Prologue
This morning, as I laid in bed and stared at the blank screen before me, about to embark on my journey to internet immortality, I came to the first (of what I assume will be many) saddening realization of a flaw in my plan: Just because I've made the commitment to update this daily, it doesn't mean my months-old feud with writers block is going to suddenly end.

I have no idea how to begin this endeavor!  If I write some sappy poem about love and trees and feelings, it will set what I can only call a very gay tone (pale yellows and greens) from the get go.  I thought about finding something in pop culture to riff on in a comedic fashion, thinking that perhaps I could find a niche in the world of comedy blogging, but everything I came up with felt forced and contrived.  If I try to be funny, I won't be funny, then everyone will just feel embarrassed for me and leave comments like "lollerskatez, good one, Dan!" without actually reading it.

So I bit the bullet and asked a friend what I should write this first entry about, telling myself that no matter what she suggested, I would take her first suggestion and just write about it.  She said "love".  I rolled my eyes.  Then I began writing...


Love
I long ago came to the conclusion that love is nothing more than an evolved reaction in our brain that serves to help the continuation of our species.  A boy loves a girl because it stimulates procreation.  A parent loves a child because it makes them protect, and nourish, and teach them at a time when they're too weak and small to survive on their own.

When I first decided this and really began to believe it, it deadened me to the idea of falling in love.  "Why should I be manipulated by my own brain?" I thought to myself (probably, I was a pretty melodramatic teenager, and that seems like the sort of thing I'd think to myself).  And I proceeded to become callous, manipulative, and insensitive.  This lead me to have a lot of sex, tell a lot of lies, and hurt a lot of people who didn't deserve to be hurt.

It wasn't until my 20s that I realised that, just because love is a chemical bowel movement of our brain, it doesn't make it any less real.  In fact, in a moment of profound and life-altering clarity while reading an Archie Comic, I came to understand that this brain BM means that love is all the more real.

I didn't stop eating because my brain told me I was hungry.  I didn't stop sleeping because I've evolved in such a way as to require rest.  Why should I thumb my nose at love just because my brain has its own ulterior motives about it?  Ever since that Archie Comic related epiphany (you will notice, if you continue to read my blog after this, that I do two things regularly:  make up simplistic metaphors, and read a shitload of Archie Comics), I have relished the opportunity to find and cultivate love.  It happens so rarely for me, that when it does happen it feels like... like... like... like the exact opposite of the feeling I get when I see a preview for another Judd Apatow film.

When I look back over my (family members reading this prepare to shudder) sexual conquests, I no longer get the feeling of carnal pride I did as recently as a year ago.  I often liken sex with someone who you don't love to going to a hockey/football match between two teams you have no real affiliation with.  Sure, you enjoy the game, but really at the end of it, you don't really care about the outcome or the goings-on.  As I scroll through my mental Myspace of the girls I have been with since I lost my virginity at age 14, there's a few who can make me crack a smile, a few about whose sexual abilities I could wax poetic, but the only faces who truly stand out are the ones I loved.

The Three

I reckon I have been in love three times.  The part of me that took Intro to Psych at Waterloo can explain away two of them in a dismissively textbook fashion, but that would contradict the entire theme of this entry so I won't do that.  I will just bite the bullet and say that I have loved three girls.  Now, I am going to say a little about each of them, but rather than calling them out by name in this semi-public place, I will denote them by their first initial and be somewhat vague in my description of what happened, retrospectively touching on what I learned.

J- The much-publicized "first love".  Everyone has one of these, and more often than not most people regret them.  I find it somewhat difficult to legitimize anything I felt when I was 17, because I was such a wanker back then, but at the time it was very real.  This "love" (really a co-dependent relationship of her needing someone to solve her teenage drama and me needing someone to emotionally and passive-aggressively control... shut up psych101dan, shut up shut up shut up!) lingered until I was 20, which is really quite pathetic now that I look back on it.

I liken this relationship to the song "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger.  Not because the song has any sort of profound lyric in it (the song is, in fact, about masturbation) but because it was my favourite song on the first CD I ever purchased with my own money.  I listened to that song ad nauseum for a year.  Over and over and over on repeat I would play it and sing it.  If it came on the radio I would yell at everyone in the car to shut up so I could hear it.  By the time I got a new favourite song (probably Intergalactic Planetary by those dastardly Beastie Boys), I was sick of Flagpole Sitta.  Suddenly, out of the blue, I could not stand my once favourite song.  The sound of it made me cringe.  I'd let out wails of disgust and turn the station if ever it came on the radio.  I honestly HATED hearing that song, for no other reason than I subjected myself to it with every free moment I had for a year.

Now, a decade or more later, if the song comes on somewhere, I have no real reaction to it.  I don't ask that it be turned off, nor do I wish it turned up.  It stirs some vague feelings deep down in me, hearkens back to some lukewarm memories of something that made me happy at a time when happiness came so easily that it really didn't matter.  That is how I feel about my first relationship with J.

o

T- This one ended before it ever really got started.  I look fondly back on this one because it was really the catalyst that made me realise that love is something worth having in one's life.  Now, psych101dan would like me to point out that this girl and I were never in a relationship and never slept together for a multitude of reasons that added up to it being "forbidden".  Psych101dan, who prefers to spoon feed you his message as opposed to letting you reach these easy conclusions on your own, would also like to point out that the driving force behind this "love" was the forbidden part that would have made a lot of our shared close friends angry or jealous.  I'd like to tell psych101dan to fuck off and stop being a buzzkill.

Although this foray into love ended with tears and heartbreak, it didn't end with real anger or hard feelings.  My previous experience was a very Taking Back Sunday kind of love, that many teens experience.  Whereas my time loving J was like the pop-culture sensation Twilight, in that it began as a cute little teen love story and devolved into creepy "if I can't have you I no longer want to live" territory way too quickly, my time loving T tended to have both shoes on at all times, as opposed to the other shoe dropping every other fucking day.

T and I aren't really friends anymore, which is unfortunate because we really had loads in common and were fine friends before the silly love thing happened, but I have never ever wished her any ill will, which I think made this a much healthier experience than I'd ever had with a girl before.

o

N- The most recent of the three, N and I only just broke up a very short while ago, and because I doubt very much she'll actually ever read this, I am willing to admit that I am not over her.  To quote Vinny Chase, "I have glibbened with age" and although I still love this girl, I'm finding the strength within me to be happy without her.  Psych101dan can't ruin this one with his nerdwords either, which is a lovely feeling.  This was just a straight up boy-meets-girl, boy-loves-girl situation, and it was very healthy and fun and happy as far as I'm concerned.  Now, the idea of this section was to give a retrospective look at my past loves, and because I still love this one, I guess I can't retrospectively ruminate on it.

If I had to find a metaphor for this, I think I would use a baking metaphor.  You know when you are baking a cake, and you buy all the best ingredients, and follow the recipe to the letter, and it's really going well, then the cake has a little meltdown and moves somewhere where it's nearly impossible to spend time with it so both you and the cake decide it's just better to end it there on good terms to avoid having to go through any sourness?  That's what this is like.

I have no hard feelings for N, these things happen (I think perhaps here would have been the better place to quote Vinny Chase) and in leaving it this way, if nothing else we can both look fondly on it, and if we meet up again down the line, there won't be any uncomfortableness or mean words to get over if we ever want to give it another try.



I am leaving this here, because I want to go play video games.