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if I read at slams, I would call this "you are a boy"
You are a boy. You love Wet Hot American Summer and The Big Lebowski and midnight movies. You've taken stand up comedy classes (improv of course) and love it when girls say you're funny. You can name three Saddle Creek artists (counting any Conor Oberst project only once) and go to every indie rock show that hits town. You stand in the back with a beer, watching the girls in tight shirts watch the band. You have DSL and spend late nights downloading songs both ironic and sincere. You were the first person in your tight circle of childhood friends and college acquaintances to like The Darkness after all. You have digital cable and at least two roommates and only smoke socially or just can't kick your pack a day habit or you only smoke when you drink, which is all the time. Your fridge is filled with cheap beer and ice cream and burgers (meat or boca) but you pride yourself on your cooking skills and whip out one of three signature dishes when you need to impress a date. One is a pasta dish. All are delicious. You don't have a job, unless you're temping, or your temp job was just made permanent (don't worry, it won't last long). Somehow you always pay rent, though the utilities sometimes get lost in the shuffle. You fall in love at the drop of a hat, for wounded girls with big eyes, girls who are clearly brittle inside and hesitant and desperately wanting to feel loved. You fall in love with the big-eyed girls and make them your world for a week or a month or many months and when you look into those immense eyes, as you love to do late on Saturday nights, slightly buzzed, you see your own wounded, brittle insides, broken by so many other girlfriends, and you refuse to be hesitant and you will save her, you will save you, and you kiss her hard and deep all week or month until you see the hesitation drop and her belief in you grow and she opens her heart to you and you stop seeing your own wounded self in her over-large eyes and that's the way that ends. And you can spend whole days sitting in your room organizing and burning your MP3s and your roommates never worry because "That's just the boy."
Or...
You are a boy. You got a degree. You got a job. You got an apartment. It is all going gangbusters. On Thursday nights you go out for drinks with your coworkers and don't mind getting sloppy in front of them. Or going home with one or two of them, on occasion. You want a nice girlfriend, the kind of girlfriend who is hot and sexy and smart, but not smarter than you, or if she is, not funnier than you anyway. You want a girlfriend you can take pride in, show off to your friends and coworkers, prove that you are worth a girl like that. You want her to take pride in you, that sort of fawning pride that is visible in every sharp angle of the standard beauty of her face. You date a lot of younger women. Some in college. You could tell some dirty jokes about younger women, but only to the guys. You want her to take care of herself and have a good body, though you're still a little rough around the edges. Or if you're not now, you will be soon enough. You watch a lot of TV. You read a lot, though no matter what you read, newspapers or history books or magazines or fiction, you take it just a bit too literally. You form opinions quickly and will defend them until the party ends or until the unwitting partygoer you’ve cast as your opponent has wandered off, bored, in search of more beer. The world, you think, is us against them and you are firmly leading the better side of us. "Boy," your friends think secretly to themselves, "Someday you will realize how them you really are."
Or...
You are a boy. You know what that means. The high school jocks and your overbearing dad and your resentful mom and your college feminist theory professor and your riot grrrl girlfriend taught you all that is wrong and bad and hateful about the male. You are sensitive to it and hate it as much as any post-feminist girl you know. More even, since you've lived it. You call yourself a feminist. You listen to Le Tigre and retro girl groups. You keep your youthful indiscretion with gangsta rap on the down low. You went to a small liberal arts college and now you're trying to get your foot in the documentary film industry or trying to get into an MFA program or trying to settle on an appropriate branch of social work. It will happen, don't worry. You have talent. You're focused. You worry that girls will be a distraction, there is too much to do and they are too much the other. Opposite. You learned that well from the jocks and dad and mom and professors and the grrrl. Besides, you do not want to ruin and break them, you do not want to let your destructive masculine energy overpower their positive femininity, you do not want to be the jerk your dad was and create another version of your mom. You respect them too much. You're too uncomfortable with confrontation. You don't want the responsibility of a broken heart laid on your doorstep. You have work to do. You work on your film. You work on your novel. You work on your grant application. You work on your plans. When they are done, when you are set-up and settled and ready to go, the girl will appear and it will be fine and you will not have broken anyone's heart and you will not have to make any effort at all, it will all be easy and perfect, just like the fairy tales your riot ex-grrrlfriend rejected when she hit adolescence. And your riot ex-grrrlfriend shakes her head and says "Boy, fear is not the same thing as self-reliance, and I am not as other as you think."
Or...
You are a boy. You are the life of the party, every party. You network and call it making friends and mean it. You love getting emails, watching them fill your inbox with missives from people who want to know you. You don't return most of them. You are in a band or in the music industry or in media, new or old. You are at every show and every night and every opening and you glow like electricity, surrounded by all those people. You pick a trait, a natural talent or interest, and you play it up and make it you. Intelligence maybe, so you are all about foreign films and 60's revolutionary youth culture and postmodernism. Music maybe, and you are an encyclopedia of labels and release dates and what came out on colored vinyl and how much it's going for on eBay. You fancy yourself a revolutionary at heart, and flirt with anarchy. You flirt with drugs, recreational only, or at least you used to when you were younger. You look younger, if the drugs haven't aged you prematurely. Baby-faced. Precocious. It makes it even more impressive when you know the It band or director or artist first. You have a lot of female friends, or acquaintances anyway. You don't date them; you "hang out." You're still working out some of those adolescent insecurities of being the dork or the geek or the little guy, hitting puberty too late or hitting the books too hard, so you've taken a decent number of girls home. You haven't slept with them all though. Some things are still special. Or anxiety producing. You are slick and charismatic and girls call you cute and call you up but you still worry, deep down, that humiliation will be mixed up in there somewhere. The girls are so cute after all, and there are so many other guys who are cooler and taller and better connected with trendier hair, so you must act the part and don't bother calling back right away. If every guy waits a week, you will wait two. You are an overachiever. You must be impressive and aloof and cooler than all of them. And the girls giggle in the corner and look at you making small talk by the bar and whisper, "We see through your bravado and overcompensation and insecurities, and oh confused boy, don’t let the persona become the person."
Or...
You are a boy and you create and you are excited and you are intelligent but you are goofy and that's okay. And you meet a girl and you make no assumptions and you make no comparisons and you take lots of chances with an open heart. And you accept the consequences and the consequences are mainly glorious. If there are tears, they are overwhelmed by smiles and if there are fights they are overwhelmed by handholding and if there is confusion and insecurity and hesitancy it is overwhelmed by clarity and reassurance and both feet in the pool in one jump. It is all overwhelmed eventually. And you smile and you tell her stories and you look in her eyes and see her there and you kiss her and she says yes and yes and she says, "Hello sweet boy. Hello young man."