An Open Letter

To a Man who is Not Yet in My Life:

I wish you were already, because I’m sick of being alone, sick of eating all my meals alone, sick of drinking two glasses of wine alone and having no one to talk to. Sick of it being late in the night and having no one to be on the phone with in a loose, relaxed manner. Sick of having no one to rough and tumble with.

I wish I could meet and trust you.

-Me

Taste of a Menthol Smoker

I have been a bad blogger.

I failed 30 Days. You would hope that this was because I was so successful at 30 Days, at getting out and involved in the world, that I hadn’t time to blog, and this was why I failed. Or that I had nothing to report, at least. No, I failed because I stopped going outside.
There is an upside to this. Hear me out.
The first day I failed- ok, well, the first day I failed it was because I was sick and limping which made any trek outside seem terrible. But the first non-sick time I failed, it was because I got carried away doing something I have needed to do since even before I moved back to LA. I built a studio. A studio! To make art in! Even better, I used the furniture my mom has failed to move out to do this. I used the furniture and built a dividing wall in my living room, separating it into living room and Studio(!), so that now I have an official place that I can walk into and recognize that I am at work now. So that was a wholly justifiable reason to skip a day of 30 Days, as the productivity I experienced outweighed the benefit of going out.
But then I skipped a day ’cause I spent it on a message board.
Since then, I have been on and off, staying in somedays, in the Studio, and going out some days, with a friend, or my mom. So with two days left, I officially confess, I failed 30 Days.
I will skip the paragraph about how I think my 30 Days resolution was a silly one, how I would have done better by resolving to work on my art daily, or do pilates daily, or even just the dishes daily, building a reasonable habit I could keep. I’ll skip that part, and get to the juicy bits.

TOM. TOM is the juicy bits.
I dated another guy, lets call him Bill. I let Bill take me on two dates, because Bill has been keeping up polite conversation with me for almost two months on the dating site. Bill took me out on fun dates. I had a good time. Well, I had a good time right up until Bill tried to turn a hug into a kiss, whereupon I squirmed out of reach and fled his car in acknowledgement of the fact that I simply felt no spark between us.

Then Tom. TOM. Undateable, broken Tom. Undateable, Broken Tom, who flirted with me online and on the phone like it was his big passion, who turned a casual dinner invitation from me into an exciting, sexy sleepover date, who suggested co-showers and co-bedding, who, the night of such plans, came over declaring that he could only have one glass of wine because he needed to drive home safely. Who looked at my body from the safety of the other side of the table. Who touched only my shoulders for too long, who used the pretext of petting my cat to touch my hand, who gave me three hugs when he left.
I am afraid Tom is being a coward. An emotional coward. He will flirt with me like woah online in messages and IMs, in texts, and phone calls. He will make sexy plans. He will excite me to the point that I will scrub my toilet and change my sheets in anticipation of him spending 15 hours in my place, will try to layer multiple pairs of underwear on the chance that I could strip to the sexy pair for sleeping next to him, will spend 20 minutes separating my eyelashes with a pin because the mascara clumped and I can’t have him wake up next to me, clumpy eyed, will spend days counting down the hours whenever I’m in bed until he is in bed with me. Then, he will show up and effectively fail to cash the check his flirting wrote.

Tonight he was supposed to take me to my bar. I call it my bar, but it’s really more his bar- he wrote the drink menu, he advised them on what liquors to buy, he knows every person who works there. I have been going there for a month and a half, knowing that everyone knows him well, never once mentioning that I knew him too, that he dated me, that we were “complicated.” Tonight he was going to take me there, and I alternately felt anxious and thrilled that he was going to Out me as in some way his. I was eager to see how he would treat me in front of all of them, since the last time we spent in front of any of his friends, he pre-emptively declared me his girlfriend. Instead he showed up for a dinner with a small glass of wine, cuddles with my cat, pretended non-touches, and goodbyes. 2 hours.

So I walked to the bar by myself in a contained, disappointed rage. The bouncers and bartenders all greeted me. They stopped to chat, they gave me all my drinks. A young man started to chat me up. Turned out that he works there, has been watching me ever since the first time I walked in, wanting and hoping to talk to me. We had plenty to talk about, and his intermediate confessions of attraction to me grew in intensity with every passing half hour. He tried to kiss me in the bar and I refused. We left about the same time. He walked me home, holding my hand. He professed a respect for my decision not to kiss him any of the times he’d tried, at the bar or on the way home. At my building he gave me a hug, and I turned it into a make-out session. He asked me to come back to the bar to see him, and I said I’d be going back anyway.
He has to know Tom. Not only must he know Tom- get this- he has the same name as Tom.
And I walk in my front door knowing that below, a young man walks away, happy because the girl he has watched for weeks has kissed him, while I wish that Tom would have just kissed me and taken me to the bar himself.

