Karma and I...we's a BITCH

I realize this brief, bitter, cold post will hammer home the sense that I'm a real bitch....but you know what? So's karma. And why is karma a bitch? Because karma keeps it real. Because it reminds us that none of us are immune to life's hardships, that none of us can get away with dishing out the bad only to receive the good in return. It sounds more to me like karma's life's vigilante, out to remind us that we're mortal and vulnerable, after all. If that's a bitch, then I'm happy to be one.

Like Single Librarian, my good friend and co-blogger, I also occasionally think about my last true love. But Single Librarian is, I'm quite confident, a better person than me. I broke up with my ex, for the first time almost two years ago and for the last time almost a year ago, and I still to this day feel my blood boil at the mention of his name. So when a mutual friend shared with me that my ex was be heading to Cabo last week on a vacation to an all-inclusive resort to which I had introduced him, and to which I begged him to take me only to hear repeatedly "I can't afford it," I just about lost it. Seriously? It felt like just another petty, immature snub so typical of him, another demonstration of his all-consuming selfishness. I heard through the grapevine that he had posted online: "heading to CABO!!! I sooo deserve this." I just about came through my skin. Really? You, who emotionally abused me and tried to control me and couldn't get around your own needs and desires, you? You DESERVE the vacation you promised and then denied me repeatedly for years? Right.

But karma finally came a knocking. And I don't mean that karma was alive in the repeated tearful phone calls and late night texts  he sent to me over the last year (yes, YEAR) declaring his shame and guilt. I don't mean that karma is the knowledge that he is still not over me and has dated almost 10 girls since we broke up, not to be satisfied by or interested in a single one. Because those things are mostly a nuisance to me...and karma doesn't seem to be coming back around when I hear those things--it seems to be losing direction from it's real target and goal, and it's just annoying me.

Nope, this is karma: hearing that during the trip he "deserved" to the place to which he promised but failed to take me, my ex got Monzuma's Revenge, aka, Traveller's Diarrhea, aka E. Coli. And he spent most of that trip shitting himself in a Mexican hospital and still hasn't recovered.

That's karma, my friends...and the bitch is still smiling.

Redbeard

Three years ago I met a man I thought was going to be the love of my life.  He was slightly older, dedicated, intelligent and he declared his love for me swift and often. He had a beard before I even knew I liked beards and ginger hair.

At first I wasn't even sure I could like him because I could barely see his eyelashes and his nine years senior was something I hadn't bargained for. But then he brought me a college sweatshirt to my library when I got into graduate school and made me tea in the morning. So I fell hard and slept in his bed most nights.

For a long time, things were good. Really good. There were trips and lots of laughs. People pulled me aside at parties, called me on the phone, sent emails; all to tell me that he was a keeper.  "He's the one you've been waiting for," they said. And I agreed with every inch of my being.

And then, at the start of a fresh new year, it ended. I came home on a Monday to find him still in sweatpants, his teeth unbrushed, some unremembered movie on the television. I hung up my coat, asked what we were doing for dinner and he responded with "We need to talk," started crying and broke my heart.

Within an hour the new luggage set my parents bought him was reclaimed with my dresses and shoes. Long forgotten mail, mismatched socks and granola bars I just purchased stuffed into a half dozen garbage bags. He refused to look at me and washed dishes in the kitchen.

Then there is long story of how I made my body forget him. How my winter was cold, my spring sad and how in summer I decides to let go. But the truth is that I haven't forgotten him. If I pause long enough, make the world quiet enough, I still smell him. I see the way he smiled at me when I was being emotionally ridiculous.

I love-hate that. Part of me never wants to forget that a person once loved me so completely. The other part of me wants to ship away the memories and start fresh. Even if means never feeling that way again.   Finding that feeling just doesn't happen easily. At least not for me, the girl who dates but rarely has a boyfriend. Not before, not after.

See, I'm celebrating birthday number 30 this week. It's been filled with flowers, lunches and dinners. There were gifts and Facebook messages.  But nothing from him.  I'm not foolish enough to be shocked. But I can't help but be disappointed that I mean so little.  Did he really forget our first unofficial first-date was campaigning for President Obama on my 27th birthday? Did he really forget that our 3rd year anniversary is this weekend? Because I just don't understand how a body can remove those things from memory.

If there is a secret, I'd love to know.

Can men and women be just friends?

There's a great scene in When Harry Met Sally where Harry explains why men and women can never be just friends:



I thought of it tonight when I was explaining to a friend how somehow, in the course of a year, I feel like I've lost all of my male friends. For years, I had many male friends - great, fun, close male friends. And then I got divorced, I became single... and sex really did get in the way.

