misadventures in NYC

Electronic Post-It

2007-09-17T13:16:00.001-07:00

There’s an episode of “Sex And The City” where Carrie’s boyfriend breaks up with her on a post-it. Just stuck on her computer. No phone call, no longer letter, nothing. Just a simple post-it that indicates, in a way words couldn’t even begin to convey, exactly what her boyfriend thinks of her and of their relationship.
It seems such a cruel thing to do that I thought it would be relegated only to the world of fiction. A hyperbole of an inconsiderate breakup used to make people chuckle and prove a point.
Oh how naïve I can be sometimes.
I had been dating the Brit for about two months. It still wasn’t serious, which was fine by me, but we saw each other about once a week and emailed every couple of days. About six weeks after our first date, I decided to throw a party.
And found myself facing a dilemma. Did I ask him to come? It was a weird situation. We weren’t dating all that long, but at the same time, wouldn’t it be rude for me not to ask? Were we ready to introduce each other to our respective social circles? I wasn’t quite sure.
Meanwhile, one very cold early December night, he asked a very simple question over a very nice dinner:
“Hey, after this, some friends of mine are at a bar around here. You want to go meet them?”
Very casual, very I-didn’t-deliberate-over-this-for-hours. And all of a sudden, I felt very silly about my dilemma.
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”
A little later on that night, I told him about my party.
The day before the event, I called the Brit. He had been sick earlier in the week and I wanted to check up on him. Plus, I hadn’t really gotten a definitive answer to my invite.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like hell. I was feeling better, but I went back to work today and I think it just wore me out.”
“I’m sorry. Are you going to be able to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Yeah. I’m in bed already. Just going to hang out all day. What are you doing?”
“Shopping for my party.”
“You’re throwing a party?”
This troubled me. I guessed it was a clear indication he wasn’t planning on coming, but I played it off.
“You knew that! You were invited?”
“I was not!”
“You were too! You just don’t want to come!”
“I do to! If I’m invited.”
We’re both laughing at this point. “Yes, you’re invited,” I tell him. “It’s at my house. Starts at 9. Bring friends if you want.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
I went along with the rest of my preparations. It was a Christmas party and I was doing “Cookies and Cocktails.” I had spent the past two days baking dozens of cookies and cleaning my apartment. When Saturday came around, I was amazed and proud that I was not only on time, but actually ahead of schedule. I was an entertaining goddess! Clearly, this was my true calling.
And then I went and bought the Christmas tree.
A few of my friends came early to help me buy a tree and haul it five blocks home and up five flights of stairs. We figured that would be the worst part. Once it was in the apartment, it was just a matter of throwing it in the stand and decorating it. Easily done in 2 hours. And I’d have a live Christmas tree in my house for my party! Never mind that I live in 400 square feet and was expecting about 30 people. It would all be fine. After all, I was an entertaining goddess.
J,K and I lug the tree home, make it up the steps, and try to put it in the stand. And realize, quickly, that it doesn’t fit. There are too many branches at the bottom of the trunk. Shit. We try to break them off. That doesn’t work. We try to saw them off with a bread knife, the closest thing I have to a saw in the house. Not surprisingly, that doesn’t work either. It’s at this point that my neighbors come over to see what the hell is going on.
K and I run to the hardware store to buy a saw. The hardware store’s closed. Finally, in an act of desperation, K and I head back to the Christmas tree stand and beg their saw off them. Now we’re walking around the Lower East Side with a saw and increasingly desperate looks on our faces. We try to fix the tree ourselves. I straddle the tree to hold it steady while K, in her nice denim skirt and knee-high black boots, puts one foot on the trunk and saws away. Nothing works. We finally prop the tree drunkenly against the side of the fridge and K runs off to return the saw with a box of Christmas cookies for the nice man who let us borrow it on faith.
In the midst of all this, I’m still trying to get ready and finish putting the food out. So when this oddly silent Asian kid shows up 45 minutes early, I feel like I might just have a nervous breakdown. The food’s not ready, I’m not showered, my tree looks like it’s been celebrating Christmas early. And now there’s this weird kid that a friend of mine met on the internet and decided to ask to my house sitting on my couch, not saying anything. (Although, to be fair, looking back, if I had expected to come to a Christmas party and walked in to see a girl straddling a Christmas tree while another girl tried to saw branches with a bread knife, I might not have said all that much either).
Somehow, everything gets done before 8. I am showered and dressed and I have makeup on. A comes over and finishes putting out the food so I can get ready and somehow, magically, everything’s done by the time the first guests arrive. And even if everything wasn’t ready, the first guests are Jules and Sculls, and they’re family, so they’d understand. They’ve even brought a saw to help me fix the tree.
“Yeah, I think I may never be able to go back to the bodega on the corner,” Sculls says as he walks in the door.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I wasn’t thinking and I put the saw in the cooler. And when we went for ice, the lady asked, ‘Do you need a bag?’ And I said, ‘Naw, just put it in the cooler.’ And opened it up and took the saw out. And the entire bodega went silent.”
“Nice. She was probably looking at Jules, trying to find signs of Stockholm Syndrome.”
Sculls gets to work on my Christmas tree and before too many people even get there, it’s in the stand and Sculls has pretty much stopped bleeding. It’s a great party and I’m having such a good time I don’t even realize how late it is. I just happen to glance at the clock and realize that it’s late and the Brit isn’t there yet. Odd.
I send him a quick text message, jokingly saying, “I know you’re not standing me up. Where are you?”
I get one back almost instantly. “I told you I was a bad person. I can’t see you right now.”
And there it is, my own electronic post-it, telling me exactly what he thinks of our potential relationship.

Girl Scout's Honor

2007-03-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

Guys--I really am okay. It was just a pity party, not a cry for help. I've gotten a few emails and phone calls from the last post (the only one that's ever inspired such a reaction) and I felt I needed to respond before my birthday party became an intervention. I was having one of those moments where I felt sorry for myself and I decided to write about it. I don't go around every day feeling sorry for myself or shitty about myself or full of resentment. I promise.
The truth of the matter is that it's hard for me to put myself out there. I don't like risk. I'm not good at it. And I did this time and I got burned. Because, somewhere along the line, I got it into my head that getting burned translates into severe embarrassment and stupidity on my part, I didn't tell anybody about what was going on. It's not because I think anybody would judge me (I mean, you let not one but TWO gay guys slide. Really, if there was ever a time to judge ... ).
Yes, the guy is still in my life. And yes, that causes me some concern. He knows that. Things are a little confused right now, but the truth of the matter is, I want him in my life right now. I don't know why. But I do. As a friend.
No, I am not waiting around for him. I don't know what the future holds, but what this whole experience has taught me is that that's okay. I tend to play my life like a chess game: I need to be two moves ahead of everybody else. And if you live your life like that, you never take any chances and you're left wondering what if. I didn't think with him. I just took a leap and hoped for the best. It didn't end the way I wanted it to, but what I got isn't bad: a friend who will talk me through my insecurities and support me through a crisis and make sure I'm laughing when I really should be crying.
So, in conclusion, thank you for worrying about me. But I'm okay. Girl Scout's Honor.

Pity, Party of One

2007-03-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

It’s official.
With the friend who was single for so long we were wondering what the hell was going on there now “kinda, sorta dating somebody,” I am the very last one of my friends in the single column.
The very last one.
I know you’re thinking, “Oh, come on. Somebody’s got to be single.” And yes, I have some friends, like the one in Ireland, who’s not dating anybody (although I haven’t talked to her in a while and, at last count, four men were vying for her attentions). But, of the people I interact with every day, it’s me and a bunch of couples.
How the hell did that happen?
I haven’t talked about the asshole much here for a couple of reasons. One is that it was just too raw. He really hurt me in a way I haven’t been hurt in a while. Every time I tried to write about him, my funny, insightful anecdote turned into a whiny pity party and I do not want my blog to become a series of therapeutic diary entries. I have a separate diary for that.
But now I’m the only single girl. So let the pity party begin.
I can’t help but think that I spent five of the last six months believing that the asshole was going to come home and make good on the promises he was tossing out liberally every single day. And when I should have been dating people that actually gave a shit about me, who actually had intentions to be with me, I was waiting for somebody who, well I don’t know what the hell he was doing but he didn’t have intentions of being with me. He told me that himself. So it’s hard not to view that time as time wasted. And it’s hard for me not to feel like a fool for believing his lies.
Another reason that I haven’t written about him is that to write about him is to admit, to myself and to the very few people who know the back story, that he’s still in my life. I talk to the asshole just about every day. And that causes me huge issues. Because I feel like I’m setting myself up to be hurt again and I know I capitulated too easily after he hurt me so badly. I’m not sure even how we wound up being friends again. Except that, after telling me that he never had any intentions with me, he wouldn’t let me go and there’s only so many times a person can apologize before you either accept of feel like a heartless bitch. It’s kind of funny how that works.
But now, as I see the asshole’s the consistent man in my life and I look around and find myself in the land of the single, party of one, I’m starting to wonder if forgive and forget was the wisest policy decision. It’s not easy to feel full of forgiveness when I’m feeling like I’m playing the fool. In fact, the emotion I feel full of right now is resentment. I resent the time I spent with him before, I resent the time I’m spending with him now. I resent the way he made me feel like shit about myself, how I felt like the world’s biggest fool because of him, how I wonder all the time if I’m being the world’s biggest fool right now for still being in contact with him. I resent that I let him get away with not answering my questions. I resent that he wouldn’t answer my questions in the first place. I resent that I don’t know what he’s up to and I’m not sure what the hell’s going on or why he feels the need to have me in his life even though, walking contradiction that I am, I know that I would resent it if he cut me out of his life when the shit hit the fan two months ago.
Told you it was going to be a pity party.
But when all that resentment confetti hits the ground, and I’m alone to clean up the mess, I really have to point the finger at myself. Why do I set myself up to be hurt? Why did I care if he thought I was a bitch for not forgiving him for lying to me for five months? Why did I let him back in my life when he needed me instead of protecting myself? And, most importantly, why, now, can’t I let him go?

Beware of Co-Workers Bearing Gifts

2007-03-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

As some of the regular readers of this blog may remember, I met AJ (the Key West Wonder) through a woman I work with. It was very much a left-field setup. We weren’t particularly friendly, so I never expected her to come out with, “let me introduce you to somebody.”
I’ve learned the lesson the hard way: beware of gifts that come from left-field.
I was out at a movie with my friend Keaton when he dropped this bomb on me. Keaton and I also work together, so naturally he knows the woman who set me up with AJ. He asked if I had spoken with the matchmaker lately (the matchmaker has since moved to another company). I said I hadn’t.
“You know, we were never really all that friendly to begin with. The whole setup thing was kind of weird,” I said, throwing a handful of popcorn into my mouth.
“I was just wondering how she was doing with the gay husband,” Keaton said.
“You’ve referenced that a couple of times recently, Keaton,” I said. “You know, he’s an actor. That doesn’t mean he’s gay. Plenty of actors are straight.”
Keaton looks at me funnily. “I’m pretty sure actors that look at gay porn on their home computers are gay, though.”
I choke on my popcorn. “Excuse me?”
“How do you not know this story?”
“I’m not sure. Did you ever tell me this story?”
Keaton thinks. “I thought I did. But maybe not.”
I’m getting impatient. “So you want to start telling me now?”
“Sure. One day she comes in all nuts and grabs Carl and says she needs coffee. And she proceeds to tell him that she just caught her husband looking at gay porn on the computer and is that normal?”
“I guess it’s better that she caught him rather than, oh, I don’t know, one of their two very young daughters. But holy shit.”
“I know. So Carl’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s normal. IF YOUR HUSBAND’S GAY. Other than that, not so normal.’”
“Oh my god.”
“I know, it’s horrible.”
“No, not that. I mean, yes it’s horrible. But I’m just remembering something.”
After emailing back and forth for about two weeks, AJ and I made plans to go for drinks. Since she was the force behind us getting together, I told the matchmaker that we were finally meeting face to face.
Instead of being happy, she got a little weird.
“I’ve been struggling with if I should have told you about this or not,” she said.
Oh jeez. “Tell me what?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t know if I should mention something or not, and I keep going back and forth, but now that you’re meeting him, I guess I should say something.”
“What’s wrong? He’s not married, is he?”
“Oh, nothing like that. It’s just that, two years ago, he had [long dramatic pause inserted here] thyroid cancer. And I thought that he should tell you himself, but then I didn’t want you to think that I should have warned you.”
I’m stunned. Not that he had cancer, because I’m not a freak who somehow thinks cancer is catching. I’m stunned that she’s telling me this like it’s some big horrible secret. He had cancer. No big deal. Now if he had cancer and also a few rape convictions behind him, then that’s when I could understand the tone of this little speech. But this is just odd.
“Is he okay now?”
“Oh yeah. He’s fine now. I think he takes a pill every day because it’s affected his thyroid, but that’s it.”
I really don’t know what to say. I know what I want to say, which is “Seriously, lady, what the hell is wrong with you?”
Now, all of a sudden, the tone is flying back with me with a whole lot of sense behind me. Because I’m also remembering the time I met her husband, AJ’s best friend.
We went to the restaurant that the actor worked in (he’s not exactly a working actor. Much like, I’m finding out now, he might not exactly be a straight actor). It was the night of our first fight. I was out with him and my friend A and we decided to stop by the actor’s restaurant. A and I were introduced, then we were left to the bar to our own devices while AJ disappeared for a while. Kind of a long while. When he got back, he was incredibly nasty. He had never been like that before. After we walked Allison home, we would up having a huge fight on the street and I left in tears. I just couldn’t understand the sudden change in his behavior.
Now I found, I could.

