopped me and said that someone was smoking in our yard, and it didn't make the neighborhood look good... so I just wanted to let you know. Ostracized. I was Hester Prynn-ed right out of the neighborhood before I could even start.
But I've tried my best to fit into the mold the best that I can. Tonight for instance, we had a little dinner party on the back porch, I fixed pumpkin cupcakes, and I spent the majority of the night doing laundry and watching Pitch Perfect in the background. Everything seems so simple in this world because on the surface... it is. But as we learned from Desperate Housewives' 9 year tenure on ABC, life is not always as it seems. Before I left for Knoxville a little over two weeks ago, life was going pretty well. I'd gotten the anti-smoking neighbor off my back, and I was getting settled in to the normalcy of quaint-Arlington-life. I was dating someone. Sometimes, my roommates would sit down and watch Big Brother or some other show with me, and I had even gotten comfortable enough to whip out the ol' bottle of wine every once in a while, but when I returned... everything got more complicated. The dating was over, my friends were busy, Big Brother had ended for the season, and everything was just amiss.
My dating life, per the usual, is a bit of a sham. I was sitting at home on a Tuesday night in gym shorts and a t-shirt, watching my DVR-ed Dancing with the Stars. I was sipping on some wine, and of course as most young boys do whilst watching Dancing with the Stars, I got lonely. I turned to my tried and true method of meeting people... online dating... because it's been so very successful in the past. I sent a cutie a little message, and I put my phone down, content with myself for the valiant effort that I had made in the dating world. Because our generation is a really freaky,l nearly voyeuristic one, obsessed with knowing as much information as possible, this site tells you how far you are from one another. Originally, it said 2 miles away, but after it refreshed, it said 1 mile. I thought that was kind of strange, but sometimes the GPS is off a bit. I looked back down and it said .5 miles away... it started to feel eerie. At this point, I picked up my phone and held it, waiting to see if my interest-turned-stalker was getting any closer. After refreshing again, the distance had updated to 300 feet away--guys, that's a football field. At this point, I was convinced that my killer could see me. I wasn't sure what to do because the only thing around me to kill someone was a remote, a large potted plant, and a stack of bills. In short, I was the black guy in every slasher movie. I was the opposite of Jennifer Lopez in Enough. All I had done was send a message to someone on a dating website, and in the course of 15 minutes, I was convinced that I was staring death in the face.
The phone refreshed one more time: 17 feet. This was it. My front door opened and my roommate walked through and behind him was a familiar face. The same face that I was looking at and refreshing just seconds before. He said, "Hey man! Glad you're down here... I have a friend I want you to meet." I didn't catch a name because at that point, I started laughing... and not in the, "laugh along with me kind of way," but in the, "I'm sorry I laughed at your cat's elaborate funeral" kind of way. I introduced myself and then put together what I was wearing: white gym shorts with a hot sauce stain on them from dinner and a t-shirt with a hole in the armpit. At this point, I was out of control. I was laughing to the point that I was occasionally snorting as they looked on at me like I had some kind of social disorder (which, in all honesty, I may... but that's neither here nor there). Eventually, they went upstairs and didn't come back down for the rest of the night. When I went upstairs, the door was closed and the light was off, but in all of my laughter, I didn't put together what that meant; it wasn't until the next day that I realized that I had lost my online venture before it even started. But, for now at least, I had my life.
So, there may not be any dogs down the street named after prescription pain killers, and no one has gotten their windows busted in, but that's not to say that nothing happens in the suburbs. The lease has barely started, and I'm not convinced that the woman next door isn't housing someone in her basement or something. But in the mean time, I'll just sit on the couch with my pumpkin muffins and DVR shows that I would prefer the rest of the world didn't know I watched... and when I get lonely, I'll sift through the pictures on online dating sites considering which ones are secretly dating my roommate, which ones might be available, and which ones may actually show up at my door in an attempt to kill me.

