I’ve been watching some old episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia lately (yarrrr!) and realized recently that I don’t actually have the hots for Charlie Day, as I’d previously thought. Maybe it’s the stress of the job search, maybe it’s the pressure of perfecting the thesis, the obsessive redrafting and revision, maybe I have finally lost my mind, but I must admit to myself and to the world that the man with whom I’m smitten is not Charlie Day, but Charlie Kelly. Yes, that is Day’s character on the show. Yes, he is a completely dysfunctional manchild – no, not even a manchild. He is beyond damaged. He lives in filth, he huffs glue, he has unpredictable fits of screaming rage, but what really gets me, right in the pelvis, is that he is functionally illiterate.

This is it. I have come full circle from high school grammar nazi to fangirl for the feebleminded. I’m like the kid whose mother spanked him when he was naughty and now he pays a dominatrix to step on his balls.

I wanted to understand this counterintuitive turn, but I wasn’t willing to put too much effort into it, so I turned to Google. Articles about the psychology of sexual taboos are disappointingly sparse – though I did find a few interesting (read: creepy) things. For example, Jess McNally, a contributer at Wired Science, wrote an article about incest taboos that included a quote from psychologist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois: “People appear to be drawn to others who resemble their kin or themselves.” I am enamored with the title of this article: “You Are Sexually Attracted to Your Parents, and Yourself.” Hooray for oversimplification, alarmist language, and an unnecessary comma ALL IN THE SAME TITLE! As if anyone reading Wired Science would notice.

So… is my ideal mate a dirty idiot? If so, what does this say about me? Maybe Charlie is who I am, deep down – who I wish I could be. When a barista screws up my drink order, I smile politely, say, ‘Excuse me,’ and let it go with a shrug, but what I really want to do is flail my limbs and scream about government conspiracies to limit my intake of stimulants.

Perhaps I just have to blow off some steam. I think the best course of action at this point is to follow the fantasy. All I have to do now is find the diviest bar in town; a place where someone will try to sell you a fake Swatch and a baggie of rock salt that they insist is ‘the good shit.’ If anyone out in there in Binary Land knows of a bar in Chicago where no sane human being would ever go, please let me know in the comments. I’ll be scouring Yelp.