The Accidental Date

2007-02-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

The Brit was somebody who used to work at my company. We occasionally had to work on projects together, which is how we got to the friendly, “Hey, how are you?” passing-in-the-hall stage. But when I got promoted off the project I was working on, I moved to a different floor and I hardly ever saw him any more. In fact, I hadn’t seen him in months and months when I had to go up to my old floor and bumped into him.
“Hey, how are you?” He said in his beautiful London accent. “I haven’t seen you in forever. I wasn’t even sure you worked here any more.”
“Nope, still here,” I said, stifling the butterflies in my stomach that I always got when I was talking to him (he’s so pretty) and the disgust at how my own Northeast accent sounded next to his pretty across-the-pond one. “I’m good. How are you?”
“Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. I’m leaving. My last day’s on Friday.”
Oh. No more chance encounters in the hall with the pretty British boy. My stomach sank a little. In my company, we’re in a pretty-boy drought. We couldn’t afford to lose one of our best.
But I soldiered on. “Congratulations! Where are you going?”
We spoke for a couple of minutes about his new job and then I had to get going. “Well, keep in touch,” I said, because that’s what you say to people, regardless of whether you ever really kept in touch when they worked at the desk across from yours. Social convention and whatnot.
“I will,” he said, because social convention again demands it must be satisfied. “I’ll shoot you my email address before I leave.” More social convention, I was sure.
I went downstairs, never expecting to hear from him again. So when I came in Friday morning and there was an email with a link to his personal email instructing me to keep in touch, I was surprised. When I got an email a week later asking what I was doing after work on Wednesday, I was even more surprised.
I met him after work for drinks. Drinks turned into a meal. Several hours later our waitress, who had decided almost instantaneously that she didn’t like us, (it may have been because she overheard us laughing after, instead of reciting the specials, she recited the ENTIRE f-ing menu in her very heavy Russian accent. It was 15 minutes of awkwardly trying to follow along with our own menus, the whole process made more difficult by the fact that she didn’t go in order but jumped all over the place) dropped the check. He picked it up and I turned to get my wallet out of my purse.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said with my wallet in my hand. I never know how to play this game. I feel that once you move to get your wallet out, if you don’t pay, the move looks insincere. But pushing to pay gets uncomfortable. So I wind up with wallet in hand, hovering somewhere between the table and my purse.
“Please. I’ll get this. Don’t worry about it. Please.”
And then, the wave of realization hit me. I was on a date.
It had taken me nearly 4 hours to make that realization.
With all the vagaries of the male/female relationship these days, I feel like accidental dates are all too common. Boundaries are no longer clearly defined. In our parents’ day, things were clear. If a guy was meeting you for a meal, he was taking you out on a date. He would pay and most likely pick you up and drop you off at your parents’ house, where you would be forced to live until such time as continuous dates turned into marriage and you moved from one home to another. By no means am I advocating going back to that system. At the same time, there was something nice about the clear delineation.
After all, what does our inability to commit to a single date say about our inability to commit overall? We’re a society that values the transient. Take a look at this year’s Grammy winners. How many of them will even chart next year, let alone be nominated for an award? We are a society that watches that 15-minutes-of-fame clock like trend hawks searching for the next prey. We’re fickle. We love you one minute and the next we’re burning any evidence we ever acknowledged your presence.
And we’ve taken that attitude into the dating world. When it comes to relationships, most of us are like hobos hopping boxcars. We won’t even commit to a journey long enough to buy a ticket and sit in the comfy seats. Instead, we hop on and off where we please, traveling wherever the wind will take us. And that’s fun for a while, but eventually it gets hard to jump off that moving train with all that emotional baggage.
We don’t want to commit because if we commit, and it doesn’t work out, we’ve failed. We’ve been taught that “failure is not an option” (a phrase, ironically enough, uttered most often by a man who reigns supreme as the Midas of Failure … everything he touches turns to shit). And when faced with that kind of pressure, who’s going to be able to commit? You ask, she turns you down, you’ve failed. You’ve let God and Country down. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure to put on drinks and maybe a nosh.
So instead we hedge our bets, see how things go, never say one way or another where we stand. We question the validity of our relationships, hesitate to say that we’re committed, that we’re off the market, well past the expiration date on the dating label. We fear putting ourselves on the record for anything and then act surprised when our relationships play out like a broken record, repeating the same scenarios again and again. And we wonder how we find ourselves accidentally on dates, accidentally in relationships, accidentally with exes we never meant to be significant others in the first place.

Read Me a Story

2006-12-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

Guy One (the nice single dad) called me up again for a first date (oddly, about the same time Guy Two came back, but more about him later). We went for our first date, to the opera. A little intense for a first date, but I think he had tickets previously (at least, that’s what he told me) and I like the opera. The perfect gentleman through the whole date, very nice.
Nice turned to creepy pretty quickly.
He and my friend A were in the city for some work function and they stopped by for lunch after work. A had an appointment and left early, but Guy One stayed behind for a little while. He was looking at my bookshelf, going through the titles when he said, “I didn’t know this was a book first.”
He was holding a copy of “Howl’s Moving Castle,” an amazing young adult book that I loved as a kid. Recently, it was turned into an animated film where they turned Howl, the outlaw bastard rock star wizard, into some prissy, homosexual 16-year-old in tights. It’s not my favorite film. But the book is something you all should read. To yourselves. It should take you two days.
We talked briefly about the book and the movie and then it was time for him to go. We weren’t seeing each other that weekend (he was out of town) but we were going to get together the following Friday. So about a week later, he called to make plans.
“Are we still on for Friday?”
“Sure!” I replied. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well, I was thinking we could go to dinner,” (so far, so good) “and then go to a movie” (still good) “and then I was thinking we could go back to your place” (wait, this is a little presumptuous for a second date—shouldn’t we see how things go first? Oh wait, he’s still talking …) “and you could read ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ to me.” (EXCUSE ME?????)
Who ever thought premature sexual activity was ever going to look like the better option?
He wants me to read to him? Really?
Now, normally, given the people I tend to date, I would think that there was a good chance that he was illiterate and couldn’t read to himself. Or that drugs were screwing up his vision too badly for him to focus on the teeny-tiny words. But he’s a teacher that doesn’t even drink. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with his vision or his cognitive skills.
Trying to make lemonade out of this sudden batch of lemons I found myself with, I started asking people what they thought. I figured somebody had to think this was normal.
Not ONE person thought this was acceptable second-date behavior. Not too many people thought this was acceptable ANY date behavior.
“Maybe he’s just trying to get into your apartment late at night,” my friend Chris suggested, trying to be helpful. You know there’s something wrong with a situation when your friends are suggesting that the guy you’re dating is trying to get in your pants too early … and that’s the better scenario.
I decide that I’m going to just say my apartment’s too messy and that nobody’s coming over. That’s something everybody can understand, a messy apartment, and if he’s not in the apartment, I can’t read to him. Because I really just can’t. I’m picturing plot lines to bad “Who’s the Boss?” episodes, where Tony tries to seduce Angela by seeming literate and cultured, taking her to Vermont and reading her poetry on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. But then Mona shows up and somebody cracks a tooth and antics ensue. In short, I CANNOT read to a guy on a second date.
We go for Ethiopian food, which was a lot of fun, if you put the fact that actual Ethiopians aren’t eating anything while you’re stuffing your face out of your mind. And then he starts in.
“I’m thinking, instead of going to the movies, we go back to your place.”
I choke on whatever tasty-but-indistinguishable thing I’m eating. “Oh, no, not tonight. My apartment’s a mess. I had a choice between taking a nap and cleaning up and unless I got a nap in, I wouldn’t have been able to see you tonight.” That’s flattering, right? I chose seeing you over cleaning my apartment. So now it’s your turn to be understanding and drop the freakin’ “read to me” bullshit.
He wouldn’t let it go though. “But I brought dessert! And it’s going to go bad! I was having this the other day and it was amazing and I thought I had to share it with you. But I have to make it tonight!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a surprise, but it’s amazing. You have to let me make it for you. I can’t wait until the next time I see you, it’ll go bad.”
He kept it up through the end of dinner and through two across-town blocks until I finally just let it go. I could care less if my apartment was a mess at this point. I wasn’t ever going to see him again. Of this I was damned certain.
He came over. He made me dessert (oh, it was hot chocolate. From a mix. He left the mix at my house. Expiration date: November 2007.) We watched a movie on tv. He finally left. I didn’t have to read to him. More importantly, I never had to see him again. And that was a sweeter ending to the date than any dessert he possibly could have had in his messenger bag.

From Two to Zero

2006-10-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

In six days or less, too! I’m checking with the Guinness foks, but I think it may be a new record.
Guy One (the nice one) went first. He wanted to come visit me at work. Considering I had met him once, briefly, at a bar and would have never even given him my phone number if hadn’t come with references, I thought it would be really unprofessional to bring him to work with me. I wasn’t going to mention it and hope he forgot it, but he asked me on Monday and I told him the truth.
Haven’t heard from him since.
Guy Two (the asshole) was a little trickier. He came back into town for a brief time and was there but not there. Something was up.
That something was his on-again, off-again girlfriend. They were kind of off-again when we started talking. But she’s good. Oh, she’s real good. She lost her job and started freaking out and guess who she turned to to get through the crisis.
Guy Two didn’t have a chance.
What pissed me off about the whole scenario was not so much that I lost either one of them. Because let’s be realistic. If either one was the right guy, then I wouldn’t be writing this right now. Truth be told, if either one of them was the right guy, then I wouldn’t be worried about the other one. But I really didn’t like how I felt used. Both guys had other agendas. It wasn’t about me. It was about filling a specific need in their lives. And when that need either wasn’t fulfilled (in the case of Guy One) or wasn’t necessary any longer (Guy Two) then Goodbye Hopeful.
Sometimes (and this has been a huge issue in the past year), I feel like I have the Mark of Cain on my forehead and it shines like a huge beacon to needy men around Manhattan. Need someone to get you through the long, lonely nights in a war zone? Call Hopeful! Need to work on your career? Hopeful’s good for advice. Need a beard, because you’re 33 and your friends are all wondering why they’ve never met a single one of your girlfriends? Hopeful loves the gays! Trying to come down off a coke addiction? Hopeful will put a wet compress to your head and hold you while you shake.
Jesus Christ. What is wrong with me?
My mom attributes it to the fact that I curse. She says guys are “old-fashioned” when it comes to cursing. I wish it was as simple as my filthy mouth, but I really don’t think my love of the word fuck is what’s attracting the needy weirdoes.
I think my big mistake in all this is that I genuinely care. When Guy One was worried about his daughter (oh, yeah, he’s a single dad to boot), I assured him that he was doing a great job raising her and that she had amazing people around her so he shouldn’t beat himself up for not being able to provide her with the white-picket-fence dream. When Guy Two was getting shot at, I made a point of checking in with him and of making him check in with me, so he knew somebody wanted to make sure that the only hole he should be concerned about was the huge asshole he was turning out to be.
In the last post, I talked about how all girls want is the asshole, the guy they can’t have, but I’m realizing this week that guys are the same way. You don’t want the nice girl. You want the bitch. The one who could care less if you got shot in the ass or if your daughter wound up on the pole.
When it comes to matters of love, is it all about the thrill of the hunt? And, once someone resigns themselves to becoming the prey, do we all just sniff the carcass and walk on to fresh meat?

You Can’t Always Want What You Get

2006-10-07T15:35:00.000-07:00

There are two men in my life right now. That alone is worth posting about, but the two men pose a very interesting dilemma.
These two guys, they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Guy One is sweet and nice and wants to be good at me. He calls me to tell me that he’s going to be in the middle of nowhere and may not be able to call, but he’s going to try. He doesn’t ever want me to think he’s not interested. He wants to take me on nice dates and have fun and just be my boyfriend. He’s got a great job and a great life and he’s looking for a great girl to complete the circle.
Guy Two has no interest in commitment. He just wants to do nasty things to me in bed.
Guess which one I’m hoping calls tonight?
I’m hoping that my visceral reaction to Guy Two is just a reaction to AJ’s only wanting to snuggle and that I’m not completely screwed up. Don’t worry if you’re snickering. I’m not really buying it either.
Guy Two doesn’t call on a regular basis. He hardly calls at all. He’s a big text-message and email fan. Part of it is the hours that we work, but the bigger part is he doesn’t want to get too close.
Guy Two knows just how to be sweet enough to keep me intrigued. He asked me to email him a picture (oh, to really blow a hole in my “not completely screwed up” theory, Guy Two is currently across the world, reporting from a war zone. Did I mention Guy Two and I work together? I rule!). He makes sure to deal with my neurosis and calls when he leaves on life-endangering missions and every time he lands after getting on a plane. He spends 12-14 hours a day talking with me.
But Guy Two isn’t looking for a girlfriend. Guy Two is looking for Osama.
Why is it that the biggest turn-off to me is a guy who’s interested? There is nothing that peaks my interest more in knowing that I might not be able to get what I want. If I have to fight for your interest, if I have to pull out all my tricks to keep you entertained, then you’re the one that I want.
Just want me to be me? Chances are we aren’t going to make it to the fourth date. The attention’s fun for a while, but I’m going to get bored faster than a hummingbird with ADD.
For all I preach about how all I want is a nice guy to be good to me, I really don’t. I want an asshole. I want an asshole so badly I can taste it. I want somebody who won’t call when they say they will, somebody who won’t commit, somebody who lives in a place, physically and emotionally, that is completely inaccessible. And then I want to bitch to all my friends that I’m not being treated fairly and why can’t I find a nice guy? But I had the nice guy. Had him in the palm of my hand. I didn’t want him. There was an asshole around and he distracted me like something shiny.
I know I’m not the only one out there. I know a couple, friends of friends, where the girl is the sweetest, cutest person I know and the guy she’s been dating for a year and a half doesn’t want to admit he’s in a relationship because he’s too full of himself to realize he’s never going to do better. In fact, he should be thanking his favorite deity every day that he got somebody this good. But he treats her like shit and she chases him around like a puppy dog and that’s how their relationship works. I always look at the two of them and say, “Why won’t she dump his sorry ass? She’s so perfect, she can do much better.” And then I go lust after whatever asshole isn’t interested in me at the moment.
What is it that’s so attractive about the asshole? I wish I knew. Usually, they’re good-looking and they know it. They just exude confidence. They are charismatic to a fault. They can make you feel like the most important person in the room when you’re around them and, when they take it away, it’s like coming down off a high. You spend the rest of the next few years trying to get back to that original high. The one that made you feel like you were queen of the world.
Nice guy? Well, he’s not so great-looking. He’s cute, but he’s never the drop-dead-gorgeous that asshole is. He’s usually smarter than asshole, but not as charismatic. And he definitely lacks the confidence asshole’s got. He walks around wondering how in the hell he got so lucky with a girl who can clearly do better.
It doesn’t take much time for that attitude to pervade the relationship. Pretty soon, you’re both wondering how the hell he got so lucky. Maybe it’s time you try to find that something better. And so you blithely go chasing after asshole, heart on a platter, free for the stomping.

