Hello Kitty: It’s not just for 10-year old girls anymore?!

            Okay, I have this friend, and we’ll call him “T” for the sake of his dignity. He’s a 21-year old, (self-declared) straight male, male. We hit up the campus bookstore after class today because he needed a caffeine boost (after showing up 20 minutes before the end of class due to a faulty/ancient alarm clock). We get there, head to the cold case, he grabs a “Rockstar” (which is a blog/rant for a whole other day), and we go to pay. As he opens his wallet and pulls out his debit card, I see the thing that caused me immediately to lose about 20% of the respect that I had previously had for him (which still puts his level leaps and bounds ahead of many others). On his debit card…he has a “Hello Kitty” emblem for ANYBODY to see.

Are you F#$%ING kidding me?! NO self-respecting man should have a pink, kitty cartoon on his debit card (or for that matter on ANYTHING that he owns)…period. I immediately called him on it, and his defense was “It’s a great ice-breaker to meet women with.” All right, this is what we call the “dynamite fishing” defense. Does it work? Yes. Does it even work REALLY well? Yes. Is what you catch by doing this going to be worth it? Probably not. Will you lose self-respect/a sense of victory from your results? ABSOLUTELY!

When I’m chatting up a cute, young woman, I want to know that she’s laughing WITH me and not AT me. Because, let’s face it, the BEST response that you can hope for in this instance is that the girl who’s caught your eye will PITY you enough to find it cute and laugh out of a sense of awkward tension and NOT genuine appreciation for your sense of humor. So guys, let’s agree that we’ll get rid of embarrassing emblems on our “grown up” items, like debit cards, cars, etc. because like 1st Corinthians verse 12 said “When I was a child, I sp[o]ke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”