Six

Sixth time’s a charm? Who knows. I think it’s fair to say that, considering what’s already happened in this experiment, that anticipating the worst is to be expected. Getting ready frantically at the last minute, throwing on a shirt that doesn’t quite fit as it should, noticing the clump of eyeliner in the corner of my eye, and covering up a stain with a cardigan becomes all that I can muster.

I didn’t care about Six. I didn’t care about this stupid date at this stupid coffee shop. And I certainly didn’t care if I looked a steaming pile of shit when I walked in to meet him.

Let me elaborate: I had on a button down, camel-colored shirt that I bought at H&M ages ago and hadn’t worn in years. I threw on a J. Crew floral cardigan to cover a stain on the right side of my stomach and to hopefully hide the fact that when I sat down, the buttons down the front of the shirt gaped open, revealing the magenta of my bra, the pale white of my skin.

But really, who gives a fuck? Just another stupid date out of fifty-two. I was getting sloppy. I was also coming off of an afternoon of packing up my life and my dog into the back seat of my car and transferring it all to my mother’s apartment because my furnace stopped working, and I was left with a house slowly sinking into the low 50’s. With the idea of a multiple thousand-dollar home repair looming in the somewhat near future, I was in no mood for being fun and flirtatious.

I left late. My mother was not pleased with me depositing my skittish dog in her new apartment, on her new carpets that she had bought THAT MORNING. I don’t blame her. So I did my best to empty the dog’s bladder on every fire hydrant and sign post that we could walk by, and when I left twenty minutes before 4pm, knowing full well that it took me thirty minutes to get to where we were meeting, I didn’t care. I looked like shit. I felt frantic.

At ten minutes before four, I ran into a nasty stretch of holiday traffic and came to a standstill. Shit.

Luckily I had Six’s phone number, so I called him from my stopped position on the highway.

He picked up the phone and said, “This is Six.” Hm. His voice was kind of hot. How is it that I’m old enough to be dating men who sound like such MEN? I remember when I ran the risk of dating some boy who sounded like a chipmunk. Now they all sound SEXY. I faltered a bit. Shit, I thought. Maybe I should have put on a more flattering top. The truth was that my breasts were everywhere in this shirt, and there is nothing that I hate more than being self-conscious of my cleavage. It’s a more recent acquisition in my life, my small B’s turning resolutely into D’s during the year and a half I took birth control. Even though I have been off of it for a number of years now, the breasts have stayed, a constant reminder of my past promiscuity.

I don’t like them. I think they’re just another part of my body that is fat, is oversized, that struggles to fit into clothing. So when I say that my boobs were all over the place in this shirt, it’s not a good thing. It’s a situation that makes me highly uncomfortable, and when I feel physically uncomfortable (in too tight pants, too high heels, too short a shirt), I am miserable. I get a little obsessive. I have a hard time focusing on anything other than my boobs all over the place or the pain in my feet of the waistband digging into my stomach.

You see where I’m going here, right? I should have rethought my outfit entirely.

But I didn’t care. I was meeting him for a short hour, if that, and getting the hell out of dodge.

Except now his voice sounded sexy, and when we moved towards the end of the conversation he added quickly, “Thanks for calling to let me know.”

Hm. Polite. Sexy voice.

But no worries. I am bitter and jaded, remember? I still figured it would all go to shit when I got there. He would be awkward and uncomfortable and ugly and I could go home after an hour and spoon my pup.

I didn’t arrive as late as I anticipated. I was about ten minutes late, and when I walked in and saw him across the room, I REALLY regretted underestimating the outfit.

FUCK! He was ATTRACTIVE! I think a very safe generalization is that people put the best pictures of themselves up. Pictures that don’t capture the extra inch of fat around their stomach, the awkward way in which they walk or carry themselves, the way their eyes constantly blink when they’re talking. But somehow Six had missed that memo. His pictures didn’t do him justice at all because here he was standing up from his high stool and pulling one out for me and he was confident and tall and smiling and smart (like, intimidatingly so) and, damn it, he was attractive.

I’ve definitely learned from every date that I’ve been on so far, and if I have learned anything from this one it is to anticipate the worst, but dress for the best. Because, as much as I tried to fight it, what always happens when I feel uncomfortable happened: I wasn’t at my best. There were some moments of silence. There was loud jazz playing in the background. And all I could think about was how slouchy I was, how much my shirt must be gaping open, how my breasts were EVERYWHERE, taking up my ENTIRE BODY, covering my stomach and my legs and my feet and my face and how can he not be staring directly at them because they are ALL OVER THE PLACE.

I’d say the best part was when we got up to leave and I gratefully zipped up my jacket, covering the whole shirt debacle. Walking out to the car and standing by the back of it was, by far, the most comfortable I had been the entire night, in spite of the cold. We talked freely and easily then about Pixar and Civics and the Patriots. Here’s hoping that will be a more lasting impression than the one of me scrambling onto the tall stool like a little person and my ridiculous Dolly Parton breasts pushing and craning to be seen, because, um, I totally texted him when I got home.

Yeah, that’s right. I contacted him first. And we all know what that means.

Five

Welcome to your first ever, off the cuff, mere minutes after a date, date review. No, really! Thirty minutes ago, I was sitting across the table at Panera from Five, and now I am sitting at a small table in Starbucks and writing about it. This should be fun!

I prefer a day or two to pass before summarizing, but I’m going a little stir crazy in the same location, at the same table, going over the same damn words every day for the past three months. I need something a little fresh.

A date review to break up the monotony sounds perfect, no?

I mentioned how Five was already annoying the shit out of me, right? No? Five was already annoying the shit out of me. In fact, he had been for weeks. We’ve been trying to get together for a date for that long, and it was kind of my fault, but mostly the weather’s, and then a good bit of Four’s. Let’s blame everything on Four from here on out. Fuck Four.

I’ll admit it: I’m not exactly in a jovial YAY let’s MEET PEOPLE kind of mood, but I’m pushing through that. I had a good session with my therapist (I love my therapist), we sorted out the entire Four debacle, and I have obviously decided resolutely to move the fuck on. Hello, it was two weeks. Get over it.

But back to Five being annoying. He has been, underhandedly mentioning how difficult it has been to meet (hello, it’s called RECORD SNOW FALL!), and then trying to change the time of our meet up today, underhandedly complaining AGAIN in this really obnoxious “I’m just kidding!” kind of way when I said that the new time wasn’t possible. It’s the day after Christmas! It’s a little hectic. You’re lucky you’re getting a date at all, buddy. But I held my ground, and we met at our original time, and I was equally as unexcited about it as I have been about all of these dates. Maybe it’s a defense tactic.

Oh. Looky here. Five just texted. You get to experience this in real time. Exciting!

Except not really, because Five wasn’t all that exciting. Five was, well, kind of… oh, I hate to do this because really he seemed nice and genuine and… fine, I’ll just say it: Five was kind of dorky. That’s okay, I know, but it was the kind that is awkward and maybe a little sociopathic kind of… there’s really no other way of saying this… not someone I would ever want to fuck. An awkward exchange of bodily fluids in a twin, unmade bed, on sheets he’s had since college after watching all of Star Wars one evening? Yeah, that’s more likely.

But back to how it went: it was fine. We met for drinks at Panera. Him, coffee; me, tea. (Did I punctuate that correctly? Don’t tell me if I didn’t. You try rereading the same twenty-six pages over and over again for weeks on end and let me know how your mind sees common punctuation.)