Top 20

2006-09-30T07:27:00.000-07:00

Normally, I wake up a little late on Saturdays, so while VH1 is running their top 20 videos, I’m watching last week’s episode of Bill Maher, but today I woke up early and was finished with my weekly ritual just in time for the 20th video.
Which was Paris Hilton’s latest masterpiece.
Seriously, why does this bimbo have a career? Is it really that it only takes money to establish yourself as a musician of note these days?
Her song is something about being hot and stupid (I don’t know if those are actually the lyrics, but all I heard out of her mouth was, “I’m so hot you don’t care that I have a touch of the Downs.”) But the video was what really pissed me off.
It was soft-core kiddie porn.
Basically, the premise of the video is “Paris Hilton is Hot.” But there’s also the subtext “Paris Hilton is Altruistic” (although she doesn’t know that—because she would never in a million years know what Altruistic is. She’d wonder if Al Truistic was the sexy tomboy-next-door character she was supposed to be playing in her video. But her name is Paris. So that can’t be right.)
For those of you who haven’t seen it (you’ll be the ones without the strong desire to burn your retinas right now), a 14-year-old boy has a crush on Paris Hilton. He’s a loser (you know because there’s a big graphic that reads, “Sometimes the dreamer is a loser.” That doesn’t even make sense!) and gets beat on constantly by the other cool kids in his high school who look old enough to buy beer with their own IDs. His only escape is Paris Hilton, who is shown rubbing up on him, rubbing up on the cheerleaders in his school, gyrating on a desk in what I’m guessing was an homage to “I’m Hot for Teacher.” It’s basically her sex video with better lighting and a tweed vest. In the end, the dorky 14-year-old gets Paris Hilton for real (apparently, all you have to do is show up at her door and ask) and the popular boy in high school gets his lunch dumped on him just like he dumped the dork’s lunch on said dork earlier in the video. Well played, Karma. Well played.
But what really got me was the fact that this was on the Top 20 countdown. Top 20. That means that out of all the videos out there in the entire world this was one of the best. Let me say that again. Out of all the videos out there in the entire world, Paris Hilton’s “I’m Hot and Stupid” (or whatever the hell it was really called) was one of the 20 best. In the world.
What the hell has happened to taste in this country? The only reasonable (and I use that word loosely) explanation I can come up with is that, much like senior citizens are the only ones who vote in local elections and we wind up with low property taxes and shitty schools, the only people who are voting in these surveys are 14-year-old losers who look at that video and think, “I’m a loser! Maybe that can be ME one day!” and vote with the pre-pubescent little head instead of the big one.
Where are the music geeks? Where are the people who spend their lunch periods getting hard-ons over Lou Reed and are struggling to get their cover bands to learn “The White Album” in time for the high school talent show? I knew these people in high school. They were the ones I made out with in the back of the chorus room. Do they not exist any more? Did they fade out in the GenX/GenY crossover? Are we now destined to have a lot of little people who revel in the term “Tweens” determine our musical and cultural landscape?
All I know is I am NOT wearing legwarmers.

Always The Last to Know

2006-09-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

AJ and I broke up. There were just too many things wrong. Namely that, the last night we went out, he spent the entire night following his friend Joe around and leaving me in an awkward position. It’s never fun when you’re out with your boyfriend for the night and guys are hitting on you because they have no idea you’re with somebody. But whatever, let bygones be bygones and I wish those two crazy kids all the best, just as soon as they come out of that glass closet.
So, two weeks later, Jules and I are shooting the shit at my kitchen table when the subject of AJ comes up. We’re talking for a little bit when, all of a sudden, she asks me, “Did you ever think maybe he was gay?”
I was kind of surprised by the question. “Yeah, the thought crossed my mind. Especially after the shaved chest thing. Why?”
“Well, don’t get upset, but me and Sculls were talking with Tuz” (a friend of theirs that I don’t know very well but absolutely adore. How can you not love somebody that regularly just slips into a Cartman from South Park voice?) “and I told them the background you just told me and they both were like ‘GAY!’”
“Really? Why?”
“Well, basically, they both couldn’t understand how a 33-year-old guy, hell a guy of any age, wouldn’t want to sleep with you. You’re 25. Every guy wants to sleep with a 25-year-old. And you’re beautiful and smart and funny. They just didn’t get it.”
“That always bothered me. But I thought maybe he just had a lot of guilt over it. I didn’t want to push the issue too much. But it really bothered me that, after 4 months, he just didn’t seem interested. That and the shaved chest thing. That really bothered me, too.”
“That did it for Tuz. He went to Key West. He shaved his chest for Key West. She thought that was totally gay.”
“Who knows? But to quote your own lyrics at you, his problems, they ain’t mine.”
Later on, though, I got to thinking about the whole situation again, wondering how the hell I was the last to know that my boyfriend was really wishing for a boyfriend and not a girlfriend under the Christmas tree. The warning signs were there: good dresser, kind of fussy, got a facial, had no interest in me sexually but was willing to spend a Saturday afternoon in SoHo looking for suits. It’s just that these damn Metrosexuals keep everybody confused. Nowadays, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It used to be that hair products and face moisturizers were for the gays. Now everybody’s coiffed and properly moisturized. How the hell are we supposed to tell the difference?
The more I thought about it, though, the sadder the story got. AJ’s 33. His father’s a former priest; his mother’s a former nun. His family is very Catholic. At 33, it doesn’t even seem like he’s come to terms with the fact that he might be gay. And even if he did, would he ever be able to come out of the closet? With a family like that, it doesn’t seem very likely. His grandmother cried for a week when his dad left the priesthood. Imagine what she would do if she found out her grandson was gay. It’s the kind of reaction that might force you to deny your true orientation for a very long time.
And that’s when I realized I might not be the last one to know this time.

Not ANOTHER one.

2006-09-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

At first, AJ just seemed really respectful. We had gone home together several times and kissed and cuddled, but he always wanted to wait.
“For a certain level of intimacy,” he always said. I thought it was endearing. And it made me feel safer. I wasn’t with somebody who was just looking for a chick to bang. This was a relationship. He wanted it to mean something. And that was refreshing. So I went along with it.
For four months.
The questions started forming in my head when we went to a wedding, stayed in a beautiful hotel room all night, and all I got was a cuddle and another $34.50 on my Visa courtesy of Victoria’s Secret. Why didn’t he want to have sex with me? What the hell was he waiting for? We talked, we emailed, we saw each other at least twice a week. Why weren’t we getting to that level of intimacy he was looking for?
I asked him. I got a very vague answer that I didn’t really understand. And, by his tone of voice, I could tell he wasn’t interested in talking about it. I left it alone. We were having a nice weekend, I didn’t want to push the envelope.
I thought, after coming back from a very long vacation that I had planned before I met him, that he would be bursting, that he would barely be able to wait to get me in bed. I mean, it was four months. I knew I couldn’t wait.
Instead, he wanted to go to a “dear, dear friend’s birthday party” (already my gay-dar was starting to hum in the back of my head … who’s got dear friends? Victorian-era fictional heroines, that’s who. Real men don’t have dear friends. And was the second dear really necessary?). Not exactly the homecoming reunion that I was hoping for, but I decided to just roll with it.
When we got to the party, he introduced me by my first name. No “This is my girlfriend, Hopeful.” Just “This is Hopeful.” I thought it was odd, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it.
Then, while he was in the bathroom, his “dear friend” asked me, “So, how do you know AJ?”
“I’m his girlfriend.” I said.
“Oh, isn’t that cute?” she responded. Normally, that would sound bitchy or catty, but it didn’t. It sounded slightly condescending, but it a way that made the gay-dar increase it’s buzz. She said it the way you might say it to an 8-year-old who has a crush on somebody four times her age. You want to indulge her because you think it’s just so cute, even though you know, unless the tale takes some horribly “Thornbirds” twist, you’re never going to get the invite to their wedding.
We went home together that night and crawled into bed. Like every other day. Except, this time, when he pulled me in to spoon me into our very non-sexual cuddle, I felt something different.
“Did you shave your back?” I said, pulling myself away from the chest stubble.
“Yeah, last week.”
I could barely hear my own words over the buzz. “Why?” I asked. “Why would you shave your chest?”
“I was heading down to Key West and I did it for aesthetic reasons,” he’s getting hedgy again. Meanwhile, all I was thinking was “aesthetic reasons”? Was he taking his SATs next week? Who uses words like that when you’re in bed with a 25 year old in a tiny, tiny negligee? You shouldn’t be able to use words period in that situation, never mind multiple-syllabic ones.
And then there was the whole Key West thing. I’m pretty sure Ernest Hemmingway was the last straight man to head down to the Keys by himself. AJ and his boys went down for a bachelor party that was starting to sound more and more like a circle jerk.
All I kept thinking was, “Not another one.” This one was trickier, because he wasn’t a theater director who, a full year after we broke up, was sending me pictures of himself in a tiara (lord, how I wish I was kidding), but there was definitely something familiar about this situation.
AJ interrupted my thoughts. “Hey, wanna go shopping with me Saturday afternoon?”
The buzzing in my head kept me up all night.

Finally

2006-06-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

After 10 years of dating the wrong guy, I think I finally got it right.
AJ is smart. He doesn’t have a raging drug problem, or commitment issues (commitment issues being fear of commitment or being such a fan of commitment that he’s committed to me and someone else all at the same time). He has a job (I know because he introduced me to his boss on date 3). He lives by himself (I know because I’m a big ho and went home with him on date 4). He takes me on grown-up dates (i.e. dates that don’t involve a suggested donation) and we can spend hours together without running out of things to say.
So why am I scared shitless?
Part of it is because I’m just plain crazy. I don’t mean to be, it just kinda happened. What with Hot Stove playing games with my head for five years and the requisite daddy issues, I’m that girl, the one that eventually writes a book and winds up on Oprah. So I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. The fact that there is no other shoe, that this is a guy who will always return a call, will show up 15 minutes early for me so that I’m not waiting, will always open the door, pull out the chair, make sure I have everything I need, none of this has sunk in. It doesn’t feel real for me at all.
The other part of it is that it does feel so real. This is the first time I can actually picture being in a normal relationship with somebody. This is a relationship that wouldn’t involve rehab or other girlfriends or wives or a pathetic attempt to get a GED. It was so easy before. If the relationship failed, it was so clearly not my fault. I mean, how can you blame clean, sober, not-otherwise-committed me when the relationship turned to shit? It wasn’t me, the drug addict did it. It’s a surprisingly convenient excuse.
And now, that excuse is gone. He’s not a drug addict. He’s a nice boy who wants a nice girl to look after and go adventuring with (and I’ve managed to fool him that I am that nice girl, so shhh). I kept saying over the past 10 years that I wanted a nice boy, one that wouldn’t play games with my head and would call when he said he would. Now I have one. And I keep thinking, “Damaged goods, they weren’t so bad.”
I date a nice guy that’s not totally screwed up and if it fails, it might be because I did something wrong. I’ve always been able to walk away from relationships totally blameless (I didn’t make him gay after all … blame his mother). This is one where I might not be able to get away without a scratch.
Although, really, with all the scars I have, a scratch might not be such a bad thing.

Date on Display

2006-06-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

Whenever you start dating somebody, it’s only a matter of time before you have to go on display. They bring you around all their friends. You try to act like you don’t notice that said friends are whispering about you and composing emails about you in their heads. You try to put your best self forward while at the same time try to act like it’s not an act, that you are just naturally this brilliant, smart, witty, in a word, perfect.
It’s one of the most stressful nights in a new relationship. And it’s the precursor to meeting the parents. It’s like the dress rehearsal to the real event. And it usually happens a little further into the relationship.
Which is why I was caught completely unprepared when I met AJ for drinks on our second date and found 12 of his closest friends sitting at the bar.
It didn’t start out as 12. It started out as two. Two I could deal with. The girl there was nice and low-key and chatty and the guy was silent, but smiley. Two I could deal with.
And then incredibly proper pregnant lady walked in the door.
This was the one who was going to be the harshest judge. I could tell. She already was looking at me with disdain. (She is also, by the way, the one who gave nice, chatty first-lady shit about not getting her wedding thank-yous out fast enough later on).
As the night wore on, more people kept showing up. And I noticed two things: 1) I was at least 8 years younger than anybody there and 2) Everybody was married or engaged… except for the couple who was two seconds away from getting engaged … and me, on my second date.
We left the bar and separated temporarily. I was supposed to go to the movies with E and told AJ I’d meet up with him later. Apparently, though, everybody had the same plan E and I did and every movie for hours within reasonable distance was sold out. So we met up with them again, this time at dinner.
I sat down across from nice chatty lady and incredibly bubbly lady (who had come later and decided she was going to be my new best friend for the night … when we left, I hugged her and thanked her … twice). Suddenly, I realized there was somebody new at the table. I stood up to introduce myself, trying to put my best, friendliest face forward. Charming and witty and friendly and perfect.
I went to sit back down, just at the moment that my chair decided the fight between gravity and the weight of my purse was just too much. The chair fell backwards on the floor with a loud clatter. I fell on my ass.
I could hear incredibly proper pregnant lady composing her email from all the way down the table.

Once a Man-Whore…

2006-05-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the gajillion HBO channels I have now, I was watching “The Wedding Date” the other night and, I have to say, that movie really pissed me off. And not just because Dermott Mulrooney was in it, a man more fit to clean out your septic tank than ever show up on the big screen. The premise of the whole picture just made me sick.
For those of you who’ve never watched it, here’s the spoiler that you totally couldn’t get from, say, watching the opening sequence: woman wants to piss off her ex-fiance so she hires a male hooker. Because nothing makes you seem less pathetic than hiring a male hooker. I bet her fiancé was thinking, “Can’t wait to run back to that and get me some STDs.”
As always happens in real life, hooker falls in love with woman, has sex for free as a symbol of his love (proving that not only is he a hooker but, by failing to get payment for the ONE service he provides, he’s also not a very good hooker), they fight (although there really is no basis for her being emotionally scarred by him since they’ve known each other for all of two minutes AND he’s a paid hooker), they make up, they live happily ever after. He quits the business, not a moment too soon based on the one visible transaction in the movie.
Oh yeah. And he’s an English Lit major from Brown. He’s an Ivy League hooker.
What makes me so mad about this movie (aside from Dermott Mulrooney) is that it plays off of that old dream that every girl has: be enough to turn the man-whore (this time literally) into the one-woman type. You know where this happens? Apparently this movie and nowhere else. When was the last time any of you dated a guy who slept with everything in a skirt and it worked out? All of a sudden Mr. Can’t-Get-Enough becomes Mr. Can’t-Get-Enough-Of-One-Woman? Yeah, that never happens. And while it’s flattering to think that you too could be the one to make a male hooker leave his chosen profession, would you really want a male hooker? Isn’t that a little, oh I don’t know, awkward?
“How did you two meet?”
“Oh, I paid him to fall in love with me. It’s really been working out for the two of us.”
And then there’s the issue of all the creepy-crawlies you can get from having sex with a stranger that makes his living by having sex with strangers (although based on the transaction we witness in the movie, this clearly is not his calling in life since he forgets to charge). In this day and age, how the hell is that romantic? I just don’t understand how this was a romantic comedy. Tragedy, I get, that the fact that a woman is so pathetic and suffering from such low self-esteem that she has to buy herself a hooker to make herself comfortable facing her family and friends. That and Dermott Mulrooney acting, that makes is a tragedy as well.

