Texas Book Festival

This weekend I went to the Texas Book Festival in downtown Austin. The Shy Guy and I went to a couple lectures. The first was at The Paramount Theater. Buzz Aldrin (as in the guy who walked on the moon – yes) was there to discuss his latest autobiography, and Evan Smith was there to interview him. It was almost as much of a thrill to be at The Paramount and see Evan Smith as it was to see a real live astronaut.

Indeed, when Evan Smith came out, The Shy Guy gasped, “Oh!” I knew he was gasping over Evan Smith, who is the former editor in chief of Texas Monthly and has his own PBS talk show in Texas, where he interviews various Texas related celebrities. He’s like Texas’s own version of Charlie Rose.

The interview went very well. Aldrin talked about his support of space exploration and his view that our country needed to recommit to the importance of space exploration and put the money required into it. He expressed the desire for the United States to send a manned expedition to Mars and his support for privately sponsored space travel. He talked about what it was like to walk on the moon and how it was decided that Neil Armstrong would be the first man to do so. He talked about his experiences with depression and alcoholism. It was very interesting.

Evan Smith talked about the first time he had met Buzz Aldrin. He had been eating at a restaurant in downtown Austin when someone he knew walked up and asked him if he would mind meeting Buzz Aldrin. Mind? Evan talked about being awe struck and not believing that he really was in the presence of the Buzz Aldrin and actually asking Mr. Aldrin for proof of identification (he produced a business card). Interesting to know that even someone who makes his own living in part from interviewing celebrities on television can still get excited over meeting a real live astronaut.

At the end of the talk there was a question and answer portion where the audience got to ask their own questions and Buzz Aldrin answered. When Evan Smith mentioned that the question and answer portion of the presentation was near its end and only two more people would be able to ask questions this meant that one woman on the left side of the theater and one man on the right side of the theater would get to ask his. Except that the dear man on the right side of the theater who had the microphone for the next question went to sit down and left the last question for the tow headed little girl immediately behind him.

The little girl seemed to be maybe all of six or seven. Her older brother had adjusted the microphone for her and placed his arm around her shoulders and whispered in her ear. When it was her turn to ask her question, she seemed nervous, and she said, “Um, hi,” and then told Buzz that she had seen Sally Ride last night, and then asked him what was his favorite thing about walking on the moon. His short answer was, “coming home,” which made everyone laugh. But then he gave her a more complete answer. And the whole act of that middle aged man giving up his space at the microphone for a little wisp of a girl restored my faith in humankind for the rest of the day.

We also went to see a lecture on the most recent failing of the American economy in the House chamber of the Texas Capital building. This was also a great experience and one I intend to write about at greater length sometime soon. Maybe as soon as I get a chance to read the author’s book in full. The book is, “Too Big to Fail,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin. To get the abbreviated version, you can read the latest edition of Vanity  Fair magazine. I read the magazine article but don’t feel sufficiently well briefed on the subject to attempt writing it yet. In a magazine article there are so many principle characters as to become confusing trying to keep them all straight.

After the second lecture we were thirsty and went to get some iced tea and promptly missed the third lecture we had planned to attend. So, then we needed sustenance and decided to head on down Sixth Street to Casino el Camino, where The Shy Guy ordered his famous double bacon cheese hot dog heart attack in a basket, and I ordered a Buffalo Burger (which comes with wing sauce and blue cheese) and we shared an order of chili cheese fries. After the food coma, we decided to take the bus home.

However, then I saw on the marquee of the Dobie that they were showing, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” the latest Michael Moore movie. And while I don’t advocate communism, I wanted to see that movie. As usual, whether you agree with Moore or not (and I didn’t fully agree with him), Michael Moore is entertaining and you do learn something new on the subject that you cannot learn from our mainstream media. After THAT, then we got coffee and went home. All in all, it was a good day. And it gives me lots of fodder for future blog posts.

The Man-hymen Project

I have a girlfriend who now reads this blog and hasn’t caught up with me in many years, and she, along with some of my old college buddies, will probably be most interested in this post. You see, I used to be a virgin. I know this makes me unique. All kidding aside, I don’t hold the record on holding my virginity, but I was twenty-nine when it was tugged from my grasp. Even in the circle of my friends, who tended to be more religious and conservative than the general public in such matters, this was a long time to remain a virgin.

It became something I was known for – a claim to fame, if you will. In college, I was usually referred to by my unofficial job titles of the Virgin Goddess of Audio Visual Equipment and later, the Virgin Goddess of Physical Reception. I actually delivered television sets and filmstrip projectors around campus and then was a receptionist for the campus physical plant. But everything sounds more glamorous when you put Virgin Goddess in front of it.

I’m sure there was a combination of factors that went into the very willful decision to finally lose the last vestige of my technical virginity. The magical age of twenty-nine was one of them. Turning thirty was like a nightmare for me. I realized with growing horror that I had done precisely nothing with my life. I was past the age where being a virgin is still considered cute.

I was past the age where any decent and suitable, marriage-worthy man would want the pressure associated with deflowering me. They didn’t think of it as a gift the way I did. It was more of a burden. Or a possible bout of blue balls that would stretch out for the months they would anticipate it would take me to be convinced to give it up. Better to ask out the other woman who would be likely to give it up on Date #3, as a good girl should. Being a somewhat pragmatic woman, I saw losing it as a way to increase my marriage prospects. Also, it couldn’t hurt my seemingly non-existent dating life.

There was the fear of becoming an old maid looming on the horizon. Some idiot whose thinking and statistics were both unsound had published a study that was frequently cited in the press. Its contention was that an unmarried woman over the age of thirty was more likely to be attacked by terrorists than to get married for the first time. If you are a woman of a certain age, I know you’ve heard of that study.

