Eras I Regret

And why I regret them

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The chapters of our lives are not defined by calendar years. A year is a rigid, arbitrary thing. A mere unit of measurement! It can’t possibly contain within its strict confines a proper narrative structure. Sometimes, a chapter is two years, or it’s three-and-a-half years, or it’s two weeks. These spans of time, amorphous, but much more complete in their story arcs, are “eras.” 

Think about your own life, ignore the instinct to cringe, and these periods become readily identifiable. They will step forth in their Doc Martens, wearing tiny sunglasses and stud earrings, and begin to speak. “Remember,” they will say, “I was you, once.” 

Some eras, it goes without saying, are better than others. Some make us nostalgic or bring a smile to our faces. Others make us want to curl up and die. But it’s nonetheless important to reflect on these past selves from time to time, because together they communicate important core aspects of our identities. 

Our past eras are many faces of a single, complicated being, and though they might dress differently and listen to radically different music and would actually hate each other if they were put in the same room together, they all spring forth from the singular, unfathomable You, an entity that can never be completely known, whose depths can never be totally explored, but whose waters hold treasures for those brave enough to dive deep. 

With that being said, I have decided to emerge from the oceans of myself to show you some weird pearls I found while trolling the seabed. These are eras of mine that I regret, the shameful offspring born of my unending quest for self. I am simultaneously repulsed by them and cognizant of the fact that they held within their eyes the same light that I do today. They are dead, but alive. They are me, but not me. They speak, but only in riddles. 

 Please enjoy gawking at my misshapen gems. 

My Keto Era

Some of my most shameful periods of life were times when I embraced the practices and philosophies of “some man.” A good example of this would be those few months in college where I started doing keto because I went on one promising first date with a guy who was super into it. He’d lost a significant amount of weight in a relatively short period of time by abstaining from every last food item that makes life worth living and replacing these things with eggs, mostly.

For the uninitiated, “keto” is short for “ketogenic diet.” It is largely an exercise in misery. Keto practitioners are meant to shun carbohydrates in favor of proteins and fats. The idea is to induce a metabolic state called ketosis. In this state, the body becomes more efficient at burning fat for energy and in converting fat into ketones in the liver, which supplies energy to the brain, allegedly.

I don’t know what any of this actually means, but I do know that keto guys are incredibly interested in the properties of their urine, because it supposedly can confirm that their body is in the much desired state of ketosis. 

I ate a lot of fried eggs with shredded cheddar cheese on top and pistachios during this time. On Friday evenings, this man, who might have been named Jonathan, would pick me up and we’d go to his apartment to watch a movie. But mostly he’d just lecture me about the stuff that’s in our food and give me more lore about the ketones, which, to me, and perhaps to him as well, were a bit magical, like midichlorians in Star Wars. 

What did I learn?

I learned that despite my accomplishments in life, it seems that whenever some big dumb man starts explaining things to me in terms I don’t quite recognize, the inept, unelected congress in my brain launches an exploratory committee around it and comes back with a report that invariably says, “We should listen to this guy, he knows something we don’t.” This has led me into several traps, like keto, but also “the stock market.”

Thankfully, this whole thing came to a screeching halt the first time I spent the night at his place. He kept a plastic jug under his bed to urinate in. He woke me up at 3 a.m. by peeing in it. I didn’t ask any questions, I just said I had to go. I didn’t care if there was some sort of ecological rationale behind this. I’m sure if I had stuck around he would have explained why this was a good thing, why it was normal, and why I should be doing the same thing, which is why I left in such a hurry. 

I got a cheesy gordita crunch from Taco Bell on the way back to my apartment. Aside from the crunch part, though, it was mostly keto-friendly. 

My Baking Gay Era

I am not terribly good at baking, which was the only real problem here. There was a plague, you see, and I had precious little else to do. I might actually return to this one. There’s something so comforting in collecting ingredients and measuring them out and rolling the dice on if it turns out perfectly or if something goes slightly wrong. Either way, you get to eat it at the end. You can’t say that about all your mistakes.

My Reddit Menswear Era (The Reddit Means-Weara)

Another one from my troubled college years. Oh, what an awful time! This one came to me after one of my first breakups, which wasn’t so much a breakup as it was me telling this guy I’d been casually seeing to please go away. That might sound mean, but try to understand, he was in a men’s acappella group. 

After the split, I decided one of the big problems with “my whole deal” was that I lacked discipline in nearly all my endeavors. My room was a bit of a mess. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I worked out irregularly, I didn’t have a bedtime, and I didn’t really grasp how any facet of the economy worked beyond the number in my bank account, which was not a very high number at all.

