Sunday, January 11, 2009

Lovesick, or

The Weapon of the Future is the Montage

I can't explain why, but I'm feeling lovesick right now. (Okay, that was a dumb thing to say, since the whole point of typing this is to try to explain it anyway.) You may remember the feeling: the mild anxiousness, the fluttery guts, odd swings between elation and despair. I've wanted to listen to the saddest songs I know all afternoon. My usually paralyzing nostalgia (for foreign lands and other days) has ebbed in favor of a new flavor of angst. I haven't felt this way in years, literally.

Alright, before I go any further, let me lay down some ground rules. Number one: no, Mom, I'm not actually in love, so don't get your hopes up just yet. Number two: yes, Internet Girlfriend(s), I still think you're sweet; let's flirt later.

If I was really in love, I wouldn't be talking about it—for one, it wouldn't be noteworthy enough for a blog post; for two, I'd be discreet (see post, 12.11.2008). The reason I'm talking about it, the reason it's worrying me, is that I can't explain it.

Here are the possible reasons I can come up with for why I might be feeling this way:

1. I watched several episodes of Freaks and Geeks this weekend at the behest of my roommate. I liked it. It made me feel like a high school again, which is where I spent a lot of time feeling lovesick. So maybe I'm just over-identifying with the characters.

2. I haven't had access to a (steel-string) guitar for two months. I didn't think this would bother me, being such a casual player, but it really has. I've found myself wandering around aimlessly at odd hours recently, and when I come to my senses I realize I'm looking for a guitar. Jeez, I sound like a hippie. Or a high-school cry baby theatre kid.

3. I've been on several dates in the past few months, all with charming women, and that's more than my average for a few years now. It could be an overdose of romance feeding back into my consciousness.

4. I could be in love. With who, though? The girl on Freaks and Geeks? She is a T-babe, but I don't usually go for imaginary girls. With you? Are we in love?

5. Perhaps I'm having a prescient emotion: perhaps love is on the way. How exciting!

My money's on the tv show. There's something about the mixture of film and music that is completely unfair to the senses. Throw on some dated t-shirts, intercut with shots of good times and slow-motion smiles, and choose a soundtrack of Journey-like proportions and you can't help but create something both completely false and inexorably compelling. I'm opposed to montage! (And yet, somehow, they're the best around. Nothing's ever gonna take them down.)

So what are your hypotheses? Why might I be feeling this way? (No PMS jokes, please.)

13 comments:

butchie said...

I'm sorry, I have that effect on everybody. It'll wear off.

Liz said...

I watch The Bachelor...before you scrunch up your face in disgust and ask,"Why?", check my blog. Anyway, I feel lovesick for days afterward. And I am in love....with a real person! But something about editing, the way television can make it all look so nostalgic, leaves me with a hunger. Like on fast Sunday when you yearn for macaroni and cheese and fantasize about chili dogs all through church.

Sarah said...

#1 I love Freaks and Geeks. Angelo and I used to watch it every week and we were so bummed when it got canceled.
#2 I don't think you have to worry about mom. She told me she is done with reading blogs. Unless she was lying and she was only done with mine.
#3 Watching multiple episodes of a show will have that effect on a person. I don't know if you become invested and then you feel sad when its over or what. I can't explain it either but I know exactly what you are talking about.
#4 Maybe you have Andrew Grover syndrome, otherwise known as AGS, and you are in love with love.

David Grover said...

I think I just need to dance. At the Grover Family Game Night there was no add-on dance contest, so I'm kinda overdue.

Elisa said...

Yes. You've been in love with me for years.

Hippo said...

supress your feelings. bury them deep and never talk about them. EVER!

Mary Arlene said...

I know axactly what ya'll are talking about. I always feel that empty, longing feeling after I watch too much of one show at a time. It takes me days to convince myself that life is not like a tv show and I am not missing out on anything. It just happened to me this weekend with Psych. I fell in love with one of the characters, not the actor, and when the show was over I felt lovesick for him, the show, and the pretend life I lived whiled I watched the show. (the one where I was also a detective)p.s. Mom always says she doesn't read blogs but she totally does.

Hippo said...

Mary was it Shawn or Gus?

Andrew said...

Andrew Grover Syndrome is actually a pretty healthy disease. If you can feel this way now, without any other real person in the mix, and take the time to explore your feelings and understand how you respond to them, it's like training for the real thing. Later, when another real and vulnerable person is involved, you can maybe not blow it.

My advice: make the most of it now because it's such a fun feeling.

Jennifer said...

My theory is in a different direction: familial lovesick. You just had two months in the bosom of your family. And now, you are in the cold darkness of Ohio bachelorhood. That will surely cause longings for "home" including the home you find with your love.

Having said that, I think the tv show took you over the edge. I've had the same feeling from a series of books, actually. Sarah Caudwell's. Those people are my friends, we share experiences and laughs, and then, they are gone. I always find myself wanting to call them up for a chat.

Emily G said...

Oh, man, it has to be Freaks and Geeks. It does the same thing to me. That Desario is one tough dude. He's so snarky and handsome.....Spiderman rained on his spirit. Oh, but you're probably referring to the chick that wears the army jacket all the time.

Actually, if you really want to know a deep dark secret from this, your cyber-lady-friend, I kind of have a crush on the dad of the show. Not anything sexual, I just think he makes a good dad and I think he's really funny. I really enjoy that show as should be apparent by the length of this comment. Freaks and Geeks talked me into buying a Grateful Dead album and it has altered my day-to-day life.

You just need to sit back and close your eyes with "Box of Rain" playing. It will soothe your soul or it might make you cry, but in a good way, not an Alanis Morisette way (did you know Alanis wrote all of her angriest songs about Uncle Joey from Full House? No, not Uncle Jesse. Dave Coulier. Kind of takes the sting out, doesn't it. We didn't talk about this already, did we?).

Erin said...

Have you been listening to a lot of James Taylor? That always makes me lovesick for no reason. Also maybe Neil Young.

Zach said...

Sometimes I feel like this. A plaintive pensiveness (vice versa?). Or: what would really hit the spot is to sit down by myself and watch a movie that will make me cry. (I recommend "Billy Elliot" for a tear jerker that does not distinguish in its prolific lachrymosities between the ebullient and the heart breaking. It'll get you coming and going.) But I like this feeling very much for it being so palpably a FEELING. It is so rare that any genuine emotion burrows its way past the hard-caked grime of sarcasm and curmudgeonry that constitutes the epidermis of my humour that, really, I'll take whatever I can get.