Month: June 2008

The Velvet in Dupont Summer Vocabulary List

• Annoying – When Mr. X leaves you by yourself to go get a cup of coffee and you’re standing around with your thumb up your ass and your ex-boyfriend walks by and acts like outside the pet store a block from where you live would be the last place he’d expect to see you, and has a conversation with you.
• Predictable – When your ex-boyfriend emails you after the encounter to say that it was good to see you, that it wasn’t awkward at all, and that “the dogs look good.” (Do dogs ever look different? Do they ever have a bad hair day? I mean, really.)
• Stupid – That you respond to this email because you find it mystifying that your ex-boyfriend would even be in your neighborhood and you sort of want to know why. You also decide to mention that you are happy he ran off so quickly as you were waiting on someone, knowing that will encourage him to write back to tell you that he probably replaced you seven minutes after emailing two of your closest friends asking them if they could “talk some sense into you.”
• Newsworthy – When you mention to a friend that you bumped into said ex, a person she despises, and you casually say, “WTF was he doing over here?”
• Uncomfortable – That he replies and says he “lives around the corner,” and that he is now a “we” too, as if being a “we” is the be-all, end-all to a successful life.
• Sad – That you know his need to not be alone trumps his ability to ever recognize any genuine feelings for another.
• Shocking – That you live around the corner, and now he claims he lives around the corner, so what gives?
• Crafty – That your friend manipulates google and finds out that he bought a house with his girlfriend.
• Unbe-fucking-lievable – That the address of that house is exactly 1.5 blocks away from you.
• Irritating – That he saw fit to buy a house this close to where you live.
• Coincidental – That it doesn’t take very long for him to cross your path again, at a red light, where he rolls down the window.
• Creepy – The smile on his face from ear to ear.
• Obligation – Despite the fact that you are in the midst of an x-rated text with Mr. X, you feel like this is your chance to say something about what you know.
• Grey Poupon Commercial – Where you speak to the person next to you at the red light to ask them a question.
• “Ya-got-me” shrug – What he does when you say, “So I guess you live in my neighborhood now.”
• Rolling Up Window – What you do after you say your part.
• Sorry – What you feel for his girlfriend now.
• Consolation – What you and Mr. X have, in each other, as each of you deal with your issues with exes.
• Peace – What you have in your life now, that you didn’t have during that time.
• Trash – The place where you can finally put your anxiety meds.
• A lie – What you wrote about here, because you knew that if you didn’t write otherwise, that you would really hear the shit.
• Compromise – What you had to do to your creative outlet in order to keep peace in a relationship.
• Drama – Something you no longer know anything about.
• A revelation to longtime readers – That a couple days after you wrote the above link, the two of you broke up because he threw a pile of dirt at you. That he used his key to come into your house. That you threatened, for the only time ever in your life, to call the cops. That you drove cross-country and back to finally break the tie.
• Weak – That you actually questioned your decision half way to Phoenix.
• Confirmation – That your original decision to leave was in fact, correct.
• Obvious -That you know that he has been checking this since your pet store encounter to see if you write about him.
• Satisfaction – That you are in love, really in love, and that you were probably in love with Mr. X for most of the relationship prior, that you used to think about Mr. X when you were having sex with the prior and that the ex knows that you know what he did in moving to your neighborhood, and that it’s someone else’s problem now.

My week shaped up a little better and ended with a nice long weekend with my favorites: Mr. X and my doggies.

It amazes me that I wrote a dating blog for so many years. Where did I find the energy? In the spirit of finding the right formula for weeding the weeds and finding the good ones, I subjected myself to all sorts of challenges: Going on as many first dates as possible but no seconds. Giving everyone a second chance. Not ruling someone out on a prescribed list of qualities I want. Ruling them out for having qualities I didn’t want. Thinking of all the approaches, all the iterations, all the advice, all the drama, it tires me. Especially when I can tell anyone who asks, that from where I sit…

All the cliches about finding love are true.

