when the evening’s thin

October 26, 2008 at 8:50 pm | Posted in reflections | Leave a comment
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okay, can we just not do this for one goddamn second? i am not wearing a face right now, or at least the one i’m wearing isn’t anything i’m proud of. i am going to write something and i don’t know what it will sound like — maybe foreign, maybe like everything else i’ve ever written, and i could analyze what those two outcomes might mean but i don’t care. just, ok, ok, ok.

i have worked through the weekend. technically there is one more day of weekend but it is booked solid for working. weeking workend. i don’t miss my social life because it’s tenuous on the best weeks. i do miss cheeseburgers with sam, and sunny days on hawthorne, the easygoing ambience of portland. but i don’t know what else i miss. the last months of portland i was clawing to get out. i kept wishing to be unnamed elsewheres. sometimes i named them after boys: LA, boston. what a fucking joke.

everything is closing in, flattening, so that nothing can look only good or only bad–all the facets merging to make a lightless gray.

i am compiling possible pieces for my writing sample and i have nine that have some hope, and only one of them is not about botched romance, and of the other eight, only two others are not about some very real piece of my history. broken boys in rows like dolls. i read travis’s livejournal as i sometimes do and as of two weeks ago there is some girl, some crazy-about-him girl, and he is overwhelmed with joy and gratitude and his ever-present fear. my old professor tells me that his latest ex-wife is sending him emails twice a week, saying stupid shit, and that all he wants is to have a real conversation about the end of their marriage, and all she can do is pull this adolescent passive-aggressive bullshit. sam is dating a girl and he is happy and excited and, i’m sure, good to her. a friend in portland goes through the same motions, meeting boys, losing them, walking away in disgust, wondering what’s wrong with him. i tell him, you’re fine. your standards are reasonable. other friends find no one, and keep waiting and dreaming. others talk about romance, about commitment, and their partnerships make me want to run thousands of miles away from their bicker, bicker, bicker. a famous okcupid couple has it out on their journal posts, airing their ugly secrets for their bloodthirsty friends. i read through all six hundred comments.

it doesn’t matter what the story is. i feel like i am drowning in them, they are all sounding the same. right now, i don’t feel like i believe in this kind of happiness. it either doesn’t exist, or it is far out of my grasp, and quite possibly i am kicking it away at the same time that i reach for it, exhausting myself at both ends, pushing and pulling.

this is what i get for spending the weekend alone.

i’m tired of myself now.

it is the hope that kills me. i have put it aside to make room for other things, and now i’m afraid to pick it up again. tell me: is it worth it?

And then there is no mystery left

October 24, 2008 at 8:44 pm | Posted in online dating, relationships, sex | Leave a comment
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Yes, so, clearly I’m having trouble keeping up with my update schedule. Sorry. But here goes:

I ended up agreeing to go out on a date with Luke last weekend. The good: he looked pretty much exactly like his pictures, but for a slightly weaker chin, so he was pretty cute. He managed to hold up his end of an intellectual conversation. He paid for everything (though really we just had drinks at several different bars). He had a yummy body (pale and skinny and hairless, with protruding hipbones and a tiny waist and freckles across his back). And the sex was good; I was impressed with his stamina and relentless enthusiasm.

The bad is, actually, too much for me to fully go into at this point. In summary, I really should have paid attention to the red flags I’d seen before I’d even met him. Yep. How many times do I need to relearn this lesson? Anyway, he displayed abominably bad manners, and while some of this can be chalked up to his total lack of experience with girls he can slap around in bed ( “oh wait, she’s not just a fucktoy? 😦 ” ), I’m also less than impressed with his communication skills and his ability to, like, not be a stupid fucking indecisive flake. OK then. I was willing to give him another chance and explain to him the rules of etiquette (primarily: hi, I’m still human, you need to treat me with some goddamn respect and appreciation if you want anything from me), but his ability to even allot me some time to finish this conversation is apparently nonexistent. SO NOT IMPRESSED. So I think I am going to just tell him TTYN. (By the way, I’ve become addicted to the new MTV show “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF.” OMGWTFLOL.)

The good news is that going on a date with this dude who may justifiably now be labeled a Total Creep (and maybe many of you would have given him that label two months ago, but I guess I’m more generous/naive than that) has made me appreciate Seth a lot more. It seems the key to keeping that relationship in calm waters is to just avoid all possible party-related interactions in his company. I don’t deny that part of what makes me somewhat comfortable with this arrangement — more comfortable than I might otherwise be — is a healthy dose of denial about the extent and range of his other relationships. On the bright side, he has modified his OkCupid profile to indicate that he is way too busy to start dating anyone new. So I guess I’m on the permanent schedule, even if it is just once a week.

