today i saw the musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" and it was truly incredibly cute. but not in a bad way. it helped that i have a fairly high tolerance for musicals that only work if you convince yourself that there's actually no music involved, but still. i wish the MTG would become more musical. but, what can you do. and really, this is a musical more about personality and situation and timing than it is about music. and that's the kind of musical MTG does best, really.
what i don't understand is, where's Sally? now, i never particularly *liked* Sally much, as i'm not all that sympathetic to younger siblings or to girls who have pushy crushes on guys [being the oldest of three and a girl who pointedly stopped having stupid crushes on guys as soon as possible] but she was pretty integral to some parts of Peanuts that i remember best. in my mind, Charlie Brown *has* a little sister. and Linus should *has* a love interest/annoying shadow. ah well.
and as my significant-other-man pointed out, where's Woodstock? well, actually, he said something more like "how can the show be any good without Woodstock?" but i consider that exaggerated. he's good at that. and for that matter, what about Marcy?
on the other hand, it worked well with the small cast. so it's hard to really bitch about the missing characters.
anyway, it was cute and touching without being saccharine and/or nauseating, and a friend of mine was playing the bass in the orchestra and had comp tickets, and then her and her husband and my housemate roger and i went and had good cheap thai food and all was well in the world.
and afterwards i swung by the Assassin's Guild game running this weekend and ghosted for a bit, and that was also good, because the game looked very silly and fun and i wish i had decided to apply, but ah well. i mean, they have a cow-tipping room in a game called Blazing Cattle! what more could one want?it is now time to discuss last entry's question: is there such a thing as platonic lust?
i asked this because my mind happened to call up an old memory from high school of this guy who i really really wanted to be friends with, mostly inexplicably. it wasn't that i found him particularly attractive in any way that wasn't purely asthetic, but i nevertheless really wanted him as a friend. he had this indefinible cool about him. and he was massively smart, but didn't often use it to do school things because, really, school is mostly dumb. and he said what he thought, bared his soul at a moment's notice, but in a way that was calm, not overemotionally melodramatic, and somehow not pretentious. well, at least, not so's you'd notice.
in elementary school, he had been such a jerk. an absolute pig of a jerk. but in a sort of fascinating way. and i didn't talk to him again until junior year of high school, when we happened to have class together, and after awhile, it becamse clear to me that he wasn't that same jerk anymore, he'd become a screwed-up semi-outsider type, one of my favorite types of people. and it became clear to him, he later explained, that i wasn't the boring conservative good little asian girl he had always assumed i was [because back in 5th grade, i pretty much was]. and we almost, for a little while there, became friends. but i screwed it up. because i was scared. because he made me nervous. because i was a coward [i still am a coward, sometimes... but not nearly as bad as i was then. i do learn...]. we tentatively had plans to hang out, but i thought he was going to call me to arrange stuff once he confirmed he could make it... so i waited for awhile, but he never called... and i was too chicken to call him and see what was up because i just assumed that meant he couldn't make it... and then the next day we had this awkward conversation wherein he basically said, sort of hurt, why didn't you call? and, it just seemed so difficult to explain and i sort of eeped, and he said perhaps you're just the kind of person who doesn't like to make plans? sort of hopefully... and it was so much easier just to take that explanation instead of stammering out what had really been going through my head and class was starting...
and, while we were still friendly, we never really hung out much after that. and that class was soon over and we had no others together for the duration of high school. and i still feel the pang whenever i think of this incident, because i believe that we really had the potential to be good friends... if i hadn't fucked it up.
i haven't seen him for a couple years. after i went off to college, i did
see him a couple times through mutual friends, and we got along well, though
he still makes me nervous for that reason i don't understand. but i've been
going home less and less frequently, and for shorter periods of time, and our
mutual friend circle has been slowly disintegrating. and i miss him.
so i was thinking about this incident, and i realized that the major factor was that nervousness. that jittery worry, trying to say the right thing, or at least not the wrong thing, controlling reactions, trying to match moods... basically, the "i really want this person to like me" reaction. and for some people, that nervousness dissipates, or was never really there... but for others, that little adrenaline kick of worry continues. and it's a *lot* like the "i'm lusting after this person" worry... but it's not. you don't want them to *like* you, like you. you're not actually lusting after them romantically. but, in a way, you are lusting after them -- platonic lust.
so, i think there is such a thing as platonic lust. but i know that lots of people have staggeringly different opinions about relationships. so, it seems like it's worth discussing. and it's certainly not something people talk about alot. regular lust is something i cherish, because it makes me feel good to be alive. but platonic lust... i wish i could simply relax, be myself, and not worry about the friendship because if we can't be friends without worrying about it then theoretically it's not worth it. maybe someday i'll get there.
for today, though, enough rambling. btw, the moral of the story is probably something like "don't be a coward." that incident, and my cowardly behavior in it, is one of my major regrets. i don't have many regrets, but that's one of them.
parting question: is matchmaking ever a good idea? and can you do it relatively out in the open, talking to both sides about it, and still have it work? or might that in some cases be the worst possible thing to do, because then even if they do meet, they'll be so sensitized that they won't relax or even really consider each other on normal grounds?