On Them and You.

J always makes me smile:
We are talking about the communication. It was not odd, just out of the blue.
"I mean, I just don't get it," I'm saying. "She's way out of my league. She's beautiful." I draw out the beautiful, lingering on each syllable.
J agrees. "She's gorgeous!" He says. He extolls her physical virtues for way too long.
"Seriously, J," I snap good-naturedly (I rarely snap good-naturedly. I'm in a great mood.) "Enough! I know how much better looking than me she is."
"Oh," he says, pausing. "Sorry."
We laugh.
"Do you think he fell in love with you?" he asks.
My turn to laugh alone. "No," I say, certain.
Our conversations now revolve around the usual things. Work. School, when I'm thinking about it. My inability to find a suitable mate; his ability to find the best ones. It's a good pattern. We used to meet for platonic margaritas. I miss that.
I wish girlfriends were more lenient. But I get that too. I always hated when H would let his ex get weird around me, which always happened. There's nothing worse than the awkward run in with an ex. She and I faked a good friendship for so long that eventually it started to become real.

But it's gotten me thinking. Can you really be friends with an ex? Should you be?

R(2) invited me to climb Kilimanjaro with him a few weeks ago. Then he invited me to the Bahamas. Such a tease - he knew I couldn't take time off work. I would have gone in a heartbeat. He texts me to comment on my horrible date blogs. He thought the one about him was especially hilarious - he found it when we were still dating. It was all about how to talk to someone sixteen years older than you, the high suicide rate of CPAs, and the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. I loved that post. I would later come to adore the man. We still meet for dinners, drinks, whatever. He still beats me at Scrabble every time. I still love that we drank a bottle of wine from the year I was born. (I love that about men - that they actually have wine from the year you were born.) He always teases me about the bookshelf. He built the first one, I still need him to come and build the second one - it's been nine months. I'll never get around to it.
I still see his friends sometimes. They're great people. Sometimes I'm with him when we all hang out, sometimes I run in to them at bars. We always exchange pleasantries. It's all good on the surface.

You date. You separate. You re-acclimate. Then your relationship becomes something new and beautiful.

E and I have been trying to meet up to hang out for the longest time, going on months now. We should have gone out tonight, but I begged off, still sick and tired. I never want to have fun when I'm sick-grumpy. I wanted to take him to the 1Up, since he's never been, and I think the nerd in him will geek out so hard over life-size Jenga. We're excited to be friends with each other. We had a long conversation a few weeks ago. He'd just run another marathon (gross) and rocked it. I love this. I love that even though we have literally nothing in common (except our love for his dog), we can still sit there and be fun people. Next week. I've entered it into my calendar, to make it real.

My boyfriends always hate that I'm still friends with most of my exes. I don't get why. I think that's a good sign.

I keep bringing up Portland in front of K, for some reason. It stemmed first from public transportation (theirs is so much like ours), then it was the homeless youth, then it was the spiders (HUGE!). He finally asked me what it was about Portland and I had to explain. College, I told him, for a year I did the long distance hell with a kid from Denver who went to school out there.

It was the first time I'd brought up any of the past. I was nervous. I haven't felt the way I do since my junior year of college. I want to keep him. Therefore, I can't just let anything slip out my mouth like it usually does. I want to tread carefully with the past. I have nothing to hide, but, still... I want this exploration of each other to be organic (and USDA approved).

I'm talking to E about it today.
"I can't read him," I say, frustrated.
"You're hard to read, too," she says.

For now, it's wonderful. I'd like for it to stay like this. Nothing's official - it's still in those weird tingly stages. (That was a really gross adjective, I apologize. But I'm sticking with it.) But I like where it's going. I like what it is. I like that he likes me for who I am - awesome.

(Also, and seriously never tell him this because it comes out so creepy unless I explain it properly, he totally fits into my life plan of having my last name hyphenated to B-S. I think it's so badass. Today, my favorite professor from college was telling me to go get my doctorate instead of just my masters and I had the sign in my head: Dr. Barry-Something. And it was beautiful. I will only date people whose last name begins with S from now on. I'm already on my third "S" of the year. This may be a strange 2011 trend, though. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.)