Like many men who find themselves in states of disarray, I thought the answer was to introduce a dose of fascism to my daily affairs. One great place to begin would be my wardrobe, because don’t the clothes make the man?

I didn’t really have a wardrobe to speak of. At the time, I was going for a “disheveled poet” vibe with my oversized Goodwill finds and whatever my mom saw fit to throw my way. This lack of intention, I believed, reflected a deeper, more prevalent flaw in my approach to everything. I needed to bring order to my closet. I needed someone to tell me how to dress.

So, of course, I went to Reddit. 

The Menswear Subreddit was great in that it introduced a suite of rules that needed to be strictly followed to put together a proper outfit. Many of the recommendations pointed toward the nearest J.Crew, but there were cheaper options out there, along with many lists and helpful posts telling you where to find them. JCPenney, I was told, had longwing dress shoes that could fly with the best of ‘em. But mostly these rules came down to wearing an oxford shirt tucked into a pair of chinos with a leather belt that matched your leather shoes. 

Flashes of personality were allowed, perhaps in the form of red pants, so long as the red wasn’t garish and the pants were still chinos, or in the form of a playful wristband for your Timex Weekender. I had a camo one, and even a leopard print one, which was an insane choice, but that was the kind of wild creativity and whimsy that I brought to the Menswear Subreddit. 

All in all, it wasn’t the worst time. I got acquainted with outlet malls and with different kinds of textiles and measurements and sartorial philosophies. But it was very much “baby’s first foray into style,” and I eventually grew out of it when I realized that, despite the math and logic the menswear subreddit championed, it was just one take on how people should wear clothes, a practice that’s more of an art than a science, and maybe the “disheveled poet” vibe was a better reflection of my personality than the “fruity econ major” I was dressing up as. 

I still, however, look at J.Crew with some degree of fondness. 

My Wide-Brimmed Brunch Hat Era

It happens. You move to Brooklyn, and you become something you don’t quite recognize. 

You forget the pastoral idyll of your youth and trade it in for bodegas and “public transportation.” You convince yourself that it’s perfectly fine to live in an apartment the size of your parents’ closet, and you promise yourself that you’ll buy a bed frame just as soon as that next direct deposit hits, as a treat. You get used to carrying bags of groceries several blocks back to your building. You become immune to people swinging around from the poles in the subway mere inches from your face. You buy a felt, black, wide-brimmed brunch hat. 

The black wide-brimmed brunch hat was an apex predator that ruled the waning Obama years and the early Trump years. It fed primarily on formerly Christian fundamentalist sorority girls going through an artsy phase and gay people who left their hometowns for big cities in an attempt to launch a media career. I was but one of its many victims.

For me, the wide-brimmed brunch hat was an easy way to alert the world that I had some vague aesthetic ambitions that trended generally toward “creative” and that I strongly disagreed with the GOP’s rhetoric on immigrants and sexual minorities. It was also a way for me to spend around $40 on a single item that would do the work of an entire wardrobe for me. The wide-brimmed brunch hat said everything that needed to be said. It said I used to be a goth. It said I do get a little gay with it. It said I used to have a Tumblr and presently have a Twitter presence.

So why do I regret it?

Despite the wide-brimmed brunch hat describing me pretty much to a T, I nonetheless felt like a big phony in it. Wearing it around, accidentally bumping the brim into people, sheepishly taking it off when I got sick of it obscuring my vision, was all rather silly and forced. 

Perhaps in a better world, where ridiculous hats are more normalized, I wouldn’t have felt (ha!) this way. I do believe in the power of headwear and I do wish society were a bit more like a Tolstoy novel where everyone is expected to wear an elegant hat. But that’s not the world we live in, and I can’t pretend otherwise. The wide-brimmed brunch hat only serves to remind me of a time when I was new in Brooklyn and fighting for my life to make rent every month. I’m glad it died out.

My TradCath Era

If you know anything about me, you know that I’m from rural Oklahoma, and that I grew up Catholic. I didn’t take Catholicism seriously, however, until 2007, as a junior in high school, when I decided to channel my energies into becoming incredibly devout. There were several contributing factors to this phenomenon, which I will detail below.

For one, my high school was deeply divided by religion at the time. A “nondenominational” Christian youth group called FUEL was taking the student body by storm. This was one of those edgy, hipster churches that approved of skateboarding and skinny jeans, but not women’s suffrage. Its congregants would carry Bibles like weapons into classrooms so that they might better proselytize to other students or pull out a verse to argue against the theory of evolution. 

These people were, to put it gently, my sworn enemies. I hated being preached to, and I hated the coy, transparent attempts at striking up an unrelated conversation with me that would inevitably descend into “so what’s your relationship with Christ like?” They would then try to drag me to their weird warehouse on the outskirts of town where they would physically beat demons out of each other. There were Facebook videos documenting this practice.