I scroll through my phone these days, and there's not one guy in there that I'd text just to say hi. Yeah, if I'm in their city, I'll call them up for a beer, or I might text them to trash talk during a football game. But I used to have friends that I'd really talk with... about life, and love, and girls, and work, and other real things. I don't have that any more, and it makes me sad.

There are two guys in particular that I thought I had solid friendships with.

The guy I love.

This is the guy I was drawn to as I was going through a divorce. I thought he was cute, we clicked, we had fun, we hooked up. Things got weird, we got over it, we hooked up again. I tried to just be friends with him, but things kept getting in the way, and I think I've reached the point where I can't stand it any more and need to cut him out of my life. I really do think, deep down, he's a good guy. And I don't think he's malicious or intentionally hurts me. I just don't think the two of us are cut out for being just friends, and we're not cut out to date, so we're left with this limbo that's just torture.

The guy who loves me.

This one cut me out the way I should probably cut out the first guy. And it wasn't till that happened, and I questioned mutual friends about why he was acting weird, that I found out he'd had feelings for me for years. He (in true guy fashion) never actually said anything to me about it, just drifted off and started avoiding me. I wish I had feelings for him too. It would be so easy - he's a wonderful, thoughtful, smart guy. But I've always thought of him more as a brother, not as a boyfriend. And so another friendship slipped away.

I want these guys back in my life. I considered them among my closest friends for awhile, and I feel a void without them.

Now that I'm in a new city, it seems very unlikely that I'm going to make male friends. I've got a few acquaintances here and there, but I've already screwed up a work friendship by making out with the guy. And when I think about my friends, very few of them have guys in their crew. The couples have couple friends, but overall, I now look at my girls and see them hanging with other girls, and the guys hanging with other girls.

I thought we lived in this enlightened time where men and women are equal. But I'm starting to wonder if Harry was right... can men and women be just friends? Or is sex always in the way?

Sweet Lips or Sucker Lips?

Sometimes a first kiss can be all wrong.

You may remember "Sweet Lips," the cute, kinda sexy guy I introduced in the cast of characters section of my first post. We had been out on a few casual dates, I thought he was intriguing, and he kissed me like he meant it.

A couple of weeks can change a lot. Come Monday of this week and I was just plain bored with him. His "mysteriousness" seemed more like laziness, and, call me high maintenance, but I need a little more than a text every few days to make me feel pursued, adored, and all of the other things I like to feel from a man. Besides, a lot can happen in two weeks when you fall off the radar...like Medina.

So when Sweet Lips asked to hang out this week I reluctantly invited him to join me for Trivia night at a local bar and then immediately regretted it. Ugh. Don't really feel like hanging out with him. It's a little too much work. I'm bored with this guy. Just not that into him. Medina on the brain. But, as is par for my course, I went back and forth in my mind until it was too late to cancel and not look like a total douche.

Sweet Lips showed up at my house to pick me up for Trivia and this time he didn't look so cute or mysterious. He looked like a dork who thinks too highly of himself. He maintained his cool, aloof attitude, leaving it up to me to initiate conversation and not really looking me in the eye. I found myself wondering, why the hell did you even ask to drive almost two hours to see me if you don't actually want to look at me. Was he nervous? Too cool? An asshole? Either way, it was suddenly totally unattractive. What did I see in this guy to begin with? At one point I was kind of into this guy? How could my visceral reaction change so dramatically in a couple of weeks?

And then I remembered the Theory of Relationship Relativism--we read men in relation to other men. For example, coming out of my last relationship, a relationship with a control freak who couldn't stand for me to have friends of the opposite sex and even got jealous of my girlfriends, any man who even asked me "what did you do today" became unattractive to me. In fact, I developed an immediate and incredibly strong aversion to those men because comments like these were interpreted as a control freak's attempt to dig info out of me. A simple question felt like an interrogation. So compared to the ASSHOLE (the nickname we'll give my psycho controlling ex), Sweet Lips's detached demeanor was "sexy." But compared to Medina, Sweet Lips just looked like an asshole.

When he dropped me off later that night, I thought to myself, well...at least maybe I can get one last sexy goodnight kiss out of this guy. When he leaned in for a kiss I hesitated, even pulled back. "You're not going to kiss me?" he asked. Despite my better instincts, I thought, what the hell? and leaned in to meet his lips. Five minutes later, I left the car with two swollen lips because, in the words of the lovely Charlotte York, "he raped my face! I'm never seeing him again." AMEN. Fare thee well, Sucker Lips.

Always a...