Twenty-nine also came with an abrupt change in my hormones. I suddenly had more of a problem with acne. I had whacko periods for a while there, every two weeks, then every five weeks, then back to normal, and two weeks later… I was just more interested in sex, more curious about it, more determined to see what the fuss was about and to have sex just for the experience of it. I got on the pill, and that helped with the acne and the periods but not much with the rest.

It felt like I was aroused all the time. This was probably as close as I will ever come to being a seventeen-year-old boy. There was a young French intern at work that I thought was really sexy. When he walked into a room I was able to smell my own arousal so acutely that I was just sure that other people could smell it, too. And I bathed daily, regularly. So, something was wrong with my body. It was telling me I had waited long enough. It was sending me a telegram that said, “I want to get laid STOP,” in morse code. I knew this because I was tapping it into my clitoris every night.

Once I made up my mind to go through with it, it was just a matter of finding the right guy. One of the married men I palled around with at work gave the good advice of, “You don’t want a choir boy.” Armed with my new plan of action (no choir boys, check), I went out on the town in the warehouse district with some friends and got trashed at Polly Esther’s. My best friend at the time was a young woman who had an older brother close to my age.

Adam, as he shall be forever renamed, was not a choir boy, although he struck me as a possibility while he was singing a Doors song into a microphone connected to a karaoke machine. He was a few inches taller than me and was already starting to lose his hair. He shaved his head. He was thin with a muscular build, yet not a bodybuilder type. And he had a pleasant face that spoke of hard living and substance abuse and a solid lack of higher education, marketable employment skills or future earnings potential. I saw that all in the lines on his face and the faint gray circles under his eyes that never went away. This guy was it!

I picked him because I wanted someone who knew what he was doing, and I picked him because I wanted someone who was not threatening in an emotional sense, someone I could trust not to be violent or abusive but with whom I would not develop any feelings that were consequential. And in this sense I made a good pick.

The first night I met him we were all over each other in the back seat of his sister’s car as she was driving me back to where I had left my car parallel parked on the street somewhere outside Artz Rib House. Since the sister was my best friend she ended up being my confidant through this process, and I’m sure that Adam and I kissing and groping in the back of her car is one of those moments that would have definitely qualified as TMI, but she said nothing and seemed to be delighted. Was she thinking that maybe we might fall in love and that that love would inspire him to want to be a better person on my behalf? He would give up drugs, find steady full time employment, stop obsessing about his crappy childhood and be happy for a change? Even I didn’t believe in that fairytale.

The second night we got together I picked him up at his house, and we went to dinner. I think he paid. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t really matter. At the time, Adam was living rent free on the couch of what I like to refer to as the Halloween House. It was owned by a very imaginative and macabre gay man. The man had once been an animator for the Disney studios. The whole house was decorated in Halloween theme, complete with a tombstone where the shrubbery would normally have been outside the front door. Adam was working part time at as a bouncer at a karaoke bar that his “landlord” frequented. His caricature is still framed on the wall of the bar for all the world to see. If I ever feel nostalgic I can go there and see the man with whom I lost my virginity, looking exactly as he did at that time. His features are just a tad more exaggerated than in real life.

After we had dinner I drove us out to Emma Long Park after dark where I sort of made him audition. After all, I did not want to lose it to someone with substandard equipment or someone who wasn’t clipped (it’s a preference or a prejudice that I’m entitled to have). He passed my test with flying colors, and I knew that the next time we got together would be it. My roommate was going out of town to visit family, and I would have the entire house in Oak Hill to myself. I picked him up. We got pizza and beer and that was that.

Okay. I’m not going to write about it in detail, but I will tell more than that. I think some things should just remain private, so if you’re reading to hear about foreplay or positions and orgasms, and whether or not I swallow, or if I like to make noise, and if I do whether it’s screaming or moaning, you can stop reading. If you know those things already, then you’ve had sex with me, and if you don’t, then it’s none of your business.

What I will say is that at one point in the evening I thought I would never lose it because my body would not cooperate. Adam was on top of me, hammering on the entrance to my vagina like a battering ram, and it would not yield. I thought I would cry in frustration. “Relax,” he said. “I am!” I cried out in defense. But if you know me very well, then you probably already know that I was not relaxed. I’m a pretty high-strung creature. Eventually, I did what I instinctively knew was necessary and flung my legs high up in the air in a deep V and we got penetration and then I wrapped my legs around his waist and bled profusely. Afterward, he got up and soaked a washcloth with warm water and then came back and cleaned me off. He could be considerate like that.

In fact, I bled every time we had sex for the first three times we got together, which was probably at least the first ten times I had sex. I began to think that I had the hymen that would not go away. It was stubbornly holding on to my cervix for dear life. “No,” it said, “I like it here.” I thought maybe there was something seriously wrong with me, and I would have to be taken to the hospital like the heroine in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

A guy friend of mine once asked me if it hurt. I have to admit it did hurt, but it hurt so good. It felt pretty much like I had imagined it would, and I liked it. I was hooked. It was my new drug of choice.

Adam and I did it on a fairly regular basis for several months, longer than most of my dating relationships. I had a brief moment of mourning for the hymen where I called my old campus minister and expressed some guilt, and he asked me if I could maybe turn this into something. Hmm. Let’s see. Adam’s pillow talk consisted of how he got the shit beaten out of him every day by his father when he was growing up, how he wished his father would apologize for beating the shit out of him, and how he would never forgive his father for beating the shit out of him. I knew his father, and Adam was only hurting himself. Adam’s father had long since forgiven himself for anything that had happened in his first marriage. There would be no apologies.

