A List of Men You Shouldn't Go Out With

I've had enough female friends and have talked through enough of other people's relationship problems to come up with some fairly obvious fault areas: men who you really should not go out with. As a side note, people can always change and mature. We are able to, with amazing veracity, turn our lives around and change everything. These then are more possible points in a man's existance when you should not date him (not to they will all grow out of these points either). Here is the list:

Men who expect you to cook for them.

Not having the ability or sense to cook is forgivable – it involves certain skills and modes of thought that not everyone possess. But you should never go out with a man who expects you to cook for them for one very simple reason: it changes an activity which should be pleasurable for you into a chore. Cooking a beautiful meal for a loved one is one of the most instantly gratifying things you can do, but having this expectation on you mutates the activity into something wholly unpleasant.

Men who don’t do their own laundry.

This is both arrogant and pathetic. Men that do not launder their own clothes have been spoilt to a dumb degree and will not be used to not getting what they want. They will be immature and petulant, like young children.

Men that regularly spend 5+ hours daily playing video games and are over 21.

Anyone with that great a need of escapism, whilst not being able to overcome the daily deficiencies in their own life which fill their need to play video games, will probably not handle the trials of a relationship very well (or, indeed, the pleasures: no video game, not even Castlevania, will make you a better lover).

Men with the word “Failure” cut into their arms.

This is a specific case I saw, but it applies generally to someone who hates themselves considerably. Don’t go out with these people – they have, somewhere along the way, convinced themselves that because they are losers, they don’t deserve any happiness or success, and will constantly sabotage their endeavors. Not only that, but because a relationship would you would qualify as a success, they will do everything they can to make you hate them, and if you’re still around, will try to pull you down with them.

Men that are loathed by all of their exes.

I quick glance at a man’s relationship with his exes can give you a pretty good summation of a few things: how they handle themselves in times of relationship crisis, and how generally mature they are. Also, if there are any latent dickhead tendencies lurking underneath, this is where it will be most obvious.

Men who feel the need to constantly remind the world how not gay they are.

The thing is, they’re probably not gay, but this is what makes it so worrisome. This level of sexual insecurity is not helpful for a relationship.

Men with questionable relationships with their exes.

Men who flirt with their exes with little regard for your feelings, and will then turn it around on you with accusations of jealousy. It is really a question of priorities: if they make no consideration to change or modify their behaviour in order to account for your very normal and understandable insecurities over their former lovers than that they behaviour is innately selfish and self-serving.

From March

I was sitting in Fremantle train station, waiting, as one does, for a train. A girl walked past me and sat a few seats down - beautiful, pretty, cute, upturned nose like a ski-jump, circular scar on her right shoulder, tied up dark hair. She was crying. Absolutely sobbing into her sunglasses, then wiping away whatever tears happened to flow out from under them. She would stop momentarily, then look up again in my direction, then start crying again.

I sat there, thinking. Should I go over? What would I do? I imagined getting up and walking over, but then this is the conversation I imagined in my head:

ME: Are you OK?

SHE: *Cries*

ME: *lost for words because she's obviously NOT OK which is why she's crying so it's a really dumb question to ask*

So I sat there for a while, dicing through hypothetical scenarios, until the train arrived.

On board, we sat in a similar set up: her to my right with about 4 seats between us. Like me, she checked and adjusted her hair in the window's reflection, but unlike me she was (still) crying. I revised my imagined conversation:

ME: Hi, sorry, but are you OK?

SHE: No.

*shakes head, not looking at me*

I'm not.

ME: Well... if there's anything at all I can do as a complete and total stranger on a train, let me know yeah?

SHE: *looks at me, nods*

But I was too scared to. By this stage, other people started getting on the train - the first, three Swedish tourists, sitting across from us. They seemed to note her crying, but they sat amongst themselves with their foreign tongue. This was now tough - any interaction I made with the crying girl would now have an interested audience.

"Hey! Remember that guy who talked to that girl on the train and she yelled at him for coming up and talking to her like a creep when she was obviously just upset? In Australia? Hans! Remember that?"

So I kept my mouth shut.

More people arrived. Middle aged Japanese couple, girl with nose ring, and young couple, who sat across from the girl. More than anyone else they too noted her crying, but made no show of it. By now the girl seemed to have hit a spot of quiet resignation - she looked almost wistful. Then she quickly took her phone out to read something.

The train started. The girl-half of the young couple showed off their newest acquisition: some Japanese toy. It was composed of two mechanical dolls, like squat spinning tops, which sat upon a small stage with a circular track. She placed the dolls on the track, then wound the stage up below. The dolls started to spin - spin around the track and spin around themselves, while the whole contraption began to play Beethoven's "Fur Elise" in stops and starts. I smiled.

