I’ve been waiting. Waiting because I have this really bad habit of winding up with women who are… less than a good fit for me. I had this serial monogamy thing going for a long time and somehow managed to just go from one shitty relationship to another. I’m good at a few things in this world but finding the right partner to…uh…partner with does not seem to be one. And after the last one…
OK.
Here’s what happened:
I had been living in California, the Bay Area. I went to grad school at Berkeley. Art history. I was pretty convinced that I wanted to get a PhD and maybe one day curate a museum, or teach or… y’know, the two things you can do with a PhD in art history. But, I dunno if it’s the hippie vibe that still kind of exists in Northern California, or if it’s just the way things went, but I started getting more and more into sort of avant-garde stuff.
Like, I met this group of guys who were really into peyote, and I started hanging out with them, and we’d go out into the desert and spend the weekend rock climbing, and talking about crazy ideas for these out-there art installations. I tried the peyote once and it didn’t take—I just got really freaked out and hid in a cave for a couple days—but the experience of being out there with these free-thinking, super-creative dudes wound up being inspiring enough for me.
One of the ideas we came up with was something we called AVATAR. Which stands for Audio Visual Assisted Talk and Robotics. Which isn’t even exactly accurate to what it was we wanted to make, but the acronym was too cool, so we ran with it. In a nutshell, what we wanted to do was build this massive, epic art installation that would be, like, the size of a small city and would be inhabited by these, like, highly sophisticated robots, but doing insanely mundane shit.
We were trying to make a commentary on the progression of innovation in the twenty-first century against a backdrop of commonality that unifies all people across all cultures and all times. Or something. I dunno. There’s probably a reason it didn’t work.
But in order to even attempt to pull it off, we had to draw in help from some of the students in the Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab. And that was where I met my ex-fiancée.
Now, I don’t like to brag, but I’m pretty charming. Maybe it’s just the Southern boy in me, but I can almost always charm my way into or out of any situation. With anyone. Always been like that.
Not with her.
Alice was the first person I met in my life who could give a fuck about how clever or charming I was. The robots that she built were easier to make laugh than she was.
And we were together for almost three years. We never really had much fun. She was cold. She really was. The sex was never even that great. I don’t know why we stayed together. And then one day she turned to me and said, “You wanna get married?”
Honestly, it took me so off guard that I think that’s why I said yes. I have no other logical explanation for why I would have done such a thing. But I did. And then we started planning a wedding. Which was ridiculous.
And this whole time, I’m still working on AVATAR. The other guys had sort of fallen off. A couple of them graduated and moved onto other stuff, one got busted for drug trafficking, and I’m not sure what happened to Todd. Anyway.
But I still believed in it. I did. The more I dug in, the more I thought it could be special and say something really important. She who shall not be named hated it. She’s very, very, very practical. Methodical. Pragmatic. She doesn’t have a lot of patience for “art.” If she can’t see the end game, she won’t do it. I mean… she’s a scientist.
And what I came to realize is that the end game for her with me was… stability. Or so she thought. On paper, I suppose I’m the kind of guy she imagined would be a good husband. I’m not totally stupid. I have pretty good genes when it comes to physical attributes that most people see as important. And I don’t need a lot from other people to feel all right most of the time.
But the one thing she hated is that I’m an artist. I mean, I can’t help it. It’s just what gets my motor going. But she hated it. She wanted me to take all the work and research I’d done with AVATAR and “apply it to something useful.”
And one day, after having a conversation-less breakfast, she looked at me and said, “I’ve been fucking someone else.” Just like that. Cold. Impersonal. Robotic.