When it ended, he ended it. The sex was good, and I was hot, but he could not put up with my personality anymore. I thought that was rich. I had gotten a good education out of the whole affair. I think all of his former lovers had been the kind of women that bring Cosmo articles to bed with them. I was not sorry over the loss of a relationship that had never been. I was just sorry that if I ever wanted to get laid again I would have to find a suitable candidate. This was what I hated about it. I would have to break in a new lover.

A couple of footnotes about Adam, lest anyone think I was inconsiderate of him. Lest anyone think my unwillingness to consider a relationship with Adam was because I was being overly picky, stuck up, or uncharitable, I have a couple of choice Adam moments that popped up after we stopped sleeping together.

First, I moved into an apartment with Adam’s sister and her daughter. We hired movers, and she hired her brother to watch after her daughter. The girl was just two years old and in the process of toilet training. Adam had spent the day on the computer playing video games. When we got back to the house, the little girl had spent God only knows how many hours in a dirty diaper. I carried her upstairs and changed her diaper, having to painstakingly scoop out the shit from the folds of her tiny genitals. It felt like my penance for having had sex with THAT MAN.

A few weeks after we moved in together, Adam’s sister told me that Adam had met a woman mere days ago and fallen in love and that he was going to be moving in with this woman. She was a divorced kindergarten teacher with three young children. I told the sister that Adam had fallen in love, my ass. He saw an opportunity to move up from the couch at the Halloween House and had taken it. I would have loved to have been wrong about this, but as it turned out, I was right.

A couple months later, I got a call on my cell phone from the woman that Adam had moved in with. I had briefly met her once. I’m not sure how she got my phone number. She was in tears. She had given Adam her debit card and the keys to her car so that he could drop her off at her job and then drive her car back to their home and search for jobs on the internet while she was at work during the day.

One day she went to buy groceries for her young family and found that her bank account was overdrawn. Rather than using the internet to look for work, he had used it to look at porn all day. That was why she had no money to feed her children. She kicked him out and reported the credit card fraud to the police. The police told her something else. The police told her he was not only looking at porn but at child pornography. She was calling me to see if I knew where Adam was. In a cardboard box underneath an I-35 bridge? Ask me if I care.

There will be some people who will read this post and, no doubt, find me cold and heartless. I suppose you could see it like that. Before the revelation of the child pornography, I would have cared. I didn’t look down my nose at him for the child abuse or his employment history or his lack of education. I grew to feel contempt for him because of his inability to recognize that only he had the ability to change his life. I had no respect for him because he refused to see that as an adult he now controlled his own destiny. I had sex with someone I didn’t love and that I didn’t even like that much. It was what it was, and no love was lost on either side. It’s something men do every day just because they see a woman that they find attractive. And let’s face it, some of them sometimes don’t even have to find the woman attractive. Just there.

So, while the movie industry makes millions of dollars off of whole movies centered around the plot of the teenaged boy losing his virginity in what is usually not portrayed as anything other than planned, calculating and cunning…My losing my virginity at twenty-nine will not ever be made into a movie because it will seem like I planned it. I was calculating and cunning, and there was a disparity of power that is somewhat uncomfortable to watch. It was not uncomfortable to live it, and I do not regret it.

 

Why Aren’t You Married and Why Don’t You Have Kids, You Freak?

Tuesday morning at approximately five o’clock in the morning I was rudely awakened first by barking dogs and then by two police officers in my courtyard looking for a fugitive who, unbeknownst to me at the time, had apparently parked his car on my front lawn in the midst of a hot pursuit. If the cops had shared that tidbit of information with me at the time I could have told them where the fugitive ran. He scaled the fence that separates my property from some other duplexes on another cul-de-sac that is, unless you use the “shortcut” that we have to keep boarding up and screwing No Trespassing signs to, several blocks’ walk away. But they didn’t ask me that.

What they did ask me was this:

Did you see a man run through here? No.

Can we search your backyard? Sure.

Is there a man hiding in there with you? Oh, good Lord, no.

Do you live alone in there, a two-bedroom duplex? No man, no kids? Yes.

What kind of dog is that? A weiner dog.

All of this was asked through my bedroom window, which was open. No lectures please. It’s not visible from the street. During the whole conversation I am worried that the policemen can view the vibrator on my nightstand with their flashlights, like this should be my biggest worry when they are obviously wondering if I might have been harboring a fugitive. I should have been waving it in their faces. Look! See? That man who parked his car in my front lawn is not my boyfriend. I haven’t gotten any since May. I promise. And what are you doing later? I like a man in a uniform.

I am used to people thinking of me as some sort of social anomaly. I am a thirty-eight year old single white woman who has never been married and has no kids and lives alone with a weiner dog in a two bedroom duplex in northeast Austin. My Mexican neighbors shake their heads in a mixture of sympathy and perplexity at my apparent unwillingness or inability to procreate. I think I’ve answered the question in previous posts about why I am childless. I have never fully answered the question of why I am still single. The short and politically correct answer, I guess, is that I never found “the one.” But why not?

Why not? It’s a good question. Other people fall in love and couple up. Why not me? (They’re writing songs of love, but not for me.) Well, the great thing about the internets and Facebook is that you can really examine this stuff at great length, complete with pictures of the men you used to date (or even just wanted to date) and pictures of their wives and kids and girlfriends and fiancées. You can congratulate yourself or beat yourself up, rehash what has already been overanalyzed like a horse that was beaten to death and then sent to the glue factory. Wake up and smell the Elmer’s.