Partying Like it’s 1998

2006-03-18T11:56:00.000-08:00

My freshman year of high school, I came between two best friends.
It was an inadvertent action. I was very naïve and had no idea whatsoever that either of them, let alone both of them, were interested in me. I was 14. I didn’t really see myself in any kind of sexual capacity and I couldn’t imagine anybody else did either. So for the whole summer, I toyed with these two guys hearts. I talked to both of them all the time on the phone, because we were 14 and where the hell were we going to go (this was before the advent of the internet)? Occasionally, we met up at the mall, because, hey, we’re Jersey. And then, finally, one of them got the nerve to ask me out. We “went out” for a day. And then I got freaked out about the whole thing and took my yes back. I wanted to save our friendship.
Guess who barely ever talked to me again?
Once I took my yes back, the other guy decided to make his move, but by this time, I was so confused and freaked out, nothing ever came of it.
Except ….
The second guy was more aggressive and low and behold, 3 years later, we were making out in secret in whatever little corner we could find. It was bad for a number of reasons. One, I really was interested in the first guy. Had been since I was in sixth grade and now we were graduating high school. Two, one of my good friends, who I had met after freshman year, was interested in the second guy and when she found out what we were up to (which, of course, she did, because teenage girls have big mouths), she was really mad. Three, it was just trashy. We were making out in the health room, up against a poster that read “If smoking did to the outside of you what it does to the inside of you, it wouldn’t be so cool.” Come on.
I bumped into the second guy once, the summer after my freshman year of college, and then never saw him again. But thanks to these cheesy online communities, we wound up finding each other again and made plans to meet for drinks.
Second guy brings First guy with him. And we party like it’s 1998. We fall right into the same rolls. They are competing for my attention and, despite the fact that they’re best friends, and have been for nearly 12 years, they put each other down and make little digs at each other in my presence.
And what do I do? I fall into the exact same pattern I always do. I’m more attracted to First guy. I take Second guy home with me.
That Friday night, so many years later, we were still knuckle-dragging our way through gender relations. I didn’t want to tell First guy how I really felt, for fear of being embarrassed, and I was too attracted to the attention Second guy lavished on me to tell him the truth. We had not evolved much beyond our 14-year-old selves. All of which made me wonder, can we ever really have a change of heart?
When we speak of our first serious loves, we always talk about how we still love them and how we always will. We’re not IN love with them any more, we’re quick to couch, but we still hold a special place in our hearts for them that will NEVER change. But maybe change is good. Change is what prevents us from falling into the same habits. We don’t change because it’s easier not to. Change takes work and it’s scary and who the hell needs that? But not changing our hearts (and our ways and our habits) means that we’re making the same mistakes again and again. Maybe not with the same people, but if you’ve ever been told you have a type, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I know I, for one, haven’t had a change of heart in about 10 years. I’m still playing the same rolls I was playing when I was in high school. Except it’s not 1998 any more.

Quarter-Life Crisis

2006-02-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

So I’m about 4 weeks away from turning 25.
Many people instantly say, “You’re so young! You have your whole life ahead of you!” I want to shoot those people. Because 25 is your MIDDLE TWENTIES. You know what comes after that? Your late 20s. And then there’s 30.
I met up with some people from High School the other night and they’re all just starting to get their lives together. They spent years jerking around, doing whatever the hell they wanted. A lot of them bartended to make rent and just had a great time. What was I doing while they were off having a good time? Forging a career for myself. Climbing the corporate ladder. And all the while wishing that I had the balls to go and do nothing. It’s not easy to do nothing. To pack up and travel and think things will figure themselves out when you get back, which is something I’ve always wanted to do, but was always too afraid of to take the plunge. And now, I’m 25 and I feel like the window of opportunity for that is over. After 25, it’s just irresponsible. I know that things go on your permanent record after 18, but people cut you a lot of slack when you’re 22 and do something stupid and fail. At 26, people want to know why you’re still bouncing around like a kid.
I know that just about everyone who’s reading this blog is thinking, “Oh that’s ridiculous.” Quick. Name two people over 26 that are just bouncing from place to place, doing nothing with their lives, that you don’t worry about and, slightly, look down upon. You couldn’t think of one, could you?
I know it’s ridiculous to think of your life as over at 25. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I just feel like my chance to be a kid is over. And I wasted it being a grownup.

Renaissance Man

2006-02-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

When I was 18 and had just moved to the city, I met this boy named Lance. Lance and I worked together downtown and we would occasionally take the subway home together. Lance was in college studying to be a photographer and he always seemed to know interesting things about art. I kind of developed a crush on him, even though, looking back, he kind of looked like Doug, that Nickelodeon cartoon. And I think he fake-baked. His skin had an orangey glow that I didn’t notice in the throws of a barely-out-of-adolescence crush.
Finally, right before Christmas break, he got up the nerve to ask me on a date. He wanted to take me to the Met. I was still young enough to be impressed by a date that only costs the guy a suggested donation. We decided to go the first weekend we were back in the city.
The night before, my friend A came up from Ivy (where she went to school) to spend a night in the city. We were puttering around in my dorm room, getting me ready for my big date, when she brought up something I hadn’t even thought to be concerned about.
“How well do you know this guy?”
“Not that well. I mean, we work together, we spend a lot of time together, but I don’t really know him all that well. Why?”
“What if his favorite section is Arms And Armor?”
At this, we burst into giggles. “A,” I said. “Nobody’s favorite section is Arms And Armor!”
I met Lance at the 6 train at Astor Place and we went uptown. I felt so excited. I remember having these delusional ideas that this was exactly why I moved to the city instead of going to some state school with a campus. I was going on a “real” date, one that was full of culture, instead of getting drunk and hooking up with some random I met by the beer keg at a frat party. The thousands of dollars in debt that I was going to be in when I graduated all seemed worth it somehow in that one moment.
We get to the museum. He pays well below the suggested donation for each of us. We wander through the museum for a while, sit by the Temple of Dendar, and then find ourselves in Arms And Armor.
“This is my favorite section of the museum,” he says, gazing up at a suit of armor.
I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “Really?” I ask, trying to keep the smile from my voice. After all, this is a very mature date and mature people don’t laugh at their dates for no apparent reason.
“Oh yeah, I’m totally into this stuff,” Lance says.
“Really?” I ask again, proving my incredible conversational skills. I am still trying not to laugh at the ridiculous coincidence of it all.
“Yeah. In fact I have two suits of armor at home.”
“Two suits of armor like these?” I ask, gesturing to these massive steel suits. I can’t imagine where, except in a museum, you’d have room for one, let alone two. Unless you own a castle somewhere. And I was pretty sure he said he grew up in Long Island.
“Not like these. Mine are more chain mail, mesh things. I made them myself. I wear them when I go fighting.”
I’m not laughing any more. “When you go fighting?”
“Yeah, I do these Renaissance re-enactments sometimes. We go upstate in the woods and re-enact battles the way they would have been fought in the Middle Ages. They’re great. Usually, they take the whole weekend. It’s a lot of fun.”
We left the museum shortly thereafter and walked around Central Park for a little while before heading back home. I saw Lance at work, of course, but generally kept my distance. I’m just not the Maid Marian type.

For The Couple Who Has Everything

2006-02-14T15:45:00.000-08:00

I was reading CNN.com this Valentine’s Day and, in addition to the regular news, there was this blog entry from one of their correspondents on vaginal rejuvenation.
I kid you not.
Vaginal rejuvenation is when you have your vagina reconstructed. You can tighten your birth canal, change the size (and I’m assuming shape as well) of everything down there. And you can get a new hymen.
That’s right, folks. For thousands of dollars, you, too, can be a brand new virgin. Just like when you came out of your mother’s (yet-to-be-rejuvenated) womb.
The article goes on to say that a couple, married 18 years with two kids, had a new hymen installed for their wedding anniversary.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Did they just burn a big pile of cash last year? Because, seriously, if you have two kids already, who the hell do you think you’re fooling? Or is this to make up for the fact that you wouldn’t let him so much as unbutton your blouse until you said “I Do,” only for him to find out a few hours later that he wasn’t exactly going where no man has gone before?
And, men, really, is that even a gift? I know everybody wants to be somebody’s first, but when you know you’re not (as evidenced by the TWO FUCKING KIDS you guys have playing X-Box downstairs), isn’t it just a lot of pain and awkwardness for no good reason? Isn’t there a point when you’re in your 50s and you’re married, that you just don’t want to deal with that any more? Sex on a towel (just like sex in an extra-long, extra-narrow dorm-room bed) gets old really quickly. There’s nothing I’d like to particularly revisit about either one, and I’m only in my mid-twenties.
I think if you do go through with this though, you really should make an effort to have a full-on deflowering experience. Maybe you can have his mom walk in on you about three minutes in, leading to an uncomfortable moment where she stands there, mouth agape, while your husband screams “Get out of here!” voice cracking all the while, only to have to sit on the couch moments later, dressed now, hair still a mess, while his mom calls your mom and everybody gets a lecture on the importance of waiting until marriage and I hope to god she’s not pregnant and I don’t know how you raised your daughter but and my kid wasn’t the only one in that bed. Maybe your mom can haul you up by the arm and storm out and throw you in the car and start crying. I mean, if you’re going to spend all that money on a new hymen, you might as well go all out. Do it right.
And do you gift wrap it? Throw a bow down there. A few ribbons and a gift card perhaps? Although I tend to think presenting it as a gift is really misleading. “Honey, I could have bought the sexy lingerie but I opted to spend our kid’s college fund so that you could have the awkward experience I denied you by whoring around before we were married.”
Do you think Hallmark makes a card for that?

Where’d She Go?

2006-02-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve been missing for a while. I know that. So many of my friends have been yelling at me to write. So here I am with my mea culpa.
Back in November, while I was on vacation at the happiest place on earth, I got robbed. They got a lot of my good jewelry (the stuff I never wear because I’m afraid I’m going to lose it but I still wanted), my good camera (that I didn’t want to bring because I was afraid I was going to break it) and my computer.
I refuse to blog at work because I don’t want anybody tracing it back to me and firing me for doing personal stuff on company time. This may sound a little outrageous, but I actually know somebody who got fired for posting on her blog from her office computer and it’s made me a little gun shy. Also, there are very few people at the office who I feel need to know about my personal life. We’re newsies. We gossip.
The other thing, though, is that I didn’t know what to say. Being robbed was the most violating experience I’ve ever been through. It wasn’t just the stuff he took. It was that somebody I didn’t know, somebody who had nothing but malice for me, was in my apartment, my cute little space, the two rooms I had spent so much time lovingly decorating and where I had felt so safe. He had gone through my stuff, picked and chosen what he wanted. He went through my drawers, spilled my stuff all over the place, and the left. The police came and went through all my stuff all over again. They put black fingerprint powder all over everything and came up with nothing. I walked into my apartment and had to put my life back together, put things away, clean up the powder that got everywhere.
In addition to putting things together physically, I had to pull things together mentally and that’s a lot harder, because nobody can really help you with that. I cried the entire first day I was in the house. I thought I had pulled myself together a little bit, although I never slept more than a few hours at a time that whole week. Then, the Saturday after I came home, I was in the shower when I heard what sounded like loud noises on the roof. The police told me that they think the robber came in through the roof. I jumped out of the shower and ran to see if there was somebody else breaking in. It was then, when I was dripping wet in a towel with shampoo in my hair in my hallway, that I realized I really needed to get a grip. Because, seriously, what the hell was I going to do to fight a robber?
It’s been very, very hard. I still jump at loud noises and I still feel sometimes like I’m a sitting duck. But what are you going to do? I finally bought a new computer and now, I’m finally starting to write again. It’s all part of putting things back in the drawers they belong in.

Hot Stove Confidential

2005-10-30T13:14:00.000-08:00

I thought I had never seen the movie “LA Confidential.” I hadn’t seen it for so long and I had just gotten used to people telling me that I needed to see it, that I forgot I had seen it. Not seeing “LA Confidential” had become a bad habit. So when I joined Netflix, I put it in my queue right away. After all, I hadn’t seen it and it was supposed to be such a great movie. Everybody says so. I really should get on that.
When the movie came and I popped it in, though, I thought the story seemed familiar. I knew this. Kevin Spacey, fame-loving cop that got off on the notoriety. The young rookie. The crooked commissioner. It all seemed vaguely familiar. “Maybe I’ve just watched the beginning,” I thought. “I don’t really remember watching the whole thing. Maybe just this part.”
About two-thirds of the way through, I realized I had seen the entire movie. I remembered exactly how it ended. It took me a little while, but I finally got the whole picture.
That’s how it was with the Stove. The Stove showed up at my house one Friday night. We went out for drinks and he told me everything that I had wanted to hear when I was 19. Being in love with him was a habit and his confession made me forget that I had seen this movie before. I popped it in eagerly. But something just wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It felt like I had already seen this movie. “Maybe I’ve just seen the beginning,” I thought to myself. “I’ve never seen the end before. I should really see the end.”
Soon enough, though, I realized I had seen this movie before. I knew the whole story after all. By heart. I had just gotten so used to feeling like I never got a chance to see the whole movie that I had forgotten that I had seen the credits and everything. I had, in fact, seen every last scene.
I saw the honeymoon scene, where we couldn’t get enough of each other and everything felt so new and exciting and I never felt more beautiful and sexy and intelligent. I had seen the scene where he doesn’t return my call right away. I had seen the scene where he calls with a really good excuse.
I had watched the scene where he back-peddles and pulls away and tells me how he confused he is more than once. And I had seen the scene where I call repeatedly, pissed and confused, not getting any response as our male love interest disappears to parts unknown many times.
I had seen enough of the scene where our young ingénue, who had so recently felt so beautiful and sexy and intelligent, sits in her apartment, alone, chain-smoking and drinking cheap red wine, feeling ugly and stupid and unloved and wondering why it was that he always leaves her in the end as the credits roll over Sheryl Crow’s “Maybe Angels.”
The Return of the Stove was like “LA Confidential.” I had momentarily forgotten that I had seen this flick before. I got excited when it showed up at my house and I couldn’t wait to press play, see what happened. It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that I had seen this movie before. And it suddenly dawned on me how much I didn’t like the ending.

