I had an interesting encounter with a random guy yesterday in the Kroger parking lot. He drove up beside me as I was heading inside. It took me a moment before I realized the repetitive, persistent noise behind me was human, and it was saying, ” ‘scuse me…’scuse me!” I turned in his direction and then he said, “where do you get your eyebrows done?” He had a flyer in his hand, he was about to give it to me.
Some guys are doing this new thing now, where they know they have no reason to talk to you, and they know we hate that. So now they’ve started a business, just to have a reason to bother you. He’s the second guy in as many months to have done this– make it seem like you’re listening to a sales pitch when suddenly, just when you thought it couldn’t get more annoying, the qualifying questions start getting a little more personal. The purpose is two-fold, I imagine: on one hand it gets you talking to a girl; on the other, it makes you seem like you’ve got a job and you’re out there grinding and trying to make something of yourself. Or at least, it’s supposed to.
So after I tell him that I don’t go anywhere to get my eyebrows done he goes, “oh are you married?” A perfectly logical follow-up question, right? If there’s a guy out there who does this, please know that at this point, I’m just anticipating the moment for you to get to the end of your pitch so that I can say no to it. But I remained respectful. I think at that point he asked if he could take me out and I said “no.” I think before that he asked if I was interested in going out with [random strangers that pull up in cars at the Kroger parking lot to ask me out] and I said “no” to that as well. He tried to whittle down the root of my objections by asking, “why not, is it b/c I’m not wearing a suit?” Implying that I’m shallow and easily led by appearances. If you must know, a suit will help anyone’s chances with me. But it was the very lameness of his existence that actually did him in. I couldn’t really say that to him, so I instead pointed out the weirdness of his approaching me in a parking lot behind the wheel of a car while his boy sat awkwardly in the front seat. He realized it was unusual but explained that I caught him off guard and was “dressed so nice today” that he decided to stop. I tried to tell him that I would give his flyer to some of my friends who get their eyebrows done but he drove away. He couldn’t get a date, but apparently he didn’t really want any business either.
Has that ever happened to you, ladies? It seems like the nicer we are the quicker they have to leave our sight and they end up doing something so rude as that. It just makes me wonder what that exchange was really about, because it wasn’t about communication, and it certainly wasn’t about creating a relationship. He was so interested only a half a minute before. Suddenly I’m of so little value to him that he doesn’t even have the energy to listen to me another second. Maybe he was angry, maybe he was embarrassed, but there’s no doubt the circumstance brought some information out about him neither one of us would’ve known about had I just said “yes” to him.
Guys think we have it easy, when we really just have it hard in a different way. We don’t face the exact same challenge as they do when it comes to, say, getting a date, but that isn’t to say we don’t have challenges. When your job is to ask someone out, you have certain things you have to worry about doing or not doing, like picking the right person and/or getting a “yes.” Likewise, our job is to get asked out, which means we have to be the right person, while simultaneously not being the wrong person, and say “yes” to the right person, which also means saying “no” to the wrong person. You don’t know if the next time you get asked out will be the last, and you don’t know if you should say “no” to the wrong person if he’s only 1% wrong, or 10%, or 49.9%. I can’t remember exactly why but the whole incident reminded me of God.
God is a lot like a woman. People tend to forget this, or gloss over this, especially if you’re a [religious] man. It’s weird to think of God as a woman, and not in this New Age Philosophy type way. The fact is both genders are nothing more than expressions of who He is anyways, and neither gender can claim complete ownership of being male or female, which is really more of an office than an identity. I’m convinced that most of the misunderstandings that happen about God is b/c people forget to think of him as a true, bonafide person. So let’s practice. Let’s think of God not only as a bonafide person but as a woman person.
Let’s say you get “serious.” You come to church, you pray the prayer, you sing the songs, you read the book, you hang out with the people. God knows you’re full of crap. He sees your elaborate gesture but it’s not completely certain it’s on behalf of Him. Then you make your move. You focus the conversation on what you really want. A relationship. A job. Power. A nice respectable hobby. Righteousness. God tells you “no.” You get pissed. Or embarrassed. You don’t know what you did wrong. It’s just unfair, really. It’s bullshit. So before God can finish speaking, you bounce. God didn’t need it, but now he knows for sure that you were full of crap. It wasn’t about Him at all, just about his goodies. And you know what? God made a good decision. He makes the same decision we tell people make all the time if they want to be healthy: set boundaries.
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