Meanwhile, I’ve started seeing a therapist — an intern, a student of the California Institute of Integral Studies. The first session (intake) went okay, but then again I didn’t let her talk much; she just asked background questions. The second session, this past week, was a little rougher. I once again talked almost the entire session, but I ended up talking a fair bit about poly and kink and giving her a perfunctory education on these things. I’m not sure whether her total ignorance will end up being problematic in the therapeutic relationship. I did manage to talk about nothing but Seth the entire session, which I thought was pretty funny. Relationships are a great diversion, like a tangled ball of yarn you can just sit and pick through for hours without getting much of anywhere. And I guess they make a good icebreaker for me. I talk about relationships to everyone — even to complete strangers like you! The deeper issues, whatever those are, will have to be worked up to. Earned, so to speak. Ha.

The other change that’s happened in me since my date with Luke is that I seem to be more eager to go out and find some more people to date. Who knows why? Maybe the one date was enough of a blow to my self-esteem that I feel like I need to go trolling for someone who will appreciate me more. And yes, even more than Seth. And with whom I can have a great intellectual conversation — that would be great. And as long as we’re wishing, how about some emotional bonding too? Not to get greedy or anything.

Nothing much else is happening, sorry to report. See you next week, by which time I hope to have at least two new prospective boytoys.

Lukewarm is not sexy

October 9, 2008 at 11:37 am | Posted in dating, relationships, sex | 5 Comments
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I’m on vacation this week, which in theory would mean that I should have lots of time for idle reflection and that sort of thing. Well, this isn’t actually the case, but I’m going to pretend it is for just long enough to write this post.

I saw Seth a few days ago for the first time in over a week, since he had been sick the week before. I wasn’t feeling much like going out with him, since I had a lot of shit I needed to get done and anyway I seem to be perpetually in a state of talking myself out of the relationship. But I showed up and then he showed up and the first thing he did was give me a mix CD for my long vacation drive. Aww! I’m a sucker for gifts. And it was a kinda cute thing to do. So the date went decently. After dinner we wandered over to Mitchell’s for ice cream and while we were eating it, he asked me, “So are we dating yet?”

“We’ve always been dating. We go out on dates,” I told him.

“I guess that’s true!” he responded, though not exactly happily.

“Are you trying to bring up the girlfriend/boyfriend thing again?”

“I was mostly kidding,” he said.

“OK.” I ate some more ice cream. “Wait — mostly kidding? I almost let that slip.”

He grinned at me uncomfortably from behind his sugar cone.

“I have to say I really don’t get the difference between a girlfriend and someone you’re dating when it comes to the polyamorous lifestye,” I admitted.

“That’s a good point.” He thought for a moment. “I guess it has to do with the expectation of continuity.”

I told him my only real hangup at this point is the whole sleeping-with-a-million people thing. We talked about STD testing and such. I told him that I knew it was my thing at this point, and that I just needed to decide whether I wanted to continue to accept so much risk to my “sexual health,” as they say.

He said he understood. “You haven’t decided whether you are committed to poly as a lifestyle or whether it’s just a passing thing, so it makes sense.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Well, if you were committed to the lifestyle you might be willing to take more risks for it because it’s a principle around which you organize your life.”

I looked at him. “Are you saying you want me to organize my life around you?”

He laughed at that and apologized for pushing so hard. I asked him why it was so important to him. And then he told me that it was because the last girl he’d dated from OkC had just up and disappeared after a month of dating. He was trying to prevent that from happening again.

Unfortunately, I failed to take this opportunity to reassure him that I would not disappear without warning. Honestly, it’s something I’d consider doing in general, but he’s been too nice to allow me to justify it.

Driving home that night, I realized that he was probably sticking with me — and interested in dating me in some consistent, reliable manner — for reasons that had little if anything to do with me as a person. He wants to be wanted; he wants to be able to consider this experience stable. And I guess that’s what I want, too, or at least the most basic level of it. Which is why it’s okay right now that we don’t have very much in common, that no crazy sparks are flying. We are, perhaps, just serving each other’s narcissistic ends in a perfectly complementary way.