He was awkward as hell when I first walked in: not looking me in the eye, looking at the ground, looking anywhere but at me as I made my way across the room to the table he had picked out. And when I got there, I realized quickly that he had already purchased a beverage. I guess that’s normal, considering the casual setting, but I wasn’t expecting it. So I sat down only to say an initial hello and then excused myself to go get my own drink. When I came back to the table we talked easily enough. Not much as far as chemistry is concerned, but he asked me about the essay I’m working on, told me about one he had written in college on leadership models that somehow compared Martin Luther King Jr. and Star Wars, and as much as I wanted to be interested in this, I couldn’t hear anything but “Dork dork dork dork dork dork. Dork dork dork dork. Dork, dork dork dork dork dork dork dork. Dork dork dork dork dork: dork dork dork dork dork dork dork!” I’m not saying that this is an immediate deal breaker. It’s not. There is some real symbolism and significance to Star Wars, but I do wish that someone would send out a memo to all men that mentioning Star Wars on a first date is probably not the best idea. Unless you’re obsessed with it and it’s your life and you need a girl to put on a Princess Leia costume before you’re capable of getting an erection, in which case you should mention that immediately so she can run, screaming, in the opposite direction. Or wink and reveal a flash of white and gold under her shirt and have you fall madly in love with her. My dating philosophy: it’s better to get all the skeletons out of the closet from the start. Better than finding them out later when you’re too wrapped up in emotions and rose-colored glasses to see how terrifying they really are, no? And wouldn’t you want to find someone, ultimately, who would love you, skeletons and all? I know I do.

Just saying.

The entire date lasted for about an hour and a half.

Maybe we’ll just be friends. Or writing buddies, because when I mentioned wanting to one day teach writing at the college level, he told me that he had written a novel.

“Oh, really?” I said, leaning in closer. “What kind of novel?”

“Modern fiction,” he said. “Kind of like Dan Brown.”

Oh. I sat back in my chair, slightly disappointed. Again, not judging. (But kind of, you know?) I read The Da Vinci Code. It was just a missed moment, and when he launched into some bizarrely inconsequential and nonsensical explanation of how it starts and how it is a lot like The Manchurian Candidate, but NOT because he wrote his BEFORE the movie came out, and then something about something that I didn’t really listen to and all of a sudden he was talking about computer code and the technology behind house arrest.

Really.

Maybe it was nerves. Regardless, I won’t be initiating contact, the test of a good first date, in my book. I could definitely wait for Five to contact me. That’s not the best sign in the world, but at least I’m not writing him off with the likes of One or the felon I accidentally dated earlier this year.

In conclusion: if he wants to see me again, I’ll go.

In the meantime, I’m meeting Six tomorrow.

Five: The Preliminary

Even though I find Five to be highly annoying, I'm meeting him this weekend for coffee. Knowing that I have myself holed up in a local Starbucks, working on a writing project, he texted me a random bout of encouragement...

Five: ... and I lived happily ever after! There you go. That is how you can end your paper.
104: Ha. Yeah right. What about the objectified female characters in Shakespeare? Do they too, because that is what I'm writing about.
Five: Well, with Taming of the Shrew it's been said that one view can be tongue in cheek where Katherine isn't "tamed" but actually found her place as "proper"woman in private.
Five: I took a women in Shakespeare course.

Um, whoa. Bonus points for Five. I was expecting a response about NASCAR.

Characters

Stewart used three hopeless, unappealing lines to pick up women. One was that he would have been a concert pianist if his fingers hadn't been so fat, but they were, so instead he became a plumber. Another was that he was a very rich man and had always tipped the hookers well in Vietnam. The third was that his mother rented him a great room.

-Rebecca Barry, Later, At The Bar


I'm surprised I haven't met any Stewarts yet. Although, knowing this town and my luck, I'm sure I soon will.

The Seventh Book

Forever...

I don’t know what all the hubbub is about. Birth control and teen pregnancy and foul language? Please. I think those are the least offensive aspects of this book. For me it wasn’t the fact that Blume made sex and “love” and contraceptives an integral part of her book that bothered me. It was how cavalier it all was.

This is tricky, reviewing a book meant for young adults, especially when it deals with very adult themes. I was left wondering: what age of reader was this book written for? The characters in it are seniors in high school and in a place in their lives where things like sex and relationships are the norm, if not the entire focus of their days. But the way it was handled, the way Blume breezes through the actions, the emotions, the sincerity of the characters makes me think that this book is meant for children. Is it?

I have a hard time placing proper reading levels. I was reading Judy Blume’s so-called “adult” novels by the time I was twelve. And that’s not me bragging, I swear, but this book seems ludicrously simple to me. The characters are all one-dimensional and the ways in which they deal with the issues of impending adulthood were flat, unimpressive, and downright immature.

I’ve always been a highly emotional person (understatement of the century), so maybe it’s me, not Judy. After all, I was writing Sylvia Plath quotations in a notebook in ninth grade, lamenting the end of my first relationship. But, no, I think it is Judy. I think it’s offensive to write a story about young love and make it so… vanilla. After Michael kisses Katherine for the first time she describes it as “a nice kiss, warm but not sloppy” (10). Um, WHAT? That’s her only reaction? Am I a freak of nature then? Was I the only person who ran into the front door of her house, jumped up and down like a pogo stick on the kitchen linoleum, grabbed my mother by both shoulders, and squealed, “I did it! I kissed him!” Ok, I probably was. I had an unusually close relationship with my mother from a very young age. She was the only person who knew I had lost my virginity for months. But still, I remember my first kiss being incredible. Warm, yes, but also feeling a sense of the room fading around us, a sense that the only thing happening in the entire world was the meeting of our lips and the timid touch of our tongues. But maybe that’s too much information for children. Maybe that’s why Blume writes about love in such a blah fashion? Maybe my version is a bit too… erotic? Which brings me again to the question: who in the world is this written for? If it’s written for young adults, people old enough to be engaging in the behaviors described in this novel, then it’s offensively simplistic. Would I mind if my daughter read a book about sex and birth control and teen pregnancy and suicide? No. Would I mind if my daughter read a book about sex and birth control and teen pregnancy and suicide that dealt with these serious issues so flippantly, so childishly? Yes!

I mean, seriously. What the hell, Judy? You have a girl who sleeps with a lot of men, becomes pregnant, doesn’t know the father, and gives birth to the child just to “experience childbirth”?! Can I say “WTF?” in a book review? WTF, Judy?! If I had read this as an eighteen year old, I would have been insulted.

And if it is meant for children considerably younger, and therefore less emotionally evolved, than the characters, then I get the uproar. This book reads like a book meant for a girl in elementary school. Would I want my eight-year-old daughter reading a book that handled sex as some romanticized act where everyone is magically orgasming all the time? (Do not make me launch into my tirade about the socially irresponsible implications of suggesting that the female orgasm is easy to attain with the flip of a wrist, the touch of a finger.) Would I want my eight-year-old daughter reading a book that handled teen pregnancy as a fun adventure to have one summer? HELL NO. If you’re going to going to discuss those topics, do it responsibly. Show the consequences. Show the effects of those decisions. Not just, “On Thursday morning, Michael’s birthday, Artie hung himself from the shower curtain rod in his bathroom. Luckily, the rod broke and he fell into the tub, winding up with a concussion and an assortment of cuts and bruises. He was stitched up at Overlook, then transferred to Carrier Clinic, a private psychiatric hospital near Princeton” (150). Really? That’s ALL the attention you’re going to pay to teen suicide?

