The Thirteenth Book

Bird by Bird

I apologize in advance for the let down. Not for me. For you, unfortunately. I've found in reading Bird by Bird that there isn't much in it to "review." It's a fabulous book that I highly recommend for any level of or interest in writing, a book that I find myself rereading chapters of depending on what I'm struggling with, but there's not much to say about it other than YES THAT IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL ABOUT WRITING and WHAT A GOOD IDEA TO FOCUS MY CREATIVE MIND and HAHA ONLY A WRITER WOULD UNDERSTAND THAT. See? It would be an obnoxious review. So I'm scanning my pile of unread books, looking for something I can whip up and present to you on Friday for review. The thinnest one on the shelf? Blubber, by Judy Blume. Another attempt at my Blume revival. Maybe this one will be a more positive experience?

I plan on sticking with fiction from here on out. Lesson learned.

An Ideal Situation

Well look at what we have here! A combined boy and book update! Enjoy!

Marry Him

Apparently I’m a little cray cray. You know, completely fucking whackadoo. There was a moment on Sunday, a very raw and vulnerable moment that I am not proud of in which I wrote this:

This is not happening. This is not happening to me right now on THIS DAY after LAST NIGHT. NO. NO! I refuse to believe that this is actually happening.

Do you know what I realized yesterday around, oh, noon as my mom was being admitted to the hospital for some nasty, weakening, puke-fest disease? Do you know what I realized after a week of taking care of her at my house and six hours of sitting with her in the ER the day before, for which I had to cancel plans with this boy I've been dating for a month (yes, a MONTH!), while my sister flitted about in a state of ecstasy, partying and whatnot, and while my aunt stayed home with her controlling and emotionally abusive husband because he gets mad when she goes out when he is home? Do you know what I figured out as I was getting ready to go meet this boy, THIS BOY WHO I HAVE BEEN DATING FOR A MONTH, to go to a nice dinner with and spend the night with and, oh, I don't know, maybe have sex with because FUCK dangling participles right about FUCKING NOW, OK? I realized that, in all my of my FUCKING life, I have never had a Valentine's Day.

NEVER.

NOT A SINGLE ONE.

So you know what I did? I called my aunt and told her I couldn't take my mom to the hospital because I had plans. And I felt terrible. And I cried. And I knelt by my mother's bedside in a very melodramatic way and told her that I felt terrible and guilty and she put her hand on my head in some sort of blessing and said, "No, 104. You already do too much. You should go." (I mean, really, it was a moment.)

But I fucking left. I put my dog in the kitchen, and I packed an overnight bag with a sexy dress and my black pumps and CONDOMS and my VIBRATOR and I LEFT.

And then this morning I left Nine's apartment at 8am to go spend the day at the hospital with my mom for twelve hours, and I kissed him goodbye and he told me to text him later to let him know how my mom was doing and I locked the door behind me and got into my car and thought, "I did it."

I did everything right this time. I waited a month. We had a serious conversation in which discussed past partners and being tested and monogamy and abortion.

I waited. I was good. I did everything right. He was nice and thoughtful and sweet and smart.

EVERYTHING.

And now it's midnight. On Valentine's Day. I've texted him twice. I called him once, which in his defense he did answer and have a 5-10 minute phone conversation for the last bit of his drive to his friend's house. But he never responded to my texts. He never called like he said he would.

So I am saying this publicly: IF HE DOES NOT CALL ME OR TEXT ME OR CONTACT ME I AM NEVER HAVING SEX AGAIN.

THAT'S RIGHT! I'M RECLAIMING MY FUCKING VIRGINITY IN ALL ITS FUCKING GLORY AND I'M CLOSING THE FUCKING DOORS.

And OF COURSE I came home tonight at MIDNIGHT to a FREEZING COLD HOUSE because my FURNACE is BROKEN. AGAIN!

I can't believe this is happening again. All of it.

Happy FUCKING Valentine's Day.

I even posted it. I’m sure most of you missed it because I took it down about 27 minutes later when he CALLED and said that he had been TEXTING me all day with no response and I had been MISSING all of them because the hospital totally FUCKS with cell phone reception.

Yeah. I told you. Completely fucking nuts. But the problem since then has been all the vulnerability and all the fear and whack crackers that something like that creates have yet to subside. And since then, our communication has been limited to a few minutes when he gets home from work, a few more minutes before he goes to sleep two hours later and that’s it.

This puts me in a bad place mentally, perpetually convinced that he is about to end it. It’s not a pleasant place to be, but I’m keeping it to myself, trying my best to not let him see it. And then yesterday I was telling my mom about our lack of communication, and she said,

“Didn’t you say he’s working really long hours this week?”

“So?”

“And didn’t you say that he apologized for being so tired all the time but that it was his crazy work schedule?”

“So?”

“So, how many hours is he working this week?” I looked at the ceiling and calculated. Twelve hour shifts for five days a week and then a thirty-hour shift on Saturday for the next month.

“Like… ninety?”

“104!”

“What?”

“You don’t think that is why he is tired and has less time to talk to you in the evenings?”

“No. I think it’s me. I think he isn’t into me.”

“You’re nuts,” she said and went back to watching the Olympics. Ok, so maybe she had a point. The first being that I’m nuts, and the second that it wasn’t about me.

There’s something very dangerous about the He’s Just Not That Into You argument. There’s something very all or nothing. Something very selfish. Something very “I deserve the best all the time and forever and if not then you’re not really into me and I deserve better.”

I’m reading a book that is changing my life. Well, that’s kind of questionable, but it is changing the way I view dating and the He’s Just Not That Into You philosophy that I’ve come to live by since circa 2005. The problem with HJNTIY is that it leads to women believing that they deserve all the attention, all the love, all the affection, all the perfection all the time. It does not account for a man who works more than twice the number of hours she does in a week. It does not account for a man who is in a bad mood because he put on a few pounds. It does not account for men being just as human and flawed and temperamental as women are. If women were expected to be doting and perfect girlfriends/fiancées/wives all the time or forget it, there would be an outcry of raging feminists. I’d be one of them. It’s a double standard. We think we deserve perfect men who love us perfectly when we are not perfect ourselves, when we have fat days and act like complete bitches (um, last Friday for me, I don’t know about you) and when we don’t fucking feel like giving another fucking blow job for fuck’s sake.

I had a conversation with my best friend yesterday that went something like this:

BF: How are things with the boy?
104: Good.
BF: Just good?!
104: Yeah.
BF: WHAT? You’re so wonderful! You’re so AMAZING! You deserve someone who is stunning! YOU DESERVE THE BEST!