It just wasn’t something I wanted to do with my time. 

I was so irritated with these people that when my AP history teacher taught us about the religious wars of Europe, wherein Catholics would stuff protestants into cages and hang them from atop the cathedral spires, I suppose I thought, “Wow, someone should do that to Mikey.”

Seeking sanctuary from the nonstop barrage of attempts to convert me, I found shelter in Catholicism, the religion I’d grown up with as a Mexican-American, but never really taken seriously. Mexican-American Catholicism is, in my mind, a perfunctory thing. It’s something you gotta do, but it’s largely decorative. You hang up pictures of the pope and you buy the candles and, sure, you attend mass and sing the hymns, but it’s not a choice you made, and it’s no big deal if you don’t actually believe in it. 

As long as you feel guilty most of the time and wear a single gold piece of jewelry with a crucifix on it, you’re meeting all the requirements. You’re basically Italian at that point, which the Church heavily approves of.

But this changed when I found myself dealing with these protestant crusaders in skinny jeans. For some reason, I wasn’t yet confirmed, so I decided to fast-track that process by attending confirmation classes for the elderly and the dying. Here, I got super into Catholicism. I knew what the Council of Nicaea was. I knew all the steps one had to take to become pope (I was desperately behind). I learned all the songs and took pride in our beautiful churches and in the fact that we were the “universal” church. 

I was confirmed John Paul ‘Saint Juan Diego’ Hernandez Brammer. I argued with other Catholics about niche aspects of Church doctrine in the YouTube comments section for Ave Maria. I was well on my way to being assigned a really cool hat by the Vatican.

Then I got bored and stopped. 

I’d like to say I had some sort of theological awakening, or that I discovered I strongly disagreed with the Church’s stance on some social issue, but that wasn’t it. Mass is so boring, you guys. It doesn’t matter how pretty the church is. A lot of it is sitting, or kneeling, or muttering. Once I was confirmed and the religious wars in my high school died down, I felt like I had completed the video game, and I simply left Catholicism behind like it was an outdated edition of Spyro the Dragon for PlayStation. 

I do still love the songs, though. 

My Facebook Menace Era 

You know how it is. You finally come out of the closet, you learn about Magneto’s deal in the X-Men (why assimilate, when revenge is an option?), and you start taking out years of pent up wrath on your acquaintances from high school. I was a real scourge for the digital community of Lawton, Oklahoma, in 2012. 

You think you can just be the son of a rancher I went to middle school with and get away with casually commenting “haha gay” on your best friend’s profile picture? Not on my watch. “But what about straight pride month?” you, some dunce I met in Señora Santiago’s Spanish Club, ask aloud, unaware that I am hurtling toward you like the asteroid toward the dinosaurs at the tail end of the Cretaceous Period to write, “every month is straight pride month, dummy.”

There wasn’t a single person I wouldn’t fight during my Facebook menace era. Former teachers, neighbors, friends of friends, you name it. I had the time and the energy to scrap with you. I would engage until you either blocked me or accepted defeat.

I think I was incredibly angry over the daily indignities I suffered in silence as a closeted youth, and I was ready to make it absolutely everyone else’s problem. It’s not that I think casual homophobia is excusable, but being that hostile, that spiteful, wasn’t fun. It was a constant psychological burning sensation. I eventually learned how to pick my battles and, even more importantly, how to “mute” people on social media. That helped a lot.

My Facebook menace era actually coincided with my wide-brimmed brunch hat era. I think the hat was controlling me like the Green Goblin mask. 

My Situationship Era

Actually, let’s discuss this one at a later date. I promise I want to talk about it, but now is just not the right time, you know? And isn’t what we have here kind of nice as it is? I mean, there’s no need to rock the boat. I feel like our needs are being met, and we’re so busy with our own things anyway, I don’t see why we should complicate it. You’re so into your career! I’d hate to distract you from that. You get it, right?

I’m so glad you understand and that we’re on the same page. 

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Thank you for looking inside my cursed jewelry box. I’m curious, what are some eras that you’re ashamed of? Did you wear a silly hat for a few months? Did you join an internet community that radicalized you for a while in an embarrassing way? Are you the chosen one that the keto people have been waiting for? Are you overflowing with ketones? I’d love to hear about it. 

Meanwhile, I encourage you to enter your “paid ¡Hola Papi! subscriber era” by clicking the button below. It’s one you won’t regret, as you’ll get access to more columns and more writing like the piece you just read. Thank you again, and I’ll see you in your inbox soon.

—John Paul