And WHY is there so much sex? Sex everywhere. Sex on every page! I read this sitting at a small table at Starbucks, and little children would sit down with their parents next to me with a steaming cup of hot chocolate, I would make a right angle of the pages to prevent them from seeing the sex. Sex everywhere!

I had a fairly sexually charged high school experience, so I don’t think that I am unqualified to say this: I don’t think I ever thought about sex as much as these characters do. In fact, I don’t think I ever really thought about sex or talked about sex when I was making out with a guy or taking off my clothes with a guy. We were in high school. We were mastering the art of foreplay. And when I did have sex there wasn’t some huge build up to it. It just happened. One day we were not having sex, and then the next we were having sex. Blume’s version seemed melodramatic at best.

The New York Times Book Review called this book “a convincing account of first love.” I disagree. Where were the genuine emotions? Where was the feeling that everything was so drastic, that every bad is the end of the world? It’s a feeling that only teenagers, without any sense of foresight, are capable of feeling.

Get with the program, Judy. I’m disappointed in you.

I give this book one star, which I think is generous. But I guess I kind of appreciated the attempt at a moral, which was that teenagers are too young to understand “forever.”

(Author’s note: I’m not a Judy hater. If you are looking for an informative book for young children about sex and relationships, I actually highly recommend the book Letters to Judy. I found it at a yard sale when I was young and read it cover to cover many times. It’s detailed, informative, and a wonderful resource for children to understand the experience of growing up without feeling self-conscious of “weird.”)

Elope

Dear Insanely Hot Man Sitting Across From Me At Starbucks,

Marry me.

All my love and devotion,
104

The Sixth Book

Yes, really.

One of my very best friends, who is also a writer, sent me on a Judy Blume buying spree over the summer, and I'm determined to reread the ones I read when I was, mostly likely, too young to understand them and finally read the ones that I never did.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

How is that all of my book reviews have centered on predominantly feminist readings? Am I slowly finding my way into an analytical niche, or am I just inundated with feminist influence given a certain essay topic I’ve been tackling lately?

(No, you don’t want to read it. No one wants to read an essay on the masculinization [among other things] of Miranda in The Tempest. I know hardly any of you read these more light-hearted reviews. I can’t imagine anyone being interested in reading something with legitimate citations and attached bibliography, except for my obliging friends who I am forcing to read it for feed back [thanks, friends!].)

But I’m going to go out on a literary limb here and say that one cannot discuss Michael Chabon without discussing his female characters. And why, you ask? Oh, unknowing reader, I’ll tell you: Chabon is undeniably a man’s writer. All of my wily womanly ways tell me that there shouldn’t be a difference, but all of my literary theory days tell me that there is: there is a difference in how men and women view the world, what they, therefore, choose the write about, and how, arguably, they write about it.

There is nothing to argue about with regards to Michael Chabon. His male characters are complex, rich, complicated thinkers. His women are flat, unfeeling, sometimes disgusting people. I find myself wondering if maybe all of this man-love is an indication of his closeted tendencies. But no. He has a wife. A wife who absolutely adores him. And babies. Lots of happy Jewish babies.

But still, there is a feeling I get when reading Michael, a not so happy feeling that my gender is being ever so slightly insulted, misunderstood, and that I am, without a doubt, being left out. At the risk of incurring the wrath of many well-read women, I find it interesting that many people compare this novel to The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, interesting because I kind of (brace yourselves) hated both of those books. Gasp! Shock! Horror! I know. But I did. And it’s only NOW, reading that comparison on the back cover that I realize why: they’re boy books.

Judge away, but it’s true. They are about boys, they follow boys, they revere the inner workings of boys in a way that is far from universal, and that is a theme that I just cannot latch onto. I can sit on a couch and read 297 pages of it, but it is from a removed perspective. I don’t find myself underlining or starring or exclaiming, “Yes!” out loud while I read. I read as an outsider. Yes, this is how some men must feel. Yes, this is how it must feel to come of age as a man struggling with his sexuality. But I can’t, could never, understand that.

Now. That’s not to say that a book about such themes can’t be good, because, while I hated Fitzgerald and Salinger, I looooove Chabon. Okay, maybe I should reserve the multiple o’s for a writer I identify with more readily, but I feel the need to use them here to show just how much the above discussion was not one containing any ounce of distaste. It just… is what it is. I’m a girl. I can’t relate to a lot of Chabon’s male characters. And I can’t relate to his female characters either. I guess this is what I should start with then. Get the feminist nonsense out of the way so that we can get onto the good stuff. And by good stuff, you know I’m talking about sex.

The first two sentences of the book set up the unbalanced portrayal of women in the novel: “At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We’d just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will—a year I’d spent in love and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him” (9). I didn’t underline this sentence or add any marginal notes because it came so early on in the novel, too early to be a part of my outlining of themes to discuss and examine. I wasn’t prepared for such an immediate indication of women being boring and odd and lifelessly discussed, but upon opening the book for examination just now, just this minute, it immediately jumped out at me. It sets up a precedence that is upheld throughout the novel: women are vaguely described in terms that show a lack of understanding on the part of the narrator.

Perhaps the clearest indication of Chabon’s jaunty depiction of women is Phlox, a pathetic, haphazardly put together, odd kind of woman. She senses Art’s sexual unrest before he does and in that way is allowed one graceful opportunity to shine above her male counterparts. But then that is just as quickly thrown out as she corners Art into meeting her in the library and arranges his fall back into her arms. Cleveland says it best when he reassures Art that Phlox’s determination to never see him again is temporary, as if her feelings and consequences are fleeting and flimsy and therefore not to be taken seriously. Even when she does argue with Arthur, it is an argument against an empowering lyric in a Bruce Springsteen song. And when Jane comes to her aid, it is not to stand up for her but to sympathize with her: “As soon as [Jane] heard that anyone was or had been in any kind of distress, she became an engine of sympathy, hurtling to the rescue” (152). Jane’s sympathy is one-dimensional, insincere. Even Phlox’s name is floral. She is superficially described by the clothes that she wears and the color of her hair. Not much else is revealed aside from her petty detailing of women who are jealous of her and her own jealousies towards Arthur, with whom she suspects Art is in love.

Even when Art is not the one detailing the nature of women, they still are one-dimensional. He tells the story of a man that he meets who says that “’Every woman has the heart of a policeman’” (217) and shares the story of his ex-fiancée who figured out that another woman was interested in him with an exchanged glance. Of course in this man’s telling of the story, his fiancée is paranoid and suspicious, and he is the innocent. The validity of his tale is questionable, but the instance of women being unattractive is not. When Phlox writes Art a letter, she spends half of it talking about how incapable she is of expressing herself in writing and how self-conscious she feels knowing that he is more intelligent than she is and probably examining it for mistakes. But when she does get to the point of the letter, she comes off as egomaniacal and demanding: “There is only one place in the world where you are supposed to put your penis—inside of me” (230). It raises a few eyebrows, no? I’m not sure of any woman who would ever say something of this nature, but welcome to the world of surface, unlikable female characters. Welcome to the world of Michael Chabon’s women.