Now that I sound absolutely insane, I'm off to bed.
Work is crazy this week, and I have a half-completed marketing plan that's due by like 10am. Oh great, deadlines. Yay.

On the Not-Date Date

Millennials are screwed.
Those of us born after 1982 have no idea what it means to interact with people romantically.
It's half the fault of texting, the rise of the "booty call," and the general departure from the chivalrous into the hook-up culture.
The middle ground we often stand in can be a beautiful thing. You get to try on pseudo-relationships before you leap into them, but a lot of chaos ensues in the meantime.

I don't want to sit here and say it's representative of my generation, because I've dated plenty of people (still am dating) who were born before 1982 and share the same, seemingly Milleninial semi-chivalrous-yet-hesitant-predilections. On the flip side, I've also dated plenty of people born after 1982 who are adorable, charming, and date-driven. Not every date leads to a relationship. Some lead to beautiful friendships. Others lead to crazy passionate affairs. Some just stop. Some just limp along. Some lead to the best stories ever.

Ready for this?
I've experienced a lot of that ensuing chaos, but nothing on par with this:

My dear friend E lives with three wonderful randoms she met on Craigslist. They have a giant, gorgeous house. They threw a Halloween party last weekend. At said Halloween party, I was introduced to this kid. We'll call him K.

Reader's Digest version: I meet boy at party. I kiss boy. We exchange numbers. We get dinner. He offers to pick me up and then pays for dinner. We have drinks. I try to give him a goodnight kiss and it's soooo (yeah, that) awkward.
[there are more gory details including the owner of the bar buying us shots and telling us we looked like we were going to get married, but I'll leave that for another day]

I hear today that he told his friend that it took him awhile to realize he was on a date.
What?!
I mean, that definitely explains all the weirdness.
I spent about an hour burning with shame, humiliation, and the prospect of semi-rejection before I snapped out of it. I'm not putting this one back on me. Seriously? You make out with me and then expect me to think we're having a business-y dinner meeting?

I start polling people I know:

I call Katie to ask her advice. "If it looks like a date and smells like a date..." she says.

I ask J. "It's like if you came over and I had Barry White on and was wearing a sexy bathrobe and there were rose petals all over the floor, but I just wanted to play video games."

E tells me to stop being such an idiot.

I was just watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother about Ted going on a date with Stella, only to realize that all of her friends are there, too. He whispers to one of them that he's embarrassed because he thought it was a date and she whispers it to everyone else. Then they whisper the collective response back at him. Everyone laughs at him.

This is my life. I am Ted Mosby, architect, and apparently, recent master of the non-date.


I'm semi-related news:

I guess it's somehow fitting that I'm wearing this shirt today:

The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.

SIGMUND FREUD, The Question of Lay Analysis

On the 30 - 50% Rule and the date.

"People only listen to 50% of what you say," I tell J.

We think about that for awhile. Half of what you say, you're saying solely for yourself. That's alright, because 50% of what you say isn't being processed by your audience.

It's the 30-50% rule.
And it's awesome.
You never have to worry about what you say in front of people, because it doesn't matter. Chances are, they weren't paying attention in the first place.

***


"You're not at all like I expected you to be," he says. 

"How so?" I ask.

"You wear a lot of black...You're not conventional at all. You look like you would be. You don't even have any tattoos."  

Inwardly, I groan. I hear the "not conventional" bit so often that I'm not sure it's even a compliment any more. 

Outwardly, I laugh. "I have two," I tell him. 

He's got me pegged: "Such a strong personality coming from such a petite girl," he says. "People don't expect that. I bet you don't get along with girls." He's not wrong. I don't. They scare me. 

As last night wore on and the bar got slowly more and more crowded, I found my eyes wandering. I love to look at people, to watch them shift uncomfortably, embrace happily, stand still sipping drinks. I watched the businessmen come in, all shiny shoes and Oxford shirts. I made eye contact, then shyly looked away.
He was telling me stuff about his passions, his dreams, his art, and I was listening, sort of.  Conversation was good, time passed easily. I got tired - it's the vicenarian curse. Adolescence slips away and all we're left with is the hope of eventual maturity. I'm doomed to be tired from now until the day I die.