History Calling

2005-09-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

“Listen, when you’re little and you don’t know better, you go up to a hot stove and you touch it and you get burned. Because you don’t know that a hot stove will burn you. But then you learn. And you don’t touch the hot stove anymore.” Jules said. “So don’t touch the hot stove again.”
The Stove in question was a bad idea from the start. He was a going-nowhere addict that hadn’t graduated from any of the three institutions he had gone two in the past six years.
Of course, I fell in love with him.
From the time I was 19 to the time I was 23, the only person I was really interested in was the stove. I dated other people. I slept with other people. But it always came back to him. Even after not talking to him for over a year once, seeing him ignited all the old feelings again. But when he didn’t return my calls the last time, I decided enough was enough and put actual energy into getting over him and it actually worked. I did a damned fine job, in fact. Sure, I thought about him now and then, when something jogged a specific memory, but those times were few and far between and the feelings had changed. I thought about him with nostalgia now, not lust.
Nearly two years after the last time I saw him, which was also the last time I spoke to him, I was having a couple of late-Saturday-afternoon drinks with a few friends when my cell phone rang an unfamiliar number with a 718 area code. I picked it up, wondering which one of my Staten Island family members got a hold of my cell number.
“Hello?”
“L?”
“Yes?”
“It’s the Stove.”
“Oh my god.”
“I live in Brooklyn now.”
“Oh my god.” Part of the whole getting over him process was that he lived on another coast. An essential part. A key part. Basically, what my whole process was based on. I walked out of the bar.
We chatted for a few minutes then I got off the phone (didn’t want to be ruder than I already had been). Our bar party broke up shortly thereafter and I immediately got J on the phone.
“The Stove called. He lives in Brooklyn now.”
J snickered.
More history: J was the reason I met the Stove in the first place. They were in film school together. We met at a film student party. J loves me. She loves the Stove.
She hates the two of us together.
“I love you. I love the Stove. I just don’t love you and the Stove together,” J was saying. “Besides, he’s probably bald by now.”
A just called me right out. “So, are you going to see him?”
“Probably.”
“So … Definitely,” A said, laughing.
“Ummm … yeah.”
There are people in your life that you know are a bad idea from the start, but you can’t help being attracted to them. No matter how toxic the relationship, how stupid you feel when he pulls the same shit he’s been pulling from the beginning, there’s something that pulls you in. What is that? What is that masochistic tendency that lives inside so many of us that they wrote a best-selling book about it?
When you find out what it is, drop me a line so I know just exactly what it is that’s wondering why he hasn’t called me back yet.

In Which I Date A Mythical Creature

2005-09-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, in an act of stupidity, I went on a date with a man who called himself Ogre.
Wish I was kidding.
Ogre was a friend of my friend Jules’ boyfriend. Jules’ boyfriend is great. I thought to myself, “Wasn’t there something about birds and feathers and flocking? He should be a great guy, too.”
That, it seems, is another fairy tale.
Ogre was a before picture and it was going to take a Bob Villa-like effort to make him into an after. I didn’t realize this at the time. I was still going on that whole birds, feathers, flocking mentality. It didn’t take me long to realize he acted, most of the time, like a beast rather than a man. He had been a bachelor for so long that he did all the nasty bachelor things that PG movies have been immortalizing for years. Ate borderline rancid food straight from the container, standing in front of the fridge. Burped, farted, picked whenever he felt the urge. Plus, life to him was the part you had to put up with between buzzes. He drank. Excessively. And he wasn’t always a fun drunk.
The last straw was when I met the other friends. The ones that he kept hidden for a while until he felt a little more secure in the relationship. He saved Pete for last.
Pete was an older guy, a mentor, if you will. That is, a mentor in the sense that if you wanted your life to turn out really, really badly. Like highlight of your life was the time you made a “guest” appearance shirtless on “Cops” badly. Pete thought he was the life of the party, though, and the more he drank, the more he wanted to reminisce about the good old days.
“Lemme tell you a funny story,” Pete says to me and my friend E, taking a big gulp of what smells like diesel fuel. “Lemme tell you a funny story about the last time I saw this guy here,” clapping Ogre’s friend Bear (so named because he’s big and hairy) on the back. Bear is actually the only friend of Ogre’s that I actually like. Although the fact that I met him at all is something of an oddity because, ever since he got married, his wife doesn’t let him play with his old friends any more.
Bear’s wife is a very smart woman.
Pete launches into his story. “So this one time, I walk into the strip club and there’s this guy there. This big black guy that I used to do time with.”
“Did time in the strip club with?” I ask hopefully. I cross my fingers under the table. Please let it be the strip club. Please let it be the strip club.
“Nah. We did time upstate together. Jail time.” Oh Jesus.
Pete continues, “So, anyway, I went up to him and called him a Nigger. And he was all angry about it and shit.” Can’t imagine why. “I didn’t mean it bad or anything. Like, my friend. They call each other that all the time I didn’t see what the big deal was or anything. So anyway, he wants to fight me. He gets his other big friend with him and they’re starting to come at me, so I grab Bear, so it’s even. But these guys are big. Usually, I have a gun on me, but for some reason, I left it in the glove compartment in my car that night. And the car was in the parking lot. Luckily, the hooker with the drugs showed up just then, so we just grabbed the drugs, jumped in the car and took off.”
I am gripping the table, white-knuckled at this point. I cannot believe that I’m sitting across the table from this guy. I am mortified that I brought my friend E into this situation and I can’t help but think, “I am a professional who went to school and busted her ass to get a great job. What the hell am I doing sitting across the table from a racist ex-con who’s drinking himself into an early grave?”
E interrupts my thoughts. “Which part of that story was funny?” she whispers “‘Cause I think we really should laugh. I don’t want to get shot.”
“I have no idea.” I turn to Bear. “What part of that story was funny?”
“It wasn’t funny at all. It was the scariest moment of my life. I thought I was going to die.”
Pete has now finished his drink and has returned to us from memory lane once more. “You know,” he says, looking at me. “You, you’re really uptight.” He turns his attention to E. “But you, you’re kinda cute. You know, I’d rape you if I wasn’t facing 10-20.”
E stands up. “I gotta go,” she says.
That was the last weekend Ogre and I ever spent with each other.

The Best Friend I Never Met

2005-09-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

V is a friend of mine that I had never actually met. We worked together in different branches of the same company and we developed a friendship outside of work somehow. So, eventually and inevitably, one day, he comes up to visit.
“Wow! This is so weird,” he says shortly after I pick him up from the bus station. “You’ve always been the best friend I’ve never met. And now, I’m meeting you!”
We have a great day, touring the city, wandering miles through Central Park alone. We go to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants and then go back to my apartment to wait for a friend of mine to come into the city so we can hit up the New York City night life.
We crash. All that walking and “fresh” air just tuckered us out. “How tired are you?” I ask him, lifting my head off my hand but barely opening my eyes.
“I feel how you look right now,” he says. Doesn’t even bother opening his eyes. I call my friend and explain ourselves into a night on the couch in front of the tv.
And then, the inevitable happens.
“For hours, M, HOURS,” I whisper into the phone while he’s in the shower.
“Yeah. ‘Cause nobody saw that coming at all,” M says sleepily. “But seriously, man, congratulations.”
We spend the rest of the day being that cute New York couple. We go to brunch. We walk through SoHo, window shopping. We meet M for coffee and cream puffs. We stop in a store for a second and, while he’s off looking at something, M and I gossip.
“So?”
“He’s cute. And really funny. I like him. Good job.”
“He is cute,” I say as he starts walking back towards me.
We leave M and start walking home. “So, have a good weekend?” I ask.
“Had a great weekend!” He smiles and takes my hand.
“So, think you’ll come back?”
“Definitely. Think you’re coming to see me soon?”
“Sure.” He squeezes my hand tighter. I am deliriously happy.

“You ever see that ‘Sex And The City’ episode from the first season, when Miranda sees Scooter with a new girlfriend and she calls him up and says she wants to see him and he breaks up with the new girl immediately and the new girl says, ‘You’re breaking up with me while you’re still inside me?’”
“Yeah,” M says.
“At least he had the decency to pull out first.”
“NO!”
“Oh yes.”
We’re lying in bed together when all of a sudden, my dear, sweet friend V (who has made guest appearances on this blog before) turns into that most dreaded of creatures: a “guy.”
We went from planning trips back and forth to well, we’ll see, this might not fit into our regular lives, blah, blah, blah.
Do you hear the record scratch in your head? Because I did. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom on the pretext of taking my contacts out. “You are an idiot for buying into this,” I told my reflection.
I left the bathroom and went to my kitchen sink, where I lit up. Normally, I have strict rules about smoking in the house, but I figured tonight was the night to break the rules. I was furious.
By this time, V is sitting on the couch, getting the idea that he’s no longer welcome in my bed. I figure I have nothing to lose, so I ask, “Why did you come up here this weekend?” I get this long-winded diatribe with percentages and figures and references to a friend of his from his home town, but I feel no closer to an actual answer.
Then he starts in on how he hasn’t been in a relationship since he broke up with his girlfriend five (five!) years ago and he can’t maintain an infatuation with anybody so he doesn’t want to casually date. And so on and so forth.
“Dude! Let yourself off the hook!” I finally interject. I’m getting sick of listening to this, honestly, because I’m starting to wonder how genuine this whole rant is and, no matter how honest it is, it still doesn’t take away my feeling that he just came up here to try to get laid.
“What?”
“Let yourself off the hook. Look at the shades of grey. So you can’t maintain an infatuation with somebody. That’s creepy, anyway, somebody who is just infatuated with people, rather than developing a relationship with them based on more than that. Stay with her because she makes you laugh or because she cares about you. Don’t get in your own way.”
We talked about that for a while longer. I try to understand where he’s coming from, but I just can’t wrap my head around the whole been burned once never try again mentality. Who hasn’t been burned? If you’re in your 20s and you’ve never been burned, I feel like you’ve done something wrong. It means you’ve never put yourself out there emotionally and I honestly can’t imagine anything more sad then being that emotionally closed off from the world.
After a while, he takes my hand. “You are a very smart person,” he says.
“I’m a very sleepy person,” I said. “Listen, you can watch tv or read out here. The light and noise really won’t bother me. I just have to get some sleep before I have to pull an overnight.”
“Actually, I’d like to go to bed with you.” Knock me over with a feather. Weren’t we just talking about how he was going to be shy-away-from-intimacy guy? I don’t know why, but I felt oddly compelled to let him. I think a lot of that was I wanted to pretend that what had just happened wasn’t as bad as it really was and it would be easier to pretend if he was sharing a bed with me.
We talked and laughed like we always had and I couldn’t help but feel sad and angry all over again. This is what a good relationship was supposed to be, somebody you wanted to share a bed and a laugh with. Very rarely do the two come together. “Why did you have to go and turn into a guy?” I said, hitting him in the stomach.
“What do you mean?”
“You went and turned into a guy when we were really good friends and now we’re not going to be friends any more. It’s going to be awkward because you’ll never stop being a guy now.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh, it’s true. You’ll call once or twice, there’ll be a few awkward emails, and then, that’ll be it. Next thing you know, it’ll be two years down the road and something will jog my memory and I’ll call you. Of course, without me, your life will take a huge downward spiral and you’ll be a raging alcoholic or something like that, and it’ll just be sad.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I can’t help that you will eventually fall to pieces without me,” I said. “But don’t worry. My fiancé and I will totally get you into a great rehab.”
“Nice.” He swats me playfully. “Thank you for that.”
“No problem.” I roll over on my side and prepare to go to sleep
“Any other prophecies?” V asks as he rolls up behind me and wraps me in his arms. I wish to myself that this didn’t feel so nice.
“Nope. The oracle is going to sleep,” I answer. “Just one last thing: it would be a real shame to miss out on something great just because you’re afraid.”

City Mouse In The Country

2005-08-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

Jules called me last Friday.
“What are you doing next weekend?”
“I might have to work, but if I don’t, nothing. Why?”
“We’re going camping. You should come.”
Huh. Here’s the thing about me. I have NEVER gone camping. I don’t go anywhere that I can’t wear heels. But I’ve been thinking that I need to make some major changes in my life. So maybe it’s time to try something new.
“Sure. If l don’t have to work, I’ll come. But I don’t have camping stuff. I’m not really a nature girl.”
“Don’t worry about it. We got you. Do you have a sleeping bag?”
“I DO! From sleepovers in middle school.”
“Then you’re fine. Bring that. We’ve got everything else. It’ll be fun. Just come.”
So Friday morning, I packed myself up, grabbed my sleeping bag and went to work. Jules and her boyfriend picked me up after work and we set off to the wilderness.
First stop: Jules’ mom’s house to pick up some more stuff, including her older brother. He looked at my feet. “Are you wearing heels?”
Shit. I had never taken off my heels from work. I had shed the blazer and was running around in a t-shirt and jeans but I had forgotten to replace my heels with the sneakers I bought my freshman year of college and that still look new, that’s how infrequently I wear them. I went back to the car and changed my shoes. I felt short. I’m used to seeing the world about two inches higher. I felt like Camping Barbie, like my feet should be permanently molded into that high-heel shape so when you wear sneakers, you look stupid.
“Hey, look, it’s Camping Lindsay!” Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who had that thought.
We packed up the cars and set off. It took us less than two minutes to get going the wrong way. We’re all city people. We’re not so good with streets that aren’t numbered.
We find ourselves driving through pouring rain. This is not looking good. It’s getting so bad that visibility is starting to not be so great. The other car we’re caravanning with is thinking maybe we should pull over and let the storm pass. “It’s clear over there,” Sculls, Jules’ boyfriend, says, pointing to the left. “Too bad we’re driving over this way,” he says, pointing to the right of the car, where the clouds are black and streaming down to the ground. I don’t know much about nature, but I do know this: when you see clouds that touch the horizon, it’s pouring. I’m starting to wonder why I thought I needed to try something new.
We get to the camp ground in a light drizzle that stopped by the time we finished with registration. They hand us contracts to sign. The contracts basically sign away our lives. “We’ve got one more thing for you all to sign,” the 15-year-old charged with our safety told us.
“Five bucks says we have to sign it in blood,” I said.
Contracts and lives all signed away, we head up to our campsites. They’re on top of a hill. We have to haul all our stuff up and down. It’s just like the city. Our campsite’s a walkup.
We get ourselves set up and I get to see what camping is really about: drinking. We drank a case between four of us by the time the other people in our group got off work and got up here. By this time, it was dark. Setting up tents in the dark, not as easy as setting up tents while it’s light out, but we got the job done. To celebrate: more drinking.
We drink so much that we forget to be good campers. We just fall asleep. We wake up in the morning when it starts pouring on all of our tents. We wait for the rain to stop (a fierce but quick moving storm that’s over in 45 minutes) before we venture outside and realize just how citified we are.
The night before we put a tarp up just in case of bad weather. We strung it up carefully and put a poll in the middle so that even the tallest among us could walk under it. And it worked. The ground under the tarp was dry as a bone.
Unfortunately, nothing was actually under the tarp. Everything we left out at night, the food, the clothes, the napkins, even the damn matches, was on a picnic table right next to the tarp. And everything was soaked. We’re idiots.
We spent the rest of the morning trying to salvage things and throwing out the really damaged stuff. By that time, it was time to go rafting. I’ve never been rafting before. I was told I couldn’t wear heels. I had to wear swimmy shoes instead.
We were running so late and it was overcast and grey so it took us about an hour on the river before I realized I left the sunscreen in the car. We got back to the campsite drunk and tired and as red as lobsters. There was only one thing to do to combat that. We drank some more.
The next morning we packed up our camp site and dragged everything back down to the cars. We sat around after the cars were packed, shooting the shit and playing catch and Frisbee. Oh yeah, and drinking. We didn’t want to have to haul that beer back to the city.
It was finally time to go. We drove back down the mountain and headed towards electricity and running water and civilization in general. I loved camping. I had a great time and I would do it again in a second, even as I sit here, home from work for the day because I am so sunburned I can’t wear anything other than a thin cotton nightgown.
That being said, I can’t wait to slip my feet into a pair of two-and-a-half inch stilettos.