But, then again, maybe it is partly purposeful, considering the narrator. He is a young man struggling with his sexuality and his opposite and demanding attractions to men and women after all.

(Take that as my transition into the good stuff.)

The main pull of the novel is Art’s struggle with his sexuality, his back and forth attempt at figuring out who he is attracted to more, men or women, and how he can rectify his ability to be attracted to both. We’re allowed the objective and critical viewpoint as readers to examine how he discusses men and women differently to realize which he prefers before he even does. By simply noting the way in which he describes his contact with women, one can see how uncomfortable he is in their presence. When walking with Phlox down the street, he describes his discomfort: “My arm was around Phlox’s waist, chafing against the funny white leather belt she’d used to hitch up her dress” (149). In a post-coital embrace, Art experiences a similar awkward and irritating embrace: “I grew more and more uncomfortable, bound up in Phlox’s arms on the rough carpet. I wanted a cigarette, wanted to unstick my prickling skin from hers” (261). Even Art’s interactions with women become a show and insincere: “I lifted her and swung her and kissed her, through all three hundred and sixty degrees, like a soldier and his girl. We got some applause” (141). His conversation with Phlox becomes “empty” but “happy” (142), devoid of depth and real emotion other than those found on the surface. Enjoyable acts of affection become irritating, and through the negative depictions of his interactions with women, Chabon reveals the true direction of Art’s sexuality even if Art hasn’t realized it yet himself.

Throughout the novel, Art’s sexuality plagues him, and we wince and want to tap him on the shoulder and point out the points at which it seems instinctually true. When faced with the love of another man or the suggestion of his homosexuality, the truth of that confrontation soars within him: “I felt something. It flew around my chest like a black bat that has got into the house, terrified me for an alien moment, and then vanished” (41). And when he decides that he can’t decide whom he wants to be with, Phlox or Arthur, he uses a coin to determine who he should be with, who he should call. But still, the instincts of his sexuality override the arbitrary outcome: “Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur” (239).

Overpowering everything else, feminist or fun, is the underlying path of the coming of age novel. It has the undertones of The Graduate, where time stretches on and on, seemingly endlessly. The timeline of the novel is one short summer, but pages and pages pass as plot unfolds and the reader is surprised to learn that only a few days have passed within the lives of the characters. It’s without a doubt a celebration of young adulthood, those magical years between the imprisonment of childhood and the freedom of adulthood. It’s through Art’s loss of innocence, the realization of his sexuality, and his sexual encounters with Arthur that he is set free from the confines of his powerful father and the weak-willed ways of his childhood. It is quite a lovely novel, capturing that time that we remember so clearly but so exaggeratedly with nostalgia: “When I remember that dizzy summer, that full, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness—and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything” (297).

I give this novel three and a half stars.

Phone Conversations Gone Bad

I just got off the phone with a potential. He sounded great on paper: a published writer, works for the government, a big reader.

Exclamation marks all around!

But on the phone he sounds like a bored announcer. Like a person who has written down the questions he wants to ask and gives his planning away in the intonation. Like a sleezy boss who's not really listening, just responding with canned answers. Like fucking Bill Lumbergh.

I hope he doesn't call again.

The Big Eeeeeezy

Have you ever noticed how every man has his own verb for ejaculating? I've often pondered this personalization of such a sticky word (pun intended!) and have even been shocked (read: repulsed) by some of the selections I've heard. I think this is a list worth keeping throughout this experiment. Not that I plan on bringing many of the fifty-two to orgasm, but I find it to be a very amusing matter. Kind of like how guys have different preferences for how someone refers to their penis. I've heard men prefer "cock," but that sounds so porn star to me. (Come to think of it, that is probably why they like it so much.) So I am a proponent of "dick." It's still dirty, but not prostitute dirty. (No offense to those women out there who use "cock." More power to you!)

But back to the issue of the male orgasm. I had an ex who called it "nutting." Blech. Just the image that evokes makes every orifice close up in protest. I just imagine sticky peanut butter... everywhere. How unfuckingromantic can you get? You want to "nut" inside me? No, asshole. Take your protein elsewhere, please.

Four had his own spin during our half-asleep hand job session: "blowing." As in, and I quote, "Can I blow it in your mouth?" First of all, that just sounds painful. Second of all, let's not get carried away. You're not packing that much that you're capable of blowing anything anywhere. You and I both know that a more appropriate word would be "drizzle."

Four

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Sneak Peek: Four

"Let me know when you get home so that I know you got home safely," he said across the empty parking space between our two cars.

I've heard rumor of men who do this. I've also heard rumor of men who write their women love poems in latin and wear shiny armor on a regular basis.

But say it he did, and I was uncontrollably swept up in the chivalry.

And then halfway home, he texted me anyway:

"I had such a good time tonight. I don't know that I could have asked for anything better."

Tomorrow, we're meeting for lunch.

Excuse me, Officer. Can you tell me what I did wrong?

Follow me on this one:

The weather here is terrible, so Four got rescheduled for tomorrow when the weather looks clear, and Five is going to have to be pushed back to sometime next week, and Six is scheduled for Tuesday so if Five gets pushed back past Six then Six will become Five and Five will become Six, and I'm pretty sure a Seven will happen somewhere in the mix. I'm getting ahead of myself, I know.

I spoke with Four on the phone this evening, and he was very talkative, very personable, very... country. What did I expect when I'm an hour outside of the city and he is an hour outside of that? But there's something about his accent that is particularly sexy. Or maybe it's the fact that he's a soccer player. Or maybe it's the fact that he's a police officer.

I've been pulled over nine times for a variety of vehicle offenses. I've never gotten a single ticket. Here's hoping my streak of police being putty in my hands continues tomorrow night.

Real Profiles, Real People

Um, since when is "soccer" a possible major in college? Liar liar, pants on fire.

A New Career

In How To Be Single, a silly, stupid, offensive book I read recently, one of the characters quits her job to take on full-time dating.

I get that.

Three

Angry girl music is on. Calorie-free tea is being sipped because I ate all of my calories in one meal today. A 1500+ calorie lunch at Chipotle. What, you don’t believe me? Fine, 1555 calories to be exact. A burrito with rice and fajitas and carnitas and corn salsa and lettuce and (here’s where it gets ugly) sour cream AND guacamole and CHIPS for crying out loud. You can add it up yourselves, if you want. It really happened.

This is the point in the dating process where I would normally throw in the towel and go back to writing short stories in the evenings instead of hunting out half decent men at all hours of the day. This is the point, three men in, where I’d shrug my shoulders, declare myself exhausted from the fifty-eight emails exchanged in a matter of days and the arrival at the other end without a decent man to write home about.

But LUCKY ME! I have forty-nine to go! Four is tomorrow! And five is the day after that! And LUCKY FOR YOU, my sleep deprivation is kicking in and, aside from causing a nearly projectile puke situation at the gym tonight, it’s making me a little KOOKIE. (Funny, if you attempt to spell that with a “C,” it’s just cookie, and that’s not at all the point of that sentence. But if I were a cookie, I’d be a snicker doodle, and I would eat myself because I’m starting to think that NONE of these men are ever going to get a second chance, let alone a third of fourth in which something of that nature would ever be appropriate.)

So, okay. I’m hungry and tired and horny and on high alert for hot men in every corner, picking them out on the train, getting mad when they have their left hands in their pockets, getting a little tingly when the man walking by me at Starbucks RIGHT NOW just happens to be halfway attractive and smelling deliciously of some kind of cologne. Excuse me, Mister? Can I sit on your lap? Your face?

