Never go into anything with high expectations. Never look forward to dinner with friends, because you will get in a car wreck on the way to the restaurant. Never look forward to getting that call from that girl because she won’t call, and if she does, it will be an accidental call while trying to dial her actual boyfriend, Brad Pitt, because this fake scenario is happening in 1995. Never look forward to that European vacation because your plane will crash over the Atlantic and you will have to stay alive, while floating around and feeding on your dead family.

Almost anything that you have or will ever be excited about will be at least somewhat of a letdown. Even your happiest memories are marred by something that you either choose to ignore or have forced your brain to forget to preserve that perfect story. You think the first time you were intimate with a woman was great? Think about that really hard. Remember how you were in the backseat in your tiny car in your childhood driveway and had to contort your body so that you could fit and then your left leg fell asleep and you started sweating profusely, while constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure your parents didn’t see you? What part about that memory was great?

Nothing in life is good. All that is good comes from distorted recollections based around selected repressed memories. Life sucks, but thinking about life can be great. Why do you think The Hunger Games trilogy was so much more successful than The Unauthorized Autobiography of Joseph Lieberman trilogy, other than the fact that I just made up the latter? It’s because real life is boring, disappointing, and painful.

My date tomorrow evening is going to be awful, and I’m going to go into it knowing that. I expect nothing but disappointment. However, if even one good thing happens, I will hopefully be able to repeatedly replay that part in my mind until it is all I can remember about that event. If the very slim chance that we end up getting married comes true, then that one positive memory will become the official story of how we met.