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The Crazy Place

posted 13th April 2010    Written by: Nicole Antoinette    CATEGORY: Nicole Antoinette, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 2

The ending of this story is that I’m overwhelmingly jealous of fish. The beginning is that I’m totally batshit crazy. I promise there’s a middle that connects the two.

A few months ago, a thing happened with a text message.

Basically, I got a few texts back to back from someone I usually respond to right away, someone I think is pretty damn fantastic, but because I was in the middle of a phone conversation with someone else, I didn’t respond. And then I got off the phone and forgot to respond, making my eventual reply that much later and more out of character.

I know what you’re thinking here. You’re thinking, “Who the hell cares?” and I’m nodding along in agreement with you. Who the hell cares? No one. Except, apparently, that that’s not true because I seemed to care a great deal.

It started innocently enough. “I hope he doesn’t think I was ignoring him,” I thought. But when a few more minutes went by and I didn’t hear from him, it transitioned to, “Shit, he’s probably mad at me” to “Why didn’t I just respond? I can text while I’m on the phone” to “Great, we’re never going to hang out again.”

I wish I was exaggerating in the slightest, but in 0 to 60 I had gone from being myself to being in The Crazy Place. You know, the place where all of your logic and reasoning and normal rational adult skills evaporate and you exist in a spinning hamster wheel of unfounded truths that are equal parts ridiculous and yet unquestionably true in your head.

And it doesn’t just happen with guys and dating, it happens all the time.

I’ll spend hours agonizing over saying the wrong thing to a potential new friend in our first meeting. I’ll agonize over the “what I should have done-s” in job interviews, analyzing the tiniest details until they’re no longer recognizable anymore.

Yep, The Crazy Place.

The most frustrating thing about it is that while it’s impossibly easy to slip into The Crazy Place, it’s just straight impossible to get out of it with any glimmer of dignity. By the time you snap out of it, you’re so embarrassed and disgusted with yourself that the feelings have taken on a monster-like life of their own, which is about when I lose it. When I stop and stare at myself in the mirror and yell, “REALLY?!” because what kind of grown woman lets herself do this?

Oh yeah, the kind who’s alive, that’s who.

But why do we do this to ourselves? Let a thing that’s not a thing become a thing, I mean. It’s exhausting and I vote we stop it already. You know who doesn’t pull crap like this? Fish. Fish don’t do this. Fish are only concerned with eating and making baby fish and making sure no one eats their baby fish after they’ve made them. The end.

The fish comparison came up two Sundays ago, when I was watching Life, that new Discovery Channel show that goes around the world, species by species, with Oprah narrating the most mindblowing things you’ve ever seen in the history of ever.

I was watching the fish episode and I was like, “You know, fish don’t worry about shit like text messages from cute boys.” And then I sat there for a solid two minutes being furious about how life is hard and how I should have been born a fish.

But, just as I was reaching the height of my envy and annoyance, they showed a scene where all these female fish laid their eggs on a floating palm frond and then all these male fish covered the eggs in clouds and clouds of sperm and it created this gross cocoon thing that trapped and killed a bunch of the fish.

And so, I leave you with that for perspective.Maybe we spend the occasional night in The Crazy Place, but at least we aren’t routinely at risk of being smothered by sperm.

photo credit: JennyHuang

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