Digital, Digital Get Down

My friend Alex and I were talking over a nice dose of Fro Yo the other day and reflecting on our youth. Of course, when you're coming of age, you're bound to make mistakes. Bobby, of The Brady Bunch, learned the hard way why he shouldn't play ball in the house. Frankie Muniz found out why you shouldn't kick your dog during a baseball game in My Dog Skip. And I'm not saying that my generation had it any harder than the next, but if you weren't careful, coming of age could be really, really dangerous for someone our age. As we were thinking back to what it was like growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, I think we might have weirded ourselves out just by looking at the prospects. It was after that conversation that I decided that my children would not have access to the internet until they are least sixteen years old. Why did we not listen to NSYNC when they warned us about these "digital get downs?" Nothing safe happens online.
I had no business on the internet as a child, and if you think back, you probably didn't either. I remember when we got our first computer back in fifth grade--yes, it had CompuServe dial-up internet which allowed you to make a sandwich, walk the dog, and finish a Melville novel between page loading times, but it was the internet, and that was pretty friggin' cool back in 2000. My brother and I would take turns getting on it, and it's not like we could do too much damage because it was stationed in our parents' room. We lived in a very old single wide at the time, so even if my parents were on the other end of the house, if we had something naughty up that made noise, they could hear it without a problem. We never wanted to abuse having a computer... hell, we were just jazzed that we could play Minesweeper any time we wanted to, though neither of us having any idea to this day what that game is about, nor how to play it.
But it wasn't long until we messed everything up. We had grown tired of 50states.com, which apparently is no longer a website (sigh), so we decided to look up facts about Washington D.C. before I took my trip there with safety patrol. Casey and I gathered around the computer to look up whitehouse.com, and there it was for the world to see... naked. women. We were equal parts embarrassed, intrigued, and filled-with-sin. This friend we had known for such a short amount of time had become our enemy so quickly, and from there, it was clear that the internet was going to be the kind of friend that you just don't tell your parents about.
But the inadvertent porn via what we thought was a government website was not the problem. Alex and I decided that the problem really started once we got into middle school. Looking back, we were all over the internet in ways that we, nor our parents, really had any idea about. I remember back to my AIM days when I would sit on the computer changing my background and my layout and coming up with my screenname, and it all seemed so harmless... but then I think about all the chatrooms that I would go into and all of the "friends" that I would make on there. And when I talk to people my age about it, it really was not an uncommon thing for people to make friends and exchange screennames with people that we had no idea who they actually were. I had one friend who was 13 and lived in Ohio named Brittany, and we would ask each other all kinds of personal questions, and 12 year old me was on the other side of the computer screen throughly convinced that I had found my soulmate over the internet. In reality, there's a solid chance that I was not talking to Brittany, or possibly even a child. How we were not all captured by a man named Carl who had an affinity for Mogen David wine and My Little Pony, I will never know.

Honestly, if I were speaking with a predator, I'd probably
also ask for some M&Ms.

All of the conversations would start out the same: ASL? Just think about it for a minute--why in the hell did a 13 year old need to be telling another 13 year old his or her age/sex/location? Hi, my name is Justin, I'm 13/Boy/Knoxville, TN. Here's my address... now come grab me so that I can end up being another story told by John Walsh. We giggle at Chris Hansen because he's always doing the intercept between the pedophile and the decoy on To Catch a Predator, but I have no idea why I'm laughing and judging the idea that these kids' parents weren't paying enough attention because my parents totally let me do the same thing. And the one time that I did connect with a stranger online (on MySpace, may it rest in the shadow of Facebook), I suppose that I was lucky enough that the person I was meeting was an actual fifteen year old girl and not some strange predator because when I asked my mom to drop me off at the movies to meet her, my mom just agreed to it, like that's a normal thing. All I had to protect me was an absurdly loud voice, a twenty dollar bill, and a Nokia phone that was missing the * key and was really only useful to play Snake. I was one of the lucky few whose online ventures led to his first kiss, then friend, then girlfriend, then back to friend, now life coach... but everyone else doesn't always end up so lucky.
The problem with the internet being available to our generation is that we like to hope for the good in people, which is probably why it takes so long for us to learn lessons. Here I am, typing up a brief history of the dangers of the internet with my online dating profile open in the separate tab thinking to myself Hm. I wonder why I haven't met anyone of substance or sanity on here? Well, it's because the internet is where crazies go to hibernate. And then it's the ding of a Facebook chat, or the pong of a new message that wakes them up, and then we all go into full blown creeper mode. And it's something we learned from an early age... well, at least those of us who survived. But that's the scary thing, the chat rooms and the AIM and the time we spent searching the internet for the next weird thing to get ourselves into was just the beginning. Now we use it to keep tabs on our exes and people we don't like and to look up pictures and videos of cats doing human things. (Oh, you haven't seen Kittens Inspired by Kittens? Do it now.) I don't think that the weird dial-up noise that used to come on as the internet loaded was a lack of technology... I think it was more of a warning sign that none of us never listened to, and after some reflection, it's my very own mistakes that will keep future Kirkland children from accessing the internet until at least after puberty. Maybe longer.