Here’s where we get into trouble, according to Lori Gottlieb. Here is where we pass up the 8’s for the 10’s because we think that we are perfect and we deserve perfection. Here are the facts: I am not a 10. I’m probably more like a 7, and that’s only because I have my life together and have a pretty face. If we were going on looks alone, my body fat percentage would easily knock me down to a 6, if not a 5. It depends on whom you ask. So let’s say that, during all of my viable dating years, I’d pass up the 8’s in search of a 10, who BY THE WAY DOES NOT EXIST, so I’ll be searching forever for an impossibly perfect man and then I’ll be 41 and single and the only thing I can get with my shriveled up uterus is a 5. A divorced guy with kids and an evil ex-wife, or, even worse, a guy in his forties who has never been married. :::SHUDDER::: Should have stuck with the 8, right? The point is that what I DESERVE is a good boyfriend. Not a perfect boyfriend. After all, I’m not a perfect girlfriend (see above). I deserve a good man who is intellectually stimulating and a good communicator and shares my same desire for a family. (Lori asks us to separate our wants from our needs when looking for a match, and then throw out your wants because things like being tall don’t say anything about what kind of man he is, and then narrow your needs down to three. Those are my three.) Of course I don’t yet know if Nine fits the bill. I don’t yet know if, when push comes to shove, I’ll feel heard and respected when an issue arises. We’ll see.

This passage best sums it up:

"In America," she said, "when a potter makes a pot, they put a glaze on it and put it in the kiln and know exactly what it's supposed to look like when it comes out. But when the Japanese make a pot, they put it in a wood-fire kiln that could be any temperature, and when they take the pot out, it's not always exactly like they thought it was supposed to look like. And they say, 'Oh, wow, this is what the fire did to the pot and it's gorgeous!' They believe that there's no beauty in perfection.

"So instead of knowing what the person across from you is supposed to be like, ask yourself the pot question, 'But what is it, and is it beautiful?' rather than thinking, 'It's not this and it should look like this.' The question you have to ask is, 'Do I like it?' instead of 'How does it compare to what I thought I wanted?' People can surprise you." (267-268)

The point is that I’m trying to not specifically LOOK for the bad in him, which, oh hey, it turns out I ALWAYS DO. So last night when he called, sounding completely exhausted after a thirteen hour shift because apparently all the babies in the world are sick, poor things, I tried to be understanding. I tried to think about how I would act if I weren’t looking for all the bad things about him like how he doesn’t respond to my text messages or how he doesn’t talk to me on the phone for long enough lately, and I tried to think about how I would act if I were appreciating him for all of his good qualities. You know what I did? I stopped acting like a total fucking fruit basket and started acting like a supportive girlfriend. (NOT THAT I’M HIS GIRLFRIEND! OH MY GOD! MY LIFE JUST FLASHED BEFORE MY EYES!)

Instead of getting angry and waiting for him to say something about whether or not we’d be seeing each other this weekend, instead of assuming that he was seconds away from ending things, instead of being bitter and holding out for him to come visit ME this time because I visited HIM last time, I breathed in and out and pretended like I was normal. And I said, “I’m sorry your schedule sucks so much this month. Is there anything I can do to make it more bearable?”

And I waited for him to say no, that he just wanted to stay home and sleep all of Sunday and then I would find out that he really went to his friend’s to play video games or go to a strip club or concoct ways to end things with me without it seeming like he used me for sex because OF COURSE he is using me for sex!

But instead he said, “You could come over.”

And I melted.

So I’m going over to his place on Sunday after his thirty-hour shift. He wants to take a nap and stay in, but he wants me there with him while he does. So I’m going to go over there and be supportive and a little more generous and not so fucking demanding of perfection all the goddamn time, because sometimes, every so often, it’s not all about me.

I know. I’m just as surprised as you are.

The Twelfth Book

Double book reviews this weekend!

The Eleventh Book

Into The Wild

I know I’m supposed to be literary and serious with this review. I know I’m supposed to criticize Krakauer’s inclusion of personal anecdotes and his bias perspective. I know I’m supposed to take a stand on either side of the Chris McCandless debate and call him a suicidal moron or a glorified idiot or a romantic hero. But, honestly, I don’t give a shit about the debate. I think it’s reductive and insulting to give in to it anyway. Here was a young man, a life, a being struggling to live his life in the most meaningful way possible. Now, I can say that he based his ideas of a romantic and true life on some unsound sources. Jack London never lived in the wild, Chris. He was a fiction writer. But still, he found some sort of truth in his words and chose the life that he chose. I wavered throughout the book. I went back and forth between the images of his sister and parents and the underlined passages in the books found by his body and the obvious sides I took after reading each. He was selfish to be so reckless with someone his family loved so dearly, he was brave to live his life in a way that he believed to matter. I closed the book yesterday afternoon somewhere in between those. Somewhere between knowing he was selfish and knowing that we’re all selfish if we’re really living a life that matters. After all, living the life we WANT by definition is selfish.

I did something after I placed the book on my small stack of read books that was kind of stupid. I know myself fairly well at this point in my life. I’m sure I will look back at forty and laugh at my seeming self-awareness in my twenties, but one thing I won’t ever be able to deny is how I know, and always have known, how fearful I am. I am very quickly and suddenly terrified: by visual images, scary sounds, the idea of eternity, certain astronomical discussions, any theme of apocalypse, and most definitely creepy children. I don’t even want to talk about that scene in The Ring where the little girl crawls out of the television because OH MY GOD NOW I AM THINKING ABOUT HER GREY, DRIPPING SKIN AND AM GOING TO HAVE NIGHTMARES FOR DAYS!

Thanks a lot.

But after reading the last few paragraphs of the last chapter, I became curious:

At some point during this week, he tore the final page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. On one side of the page were some lines L’Amour had quoted from Robinson Jeffer’s poem, “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

“Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.”

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief adios: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness. He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he’d walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.

One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horrible emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

I have to find that picture, I thought, as I tentatively opened my web browser and typed “Chris McCandless photos” into google image search. This is the fifth image that came up, and it is the abovementioned picture:

I thought about that picture all day yesterday, all while writing this review, all throughout breakfast and watching a recorded episode of The Colbert Report. There is something about that picture that scares me. Undeniably. I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s visually frightening: the gaunt face, the hair, the clothes, the legs that seem to not exist underneath the spaceless khakis. But more haunting than anything is his smile. He’s smiling. He knows he’s dying, he detailed it in his journal, he wrote a note for immediate help acknowledging that he was near death, and yet he was smiling. It haunts me that, even in the last moments, even when he knew that he had made a mistake and that this journey had led to his death, he did not waiver. He smiled. He smiled because he knew that he had lived a life that, to him, had the most meaning possible. It’s not my meaning. It’s most likely not yours. And he was undeniably an idiot for at least not taking basic supplies like a machete and a compass and some decent hiking boots. But it was his life, and he lived it the way that he wanted to. Entirely. How else could a person smile when they know they are hours from death? I think the debate over Chris McCandless’s life and death comes from the fact that these ideas of beauty and truth are entirely subjective. What was Chris’s truth is not everyone’s. But I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that they would feel incredibly fortunate to be able to know in the end that they lived their respective lives with as much beauty and truth as they could grasp.

