Eugene's Life Story

Hi, Kiersten. Let's start from the beginning. My name is Eugene Levitsky. I am a Russian Jew who came to the U.S. when two years old. I learned English off a tape of Snow White and a shitload of PBS. My Russian is pretty much perfect. My mother is a domineering lady with a great talent for linguistics; I take after her in temperament. My father is a mild-mannered engineer with pretty damn decent skills in math. I take him as my moral role-model. Also, I stole both of their primary talents but can't navigate or do science for SHIT. Anyway, not much of this is relevant, but it's my own personal "Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider and let his Uncle Ben die," and god forbid a retelling of Spider-Man skips those bits.

Anyway, my mom always tried to be a Tiger Mother, years before anyone had even thought about writing that book, but my dad and my mom's mom (who came with us) didn't quite let her do it. So I was like a failed experiment from a comic book - not quite perfect accidentally-white Asian child, not quite normal, well-adjusted human being. Instead, I became a brilliant slacker. (Ok, the degree to which I am brilliant is debatable. I'm pretty damn smart, but I'm certainly closer to Simon Tamm than to River. and I really hope you've watched Firefly, not for the sake of the reference even, it's a damn good show).

I didn't properly make friends until late middle school / early high school. But I had spent my entire life having crushes. My first crush was when I was maybe 4 years old on a plaground, and I'm pretty sure I was involved in a love triangle with a lesbian. I think the lesbian may have won, props to her. Anyway, crushing continued until maybe my sophomore year in high school, when my best friend ever did something that maaaaaybe she shouldn't have done. The following is the story of three relationships.

A little background on my best friend: Erin Cabelly. For years, we called her Kabelly, and we will do so here as well because eventually, there's a different Erin involved. Met her my first week of freshman year. Bitch has a lot of serious issues, and these become important later. Almost 0 romantic tension between the two of us, which helps a lot.

Anyway, Erin had seen me crush on first one, then another girl. Intensely, and with intense failure. Which was par for the course. Se had previously gone to school with a girl named Alexa. THey were still pretty much friends. Alexa had issues and wanted a boyfriend. I had issues and wanted a girlfriend. I decided to give it a try. We started talking on the phone, liked each-other well enough, and, after a month of phone-talking, agreed to date (we went to separate high schools, and this was before driving became a thing, so it was essentially long distance). Alexa was self-absorbed and neurotic to a degree that almost made me look normal. She was also conventionally hot, which... I mean, come on, I was 15, and she had boobs. Seriously. I had no choice in the matter. On the other hand, she almost immediately developed a crush on a good friend of mine who wanted nothing to do with her, and I spent 10 solid months being part-time boyfriend, part-time therapist. And I'd never stopped crushing on this one girl named Amanda. So I spent my entire first relationship in what was essentially a loveless marriage. It was on-and-off, mostly with her breaking up with me and then taking me back out of what I suppose was desperation, until I put my foot down and we broke up for realsies. Incidentally, that was the year that I discovered the Ting TIngs. AS I told Alexa shortly before we broke up, "You know that song, 'Shut Up and Let Me Go'? I really, really like that song!" "I hate that song," she said to me. We've talked a few times since then, and have made piece. Though I know, very happily, that I can never go out with her again, because the way she talks drives me insane. ANYWAY.

Ten months pass. Junior year of high school goes by. Lots of fun little events and adventures - new crushes, as well as lingering old ones. I wrote a sitcom script that would have been a pilot to a series that would have covered the events of that year. Apparently, it didn't suck. I realize, pretty quickly, that there is only one thing worse than never having had a relationship: being single after a relationship. Once you get used to the shapes of coupled life, not having a significant other... jebus, it means no romantic partner, no person who's beholden to you and to whom youre beholden, no sex(-like stuff), none of that. By the end of the year, I had made a mental list of five girls I wouls consider asking out, and... well, with weeeee bit of prompting from Kabelly, I asked out one Joy Wang.