Bridesmaid. Earlier in the week I was asked to be one. Again. For the 8th time in four years.

So once again this spring I'll be donning a brown dress with a bubble skirt and getting my hair done while trying to put on my face that suggests I really care about flowers. And though the dress isn't actually hideous and though the bride is truly someone I love and one who waited a long time to find love, I can't help but dread it just a bit.

I'm touched that she asked me because we both lost someone important in our lives recently.  She's not a friend who is just trying to keep her numbers even or is striving to have the biggest bridal party this side of the Mississippi.  I wouldn't have ever dreamed about saying no, because I want to be there on a day that will surely be bittersweet but stand with her when she celebrates the true love she so deserves.

But here is the deal.  As a single girl who has never been engaged and certainly never been married. I can't actually admit to anyone except other like-minded women that I kind of dread weddings. I can't admit aloud that I have had so many years of oogling engagement rings and buying gifts off of registries that my heart is starting to grow cold.  I hate the bridal mentality of "it's my day so I get what I want" so much that I automatically anticipate it. I think it screams of selfishness and it's just plain rude. I hate how the whole day suggests that this one particular girl is better than the rest because some guy asked her to marry him. Nothing about the day celebrates her own accomplishments; just the ring on her finger and the white dress. So even if the bride never exhibits a lick of "-zilla"symptoms, I constantly fear it. 

No single bridesmaid can ever tell her bride-friend to cool it. That the fact that she hasn't considered the style of dress she picked for her girls may not be flattering, expects multiple bridal showers (and subsequently gifts), requests hair styled in certain way (and on the worst occasions dyed a certain color) just has to go unnoticed. None of that is even a fleck of pepper on your friend's teeth.  Because no one even debates for a minute if they should open their mouths and say something.  Because the unspoken rule is that you don't piss off the bride. No matter how unreasonable. And maybe it's because I have this overwhelming sense of responsibility to others, worry too much about the happiness of those around me and was generally raised to be polite.* But none of that sounds appealing to me. 

And being a bridesmaid is a day filled with so many emotions. It's about happiness for your friend, but dread because you know you're just a few steps closer to losing her. It's about looking pretty but understanding that no one really cares because you're not wearing white.  It's about the stress of wondering if your single-self will be honored with a guest invite, and when are, agonizing over who to bring. Chances are you'll go by yourself and take advantage of the open bar. You may say a prayer that just maybe this will be the event where you meet your significant other. Or in the very least you hope there will be a cute, straight groomsman. And then you'll be quietly disappointed when you realize that at this age, the single table is just a dwindling few and there is no one you'll be taking home. Not for a night. Not forever. Your fairy tale is not to be written while sitting in a chair covered in sheets that cost more than your cell phone bill.  And the worst part? The reality that you don't even want that story tends to get lost in the fog.

So yeah, I'll just be over here pretending that one more 27 Dresses comparison is funny. I'll start hoping that if I don't at least have a date for this particular wedding, I can scrounge one up for the other two that are on the calendar for next summer.  And if not? I better have fair better hair than Katherine Heigel ever does, a kick-ass pair of heels and they better be stocking a variety of alcohol at the open bar.

*Don't worry, I'm trying to work on this. It's probably deserves it's own blog post and many therapy sessions. 

Weddings are Evil

Weddings have the paradoxical effect of simultaneously making me feel thankful I haven't gotten married and lame for being single. It's baffling. The same moments at weddings that make me want to vomit up greasy, bland wedding buffet food in my mouth are the ones that make me feel sick to my stomach in a different way, in the gut-wrenching, God this is awful kind of way. From the name cards indicating your couple or single status to the cake cutting and slow dancing, I find myself thinking two wildly different thoughts: "thank God that isn't me" and "God, why isn't that me?"

Weddings hit on everything I resist about marriage as an obligatory social performance and rite of passage. The parading around of the bride and groom as spectacle, the huge, poofy, (usually hideous) wedding dress that probably cost as much as my Honda, the cutting and eating of a cake that almost always tastes like cardboard, but again, probably cost as much as my Honda, the endless kissing-on-command prompted by increasingly annoying choruses of clinking, and of course, the snagging, tossing, and replacing of a garter the bride has been hiding all day up in her hoo-hah.

And sometimes, I think, the performance of these expected rites of wedding bash bliss are analogous to the nature of the marriage itself--performed by the bride and groom out of a sense of obligation rather than a sense of true joy and will to share their lives together.

Of course, not all weddings feel like this. But the wedding I attended this weekend for my little cousin and his new wife was the epitome of everything forced and showy. I don't know how long they'll stay together, or if they even love each other. The wedding was straight out of The Wedding Singer. But no matter how silly the rituals, no matter how cheesy the marriage...I still felt almost the entire night that I was living without.