The Single Girl Treatment

2005-08-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

Another one of my friends calls up, squealing about the latest date she went on and how she’s so in love. “He’s so nice and he’s good-looking and he has a great job and we just had the best time.” Blah Blah Blah.
Lately, I’ve become the single girl in my group. I don’t know that happened, but here I am, the single girl.
You know what happens to the single girl? She gets the single girl treatment. That means that all your friends surround you like you just got told you have leprosy and they’re determined not to let a few postulating lesions put them off. You have the promises of a night, “Just the girls—no boys,” like you couldn’t handle seeing your friends with somebody when you, yourself are alone. Like you’re going to slit your wrists right at the dinner table with the butter knife when you realize you’re alone. It hadn’t dawned on me before, but that’s when I knew I was the single girl.
“Oh, you have to meet Pat,” E said to me one night as we were walking out of a bar.
“I’d love to.” (Pat being the new boyfriend. They had been together for about a month. Already, I wasn’t too sure about him. He used an ironing board for a kitchen and a coffee table.)
“And don’t worry, we’ll all go out one night, you, me C, G. Just the girls, no boys.”
Thank god. Because everybody knows boys have cooties.
When people who were single aren’t single any more, they spend the first few months of their lives acting like single is a contagious disease they finally managed to get rid of. You don’t see as much of your friends now that they’re dating somebody else. You don’t get as many phone calls. Part of it is that they’re happy in love, sure, but the bigger part of it is they don’t seem to want to acknowledge their own single lives. “Oh, she’s got single. I had that once. It took me forever to get over it. I love her, she’s my girl, but I just have to much going on in my life right now. I can’t catch single again.”
Then, there’s that forced single-girl-meets-new-boyfriend dinner that is about as awkward as they come. They’re happy in love and gushing and it’s just human nature to instantly start looking for all of his flaws. Nobody can be that perfect. They just can’t. So, while they look adoringly at each other over the rims of their wine glasses, you’re looking at him with your eyebrows raised, trying to figure out the bullshit that lurks beneath.
And then come the setups. Every girl’s boyfriend’s got a single friend/brother/cousin/former cell mate and wouldn’t it be great if the two of you hit it off? Your girls are happy in love and now you have to be, too. So you wind up going to endless bars and dinners and parties attached to some mooch that wants to spend the night talking about the ex-girlfriend who really broke his heart. As the night goes on, and he gets progressively drunker, you hear details about his sex life you wouldn’t want to know about your own sex life until, finally, he gets drunk enough to call her, walking off to some quiet corner and leaving you to wonder how that winner managed to slip through your fingers.
And that whole night, you could have been meeting Mr. Right if your friends weren’t so determined that you should be happy.

The Slump

2005-08-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

I am in a slump of epic proportions. I have not been out on a proper date since the closeted homosexual took me to dinner and the stranger next to me at the restaurant kindly suggested I try again.
I know a large part of it is because I work weird hours and, with very few exceptions, the men who are free around one in the afternoon are not the guys you want to be dating. I could have my pick of any of the just-this-side of homeless vegetable stand workers that I pass on my way home, but somehow I feel the conversation would be lacking.
There isn’t anybody in the past two months I’ve met that I would go out to dinner with when I could be taking a nap or reading a book. I genuinely enjoy being single and the guy has to be great in order for me to move into “girlfriend” mode. Or at least appear great. They usually turn out to be crazy, but in the beginning they put on a good show. The guys I’ve been meeting lately, they’re not even bothering with the smoke and the stage lights. They’ve all had some major character flaw that they wear on their sleeves like a badge of honor. I want to take them aside and teach them. “No, honey, it’s not a good thing that you’re an out-of-work writer with a coke habit. Don’t broadcast that like it’s one of your better traits.” Then I find myself thinking, “If that’s what they’re showing you, then, Jesus, what’s lying under the surface?” I don’t want to be on a date where I’m praying for shallow waters so I know I’m going to make it home at the end of the night.
How do you keep the faith that there’s somebody out there for you when you’re meeting people that are making you question the existence of God?
I know I’m not the only one out there asking this question. I know because every time I joke that I’m going to die alone and the 80 cats I’ve horded (because that’s what single old women seem to do—become cat ladies) will start eating my flesh before the police notice the stench, most of my single friends laugh. But not the right laugh. It’s not that “Oh, you are so ridiculous” laugh. It’s more like a nervous, “holy-shit-I’ve-had-that-same-thought-we’re-all-screwed” chuckle.
New York is one of the hardest cities in the world to date in if you’re a single woman. People have written columns and articles and chick lit books (one incredibly bitchy queen I met in a book store called them “cliterature” and I loved him for it) ad naseum about this very subject. But the problem with the slump is eventually it just brings out your insecurities and fears. You find yourself asking the important questions: Why is everybody else finding somebody and I’m not? Am I just not looking in the right places? Do I have some startling personality defect? Do I smell funny? It starts to feel like you really are the last single girl in the city and they should stuff you and put you on display in the Museum of Natural History with the Wooly Mammoth and all the other antiquities.
“What’s that, mommy?”
“That was the last single girl in New York.”
“What happened to her?”
“The cats got her.”

Same Shit, Different Gay

2005-05-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

Everybody usually has a type. Some people are into tall blonds. Some people are looking for the class clown. Others want the nerd. Bill Gates is somebody’s type. Colin Farrell is EVERYBODYS type and he knows it.
My type is closeted gay men.
I don’t know how it happens but I’m becoming the Margaret Cho of the Lower East Side. I attract closeted gay men like no other. If you’re looking for a hetero-experiment, you’re probably looking for me.
Saturday night, I went out on a date with A, a nice guy I had met at a bar the week before. He didn’t seem gay when I met him, but I guess alcohol really does dull the senses. I did get my suspicions when he called me to tell me where he made reservations and told me, “I asked my boss where I should take this nice young lady I met last week to dinner.” Nice young lady? Really?
I got there early and had a glass of wine at the bar, watching the thunder storm that had just opened up on New York. He arrived. I noticed his eyebrows were more nicely manicured than my own.
We sat down and looked at the menus. The restaurant was really nice and the menu was interesting. “Feel free to have whatever you want,” he tells me. That makes me cringe. I’m a young professional with a decent paycheck. Honestly, I could buy you dinner. I hear that and I feel like it’s a sign of false generosity. Pet peeve, but he’s nice, he’s just a little awkward. Let it go.
“Are you really hungry? Do you want an appetizer?” He asks a few seconds later.
“Do you want to split something?” I ask. I’m more concerned with wasting food than wasting his money.
“Oh my god! I was just going to ask you the same thing!” He squeals. Squeals. The hint of a familiar accent creeps in.
We order, he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. While he’s away, I make friends with the couple sitting next to me, a married couple in their 40s with two toddlers who are thoroughly enjoying the fact that their dinner does not come with a toy and you cannot color on these menus. A comes back. The date resumes. I think I hear that same familiar accent when our appetizer comes and he offers to make me a “little plate.”
We had a good time. We didn’t run out of things to say. But a lot of that is because it is rare that I ever run out of things to say. If I’m not talking, I’m sick or really, really tired. It’s also a good way to tell if I’ve had too much to drink (basically because I get sleepy, then I shut up). He’s not doing a lot of the talking. But that’s okay. I’ve had enough wine where I’m fun, gregarious drunk.
There’s just certain things about the conversation that make me think “girlfriend” instead of “boyfriend,” which is troubling when you’re out on a date. This is the pitfall of dating in New York. On average, every New York girl winds up dating a guy who comes to the realization that he’s gay. I just happen to date more of my share, to maintain the average that would otherwise be thrown off by the girls who avoid this New York dating pothole. It’s just with the whole metrosexual trend, it’s hard to determine who is and who isn’t. It used to be easy. If he’s got more Kehil’s products in his bathroom than you do, that was a good sign. If he gets manicures, that was another one. Now, that’s basic New York maintenance. The modern New York couple gets their mani/pedis together.
He excuses himself to the bathroom again (the bladder a size of a pea!). The woman next to me has now had a few drinks in her and she sees this as her moment of opportunity.
“Honey, I’m looking at you and I just, I just think you’re great. You’re beautiful and dynamic and you’re talking and you have a lot going on. I think you can do better.”
Honey, I’m thinking the same thing.

Bad (S)Ex

2005-05-28T19:16:00.000-07:00

People always say that you can’t be friends with your ex. If things were so great, you’d still be together. But you have to be the one to prove them wrong, don’t you? You want to show that you are a more evolved person and, although you can’t figure out a Rubix Cube, you have neatly sorted out the more complex puzzle of the former lover. How do I know you so well? I AM you.
My ex and I have an interesting relationship. We live down the street from each other (when we first met he had just signed a lease for an apartment down the street from mine). Our hours are different enough that we don’t really bump into each other. But we profess to be those more evolved people. We make appointments to bump into each other. We grab lunch every now and then. We get coffee. We hang out and grab drinks. Whatever. We’re neighbors. It’s cool.
So you could have knocked me over with a feather when we went out to lunch to celebrate the fact that I found an apartment and we wound up sleeping together. It was supposed to be innocent, but I was in a good mood, we were having a good time, next thing you know, we’re making out and one thing led to another and there you go.
When it was over, I fled the apartment like it was on fire.
Once you’re in a relationship with someone and the feelings have petered out, it’s nearly impossible to re-define your relationship outside those sexual boundaries. Try as you might, you’re always going to go back to the relationship you know and are comfortable with. That relationship’s dead. But you get a little comfortable, a little lazy, a little less vigilant than you should, and next thing you know, you’re playing those rolls again. You weren’t friends in the first place, now you’re trying to be friends and you’re pushing the old relationship under the carpet. It never works.
So why do we try?
It’s hard to admit that a relationship has failed. It’s a letdown and it also means that a person who was so important in your life at one point is now no longer in your life at all. It’s not just that his position has changed. His position simply doesn’t exist anymore. So you take this person and you try to cram him into your life in another way. It doesn’t fit. You don’t care. Your friends can’t believe that you still talk to this person that hurt you/cheated on you/let you down etc. You don’t care. You are convinced that you are more evolved than your friends. You’re going to make it work and show them all. Keep twisting the Rubix Cube. You’re never going to get the colors to line up the way you want to.
The ex and I are still pretending to be friends. He emailed me the next morning to try to talk me down and we’ve exchanged voicemails. But I see myself falling right back into those same rolls again and again. Today, I had a problem and he was my first phone call. And he calmed me down and solved it. He’s falling into those same rolls, too. Now I feel even more determined to show that we can have a non-sexual relationship, despite the fact that, intellectually, I know better. My competitive side is coming out and I’m going to beat the odds dammit!
Still twisting the Rubix cube.

The Hunt

2005-05-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

If you want to live in New York, you have to find a place to live. This is where the weak are weeded out. It is Darwinism at its best. It is hell.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just take a stroll through the real estate pages from a New York City paper. You will be amazed, I guarantee. In most major cities, $900/month will get you a nice apartment. Do you know what you get for $900/month in New York? Nothing. There is nothing you can find for $900/month. You can’t get a cardboard box on the street for $900 a night. Not in a good neighborhood, anyway.
It’s also such a tightrope walk. You can’t start too early, because you’ll see something you love and by the time you’re ready to move, it’ll be gone. But start too late, and you’ll be looking at a $900 a month cardboard box in a bad neighborhood. It’s the most stressful two months.
I started in May. I had until the end of June. I figured that was enough time. I made an appointment to see a studio in Hell’s Kitchen. Hell’s Kitchen is “up-and-coming.” That means still crappy enough to be affordable. A lot of my friends live there, because they are also poor. It would make it easier and I could save money on cab fare back to my “up-and-coming” neighborhood. I would like to stay in my neighborhood, but people got wise to the up and comingness of my hood and moved in and now it’s evolved to trendy/gritty. In New York, trendy/gritty means pricy. Who ever thought gritty would mean pricy? Shabby chic killed all us poor people.
But I digress. I’m sitting on a Sunday afternoon, waiting for an agent to come and show me a bunch of apartments, including the one in Hell’s Kitchen. I get there. The agent I talked to is not there (he’s also not an agent, I come to find out, just the guy who answers the phone. But he has a dream, dammit). I talk to a woman named Lee. Lee reminds me of a math teacher in middle school that I hated. I’m already suspicious. She hands me a form to ask for my financial information. One of the questions on the form is “What will you do if you can’t find a place by your move-out date?” I am tempted to answer “Cry.”
Lee starts in with what I have come to find out is the NY real estate agent philosophy: PANIC NOW!!!! I feel like I started too late, I’m starting too early, I’m broke, I’m unworthy, what am I even doing in this office? When I truly feel like shit about myself, they finally let me see an apartment.
It’s not the apartment I went to see, though. There’s a problem with that. The landlord’s not in/the apartment is only showing in open-houses/the apartment doesn’t really exist. Something like that. The bait-and-switch is part of the PANIC NOW!!! Philosophy. They finally take me to see an apartment. A studio they say is “tiny,” about 300 square feet. The introduce me to the “shower.” A “shower” is a young kid who needs a day job while they’re waiting for their big acting/recording/songwriting break comes through. They get a cut of the fee, but not a big cut.
My shower looks like he’s about two red blood cells this side of albino. He is the palest human being I’ve ever seen. EVER. This is when I called M, who lives in the neighborhood. I was not getting eaten by night of the living dead over here. I mean, I want to stay in the city, but some things are not worth your life.
“Is he creepy?” M asks.
“So you said to meet you on 58th and 8th?” I responded.
“Guess that’s a yes. Meet you in 10.”
We walk over to the apartment, which is behind Lincoln Center. And when I say behind, I mean almost in Jersey. We finally get to the building and walk in. M walks in first and snorts.
The room is about the size of most closets. And I’m not talking big walk-ins. You could fit a twin bed on a metal frame and a folding chair. It’s 9x9. The last time I checked, that was 81 square feet, not 300. The shower offers to show me the kitchen. It’s a good thing he pointed it out. I would have missed it otherwise. It’s a mini-fridge with two burners on it. No oven. No cabinets. You would have to have talent to make Ramen in this kitchen.
“Would you like to see the closet?” Lurch asks.
“I thought we were in the closet,” M says.
“Does it contain the other 200 square feet that are supposed to be in this apartment?” I ask.
He opens the door. It does not.
The landlord’s there. He’s actually showing this place with a straight face. I keep looking at him, waiting for him to crack up and go, “Just Kidding. The real apartment is upstairs. This is a supply closet.” That would be OK. I can appreciate a good joke.
Instead he says, “You’re paying for the neighborhood.”
Excuse me? Unless I’m paying for the neighborhood’s groceries, I can’t see where my $1200 a month (oh, that’s right, it’s $1200 a month, plus a 15% of the annual rent fee to the broker. And Lurch. I’m sure he gets a cut. Although what he spends it on, I have no idea. It’s nothing with iron in it) is going.
But this is what you have to deal with when you live in New York. Buying, renting, it’s all the same. And it’s all bad. Jail cells are bigger than some apartments you see. And you don’t have to pay for jail cells. And they have tuition reimbursement in jail. I bet Lurch won’t cut me a check for early registration.
My parents think I’m crazy. My relatives think I’m insane. This has very little to do with the fact that I pay so much for rent. But it plays a factor. It’s hard for me to believe, myself. But I went out to look at an apartment in Queens and I almost cried. It was $1000/month. It was huge. The landlord was nice. But it was QUEENS. Nobody’s going to visit me in Queens. The apartment was almost IN LaGuardia Airport. People could stop by on their way to vacation.
Living in New York is like a drug. It’s an expensive, it’s bad for your wallet, it’s bad for your health, it makes your skin look bad, you don’t eat as well as you would in the suburbs because all your money’s going to feed your habit, you get your apartment from a sketch dealer in a bad neighborhood, you could die. But I’m addicted. As soon as I could, I jumped a train to my pipe and got back on-line, looking for an overpriced closet I could live in.