Ten-ish

Before things started going well with Nine, there was a Ten lined up. I ended up not returning his call one Sunday when we were supposed to meet because he sounded abrasive in his voicemail message and kind of annoyed and hadn't put much effort into planning the actual date and I felt fat and I really just wanted to have coffee with my mother read the paper. We know this about me: I like a man to take charge. I like a man like Nine who has a plan for a date and executes it. A man like Nine who says, "It's too bad you watched Food Inc. and are now a vegetarian because I made a reservation for us at Ruth's Chris for this Saturday," to which I said "SCREW THE COWS, I WANT STEAK!"

Ten was kind of half-assing his way around meeting me, and I didn't feel inclined to put in any more effort than he did. So I didn't return his call, and when he texted me two days later, I said I got busy and had made other plans since our plans weren't definite. It's true. I take the plan of sitting around in my pajamas on a Sunday very seriously.

He still texts me occasionally, and I keep him on the far back burner in case things go south with Nine. I'm always prepared for failure, for a change of heart, for a total 180 of character. But the other day he sent me a link to his blog. His triathlon blog, where he records his workouts, his clean eating attempts, and his undying feelings for his ex-fiancé.

Hold up. What?

Yes, that's right. In his blog, he details his past relationship with her four years ago, how he has never gotten over her, and how he found out that she is pregnant and engaged and couldn't breathe for a few minutes.

Listen, I'm all for romanticism. According to my therapist, I am a romantic. But I also have a nasty realistic side that pops in and tells me NOT to send the link to a personal journal detailing how I am, and always will be, in love with my ex to a boy I would like to date in the somewhat, whenever I can get my act together and make a fucking plan, future.

Not to mention he's from Massachusetts and a Republican and has, like, ten siblings and a dysfunctional upbringing sprinkled with abuse and addiction. At least that is what I gathered from the blog.

Late Fees

I should have written fourteen book reviews by this Friday. I just went through the calendar year to count every Friday that I have been writing this blog. That means I'm five books behind. Holy mother of Christ. Good thing I work best under stress.

Adaptation

Oh, I've been meaning to tell you that I caught a random showing of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh on HBO or Cinemax or some movie channel that I pay far too much for to use so sparingly. It was good. Interestingly, they took some serious liberties with the story. They completely left out Arthur, the man Art has a love affair with, and transferred that story line (and ensuing hot gay sex scene) onto Cleveland. That then complicated things with oh what was her name? Oh right, it doesn't matter because she is a girl in a Michael Chabon novel. Jane. Of course. You can't get any more plain than that. It complicates things because Jane is Cleveland's girlfriend, and she walks in on them naked in bed together. Yeah, that was definitely not in the book. And Phlox is essentially replaced by Jane, except for a few sex scenes and pornographic acts of revenge. They essentially rewrote the damn thing, but it seemed more cohesive and fluent that way. It was a very effective adaptation for as many liberties as it took.

Now, as far as the first half of The Lovely Bones, which I watched the other afternoon with my mother who works at a car dealership full of sketch balls who do things like sell crack and pirate movies before they're even released in the theaters? Yeah, that was a huge hunk of cheese. I mean, come on Peter Jackson. An echo effect to make all of Suzie's lines "ghost-like"? You're worse than Sebold.

Julie and Julia

Do you think Julie Powell has a Le Creuset? I bet she does now that she’s a famous author. I’m pretty sure she has one in the movie version. But a prop on a movie set does not a gourmet chef make.

Julie, Julie, Julie. What am I to do with you? The truth is that I wanted to read this book after the piece you wrote about how you were depicted in the movie version of your book, which is a blog-turned-memoir for those of you living under a rock. She has a point, I thought, as I read her words about what can be conveyed and what can’t and what must be changed for Hollywood standards. Poor Julie Powell, I thought. Although I saw the movie and had kind of liked her. But maybe it was my penchant for all things Amy Adams. So, I thought after reading the article, she must be a SAINT in the book!

Let me tell you a little something, Julie Powell, the way you were depicted in the movie is WORLDS above how you depict YOURSELF in your book. I liked ya. I did. I wasn’t so interested in the scenes concerning you, what with the distraction of Meryl Streep as Julia Child, but I didn’t think you were whiny or annoying or self-obsessed like some of my friends.

But oh ho ho, Julie! In the book, which YOU yourself wrote? You’re a flipping nightmare, woman!

The thing that is so wonderful about writing, and more specifically blogging, is that a writer can create a version of herself that is flawless. I’d imagine for most people it happens without even trying. It’s like internet dating. You say the best stuff about yourself. You turn on the charm via text and phone conversations. The person doesn’t get to see how you get bloody noses on a daily basis or how you walk uphill like a duck. Sometimes I read what I’ve written on this blog and think, “Damn, I’m cool!” I’m not. I’m lonely and kind of a loner and I let the dust bunnies build forts in the corners of my house. When I told the story of Eight to my friend, it went something like this:

“He was a Catholic! He was coming home from a youth ministry trip! It was really uncomfortable and weird.”

The truth is that I am terrible at telling stories out loud. I second guess myself, I worry whether or not the other person is enjoying themselves, I tell myself I’m not funny and no one is listening and why don’t you just sit down and shut up and stop fucking rambling already.

The point is sitting in front of my little silver computer is safe. I can make my life sound amazingly entertaining and uproarious. I can sound smart and funny and sassy, when really I’m sitting around in black yoga pants and a grey Red Sox sweatshirt that I bought for an old boyfriend that he returned to me when we had terrible makeup sex. An old boyfriend who just happens to be married with a child now. An old boyfriend who I just happened to have a dream about last night in which we were at a baseball game and I asked him whether or not he would ever cheat on his wife and he looked at me with his sweet blue and brown eyes and was totally skeeved out.

But this isn’t the version of myself that I show in my blog. I show the funny 104, the smart 104, the sassy 104.

So here is my gripe with the Julie in the book: she is awful to her husband (“’No, no, no. I have aspics. I have to bone a whole duck. Can you even conceive of boning a duck? Of course you can’t. Your brain’s too consumed with the NewsHour and FreeCell to waste time on something just because it’s of all-consuming importance to your wife’”); she is childishly and needlessly perverted (“I was feeling very cook-y in general, actually, cool and collected, until I got to ‘forming the ribbon.’ This sounds like some ancient Asian euphemism for kinky water sports” [um, no it doesn’t]); she is an admittedly bad friend (she includes anecdotes that are completely off topic and unrelated about her friends’ love lives only, I can imagine, to make her flat book a little more lively); and she uses some of the most obscure and unclear imagery in the world. If this is the cleaned up and polished version of herself that she wants to show to the world, the version that is most appropriate for public consumption, she must SUCK BALLS in real life.