1) Be Yourself
I knew Mr. X for four years before we ever took a step in the romantic direction. Hindsight being 20/20, I often wish I could take back some of the stories I told him about my escapades with other men. But, I know that it’s the stories and their content which shaped me into who I am, and who I am is a person who he wants to be with, so did I really make a mistake in being myself?

My parents routinely tortured my brothers and I to “go to church.” There’s no way that my ideal man is at church on a Sunday morning. He’s either sleeping, or he’s working out, but I know he is not at church. And if I met him at church, you know what he would say to me once I tricked him into believing hangovers were a better way to spend Sunday mornings? “My mother wonders why don’t we go to church anymore.” Yeah. That’s a problem. Because MY mother taught me that church was a place to poach a husband. And my dad taught me that it’s a place to get free coffee. It would be a bad idea to pick someone up there, because they would always think I was religious in some way.

2) You don’t “find” love. It finds you – when you are least expecting it
Sure, there are some of you out there who put a profile up on Match or JDate and found the love of your life. You were looking and you found it. This applies to most of my friends, as a matter of fact, who are currently in love. Consider yourself really really lucky. I met my first love in a chat room. In 1997. So I’m not unconvinced it can happen, but as with everything, online life has become much more complicated. Everyone’s got their own agenda and you really have to wonder how people are successful at all in finding each other. Chalk it up to timing.

After the end of a trainwreck of a relationship, one of my best friends said, “Why don’t you take a break from dating for 6 months? I don’t want to hear anything about anyone for 6 months, can you do that?” Sure. I agreed. Hell, that was easy, I was off the hook. I was trading in my heels and lip gloss for flip flops and hoodies. That was a challenge I was more than happy to accept. I had my answer ready to anyone who asked, “I’m just not dating right now.” So easy! Why didn’t I think of that before?

One month later, I heard from an old friend who heard a rumor about me. A juicy rumor of which Mr. X and I were the subjects. I texted him to ask if he too heard this rumor. We hadn’t spoken in a while. He hadn’t heard the rumor. But the texting opened the door. It would have been easy to clarify the source of this rumor and close the door. But the door stayed open. I don’t know why, but it did. I didn’t slam it. Neither did he. And when the conversation turned from “Why do people think this” to “Maybe people think this for a reason” to “So is there something here we need to explore?” then there was a lot more that needed to be discussed.

3) Fall in love with your best friend
I already mentioned that I knew Mr. X for four years before we ever discussed “us” in any romantic context. But it isn’t just about knowing someone, it’s about knowing them. Hot Neighbor asked me how Mr. X and I were able to shift into a passionate place after being in the “friend zone” for so long. I don’t know how we could not have done this, by the time we ripped each other’s clothes off it seemed so normal.

Dating just somehow lends itself to people being either too guarded or too open. I tended toward the former in my years of dating, but I definitely heard there were plenty of the latter. {“I can’t wait to have kids” is not an acceptable statement on a first date. Or a second. Or a third. Yes, really!}

I knew things about Mr. X before he recognized them and admitted them to himself. He knows things about me that I haven’t said out loud to anyone, ever. When I point something out that he hasn’t admitted yet he says, “Get out of my head!” When he does the same to me I say, “Damn you!” We learned those things about each other long before anyone was trying to make a “good impression.”

I love when he swims around in my head and I rather love doing the backstroke inside his.

Patsy doesn’t know this but G-man told me a similar story at their rehearsal dinner. He said Patsy was the girl he just wanted to talk to about everything all the time. She was his best friend. He was hers. Now they is hitched, having babies for welfare dollars and living in Texas dagnabbit. Sorry. I went a little far with that. They are not on welfare, but they are not averse to eating at Babe’s Chicken House.

4) You “just know.”
You do. You have to be really good at listening to your instincts, but you should “just know.” (Unless you’re that person who “just knows” with everyone who trots along.)

If you wonder, then it isn’t right.

If you think, “If only he would…” it isn’t right.

If you say, “I love her, but…” then it isn’t right.