Til Hot Ass do us Part

2005-02-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

My friend A works with this guy, Rich. The first time I met Rich, I got a bad feeling about him. This is because A had told me all about Rich, as well as her other co-workers. She also told me about Rich’s wife and young child. So when I walked into the restaurant for her birthday dinner last year and saw Rich’s arm slung casually and familiarly around the back of a chair that contained the woman he brought with him instead of his wife, I started to dislike him. That dislike grew when Rich announced he was too drunk to drive home and that he was going to stay with his cute, blonde, not-wife friend. Rich must have been a real lightweight. His one and a half gin-and-tonics on a full stomach had gotten him so drunk he thought we would believe a crap story like that.
Surprisingly, A did believe him, though (in her defense, she had consumed enough alcohol that night to justify her believing that crap story. She also believed she was fine, right before she passed out on a couch at the lounge we went to after the restaurant). So it came as a surprise to her when, one night, Rich started to put the moves on her.
They were out with co-workers. Rich was, again, sans-wife and his “friend” was out of town on business. So he turned his sights towards A, who had, again, managed to drink enough alcohol to convince herself that Rich was a nice guy with altruistic motives. He told her that, if he wasn’t married, he would definitely try to take her home (isn’t that a nice sentiment in and of itself? “If I wasn’t married, I’d definitely bang you.” Doesn’t it just make you think of roses and hearts and the names of your first children? Note to men: “I’d fuck you” is not a pickup line.)
At the end of the night, Rich decided to drop A and another male co-worker off so they wouldn’t have to walk home. As decorum dictated, Rich dropped A off first. But then….
“He called you back? And asked to stop by?” I was shocked.
“I know. I thought it was odd.”
“It is odd,” I said, mouthful of Eggs Benedict suspended midair in disbelief. “But you know what? He did it on purpose.”
“He didn’t want T to get suspicious.”
“Exactly. If everything was above board, and if he wasn’t trying anything except to see your apartment, he would have either dropped you off last, or he would have asked T to hold on a sec or come up with him to see your new place. The fact that he so blatantly hid the fact that he wanted to come upstairs in itself makes the whole thing not right.”
“That’s exactly what I thought. But I was really drunk. So I didn’t think about it when he called. I just said sure. It was really late.”
“How late?”
“It had to have been at least 3 in the morning.”
“Doesn’t he have a wife and kid?”
“A wife, a kid and one on the way. But wait, it gets worse. While he was there, he came up behind me, put his arms around my waist and pulled me into him.”
“Ewwwww.”
“I know! He just hugged me, he didn’t do anything else, but still. That’s intimate. I wouldn’t do that with my girlfriends. Definitely not my guy friends. So what the hell was that?”
“Um, gross. And wrong. He’s a married man. It’s very, very wrong.”
The story really upset me for a number of reasons. I don’t like Rich at all, and now I was justified, but who the hell wants to be justified like that? He had been rude to my friend. He was being miserable to his wife. And, ultimately, he was being a real shithead to his kid, who would have to bear a lot from the fallout of his clearly doomed marriage.
More that that, though, it made me wonder: Do people’s vows mean anything to them anymore? Has “Til Death do us Part” become “’Til Something Else better comes along”?
These days, it seems like the only people who are taking marriage seriously are gay people, the one demographic who are forbidden by most bass-ackwards states from getting married. There is a actually a show that features the shortest-lived celebrity marriages (Britney Spears is apparently trying to see just how many times she can get on that show. Although, I give her credit. She and the freeloader she married have lasted a lot longer than I expected. A lot longer being 4 months). Just like the word “obey” has been taken out of most traditional vows, so to have the words “til death do us part,” if not literally, then definitely in practice.
I think of the way my great aunt talked about her husband and their marriage and I wonder if it’s possible today. My aunt was so in love with her husband. Did they have a perfect marriage? Of course not. They were dirt-poor and people kept dropping by their house to live. But they worked through all of it. People today don’t seem to have that kind of stamina, as evidenced by a 50% divorce rate and marriages that end after a few years, or a few months. The biggest difference, though, is the attitude going into the marriage. Divorce used to be taboo; now it’s almost expected. And people aren’t thinking long-term as they walk down the aisle. People are getting married the way they should be buying shoes: they may not be practical, but they’re awfully cute, and if you only get a couple of seasons out of them, so what? They’re fun. But when your spouse starts to really be a pain, just try to throw them in the back of your closet and see what happens. You’ll have a divorce lawyer so far down your throat he’ll be up your ass.
I’m not totally innocent in the married-man department. I’ve gone on dates with married men. I’ve also gone on more dates with men I had no idea were married, or had live-in girlfriends, until the end of the night, when they finally fess up. I’ve been hit on numerous times by men who don’t even bother to hide the wedding band. And it all makes me doubt the validity of marriage as an institution. If nobody really believes in it, does the institution of marriage really exist? (If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it….) Commitment should mean something, but these days, it doesn’t. We change jobs, careers, lovers, spouses like we change socks and underwear. When the going gets tough, people tend to cut and run faster than a shirtless redneck on “Cops.” Why, I have no idea. I also don’t have any plan on how to bounce back from this cultural phenomenon. Should we blame cartoons, that have given us all Adult ADD in everything in our lives, including cartoons? Is it the culture of divorce that most of us have grown up with that has made us cynical? Or is it this overriding apathy that I see has taken over so many of my generation that makes work a four-letter word? I don’t have the answers. I’m guessing that Rich’s wife doesn’t have them either, as she stares down at her pregnant belly while her husband sweet-talks the twenty-something set.

Roses are Red, Valentines' Blues

2005-02-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

“Hello?”
“Hey E. Happy Valentine’s Day!”
“Isn’t it just your favorite day?” E’s deadpan tone is dripping with sarcasm. And, to be honest, bitterness. Clearly, this wasn’t her favorite day at all.
For some, February 14 is a four-letter word. It’s a reminder that you’re alone, that you’re clearly going to die alone, that you might as well give it up now and start adopting cats.
For me, February 14th is just another day, only, on this day, you have a better excuse to eat chocolate. This sounds like sour grapes, I know, like I don’t want a valentine anyway. But it’s not. Valentine’s Day is usually only great for a select group of people. Hallmark, Russell Stover’s and the people who make those Mylar helium balloons. Other than those select corporations, I’ve never heard of anybody who had a GREAT Valentine’s Day. A nice day, a great dinner, something special, but a GREAT Valentine’s Day? It’s like a GREAT New Year’s Eve: try to find someone who had one. Nearly impossible.
When I was a kid, I used to love Valentine’s Day. My parents would buy me one of those red hearts full of chocolate. We would have to bring a shoebox into class that we would decorate with construction paper, markers, paper lace doilies, stickers, glitter glue, whatever our New York City public school PTA budget could provide, making beautiful mailboxes to hold all our cards. The night before Valentine’s Day, I would painstakingly print out the name of each and every classmate on my tiny valentines with pictures of Strawberry Shortcake or the Carebears and the cheesy little jokes that only an 8-year-old finds funny. We would wait all day until our class moms came in with cupcakes and juice and little bags of candy and we would run around and deliver all our valentines and eat and then, when we were all good and sugared up, the teacher would send us home to our parents.
When I got older, my mom would buy me Godiva chocolates in place of the drugstore hearts. I used to get cards from secret admirers in high school and carnations from friends, sold by the student council to benefit various causes. When I was in college, my mom sent flowers a few times. My freshman year of college, when I was living in a real college dorm, my room was filled with flowers from parents, my friends, my roommate’s friends. It was nice. More importantly, it was about love. Not sex. Not desperation. Love.
To get depressed about not having a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day is to miss the entire point of the holiday in the first place. Saint Valentine (who, being a Catholic saint, would probably not approve of that garter ensemble you picked up from Victoria’s Secret, fyi) was a man who believed in love. He died a martyr because he married people in Catholic ceremonies during the Roman Empire. And while that’s a very romantic story, the part that goes overlooked in this whole story was that this was a man who died standing up for what he believed in. He believed so strongly in what he was doing that he put his life on the line to prove his devotion. And that is what’s beautiful about Valentine’s Day. When was the last time you felt that passionately about something? Most people wouldn’t put their credit card on the table for the person they’re desperately hoping will ask them to a Valentine’s dinner tonight.
St. Valentine didn’t settle. He didn’t lower his standards to fit some society’s ideas about how life should be. If he didn’t, why should any of us? And every time we feel that we should have a boyfriend, that we should have a date, every time we get depressed that we’re sitting at home on Valentine’s Day, or that we’re with a group of friends instead of that special someone, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Valentine’s Day is, at the end of the day, just another day. It’s not a mandate to try to conform yourself into what society dictates is the “right” behavior. St. Valentine didn’t do it, and now, once a year, people eat candy out of cardboard hearts in his name.

PSA

2005-02-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

I am at a loss as to how to explain the male psyche. I am not alone in this. If my girlfriends and I could understand this, we would probably be reduced to staring at each other over half-finished pints. If my male friends had a clue, this blog would not exist.
This doesn’t mean I don’t try and pick my male friends’ brains every chance I get, trying to figure this out. My male friends know when I’m on a rant, they should just try to placate me and eventually I’ll get tired or something shiny will grab my attention and they’ll be free. Until then, they try to break things down.
I was having one of those moments and V was the unlucky male recipient of my confused wrath. I was still obsessing about the neighbor “incident.” The fact that the incident was next to nothing and I wasn’t horribly broken up about the whole matter wasn’t the point. I just thought the whole thing was incredibly indicative of a much larger force at play. And it was something to obsess about during an incredibly slow day at work.
V brought it up, anyway.
“What’s going on with that guy you were all vague about last week?”
“I never heard from him again.”
“What happened?”
“He kissed me and never called. Drive by kissing.”
“Did you try to get in touch with him?”
“I sent him a text message. He never responded.”
“That’s not cool.”
“Why do guys do things like that? You’re a guy. Explain this. Please.”
V was quick to say that he didn’t speak for all mankind and that this guy was a huge dick if he was disrespecting me like that (this is why V is my friend), but he also brought some insight.
Basically, from what I can get from him, men are still all about the chase. But because we’re no longer hunter/gatherers, they turn the chase towards us. And, sometimes, just knowing that they can have us is enough for them. Once the chase is over and they’ve proven that they can capture us, they don’t need to bother any more. This was nothing new.
What shocked me was V’s reaction. As he told me all this, he admitted that he had been guilty of this whole hunt and run method of dating. The more he talked about it, the more he became guilty. He ended his explainer suddenly.
“Now I feel bad.”
Is it possible that we’re all just hurting each other and we don’t even know we’re doing it?
V’s confessional made me think of all the times I’ve been unkind. And, sadly, there are a lot of them. There are a lot of guys I know who would LOVE to date me that I just don’t have chemistry with. I know they think we do. And, I hate to say it, but I love that they think we do. It makes me feel better about myself to know that somebody else likes me in that way. It allows me to tell myself I’m picky, not desperate. And it softens the edge of my nightmare of becoming one of those crazy cat ladies.
I never thought my acknowledgement of love unreciprocated hurt anybody. But there are people out there tonight who are feeling about me the way I feel about the neighbor. They are wondering why I don’t call, why I kissed them once and never kissed them (or called them) again. And I hardly gave them a second thought while they wondered what they did wrong, what opportunity they missed, what they could have done differently that one time, that would have turned things around.
I guess my point here is that we are all careless with other peoples’ feelings while we wonder why people are so careless with ours. The bottom line is it all comes back to the oldest of sayings, “Do unto others what you would have others do unto you.” A broken heart is a horrible thing to hold, in your hands or your conscious.

It's Biology, Baby

2005-01-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

We all want the same things. We want to be loved. We want to love in return. We want to feel like we have something stable. This is what we say to each other over and over again. But then our actions belie everything we say we hold true.
Why do we set ourselves up to fail?