One of my favorite exes is a guy that I dated very briefly in college. He has a real name, but we always called him by the name of a very famous cartoon animal from the funny papers. I’ll call him Marmaduke. I was no older than twenty at the time and still living with my parents, as in I had never moved out. He was older. Twenty-five or twenty-seven. I forget now. God, was I nuts about Marmaduke! Everyone was. He was just the most charismatic sort of guy. He waited tables at an oyster bar then. I think maybe he was in school to be a paramedic. Now he’s a firefighter. All my friends were crazy about him, too.  All my guy friends thought he might be the coolest guy who ever lived. All my girlfriends were envious when he asked me out. I felt like I won the dating lottery. Why me, God? I have done nothing to deserve that the dating gods would smile on me so.

After about six or eight weeks of bliss, one evening I went over to Marmaduke’s and his roommate’s. We had a double date going on. His roommate was dating someone I was friendly with, and we had dinner over there and watched a movie. It was like any other evening I had spent with him in tone, and I never saw it coming. We went to his room. I think we made out a little. I remember he had the largest hands. I used to like to hold my hands against them, palms together and be amazed at how they would dwarf mine. Later I would write a poem about this, as if it were some sort of profound revelation and I was the first woman to ever do that sort of thing.

He said he had something to talk about, which should have been my first clue. Then Marmaduke said that I was a really great girl and that he liked me very much but that he had no intention of getting serious. I could feel the blood rush to my face, start to pool in my head. The whole pallor of the world changed, and I had the feeling that this was not real. That I would wake up the next day and realize that it had never happened, and it was all a bad dream. Then I would call up Marmaduke and we could go out for coffee with all our friends.

Serious? Who said anything about being serious? Not me. I was all for having fun. There had been no serious discussions, no pressure to commit. I was committed to getting that piece of paper that guaranteed that I had jumped through enough liberal arts hoops. And then he said that he had felt pressured by my friends, that they all seemed to be steering him toward our inevitable supercouple status. It made him uncomfortable. It made him  feel like a heel. And for a split second I hated my friends, every last one of them. He could not be dissuaded. He could not be talked, begged or reassured out of it. Not that I would have begged, anyway. And that was that. We stopped seeing each other. C’est la vie.

That weekend was Superbowl weekend. We were both at a Superbowl party the very next night. I observed the pressure he had previously experienced myself. How are you and Marmaduke? You two look so great together. Why aren’t you sitting together? How’s that going? I dodged the questions. I left the party early and went to get some coffee with a girlfriend that I spilled the beans to. Screw it. Let Marmaduke explain to them what happened. He dumped me. That should be his responsibility. And eventually, the grapevine did inform everyone. I never had to answer any questions.

A mere week or so later I was playing pool with Marmaduke’s roommate and some of his friends. I was able to gather from the conversation that he was now living with some woman. Huh? And that’s when I found out that Marmaduke’s roommate was not really his roommate. I learned that he’d actually been living with a girlfriend at the time that I met him, a fact that I was absolutely certain had been purposely withheld. They were having problems. She had kicked him out of the house. How long ago? Exactly one day before he finally asked me out after months of flirting. And now she had crooked her little finger and he had come running to sleep on her couch.

My rage and righteous indignation were something that only the very young should be capable of experiencing. After all, there is worse villainy in the world. I think every last one of my male friends had known about the live in girlfriend and also known that I didn’t know. I was learning that men stand up for their own kind, regardless of their alliances with women.

“What? Do I have Spalding stamped on my forehead?” I bellowed at the top of my lungs.

They looked at me like I had sprouted a second head. They didn’t know what I was so angry about. He had needed someone to make him feel good about himself, someone with whom to have fun. And I was nothing if not fun. I am the original good time girl. How had this hurt me? I got several free dinners out of it, after all.

That’s pretty much the story of Marmaduke. He never did really reconcile with the girlfriend. He tried. She wouldn’t take him back. With enough time we became friends again and once we even made a botched attempt at being physically intimate with each other. I was in the habit of being way more physical with exes than I had been when I was actually dating them, as if I could not handle the simultaneous risk of both my heart and my body. One at a time, please.

We ran into each other again several years after I graduated when he was living with the woman who is now his wife and the mother of his children. We were at church, and when I showed up with some friends they purposely let me stand beside Marmaduke, on the other side of the girlfriend, who introduced herself later as “practically married” to him. Funny. I don’t see a ring. He was genuinely ecstatic to see me, surprised, gushing over how great I looked. And that really was the end of it.

Why did I tell this story to explain why I never got married? Is it because I think of Marmaduke as the one that got away? No. I have no regret about that. I tell the story only because it is typical of my dating relationships prior to the Rat Bastard except that I usually did the dumping. I may have been overly picky. I once refused to keep seeing a really cute guy that I had a terrific time with on a date, largely because he couldn’t tell the difference between Sinatra and Bobby Darrin on a recording of, “Mack the Knife.” That was really the final straw for me. A gay friend of mine said I should have given the guy another chance since the orchestral arrangement on both recordings is exactly the same.

I sometimes secretly think that men are good for nothing. But then I realize that that’s completely unfair. They are, after all, good for disappointment. They are really great at managing to make you feel like shit about yourself from about the time you start to grow hips and breasts until, I presume, the time that you get your first hot flash. Maybe longer. And it is this attitude that probably, more than anything, is why I am still single.

Voicemail

I hate voicemail. I don’t have much choice about answering the voicemail at work. However, my personal voicemail will sometimes accumulate to the point that I have to empty it because I have no space left. I usually don’t listen to the entire message. Just enough to tell whom it is and then delete it. Yesterday I was listening to my voicemail, and it made me laugh.

I have a good girlfriend that you might actually say is my best friend. I’ve known her for about six years now. She’s amazing. She’s one of those women that you aspire to be but never will. She’s Barbie doll beautiful, super smart, and one of the most generous persons I have ever known. She’s so perfect even her feet are pretty. I met her at a temporary job I was working once. We were both talking about Dennis Lehane’s book, Mystic River, and how much we had liked it. Clint Eastwood had just come out with the movie version, and so that weekend we made plans to go see it. The rest is history.