Joy Wang was an amazing Chinese girl whose mother was ACTUALLY a tiger mom. By this point, I was aware of the fact that I had a bit of a problem wherein I didn't know whether or not I was capable of being properly in love. I spent a significant portion of that relationship with a crush on the same Amanda, then developed a crush on a different Amanda (with whom I'm still friends), and, in college, got feelings for a chick named Nina (more on her later). And I refused to lie about any of this. Joy had a similar not knowing whether she was capable of proper, romanti, focussed love, so she was ok with my problems. At first, anyway - they ended up rankling her in the end, justifiably difficulty. But, in rosy retrospect, probably the best relationship of my life, at least for a while. We challenged each-other intellectually. We were both thoroughly fascinated by sex - we became the school's resident "too much PDA" couple, and we relished it. For all of my senior year (she was a bit younger... separate story!) there was some effort being made to produce that sitcom I'd written, though a few gross miscalculations on my part stopped that from happening, but... she put a lot of work into helping with production. It still warms the cockles of my heart. But eventually, I went to college, and she was still in high school. I was a commuter, so it wasn't exactly long-distance, but... well, she pretended at home that our relationship didn't exist, and she got a crush on another guy, and she was so devoted to all of her school activities that eventually, every time we saw each-other was just horrible. I broke up with her. I kind of tried getting back together with her 5 weeks later, but instead, she went out with that other guy. At first, the break-up went well, but eventually things turned ugly. Incidentaly, never date someone whose name is a common noun, EVERYTHING ends up reminding you of them. We're working on being friends again now.

Here is where the plot gets really... plot-like. Rewind to just before I asked Joy out. There was this girl named Erin. She was extremely shy; in my household, where half of my friends were referred to by a description rather than a name, she was "shy girl." And... well, I'd paid her some attention. I'd been friendly to her. And, having had enough crushes on manic pixie dream girls to know exactly what was going on, I was not at all surprised when I found out that she had a crush on me (which doesn't actually happen, generally speaking). What did surprise me was that she approached me and told me about her feelings, and then sai, "but don't worry, I'm not pursuing you or anything." What I should have said was,"Hey, want my dad to do a shit-load of driving so we can grab dinner some time?" Instead, I praised her on her courage, told her that she was such a guy, and sent her on her merry way. And then asked Joy out a week later. Since then, I had felt responsible for hr happiness and tried to set her up with other guys.

Flash forward to the latter phases of my relationship with Joy. Joy itroduces me to her next-door neighbor, Max. Max is adorable, naive, the kind of dork who lives under a rock and doesn't interact with people. Joy showed him my script and he loved it. Joy introduced him to me an he loved me. Maybe even really loved me, I'm not sure. Anyway, eventually, Max and I developed a master-protege relationship, with him under my wing. When Joy and I broke up, it was like we had split custody over him. Since they were next-door neighbors, and I was the only one with a car, the comparison worked disturbingly well, with her having him on school days and me getting him on weekends and holidays.

One day, Max and I are walking in Newtown, and we run into Erin and a friend of hers. We go into an art store, sort of split up, and start walking around. Suddenly, I observe something unprecedented. Erin, who is painfully awkward, and Max, who is painfully awkward... are talking to each-other fluently, easily, as though it were nothing in the world. Joy and I, who were still trying to be friends and were looking for bonding experiences, saw this as an opportunity.

That summer progressed. I got close to a that Nina girl from college who had been making my life romantically interesting. Max and Erin were hanging out a lot. Eventually, Max asked Erin out. She rejected him. I made out with the other girl. She told me things were not going to work out, and she let me off easy. Shortly after, Erin asked if we could talk, and told me she still had feelings for me. Upset, desperate, and hoping that maybe things would work out, I asked her out. Due to some very poor timing on my part, I wasn't able to tell Max about this until after. Max freaked out and stopped being friends with me. Fair enough. Erin and I go out, it's nice, she goes off to college in Connecticut, but we maintain a long-distance relationship. Max goes to a college in Boston, and won't talk to either Erin or me. This upset Erin greatly. She's been abandoned by people before...

