Gladwell Moore’s Guide to Girls (2)
By:
December 19, 2009
Last week’s advice was not for everyone, Gladwell Moore recognizes that. What if you don’t want to be a playa? What if you just want one, the one, with whom you can hang out at the café, redecorate the loft in Williamsburg, and take home to Mom as the final blow to your brother in the “cool” sweepstakes? Is that so wrong?
[P.T. Barnum]
Let Gladwell Moore help you help yourself.
Ok first, don’t memorize any sports scores. Second, move to San Francisco. San Francisco is a very good place for you, even the nerds have harems out there. But you don’t want a harem you say, you just want the one? No worries. Don’t hang out in your apartment, get out to the café with your computer. Work on your iPhone app, work on your novel, but – in the café. Well maybe it isn’t actually a novel, maybe it’s your memoirs, but since you’re only 27 you don’t have too many. But, you have excellent computer skills. Gladwell Moore has two words for you: copy, and paste. Once your blog is over two pages, it’s a memoir. Meanwhile, keep your peripheral vision sharp, and man up your patience. These are your secret weapons, patience and the periphery, which you have been perfecting since junior high. Gladwell Moore advises you again to look to the past for helpful models, but a little further back this time. Think medieval siege.
Ok, you picked a café. Do not despair, she is there. Do not chase after her, just watch, and wait. What you are watching for is not eye contact or her accidentally knocking your Carhartt jacket off the chair or whether you order the same kind of soy chai. You are not even watching for her. You are watching for the baby boomers. These are the guys who had their heyday in the 70s, and it was so great they haven’t left yet. “All those café girls,” to paraphrase Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, “they just stay the same age.” These guys are easy to identify, chains glinting in grey chest hair, crazy shirts untucked, and Serious Lines. Seriously. “What’s your sign?” “Want to drop everything and sail around the world?” “Hey, are you one of those hippie chicks who likes music, and dancing . . .?” “Um, are you done with that section of the paper?” Gladwell Moore is not making this up, it’s High Noon at the Oasis.
[still from High Noon, dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952]
The girl they circle around? The ginger-eyed geriatric magnet? That’s her. And you will be her champion, simply by virtue of your later birth date. You are a baby of the baby-boomers, and when they’ve worn her down enough, she will grant you her colors.
Ok, so she moved in, you let her art-direct the wedding, and then you moved back into the apartment with better appliances. But now you want to have a baby? And you know you’re just throwing money away, shouldn’t you start looking for a house?
To paraphrase Herzog’s bullet, these are not significant problems. Gladwell Moore knows what your real problem is: have you turned into your parents? Are you still cool?
[Fran and Dan from myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com – definitely cool – Ed.]
Well, they may have been awesome, but Gladwell Moore is a professional, and can see their mistake. They weren’t trying hard enough!
You, however, will make the middlebrow meta-move of making a movie of your memoirs! About meeting a girl, and getting married, and having a baby, and buying a house. You will then promote it insisting that it is absolutely nothing like your life at all, it’s a staggeringly complete work of genius fiction. (While giving your brother a nougie in the back seat when Mom’s not looking. You have so totally won.)
Oh, and be sure to make at least 5 million dollars when your blog is optioned for the film. You’ll need it for a house in the Bay Area.
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