ILLUMINATI: Date A Girl

Date a Girl …         

By Krip Yuson

It all started with a mock-tough essay by Charles Warnke, a 21-year-old American writer, which showed up in the Internet a few years back. It was titled “You should date an illiterate girl.” Cynical lines posed injunctions from the get-go:

“Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Mid-western bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub… Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance….

“Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. … The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am.”

Now, that was fine writing. Surprisingly, barely a month later, a young Filipina, Rosemarie Urquico, responded with a piece that also went viral among Pinoy FB adherents and bloggers. (A pity that as with Warnke, we can only quote brief excerpts.)

“Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books….

“… If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

“Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

I got into the spirit of things, and posted the following on my FB Wall, titled “You should date a girl who farts, openly”:

Date a girl who lies. Date a girl who practices all sorts of subtle deceit. She will teach you the ways of the world, as if you didn’t know it yet. She will affirm what you have suspected all along, that everyone thinks you’re a child who can only be told of happy gifts. And that everybody else cheats or dispenses bull.

Keep dating a girl who unfriends you when she doesn’t want you to see photos of her with other men in Facebook. The hurt will stun you, and prepare you for the mysteries of the next life, equip you with something better than religion. Date her still, so you can block her when she cries foul over your own sense of democratization.

Date a girl who laughs, whose hair is wild and who closes her eyes in rapturous sleep once you run your fingers through her curls. She is also likely to laugh at most of what the Pope says.

Date a girl who farts, openly, without rancor or remorse. It doesn’t mean she’s bereft of social graces, just that she accepts life as it is, with all of its myriad chemical processes that can only be masked to a fault. By breaking wind, in public, she manifests her willingness to participate in an edgy universe.

Date a girl who does all those: lies, laughs, farts openly — for she will be your mirror, and exaggerate your excesses.

But if you find yourself too weak and can’t stand your own face and warts, then rethink your typology of dalliances.

And since you don’t want to date a boy, maybe you’re better off with a plant. Why, you can watch it grow, or be assured it does, even away from you, without sadness or blame. With just some water. And sun. And a few words from you, or many words, that are heard, and heeded. Or so you think.”

Okay. Well, you get the drift, and the picture. Happy Valentine’s Day!