Pox girl and the Phobic

Okay, he's truly, clinically phobic about germs, the new boyfriend. Nobody is perfect, right?
I tell myself I don't need to take this on. I really don't. Not my problem.

But he's phoned twice trying to make it up. The second call, I'm virally teary, offended and depressed and ask in a somewhat hysterical, quavering voice, what other phobias might be looming - homophobia? racism? Because those are real deal breakers I tell him. He assures me he is not a Nazi or harboring either of those peculiarities.

He asks if he can see me after I go to the doctor tomorrow. "After all," he argues, "I'm not going to get over the phobia sitting here alone." And he's proud that he's already made it past the discovery of a tattoo on my upper left arm - tattoos apparently being related to the germ-thing. He's thinking maybe he can conquer fear of germs and viruses next. "That's what you need alrighty, a tattooed, virus-ridden girlfriend for therapeutic purposes." He agrees enthusiastically. As if he can tell that I see his point and seem to be moving him out of potential ex-new-boyfriend to probationary-new-boyfriend status.

What can I tell you? What passes for my love life is, at least, not boring. And did anyone see "Aviator?" Because Howard Hughes was a pretty interesting guy before he went completely off his rocker. Okay. Never mind. Fire at will.

Athletic footware and interviews

A month ago, the final breakup with the Scorpio. A note under my door, followed by weeks of off-and-on snotty nosed crying. I'm puffy-eyed and feel like someone has taken a metal scoop and dug my heart out. The space that's left is sore.

And it's back to internet dating. My old rule is "you have to write me for a while before I'll meet you." Someone points out on their profile that what this method garners is a lot of history that may not be particularly relevant. Someone else says, "You write for ages and then you meet - and hey! You're still meeting a stranger." I have a new rule now. I will talk to you once or twice, briefly via email - and then we meet in a public place.

It's like interviewing. I had three interviews this weekend - one on Saturday, two on Sunday. As my friend D says, "it gets exhausting." Up until the third interview - when I meet HB.

He picks me up, and rather than suggesting a coffee, he spreads out a promotional poster advertising the events at the harbor this weekend. "I have an itinerary," he tells me. We locate the place the bands will be playing and light out for the harbor. He parks and is bewildered, when he comes to open the car door for me, that I'm already on the other side of the van. Good manners, I think. Not me, him.

We stroll, we locate the beer tent where the bands are set up, and we settle in to watch people and listen to the music. He's funny and he gets all my jokes. Never short of an answer. He won't hear of me buying a round. The music is great and we're both belting out songs along with the band before too long. I keep thinking, in total amazement, this is a real date. And I'm actually having fun.

By the end of the evening, we're in The Red Fox Tavern. There's painful local talent on stage and the place is jammed with regulars and it's a little like the bar scene in Starwars. He'd said we were going to another bar. "Bait and Switch" he grins at me.

The next morning, I get an email. "Do you have plans? Shall we go to brunch and for a walk?"
I have plans. My house is in shameful condition. I'm behind on my beadwork. "Brunch would be great" I email back.

Brunch starts at 10:00 and he leaves at 8:00 that night. It turns out that he's a bit of a lunatic. Attention Deficit, I think. He's very bright and his mind is going about 20 times the average human speed. We end up driving and he gives me a tour of auto body shops, indoor cart-racing facilities and remote factories, mostly because that's where the van pointed at a given moment, I believe. For some reason, I just relax and enjoy the pointless meandering. It's a beautiful day. Why not drive anywhere at all?

In the evening, he wants to show me a lake.
Now the interests on his profile were hiking, kayaking and swimming. When I answered his email I agreed to meet with him if he could settle for a woman who might hike, provided no bogs or swamps were involved. I am wearing silly jeweled sandals that consist of a thin sole and two straps over my feet. The path is less gravel than treacherous chunks of rock and root. It's narrow and the trees are closing in. There are boggy patches. We pick our way through what seems like a mile of bad walking and finally I say, "HB!" He continues walking merrily along. "HB!" He stops and turns. "HB, look at me. Have you noticed at all that I'm rather a girly-girl, as opposed to your basic outdoor athletic type?"
He beams at me. "Almost there."