I decided I had to say or do something otherwise I would regret it forever. Maybe it would have no effect. Maybe it would result in my humiliation. But maybe it would change everything. It seemed like a sensible bet to take with that in mind.

I had only one stop, because I was getting off at North Fremantle. I thought: I can't go over and talk to her, because the minute I do, I'll have to leave, and that would be redundant. Maybe I could write something for her, I decided. Just something, anything, to show her that she somehow wasn't alone, that somehow someone cared. But I had no pen or paper. I looked in my wallet - most cards couldn't be written on (The Shearing Shed, Fi&Co, Igor & Katja, the W.A. Police), but a few were white. I couldn't use one of my therapist's cards ("Hi! I see you're crying on a train. Take this card. You're obviously nuts and should be in therapy."), nor could I use my rent card (because I, well, needed it to pay the rent). The only thing left was a reciept I got from Soho-Soho the night before, when I payed for my fishcakes with eftpos because the meal cost $20.50 and I only had a $20 on me. It would do fine.

But I didn't have anything to write with. My mind started to get desperate - can I scratch an impression with my thumbnail? Do I carry lipstick? *Any* makeup I can use to write with? I realised I had to bite the bullet and be brave: I had to ask a stranger for a pen while on a train. I looked around: the girl with the nose ring had a bag.

"Sorry." I said, trying to get her attention. Failed.

"Sorry." I said again. "But do you happen to have a pen I could borrow?"

I repeated my question because she couldn't understand it, then started looking through her bag. I started making up excuses, saying

"I just had this thought that I really needed to jot down.", as if somehow needing a pen made me look like a freak or a loser and I had to hide this fact. She finally found a permanent marker and lent it to me, and I quickly jotted down a note on the back of the receipt. I gave it back, thanked her, then folded the note self-consciously - not wanting to show the message to anyone else on the train, and also wanting to avoid her thinking I had just given her a receipt for a burger joint.

My stop came, and I leant over to her and placed the note on her bag. She looked at me quizzically, but I stood up and walked passed her to the train door. I pressed the button for it to open, then stood, fixed like concrete in my place, staring straight ahead. Did she even see the note? Did she think it was rubbish? Did she open it up? Did she read it?

The train door opened and I stepped outside. Without turning back, I started to walk as the train rolled on. I decided that even if she didn't read the note, it didn't really matter. Because I trusted for her what I had written on it:

It'll get better.

So irregardless of me, it would.

I walked out of the train station, full of adrenaline and loving, even for this brief moment, what it meant to be human.

Then I walked back because I realised I hadn't tagged off.

The end.

On Ghosts

I walked past a ghost tonight. It is a ghost I see on an almost weekly basis. As usual it was the same outcome: they completely didn’t see me and made no acknowledgment of my existence. Any attempt to catch eye-contact or entice with a friendly smile proved futile. They are simply existing on another plane of existence which once ran through mine. They were once very much alive and responsive – they smiled and laughed called me by my name. But now they are merely a ghost.

It is virtually impossible to get to a certain age and not have a few ghosts: people who have, for one reason or another, through their fault or yours (or more likely, both), have decided to ignore you completely, as if they were unable to materialise any sort of contact. I myself have two or three (at least). They touch nothing directly in your life with their presence – they might in fact try with great effort to keep whatever presence they have away from you by crossing the street or waiting for the next bus – but merely by being there and being ghosts they succeed in filling your life with a palpable sense of emptiness.

‘What am I?’ you suddenly ask yourself. ‘What kind of monster is deserving of this?’

But of course you are not a monster, you are a human. You are so human, you are probably someone else’s ghost. You’ve crossed streets or pretended that the bus wasn’t yours – you’ve diverted your eyes at the right time, perhaps simply out of ease or perhaps out of spite. You’ve liked, then loved, then hated, and then not known what to think, so it is simply easier, and less scary, to not look. This is the recipe of the ghost. So much of our interaction with the world and the interaction done to us is fraudulent: we really aren’t suddenly transfixed by a certain cloud which requires us to move our gaze to a certain fixed spot, we really aren’t suddenly called “silently” on our mobiles and have to take upon an enthusiastic conversation with our mothers. But in doing these acts we do a disservice to our fellow human. We leave them thinking

‘What am I? What kind of monster is deserving of this?’

So I propose we all cease being ghosts to each other. We look at each other. We don’t have to smile (we may not like certain others), but we owe it to humanity to at least acknowledge each others existence, no matter how scary or confronting a prospect that might be. The harm we potentially do isn't worth the stress we potentially save ourselves from, selfishly, as if all others were on another plane of existence.