The perfect man and how you know
If you want a lot of hits on your blog, you should post the perfect man line “I killed a bear and wrote a poem about how sad it made me feel”. But what is disturbing me about this is the people googling this subtle variation “I killed a bear for you and wrote a poem about how sad it mad me feel”. I mean, what sort of girl wants a guy to kill a bear for them? How exactly does a fellow present a girl with a dead bear? And what’s a girl going to do with a dead bear?
In the Ali version of this perfect man scenario, the guy has killed a bear for some higher and nobler cause, say because it was about to attack the village children, or eat old Mrs Brown’s adored fluffy lap dog. He hasn’t just killed me a bear. A guy can go and shoot feral pigs or foxes (here in Australia) to save and protect the native wildlife or something, but I don’t want my own dead bear. In fact, in my version of the perfect man scenario, the guy doesn’t actually need to kill the bear, he just subdues it somehow or removes the defenceless, threatened me, village children, or fluffy dog from its vicinity, perhaps as he gallops by on a white horse, and leaves the bear well enough alone.
Anyway, that’s a segue to an embarrassing admission. On Saturday night I had a very pleasant evening catching up with two old friends, known mostly from a previous church. One of them was a student minister at a church where I was (in fact they both were, at various times), and a couple of weeks before we were both leaving to go elsewhere we sat in a pew and had a conversation, and it was like, why didn’t we a conversation like this months ago? So we have been keeping up, albeit infrequently, since. Anyway, after a spot of Japanese she had to go on home, so the other friend and I decided to come back to my house and get a DVD from Redroom on the way, chosen rather randomly from what was on offer, also wandering into the local Vinnies for a bit of Saturday night op-shopping.
What we ended up watching was How Do You Know? starring Reece Witherspoon. This was everything you could imagine from that information. Now, I actually don’t mind the occasional rom com, and I even own Sweet Home Alabama, because I like that one, but How Do You Know? beats all. It was a little quirky, but altogether too groaningly cheesy. There was even a little motivational spiel, based on the story of the guy who founded Play-Doh, about how we are all one small adjustment away from the life we’re supposed to have, or something along those lines, delivered when “the one” gave her Play-Doh for her birthday (who writes these scripts?!) … So, if there is an answer to the question, I think it’s in the Play-Doh. (The character played by Owen Wilson was good for a laugh however, for his ridiculous ‘thinking on the outside’.) I pulled out the crochet, because there wasn't enough in this movie to warrant my full attention.