One day, he calls her up, and she visits him in Boston. They hang out. She realizes that hey, she has feelings for him after all. I realize, independantly of this, that I don't have strong-enough feelings for Erin to continue a relatonship, but I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, if I ignore my instincts, things will turn out alright. Also, Kabelly, who had helped convince me to give Erin a try, was firmly on the side of me continuing to date Erin. Eventually, I fired Kabelly as my relationship councellor forever.

Anyway, Erin sort of broke up with me. We behaved exactly like a couple would, but without calling ourselves that. Why? She wanted to also persue a thing with Max. Max and I, who had been suer-nervous about seeing each-other again, had a very nice hangout at the beginning of the summer after his and Erin's first year at college. What neither of them told me until a day or two after that hang-out was that he and Erin had made out. And they sort of continued to do so, and be otherwise omantic, throughout the summer. As did Erin and I. Both Max and I gave her room to not have to figure anything out for a few months because she was doing shiiiiiiiitloads of late work so as not to get thrown out of school. He and I sort of tried to maintain a friendship, but it was horrible and we stopped.

Erin and Max both left again - she to school, he back to Boston, to work to pay off a lease he decided to take out after dropping out of school for no reason. He got himself a boyfriend there - he's pan - and, angry at Erin, stopped paying as much attention to her. Well, ok, he was super busy, always either at work or shtupping his new bf. This made Erin cling obsess over him more and more. That's this academic yar, by the way.

See, here's the thing with Erin: she honestly, absolutely genuinely, does not understand how relationships work, and she does not have an inner need for monogamy. And she can't force herself to play by standard romantic rules because it makes her feel like shit. And me? Well... I'm otherwise single, and, to be frank, I'm desperate.

Anyway, Erin is home for the holidays. I'm always home, because commute. Max is in Boston, for now, anyways. Over a couple of weekends this semester, Erin and I have continued having a sex-life, though she's... well, she's sort of asexual. Or at least has a very low sex-drive. But the point is, we've figured out that we cannot date - it jut does not work. So we have sort of a friends with benefits arrangement, except that's difficult when the two people have vastly ifferent sex drives.

And here is where I am: I no longer get feelings for girls in the way I used to. I get micro-crushes - sort-of crushes on a girl here, a girl there. I'm barking up every tree a the same time. All of my female friends are in steady relationships besides Erin, and I have feelings for quite a few of those as well, although of course I won't chase a girl with a boyfriend - I've been the other guy in every relationship and almost-relationship since Alexa. Every single one. Even when the other guy should have been the other guy. An as I learned about myself after both of my first two relationships: When I am single, I am far too obsessed with having a girlfriend to wait until I fall in love, and, once I have a girlfriend, I am far too neurotic to not immediately get crushes on other girls and play the tragic hero. And I am just stuck. Stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck. And sex has become this beautiful little dance wherein, if we do do anything, I see it as a small victory for Team Eugene (yes, I have teased her about Twilight). And I don't even want Team Eugene to win. What I want most in life is to find a girl whom I really like, who really likes me, and with whom I can be non-neurotically. But those girls do not seem to exist, and if they do, I spend so much time hoping that every random girl standing in line to buy a bagel happens to be har that I'll never get past all of the false positives. My radar is entirely on the blink.

Add to this: I want to teach math, but I'm doing poorly in all of my math classes. Whch, granted, teach me stuff I don't need to know in order to teach the level I want to teach, but it's still discouraging both for me and my GPA. The parents are convinced I'm a failure. Gran died just over a year ago. The break-up with Joy was Winter/Spring 2011, I started going out with Erin and lost Max summer 2011, Erin went polyamorous spring/summer 2012. I'm motivationally challenged to the point where I know I will continue doing poorly in math classes, all of my current tutoring gigs are new and starting after the holidays, and real life is catching up. Life is really scary right now and I am fucked up in a way that, while relatively minor, is making y life miserable right now. I hate everything, and I'm only moving forward by inertia.

Sorry this took so long.