That is all. One star. I can’t muster any more.

Extension

Eek! If any of you are braving the wee hours and reading this, I got seriously and unexpectedly distracted by a phone call from Nine.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I will be up before the sun, writing a fantastic review for your consumption. Chances are it will be up before you are!

See you in the morning!

Babies

Maybe I can do little mini date reviews with no personal information. I did that once for Six. Would that be better than nothing? I'm more than happy to do that.

Click

I was so happy to wake up this morning to a sense of guilt for not having written on this blog lately. It was a wonderfully refreshing way to greet the day.

Here's something I should have explained a lot sooner: I am not okay with, in any capacity, writing about people in my life on a public blog when they are completely unaware of it. I, for this reason, have tried to make this blog as anonymous as possible, but any one who knows me or knows one of these men could easily identify these stories as themselves or their friends. People are not stupid. Case in point, and a moment of personal revelation: I no longer talk to my brother, my best friend, the most important person in my life, because of something that I wrote about him on a blog that his girlfriend found through a friend of hers. And it wasn't even something bad. So, maybe I should have been more clear about this: I will not be writing about men that I date until they are over and done with and completely out of my life. Take it from me, it is not worth losing something as important as a person over something as silly and inconsequential as a blog.

Would I like to blog about all of these dates with Nine? YES. Don't ever mistake this as laziness. All last night I was conjuring sentences and funny quips about the dinner he made me, about the kissing, about the AMAZING way he talked to me when I was giving him head, etc. This is probably not the right mindset to be in when you have a penis in your mouth, nor is it the right mindset to be in when you are trying to emotionally connect with someone (with or without the penis in your mouth). But do not take my silence as ambivalence. It's not. It's respect for these men who may turn into something more. This isn't just a weekly review of books. Books are stagnant and unfeeling and can never google something that might lead to something that might lead to this blog. This is also a weekly review of dates, and as entertaining as it would be for you all to watch as I have weekly dates that lead to hilarious blog posts, it would be pretty demoralizing for me. It's also not the point of dating. Dating, if there is any success to it, leads to emotional and physical connection. That may just happen from time to time in this process. And it might just happen, although I'm not suggesting that it be with Nine, that it leads to the ultimate in emotional and physical connections. That is far more important (and the greater purpose of this whole thing, read the subtitle) than updating the blog on a regular, weekly basis. Sorry.

Now, the book reviews? I have no excuse for that. But I kinda just assumed that no one was reading those anyway...

Obviously I was wrong! Expect Julie and Julia tonight and Into the Wild tomorrow. Really! I already have notes prepared!

Nine: An Update

I know you're all waiting for an update, but things with Nine are still in full swing. And, since you know my policy on blogging while things are still up in the air, you'll have to hold out until it all turns to shit.

In the meantime, would you settle for a book review or two? Because really I owe you three. Oy vey!

Ruminating

Thank god Nine is a pediatrician and not, say, a gynecologist. Can you imagine dating someone who you knew was staring at vaginas all day?

Another thought: do you think being a doctor will make him better at sex? I mean, he has to know where all the parts are, right?

Redneck

I've made a hard and fast rule that I don't date men from the town in which I live. I've given fair shots to a few in my past: the son of a local pizza shop, my mother's landlord, a waiter at a restaurant. They all turned out to be (to put it kindly) racist, pickup truck driving, gang signing rednecks.

But a few weeks ago there was a correspondence entertained between myself and the owner of a local coffee shop down the street from my house. The proximity worried me, but I figured if the emails were promising, then I might be willing to try it out. They weren't. He mentioned something about taking seven years to finish community college, all because of the English 101 he couldn't quite pass, and how he loved it here and never wanted to leave.

I was an English major. My favorite class ever was Literary Theory. Also, I have a VERY specific five year plan that involves me getting the FUCK out of this god forsaken town as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Needless to say, I never emailed back.

But then last night, as I was pulling into the gym parking lot, a man in an enormously offensive white pick up truck with disgusting details from 1987 was leaving, and as he leaned out the window to look both ways, a cigarette dangling between his two fingers, I realized it was the owner of the coffee shop.

This, my friends, is why I don't date anyone from this town. This is why I have struck out into the world of internet dating, if only to escape the absurd men in the immediate surrounding areas:

The Tenth Book

The furnace broke. Again. As of right now, the radiator next to which I sit IS warm. I refused to say the F word at the risk of jinxing myself again (you know, the f-i-x-e-d word), but for now I am warm. And warmth makes me happy.

Of course, in light of the plummeting temperature, I had to camp out at a friend's for the duration, scrambling to remember everything for my dog and forgetting my lap top in the meantime. Hence the lack of book review.

I don't want to get too far behind, so I'm going to post this week's book, which I've already started and will review this weekend along with Julie and Julia. The latter will simply be a tirade of enormous proportions about how much Julie Powell sucks, a thorough outline of which I've already written so as not to forget any gems of shaking hatred, so it should be a cinch to write (unlike the word "cinch," which I apparently don't know how to spell).

What Schedule?

Book review tomorrow night!

Nine

This is not a conducive writing environment. I’m stuck under the covers, shivering, only giving in enough for my hands to peep out and type these few words.

The furnace is still broken.

But I met Nine for a cup of coffee this afternoon, halfway between his town and mine, after the furnace guy left after only a few minutes, saying that he had to order me a part and when it would come in, he was unsure. I needed a cup of coffee. I needed a fucking shot of tequila is what I really needed. Something so warming it burned.

Instead a got a tall cup of chai and Nine. Nine who (okay Single Ladies, take a DEEP BREATH with me now) is a PEDIATRICIAN.

Oh, that’s right. Nine. The DOCTOR. The DOCTOR who works with KIDS. The DOCTOR who works with KIDS who texts me ADORABLE baby stories, like the cute baby triplets all sound asleep in the same crib and the fifteen month old who has made such progress since the last time he saw her at nine months and the baby who wasn’t breathing properly and how relieved he was when he pinked up like normal and OH MY GOD MY OVARIES JUST EXPLODED!

Dear 104, you will NOT be swoozed into some romanticized version of who this man is just because he spends his life taking care of babies. NO! This does NOT make him a good man! Well, okay, it does, but it does not necessarily make him the best man for you.

Moving on.

The conversation with Nine was good. I mean really good good, you know? I think this was the first date, the first out of nine, in which I actually used a little sarcasm, in which there was a little witty banter, in which there was a little play, a little suggestion, a little you’re funny in all the right kind of ways. And when he confessed that there was a month in med school where he ate Chipotle everyday, I exhaled a sigh of relief, put my hand to my heart, and confessed that for a period of time, not too long ago, I had done the same.