I Don't Know Why You Gotta Be Angry All The Time

This past week, my internship told me that I had an invitation to stay four more months if I was interested; I had done a spectacular job, and if a long-term position opened up, I would be immediately considered for it. That week started off fresh from a visit from my parents and ended with a double paycheck Friday. I had plans for the entire weekend set up, and still... with all of that good news in hand, I was told a record three times that week, Justin, I would never want to be on your bad side because when someone gets on your bad side, it's pretty obvious that they stay there.
At first, I enjoyed the summation because it made me feel like Victoria Grayson from Revenge or one of those Italian men from The Sopranos. Essentially, what I took from it is that I'm kind of a badass and garner respect from the masses. But after the third time, I began to wonder... what is it that I'm doing to people?? I looked back at my archived journals to figure out when the last time I held someone at knifepoint was, and that was way back in sophomore year of college, so it couldn't be that. Naturally, because I live in my own head, I decided to take a step back and try to think about what it is that could be making me so subtly angry.
At first I was a little perplexed as to why I could ever be perceived as a bitter person because, under most definitions, I am what the kids refer to as "living the dream." I somehow manage to pay rent every month (so far), and I have a small social circle. I'm doing well in school, and my professors think I have a witty, unique personality. What. Could. Be. Missing. When the solution isn't very evident, you start looking at the particulars. I've made a bulleted list you can scan through:

• a stronger affinity than usual for the lead pipe I carry in my car
• a spike in plays of "Somebody That I Used to Know"
• an influx of Reese's wrappers hidden throughout my apartment so that no one can find them
• an odd distaste for any movie closely related to a RomCom

After some initial WebMD searches, followed by an intensive unrelated Google search of "Where Do Broken Hearts Go," I decided that maybe I was lovesick. Lovesickness is something that people don't really like to admit to because, well, it's embarrassing and looks kind of needy. But it's not something that you should ignore because when you do that, people say that you're angry, and then you just make people less apt to fall in love with you, because that's how love works.

Apparently it's not that uncommon of an issue because, as of tonight, all three occupants of my apartment have now bastardized our personalities and dignity to create online dating profiles. Love, or the lack of it, makes you do some funny things which probably explains a lot of the weird things I've done in the past when it comes to relationships. No one can say that they're perfect, and when under the influence of hormones and the ever lingering threat of getting married while you're still in shape and proudly sporting a head full of hair, you start to have a really guilty sympathy for Amy Fisher, aka the Long Island Lolita.

I can never say that I've ever shot my lover's wife in her face, and that's something that I believe is a trait to be proud of; BUT it doesn't make me exempt from the laundry list of things I've done in the face of loneliness and desperation. The effects of lovesickness come in different forms: the direct and the indirect. As I've seen from our personal experiences at the apartment, the indirect is one of the most hilarious and/or ridiculous products involved in this process. As we've been filling out our profiles, we turn to each other in a nervous panic saying, This website asked me what I'm good at... WHAT AM I GOOD AT?!?!1?!!1 It's like we've forgotten what we do on a daily basis so we turn to basic human functions (walking places, checking the mail, buckling my seatbelt) because we've forgotten any remnant of a skill set we have. And then there's me who waits seven minutes, has no profile visits, then launches into a soliloquy about the shallow nature of humanity, and that if your profile picture isn't alluring enough, you might as well consider yourself trash. It's exhausting being self-deprecating.

This is called a Tango Corte, or as I referred to it in class,
the "kiss my ass, I'm really jaded after our relationship"
thingy.

But the redeeming quality of the indirect is that you can keep it as private as you would like; the real issue begins when you start directing those feelings in different directions. At the climax of my last relationship's downfall, I was in the same ballroom dancing class as my significant other. Ironically, we were not partners, which seemingly would make continuing in the class easier. However, the effects of lovesickness knows no bounds. I took my partner, Rachel, aside and told her, Listen. Today is the tango, and I'll explain it later, but I need us to blow this shit out of the water. And by this, I mean we need to blow them out of the water. I pointed out the couple in question and explained our mission. Rachel, being my Jennifer Grey, quickly agreed. We used our long limbs to parade around the dance floor, doing as many of the cortes (see above) as possible before our instructor told us to stop having sex on the dance floor. Was I accomplishing anything of any substantial value by completely kicking the tango's ass? No. No, I was not. But in the face of feeling kind of sad and heartbroken, sometimes it helps to believe you're doing mean things to other people. And when you look back on it, the idea of what you've done is almost comical because ninety-nine percent of the time, whatever grand scheme you had going on in your head has had no significant impact on the other person's life. You unsubscribed to your ex on Facebook? Zing. Bet that one's going to burn for at least fifteen minutes.

And sure, all of these things are easy to make fun of, pity, or maybe even demean someone for because the idea of feeling so spiteful in regard to love seems a little contradictory to the process itself. But at the end of the day, we're all just kind of human. We do stupid things in the face of potentially being alone because no matter what we may say, we like the idea of having someone in our lives. I mean, I know in my case that if someone isn't at my apartment when I get in from work, I just go and talk to the pictures on my bedroom wall until I hear someone walk through the door. We're not a species of people that are meant to live our lives alone, so you can't blame people for the weird reactions they have when they are forced to go stag for a little bit. The important part of it all is that you look at yourself at the end of the day and say, You know. I'm kind of being batshit crazy right now because if you can accept the fact that the way you're acting is totally absurd, then you at least have that in check.