Three was so-so. I wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about Three to begin with. He wasn’t entirely communicative in the days leading up to the date, and I anticipated a cancellation. But I am a woman on a mission and OH NO, DELICIOUSLY SMELLING MAN, DO NOT LEAVE! COME BACK AND STIR YOUR COFFEE BY MY TABLE SOME MORE!

Back to the sad smell of coffee grounds.

But meet up, we did. He chose a nice wine bar in a nice suburb and we both got lost on the walk over. It was 499 feet from the place where I parked and somehow I still got lost. And, as I waited for him by the hostess’s stand, he texted to let me know that he was either lost or blind.

He wasn’t blind. Just lost, and the bar happened to be down a small alley that wasn’t on our respective maps. We were looking for it on the main street and continuing to walk right by.

We sat down in the lounge area, large armchairs surrounding square coffee tables, on which we rested our glasses of wine. I sat in one next to him and turned my body so that I was facing him, leaning on the wooden arm, sacrificing the soft surface of my back to face him. He faced forward, only looking at me occasionally, when I was talking, when I was looking away, when I would touch his arm. I wasn’t a fan of that. I also wasn’t a fan of the fact that he didn’t take off his jacket for the entire time we were there. And it wasn’t like he was getting ready to run for the door. No, he was enjoying himself, he was asking questions, we made good conversation that lasted for four hours.

Time flies when you’re having fun, I suppose. Except it wasn’t an entirely rip roaring good time. He was attractive and normal and nice and well-dressed and smart and well-spoken and picked out a great place to meet, but he kind of spoke like my dad, in that rambling history major kind of way. It’s not anything I would deem a deal breaker, but it was my most tangible complaint.

I attempted this time to learn from the book of the week. In The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel describes the difference between how dogs love and how humans love: “I told him about the way [dogs] get to know you. Not the way people do, the way people flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn’t a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction—dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there’s not an end to it” (63). It was one of those reading moments where you realize the words could have been written about you. “That’s me!” you may as well declare. “I ask questions to get to the end of people!” So I took the opportunity of being inadvertently shown my behavior to try something a little different. This time around there were fewer questions from my end. The boiling line of fire was simmered into a ebb and flow of conversation about Greek life and the war crimes Lincoln committed during the Civil War and traveling around Europe and Harry Potter books. (Another complaint: he hated the seventh book. How can you hate the seventh book?!) It was all nice. Nice conversation, a nice hug hello, a nice walk to the car, a nice hug goodbye, and a nice “I had a really great time” and “I’ll call you” from him.

What I expected from this year was an onslaught of hilarious blog fodder, the likes of Three-ish. Crazy men with crazy back-stories and crazy attempts to get in my pants. And, while I’m sure there will still be plenty of those to come, what I was not prepared for were the fairly decent ones. I’m used to the crazies. I’m used to using their certifiable insanity as sound reasoning for blocking their numbers. What I am not used to is getting into the nitty gritty of finding someone who is more than just so-so, more than just nice, more than just eloquent and smart and cute, all qualities that are important, sure, but not the be all and end all of who I am supposed to be with. Dating the crazies is easy. They seem to flock to me. It’s the dating of normal men that has proven to be the most difficult so far. The men who don’t call, the men who I don’t feel like calling. I think a lot of people would find no fault in Three. He was fine, he was nice, he was great on paper. But I have forty-nine men to go. Would I forgo all of them for him? Naaaht so much. Would I go on a second date to see if there is something more there? Sure.

Let’s see if he calls.

The Fifth Book

The Dog of the Marriage

(Author's note: Sorry for not posting this last night! I passed out about thirty-six seconds into watching the first Harry Potter movie for the first time in seven, no eight [fuck, I'm getting old], years.)

Reading, writing. Writing and reading. I made myself sick this morning, reading this book on the way into the city, the train car shifting on the track as I read about guide dogs and divorce. I did better with it last night, tucked into bed with my own dog (not quite calm enough nor independent enough to be among the pages of Hempel, he who struggles spastically on his leash to get away from a tipped over, empty trash can on the mornings when the neighbors put theirs out to be picked up, emptied, and thrown haphazardly onto the sidewalk by the men who cling bolding to the backs of the garbage truck) curled around my hip, his head resting drowsily in the crease where my propped up torso met my legs.

But finish it I did, and happily.

For all of our sakes, I promise this will be shorter than the others. Have you noticed them creeping up in length from 2100 to 2700 to 3100 words each? Do not fear: half of this book and subsequent note taking was lost in nausea. This will be brief.

But don’t let the brevity suggest that this book was anything other than startlingly lyrical, poignant, suspenseful in its manipulation of details, thought provoking, and pause inducing.

The writing is pared down to the essentials, no fragrant adverbs, no flowery adjectives. Simply lyrical in its unapologetically bare prose. Paragraphs end in lines that one would expect to find in a poem, or are so short that they feel like prose poetry. One of the pieces, “Memoir,” is a one-line story (poem?) that forces the reader to pause and admit the truth and humor in it: “Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?” (95).

But let’s jump directly into the heart of it, shall we?

The epigraph sets the tone of the entire collection: “But the greatest desire of all is to be/ In the dream of another, / To feel a slight pull, like reins, / To feel a heavy pull, like chains.” In each story we encounter a character in a heightened state of loneliness, in a time immediately after the trauma of a divorce, a death, a sexual assault, or the return of an old lover. In none of them is this loneliness romanticized. Instead, they each reach for something more, a lover to replace a dead wife, the marital drama of an overheard neighbor.

There is an underlying ambivalence in their loneliness, an avoidance of the deeper consequences of their current situations, a quiet quality of lives that lack purpose and direction. It reminds me of lonely souls in Dave Eggers’ short stories, How We Are Hungry. In “Jesus Is Waiting,” the main character drives aimlessly along the east coast, purchasing hot peppers to “be good for whatever there was to be good for” (12). When she speaks to the gas attendant she asks him for directions: “’Where’s anywhere else?’” (10). She seems unconcerned when he doesn’t even point. In these stories, told by such vivid narrators, the sense is that each of us is so important, so unique, so deeply complicated. In “The Dog of the Marriage,” the narrator speaks of a piece of heirloom jewelry given to her by her ex-mother-in-law. She describes how little care she took of it, leaving it in a drawer occupied by mice. When she opens the drawer later, she finds the brooch surrounded by the shit left by the scavengers: “I thought about it, but I did nothing about it, and now the timeworn jewelry was in this sorry setting when it should have been safe in a tiny velvet pouch. All of us should be safe in a tiny velvet pouch” (24). That is the driving force of the collection: how we need to be cared for, to be loved, to love, to be seen, to be put to good use, and to be looked after.

This theme of loneliness, I’m convinced, is haunting me in my literary selections. But let’s really consider the works in which it has been the most striking: it is not specific to singles, to divorced wives, or widowed men. Even in the seemingly life-long marriage of Olive and Henry Kitteridge, loneliness pervades. I pity those people who avoid experiencing it, who stay in relationships that no longer fulfill them, who date without end a string of meaningless men. We are, each of us, always alone, even when we are together. Maybe it’s not the loneliness haunting me. Maybe I seek out the loneliness between the lines, between pages nine and ten, because I love characters, authors, plotlines that embrace it.

