Don Draper, Tim Riggins, Johnny Depp, and Billy Idol: Drunk

Jon Hamm drinks PBR-- Jill, what do we think that says about him?

I took yesterday off, since my book has been driving me crazy. I am hopefully going to get to 37,000 words today, and 40,000 tomorrow. After that you can see the end, can't you?

For some time, a feeling has been building in Sadie; it started out slowly, just a doubt in the back of her mind that was always pushed aside. But it has been growing and growing, to the point where there is no space for it anymore. It can no longer be pushed aside. In fact, it is almost begging to be acknowledged and paid its due.

Summertime is once again approaching, and Sadie and Brett began dating on a Saturday night in August. Even then, Sadie was worried about Brett, and whether his feelings could ever match hers. We always knew that they didn’t; but we need to remember that there are a lot of things that we know that Sadie does not. She has always suspected them, but stopped short at believing them. That would have been too hard. But the evidence is mounting, and can't be ignored. Sadie has given him all of the time in the world to fall in love with her, but his feelings still seem lukewarm. How long can she really give him? If he doesn't love her yet, will he ever?

Over time, her feelings for Brett have only grown. She fell in love with him quickly, and hundreds of times more after that. Sadie would never say that she loves everything about him; people are far too complicated for that. He has faults, of course: He is withholding, emotionally and otherwise. She never really knows what he is thinking or how he feels, mostly because he hides it, or most often, he doesn’t know either. He isn’t very affectionate or loving. He never seems fully there, his mind is always somewhere else. She has never been even close to figuring him out. He is sort of like a younger Don Draper, but without the seedy history and he isn’t quite as mind-fuckingly hot and mysterious. But Sadie would never fancy herself as a Betty Draper; she isn’t nearly as accommodating.

But to Sadie Desman, none of these things could ever matter more than the way that he makes her feel. When they are apart, she hungers for him. He is always on her mind; from when she wakes up in the morning to when she goes to sleep at night, she is wondering about him and what he is thinking. When she stands beside him and the world can see that she is his girl, it makes her feel better about herself. Yes, everyone may be wondering how a girl like Sadie Desman could get a guy like Brett Hall. They may conclude that Sadie is incredibly funny or really good in bed or something. To have strangers attribute skills such as these to you without knowing anything about you is powerful, to say the least. Brett is sexy; his abs could cut you if you got too close to them, which Sadie does at every opportunity. Being with Brett makes her feel alive and wanted, and it is something that she will truly miss once she is alone.

Other than Brett, almost everything in Sadie’s life is falling into place. She is set to begin her honours project in political science with her radical political thought professor, and is planning on attending to grad school after graduation. She was considering the social and political thought department back at York in Toronto, but after a particularly disastrous visit in which a David Boreanaz-crazed man in a vampire cape (she is not sure whether he attends the school, or whether he simply shows up on campus from time to time) had forced her to read his essay entitled “Reflecting Dichotomies of Subjectivity: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Humanization of the Object.” He then tried to recruit her as a promoter of his Buffy the Vampire Slayer academic conference; as a fan of the show, Sadie was very disgruntled to see that postmodernism really can ruin everything. She refused to help him, and in a fit of rage, he sent her to the nearest museum and told her that it closed an hour later than it did, causing her to be locked in overnight alongside a Texan high school football player and a hot German. To make a long story short, Sadie ended up naked in a coffin while the German and Texan hid her clothes. It was quite the night, but will have to be a story saved for another day. But ever since then, Sadie had been having elaborate dreams where the German had sex with Count Dracula who bit him and killed him, all while the Texan (named Tim Higgins) watched. Needless to say, this image was off-putting.

But Brett is starting to take up far too much of her time. Not with his physical presence; she can hardly get enough of him. No, it is in her mind. All of the time that she has spent worrying that not only could he not care about her the way that she cares about him, but perhaps that he really doesn’t care about her at all. Just think of all of the Bon Jovi songs that she could have listened to with that extra time. Or all of the ironic Crocs that she could have thrown at George W. Bush effigies.

Sadie had recently taken to rolling up her pants for a masculine shabby chic look. Initially, as she was getting the hang of the style, it took her concentration away from Brett for a while. But soon, guidebooks for mastering the rolled cuff look—which were printed just weeks before the Huckleberry Finn Revival Festival, thank god—allowed Sadie to easily master the look, thus giving her more time to obsess over Brett. It was good and it was bad; she really could have used the distraction, but ultimately, she looked like she could avoid almost any flood while looking stylish at the same time.

Getting the roll right is harder than it looks, and the experts differ on technique. Some suggest rolling one inch of cuff three times for cotton canvas trousers, and a single two-inch cuff for dark jeans. For slightly looser pants, like chinos, it is advised that the cropped pants enthusiast creates a peg by pinching the fabric slightly at the front during the rolling process. Starting from the bottom, you flip once, making as small a fold as possible, then twist the front of the pants leg by about an inch, then roll twice more while holding the pinch tightly. The pleats should stay in place. There are several don’ts. No formal shoes. No rolled-up skinny jeans. No wool pants – the rolls won’t stay. No bootleg pants, which should be burned anyway. And since rolled pants are meant to look casual, nothing about the outfit should be dressy, at the risk of looking too studied. While you’re at it, stop trying so hard. Sadie was sure glad that she had this advice; who knew that it could be so complicated! Ultimately, Sadie decided that the best approach to any pants-rolling situation is to channel Johnny Depp for that moment and ask yourself, “How would Johnny Depp roll up the bottom of his pants?” Indeed, in life, one should always be asking themselves, “What would Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow do?” The answer is usually “get drunk and make a poor sexual choice,” which Sadie is usually more than happy to do. She has always said that a poor sexual choice is better than no sexual choice.
One could also ask “What would Billy Idol do?”, and then do the exact opposite.

Like anybody who is starting to worry that they are losing everything that they love, Sadie is looking to defend it with everything that she has. When you think that someone may not love you enough, you start to try to make them. She becomes afraid to argue or disagree with him, and pays more attention to her appearance than usual. She has been making herself crazy, analyzing everything that Brett ever says or does, to try to figure out how much he cares for her. Asking him how he feels would be showing too much of her hand, which is something that she knows that she cannot do. Sadie—Brett’s Sadie, to be more precise—is a cultivated performance. Her practiced indifference, and pretending that she doesn’t love Brett with everything that she has— and more—has really begun to tire her out. She is starting to wear away at the edges, and is giving herself over to Brett more and more. He sees the difference. He sees how much she loves him, even though neither of them has said those three words yet.

For Brett, Sadie is like a pros and cons list. Right now, there are more pros to being with Sadie than without her. He can talk to her in ways that he has never been able to talk with anybody before. It makes him feel nice to have someone that cares for him so deeply. He cares for her as well, and has grown to really depend on her when shit gets real. She never asks anything like that in return, which makes things easy for Brett. The cons would start to pile up if she asked too much of him, or if she became too inconvenient, or if there were other things in his life—like school or soccer— that need his attention more than she does. When the cons outweigh the pros, he will surely get rid of her. Sadie is all too aware of this.