She’s been my friend since right after the break up with the Rat Bastard when I was still espousing theories on how he was obviously a dangerous sociopath. I’ll call her Lubbock. She’s eaten my mother’s homemade chicken and noodles with both my parents, lugged me around with crutches in her car after my ankle surgery when I was stir crazy to get out of the house and go somewhere, and been the person with whom I get my very first sunburn at the pool every summer. In return, I have lugged her around in crutches after she broke her foot, listened to the stories of previous prospective boyfriends (including the New York City coffee shop heir!) and gone home with her and her current boyfriend, Lineman, for Thanksgiving.

We called that Thanksgiving the trial by fire. We all drove to Houston together, and it was the first time that both Lineman and I had met Lubbock’s family. We needn’t have worried. Well, actually, I wasn’t worried period, since all my friends’ parents have loved me since the beginning of time, being such a “good influence” and all. I can’t help it. I’m like catnip for parents. But Lineman was really worried. He won friends and influenced people by washing the dishes. I spent that same time talking to Lubbock’s eccentric grandmother, Nana. I take it that everyone was actually more impressed with my efforts with Nana than Lineman’s dishwashing, but I got the better end of the deal because I find Nana genuinely charming, and I didn’t have to wash dishes!

To make a long story short, after the Thanksgiving by fire, maybe because we were both the only strangers among family, or maybe, as Lubbock likes to say, because we are both Tauruses and just “get” each other, we bonded, and now Lubbock and Lineman and I are all three the best of friends. When Lineman got his iPhone it was only natural that he would turn to me for help with it since I am generally acknowledged to be by far the most technologically adept of our little threesome. I fixed him up and gave him an iTunes gift card I had. In return, among other favors we exchanged that weekend, Lubbock insisted that Lineman send me a picture by email attachment that he had taken of his penis using his new iPhone. Don’t ask. My friends are weird. But Lubbock is awfully proud of Lineman’s supposedly perfect cock. I don’t remember what happened with this actually, but in the end I did not get an email with a picture of the famous dick.

What I did get instead was a voicemail message some months later. Actually, it was three voicemails. The first one was from Lineman, wanting me to join him and Lubbock for a drink somewhere. The second one was from Lubbock, presumably also inviting me to join them. The third voicemail was from Lubbock again, exclaiming that Lineman had discovered that whenever he dials my number from his iPhone the previously mentioned penis picture pops up on his display and that he was paranoid that whenever I received a phone call from him the same picture would pop up on my cell phone as well. And as I was chuckling over that idea it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should check my voicemail more often.

The Green Eyed Monster

It’s raining outside – finally we received some much needed rain this week. Rain seems appropriate for my mopey weekend. I am allowing myself an entire weekend to mope. It’s a luxury. I am going to sit around the house and do nothing but feel sorry for myself for the next two days. I am going to sleep late, neglect to shower, nap often. I ate an entire can of black olives, using nothing but my fingers, out of the can. I’ve eaten Triscuits with Easy Cheese. Later, I plan to pop microwave popcorn with real butter and eat the entire bag by myself. I will not so much as share a kernel with my dog. I may watch Legends of the Fall three times back to back just to purposely make myself good and miserable. I would cry, but in truth, I am not a very good cryer. I can’t do it to avoid speeding tickets or to show heartache. I sleep a lot when I’m upset, so I will do a lot of sleeping this weekend, and when I get done sleeping I will get ready to at least act happy again on Monday morning.

You might be curious as to what prompted Self Pity Fest. Well, it goes something like this. Have you ever had a friend of the opposite sex that you thought there was a mutual attraction going on with and then found out rather suddenly and abruptly that the attraction was more on your end than on his? Or perhaps even totally one sided? I just bet you have. I bet this has happened to you more than once. I usually consider myself to be a very intelligent and intuitive woman. And now I am feeling foolish because I will admit that in my previous ignorance and arrogance I actually imagined that my friend liked me more than I liked him.

There were plenty of “signs.” A friend of mine who had seen us interact would have sworn on a stack of bibles that he was nuts about me. And as long as I felt like I had the upper hand, so to speak, emotionally, I was supremely confident about the friendship. I could have continued to live in this state of rosy oblivion for months or years. In truth, when it comes to these things I am not any more intuitive than anyone else. I see what I want to see, and I hear what I want to hear. This blindsided me. Not only was I completely oblivious to my friend’s actual feelings, I was not even self-aware. Until it happened.

I won’t get into details, but over Labor Day weekend, my friend ended up flirting with a girlfriend of mine who was visiting from out of town. If we were really “just” friends this shouldn’t have bothered me, but the truth was that it did. Very much. I thought I had done a good job of hiding my distress. On the cab ride home from downtown, me tipsy, him drunky drunk, he accused me of pimping him out to my girlfriend. I imagined that he had wanted to make me jealous. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

I went home the next day and stewed over my jealousy. What did it mean? Was I going to have to confront it? Should I? Would our friendship survive a confrontation of this nature? Regardless, after seeking the counsel of both Katina and another male friend I came to the conclusion that a confession was necessary, and that if the friendship were to survive, I would need some space. Trust me. Space is necessary because I do not take rejection at all well. I will say something so hurtful to you that you will wish I would have skinned you alive and dropped you into a cauldron of boiling hot oil instead. I especially do not like feeling foolish, and if I am scorned in a manner that makes me feel foolish, then I pity the man who ever changes his mind and decides he wants me. Because you only fool me once.