On that uplifting note, I give this collection four out of five stars.

The Fourth Book

Have you noticed that I'm behind? Have you noticed that I owe you another book review by the end of tomorrow? Don't worry, I haven't forgotten. Instead of continuing with Rabbit Angstrom, I'm going to take a small break with a small collection of short stories. One so small that I could read it tomorrow morning and have it reviewed for you by the evening.

So here, my dears, is the fourth book:

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, that's all well and good, but you also owe us two date reviews by Monday. I haven't forgotten those either. Another Three has taken the place of Three-ish for Saturday night, and Four is scheduled for Tuesday. This plan will keep me behind schedule for another week, but hopefully once the holidays are over, I'll be able to double book one weekend to make up for lost time.

Rabbit, Run

I don’t know how it’s happened that every book I have read so far has painted a fairly dismal picture of marriage. There has never been much thought to what books I would read. When discussing it with my best friend, she brought her hand to her chin and looked to the sky and said, “Hmm, what books show a compelling dynamic between men and women?”

Wait, really? I hadn’t even thought of being that purposeful in my choosing. Honestly, I took the fifty-two books I most wanted to read off of my overburdened bookshelves and stacked them in a corner. Any similarity of theme is purely by chance.

And yet, here we are, about to dive headfirst into a book about a young married couple, about indecision, about responsibility, about growing up, about letting go of the star-like quality of your childhood.

This book (oh, this book!) is so phenomenal. I can’t tell a lie, there were parts that lagged, times when I’d text a friend and say, “This book is such a roller coaster!” because sometimes the text did become dense and seemingly inconsequential. But the page would turn and there would be the most compelling of character interactions, a blatant struggle for power, and Updike would redeem himself entirely. In the introduction, which just happens to be written by the author and the best introduction ever in my humble opinion, Updike discusses the changes made to the first edition years after it had been published. I wonder if some of these changes resulted in the noticeable change of speed on occasion throughout.

But let’s begin, shall we?

Be prepared, like last week’s random outbursts of anger and frustration with Sebold, for my sudden declarations of adoration, because there were pages of this book that I want to write copy in long hand and tuck under my pillow, paragraphs that were so hard to read, hard to hear the truth of the “unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human” (xi). There will be complications in reviewing this book. I want you all to go out and read it immediately, but with that wish, I would hate to spoil the ending and the momentous plot changes that take place within its pages. I can’t tell you what happens forty pages from the end, even though without it, my discussion on sin and punishment is going to be lacking. But, I’ll do my best to stay strong and to not spoil it for you all.

Did I mention you should all go out and buy this book immediately? Because you should.

First off, an explanation: Rabbit, Run is the first book of four. “Each… composed at the end of a decade and published at the beginning of the next one[,] they became a kind of running report on the state of [the hero] and his nation” (vii). The first book was written in 1959, so the differences of that time have to be taken into consideration when discussing themes like gender roles, sex, and religion, all of which I’ll get into. But, in the meantime, Updike does a wonderful job of placing the time in which it takes place, mentioning details such as Janice watching the Mousketeers on television and going into detail about a commercial for Tootsie Rolls. In the introduction, Updike reveals that he would sit in front of the television and take notes on these specific details to add to the book’s solid grounding in its time. I’m eager to see the progression of these details and the lifestyles of the characters as the decades progress through the other three novels.

It’s all a bit Mad Men-ian, in a way. It’s different in that it was written in the time that it takes place, as opposed to Mad Men, which is a look back on the 1960’s, but one sees the same humor in noticing how times have changed: walking in on Janice for the first time, seven months pregnant and soused from too many Old-fashioneds, the way children are often disregarded and left to their own doing instead of nurtured in any concrete way, and the ever-present influence of religion.

Of course, the most predictable difference of note is the gender roles that the characters steadfastly hold to. It’s startling at first to witness the exchanges between Rabbit, or Harry, and his women: how he finds them stupid and fat and ugly. It’s insulting, and for a good two hundred pages I hated him for it. That wording may be a little too strong, but it was hard to stomach what Rabbit was doing to the people in his life on a grand scale, let alone how he debased and disrespected them in his head.

The first description we read of Janice, Rabbit’s wife, is far from flattering. At the ripe age of twenty-three she is described as middle-aged: “Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty. With the addition of two short wrinkles at the corners, her mouth has become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it. These tiny advances into age have occurred imperceptibly, so it seems just possible that tomorrow they’ll be gone and she’ll be his girl again” (8). Women, for the most part, are described by Rabbit as fairly unattractive creatures. In the moments when he is attracted to them, when he catches a glimpse of their naked bodies, generally when they are submitting to him sexually, the way he describes their beauty is purely possessive. To be pretty again would make Janice “his girl” as she used to be. When he sees Ruth in the pool he watches her bottom float above the water, which “ma[kes] him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership. His, she was his, he knew her as well as the water” (123).

The possession of women turns physically dominating in sexual situations. Rabbit feels an “insanity” once he knows that Ruth will submit to him, “he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it… it is her heart he wants to grind into his own” (66). Perhaps the most startling moment of chauvinism happens post-coital with Ruth: “His thigh slides over hers, weight on warmth. Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat. Best bedfriend, fucked woman… He reawakens enough to feels his dry breath drag through sagged lips as she rolls from under his leg and arm. ‘Hey get me a glass of water,’ he says” (75). When Rabbit finds out that Ruth has been with a man that he has hated since high school, and who he competitively banters with like two lions fighting over a lioness, he demands that she submit to him sexually: “’Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees. I need you to’—he still can’t sat it—‘do it’” (161). And days after his wife gives birth to their daughter, he objectifies her in his admiration of her new body and role as mother: “she… seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for fucking, hatching, feeding” (201). Women, to Rabbit, are merely objects. Objects to be fucked and used as pillows and give birth and feed babies.

Troublingly, Rabbit seems to use female submission as an outlet for his anger, suggesting in many instances that it is the woman’s submission that is to blame for his outbursts of emotion, his tendency to run, and his, sometimes physical, abuse. “He repeats, ‘Did I?’ and pinches her arm, hard. He hadn’t meant to do it so hard; something angered him at the touch of her skin. The sullen way it yielded” (124). When he rubs his wife’s back he “gathers such a feel of strength from her pliancy” (211). And when, a few minutes later, days after giving birth to his child, she turns down his attempts at sex, he furiously leaves her, blaming her pathetic behavior for his departure: “But she asks for it, lying there in a muddle sobbing” (214).

There is also very little distinction in women in his mind. They are all versions of the ones he knows: his wife, his mistress, etc. Speaking of his minister’s wife, he says that “he is struck; she seems at this moment a fine-grained Ruth. There is a world of women beyond Janice” (102). And let us not fail to notice mere paragraphs later when Rabbit, without thought of consequence, slaps his minister’s wife’s ass. What’s more interesting than Rabbit’s chauvinism is the eager submission of the women who are the victims of it. Working my way through two hundred and sixty pages of pure male domination, by the end I realized there was something more than just infuriating in it. At the risk of enraging every women’s libber in the world, there was something base, something biologically instinctual about all of the animalistic fulfilling of urges. Updike states it more clearly: “He knows only this: underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance. But between that preparedness and him everything reasonable intervenes” (206).

