Te'o

I was walking by a restaurant this evening, looked in the window, saw Manti Te’o running in the NFL combine, and got to feeling bad. I feel bad for Manti Te’o.

I feel like I’ve been conditioned to desire intimacy with another human being more than anything else. The majority of happy endings that I’ve been told have involved two people falling in love and living happily ever after. I don’t think that storybook romances exist, yet I chase them anyway. And I don’t think that I’m alone in that.

Where do we search for things? The Internet, right? So why wouldn’t we search for romance there as well. Many people flock to online dating sites; I’ve joined those ranks, myself. And an online, one can experience a false sense of control: maintaining anonymity and deciding when to break it. That “control,” coupled with the desire for intimacy, can make it easy for one to become vulnerable with another on the Internet. And that vulnerability makes the Internet an easy “place” for one to be taken advantage of.

There are those who would wonder why Manti Te’o needed the Internet because, as a high profile athlete, he could have had his pick of gals. But maybe that’s a problem. I know next to nothing about romance, but I imagine that being high-profile makes it even more difficult to find genuine intimacy. You would begin relationships with strangers who already know about you, and might desire to be with you for motivations other than genuine connction.

I think that Te’o was wrong for lying, but he was also a victim. I feel bad that he has become the face of something so embarrassing. I’ve heard so many people wonder how he could have possibly fallen into that mess, but I don’t. It could have happened to anyone. I know that it could have happened to me.

High School

I love film and television set in high school. I’m currently hooked on Friday Night Lights, I’m a recovering Glee addict, and I heartily enjoy the guilty pleasure teen romcom genre (ie. Mean Girls, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc.). I found, 21 Jump Street’s contribution to the genre through young adult characters to be brilliant! I’ve also spent time writing my own high school fiction. I’ve finally stopped to ask, ‘Why?’

One, I think high school is very easily dramatized. Teenagers are very interesting as they begin to assert themselves but with very little wisdom and experience. Teen angst and idealism allows for extreme dramatic shifts within a character. And the arc of high school is very satisfying: beginning as “children,” becoming “adult”, climaxing in Prom. But I think my own experience has a lot to do with it.

My move from Chicago to suburban Los Angeles before my junior year of high school split my high school experience in two, and I’m unable to take ownership of either half. Throughout my first two years, my best friends were those that I had made in elementary school, but we began to scatter and my sense of belonging to any social circles waned (the main factor in my willingness to move to a new school). Then in California, I endured a year of near-juvenile exile before my classmates were courteous enough to include me regularly. These descriptions make my experiences sound overly depressing, but actually many of my most vivid memories of happiness are from high school; I just didn’t feel like I belonged.

So I think I consume high school media, attempting to fill a void that I feel in my own experience. But I also think I am fascinated by it because I have observed it so closely. Unlike teachers—who are outsiders looking in—I studied high schoolers as one of their own, an infiltrator pleasantly drifting in and out of circles but never becoming part of one, feeling and succumbing to the same seduction of pursuing popularity (so I wasn't totally disconnected). Coupling my observations with my two very different high school experiences, I consider myself a sort of expert on high school: like an scholarly astronomer who has studied the cosmos thoroughly, but never experienced outer space firsthand.

What kind of astronaut would I have been?