The confession went like this. I embarrassed myself and then humiliated myself while he sat there and listened. That was pretty much how it worked. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe it. Naturally, since I inspire undying platonic devotion in both straight and gay men (a blessing and a curse), he was hurt by the idea that he wouldn’t be able to see me for awhile. And worried that awhile might translate into forever. It won’t be forever. Just long enough for me to gain perspective, maybe get a little crush going on someone else, possibly get laid, although I gotta say that I have offers but the prospects in that department are less than satisfactory.

And that is the story of my mopey weekend. It’s nothing new or original, something people the world over have gone through probably since cavemen “invented” fire. The good news is that this time the guy I wasted my affections on wasn’t gay or a jerk. I consider that progress. Maybe at the rate I’m going I will find a man who isn’t gay or a jerk and who actually returns my feelings by the age of fifty. One can dare to dream.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

I just finished a book that was recommended by my friend, Shy Guy. It’s called, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins. I wanted to share my impressions. Mr. Perkins claims to have been recruited to work for Charles T. Main, a large engineering firm (that he refers to throughout the book as MAIN, as if it were an anagram rather than someone’s last name). He claims that he was recruited to work for MAIN by the NSA or National Security Agency.

The NSA is a highly secretive government agency that mostly concentrates on cryptology. They’re French Connection type spooks. It seems highly unlikely that they would be involved in recruiting unschooled and ill-prepared economists for a private engineering firm. But I suppose crazier things have happened. At any rate, it provides the book with a cloak and dagger edge and a Republican masterminded conspiracy theory that makes for more exciting reading than the dry history of American foreign policy of the last forty years. Supposedly, a production company has bought the film rights for Harrison Ford to star in the movie version one day.

Mr. Perkins does say an awful lot about American foreign policy that might shock some people and would certainly educate many Americans. He claims that as an economic hit man or EHM that he was paid to inflate the cost of modernization projects that we were doing in third world countries throughout Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Not only would he pad the cost of the projects but he would also, more importantly, project inflated figures of future economic growth related to these projects. The work would then be done by American companies like MAIN or Haliburton. When the first note was due the third world country would be unable to pay it and would default on the loan because the economic growth rate that was projected from the project was well below the actual growth rate. This made all these countries indebted to the United States of America and unable to pay the debt.

Mr. Perkins claims that this was done willfully by our government in an attempt to not only further stop the spread of communism by exerting our influence over those countries that owed us debts, but also that we used it as a form of modern imperialism in order to protect our economic interests (i.e. OIL, folks) abroad. I certainly wouldn’t put this past our government. I think that it’s also possible that the loans were simply padded in the name of good old-fashioned greed with the American tax payer footing the bill and the fat cats at firms like MAIN amassing a small fortune with each new indebted foreign country. Gordon Gecko would heartily approve. However it happened, the end result is just the same. Much of the third world is indebted to us and rightfully feels shackled, burdened and cheated.

We may not occupy these countries like the Roman empire but we exert our influence just as heavy handedly. The foreign countries may not be able to pay their debts but we amass our pound of flesh somehow. If the rulers of these countries fail to do our bidding, then this is when America sends in what Mr. Perkins refers to as our, “jackals.” The jackals are CIA agents who commit assassinations, stage coups and fund revolutions with the goal of putting someone in office who will do America’s bidding, regardless of whether that leader is a “good” leader or a “bad” leader and irrespective of any semblance of a democratic process.

In addition, in each of the many instances where the United States has stepped into a foreign country with the lip service of improving conditions, things have actually worsened for the vast majority of the citizens of that country. American companies come in and take advantage of cheap labor and natural resources. The interest alone on the loans that these countries owe in many cases means that even a well-intentioned leader is unable to afford to provide the citizens of his country with basic needs such as food, clean water, and health care. This is why much of the world hates the United States. We got richer while they got poorer. The vast chasm of income disparity between the wealthiest and poorest people and nations continues to grow and yawn.

What can be done to change this? I think we do need to change. We need to wake up quickly and smell the coffee. Unless we change our dependence on oil and change our policies in accordance we are doomed to repeat the historic cycle of superpowers ad infinitum, and we are going down. Ours is such a great country that I would hate to see that happen. Despite the criticisms in this post, I think that America is great and that Americans have done a lot of good in the world as well. I think that if we changed our energy policy and also practiced debt forgiveness to those nations that need it that we could go far in achieving good will throughout the world. If you’re interested in the concept of debt forgiveness, there’s a great organization championing the idea, mostly on the internet. It’s called One, and you can join for free and find out how you can help by influencing the politicians that represent you. Their website is: http://www.one.org/us/.

Cyberstalking

I have this innocent habit of looking up people in my past that I haven’t seen in a long time, via googling. Some of my friends who are harsh critics like to call this cyberstalking. Not so. And I know that I’m not the only person who enjoys this activity. I just do it out of idle curiosity.  No one gets hurt. Usually, no one even gets contacted. It’s just fun to see where people end up and what they do with their lives. All the examples listed below are men, but I look up women friends, too.

As a for instance, I recently googled The Rat Bastard to find that, if you can believe his own website (which I don’t), he now owns his own fabulously successful information technology consulting and services firm. Sure, now he’s rolling in the dough!

Facebook is a great place to do this,  too. I’ve found lots of people I haven’t seen in a while. Sometimes I actually befriend them. Sometimes they find me. For instance, a guy that I once briefly dated in college is now my friend on Facebook. He’s a total asshole, but I have no backbone about this sort of thing. If someone asks to be my friend on Facebook I’ll probably befriend them anyway. He’s still an asshole. He at least admits to being married on Facebook, but there are no pictures of his wife and kids on his Facebook. It’s mostly pictures of him with famous liberal politicians that he’s met and pictures from his childhood.