What ties into all of this talk of dominance and power and submission and struggle, is the discussion of sex, and there is no way to have a conversation about sex in this book without also having a conversation about religion. Hand in hand, they permeate Rabbit’s life as we see it. Sex, for the most part, is an extension of his domination of women: it is physical, it is overpowering, and it is mostly about him being a good lover. When Janice, for a brief interlude, takes over the narrative, she comments on this tendency in men. Let it be known: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve tried to express this to men I’ve dated, men who took more pleasure in being good at pleasing me than actually pleasing me, but, of course, the literary giants say it best: “You can feel in men’s fingers if they’re thinking about you and tonight Harry was first and that’s why she let him go on it was like lying there in a bath of yourself his hands going around you but then he began to be rough and determined and it made her mad to feel him thinking about himself what a good job he was doing sucking her along and not at all any more about how she felt, exhausted and aching, poking his thing at her belly like some elbow elbowing her aside. It was so rude” (215).

From the beginning, religion seems to be as much a part of the characters as their central nervous system: “Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty” (10). There is a lot of guilt to be had. When Rabbit has sex, he feels despair, and not predictably so for having sex with a whore when he wife is pregnant at home. No, instead his guilt seems to exist hand-in-hand with any form of orgasm, a consequence of Christianity: “He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows an expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair” (75). Despair at the release, not regret for the betrayal of his wife and child. When Ruth performs oral sex on him, his first feeling after the high of climax is “shame” (165), and when he masturbates in his loneliness, he feels “sorry” (199). The ultimate punishment for these sins come at the end of the novel when “the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world” happens to Janice and, as a direct result, Rabbit (227). It is an obvious consequence of their sin, and Eccles instructs Rabbit to be a “good husband. A good father. Love what you have… Carr[y it] out through a lifetime” in order to be forgiven (241).

The church’s presence is always felt, whether it is across the street from Ruth’s apartment or the constant attendance of Eccles, the minister, in the Springer home. The church’s struggle in this period of spiritual flux in history is evidenced by the relationship between Eccles, a devout Episcopalian, and his wife, a devout follower of Freud. Even Eccles battles with the changing role of religion in the world when he confronts an older minister about helping his parishioners in their time of struggle. The older berates the younger: “’Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job’” (146). Eccles symbolizes the changing role of the church in the middle of the century, even revealing his own struggles with sin and dedication to God. Even though he aims to help people, it seems that his “help” is often just an opportunity for him to hear about the sins of others in order to experience the sin through them: “When he does come in, at quarter of eleven, it turns out he’s been sitting in a drugstore gossiping with some of his teenagers; the idiotic kids tell him everything, all smoking like chimneys, so he comes home titillated silly with ‘how far’ you can ‘go’ on dates and still love Jesus” (162). He almost appears to be aroused by the confessions of his young parishioners, giddy in his attempts at connecting with them, having experienced their sin without committing his own.

The most fascinating element of the novel, more so than the sexy sex and the startling adherence to gender roles, is the question of responsibility. Updike admits to resenting the work of Kerouac and its apparent instruction to be free of obligation. He meant for Rabbit, Run “to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt” (x). This, then, is the sun around which the novel revolves. In Rabbit, Updike strives to show what happens when a high school hero grows into a man, what obstacles he faces in maturing and taking on the responsibilities of adulthood when baser, more selfish needs, call him to temptation. Rabbit sets out on a journey of pure instinct. He doesn’t decide to leave Janice until he actually does, and he stays away because it feels “second rate” to the “first rate” life he had as a basketball star (94). Rabbit is undeniably self-centered and immature, but he is also young. Rabbit is twenty-three, younger than I, mostly likely younger than you, and while we can cast judgment on his decisions from our lofty position as readers (something Updike makes a point of not doing, by the way), after two hundred and sixty pages there is something identifiable in his selfishness and envious in the way he fulfills it them without regard for consequences.

Eccles says it best during a round of golf: “’The truth is… you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts’” (115). Rabbit is repeatedly described as being a man of pure instinct. He lives in the moment and doesn’t give thought to the consequences of his behavior. He even concedes the level of his selfishness in a startling admission: “’When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery…If you have the guts to be yourself,’ he says, ‘ other people’ll pay your price’” (129). Not only does he not take ownerships of the consequences of his actions, he is perfectly content to let other people take them as their own. When Janice asks him to be sympathetic to her pain and exhaustion from childbirth when he persists in using her sore and stitched body to reach orgasm, he responds, “’I can but I don’t want to, it’s not the thing, the thing is how I feel’” (213). Towards the end he admits what drove him away from his life with Janice: “What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots” (232). In that moment of realization, we watch Rabbit grow into a man, or at least attempt to. He tries, in that moment, to kill that desire to seek out something better. But in that same moment, a clear moment in which Updike graciously allows us to view Rabbit objectively without any judgment, we see a piece of ourselves in Harry. We see our selfish desires, our questioning our long-term relationships, our picky dating habits. Harry’s self-driven and purely indulgent behavior seems to be a clear message of warning from Updike. It ties back to the religious crisis apparent throughout the novel. It is highlighted when Janice’s mother marvels at his behavior and directs a foreboding question to Eccles: “’if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?’” (132). I know Harry Angstrom. Sometimes I am Harry Angstrom. We all are Harry Angstroms, but it is the acknowledgement of right and wrong and the understanding of consequences that prevents us from living as he does. Harry Angstrom then is the selfish, self-centered, indulgent, irresponsible, base, animalistic version of all of us.

I’m so far over my word and time limit. I have twelve minutes until this coffee shop closes its doors on me. I’d love to talk more of the use of light, how it allows insight into truth to be revealed, the precise description of Janice’s alcohol abuse, the way Rabbit physically and emotionally mimics a rabbit’s behavior in his unrest and his tendency to, literally and figuratively, run, but I won’t. I’ll end here for the sake of not being locked in a coffee shop for the rest of the evening and for the sake of your tired eyes.

I give this book five stars. Five selfish, tired-from-running stars.

I spoke too soon

Three turned out not to be Three. We'll refer to him as Three-ish from here on out. Things got a bit bizarre last night. There was a moment where he quoted Whitman, and I finished the line for him, but then he mentioned how it was a problem that I wasn't Catholic because he wanted to be married in a Catholic church. Not that actually GOES to church, it's just important for him to be married in one, and I'm sorry but WHY THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT MARRIAGE BEFORE WE'VE EVEN HAD A CUP OF COFFEE?

Then there was a weird series of drunk texts about how high his sex drive was, how he loved hot breakup and makeup sessions, how he loved beautiful women, and how he would NEVER EVER cheat on me. Me. That's right, he was talking about us as if we were already a couple.

RED FLAGS! RED FLAGS EVERYWHERE!

And then the most bizarre thing happened, as if what had already passed wasn't enough. He said something about how beautiful he thought I was and how he wanted to stalk me like prey.

Now I know it's not just me. When most people find themselves in incredibly uncomfortable and whacktastic situations such as this, they laugh. It tends to shed a little light on the acid-trip of a world you've just entered. So, I laughed.

Boy, did that piss him off. The following text conversation is transcribed word for word:

Three-ish: Ok. U laugh at my serious sharing of feelings but thats ok. Nite.
Me: You're just so serious so soon. It's offputting.
Three-ish: Ok nevermind. Bye.
Me: Goodnight.
Three-ish: Forget about meeting.
Me: Ummm ok. [Is it obvious to add that I was fine with this development?]
Three-ish: U r not ready for what I have to offer.
Me: You're a little extreme. But that's fine with me. Have a good night. It was nice talking to you.
Three-ish: Bye. Good night 104. Sorry u cant handle my intensity.

