The Mad Madder's Blog

A Sublimely Simple System of Silliness | December 2, 2009

When left to my own devices, during that awkward month of the year when I am not supposed to be riding my bike too much to allow my body to ‘recover’ from the horrors I’ve put it through during the nine month racing season, I tend to spend an inane amount of time pondering things that don’t need to be pondered. After all I have to do something during the commercial breaks in a football game.

Among the frivolous topics of speculation this particular year were: “If Verbal Kint is Keyzer Soze, what really happened in The Usual Suspects?”, “If the psychic was right and I was a sex slave to a cruel Mormon man in a previous life, does that excuse my occasionally deviant behavior?”, “Should I put broccoli in my beef stew?” and, the one that resulted in today’s random rant, “What is the unifying theme in the people I find attractive?”

This particular question has come up before, stemming largely from the fact that if you lined up all the guys I’ve dated and/or found attractive over the years the only thing you would find they have in common is me finding them attractive. Tall or short, black or white, blond or brunette, athletic or bookish, scrawny or built, yeti or big foot. Whatever.  So what is my sick and twisted subconscious looking for I ask myself? Hmmm….

While there is really nothing much to be gained from solving the mystery of what I find attractive (either someone is attractive to me or not, I lack any real control), the scientist in me loves a challenge. Hence the pondering and the resultant theory:

A Sublimely Simple System of Silliness

I have decided that the only thing that these poor unfortunate souls (please break into your best Ursula from the Little Mermaid impression) had in common was an ability to be silly.  The degree to which said individuals embraced the silly seems in direct correlation with the strength of said attraction as depicted on the following useless graph (See there’s the scientist talking).

chart 2!

Silly calls for silly like pizza calls for beer. My own personal version of pheromones, the detection of silliness seems to be the factor that elevates an initial physical reaction to the next level of attraction. As with most human beings, I am prone to the “well now, that’s pretty” double-take, but what differentiates that visual response-head turn from a lasting attraction seems to be the inability of the attractor to take himself all that seriously.  After all, what are we other than an aggregate of cells that move gangily about making mistakes, offending people and tripping over our own shoelaces? (or at least that about sums me up.) What right do we have to take ourselves seriously?

Instinctively, with the unfailing ability to look past social dictates and prejudices, my brain picks out those most likely to put up with a girl who thinks the most logical means of getting from one end of the apartment to the other is clearly a full speed sock slide (despite occasionally disastrous consequences in the stair section).  A girl who can giggle for a full hour over her inability to drink water lying down while failing to embrace the reasonable solution of sitting up.  A girl who knit herself a fringed scarf out of orange fuzzy yarn so when she’s unhappy she can wrap it around her head and pretend to be Red Fraggle. A girl who thinks playing “king of the couch” (and winning of course) is just about as much fun as can be had in an evening.

So while I’ve been doing my unsuccessful best to worry about height and age, eye colour and IQ, I should just have been asking “Would he dress up like a Smurf and mountain bike race with me?” or “How will he react to the idea of barefoot full-contact kitchen hockey? (a staple of my Montreal days)”

But clearly my subconscious is far smarter than I am and has been asking those questions all along.  So the next time I find myself going past that double-take for a triple or quadruple.  The next time I feel my heart trying to mimic ‘cross race pace when I’m just having a casual chat.  The next time I pester my unsuspecting friends with tales of some guy’s grandeur and they ask me: “Why this guy, Maddie?”   I can say: “Because he’s silly.”

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