Damn Irish I Was Your Lover

If you see what I look like or talk to me for five minutes, you'll notice that I'm a textbook Irish-American 'mo with one missing component. Let's take a look and see if we can get to the bottom of this:

Reckless decision-making skills. Check.
Family history of alcoholism. Check.

History of alcoholism. Check.

Endurance for relentless pestilence. Check.

Red hair, fair skin, & freckles. Check, check, check.

Ability to repress emotion. Nope. None of that. 

Mmmmm. Pasty.

By the grace of God, I was created without the capacity to keep any sign of human sentiment off of my face or out of my mouth. To say that I "wear my heart on my sleeve," or that I'm "an open book" is a laughable understatement. I'm too starved for attention to keep things bottled up. My point being that sometimes I'm less like an Irish man and more like a Jewish woman.

Self-repression also helps with one's ability to keep a secret – which I cannot. I annually find the opportunity to blurt out what I bought everyone for Christmas while I'm carrying bags up the stairs. Saturday, I ran into an exboyfriend at Patty in the Park, Lafayette's St. Patrick's Day celebration, and was practically sprinting home to tell everyone about what happened. In short, I mistook him for a full-blown lesbian (thanks to the Tilda Swinton haircut and studded woman's t-shirt) then drunkenly stammered through small talk while trying to understand what I was looking at. The whole episode was a fuckmess and ended with a mortifying case of word vomit when I mentioned seeing his other exboyfriend that very morning (See Jewish Woman Syndrome). Fortunately, I can't remember specifics of our discussion because I'd broken my Lenten alcohol fast and was completely shithoused.

The worst part about having free-flowing emotions is dealing with the uncontainable eruptions that can take over – regardless of where I am or who's around. And as the double-edged sword of emotional autonomy works, I burst into tears on my walk home from Patty. It might have been the case of High Life, but seeing my ex made my belly hurt. I wasn't prepared to run into him and I felt betrayed that he'd lost a little weight  since I'd seen him last. So I did the sensible thing for a 23-year-old, hormonal gay to do: call his mama. 

My mom's an amazing person, but she's nearly broken from having three kids that refuse to let her be happy. On the plus side, this makes her undaunted by most things – like phone calls from her oldest son about his gay insecurities. Her maiden name is O'Reilly and she lives up to it by being an emotional cinder block. Unlike myself, she's a virtual locksmith of feelings – the ideal person to verbally bitch slap sense into me. And after an hour of her idioms that nearly always revolve around how temporary everything is, I stop sobbing and start cleaning up the living room. 

In the interest of peace of mind, I accept my Irish inheritance of flammable skin, sky-high alcohol tolerance, and Nathan Lane's emotional threshold. It's sexy for a guy to want to talk everything out. And fortunately, you never have to guess what I'm thinking. In fact, I've got a blog where I say every hostile, passive aggressive thing that crosses my mind.