But I’m not getting carried away. I think we’ll see each other again this weekend. In fact, I’m fairly certain of it unless something terrible happens in the meantime (and we know that is entirely possible). But, for the time being, let me innumerate his flaws so I don’t look like an asshole when this all falls apart. I can at least say, “See, I saw it coming.”

1. He talked about playing poker a lot, and how much he has won, and how he got comped an entire free weekend in Vegas for how much he played in Atlantic City. Worrisome. Um, I don’t gamble. I think it’s dumb. The most I’ll do is play bingo with my mom and sister, but really that’s just for the good conversation and red velvet cake.

2. He mentioned how he has a tendency to make fun of other people when they’re standing close by. I’m going to let this one play out. He could be misrepresenting it, but if not that will be an issue. I don’t like making fun of people, and if I have a cutting comment about the large woman sitting next to me at Olive Garden being spoon fed fried lasagna by her skinny husband in between bites of her steak alfredo, I’ll wait until I am well within the confines of my car to suggest carefully that maybe she find a husband who is more supportive of her actually spending “forever” with him.

3. He’s an Army doctor. I have a history with military men. It’s not a good one. It involves a lot of gut-sucking and sweeping myself off of my feet with the idea of some valiant hero with a heart of gold. It never happens. Also, I don’t know if a husband who deploys and is constantly in danger is really good for my sensibilities. I’m a bit of a nervous ninny. (Shit, I just jumped the gun, didn’t I?)

Anyway, Ten is still happening next weekend. He’s a triathlete. I really hope he’s not looking for a race partner in a woman, because, um, something probably no one knows about me, I can barely doggy paddle.

Nine: Rescheduled

Scratch that. We're meeting for coffee this afternoon. Date review to follow.

Now, if only I could come up with some perfect outfit to make me feel like a reed when really I am feeling like a heifer. I'm thinking something loose.

Nine: Delayed

Nine was supposed to happen today. This afternoon actually. We had a nice lunch date set up for this holiday that we both have off.

Except I woke up to a house that was freezing and a furnace that no longer turns on.

Needless to say, once he wakes up and texts me, I'll have to postpone the date. Probably until next weekend. Don't worry, though. Ten is already lined up, so it will be a double feature.

Eight

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I've been trudging through a bit of sludge the past week or two. I hope you've all hung in there. I promise to deliver, safely into your internet-savvy hands, Eight tomorrow morning. I'm coming out on the other end as we speak, so look forward to a revival.

The Ninth Book

Don't judge me. I'm looking forward to something a little light. And to something that will hopefully revive me enough to keep going.

Man Walks Into A Room

Let the late night writing commence. It feels like college again. I’ve given up Starbucks in favor of my white bed with my black dog and a mismatched pair of pajamas. Turns out I’m broke. And I did the math, calculating the five or so dollars I spend each night at Starbucks on a chai and then on a decaf tea to warm me up when the chai has cooled. Five times thirty is one hundred and fifty dollars. I could pay off… well, a third of my Banana Republic credit card with that! I’m living on fumes, charging every necessary item to a credit card I’ve had since high school. Starbucks, as you can imagine, is not necessary.

Let’s just call a spade a spade, ok? I’m not in the mood for this right now. I haven’t been in the mood since, oh, maybe Tuesday? I’ve had a few bitter realizations, a few rough days, a few too many friends whose lives are being torn apart by men and relationships and all the disappointment inevitably involved with those things. I wrote a bitter rant that somehow turned into a diatribe about loneliness and how you could depend on no one because eventually we all DIE. Yeah, I’m in THAT kind of mood. I’ve taken to not reading. I’ve taken to not responding to my emails. Luckily I planned this week’s date before the shit hit the Cynical Sally fan, and we met at a little coffee house right around the corner from his house.

But it has to be acknowledged that I DID NOT want to go on this date. I sat at my desk minutes before I had to walk out the door, makeupless, picking at a scabbed over pimple on my chin, IM-ing my best friend about how much I DID NOT want to go on this date. Do you think I should just cancel, I asked her? Nope, she didn’t. Give him a chance, she said, and then was shocked by my sudden declaration that he was unattractive and untalkative and FAT.

“104!” she yelled. “That’s terrible!”

Fuck terrible. Fuck being nice and being open and not thinking about it so much and keeping at it and dressing to impress. Fuck all of it. And then I said it,

“I think this is going to be the last date that I go on.” Now, my best friend is as avid a reader of this blog as any of you. In fact, I think she might win the title of biggest fan, so she has a stake in all of this. She needs her Monday evening entertainment just like the rest of you. But even still (and this is why I love her), she listened.

It’s been eight weeks. Nothing compared with the fifty-two I’ve set out to tackle. Eight is not even a quarter of the way there. Not even a fifth. And each week has seemed so long, so long ago, so overwhelmingly disappointing. And the disappointment is killing me. I guess I never anticipated hoping for anything more than a few good stories. I guess I underestimated the very loud, very bloody heart on my sleeve.

But this is not the date review. This is the book review, and it has to be said that this is not going to be a typical book review. I know I gypped you last week with a portion of the book instead of my own thoughts, but this week I feel the need to do something similar, because the portion of the book seems to BE my own thoughts. It’s magic when that happens, no? And, since the original intention was for the books to influence the boys and the boys to influence the books, I’ll let Nicole Krauss say it better than I ever could.

… “Thinking about what?”

“The old thoughts. The whole subject of loneliness.”

“What, you think I’m lonely?”

“Are you?”

Samson shrugged. Some jazz was playing low from Ray’s stereo, and it reminded him of Anna as he had come across her once, humming and swaying barefoot to a plaintive saxophone coming from the radio. He studied a paperweight on Ray’s desk, a starfish suspended in glass. “I suppose you don’t get very lonely,” he said, “what with so many people around you all the time, with the whole team working together.”

“Me?” I’ve been lonely my whole life. For as long as I can remember, since I was a child. Sometimes being around other people makes it worse.”

“Really? Because it always seems…” Ray looked at him, waiting. “Anyway, what about your wife? Didn’t you say you were married?”

“When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close—as close as you can get—to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you.”

Samson hefted the paperweight and paused to think of how his great-uncle Max used to take him to the pool at the local Y, how he would tread water and float on his back while Max did leg lifts in the water, talking to him about love. He spoke to Samson as if he were an old crony, one of the liver-spotted survivors in to do a few asthmatic laps, to exert a last burst of prowess, a man withered by exposure to the elements. He had been barely twelve. Love, Max would say, his gnarled toes breaking the surface, love is the goal of the species. Not shtuping. Shtuping you can do anytime. It’s love that’s not so easy to find, lowering the left foot as the right floated up in a regiment of European bathhouse calisthenics.