It wasn't as horrible as I'd predicted. In fact, it wasn't horrible at all. He would like to see me again. I will. But I'm not sure I'm feeling any sort of promise, any sort of legitimate future frisson. As we said goodnight, I wondered what it'd be like to kiss him. Then I realized I didn't want to.

It got me started thinking about sparks. Instantaneous sparks. There are great moments in life when something beautiful begins. It begins with a look across a dark bar, a chance comment at a party, the fortuitous arrangement of time and place. Sometimes it begins with an internet email. A first date gone well.

I've never forgotten those beginnings. That couch on Carmen St. That New Years' Eve. That party in the snow in Chicago. That night we walked around the city. The night in Cape Town at the pool hall. The road trip where we stayed up most of the night. The first date that never ended. The first time you feel the frisson, the slow curling inside your stomach, the safe knowledge of feelings. I've not known those for some time now. Am I doomed to stir up those memories in the hopes of never losing that feeling?

That feeling is what I crave. And what I'm determined to wait for. Patiently. Or at least until I'm 25 and I get on match.com, whichever comes first.

***

Today's song:

West Coast by Coconut Records
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlYGEaeoBWw

On [has] been

He is not my forever mate.

I think I figured that out some time between our second date and now. The first two dates were really great. But then again, drunk me likes most things.

I'm realizing that there is a lot of stuff he hates. (I don't like hate. I think we shouldn't hate so much. I really only hate a few things. Toe-walkers and mouth-breathers, mostly.)

Fat people, for instance. One of the things he likes about me is that I'm skinny. Great. Flash forward seven years, to the birth of our first child and subsequent divorce based on the baby-weight that I haven't had a chance to lose.

He also hates wiggling. R once told me that me and his six-year old self would have gotten along famously because he once told his mom that "if you aren't moving, it doesn't count." I wonder what kind of strange six-year old snuggler he was.  I wiggle while we're snuggling, or before we fall asleep.I'll be adjusting, slowly shifting myself into sleep, and he'll say, "Just sleep!" as though I'm that obedient. The other night he said that and I kept wiggling long after I was comfortable just to annoy him.

When we're watching tv, if I say something - anything - he'll grab the remote, pause it, then go "shh!" at me and rewind to before I talked. If you want to hang out alone, do that. If you want to hang out with me, you're going to have to deal with side commentary. Especially when you've seen the episode at least once before.

He makes his bed every morning. Not usually a red flag, but if you know me, you know that this might present problems. Although, for the last week, I've been trying to at least return my bed to some semblance of order and have been successful. Worse than the making of the bed is the sheet tucking. He tucks it into the bottom like you're in a hotel. We switched spots one night for television-screen viewing purposes and I went to pull the sheets out and he screamed. Actually yelled "NO!"

But to be honest, it's not any of those things that proved to be the deal breaker. Minus the remote aggression and the fat-people-hating, there are compromises that exist. I'm a very adaptive person. I'll mimic your habits, tune in to your needs, find myself a niche in your life and fill it pleasantly.

It really ended for me when he moved my toothbrush.

I don't like the way he talks to me. I find his patronizing attitude frustrating. We argued about how your credit score is calculated and I found myself backing down because I wasn't 100% sure. I should have held my ground. I wasn't wrong.

So when he told me that he moved my toothbrush under his cabinet because he didn't want it to get dusty, I got mad. That's not even a smooth lie. I hope by "dusty" he meant "noticed by the other girl I'm bringing home" because that's how I translated it.

I woke up at his place at 5:57 that morning. I wandered around in the pre-dawn, unable to close my eyes again. I stood in the kitchen and watched the sun rise on another wonderful day. It was a moment of utter calm.


Nobody puts my toothbrush under the sink...

(...unless it's to prevent it from being literally contaminated by strange things. I personally don't like exposed toothbrushes, but that is beside the point.)


We went out together, rode the elevator in silence, and I kissed him goodbye.


Also, sidenote: Band of Horses is awesome. So awesome.