What To Do If Someone You Love Is Being Hot

Often, there is no need to intervene right away. Watch them for some days, and see if they quit it. If not, observe for a stretch more; you are gathering information as to the exact nature, nuances, and onset of their charm.

So you are there, watching them eat noodles, or do whatever they do so exquisitely. If your face were on their face you would not be reading this. Instead what is approaching their face is bucatini, with otherworldly grace, or roguish carelessness. The oil anoints their lips; you are lost in the sauce; down the gullet go the pasta and your heart.

You have options:

BROOD

A clever maneuver, since when done without too much sad-sackery, a brood can easily turn the brooder hot as well. Fortunately, no one can see you under the streetlight at midnight in the rain acting out your noir little image of yourself. Put on a pout and pace about. Meticulously file the situation among your other woes, in the appropriate section.

SING THE BLUES

Of all the endeavors that are cheaper than therapy and seem to work according to more or less the same mechanism, singing the blues is among those with the richest tradition and yet the least utilization today. You can change that!

Here’s what you do. Find an instrument. Look up, if you don’t know already, how to play the following chords, in whichever key is the easiest: I, I7, IV7, and V7.

Then play a four-beat measure of each of the following:

I
I
I
I7
Iv7
Iv7
I
I
V7
V7
I
I

That’s the twelve-bar blues.

Oh, but that isn’t quite singing, is it. Well, do you know any blue words? Say them, moving your voice up and down. If everything is proceeding smoothly, you may ululate and sway.

DOCUMENT

Chronicle the situation. Amass an incontrovertible body of proof that the subject of your dossier is glowing in an ongoing and unrepentant manner. You want probably a full crate of sketches, poems, and lyrics so that once the courts come knocking with the subpoena and the papers are calling for your exclusive story, you can very easily just hand over the crate, so nobody gets too good a look at you, and observers nationwide will imagine your face as the face of the only sort of person who could have sculpted such tender yet incisive portrayals, and they will not learn that the only reason you had to sculpt such portrayals in the first place was because your skin was having an off day and your jeans were fitting weird, turning you into a hideous unworthy monster.

RIDE THE EDGE

Make a lame excuse to be in the room when they are reaching with a dancer’s grace to dust the high shelves as your gaze oozes from their tiptoes to their upstretched arm without missing the dappled crescent of skin revealed by the lift in their shirt. Arrange to have to squeeze tight up against them in a backseat carrying more than its capacity; sabotage the seatbelt buckle between you if you must. Go around being hot yourself, completely on purpose.

MOPE

Fake sick. Or actually become sick. Go on your phone a lot. Think about things. Moan. Gnash your genitals. Write a long note, on your phone. While you’re there, might as well scroll though some words on an app. Add a postscript to the note. Whinge about the same thing in your journal every day. Cry about something else and try to figure out whether it’s actually about that something else or it’s just a proxy for this something. But why would you cry about that? It’s good for people to be hot. It’s great. You’re happy for them. Right?

CAUSE TROUBLE

Pout in an uglier and more obvious way than the BROOD. Chase their lover from the country, or gaslight them both into trying poly. Brew an aphrodisiac from the first Google result. Hook up with their roommate and their brother. Faint. Start a fight. Give yourself a shag. Say what you mean.

RUIN YOUR LIFE

Stop maintaining the shag. Burn your whole oeuvre. Steal a boat. Get a job as the associate strategic product associate and waste the years away. Spill tomato sauce on your pants. When they look over, spill it again. Fix up the boat. Retire from the job and get a framed plaque for your loyal years of associate product strategy. Sail the seven seas. Shave your head. Feel the Caribbean breeze on your scalp. Bleach the pants. Sell the bonfire of your life’s work as an NFT.  Catch the west wind and let it carry you into the sunset until you disappear off the horizon. “Adios, motherfuckers!” you cry, middle fingers to the sky, Jolly Roger billowing from your mast, the last ray of daylight weathering the name of your beloved on the bow of the ship.

When You Are The One Being Hot

Act graciously. But do not compromise your time in the sun. It is important and soul-feeding to go on benders of incorrigible loveliness now and then.