There's Something About Mary (Movie Fan-Fiction)

The narrator relates the strange and transforming story of a magnetic female college student he studied with who compelled him to re-think the nature of social distancing.

One last short-story, inspired by one of my favorite new-age American movies, There's Something About Mary, which presents a life-story that compels us to ask the direct question, "Are we shaped by our environments, or can we in fact shape our own civilization?"

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"Well, this story begins the same way as it begins for most people --- from the beginning. I was a college student about to matriculate and excited about my post high-school educational career. There were lots of students in my freshman class, and none of us were prepared for the upcoming spiritual enigma we were about to face, and it came in the form of a female college student, a sort of a gypsy-woman named Mary! We were not prepared and simply anticipating a normal college experience."

"Mary was attractive and unusual. She was eccentric and pretty smart. She always wore sunglasses and stylish clothes. She was from Berkeley (California) and had hippie-parents and had a strange and bubble demeanor masking a deep sophistication. Mary drank margaritas and smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and intrigued every guy (and girl!) she met. Heck, even professors at our college were fascinated by her. There was something truly taking about the unusual Mary, and those of us guys competing for her affections found out we were willing to do just about anything to have her."

"Meanwhile, there were lots of changes going on in American culture and society. Movies were becoming more pedestrian conscious and politics more populist. People cared about media and consumerism more than anything, and communications became a much more popular college major. Our college featured career fairs on campus presenting special pursuits related to populist reaches in American democracy. In other words, America was embracing a completely new 'walking-man' aesthetic."

"I couldn't help wonder if Mary was more sensitive or somehow 'magically' keen about all these changes than the rest of us at our college! She was, after all, quite sophisticated and very popular and her hippie-parents I guess instilled in her a special sense of youthful idealism. Every guy on campus wanted to be known as the 'guy who dated Mary' if only for a while! This sort of humanist obsession with a single girl sort of oddly if disturbingly fit into this changing American aesthetic of people-centric imagination and socialized politics and media. Mary was like the new Barbie, and even the girls at our college were subtly conscious of this."

"I was busy, like many of the guys at our college, about purchasing the right smart dorm furniture and school supplies and obtaining the necessary training and credentials to gain good employment opportunities and great salaries. We were the office generation and wanted to embrace this changing American aesthetic as best we could really. However, I wondered if the unusual and beautiful (and hypnotizing Mary!) was somehow making us all somehow 'lean' towards anti-social rage, perhaps embracing terrorism-conscious modernism dystopian movies like Fight Club."

"College students that time had their special ways of embracing this new American aesthetic. Some embraced liberalism and campus protests. Others sought earnest inways into this new American aesthetic through ambitious venture capitalism! Whatever the road, we were all required to drive down towards this emerging horizon of globalized humanism it seemed. That's what made it feel somewhat odd actually, the prerequisite for life. Maybe that's why all the campus psychology hubbub made it 'natural' to make Mary a Barbie-girl for rebelliousness!"

"I worked up the nerve to finally ask Mary out on a date, because I didn't want to be the 'guy who never dated Mary' even if he tried to ask! So i decided to get a stylish haircut and new glasses and a tie and went to her dorm with roses. We went out to dinner and ended up dating for one month. I was in heaven. However, I soon realized Mary was secretly (and disturbingly) quite demanding. She'd insist I keep up with American culture and news, and I realized we'd made her the Barbie-girl of this new American aesthetic on our campus because she was the center of all this unusual traffic. Mary and I broke up, and she soon started dating a musician guy on campus. They broke up one month later, and he became a much more radical punk-rock musician. I now knew there was something other-worldly about Mary."

"Years later, after college, I heard the online news of one of our classmates who ended up working as a post-office manager but went ballistic and killed everyone in his post-office station with a machine-gun! This guy actually dated Mary while we were at college, and he told everyone at the time he wanted to be a fisherman. Apparently, Mary affected this post-office guy the same way she affected the musician guy who ended up becoming a radical punk-rocker. It seemed now that the effect Mary had on people around her was one of spiritual disorientation and some kind of emotional rage!"

"This wasn't obvious. Another one of Mary's college ex-boyfriends actually ended up marrying an attractive female economics major at our college and together they became a successful work-from-home business company consulting duo. However, I ended up looking up their venture consulting website and was shocked to find they'd posted some photos of our college campus in a presentation about the role of education in the emerging business world of today. The photos included a photo of Mary, just sitting and typing on her laptop! I now knew our 'Barbie-girl' Mary had transformed the world we knew into some kind of 'Twilight Zone' developmental psychology advertisement."

"Things came to a line when I discovered that another one of Mary's ex-boyfriends from our college ended up becoming a homicidal maniac, a Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) copycat who modeled his crimes/murders after the ones shown in the iconic if cult-horrific American horror-film series! I was now so worried that I called Mary (I looked up her number, and she was now a art museum consultant in Florida!) and demanded to know what she was doing to all these guys! What was her real intention? I was surprised and humbled to hear Mary cry on the phone and confess that she was simply overwhelmed by all these 'social changes' in America which she said compelled her to embrace a rebellious disposition rather than accepting her identity as a downright 'Barbie-girl. I was humbled to hear this. Maybe this Leatherface-copycat simply 'treated' Mary like she was the idealized doll, which is why he unfurled into an anti-social destroyer."

"I later discovered that yet another ex-boyfriend of Mary's from our college had joined the CIA and was working as an underground operative for P-IRA (Provisional Irish Republican Army) trying to build bridges between Sinn Fein and Parliament and eradicate unlicensed terrorism directed at civilian targets in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and thereby create more stability between the Irish Catholic minority and British Protestant majority in Belfast. This ex-boyfriend was obviously embracing a mature view on modern globalization politics and intelligence and seemed to be unjarred by his experience with Mary at our college. I then concluded that the real 'thing' about Mary was that she required us to be just a tad more 'demonstrative' about life and education itself. Weird, right?"

"So, my friends, now you know my strange if realistic story about an American experience in the new millennium. What was Mary really about? Was she really a Barbie-girl of modernism? Why did her ex-boyfriends mutate into strange creatures? Was I one of her victims? This is a tale of education and American life, and I urge you next time to consider the human value of asking your date revealing questions before deciding to pursue a truly deep realtionship that will enrich your very existence in this world. That's my advice, and I believe it's surprisingly Christian."

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)