E calls me at two in the morning. Gushing. She’s met the man she’s been looking for. She calls to tell me she met a boy. He’s great. His name’s Marcel. He was born in the states and raised in the Netherlands and he’s got this old world charm about him. The reason he’s got old-world charm, however, is because he’s old. Marcel is 43. 20 years older than E. And he’s not a successful 43. Marcel is currently the head waiter at Tavern on the Green. But that’s just until he makes his big break on the big screen.
E probably makes more than him each year (Or she’ll claim more than him on her taxes, anyway). She’s successful and, at 23, she’s starting a career. One that will afford her opportunities that will allow her to pick and choose her options at 43. Marcel is 43 and alone at a bar full of 20-somethings on a Saturday night. Why is he so attractive?
Biologically speaking, animals survive because of the “Picky Female” syndrome. The female species is supposed to be selective. We are supposed to go for the biggest males, the alphas of the pack, the ones that will always make the kill, find the water, start the fire, pick up the old bone and use it to beat the weaker males away. But more and more lately, I find my successful friends leaning towards total losers. We’re not supposed to be picky. Everybody’s supposed to be equal. And in the egalitarian community, a 43-year-old waiter should get the same deference as a 26-year-old investment banker. But is that really the case? What’s wrong with being a snob?
My friend J is a snob and we all tend to look down on her for it a little bit, glad that money and a good job and a great family isn’t as important to us. But J is well provided for. She was a selective female and got a great man in the bargain. He’s got a great job, he takes care of her, she doesn’t want for anything. And she got him by being a snob, by not lowering her standards just so she could feel like she was treating everybody the same. Being egalitarian wasn’t important to J. Being provided for was.
While E was being served by the waiter uptown, I was downtown, in unfamiliar territory, namely the west side. I’m a girl who likes to stick on a subway line (easy way to duck home) so already I was feeling out of sorts as I looked out over the Hudson River, being reminded that home (and my high school past) were not that far away. As I was chatting with friends of mine, a man comes over and demonstrates why the alpha male can be a huge problem. Instead of introducing himself with a handshake, he sidles up to me and puts his hand on my hip. Except it’s not staying on my hip. Rather, it’s sliding down and around. While I admit that my total lack of an ass (due to the fact I’m half Irish) is a fascinating phenomenon, it’s not one that should be investigated before you even say hello. As I took his hand away, he got almost nasty.
“Don’t push me away.” He nearly snarled it.
“Hey, just don’t touch me and I won’t have to.” I was trying to be diplomatic, but it was hard when there’s a nasty guy touching you. It’s never the cute ones who want to grab your ass. It’s only the ones that can’t touch a woman’s ass any other way but to grab when they see a free opportunity.
There is nothing more frustrating than when you’re trying to be nice and putting distance between yourself and your attacker and he just keeps coming at you. Eventually, you just want to scream at him, “Can’t you get the damned point? If I thought you were even remotely not troll-like, I would chat you up. But I’m fleeing. Get the hint.”
But if you do that, you’re a snob. As he kept telling my friends. Which is uncomfortable. One of my friends kept trying to tell me he was a nice guy, and maybe he was, but instantly, when I feel someone’s hand where is shouldn’t be, I instantly feel how nice can he be? Instantly, however, I was the snob. The choosy female. And that was wrong.
By eliminating the “Choosy Female” factor, however, we’re eliminating a basic animal instinct that has served thousands of species for more years then we’ll ever accurately know. We’re denying a history that is clearly stronger and smarter than current schools of thought and, as a result, we’re making poor choices that can eventually be more destructive than helpful. We don’t have to be nice to the weird guy with the roving hands. Eliminating a man who approaches you at the bar because he’s a 43 year old waiter is not wrong. It’s animalistic in the strongest sense of the word.

What We've Come To

2005-01-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

My friend M is dating a guy, S, for two months. They spend every weekend together, plus they see each other during the week sometimes. They sleep together, they go on great dates. They are going for their first weekend away together. They are, for all intents and purposes, boyfriend and girlfriend.
EXCEPT:
a) they don’t call each other boyfriend and girlfriend (don’t labels just put a damper on things?)
b) he only calls her at the end of the week to see her on the weekend
c) he hasn’t told anybody in his family about her (he says he doesn’t talk about those things with members of his family) and he hasn’t introduced her to any of his friends or colleagues
d) he’s bringing a friend to their romantic weekend away (the one friend of his she does know, and that’s only because M’s friend, through whom she met S, introduced them accidentally while S was on a business trip)
e) He’s still registered on an online dating service.

This is the era of confused, mixed-message dating. You can be “hanging out” with somebody, “seeing” somebody, “dating” somebody (but this doesn’t mean that you’re in a relationship). It’s all so confusing. And with so many different options, it’s only inevitable that you might up on different pages.
So the question is, how do you know what you are in a relationship?
Sadly, the only way to prove that you are in a relationship is through negative deduction, as the authors of the book “He’s just not that into you” stunningly proved to all of us this past year. The book has become a bible for single women in urban areas just by being a checklist of what not to look for. Everybody knows that if he’s married, he’s not that into you, but for some reason, it took a thin pink book to point that fact out to us.
Women have the most amazing capacity to read between the lines of any situation. And when there aren’t lines, we’ll invent the lines and then invent the subtext to go between them. It is a stunning amount of work we do to create relationships that are not there.
Facts don’t lie. And if he’s not calling you his girlfriend, it’s because he doesn’t want his real potential girlfriend, who he knows is still out there waiting for him, to be scared off by the fact that another bears her title. If he doesn’t tell his family or friends about you, it’s because he knows they’re simple and he doesn’t want to confuse them with Ms. Right and Ms. Right-Now. And if he’s taking you and seven of his closest friends on a romantic weekend, well, just stay the hell away, because who wants to deal with a guy that insecure or immature.
But here’s the kicker: guys also come in the player variety. Players are the ones who know all these rules, play by them, and then leave anyway. Players’ friends and families are in on it, and thanks to that lovely little double-standard, just laugh indulgently, thinking “He’ll grow out of it someday!” Players are too quick to call you their girlfriend, too fast in the professions of lust (they are very careful not to say love), too ready to make that commitment. So many of my girlfriends (and, let’s admit it, me too) have been taken by these guys. We see so many of the other guys, the ones that won’t step up, that take forever to ask for that first date, that won’t make the commitments we want or need, that don’t introduce us around, that hide us as if they’re ashamed of us, that when somebody comes around that’s just too good to be true, we never stop to think that maybe he is. We just allow ourselves to get swept off our feet. And while we’re castle-building in the sky, Prince Charming is off trying to ride some underage princess with big boobs who is, like 95% certain you can’t get pregnant from blow jobs. Because, like, she’s given out millions of them and she’s never had a problem. Yet.
It is a confusing ground that single women have found themselves on in this day and age. Old-fashioned dating seems out of place in today’s society, but this whole “meaningless sex until love” kick we seem to be on right now doesn’t ever work out for anybody (and of course there’s the exception. There’s always the exception. The exception lets you justify your own late-night drunken behavior. But there’s a reason she’s called the exception. And if you have a friend who is the exception, then guess what? You’re not it. Now put your pants back on). We are stuck desperately trying to find a middle ground that isn’t between two lines we’ve created ourselves.

Being Neighborly

2005-01-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

I have this neighbor who is absolutely gorgeous. He’s also the perfect age for me, slightly older, but not too older, and he had a great job and a nice apartment. What he didn’t have were kids, a drug problem, a current marriage/former marriage/live-in girlfriend/live-in boyfriend.
He also didn’t seem to have any interest in me.
He was nice, though, and interesting, and his friends made me laugh. We had hung out a bunch of times and always had a good time. And who doesn’t need a friend? Especially one that lives in your building and, like you, keeps less conventional hours, so might be around for a drink at one in the morning, when you’re completely stressed out and feel like if you don’t get alcohol in you, you might just curl up into one big stress ball.
So you can just imagine my surprise when he kissed me one night.
We were just hanging out, having a drink at his apartment. Originally, the plan was to leave and find a bar, but it was so cold outside and he had a really interesting bottle of wine, so we decided to stay in. All of a sudden, we’re on his bed and he’s playing with my hair and we’re just hanging out and he’s kissing me. It was a good thing we were already on his bed, because you could have knocked me over with a feather, I was that surprised. But it was great, and I felt like we had chemistry and the way he held me so tightly, and would kiss the top of my forehead, it was just so…right. I wouldn’t have ever been able to predict or explain it.
So then you can just imagine my surprise when he didn’t call.
Three days passed. We had made tentative plans to go to dinner during the week following “The Incident” and I was excited to see him again. But he didn’t call. I decided to text message him. Now usually, I am pretty adamant (and pretty good) about not calling, emailing or contacting boys unless they contact me. But this just felt different. He was a nice guy. Clearly, he was painfully shy. And he had been my neighbor and my friend first, for almost a year, actually. So the rules shouldn’t apply here, right? Besides, text messaging is way more casual than an actual phone call. So it’s only really bending my rules, not breaking them. (I can also convince myself that Carrot cake with cream cheese icing is a balanced meal according to the food pyramid if it has walnuts in it…all 4 food groups represented. What can I say, it’s a gift).
Nothing. No text back. No phone call. Nothing.
And this is when I got to wondering: Why do men pursue if they have no intention of following through?
We had a good thing. We were friendly neighbors. We were able to spend time in each other’s company and I felt that we were getting closer. Not “The Incident” closer, really, that was a total surprise. More like “bitch about your family” closer. Fun closer. Not that “the incident” closer wasn’t fun. But I just didn’t expect it. Or, necessarily want it. But it happened and then I did want it. I wanted more, actually. So when it didn’t come, that left me confused.
And, honestly, sad and angry and self-conscious, which made me even angrier. I hate when people make me doubt myself. But that’s what was happening. Was I a bad kisser? And, if I was, why didn’t anybody tell me before? Should I not have stayed over? But it was so weird, he fell asleep holding me so tightly that I don’t think I could have left if I wanted to (and, I’m not just saying this now because things didn’t work out, but part of me wanted to. I couldn’t fall asleep for the life of me. But I felt like it would be even weirder and more wrong to just slip out while he was sleeping. That’s such a cheesy, asshole-guy-in-the-teen-movie thing to do). The doubting went on for all of the third day.
My girlfriends had no answers, so I asked a guy friend of mine, “When guys don’t call, does it really mean that they’re not that into you, like the book?”
He didn’t mince words. “Usually, yes, that’s exactly what it means.” Then he went to watch 24. And I was left alone to obsess by myself again.
Women are given this bad rep about being so confusing, but I have to give it up to the men. They might perpetuate this myth that they’re simple, but when it comes right down to it, there is just no understanding their motives. When I or my girlfriends kiss someone, it’s because we’re actually interested in that person. When we sleep with somebody, it’s because we’re really interested (even if we shouldn’t be). There has only been one time when I kissed somebody to see if I felt chemistry, and I got called onto the carpet for that one by the guy, my girlfriends, my one girlfriend’s mother, who happened to overhear the conversation. But I was 18 and didn’t know any better and I felt so bad for “leading the guy on” that I never did it again. I don’t just kiss and run.
Guys do this all the time though. They will kiss you, make out with you, sleep with you, feign intimacy and then never call again. And it is so hard for women to come to terms with the idea that an entire gender could be that good at faking it that we convince ourselves that he’s scared, he doesn’t know what to do next, we sent off some kind of mysterious signal that has chased him off for good. And we obsess about a guy who has already moved on to another woman.
If we want to talk biology, it’s probably got something to do with perpetuating the race. But since we’re not stuck in the traditional hunter-gatherer roles any more, you would think men would evolve along with us and act more like the current homo-erectus we are (instead of thinking with their erections). And there seems to be no way to tell if the feeling the new man in your life is expressing is real or real fleeting. Otherwise, why would there be so many self-help books on the shelves, pondering and over-pondering these questions? Let’s face it, why would I be writing these essays?
That still doesn’t answer my question though. The question just leads to other questions. Is it curiosity? Lack of savvy? Some morbid desire to emotionally destroy the female gender one kiss at a time? Nobody seems to be able to give me a straight answer on this one. And the one person who might have been able to shed some light on this is still ignoring my text message, three floors down on the right.

The Single Girls' Table

2005-01-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

My girlfriends are some of the most amazing, talented and gorgeous girls you could ever hope to meet. I’m not just saying that because they’re my girls and I love them. My friend E is working at a major news network (like me), climbing her way to the top. My friend M was sent to Rome to work on a major studio production that is currently grossing bucket-loads of money. My friend D is a huge pr rep for one of the largest department stores in the country. My friend K is going to grad school at a top university, majoring in English literature. My friend A has a degree in physics from an Ivy-league school. You get my point. They are all accomplished women in their chosen fields. But they’re not nerds. These are also girls who you could sit and watch a game with, who could go out in jeans and a tee-shirt and sneakers and drink you under the table, girls who have been known, on occasion and when it is necessary, to dance on bars. These are girls you, male of female, would want as girlfriends.
But all of us are single. We don’t understand it. We are shocked by this when we look at each other (ourselves, we can understand, but these girls are single? How do they not have men knocking down their doors? If I was a guy, I’d be trying to put a ring on their collective fingers!)
My friends K and E and I went out to a bar one night to hear K’s ex-boyfriend play. He’s a musician, so one would think that he would be more sensitive, more in tune with his feelings. One would be wrong. K’s ex is so beyond stifled that the light from stifled won’t hit him for another hundred thousand years. So there we are, in a bar in the Village, listening to him sing love songs to K (and he is singing DIRECTLY AT HER. There’s no misunderstanding this one. He’s looking at her the whole time he’s performing. And although the audience is small, we are not the only ones there for him). He’s even singing a song to her about how he’d like to be able to write a song to sing to her. If it wasn’t so darned cute it would be damned pathetic.
It also made me want to shake him. Here he is, writing these beautiful lyrics, singing these amazing melodies and HE STILL CAN’T COMMITT. The answer is quite literally written write in front of him. And still he’s struggling for an answer. You just want to hit him on the back of the head and say, “Really?” How can he not get this? He’s got it all neatly written out in front of him in his own handwriting.
We move on quickly after his performance. K doesn’t need to torture herself anymore, and besides, the act that follows the ex is a woman who feels that she will be provocative as an artist if she makes her audience her gynecologist. Pictures of her last pap smear would have been less offensive. We travel to a bar down the street where K laments into her very strong drink. “Why?”
I’m asking myself the same question for all of us. Why are we unable to find men that commit? Why are men unable to step up and be men? When do men stop being little boys and become men?
When you look over the course of our society and the path it has taken in terms of education alone, it may be easier to understand this prolonged adolescence. Even as late as the 1980s, college was a choice, not a requirement. You could still get a decent job, work your way up, make a decent living on a high school diploma. Nowadays, that is just not the case. And whereas men would have to stop being little boys at 18 in days of old, that age is now pushed forward to 22. At the earliest. Grad school is almost a requirement these days. That’s at least 2 extra years of school, 2 extra years to be the immature asshole you’ve always wanted to be. You’re still in school. Might as well live it up while you’re still there. That’s K’s ex’s problem. He says he feels that he didn’t get to live out his twenties, so he’s living them out now, in his thirties.
Unfortunately, girls have always been more mature and this extension of foolhardy youth is getting in our way even more. For men, 35 is the new 25. But it’s kind of creepy when the 40-year-old at your parent’s cocktail party is your best bet. So we try to turn the pieces of coal we find at the kiddie table into diamonds. The problem with that is it takes a lot of pressure and a lot of years to turn a lump of coal into something you could wear on your finger and who has the time for the work and the pain and the heartache it would take? Especially when you’re on your own high-powered career path. So we wind up being the highly accomplished single-girl table at a cousin’s wedding.
Later on that night, at the third bar of the evening, we meet some guys our own age who seem fairly normal. They’re in the city for the night from Jersey. They’re all doing well, or so it seems. One has a house in Jersey that he bought himself. Then it comes out that he bought the house with the earnings he made by selling a whole lot of cocaine. Suddenly, the 40-year-old doesn’t look half as creepy as he did. Maybe it’s time your parents had another cocktail party.