Substitute

Sherekhali Is getting at-home tipsy, missing just about all of her friends, and being remarkably restrained about leaving 80 “I MISS YOU” fbook messages.

After the party I didn’t want to leave

I really
really
wish
that I could go for a walk right now.
More so,
that I could go for a
bike ride
right now.
But I would settle for a walk, preferably one in which I could meet up with someone else, but I would settle for one which I could take peacefully and safely…
This is what makes me enormously home [philadelphia] sick right now- this desperate desire to take a walk or a bike ride, right now…

You know what frightens me?
I think I might love driving drunk. I think this because once I learned how to, I loved biking drunk, the strange sense of power and freedom it supplied…

And it feels almost worth crying right now, that not only can I not even experience that sense of freedom biking, I can’t even experience it walking…

I ought to go to bed before I cry over it.

Night Drama

Tonight I went to that party.
IN SHORT IGNORING SO MUCH ELSE:
I met a guy and I might have liked him, who knew. But he was nice, and lives near me, and I was pleased.
I had to go away for a few minutes, and when I came back, I was in a situation where I asked another guy if he thought he guy I had Been talking to woulf leave that other girl he was talking to if I made the appropriate ‘hey c’mon’s.
Dude didn’t. I was sad. It spiraled and whoah shit, did it look like it had spoiled my night.
Later, the .5 person N know and enjoy told me ” Swwetie- I really think he liked you- it’s just that every time he saw you, you were talking to [a] [b] or [c]. You just had too many boyfriends!”
Never in my life have I heard that.
My goodness. Really?

Oh, goodness

Why I am silly and/or crazypants:

So last weekish, I had a night where I was really hit by the isolation lonliness I’ve been feeling. I was sitting at home alone, wishing for conversation, and realized I could, in some way, do something about it- so I posted an ad on craigslist.”Blah, blah, girl, 25, cute, sometimes witty, etc, would like some conversation” was the gist of it. I received over 100 responses that night, which was nice, and most certainly a distraction from my isolation.

So! One of these responses was from a young man, one who happened to be rather cute, and full of wittiness himself. In our conversations I learned that he once had worked for a celebrity. Random, but ok, sure.

So we ended up emailing multiple times a day each day since. I was starting to think that since, hey, I couldn’t hang out with the young fellow I wanted to hang out with, I might as well live the way I did when I was away from said desirable young fellow for so many years, and see other young men instead. This emailng fellow was seeming like a pretty nice possibility. After six days I told myself, quite arbitrarily, that if we ended up emailing for seven whole days in a row, then surely we ought to meet up, and maybe I would find someone to date. Yes.

Now here is where I will point out that I am silly.

Last night I was the last one to email him. He works during the day, unlike my unemployed self, so I understand not having any response during the day. Each night by 9:30 or so, though, I had gotten messages from him, so when it got to be past then tonight, I began to get frowny. By the time it is several hours in and I am a couple glasses of wine in? Why OH my GOODNESS, CLEARLY since he broke the every-night run, this is not meant to be. He is CLEARLY not interested, and I CLEARLY ought not to be, as – well, yeah, that’s about it. No email, NO CHANCE AT ANY FUTURE. Doom sounds ought to ring out here, btw.

CLEARLY, I am a silly goose. But wait, it gets worse.

Why I Am Also Crazypants:

I was laying on the couch, watching the episode of 30 Rock which had aired hours earlier, drinking wine and imagining what it would be like if the young man I have been wanting to see for so long was there with me. I was thinking about how it sounds when I laugh, and how I look on a casual night while watching funny tv, and imagining what He would look like, sitting in my living room. Suddenly a commercial comes on, and I spot the celebrity that Email Man used to work for. Suddenly, an uncomfortabel conflict- how, in a fantasy about Him, can I possibly allow a thought of Email Man to enter my brain? Oh, the CALAMITY!!!!!

That is why I might also be crazy pants.

The end.

OR NOT. EDIT:

haaaaaa. Email Man totally emailed me while I wrote this. That makes seven days in a row that we’ve emailed. I might just try to meet this guy. We’ll see. For now, I’m pretty f-in’ smiley, and that’s nice in itself.

late night status alert

It’s hard when

you spend an entire night

filming next to a beautiful foreign man

and end up being asked, with your lovely friend, to meet several gentleman, including the handsome foreign man you’ve been trying to figure out how to flirt with all night, to meet them at a nearby bar-

and you do, with your lovely friend,

and end up fielding questions from the gorgeous foreign man about how best to ask out your lovely friend.

And when you confess to the wingman that yeah, actually, you were interested in the foreign man, but he’s so clearly interested in your lovely friend, and no, that doesn’t have anything to do with how much you’ve enjoyed his conversation, no not at all, and he tells you he understands, OH, does he understand-

and you just end up feeling like that not-as-attractive friend, wondering how it is that things turned out this way…

man this sucks.