9. Your flirting is bad and you should feel bad
Or, That time I'd read Charlotte's Web to people over the phone
Thanks so much for reading. 100% is going to take a break in August while I go off to Lithuania and Edinburgh Fringe. See you in September.
I’ve never been chill enough to be cool. Before you @ me with “there’s all kinds of cool”, you know what I mean. I mean cool like this guy:
If you’re too young to know who this is, it’s Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life, a show so powerful it still resonates in my subconscious 25 years later. Jordan Catalano was very cool, and the main way he communicated that cool was by not communicating very much of anything at all.
(Jared Leto, who played Jordan Catalano, was so good at not communicating anything that even rabid fans of the show were left wondering if he could actually act. Leto would win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2013 for Dallas Buyers Club.)
If Jordan Catalano liked someone the chances of that person knowing was zero, which happened to be one of the main themes of the show. Whereas if I liked someone the chances of them knowing were 100%. Because I’d show them. Immediately.
And if you were a person I liked during a certain period of my life, I would have shown that by reading Charlotte’s Web to you. In its entirety. Over the phone.
If you don’t know Charlotte’s Web, the 1952 super-duper classic by E.B. White, here’s a brief rundown:
A small pig named Wilbur is saved from an early death by a young girl named Fern. When Wilbur gets too big he’s sold to a farm, where he’s befriended by a spider named Charlotte. Knowing Wilbur is not long from the slaughter, Charlotte decides she can save Wilbur’s life by making him famous. She weaves flattering statements about him in her web and everyone becomes convinced he’s special. At the local fair Wilbur wins a prize and Charlotte, knowing he will be spared, allows herself to die. Wilbur carries her egg sac back to the farm where three of her children, and future offspring, keep him company for the rest of his life.
Most people agree it’s a deeply touching portrayal of friendship (people who don’t are lunatics), and most people also agree it’s not the least bit romantic (but if that’s your thing, I won’t yuck your yum). So why would I read it to someone to show I was interested in them? Well, there are three reasons.
The first reason has to do with The Simpsons.
In the season 2 episode “Lisa’s Substitute”, Lisa’s substitute teacher, Mr. Bergman, reads Charlotte’s Web to the class, openly weeping during Charlotte’s final moments. Both teachers and The Simpsons were big deals to me, so this was like crack for my impressionable pubescent mind.
I internalised this episode at a genetic level. Cut me open and you’d see it there, next to my beating, hopeful heart. So the next time I had cause to let someone know, hey, I’d like to kiss you, I reached for Mr. White’s tale of porcine protection.
Why I thought this was flirting is the second reason.
All my romantic sensibilities at the time were the result of five inputs:
The 1985 movie adaptation of A Room With A View.
The Breakfast Club (also released in 1985).
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs by Leonard Cohen.
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.
Before Sunrise (1995).
Before Sunrise is a little outside this window, but it had such a profound effect on how I perceived romance it has to be included. Certainly whatever was motivating me to read, chapter by chapter, an entire book to someone over the phone only intensified after seeing it.
A Room With a View is about hopeless romantics where everything is doomed until the final moment when it isn’t. The Breakfast Club is about a group of very different people who discover, over the course of one day, how similar they really are. Written on the Body is about sex, mostly, but also about how hard it is to understand what you want.
And Leonard Cohen wrote things like this:
If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
Each deserves a newsletter of their own (SPOILER), but if I could sum up their collective influence on me it would be they made me think romance is a game of grand gestures. Grand, confusing gestures.
Which is the third reason.
If you’ve made it this far, you might be thinking about a small detail in my story. You might be thinking, Thom, if someone was willing to listen to you read an entire YA novel over the phone… didn’t they already like you?
And the answer is, yes, probably. I mean almost certainly. Like, that seems obvious now, in hindsight, which, as they say, is 20/20. I can see that now with all the wisdom and understanding of those intervening years.
But at the time nothing was obvious to me. I was a deeply anxious young man, with almost no physical confidence. Worse, I projected as being extremely confident, so people always assumed I knew what I was doing. I did not. I never knew what anyone felt about me until they were saying it directly to my face, and even then I was suspicious.
So I’d spend months, literally months, doing all sorts of elaborate things without getting within a mile of asking someone on a date, or making any other discernible move. Baking cookies. Buying out-of-print copies of favourite books. Recording walking tours of Vancouver onto cassette. Writing, god help me, songs about them.
And in that context someone listening to me read an entire book over the phone seemed somewhat natural. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
Which leads to this.
I’ve spent most of my life feeling alone, which has nothing to do with other people and everything to do with depression and anxiety. I’ve never actually been ‘alone’, and I’ve long struggled to make those two contradictory conditions align.
It became clear to me about two years ago that my grand romantic gestures had been, on the whole, desperate attempts to feel liked. Not be liked. But feel it. And I’m sure it will surprise no one to hear that didn’t work. You can’t externalise a need and bring it back into yourself.
It returns with empty pockets.
So about two years ago I started to consciously do less while trying to mean more. I would only make things if I could put my entire intention into them. In a gift for a friend, or a podcast for my family, I tried to ignore the screaming shadows, the constant fear that should I stop expressing, near constantly, my affection for other people, their affection would disappear.
That if I didn’t keep reading the book, no one would ever want to listen to it again.
I don’t know where I am with this now. The fears are quieter but still lurking around the edges of the forest, threatening to swarm in. Leaving Facebook and starting this newsletter was another step in fighting them back with purpose. Which is why I don’t always reply when you (beautifully, wonderfully) respond. I don’t want to need that response to know you’re my friends.