Acting out and doing the weird human things we do in the face of a loveless life is what makes us who we are. Some people like to "find themselves" and do yoga or swear off of (insert gender) for (insert time period). Some people resort to online methods in hopes of ending up on an eHarmony commerical one day. Then you have people like me, who apparently uses his lack of love life as an excuse to hone in on his ability to terrify people into believing that he could kill them at a moment's notice. Whatever you do to pass the time between romances is perfectly acceptable, as long as you don't shoot anyone like Amy Fisher did. Nobody likes that kind of crazy.

Online Dating Is a Little Sketchy Sometimes

I guess I should have known from an early age that I would be an online dater. Once upon a time, I got a random message from a girl on MySpace and after an extensive messaging stint, we traded numbers. I was just a mild-mannered sixteen year old at the time, but something about this impersonal and somewhat fabricated way of meeting people seemed to appeal to me. We would talk for hours, finding that we had everything in common: from Alabama football all the way for a shared love of Gilmore Girls. I had done it. I had found love in a hopeless place, as Rihanna might say it.

Our first date was seeing Me, You, and Dupree, which is anything but a date movie. We would have a short make out sesh in the parking lot, and then I wouldn't call her back until I found out we were going to college together.

Even in college, knowing that my lifestyle wasn't nearly as popular at small-town liberal arts college as I hoped it would be, I would try the occasional "turn a Facebook friend into something more" approach. We would eventually hang out and learn that what we liked most about each other were the other one's Facebook statuses. We were hilarious online; we remember... probably because when we had awkward pauses, I could check Twitter or my email. I don't know what's wrong with me... this amateur online business wasn't panning out the way I was hoping. Maybe this was a tell-tale sign that I shouldn't be dating online. Maybe, more so, this was a tell-tale sign that I have commitment issues, but that's neither here nor there. Regardless, maybe Rihanna knew something more about my life than I had thought. Most people believe that her song is about finding someone and falling for them hard, only for said relationship to be blown apart my drugs, possessiveness, and abuse. I, however, know that this top 40 hit is about online dating. You were wrong, eHarmony. This will not be an everlasting love.

To my dismay, college was not the place that I would find the love of my life, though I spent at least 3 percent of my time there proposing to people that weren't interested in the slightest. (I'm looking at you, Nam) Eventually, under the persuasion of a friend, I decided that I would give online dating a chance. I did the basic steps that any online dater would be familiar with: going through your personal pictures to find one that you look miraculously more attractive in than you actually are in person. If you can find one that has you and someone's hand on your shoulder, or a partial of someone's face, it looks better because that means that you may have social skills. You choose only the hobbies that will make you look like a solid life partner: cooking, occasional hiking, staying in and watching movies (but I'm not a homebody, I swear!! lolol). Eventually, you go on to say that you're "just here to meet some fun people to hang out with, nothing serious..." even though, we all know that's a lie. It's a simple formula. You accidentally forget to say that you play Magic: The Gathering on the weekend and you have an embarrassing addiction to Lifetime movies.

I wasn't prepared, but the messages starting rolling in. "Hey, I just read your profile. You seem like a really nice guy! We should hang out sometime?!?" I was never really sure how "we should hang out sometime" could be phrased as a question, but I went with it. After some initial apprehension and intensive Google research, I began setting up dates. I would tell my closest friends where I was going and all the passwords and secret places I had stuff hidden so that it could be destroyed after I was murdered. The last thing I would allow is my reputation being destroyed as a consequence of an online dating site murder. In all actuality, only one of the meet-ups was actually a date. Most of the time ended up watching approximately 34 minutes of Wipeout on ABC before we started making out. One very special time, I started crying in the middle of the kissing and announced, "I can't do this. I'm not this kind of person," and then left. The only online date that could be considered "a date" was the time I went to see Titanic 3D. Even being the emotional person I am, I couldn't handle all of the tears that came with the evening. We've all seen Titanic before; Jack and Rose die. It's terrible. The night ended with the most aggressive pop kiss of my life, and I checked my teeth multiple times on the way home to see if any were loose.

I sometimes wonder how many days I have left, considering I'm moving to DC soon and have a terrible habit of not learning from my own mistakes. I'll surely continue this online dating stint, hoping to end up with my own You've Got Mail kind of situation. However, in retrospect, the fact that the media associated with my online dating repertoire is Wipeout, Titanic, and Silent Hill should probably tell me something about my success rate. All three disastrous in their own way. Online dating is scary and really not for the faint of heart. Maybe, just maybe, we should take more time trying to meet people the old-fashioned way and not by advertising ourselves as something we're most likely not. Or maybe I need to go check my eHarmony profile to see if I've gotten any new messages. Yeah. Fate is just around the corner.