BURGER SCOOT

“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a sociological term used to describe a prediction that causes itself to become true.” – Simple Psychology.

It was 1987, I was crying in my Professor William Dorman’s office, and I had just told him, my Academic Advisor, that I was going to drop out of California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) for the second time in two years, and he was having nothing of it. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but my tears were not coming from my failure, but his insistence on not giving up on me. For the second time, he came up with a plan for me to take an incomplete, do my best to complete my other courses, and come back next semester and finish the class. I did just that and received an A- on my term paper. (He gave it an A, lined it out, and wrote A- with a note about it was late (by a semester.)

Professor Dorman left me with something that has stayed with me for what I imagine will be the rest of my life: I was living a Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Then he explained exactly what that was. It was not a compliment. Still, it was the first time I was confronted with this problem. Strange that I have never been able to shake it. It’s been 39 years since my mentor told me that I was living a Self-fulfilling Prophecy. He wasn’t dooming me, he was telling me this hard truth so I could shake it, work my way through it, but even today I see this in the mirror after I have fucked up something, even in little things like playing a game of chess or trying to solve a chess problem, and falling on my face. I wrote about it in a recent post.

my father, brother, my brother’s best friend, and my friend a couple of doors down, not to mention the kid around the corner and his two older brothers, whose bedrooms were choked with trophies reflecting their excellence. Me? I was the kid who warmed the bench in Little League and was picked last in recess games. Even something like driving a car, I was inept: I needed four tries until I passed my driver’s test at DMV. Nothing ever came easy, and it only drove home the idea that I was some kind of reject.

If only I had had someone like Tony Robbins as a best friend growing up, who made it his project as a budding Life Coach to keep correcting my self-criticism with positive affirmations. When I was at American River College (ARC), I had my friend Rick. He often tried to inject me with confidence, usually sticking with my writing (he was the editor-in-chief at ARC’s newspaper), and girls’, he was both fascinated and frustrated that I was still a virgin at 21. He even took some of the female newspaper staffers aside and asked if they would go out with me if I asked. Rick and I would, unbeknownst to me, take other classes together, and during boring lectures, he would tell me he knew that if I asked Ann, Susan, and other girls whose names I have forgotten, they would say yes.

Rick assumed this would somehow fix my self-esteem, at least when it came to the opposite sex, but it only created a kind of paralysis when being around these girls, especially when I was working on the same galley with one of them. Galleys, for the uninitiated, were narrow, which meant if two people were working on one together, it was a tight fit; any accidental bump felt magnified, leaving me flushed with embarrassment and second-guessing every word I wanted to say. The pressure of proximity heightened my self-awareness, compelling me to retreat into silence rather than engage. Rick’s tutelage didn’t last long; within a year, he moved to Southern California, and with him, the closest thing I had to a personal Tony Robbins.

While I was a complete washout in the dating department, at least Rick turned me onto writing, music criticism, film criticism, Greil Marcus, and Rolling Stone Magazine. He basically helped create a somewhat passable writer and a raging music and film critic, some would say even a snob. Think of a cross between the three guys in the used record store in High Fidelity. See below for a sample:

Not that I had a history of girlfriends like Rob (John Cusak, on the left), nor was I an over-the-top, in-your-face snob like Barry (Jack Black, on the right). I was more like Dick (Todd Louiso in the middle), but with a dash of the other two characters. Being a music and film critic didn’t get me anywhere with the ladies, and, strangely enough, it didn’t dispel the shadow of a self-fulfilling prophecy that haunted me.

It seemed like this self-fulfilling prophecy was impossible to shake, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when working for the Tower Theatre, and later, when I got my first job with the State of California, there were two women with overcharged libidos who pursued and seduced every male on the respective staffs except me. The two ladies who felt that break times were times to hunt the floor for some guy, any guy (except me, it turned out), find a closet or an unoccupied office, and sucked faces with these gents. (I don’t think the sex got more advanced than kissing.) Without a doubt, it was a blessing in disguise that I was singled out as the exception to these two nymphets’ horniness. Still, I couldn’t help but feel, once again, that I lacked sufficient levels of testosterone, pheromones, oxytocin, dopamine, or whatever to attract the opposite sex. SoCal Rick, whom I wrote about both occasions, said I telegraphed to these horny women an insufficient level of self-confidence to have either Sharon or Shelley pull me by my tie into an empty room and stick their tongues down my throat. Since I was young and abused myself probably as much as most red-blooded American men, I agreed it was my lack of self-confidence. I spoke to most of the women those days in a fatalistic tone, knowing that if I asked them out, they would all say no.

Even the women I ended up dating basically had to pursue me. First, there was Mary, quite possibly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person. She worked at the Tower Theatre when I was the crew chief of the floor staff. We enjoyed talking about music and film, but I never thought she would go out with me (or anyone else I ever met–she was that stunning), so I kept it to The Clash, Bob Dylan, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and asking her what candy she needed to restock concessions. When it became known that she and her sister were moving back to Texas in a week, I felt relieved of my fear of rejection and asked her whether she thought Erin would go out with me if I asked her. She sounded a little annoyed by the question, answering, “I don’t know,” then followed up with the jaw-dropping, “I don’t know why you haven’t asked me out in all this time.” We went on three dates during her last five days in Sacramento. She was gracious about my complete clumsiness towards dating. Talking about anything outside of music, film, and work was awkward as hell. Also, just walking down the street with her was intimidating. Men turned their heads, some making lewd comments at her. She ignored them. It was an eye-opening experience: this is the shit that a lot of women have to endure. They didn’t need to be as gorgeous as Mary.

Shortly after Mary left for Texas, Judi, another Tower employee, pursued me. Once again, I didn’t have to work on what turned out to be a very unhealthy relationship. I wrote about it in the post The Ballad of the Codependent Rat. The day after I finally got up the courage to break up with Judi, my future wife called to ask if I wanted to come over for a beer. I’ll leave my future wife/wife of 38 years out of this, since it kind of runs counter to the whole self-fulfilling prophecy, and my wife doesn’t like me writing about her on the blog.

Interestingly, I used to have a crush on Michelle, another person who worked on the Tower floor staff. (Yes, folks, it was a regular soap opera at that place in the early and mid-1980s.) Anyway, Michelle, she said, in a big sisterly way to me one night, “Jack, how can you expect someone to love you when you don’t love yourself. Somehow, my wife defied what sounds like a perfectly logical, water-tight statement. I finally got lucky, I guess, but it didn’t help me in all the other aspects of my life.

This post wasn’t supposed to be solely about my horrible batting average when it came to dating. There are many instances where I realize I’m living a self-fulfilling prophecy. All my college years, where my graduating GPA was barely a 2.0, and that’s after I rallied in my last two years in college. There’s my short-lived stint in Little League, where I played half of each game in Right Field, which might as well have been a desert as far as seeing a baseball, and when they introduced the batting tee, I actually struck out. I wonder if there is a Guines Book of World Records for striking out when the ball isn’t even moving. Or in golf, where my nickname was “Shank.” I also am haunted by this prophecy when it comes to practicing yoga, trying to play chess, riding my bicycle, and other bagatelles too numerous and depressing to mention here. So that’s my TED Talk on My Self-fulfilling Prophecy, folks. Thanks for reading.

If I didn’t define a self-fulfilling prophecy well enough above, here’s my current favorite stand-up comedian explaining it.