He put the paperweight down and looked at Ray. “I don’t know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?”

“Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you’ve actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again. Only it doesn’t last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion—the hope you’d held on to all those years—has been shattered.”

Ray stood up and walked to the window, and Samson marveled again at the starched clothes, the linen sleeves neatly cuffed at the elbows, the pants with razor creases, a man untouched by weather.

“But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget,” Ray continued. “Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship—it may not be total understanding, but it’s pretty good—or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

“People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?”

“Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel known.”

You can see why I wasn’t in any mood to meet Eight…

By the way, this book kicked ass. Do yourselves a favor and go buy a copy.

I feel your pain

You should all be watching The Bachelor this season. I know I mentioned it earlier, but I wanted to take the opportunity to sell it more thoroughly. A girl I grew up with is one of the contestants, and I'm not naming names to avoid being found out, but I'll give you a hint: I'm not the only smart, charming, breath of fresh air girl to come out of my home town.

Har har. Right right. But the show seems to go hand-in-hand with some of the themes in this blog, so consider yourselves warned that there may be references, hell entire blog posts if necessary, dedicated to this season of The Bachelor. Deal with it.

Seven

All right. Let’s do this. Let’s get this over with so we can all have a good laugh and a good gasp and a good WHAT THE FUCK and watch The Bachelor and sleep soundly tonight.

And you all should. Sleep soundly that is, because you are all lucky that you are not I. I’m not a fan of the “My Life Sucks The Most” game. In fact, I hate it, but I would pity anyone who had to sit through a two and a half hour date with Seven like I did last night.

Oy. Fucking. Vey.

Seven talked a lot. His text messages were long. His emails were long. When we graduated to phone calls, they were loooong phone calls. I did my best to chalk it up to nerves when he would interrupt me mid-story on the phone and tell me to “save it for the date.” Ok, but you just spent ten minutes telling me about your stupid job, so what the fuck?

I’m not in the mood to be cute about this.

I got lost on the way to the bar to meet him. It was in some weird looping mall-town-roundabout place that blew my GPS’s mind. I called him to have him direct me to the bar, since he claimed to frequent it often, and he was great about directions.

Great. Fine. Wonderful.

When I pulled into the parking lot, the place was empty. It was a Sunday night, the night before everyone was, presumably, going to be starting their New Year’s resolutions to spend less money and stop drinking so much and start working out more. Yeah, no one was at the fucking bar.

I did better with clothes this time. I wore black pants, black boots, a patterned, flattering top I recently purchased at Banana Republic. I felt good. I felt comfortable and pretty and in control of my breasts. All a good start.

Turns out it was a sports bar. I was entirely overdressed. Have I mentioned how much I hate sports bars?

I hate sports bars.

Well, to be fair, I hate dressing for sports bars for first dates. Second and third dates? Fine. I just don’t want the first time a man sees me to be in a t-shirt and jeans.

Moving on.

When I got out of my car, he crossed the parking lot from his.

No, I thought. That can’t be him. He’s so short. And he got shorter as he got closer. By the time he reached my side I realized heels were the wrong decision.

Um, I’m 5’1”. They were two-inch heels. You do the fucking math.

He came up to my side, made the motion of it being really cold out, said something along those lines, leaned in for a hug, and kissed me on the cheek.

Um.

Excuse me.

You are not family. You are not even a friend. I JUST met you. Keep your lips to yourself. I’m only consenting to this hug because you initiated it. I’m hardly comfortable with your arms being around me already, let alone your hands being so close to my ass, ok?

This respecting of personal space was an issue throughout the evening. Please, keep reading.

We sat the bar. The empty bar, in the empty restaurant. The waitress served us tall glasses of beer on tap, carding both of us (not surprising, considering the company), and placing our drinks on cardboard coasters with her thin arms covered in dark hair.

I played along at first. I did. I tried to smile a lot. I kept up the conversation, listening as he talked about how often he drank, how much his family drank, how shocking it was that I spent my New Year’s at home with my mom and my dog not drinking.

“You didn’t even down a bottle of wine?” he asked. No, dude. I woke up early and went to the gym and started the year off right. He, on the other hand, had to postpone our date, originally scheduled for Friday, because he was still sick from partying so hard.

When he picked up his glass of beer, he left his mouth open around the rim and let the liquid pour into his mouth as greedily as water pours from a bucket. It was disgusting.

Did I mention he had a cast on his arm? When I finally got a word in edgewise to ask him what had happened he laughed and said it was from a rough night. He was drunk (surprise!) and fell down the stairs and broke his hand and was so inebriated that he didn’t feel anything until later the following day when he was at his parents’ house and his mother noticed how swollen it was.

He brought his half-full glass (always the optimist!) back to his lips and emptied the entire thing into his gullet.

Yes. He chugged his beer on the first date. He ordered another one.

“Do you want another?” he asked, both of us taking the opportunity to look at my glass with only a few sips missing from the top.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I only have one drink if I’m driving, so I’ll pace myself.”

“Oh, wow, really? That’s impressive.” He threw back the beginning of his next beer. “I always need at least three beers to make me a good driver.”

This is where I stopped playing along. This is where I stopped being cute. This is where I stopped giving a shit what he thought of me.

“Wow, that’s a bunch of crap,” I said.

“No, really. It makes me focus more.”

“I’m sure the police who will undoubtedly pull you over would disagree.” He laughed.

I think this was the point in the evening where he started burping, covering his mouth with his sweatered arm and belching often, his whole body expanding under the pressure of keeping them behind his closed lips.

The thing that struck me the most was that he was fairly hyper active. I wasn’t sure what it was at the time. Maybe some sort of problem with picking up on social clues? He kept putting his hand on my leg. He kept inching closer to my chair. At one point he leaned in so far that, had my chair not been in front of his to hold it up, he would have tipped right out and onto the floor.

What I realized very quickly was that he wasn’t socially awkward or some poor Asperger’s kid. What I realized, as the smell of beer emanated from his mouth and he spoke more and more quickly without any memory of what we had already discussed, was that he was drunk.

Perhaps if he had been sober he would have stopped himself, but he began a one-sided conversation about his fraternity and how he had the mama’s boy hazed out of him and how they forced pledges to eat loogies and chug gallons of milk and do wall sits for forty-five minutes (hi, impossible) and about the one black pledge they had who was, you know, not black like BALTIMORE black but cool black and they had to watch what they said when he joined and how they wanted to nickname this pledge “Cotton” or “Boy” and how he would gladly do it all over again because it was the best experience of his life and how everyone had to have a little bit of an asshole in him to haze people.

All right. Let’s summarize, shall we?