I’ve cyberstalked my main heckler from my junior high school for years now. No kidding, this boy made my life nothing short of a living hell with his constant ridicule from the time I was twelve to the time I was fourteen when I finally moved in the middle of my freshman year. Yet I love to look him up on the internet from time to time. I think I’m secretly hoping that his life is miserable.

The fact is that said young man grew up and graduated with honors with a bachelors degree in English from a state university, then went on to get a masters and even a Ph.D. from a private university in California. Some of those years were spent studying abroad in France. He headed some institute thingy in Austria and then came back to the U.S. to work for a huge, fancy and very famous non-profit foundation in Chicago. Then back to the university where he earned his Ph.D. to work for another non profit. And most recently off to London to work for another type of non-profit, again headed by someone very famous and wealthy who’s concerned with improving conditions for all people in the heavily populated areas of the Muslim world, regardless of their religion, national origin or sex.

When I knew this same young man who is now so concerned with saving the world’s poor and downtrodden, just buying your clothes at Wal-Mart and living in a trailer park were enough to make you the scum of the earth. Being poor was something he believed you should have the good sense to be ashamed of. If you didn’t realize it, then he would do the shaming for you. And I wasn’t poor like the poverty stricken of the third world. I just only owned two pairs of jeans and ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. It wasn’t truly a great hardship. He hit me on the head with a fly swatter once to demonstrate his contempt. I’m imagining just what kind of punishment would befall a poor Muslim woman from the ghettos of Calcutta in his care. Would she get hit with a cane?

Eh. People change. I should probably be glad that he actually seems to have evolved into a decent human being. But I’m happier that he’s going bald, and he’s  probably still short.

My Fantasy Dinner Party

Have you ever wanted to have a fantasy dinner party? What if you could invite any eight people alive or dead  over for dinner? Who would you pick? I am going to attempt to pick eight people for my dinner party and to tell you why I would have them there. They don’t come in any  order of particular favoritism.

1. William Shakespeare – I think this one is pretty self evident. He’s brilliant. Perhaps the best writer of all time. I would want to pick his brain.

2. Steve Martin – A great writer, a funny and creative soul. I love The Jerk, L.A. Story, Roxanne, and Shop Girl. He’s wonderful. I hope he brings his banjo.

3. Carrie Fisher – The author of Postcards from the Edge and Wishful Drinking and the woman who played Princess Leia and co-starred in When Harry Met Sally. She is undoubtedly the wittiest woman alive.

4. Jesus – Depending upon how you feel about the issue, he could be my second dead guest or he  could be very  much among the living. He might not seem to fit in, but I think he’d be a great contributor to our conversation.

5. Don Henley – We have to have at least one musician, and he is one whom I greatly admire. He’s thoughtful, involved in lots of great causes. His lyrics seem to mirror a lot of my sensibilities.

6. Dorothy Parker – The wittiest woman that ever lived could give Carrie Fisher a run for her money, and I would love to hear stories from the Algonquin Round Table.

7. Eleanor Roosevelt – Out of all the guests so far, I think she might get along with everyone the best except for Jesus. Jesus loves everyone. I’d want to hear her views on the current world situation and her ideas on how to improve it.

8. Cary Grant – This is just because he fascinates me. I’ve probably read at least five biographies on him. He was supposedly a fascinating raconteur. I’d want to hear all about his life from his viewpoint.

Of course, I can think of more people I’d like to have dinner with besides just these eight. However, I don’t want to have to cook for more people than that. Maybe I could win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse and have the event catered.

Whatever Happened to Common Courtesy and Decency?

I realize that the title of this post makes me sound like some shriveled up old lady who tells her grandkids stories about how she had to walk to a one room schoolhouse ten miles one way, uphill. That’s a risk I’m willing to take. The lack of manners displayed by some people never fails to astound me.

Saturday I decided to see a Rated R horror flick called Orphan. My decision was mostly based on the recommendation of a man at the ticket counter who said that he had seen it the night before, and it was good. Good enough for me.

Now I don’t mind going to the movies alone. It’s a good way to pass the time. No one cares or probably even notices if you are alone. Your mind is occupied, and it’s dark in the theater, so you and your single aloneness are not on display for the world to see. Eating alone is a little harder to manage. It’s easier if you bring reading material. I go to the movies by myself so often that the retired man who takes tickets at that theater was actually shocked the first time he saw me go to the movies with someone.

I sat down several minutes before the movie began. Keep in mind that I said that I bought a ticket to see a Rated R horror film. The opening sequence of the film is a woman’s very graphic and disturbing nightmare about the birth of a stillborn child, by caesarean section, no less. Thank God that the family missed that sequence by virtue of being late to the movie.

Yes, I said family. A family of two adult women, one adult male, two little girls and three or four little boys, at least two of which were not old enough to be in school yet, all came running in loudly and sat down in the aisle right behind my seat and then preceded to talk and run up and down the aisles and in and out of the theater and kick the back of my chair. The father of this charming brood left his cell phone on. The ring tone was whatever obnoxious rap song with inappropriate lyrics is popular at the moment. Not only did he leave it on and let it keep ringing for several bars of the obnoxious song, he also answered it and had a very loud phone conversation with someone in the middle of the movie.

The last straw for me was probably two-thirds of the way through the movie when the man and one of his pre-school aged sons carried on an entire conversation while I’m trying to watch my movie. Even after I turned around and pointedly stared at him to make sure he got how rude I thought he was, he just kept right on talking. I got up, walked out of the theater and demanded that something be done. I was not the first person to complain. I knew this because an usher had come up to the dad several moments earlier and told him that he needed to be quiet because at least two other patrons had come to speak to a manager about the noise.

