Basic Bro | Sorry Sir, I’m Afraid You’ll Have to Pay the Extra Baggage Fee
dates: 🍦🍦🍦🍦 sex: n/a awkward diabetes moment? yes (date rating guide here) choice quote: “I don’t want to be getting hard at a hot dog place.”
Oh, Basic Bro. So sweet, so charming, and such a damn child. We hung out two days in a row. He’d messaged me asking to work on a class project together, which I thought was a pretense for hooking up again, but it turned out not to be. And honestly, thank god for that, because I’d totally forgotten the damn thing was due! He bought us pizza and we went to my apartment to work on it. After about an hour, he suggested taking a break and smoking weed. I wasn’t too worried about the work, so I agreed, though I did kind of wonder whether he this would impede him in being able to get his assignment done. Nevertheless, I was selfish and chose the possibility of hooking up over helping this poor boy get good grades. We ended up smoking quite a bit and out of the blue, he launched into his life story, telling me all about his insecurities and other emotional issues. He talked and talked, which was honestly quite tiring for me to hear, especially since he doesn’t always articulate his thoughts in a super clear way. But it was fascinating, too. He told me about his lacking confidence, how that now he’s grown up (well, somewhat...) he doesn’t get any affirmation for playing sports or being popular at school. He feels lonely. He feels like his parents don’t care about him. He was always a happy-go-lucky kid but developed anxiety after a bad breakup in high school, and it’s still really affecting him now. He feels stupid and hates himself for lacking motivation. He doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life. He wishes he had a mentor, someone to guide him through this. I was in shock. All I could say is that, well, I have a bit more life experience, and you won’t ever find that total guidance that you’re looking for. Eventually you learn to get through it and not resent the fact that you weren’t taken care of perfectly. Only you have the power to really change things for yourself. And it’s okay to feel lost, you will find out what direction your life is headed with time. I really felt for him. I still do, I’m still thinking about it. But I also didn’t want to be in that role. I was just waiting for him to shut up and kiss me or something, you know? But eventually we started talking about relationships. How he feels like sometimes you meet someone perfect, and it’s just the wrong place and the wrong time. Or does that perfect person even really exist? He recently broke up with his girlfriend, but they still love each other. It was just because of certain circumstances. He asked if I minded that he was talking about this, because he didn’t want to make me feel weird or insecure. I told him that no, it’s fine. “I don’t know what your expectations are,” he said. “I mean, I’m not looking for a relationship. I just want to hang out, and like... have fun.” “Okay, good, I’m glad.” He had to catch the last train out and we didn’t end up hooking up. I was confused. But once he left, I realized that, based on a few nonverbal cues, he may have been meaning to say, “I hope you’re not expecting to hook up tonight.” And when I said I just wanted to hang out, he probably took that literally and thought we were on the same page. The next day, though, brought that into question... We were let out of class early and went to get hot dogs. I’d forgotten to take my insulin to school so we had to stop back at my apartment, and I told him I was diabetic. He told me about how he watched the show Jonas growing up (ouch, that slight generational difference!) and he and his friend fantasized about giving Nick Jonas, who also has T1D, a ton of sugary food so they could kill him and get his on-screen girlfriend. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I did tell him that insulin would probably be the more deadly choice. Over our food, he told me more of his life story, and it was the same situation - interesting, but it really dragged on, and I didn’t get to talk much. I learned that he has a pretty tumultuous home life, that his family relationships are really complex and dramatic. He talked more about his ex, too. That he loves her, but she’s in a bad place, hanging out with bad people, and prioritizing them over him. She struggles with anxiety and he feels like he has to help her with that, but sometimes he can’t do enough. She’s been suicidal, and he helped get her in a better place, but he just found out she’s been self-harming. She has an unstable home life and for a while, his family took her in. Now she’s back with her parents and her dad doesn’t want them dating, he thinks there should be a clean break. His parents don’t like her. They still see each other, though. In fact, they’d made plans to hang out that night. It’s complicated, you know. I don’t like like him, I don’t want to date him. And it’s clear he’s not really stable, either. But hearing about all of this was very endearing, and made me like him a lot more as a person. From what I gathered during our conversation, he’s not sure whether they’re going to fully break up and stop seeing each other, or eventually get back together. They’re kind of at a crossroads. He’s not actively looking for anyone else to see, he said, with the implication of, “but, there’s you...” I still wasn’t totally sure how he felt about hooking up again, since his relationship seems to be in flux, but he said they really are broken up now. I don’t think he’s told her about anything we’ve done, though. We didn’t hook up that day, but in the last half hour or so before he left to have dinner with her (awk), we talked about sex. Kind of generally, for the most part, since it stemmed from talking about race, and Asian male stereotypes. Some runner-ups for choice quotes, “For like 5 minutes I thought about becoming a pornstar, just to show people that it’s not true! I’d help little Asian boys everywhere! No, I shouldn’t say that, that came out wrong!” “If I have a son, I’m gonna be like, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it, your daddy’s got a...’” We talked in kind of coded language, since we were in public, but the only people in the hot dog place were some old dude and the cashier. We talked about STDs, a topic about which I learned he is worryingly uneducated, his past experiences, my past experiences, the fact that he couldn’t keep it up with a condom last time... I joked about the fact that he was speaking so euphemistically, that I usually speak in pretty explicit terms, and he said, “Yeah, I mean, I love talking about sex, but when I talk that way, it kind of... turns me on. I don’t want to be getting hard at a hot dog place.” I walked him to the subway station. You could cut the sexual tension with a knife. We didn’t hug and our goodbye was awkward. With that, he left.
