“Like” has gotta be the most used word in the English language. It means so many things and serves so many purposes. It’s a synonym for “enjoy,” it’s used to make comparisons, and in the last 20 years it’s even become a substitute for the comma. And I’m not tryna be a boomer and correct everyone’s speech. I’ve seriously been meditating on the meaning of the word lately.
What we “like” has become a massive social signifier. It’s all over dating apps: “I like pasta, long walks on the beach, dogs, and traveling.”
It’s all over social media. You gotta literally “like” shit to show you agree.
What’s one of the chief complaints of girls about their bf’s these days? “He liked another woman’s photo.”
HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Should we call the FBI? No, let’s just kill him.
Lastly, and maybe more importantly, The Algorithm uses your “likes” to show you more of that same shit to keep you glued to the screen. “Oh, you like this workplace reality show where everyone’s drunk, fighting and fucking? Turns out, we have seven awful derivatives of it, so you can like all of them.”
Gather ‘round, friends. *I’m holding a flashlight to my face* Time for a scary story.
6th grade. Valentine’s Dance. First school dance of my career. I haven’t really started watching movies yet (Jon Stewart with my father is the only form of entertainment at this time) so I got no fuckin clue what I’m in for. Pretty sure I have club baseball practice1 a few hours before I show up. This is not my world.
Girls in my class? Oh yeah, this is their Championship Game. Everyone has to get dressed up. They’re allowed to wear makeup and spaghetti straps. It’s an event where all the attention is on them, all the boys are required to be there and there’s nowhere to run.
First bit is actually kinda fun. All the songs from the radio, havin fun dickin around with my friends, they got free soda (the healthy kind, Hansons), okay, maybe this might not be so bad.
*Record scratch*
Okay, shit why’d they stop the music? Well, because a slow song is coming, you dumb motherfucker.
Look, just for some background on me in 6th grade: I’m prolly like 5’ 8”, 150 lbs at this point. Big kid. Book smart. Big vocab. Up to date on politics, sports addict, atheist, for sure mature beyond my years… but there were a few areas I was decently retarded.2 Whatever this arena is called (middle school social norms, pre-teen romance, going with the flow?) I’m retarded at it.
Slow song starts.3 All the girls huddle up 10 yards to my right and start giggling, hissing, and coordinating. I’m literally standing still, hands in pockets, trynna figure out what’s happening. This is how I know I would’ve sucked in war. No situational awareness. Giant, stationary target with hands in pockets, lookin lost, just begging to get blown to pieces from land, sea, or air.
Out of the cyclone of girls, one gets shoved in front of me. Let’s call her Lacy. 5’ nothin. Skinny. Blonde. Fuckin, 11 years old. What other details do you want? Okay, fine, she has nice, big halfway-chapped lips. Alright, I said something nice. Let’s move on.
Lacy is presented to me and all the girls back off. It feels like ordering at a restaurant where no one speaks English so I just get what I get and have no recourse to say, “What’s this again? How did I get this? I don’t even remember ordering.”
Alright, well, this should be interesting. We start slow dancing, leaving so much fucking room for Jesus, not that we had to, just my choice. See, I was incredibly horny, but not for these girls. I wanted to fuck women. Rosario Dawson, Anna Kendrick, Sloane Peterson (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Not even fuck them. When I was 11-12, it wasn’t even so much about that. I wanted to go to dinner with them, make them laugh, have them say I’m smart and then just get naked. That’s as far as it went.
But fuckin… 11-year-old Lacy, at a Valentine’s Dance? She doesn’t have tits! I’m not even hard! There’s no heat here. If we were making a movie and we had a funny, classic, angry director he’d come out from under the tent and scream, “I don’t believe you want to fuck each other! Fix it, or I’ll find a couple that does.”
I can’t even breathe. “Okay, just get through this, three minutes isn’t that long.”4
I can barely make eye contact. I can barely touch her. This is how nerds must’ve felt during dodgeball when they’ve somehow managed to be the last one left on their team.
She’s having zero issues. Staring straight into my eyes the entire time. Waiting for me to meet her gaze… patiently, I’ll give her that.
Eventually, she goes, “I really like you.”
OOOOOhhhhh god damn it, what? Again, no one fucking told me this was on the menu. I don’t know this girl very well. Sure, we’ve been in the same class for five and a half years, but she’s never played football with us and she’s never sat at our lunch table and talked about aliens with big breasts, bears with machine guns, ray guns that shoot AIDS,5 etc. so, no, I’m not really familiar with who she is. I can’t tell you her parents’ names.
Also, how the fuck does she “really like” me? Based on what? What is there to like? I’m just…. Me. I don’t even “like” “me.” I don’t even know who I am. How is she so confident in herself that she can say to me, “I really like you”? That means she must like herself. The whole thing is so goddamn inside out I still can’t even wrap my head around it.
But maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t so in her motherfucking head all the time and just decided to make an attempt to be intimate with a boy her own age. Maybe she wasn’t furiously masturbating in the shower all the time thinking about being on a dinner date with Marion Cotiard laughing at all her jokes.
I just stand there, seven and a half fingers grazing her hips. I’m not even swaying anymore. I’m not a good multitasker. I can’t sway like I’m holding in a piss and try really hard to think up a response.
Loooonnggg ass pause.
“Uhhhhh, well, that’s great.”
That’s all I got. Sorry, there wasn’t a handout for this. I’ve never heard Jon Stewart talk about this shit. So I got no fuckin clue, Lacy.
After the song, I run-walk outside. I’m hyperventilating. The girl squad comes over. “What happened?” They fuckin pretend like they don’t know. Steal your watch and ask you what time it is.
I fill them in.
“WELL, what’d you tell her?”
“That’s really great.”
“WHAT!?!? You said what? That’s not what you’re supposed to say.” They’re all goin in on me. It’s like getting pelted with rotten fruit.
“What? What was I supposed to say?”
“Well, do you like her???
This is where it gets interesting. We enter the world of semantics now. Do I “like” her? Meaning what? I like my neighbor's cat. I like beef stew. Sheryl Crow CD’s. So what?
“Sure, I like her,” I said.
“Well then tell her you like her too!!!”
Per the girl squads’ instructions, I find her on the next slow dance. I tell her. She leaps at me and throws her arms around me. I’m fucked.
In that moment, my perception of what it meant to like something was forever altered. That was my standard for who and what I liked. That set of emotions. That set of circumstances.
Of course, this was a mostly subconscious process. I wasn’t actively telling myself that this was the only way to know if I liked someone. That’s rarely how anything ever works anyway. It usually takes many years to figure out what I was actually thinking at any given time. We’re human. We are masters at the art of bullshitting ourselves. Still, that didn’t mean it didn’t directly influence my next 12-20 romantic encounters.
I went on to create carbon copies of this Lacy encounter like I had been commissioned to do a decades-long university study. Needless to say, the consequences of not dealing with this shit in the moment got exponentially worse as time went on and the Lacies of the world got stronger, more cunning, and more willing to wield their power.
This subject has been on my mind because I’ve been seriously considering what I like vs. dislike these days.
I used to like Costa Rica.
At ages 14 and 19, on family vacation, that place was the best. Then I moved there. Post-pandemic, in the digital nomad era, stayed in a grimy apartment and didn’t rent a car. Turns out, Costa Rica is more of a Lacy.6
I haven’t lived in a house since July 2023. I did not know how much I valued living in a house. Interesting, I “really like” living in a house. I hope living in a house likes me back 🤭
The value of a “like” has never been lower. So much artificial juice has been pumped in, just like in the U.S. economy, inflation has hit the “like” sector just as hard as the dollar. Here’s the silver lining: When the value of something is low, it’s a good time to buy.
Plus, The Algorithm is only getting stronger. And we can also look at the world as an algorithm: we create more of what we are already creating. When we say we “like” something/someone, we’re destined to get more of it. It’s a total double-edged sword. But that’s our burden– not the world’s, not the algorithm’s, and certainly not anybody else’s.
So, I encourage everyone to take stock of their likes– or, put another way— desires. If we’re aware of our desires, no matter how bad things get, no matter how fucked up the world gets around us, we can stand firm in our knowingness, and be impenetrable when a Lacy approaches us.
The slow song starts. The little Lacy looks at you with those big, chapped lips.
“I really like you.
“Well, that’s great.”
Full stop!
And when the cyclone of middle school girls (The Algorithm) surrounds you: “Did you like it?! Did you like it? Did you like it?”
Well, did you?
Getting motherfucked to death for two and a half hours by a guy who almost made the big leagues. Perfect pre-game for a middle school dance.
To be clear, I do mean retarted. Like, the definition of it.
I don’t know exactly, but probably some bullshit by Ed Sheeran
Wrong!
We got in so much trouble for this one. Teacher said “AIDS is not funny. Ever. Under any circumstance!” Oh, if I could only tell him now, “Watch White Lotus Season 1, pal.” The scene where Connie Britton’s husband finds out his “macho” dad died of AIDS. Watched it in 2021, haven’t laughed that hard since.
Fun fact: Lacy the person turned out to be non-binary. Didn’t know which gender they were, but they knew they liked me. (Can of worms. If this piece gets 2 SHARES I’ll open it.)
"It usually takes many years to figure out what I was ACTUALLY thinking at any given time.": A priceless line, and in my case, I need about a 30 year window. Loved the Actual-ness of this whole piece, both as a visceral recall of trying times and a call to pay attention to the actual present.
Hey Zane, thanks for sharing your reflections on 'liking'—I have to admit, your story had me chuckling! The way you described your middle school dance experience was both hilarious and poignant. It's funny how our early experiences shape our perceptions, but it's also kind of sad to think about the pressures we felt back then, isn't it? Your observations definitely got me thinking.