1. Is a sloppy drunk
2. Admits to being an asshole
3. Has gladly engaged in hyper-masculine behavior
4. Was mentally and physically abusive to others
5. Enjoys racist jokes

We have ourselves a winner here, don’t you think?

I think the only good thing about him was that he was a liberal and eagerly bashed Sarah Palin. Although there was a questionable moment in which he launched into some convoluted tirade about how he couldn’t understand how any woman could be pro-choice, and when I gave him a confused look and said, “You mean pro-life?” he spastically changed his story to that and went with it.

We’ll blame that blunder on the booze.

Close to the end of the date he got up to go to the bathroom, and I soothed myself with checking facebook on my phone. It’s like mother’s milk. When he came back to the bar, he sat down with purpose and looked me square in the face.

“104,” he said, “when was your last relationship?”

“Um… uh…” I fumbled. “Like real relationship or just long-lived dating?"

“Like a really real relationship.” Nice sentence. And before I could even inhale to exhale an answer he took over, “Because I don’t want to date someone who has some old ex boyfriend who is constantly on their mind and that I can’t ever live up to. It’s just that that has happened to me in the past, and I’m not interested in anything like happening again because that was really painful for me.”

Whoa. Taxicab confessions?

“Well,” I started slowly, anticipating another interruption. “I’ve been actively dating for a while now, but my last relationship of significant length was at the end of 2007.”

“Ok. Good. That’s fine.” He sucked disgustingly at his drink. “Because the last girl that I dated had a fiancé who had died a few months before and she never got over it and had to end things with me because she wasn’t ready to date me so soon after he died and that was really terrible for me. That really pissed me off.”

Whoa.

Dude, having a long lost love is worlds away from having a dead fiancé. One is nostalgic and a nice point of comparison. The other is a fucking tragedy. It was terrible for YOU? It pissed YOU off? You’re an asshole.

I was done.

“Well, I should be getting home,” I said, and started to gather up my purse and jacket. He, of course, chugged the rest of his beer.

“Are you going to finish yours?” he asked, both of us looking back at my glass, filled halfway with yellow Coors Light.

“No. I don’t want to chug it just to drive home.” He looked once at me and then back at the glass, picked it up, and drank the rest of my beer in three gulps.

He walked me to my car. I opened my driver’s side door immediately, not taking the time to linger. I threw my purse into the passenger seat and stood back up to say goodbye. When I was upright, he was in my face. I moved my head to the left of his to give him a hug and he caught the corner of my mouth with his. I leaned further in to transition into a kiss on the cheek to make this moment less awkward, but he took advantage of my turned face and kissed the right half of my lips with his open mouth. I struggled. I pulled back, seeking a way to be as far away from his offending lips as possible, and he grabbed my face in both of his hands. He planted his lips, open and wet, on my terse two and pressed himself into a kiss. I laughed uncomfortably and watched while he literally sucked on my lips with closed eyes. I kept my lips closed in an uncomfortable chuckle, hoping he would realize it was completely unreciprocated. I pulled back, and he dazedly smiled as if what had just passed was some beautiful moment and not a drunk raping of my face that it actually was.

I got into my car, sped out of the parking lot, and called my best friend. Apparently the message that I left her was fairly stellar. All I remember is laughing hard and uncontrollably and saying over and over again, “What the FUCK?!”

He texted me before I even reached the highway. He said it was really nice meeting me and that he hoped I drove safely. I never responded.

Seven was, by far, the worst date I have ever been on. And, remember, I accidentally dated a felon who stalked me for weeks afterward, prompting me to go as far as to call my phone company and have his number blocked.

Yeah. Seven was even worse than that.

Six: The End

How has it only been seven? How am I not on Forty-Seven? How am I this exhausted after a measly seven dates?

You’re going to get the brunt of my mood tonight. I hope you don’t mind. Six started showing flaws. Seven was a nightmare.

Ok, fine. Let’s get this out there: Six stopped communicating some time early yesterday. I brushed it off as not a huge loss, because my list of his accumulating flaws was growing by the encounter.

1. He took FOREVER to decide what to do on Saturday. I spent a good ten minutes rolling my eyes on my end of the phone as he hemmed and hawed over what to do in his own town. It was uncomfortable how long he took. In the end I suggested we meet in the middle and go to his favorite museum.
2. He didn’t know what states make up New England. If you think this is beyond offensive, you’re going to love,
3. He thought, because New England is, admittedly, made up of mostly white people, that they were all rich Republicans. Dude, have you seen the demographics of conservatives and liberals in this country? How can you, as a history major, not know that New England has ALWAYS been a pioneer on the liberal front, embracing Vermont’s legalization of gay marriage AGES ago, Massachusetts’s mandated health care, and Maine. Maine speaks for itself, doesn’t it? It’s Maine for crying out loud.
4. He was completely city-centric. He tended to make multiple comments per encounter about how I lived in the middle of nowhere, outside of civilization, outside the reach of electricity. Had he ever been to my town? No. Did he care to hear that my town was only an hour outside of the city? No. Did he listen when I said that it has a population of 70,000 people and, relative to where I grew up (where the population was a tenth of that and there were no grocery stores and the nearest HIGHWAY was an hour away, never mind a city [three and a half hours, in case you were wondering]) it was quite sizeable? No. I started to grow concerned over whether my future plan to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere would coincide with his plan to be a fancy pants international lawyer at the country’s epicenter.
5. He would send pointed text messages, asking me specific questions, and then, when I would reply, take HOURS to respond. Annoying. If you’re too busy to talk, then don’t text me.
6. There was no chemistry, really. After our second date, I found myself thinking, “Oh, I hope he doesn’t kiss me.” Never a good sign. Not that I was ducking and running like I have with other men (AH HEM, SEVEN!). I was never turned off by him, but I was never dying to get into his pants.
7. And, not to be a bitch, but he lives at home with his parents. And not because of unfortunate circumstances. No, he owns a townhouse that he shares with his friends, but it came out at the end of our second date that he hasn’t stayed there in five months. He’s been living at home, never fully moving into freedom. That’s a kind of momma’s boy I began wondering if I even wanted to touch.

But all of these flaws seemed like things that would come up in the future, and I am doing my best to not jump immediately into THE FUTURE and MARRIAGE and CHILDREN and IF I CAN’T SEE MYSELF WALKING DOWN THE AISLE WITH YOU THEN THIS IS OVER, you know? I’m working on hey that was a fun date and that was a nice conversation and I like how you just put your hand on my back.

Baby steps.

But when he didn’t even try to kiss me at the end of our second date, and I didn’t stress over the lack of intimacy, and when he didn’t respond to my text message that I hope he got home safely, I anticipated never hearing from him again.

This is not a post with any intention of bashing. In fact, can we all rise and give Six a resounding round of applause, because what happened next is worthy of nothing less.

