Upon chatting with my roommate about relationships she told
me I should turn our conversation into some kind of anti-Valentines Day blog
post. While I really don’t think what we
were talking about was “anti-Valentines Day”, it’s definitely not in danger of
appearing on a greeting card any time soon. Be warned.
There’s a V-chip implanted in my brain. I don’t how my parents did it, but at some point in those dawning days of home-television-censorship that percolated through the 90’s, when befuddled politicians urged parents to regulate their kids’ viewing habits with little chips inserted into the backs of their TVs, they must have bypassed the tube all together and lodged the thing right in my brain. Clever move, Mom and Dad, clever
The genius of the V-chip was while certainly designed to ‘desmutify’
TV of all of its swears and sex stuff directly, it’s more sinister purpose
was to push a certain kind of morality on TV by eliminating all programming
that even hinted at sexual situation.
This resulted in a saccharine diet of such lost-in-the-woods
protagonists as Corey Matthews, Danny Tanner, and Randy Taylor who submitted to
a specific code of conduct, particularly when dealing with romance on a weekly
basis.
 |
| Can't get no satisfaction. |
Randy might like his lab partner, but he can’t just ask her
out. He barely knows her! What is he, some kind of creep? He can only ask her out after helping her
solve her family issues, and in the process get to know her. So sayeth the V-chip.
Danny Tanner can’t have a one-night stand. Are you kidding? He’s a loving father, which means any
romantic interest must have sincere long-term aspirations because as a father he
is obviously no longer a real man with real human needs.
And Corey can’t just ask out any girl he sees like Shawn so
cavalierly does. After comical failure
after comical failure he is only permitted to ask out a girl with whom he has
already cultivated a genuine connection prior to forming romantic feelings for
her—Topanga! And even at this, Corey
must wait until he believes that someone else might ask her out first before he
is allowed to disturb the status quo of their friendship with his selfish
request.
Though this code is seemingly predicated on sincerity,
sensitivity, strong moral fiber, and other excerpts from the Boy Scout oath,
it’s really about making sure there is no possible way that any of these
characters could be ever perceived as creepy.
It often muddles immorality with assertiveness, but hey, who can really
sympathize with a protagonist who knows what he wants and goes after it?
And so where your Shawn Hunters and Uncle Jesses can effortlessly
approach any girl without censors blaring, my V-chip is calibrated to the Corey
Matthews setting where everything needs to be “just so” for a girl to be
met.
 |
| Though best friends on the same show, Corey and Shawn were held to vastly different standards. |
For example where I’m told a normal person might see someone
he’s attracted to at a bar or on the street, and simply go right up and talk to
her, such a prospect is simply not an option for me. The V-chip doesn’t allow it. From a logical perspective I can clearly
understand the reason, even the necessity behind such tactics, but alas the
chip is a logic-less master.
How about in one of Jim Carey’s first movies, Once Bitten where Carey’s last resort of
escaping a virgin sacrifice at the hands of a bunch of vampires is to have
sex with his girlfriend and lose his viriginity. Just to be
clear, in order to have consensual sex with his longtime girlfriend, Carey must
be first threatened with supernatural termination. These things just don’t make sense, and yet,
they’re what the V-chip demands.
So scenarios where the
V-Chip shuts me down;
I see a girl a like at a coffee shop and walk over to say hi
and introduce myself.
My V-Chip; “So why are you being such a creeper? Pff, you don’t know this girl, she doesn’t
know you, Stranger-danger. She’s clearly
just here to enjoy some coffee, but you want to come barging in because, why? Just what are you thinking here? I know what you’re thinking here, mister, and
so does she!
Okay, so that’s
completely ridiculous. Here’s the V-chip
acceptable version of meeting a girl in this scenario;
So we’re back in the coffee shop and the power goes
out. Maybe a sudden blizzard strikes,
snapping electrical lines, taking out the lights and the heat. Because the snow has piled so quickly, no one
can leave and we’re all trapped in this freezing coffee shop. We meet to figure out what to do and it’s
decided that someone must go into the basement to throw on the back-up
generator (in this scenario this coffee shop has a back-up generator). For some reason the employees who know the
basement’s lay out can’t go, because someone has to make the coffee?, so me and
this girl I like volunteer—what luck!
At first she says she’d rather go by herself, or “Can’t
someone else go?” but then I make some kind of lame joke that she feigns laughter
at—we’re such an unlikely pair—and the situation has opened the door for us to
get to know each other in a legitimate and non threatening way as we talk to
fill the time while searching the dark basement for the generator that will
save everyone’s life—so non threatening except for the potentially deadly
blizzard outside that has been worsening by the minute.
In fact maybe the snowstorm has brought in some arctic wolves
that are now prowling about the basement.
And then maybe the blizzard and black out are actually the results of a
new global ice age that has plunged civilization into chaos, creating a new
world order where loosely-allied bands of marauders, who are also somehow
mutants, have made their way into the basement along with the wolves. Also something is on fire.
+
+
=
Unexpectedly thrown together into such a wacky fray, we quickly improvise a plan for survival, relying on her skills as a former high school soccer player and my amateur knowledge of canine biology—wow, we’re really getting to know each other in a totally authentic way now! Using the bacon bits that we’ve found in the supply closet, she kicks them all over the apocalyptic mutants, thus summoning the artic wolves whose main diet I once read is strikingly similar in aroma to imitation bacon substances.
The wolves attack the mutants, we find and activate the
generator, and are dashing for the upstairs door when one of the road warriors
leaps through the fire and grabs her ankle.
We were so close! Without
hesitating I tackle him, taking both of us down the stairs, telling her just to
go on without me, but she comes back for me using the ninja katana—so at some
point we find a ninja katana—to free me.
We scramble back upstairs, locking the door behind us. We’ve made it. We now have light, heat, and no fire-wolves-apocalyptic
mutant army. Success! We embrace in our shared victory, knowing
that we couldn’t have done it without the other and that our lives will never
be the same. This is my opening so I ask her if she’d like to have a cup of
coffee with me and then we really kick it off.
This would be an acceptable scenario in which I could meet a
girl as per the stipulations of my V-chip.
My V-chip’s concept of romance is a mangled distortion of
90’s TV culture where every boy wears a bowl-cut and every girl a denim jumper. It didn’t reflect actual 90’s culture and clearly
doesn’t reflect today’s. Our
relationship with one another has evolved over the years to where it has
achieved some level of sentience that allows us to communicate. It has clearly stated its programed imperative
has no room for re-evaluation and that its half-life is upwards of five
thousand years or so. In response I’ve
tried knocking it out of my head with a softball bat, but you know, it’s stuck
in there pretty good.