I like to think of myself as a pretty tolerant person. However, in a movie theater that was also showing Ice Age and the latest installment of Harry Potter, for an adult in charge of small children to make the decision to take them to see Orphan instead, is unconscionable. I think that dad is lucky I only reported him to the manager of the theater instead of to the Department of Child Protective Services. I won’t spoil the plot for you, but Orphan includes, along with the previously mentioned inappropriate dream sequence, vulgar language, two scenes including simulated sex, a disturbing scene where a child tries to seduce an adult, two gruesome murders, and an attempted murder in which a child might have burned alive. There is frank discussion involving the death of a child, adultery, and alcoholism. Just because there is a picture of a little girl on the movie poster doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate viewing for children.

I get that families like to get out and have fun, too. I think they should.  When I was a child my parents insisted on my having manners. If I wasn’t quiet during a movie or a church service or if I acted up at a restaurant, I was removed from the scene, and there were consequences. Also, I think the first film I ever saw in a theater that wasn’t a Disney movie was ET. That was released in the early eighties. I would have been at least nine years old. It’s also pretty appropriate viewing for children.

I’m okay with discreet whispering in a movie theater. I’m not the Movie Nazi. I’m okay with raunchy music. Get your freak on. Just not in public. I love “Pussy Control,” by Prince. That’s pretty damn raunchy. It’s okay at a club at 2 A.M. or in the privacy of your own, hopefully child free home. It’s not an appropriate ring tone.

My point with this rant is this: be considerate of other people. The man in that movie theater wasn’t being considerate of anyone. His children would probably have preferred to watch Harry Potter but instead had to watch the movie he wanted to watch. He didn’t give a damn whether it would give them nightmares or provide them with disturbing images that they were way too young to process. He didn’t give a damn about how his noise or his family’s noise disturbed the movie viewing experience of everyone around him. And he didn’t give a damn if his cell phone ring was polite or not. I see more and more of this kind of behavior in the world every day, and it bothers me. It’s almost as if the only people that are procreating are the kind of idiots that shouldn’t be and those of us with enough smarts and manners to raise children right are not having them. That’s probably because a lot of us with smarts and manners are considerate enough not to purposely bring children into this world under less than ideal circumstances.

The Greatest Television Shows of All Time, According to Me

My favorite television shows when I was a kid weren’t very sophisticated. I liked Batman and Get Smart, Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. I loved variety shows like Sonny and Cher, The Donny and Marie Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. I still like The Carol Burnett Show, not that you see it anymore except for in late night infomercials for DVDs from Guthy-Renker. I loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Marlo Thomas in That Girl, because they represented, for me, single career women who were independent, happy and fabulous. I looked up to them and wanted to be them one day when I grew up.

I didn’t care for The Dukes of Hazard or A-Team, but I loved The Bionic Woman and Charlie’s Angels. I had Barbie dolls of Cher, Marie Osmond, and The Bionic Woman growing up. When detective shows were everywhere I loved Hart to Hart and Remington Steele. I loved both The Cosby Show and Family Ties. Don’t get me started on Michael J. Fox. I’ll never stop. And then when I was in high school there was a revelation of what might be the greatest TV show of all time.

I remember my first viewing of Moonlighting. The pilot. It was greatness. The writing was great. I was too young and unsophisticated to realize they were ripping off the screwball comedies of the 1930s that I also loved. I just knew that it was wildly funny and entertaining and imaginative. And the sexual tension was palpable. Ah, Bruce Willis with hair in Ray Bans and a suit, in a BMW. His impression on my formative adolescent years was so strong that that image is like sex on film for me. When they finally got together to Ronnie and the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” it was thrilling. Even when I viewed the entire series on DVD as an adult a few years ago I still thought it was marvelous and fresh. There’s never been anything on television like it, before or since.

After Moonlighting, nothing really caught my imagination to the same degree until Ally McBeal came along. And I loved that show. People had a hard time with that show to some degree. There were criticisms and articles about how she brought back feminism by several years. How? Because she liked to wear mini-skirts and look attractive? Because she was obsessed with her married ex-boyfriend, Billy? Because she saw hallucinations of Dancing Babies accompanied to B.J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling”? Because she represented independent career women who still wanted to find love and raise a family? How very offensive! Everyone knows that true feminists should look and act and feel and have all the same opinions as Norman Lear’s Maude.

I liked a show called Christy that was based on a book by Catherine Marshall about a young woman who volunteered as a missionary teacher in the Appalachians. But like so much TV that I find watchable and worthy of praise even, it didn’t last.

The next show to hook me was Felicity. Over the years, it evolved into more of a soap opera, but in the beginning it was really wonderful. Felicity was about a freakishly intelligent woman with a famous head of curly hair who moves to New York from California to run after a boy from high school that she had a crush on. She does this because he “encourages” her by writing in her yearbook that he always wished that he knew her better. This show also had a lot of great writing and great actors. It was one of Jennifer Garner’s first acting roles of any consequence, and John Ritter and Chris Sarandon both had lengthy guest roles. It introduced us to Keri Russell and Scott Speedman and Scott Foley. It was created by J.J. Abrams, the man who brought us Lost, my favorite television show of the present.

I didn’t watch Lost for the first season. I caught on in repeats that were shown during that first summer hiatus. I loved it for the mystery and the characterizations and the fantastical plot that seemed to almost rival anything that Days of our Lives has ever done. My favorite characters are not Jack, Sawyer or Kate, although I like them okay. My favorites are John Locke and Sayid, followed by Desmond, Rose, Hurley and Ben. They are much more interesting to me. And I think that both Sayid and Richard Alpert are sexy as hell.

I could go on, but these are the stand outs in my mind. With the possible exception of Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, the British show Keeping Up Appearances, and the super funny Arrested Development I think I’ve made an almost exhaustive list. But maybe I’ll think of some others later.