Listening to his mix CD on the drive yesterday, I skipped about half the songs. Approximately two-thirds of the way through the compilation I began to seriously wonder whether this was just some random travelling music mix he’d had on his computer that he had simply burned and given to me — not made specifically for me, but presented that way in order to endear him to me. Am I unreasonably suspicious? Granted, he really has no good sense of my musical taste, nor has he had much of an opportunity to get one. But then why make a mix CD? The songs, for the most part, clearly aren’t about him, or me, or “us.”  This possibility of having been given a generic mix CD depressed me. I’m also not sure whether I should bring it up, and how I could do so without seeming like an ungrateful bitch.

In other news, last night I received my first message from Luke in something like six weeks (i.e. whenever I last posted about him). It said:

Hi Jana,

I haven’t heard from you in a while. How are you doing?

Luke

What the hell? Luckily I was tipsy when I got this, and responded with:

i took an update in your profile a while back to mean that you and the girl had decided to take things between you more seriously. given that you wrote that you were looking only for new friends, and that you and i had already established that you wanted something more than “friendship” from me, i concluded that any possibility of interaction between us had been voided. the fact that you’re writing me now suggests that something has changed on that front, whether or not your girlfriend (or however she’s currently labeled) is aware of it. so what’s the story? in other words: what do you want?

This morning I got his reply:

Yep, the girl and I tried to take things more seriously. It turns out we were just meant to be friends. We left things on good terms. The result is that I’m single.

What I want is to take you out sometime. If you’re available, that is.

If not, no worries. I hope you’re well!

Ugh. Of course, being the person I am, I’m considering letting him take me out, despite the following red flags:

  • He was willing to lie to the last girl he was dating regarding sleeping with someone else, which means
  • He didn’t respect the last girl he was dating, and
  • He was willing to risk her sexual health for this secret fling. Furthermore,
  • He didn’t have the balls to tell me that he’d decided with his girl-thing to take things more seriously; he left it up to his OkC profile to inform me. Fucking lame. Finally:
  • He doesn’t seem very interesting as a person.

I’m not sure I have it in me to date two guys at once with whom I am far more sexually than intellectually/emotionally compatible. It might get… tedious. And depressing. ALSO, for all I know he could be lying about having broken up with the other chick! Christ.

The reasons I might let him take me out:

  • Free dinner. (And he’s a foodie = excellent free dinner.)
  • The sex would be good, most likely.
  • I am technically in a “poly” relationship and the amount of risk I’m taking being in it is totally stupid because I am not even reaping the benefit of that risk, which is that I get to sleep with whomever I want. So, like, I should start sleeping with more people.

That’s all I’ve got. Oh wait:

  • My life is a sociological experiment focusing specifically on male-female relationships. More data!

So, it’s time to vote! Should I let him take me out? If yes, should I include caveats/conditions? Which?

Don’t you trust me?

October 4, 2008 at 4:17 pm | Posted in relationships | Leave a comment
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My updates are lagging, I know. The crunch of MFA application time is hitting me hard; my first deadline (for Irvine; fat chance!) is December 1, and my next ones are Cornell and U-Iowa on December 15. My writing samples are basically nonexistent. So you see, I have reason to be freaking out. (You can’t fucking put together a writing sample overnight, OK?)

Of course, dear readers, that excuse doesn’t mollify you in your unending quest for boredom-allieviating Internet drivel, does it?

So here are a few morsels for you to devour and shit out undigested.

Last weekend I attended SF’s Folsom Street Fair for all of 15 minutes before being irritated, then overwhelmed, by the impassable horde, and finally whisked away by Seth to a party, at which i was presumably his “date.” At said party, for which I was lamentably underdressed (not wanting to embarrass myself in my Hot Topic faux-leather), I had the dubious pleasure of watching Seth make out with pretty much every girl there. One of them in particular I found excruciatingly undeserving of my presence, so when he invited her to dinner with some small subgroup of the partygoers (myself included) I half-feigned sickness (in truth I was pretty sick of the whole scene, including him, by that point) and retreated to the safety of my sister’s company. Jesus christ. No more poly parties for me, ever, especially in the company of that attention whore Seth. It is starting to squick me out how many people he is actually more or less “actively” sexually involved with. Fortunately, telling myself that I have more urgent matters to worry about has successfully quelled my anxiety. It’s becoming painfully clear that I really don’t have time to maintain a relationship more serious than the one I have with Seth, so I should stop complaining about having the opportunity to get laid once a week or so.

On another, completely unrelated, note, please do yourself, as a reflective, authenticity-seeking human being, a favor and read this.

I’ll try to update once a week, but I probably won’t get into full swing again until 2009.

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