If you say, “This person makes my heart sing. They make me feel alive, better, and happier. Life without them would suck. When I see them, when they put their arms around me, when I kiss them, I feel like everything is just going to be all right,” then you know.

~~~~~

The thing is, you can listen to other people’s best advice on how to find the person you are supposed to be with. You can listen to all the tips, tricks, strategies. You can get set up on dates. You can set yourself up on dates. But you know what? All the stuff that make the cliches are founded in truth. For really good reasons.

Which cliches did I miss?

I had a really bad week last week. (I actually wrote that sentence before it even reached the bottom.)

I had the kind of week where you have to take a Klonnie every night because you can’t cope with your life. I knew this would happen, because two weeks ago I actually heard myself say, out loud, “I love my life right now.” (After I said it out loud, I heard my mother screaming “TOUVLO!” from Connecticut, which means, “idiot” in Greek because I knew I jinxed myself.)

So it’s why I didn’t write. I can’t write when I’m really miserable. I know, I’m the opposite of most of you and Hemingway. You are more creative when miserable.

Monday was a disaster followed by a Tuesday, a disaster of more epic proportions, mostly because my Monday at 5:00 went something like this: “Drop everything, this needs to be done right away.” This is not the first time this has happened at the Vortex. I always hope it will be the last, but now, it’s happened enough that I need to have a conversation about it. Damn it. I hate having to point out the obvious: When you routinely wait until the last minute to dump something on me of this level of complication, be prepared for mistakes. And because of the kind of work, these mistakes could end up following us for a couple years.

Then, as has also happened several times, the work dumped on me was not dumped with its details in their entirety. Nope. They were uncovered during the day like a treasure hunt, changing everything and making me start from scratch. The only break I took was a phone call from the vet to thankfully tell me that Thora’s tumor wasn’t cancer. Christ, finally something goes okay. So my deadline came and the only thing I accomplished was wasting an entire fucking day and getting nowhere. I put my name in the upper right hand corner and turned that puppy in. Fuck.

Even though the deadline was at 5, I ended up working until 10 because I’m the only one who knew something and had to run a meeting. Did I mention that during my 14 hour day I also had to hold my emotional shit together because Mr. X and I were engrossed in a drama of “All My Children” proportions and I just needed a good cry.

And wait, when I came in a few hours late the next day to make up for that ridiculous 14 hour day I pulled, I had emails asking for stuff “first thing.” It’s time to count my gray hairs. If unemployment wasn’t at 10% I’d go get another less stressful, more organized job. (Liars keep saying 5.8% unemployment but don’t forget that some people burn through those 26 weeks and still have no job. And by “some people,” I mean me and those like me who know working is for the birds.)

So when a tornado hit my office and the power went out across the area, leaving several co-workers stuck in the elevator, I was so burned out I had no problem going home to my de facto new roommate, E. I love that E cooks for me and walks the dogs. I don’t love that E spilled balsamic vinegar all over my freshly shampooed car mats. There was always some reason to not get my car detailed. Summer brings beach and sand and dogs. Fall brings leaves. Winter brings sand from snowplows, it was always something. Sucking it up and getting the car de-dog-haired took four years of warming up and was such a big deal and all it takes is one E and one shoddy tupperware container away from destruction.

After I kicked her out of my car, I drove to work and promptly took my car mat to the sink at work and washed it. Someone walked in and said, “What the hell is that?” And I said, with that tone like everyone should be doing it and I’m starting the trend, “I’m just cleaning my car mat.” When someone later asked why the office smelled, I said, “Oh, because I put my car mat on the a/c vent.” In my disoriented and stressed state, it never occurred to me that any of what I was saying was, well, ridiculous.

I tried to keep my head up for the rest of the week but barely made it. When I got home on Friday I had big plans for running and working out and all I did was medicate and lay in bed. From Friday at 4:00 until now, Sunday night at 11:30 p.m. It was too hot to do anything. You would think that not leaving the house would mean nothing else bad happened.

You would be wrong.

I lost my emotional shit again over a misunderstood text message and a phone being turned off and just when that resolved itself and I thought I could finally send this week packing into the past, my mom called. My uncle died Saturday night.

Fuck. Me. To. Tears.

Well. You wanted me to write. I told you it wasn’t good.