He called me. He called me this morning and told me that he had a really fun time on Saturday and then listed off the reasons why he didn’t think the timing was right: he was applying to law schools far away, he would be busy with applications, and we lived awfully far away from each other, all of which was a roundabout way of saying that he just wasn’t that into me.

But MY GOD he CALLED ME and WAS A GROWN UP. It’s a (belated) Christmas miracle!

(It’s sick and twisted that I’m kind of more attracted to him after the phone call than I was before, right? Yes. Say yes.)

I don’t know what he expected from me, probably not what he got because he avoided my response for a while, rambling off excuse after excuse, all while I sat on my bed smiling like an asshole. And when he was done, I gushed, “Thank you SO much for calling to tell me that. I REALLY appreciate it.” What a refreshing change of pace!

He must have thought I was insane.

But, you know, he was fun. Not uninhibited and outgoing kind of fun like I prefer, but we had a nice time. There is no need to burn bridges. Maybe we’ll still hang out as friends. Maybe, one day, I’ll need a good lawyer. Lord knows, with the way things have been looking lately in the land of love, I will.

Real Profiles, Real People

I think it's safe to assume that if one lists "surfing the web" as the ONE thing one does in one's leisure time, that what one really mean is "watching xtube and whacking off for hours."

Seven: The Build Up

If it weren't nearly one in the morning, if I hadn't just gotten home, and if I weren't already neatly tucked into bed, I'd write Seven tonight.

There was face rape involved.

Believe me, you all are going to LOVE this one.

Six: Continued

For the sake of anonymity, let’s say that we met in Chicago. We met at the farthest Subway station and took the train into the city. We got off at the stop for The MoMA, circled the museum, and stopped in all of the gift shops. Apparently we’re both suckers for museum stores. Afterwards, in the freezing cold (or was it the stifling humidity?), we walked the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, the skin of our legs going numb through our pants.

You know my policy on writing about people that are still being worked out: it feels very wrong. But just know that Six is still continuing. In a very tall, friendly way. And when my text message noise sounds or the phone rings, I find myself hoping it’s him.

The Eighth Book

Later, At The Bar

Um, can I skip this book review?

It’s not the book. I loved the book. I just… I’m feeling lazy and full of shrimp cocktail and champagne and really I just want to copy, word for word, one of the stories in this collection and have you all experience what I experienced in reading it.

These stories were good. I mean, GOOD stories. Beautiful stories wherein simple people who live simple lives are given the opportunity to be great, to see life clearly, to win back time and perspective. But, sadly, they don’t. Not once do they reach out in that moment of clarity they are each afforded and take some of it with them, or absorb some of the weight of reality, or make something more of their lives. Each time they go back, quietly and without much fuss, to the every day of their upstate New York lives. They’re sad stories, really. But so beautiful in their sadness, in their inability to be anything more than they exactly are: small, quiet, fairly boring to be honest, and failing to be anything more than what is directly in front of them.

These stories were funny, the characters were funny, and I longed to find myself in a bar with each of them. I would have gone home with most of the men, cried with the women, and lamented every bit of life that had passed us by.

I know it’s probably illegal for me to share all twenty-two pages of “How To Save A Wounded Bird,” but I’d like to. I’d like to write every word of it here in one long block of writing and say, “See? This is why I can’t write about these stories. This right here.”

Oh, forget it. I’ll at least copy the last four pages.

“Let me ask you something,” Elizabeth said. “What made you want to be saved? What made you think you’re so terrible that you need Jesus to save you?”

Trevor said nothing.

“How old are you, eighteen?” she said. She could feel her face getting hot. “What could you have done? Masturbated? Taken money from your parents?” They passed a dead, bloated raccoon lying on its back on the roadside, its little arms and legs splayed out.

“I bet you kissed a boy,” she said.

Trevor flushed.

“I bet you kissed a boy and you want Jesus to save you from yourself.”

“Mrs. Teeter,” Trevor said, “are you mad at me?”

They pulled into the parking lot of the Wildlife Center, and he stopped the car. “It seems as though you’re attacking me personally, and I’m just trying to talk about my paper.”

“You’re all so afraid of sex,” she said. “Sex before marriage is bad, sex with a same-sex person is bad. I’ll tell you what’s really bad. What’s really bad is when you’re married to someone and you just don’t like having sex with him at all. Have you thought about that?”

Trevor was looking at his hands. They were strong hands with graceful fingers, the kind Elizabeth loved on a man. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Not like that.”

“You don’t think,” she said. “None of you do.”

Elizabeth put her head in her hands. She imagined that later Trevor would complain to his mother and possibly the Moral Majority that she had overstepped all her boundaries. She’d lose her job and have no husband and spend the rest of her life sitting in her house trying to control her stupid cat. She’d be attracted to other men and they’d probably all be gay and eventually she’d find a woman who was just like her father who would leave her, too.

“I haven’t kissed a boy,” Trevor said. “My brother is gay, but I don’t like guys that way.”

The bird, which had gotten very quiet, rustled a little in its fake nest.

“Remember how in my last essay I wrote about that place I had to stay?” Trevor said. “There was a guy who was in there because someone said he was a homosexual and we all gave him a really bad time. One day we locked him in a locker and peed all over him and left him there.”

Elizabeth didn’t look up, and for a moment all she could think was, for Christ’s sake, Trevor, why didn’t you write about that?

“Then later that night he slit his own throat with a shaving razor. He was right next to me and I couldn’t think of what to do so I reached over and held his throat together with my hands. I tried to talk to him. I told him that we would all get out of there soon so he should hold on. I don’t know if he noticed because he was pretty far gone. But I held on and all I kept thinking was, Please, dear God, please take this job away from me. Someone else take this job.”

Elizabeth’s head was still down in her hands, and she was afraid if she started to cry she would never stop. She wanted Trevor to kiss her. She wanted his beautiful, sad hands on her neck, in her hair. “Please,” she prayed silently, “let him kiss me.” She knew that if she was going to pray she should be praying for Trevor, or that poor dead boy, or even the baby bird. And she also knew that kissing Trevor would be futile, that it would only disappoint her and confuse him, and both of them would end up sadder than they already were.

She could hear cars whirring by the Wildlife Center, which was in the middle of a strip mall. “Please,” she prayed again. “I need to kiss someone.”

Trevor took the key out of the ignition. “It’s how I make sense of things,” he said. “It may not work for you, but it’s what I know.”

She heard him undo his seat belt. He leaned toward her, close enough that she could smell his young, salty skin. She wanted him to touch her so much her heart actually stopped. But he didn’t. Instead, he very gently took the box with the bird in it from her hands. Then he picked up his blue brick, got out of the car, and when she lifted her head he was walking away from her to the Wildlife Center, bird in one hand and fake rifle in the other.

See? This is why I can’t write about these stories. This right here.