Good Grief

I don’t know how many people read Peanuts anymore, seeing as the strip is just reprinted weekly from ages long past, but that right there is a testament to the strip and Charles Schultz. I hold a certain empathy for Charlie Brown - growing up it was really easy to identify with the character. No uncoordinated adolescent can deny ties to a character who can never for the life of him kick the damn football (though maybe to no fault of his own). More importantly I’ve found that the two of us share something more significant than athletic skill, that being taste in women. One of the prevalent story arcs in Peanuts is Charlie Brown’s inability to cope with his adoration of the Little Red Haired Girl. She’s never shown in the strip, and only worshiped from afar - reminding me of Quixote’s Dulcinea. The problem is, there are certain girls that I’ve found, and fallen for, that completely strip me of my ability to cope and flirt, around them I almost feel stripped of myself. If I catch ones eye across the room I can’t even smile to dissolve the tension, only bashfully look at my feet, caught red handed doing something I know I shouldn’t have done. What’s worse? They’ve all been amazing, fun, intelligent and gorgeous red-heads.

Two things started this post – first I found a document on my computer dated from October of 2004, it was a depository of quotes. Between quotes from H.L. Mencken, Benjamin Disraeli and Douglas Adams, I found a scene from a Peanuts movie or strip, I forget which:

It's stupid to just sit here and admire that little red haired girl from a
distance. It's stupid not to get up and go over and talk to her.
[stands up]
It's really stupid! It's just plain stupid; so why I don't I go over and
talk to her?!
[sits down]
Because I'm stupid.
~Charlie Brown

This ailment plagued me my freshman year and my sophomore year, with two different women, and thus the quote made it into my depository. I thought I had kicked the habit when I moved on to brunettes and the like, but I was wrong: she’s studying here in Buenos Aires with me, regretfully strawberry blonde. Yup, that’s reason number two.

I’m being good. I have to be mindful of how much attention I pay to her, purposefully ignoring her so as not to fawn. The fact that when I talk to her I feel witless and slow helps. Sometimes my thought process just freezes around her, sometimes this is a little less helpful... but something happened that threw me for a loop. Something frustratingly meaningless, but it sent me flying nonetheless.

Last night a group of us went to go see Rent in Spanish. The show was amazing, and the music was the same and as awesome as ever. Whoever translated did an amazing job keeping the lyrics in line, and relevant. For me it was an exercise in figuring out what was going on, but it was much like watching an italian opera (la Bohéme) with a loose idea of the plot and just going aloing for the ride. The fun part was watching them try and fit 525,600 minutos into the same space of time. Regardless, the girls I went with decided it’d be nice to dress up and I threw on a tie.

After the show we were trying to flag down a cab and walking to a bigger intersection for better results. Standing on the corner, she began to yawn and I hit her with my program in admonishment, telling her she couldn’t be tired as she had a long night of clubbing ahead of her. Our conversation fell into inanity and slowly died away as the others tried to grab a cab. This one has a bit of ADD and she absent-mindedly grabbed my tie to better inspect it for the better part of 15 seconds (Jerry Garcia = shiny). When she looked up at me she saw a dopey smile behind which raged a battle between elation and sheer terror. I don’t know if she realized it, but she certainly realized how close she had drawn herself towards me and had to awkwardly take a step back.

This sort of vignette is reserved for some romantic comedy and I’ve had to distance myself from it and come back to reality. I don’t need to be keeping a checklist to determine whether my life is comedy or tragedy as I’m not living in a narrative. My problem however, is that my brain is still buzzing about it behind my conscious thoughts, especially when it comes across other quotes from that repository. Specifically this one from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (and aptly so, considering how trapped I feel in this situation):

"His response to women was one of worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous... too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily."