Confronting the (Un)convincing Absurdity of Hollywoo and Our Own Lives

I finished watching BoJack Horseman Season 6, Part 1 and reading Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Someone Who Will Love You in All your Damaged Glory: Bang-Your-Knee, Bust-Your-Heart-Open Love Stories within a day of each other. This was not by design.  Netflix executives had a convoluted rollout strategy. My friend said that this book might help with all of my neuroses when it comes to dating. I’ve been trying not to be a projection of all my self-doubts and rather a more honest version of myself. Which is to say, what happened next was just the natural consequence of the timing of my life at this particular juncture.

Sometimes, the universe just syncs things up in just the right way and all you can really do is laugh. I laughed a lot between those two days. A sly smirk. A quiet chuckle. A full bellied laugh. A sharp exhale as though I had been punched in the gut leaving me without any air. This is the best lexicon I have for describing my initial reactions to absurdity. Absurdity is the best way to describe a world where the US government has passed a law that lets billionaires literally kill people without consequences, where gun control was handled in a matter of days after women started exercising their 2nd amendment right, where the governor of California was determined by a ski race. Absurdity is the best way to describe situations like how many goats to sacrifice at a wedding, staying on a train for sixty years trying to get the courage to talk to someone, or forming a superhe…