Girls
Now Playing: Lost Prophets
I wouldn’t say I’m an emotionally stable person—ask my mom. Raising me involved a lot of tantrums and headaches on both sides of the parental equation. But I have to say, they did a pretty sweet job. I mean, I don’t know where my good looks came from, but after taking my genetics course I figured that what I call the “handsome” gene must be recessive. That’s not true, no, my mother is the best-looking woman in the world. And my dad…he’s got…he’s smart.

So I have some intense emotions, but I’ve found a way to either express them without hurting anyone. I remember when I was little I used to just do pushups over and over at night until I couldn’t feel my arms. It was sort of a way of avoiding crying. I still do that, among other things.

My friend Mr. Mi, Miss C and I headed into downtown Osaka to buy me an electric guitar (one of the most important things in a man’s life, replaceable only by a motorcycle or an even sweeter electric guitar…or maybe a horse, I guess, if you’re a country boy, but I’m most definitely not). Miss C is this Japanese girl we met at a bar that speaks near-perfect English because of her Canadian boyfriend. Make that former boyfriend, as Mr. Mi informed me the night before at a bar. He was a verbally abusive drunk and also paranoid about her having other boyfriends that didn’t exist. Ironically, he ended the relationship.

As Mr. Mi announced the news at the bar last night, Mr. Ma and Mr. Mi, who are both trying the long distance relationship thing, turned to me. “So what are you going to do about this?” Mr. Mi asked me.

“Yes, let’s discuss this,” Mr. Ma said. Again, he’s the black dude from LA. Mr. Mi is a Japanese/Chinese mutt with an overdeveloped sense of skepticism.

I shrug.

“Oh come on,” Mr. Mi said. “She’s like the coolest girl we’ve met here.”

Mr. Ma nods and briefly looks up from his cell, which he’s using to send a text message. He gets an email at least every five minutes or even more often.

I can’t believe I have to sit through lady advice from these two. Mr. Mi is on the phone with his woman every time I go over to his place and he told me that she cries every time he’s called her. Mr. Ma, on the other hand, has a girl that gets overly paranoid about his activity here. Whenever I go over to his place he spends about ten minutes convincing her that the sound in the background are not from a girl. They both seem to enjoy trying to deal with those head-cases, so I guess they’re puzzle-piece fits.

“I just—I don’t know. They’re just really good friends of ours and we’re lucky to have Japanese people that help us out so much,” I said.

“Oh, don’t give me that, that’s such a lame excuse,” Mr. Mi said. I think he’s just been out of the dating game so long, he wants to live through me. I’ve seen his dance moves and he’d be really good at picking up the club women, I’m sure.

“Yeah, I don’t think it would last long and that would make things weird with our ah, our friend circle thing we have going, you know?”

“Whatever, man. She could teach you Japanese so fast.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Ma confirms without looking up from his cell.

I never really thought about using women for language acquisition, and it doesn’t seem to be either ethical or an attractive idea.

“I’m just not into her like that.”

“Come on, it’d be good for you. Your pad’s got to be getting lonely by now. She could be the perfect addition to the place,” Mr. Mi said.

“Let me repeat myself: No, there’s no use in that. Let me rephrase myself: I don’t have any feelings for her.”

They still didn’t seem to understand, but I’ll spare the agonizing trail of the hours that ensued.

Mr. Mi and I met Miss C on the train and headed into Osaka. I threw a lot of Japanese out and she’s very complementary towards me. She said I spoke without an accent, but I don’t believe that. If you can spit out one syllable of Japanese here, you get showered with praise because the Japanese study for years but are too shy to speak any English. She’s an awful teacher—I have to drag things out of her, and once I say it successfully once, she moves on to something else. I have the memory of a dog that lives with a hippie, so I never remember anything I ‘learned.’

My apartment’s getting pretty lonely with just me, and it’s been a while since I’ve had a meaningful relationship with a girl. I’ve noticed that most people date in order to test whether they’re in love with someone or not, and then after a messy breakup they kind of go, “wow, I really wasn’t falling in love with them. I was just using them to relieve all the stress from my demanding job. Oh well, at least I have you, Ben and Jerry.”

I have the opposite approach. I fall in love with almost every girl I see, if only for a few seconds. If it lasts for more than a week I know I’ve got a problem, but it usually doesn’t. I remember there was one girl I had a crush on in a class and never even talked to her. There was just something that was amazing that I couldn’t get over—I still remember her today, even though I never even met her.

It’s the most awful feeling in the world when I’m dating I don’t feel anything for. Don't get me wrong, I get lonely just like the next guy, but even when I give in to an opportunity I always want out, and I get out of it immediately. That’s why most women don’t last more than one or two nights out with me. That and I’m a hard person to enjoy spending time with. Sort of how most people don’t like stabbing themselves repeatedly, most people don’t like the raw form of my seemingly random and intense personality. And that’s why I can’t understand why Mr. Mi thinks it’s a good idea to date someone in order to learn a language.