It baffles me. When I say I don't want to get married, I mean it. I was engaged once and called it off. I don't daydream about having my own wedding someday, or about having kids. I've been the one to break off every serious relationship in my life because the man in my life wanted to marry me and I didn't want to marry them. The people I care about in my life keep saying, "oh, you'll change your mind when you meet 'the one'!!" But I'd bet them every meager penny to my name that they're wrong. I love my life the way it is. But I don't care how happily unattached and independent you are...there is something about a wedding--any wedding--that makes you feel deep inside that something is wrong with that. Maybe it's the fact that a wedding is a celebration of two people sharing a life together, maybe it's the pitying eyes my elder family members shoot me when I'm the only one at my table not getting up to slow dance with a significant other, or maybe it's the smugness of the bride thinking she's a fucking princess for a day just because she's valuable enough to some man that he put a ring on her finger. But weddings almost always make me feel like shit.

These are some but not all of the reasons I was counting down the minutes until "Medina" picked me up in his big truck to take me out for some after-wedding drinks. We laughed and talked and those liquid eyes bore into mine while the world around us disappeared, as it did on the first date, for three hours. I was drunk on something when he dropped me off back at the hotel, and it wasn't alcohol. And then he kissed me...and I don't quite think I've returned to the real world yet.

On paper, we're opposite in so many ways...he's tattooed and tough and republican and chill, and I'm polished and girly and WAY liberal and uptight. He told me he snores like a person with sleep apnea, and I can't even stand to sleep in the same room with someone who breathes audibly. We're die hard football fans for rival teams. We live in different cities.

I'm a list maker, so let's be fair and make a list of the things we have in common. We're both scorpios, which explains the liquid eyes thing. We're have close relationships with our families and have parents who have been married for 35+ years. We're both hard workers...he's the first person I've met in a long time who goes into work earlier than I do. And I think if you compare this list to the last one, the commonalities are far more important than the differences.

But if I stop thinking and just feel, none of the lists really matter. Because when we're in a crowded room his eyes never leave me. When I'm around him the space between us is practically buzzing with electricity. 24 hours later, I can still feel the way his hand tangled in my hair and his scruff tickled my cheek while he kissed me. And that, my friends, is the za-za-zoo.

I want this.

Ally McBeal is one of my favorite shows of all time. Robert Downey Jr. on Ally McBeal is one of my favorite characters on one of my favorite shows, and so a perfect ending to last night was crawling in bed with one of my best friends, pouring ourselves some wine, and firing up her DVDs to watch a few RDJ-centric episodes.

In case you didn't watch the show, Ally is a neurotic 30 year old lawyer. She hears songs in her head and sees things like dancing babies. She's a hopeless romantic and yet completely unlucky in love. But one day she meets Larry (portrayed by the completely wonderful Robert Downey Jr.). Larry has issues of his own (an ex-wife, a son), but the two completely click, and their first kiss is an amazingly romantic scene:



If you were to ask me right now what I want from a man, that's it. I want to tell him my insecurities and my problems and my fears and him say, "OK. We'll work on that." I want him to know all the issues I've got inside my head and all the things I think about way too much, and I want him to just not care about them. I want him to look at me the way Larry is looking at Ally, and I want him to kiss me the way he kisses her.

After this scene aired, my friend said, "That doesn't happen in real life!" And no, it doesn't. Not scripted like that, with perfect lighting and an incredibly gorgeous guy. But if I completely lose faith that it ever will, I will go insane.

This week on one of my other favorite TV shows ever, How I Met Your Mother, Ted gave a little speech about how, little by little, he's losing faith. He used to believe in soul mates and destiny, and he's been beaten down so many times that he doesn't quite believe it anymore. I feel the same way. I don't know how many of my friends - wonderful, strong, beautiful, funny, intelligent women - continuously strike out at relationships. When one in two marriages end in divorce these days, how can you keep faith in any relationship? How do you know that somewhere out there, there might be your own version of Larry - someone who will accept you for who you are and help to make you a better person?

Even on TV, sometimes things don't work out. Unfortunately, Robert Downey Jr. was still in the midst of his drug problems when he was on the show, and he was written off when he was arrested for the upteenth time. At the end of the series, they didn't even end up together. But I like to think, in the TV universe inside my head, that eventually they found each other.

I don't know that I'll find my Larry out there. I don't know that my next relationship won't end in heartache. I find it really hard to keep believing, but I have to. Because if you completely lose faith, what's the point at all?