9 Putts into One Hole
February 22, 2013 § Leave a Comment
These 9 guys all putt their balls into one hole.
The friend zone is not your friend
February 20, 2013 § 6 Comments
originally appeared on my News24 column on 2011-12-01 08:23
The friend zone is a dangerous place to find oneself in. It is virtually impossible to extricate oneself out of friend-zonism. Many naïve young men have willingly come into the friend-zone thinking that they can get out easily. No, my friend. Don’t fool yourself. It is an abyss so deep and dark you can’t get out. And worse, you can’t get into the deep dark place you really want to get in.
What is the friend-zone, you may ask. Wikipedia describes it as: “The friend-zone is a dating term describing a relation in which one partner wants to become intimate romantically while the other prefers to be just friends. It is generally regarded as not a positive development, particularly for a man. The sense is that once this has happened to a relationship, it’s difficult to undo.”
It is not just men who fall prey to this one-way romance field. Women too. But men are the ones who are most likely to fall victim to this naïve crime. It is a maximum-security prison without parole.
Emotional Booty Call
The person who has friend-zoned you gets all the benefits while you get nada. The friend-zoned entity becomes nothing but an emotional outlet. When she has some relationship issues or likes some other guy who doesn’t like her back, she will call the friend-zonee. And the friend-zonee will listen with the most care and give some advice. The phone call will probably end with, “Thanks friend”.
The friend-zonee is always hoping that someday, the friend-zoner will see the error of her/his ways and decide that they want you after all. All you will see is her moving from one relationship to another, except with you. Idiot.
She will tell her friends that there is nothing going on between you, while you lie, perhaps to your friends and say, “I hit that.” We see you liar. We see you.
I’ve seen guys tell their friend-zoner that they like some other girl hoping that the friend-zonee will get jealous. Instead, she gets genuinely happy for him and starts picking out outfits for him to wear on a date.
I my friends, yes, me, a whole Khaya Dlanga, was once friend-zoned. I was young and naïve. The line that was used on me was, “I am in a relationship with Jesus.” I mean, what could I have said to that? I turned to her and said, “At least I lost to a better man.” And thus the journey to the depths of friend-zonism began. But I managed to get out.
The friend-zone is a form of romantic abuse. When people see you together they may say things like, “Are you two a couple?” She will laugh and say of course not. The friend-zonee will feel all warm and fuzzy about this, foolishly. She will do everything she would do with a boyfriend with you, but none of the stuff you wish she would do to you.
How to get out
Rule number one: Don’t even get into the friend-zone.
Stop hanging out with her so often. Hang out with her about once every two weeks, even then, not for too long.
Don’t go shopping with her:
Once you start going shopping with her, especially if she started calling you friend, you are toast buddy. You essentially become the gay friend she always wanted to have who’d help her with her shopping. If she says, “Let’s go shopping.” Just tell her you’re not interested and you’re not her gay friend. (Is saying gay friend offensive?)
Refuse to sleep in the same bed as her:
If she says you can sleep in the same bed. Hell, refuse to sleep in the same house. While you pretend to sleep and tortured by thoughts of her in bed she is sleeping peacefully, dreaming about her boyfriend or potential boyfriend. Why put yourself through that hell?
Refuse to talk about her emotional issues:
When she starts talking about some emotional issues she has, stop her immediately! This is the greatest trap. You think that she is starting to trust you, so she’s opening up to you by telling you her issues. She isn’t. She’s trapping you.
Tell her straight up:
Tell her you’re no longer interested in being in her friend-zone. If she wants to go out, hang out, it’s fine, but none of that girly, crying, cuddly, shoppy stuff with you anymore. You’re out of there. Be out and mean it.
The friend-zone is where many soldiers go to die.
Don’t become friends, my friend. The friend-zone is not your friend, my friend. Be warned.
Messi kicks one ball but scores with two balls
February 20, 2013 § 1 Comment
two goals with one kick
You had just one job to do
February 20, 2013 § 2 Comments
Muhammad Ali predicts the first black president in the 1970s
February 19, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Ali was right. Obama was elected after Bush. The ship was sinking, and they got Obama.
Budget Burials, Cheaper & Deeper
February 18, 2013 § 2 Comments
This is bad and hilarious. But mostly bad.
F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Secret of Great Writing
February 16, 2013 § Leave a Comment
This originally appeared on Brainpicker
In the fall of 1938, Radcliffe College sophomore Frances Turnbull sent her latest short story to family friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. His response:
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.
That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,
Your old friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
Two years prior, in another letter to his fifteen-year-old daughter Scottie upon her enrollment in high school, Fitzgerald offered more wisdom on the promise and perils of writing:
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936
Dearest Scottina:
[…]
Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
[…]
Nothing any good isn’t hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.
Scott
