Superlatives are often the only comparison in my family. My friend Jonathan, who got his masters in poem writing, explained it best when he said, ‘There is no reason in being a good poet.’ That resonated with me. I don’t want to be a good anything, I want to be great or I guess I don’t really want to do it. There are exceptions, but that is true of a lot of things.
Four years ago today, or roughly today, I kissed Jordana for the first time. She was sleeping on the couch downstairs at my house on Beachwood Drive in Hollwood (why are there so many (blank)-woods in LA, a place without trees?) and I had theoretically gone to bed. I tossed for about five minutes and then I came back downstairs. I was sitting on the couch where she was sleeping and I asked her if I could kiss her. She laughed at me and said Sure, so I did.
We think it was the first of April. Either way, it’s nice to have a relationship based mostly on laughing start on April Fool’s Day.
Jordana is not the smartest person in the world. It’s hard for me to admit that because she is so much smarter than me, but I realize there are people who understand recipes and who got perfect scores on their SATs and can memorize whole plays in a glance. To be fair, she certainly remembers everything, every single detail of things, and she scored a 1070 when she took her SATs in seventh grade (although it was her mom who told me that, she thought it was funny). When it comes to following directions she is hopeless. But her grasp of the world is vast, she always knows Irving Berlin from Harold Arlen, she knows all three rivers that feed into the Elbe, she does math in her head as fast as I do. But I know she isn’t going to be offered a Nobel Prize in anything.
Jordana is also not the most beautiful girl in the world. Again, it’s hard for me to admit that because she is so incredibly beautiful compared to me. But she is a little too tall and she has the kind of broad strong looks that some men are not attracted to. I mean, she is definitely the most beautiful woman I have ever dated, legs-butt-breasts-eyes-neck, all that stuff is just unreal piece by piece. When I watch her watching a movie, or if I catch her changing, or especially when I see her laughing at our friends, I am amazed at the sheer physical beauty of her. But if you catch her dancing, or trying to play basketball, you wouldn’t consider her a paragon of feminine beauty. You might think she was a little awkward.
And it has always been hard for any of my brothers and sisters to be with someone who wasn’t an absolute, who didn’t have some kind of clear indication that they were better and more special than anyone else we could possibly be with. The woman I married when I was in my 20s was someone who was so obviously unlike anyone else, she was so clearly superlative in so many ways, it was easy for me to bring her in the fold, despite the fact that my family, each and every one of them, could barely tolerate her.
But there is a thing about Jordana that goes beyond her mind or her body, and I won’t be able to describe it here. All I can say about it is that she loves the people around her with the kind of abandon that is infectious. The cliché maintains that love begets love, and I have never understood it before now. I find that with her in my life, I have the obligation and the ability to be a better man, not just to her, but to everyone I know.
In the time that I have spent with her, I have lost the necessity for cruelty. I am still cruel, but now it is a choice, and one that I always regret immediately. I have also lost the necessity for dishonesty. I still lie sometimes, but mostly because it is funny or because I am about to admit I am lying. I have lost the impetus for dominance, I have lost the need to prove myself, I have lost that constant craving for acceptance and understanding and success. I feel like I have that all the time now, just in being with her.
The kind of happiness I have with Jordana requires more than I will possibly be able to write, it should be the only thing my blog is about. So, I’ll stop. I just want to say, I am so glad that I asked her if I could kiss her, and I am so glad she said yes.