Holy mother of Christ. Welcome to the world of dating, folks. It's a fucking minefield.

Two: The End

Apparently I’m a little old-fashioned. Apparently I’m more like my debutante southern best friend than I am like my northern independent ones.

Fact: after a date, I don’t call first. I don’t text. I don’t make an ounce of contact.

It’s the big test, more than paying the check, more than opening the door, more than not being a felon, more than not asking me what kind of porn I like.

Ok, maybe not more important than those last two. But still, it’s the moment that every person in the dating world dreads: will they make contact?

“You’re ridiculous!” my best friend told me the day after my date with Two. “Just text him! Who cares?!”

I cared. But she was kind of right. The point of this whole experiment is to shake up my dating kinks. So fine, I’ll text him. And I did. Something along the lines of “Thanks again for the drink last night. I had a great time. Hope you’re having a good day.”

For the rest of the morning, there was nothing. And in that nothing, something very insidious happened: the power shifted.

You know what I’m talking about. I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman or both or neither, you know what I’m talking about. When you go from cocksure to does he like me? And, if he doesn’t like me, what went wrong?

For some people I know, this can go on for days. For weeks. For agonizingly, blindly analytical months. Luckily, I’ve read He’s Just Not That Into You. I bought it when it first came out. I saw the movie, even though it missed the entire point of the book. I’m prepared for the worst.

But no amount of self-help literature can save the common person from the “What went wrong?” replay. I blamed the awkward ending, the fact that I was short, that I asked too many questions. And then I landed on the honker of 104’s self-esteem. Everyone has one. For some it’s their toes or their hair or their nose. For me, it’s my weight.

That must be it. He must want some stick thin girl. Yes. It could be nothing else. It’s because I’m fat and disgusting and who would want me anyway?

Girls. How silly we can be. How capable we are of loving our friends and our families and hating so vehemently on ourselves.

But back to Two and his lack of response. The fact is that he did end up responding. A few hours later. Some obligatory response. At least I took it to be obligatory. It could have been perfectly sincere, but the power had shifted. The self-esteem had been called into play. This was over before it even began.

But have no fear. I steadied myself. I texted him again later that day, in which I specifically mentioned how I was looking forward to seeing him at the concert the following night.

No response. None. For the rest of the afternoon. For the rest of the evening. For the rest of the night, into the next morning and the next afternoon and the next evening.

It was safe to assume this was over. It happens. I’ve certainly done it to enough men that I have a few coming my way. Some things just don’t work out.

Later that night I went to the local convenience store for a self-soothing stock up of junk food. I was in sweatpants and a zip up sweater I bought five years ago that has since shifted and shrunk into some cock-eyed version of what it once was. There was no makeup, just the blazing red of a pimple that I had persistently been digging at for days. That and the dark circles under my eyes. That and the pint of Ben and Jerry’s in my hand.

Suffice it to say, it was not my finest hour. Suffice it to say, it may just have been my worst.

I was standing by the pick-up counter, pint of ice cream in hand, waiting for my fried macaroni and cheese bites and garlic fries (I SAID it wasn’t pretty, ok?), when this extremely tall man walked in front of me and to the edge of the prep area. He stood there with his hands in his pockets for a few minutes, waiting for an order. But no, he didn’t order anything. He was talking to the girl behind the counter pouring Garlic Whirl (I believe that’s trademarked, folks) from a yellow plastic jug onto my steaming fries.

I wish I weren’t so nosey. I wish I weren’t a reader and a writer and an observer of the world. I wish I had simply stayed looking forward and waiting for my fried food to be delivered into my waiting and already full arms, grease hopefully leaking through the paper bag that held it. But instead I noticed, from the long range of my peripheral vision that the man was as tall as Two, had the same eyes as Two, and was even wearing the same black jacket as Two. For a second, and from my limited vantage point, I doubted it. He wasn’t wearing glasses. He seemed to have a little bit of a belly that I didn’t remember from the other night.

But then it all snapped into focus and it WAS him and I WAS holding a pint of ice cream and waiting for a huge bag of fried food and I had NO makeup on and I had a PIMPLE the size of Nebraska on my chin and my hair was disheveled and frizzing and my face and chest started turning the most giveaway shade of red and—

Wait a minute.

Wait just a damn minute!

He’s talking to the girl behind the counter! He’s telling her he’ll see her later tonight! The night of the concert that he was supposed to be seeing me at! She’s acting disinterested, and he’s pathetically pursuing her attention. And now he is walking out without a single purchase in hand!

Did he just? Was that just? Yes, it WAS! He came in to speak to the girl behind the counter. The girl working at the convenience store on the corner. The girl who has to wear a hairnet to work. The girl whose uniform covered a flawlessly pale and pert body. The girl whose hairnet held back thick hair the color of Amy Adams’s. The girl who was squirting garlic whirl on my fries and who just happened to be undeniably pretty.

There’s no judgment here. It’s a tough economy, and this particular store pays $10 an hour with benefits, which, in a town that has few employment opportunities above minimum wage without being licensed or certified for something, is a good deal.

But really? REALLY? I got stood up for a girl who works at what is essentially (for the sake of being universally recognizable) a 7-ELEVEN?!

The end.

Three?

I want to record this so that I don't forget to tell you in the date review.

First of all, Three and Four are lined up and ready to go. Look forward to that.

Second of all, this whole experiment really started because I got a pesky communication notification from eharmony a few weeks ago when I was with my best friend, and I made the mistake of complaining to her about it.

"What?! SOMEONE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU? TALK TO HIM!" she screamed in the confined space of the car. I hesitated. I had gotten in the habit of deleting these emails and letting my subscription be renewed month after month without ever using it, you know, just in case.

But something about her prodding, something ALWAYS about her prodding (maybe it's the volume), made me do it.

"Fine." So I answered his communication. And then it turned into the beast of this blog and this dating experiment.

The person who contacted me that fateful day kind of fell out of touch. He stopped writing. I lost interest and started talking to other people. But, long story short, it turns out he sent his phone number in an email and, when I didn't call him, took that as a sign of my disinterest.

This misunderstanding turned into Three. Everyone, meet Three.

Anyway, as I'm writing the post that I'm about the post, he's texting me apologizing for the miscommunication. We're both apologizing for the miscommunication.

And then, this conversation took place. Brace yourself, ladies.

Three: Ok. I appreciate your sincerity. Sometimes it's hard to filter the signal from the noise.
Me: Nope, no noise here. Honestly.
Three: I meant in the semiotic sense. [Am I the only word nerd who is already swooning?]
Me: I know. I did, too.
Three: I'm a bit inebriated so everything I text, you need to take with one molecule of NaCl.
Three: If you understand that, then I love you. :-)
Me: Salt. Got it. ;)
Three: Ok well ummmm. You are kinda hot.
Three: Do you like geeks?
Me: It would depend on the geek. That's pretty general. He could be a geek who called me ugly, in which case I wouldn't.
Three: Well um, if a sort of intellectual non-jock thought you were quite attractive?
Me: And he was nice?
Three: Very nice.
Me: Then chances are I'd like him a lot.

There were so many points earned in that exchange, I lost count.