The lake is beautiful when we arrive. He's promised me the sun will set for us and light the water, just wait. It hasn't quite when we arrive and he admits he hasn't come through on that but quickly points out a tree the beavers have almost felled. "Bait and Switch" he says again.

On the way back, it seems there are more paths than we noticed earlier. After tromping, in my ridiculous sandals for about ten minutes, he stops ahead of me and says, "Does this look familiar to you?"
"What??"
"Does this look familiar to you?" I look around. It looks like forest and bush. All of it.
"Noooo. I don't think so HB. Why?"
"I don't think this is the way we came. See usually I go a different way and come out over there." He points to a jetty of land about four miles away and then perks up. "I'll bet if we took this path over here, we could still get to it - and it's on our way!"
"HB. Get me out of here." He looks surprised. He hands me a blueberry.
"Eat that. These are SO good for you."
And then, I'm not absolutely sure it was anything but blind luck, he got me out of there.
"I'm not forgetting you dragged me through bogs, HB." This does not diminish his cheer level in any way.

But I see the pattern shaping up already. We work different hours through the week and just before he leaves, he says, "I know! I'll come over Wednesday morning at 6:00 and wake you up and drive you to work."
"No you won't."
"I won't? Why?"
"Because I know what waking me up means and I'd be late for work."
"Noooo. I'd get you to work."
"No."
"You know you just might start to like that after a while."
"I will kill you if you show up here at 6:00 a.m." He smiles beatifically.

The pattern:
"No HB. I'm not doing that."
"Okay!"
And then we do whatever it is he had in mind.

So we'll see. We'll see. You know it might not be half-bad to hang around someone who has announced, in answer to something grumpy and skeptical I've said, "I'll be the cognitive therapist for us." A Leo. Goddess help me.

A good frog is hard to find

Here is my fantasy:

I meet a man in my day to day life. We talk for a few minutes here and there. We finally decide, because the conversations are pretty good, that we should have coffee together. We have coffee or a drink together and the conversations get even better. He's interesting to me and I'm interesting to him.

We exchange phone numbers. He says he'll call on, say, Wednesday. He actually calls on Wednesday.

He asks me out to dinner.

Ahhh.

Dinner. At a decent restaurant, with a little ambiance. And why does he choose that kind of place? Because he wants to impress me just a little and wants the atmosphere to be congenial and pleasant.

We meet at the restaurant with a little ambiance. I wear a dress and my wonderful new high heels. Why? Because I'd like to impress him a little.

And while we're having dinner and another great conversation, we're both thinking how lucky we are to be there with each other. We're thinking about possibilities. We're actually entertaining hope.

After dinner, we go to our respective homes - kind of wishing that we weren't but not wanting to spoil things by rushing ahead.

Right. Pigs fly. And it's the era of internet dating. Besides, I keep mistaking frogs for princes.

Either KD had a slip of the tongue today or I had a slip of hearing but I thought she said, "Traumedy" describing a movie. I started to laugh. The perfect label for my so-called-love-life:
Romantic Traumedy.

Damn I'm tired of it.

**Some post after all this time, but hey - that's what's not so new.

They pay Oprah for this

I realize that most of you probably imagine me to a kind, patient, loving and occasionally amusing person – clear and articulate about my feelings and sensitive to the feelings of others. A virtual model of consistency, level-headedness and at least a little comic attitude. Certainly someone who doesn’t deserve the unfeeling sons of bitches who litter my love life.

This concludes fiction practice for the day…

“What is it you really need?” he asks.

“Not to die alone….but that’s stupid because, let’s face it, no matter how many people are around your bedside, they aren’t making the trip with you.” He smiles and nods and I continue, “I want to feel protected. Like some man actually wants to protect me. But the minute any man tries it, I wheel around and ask who he thinks he’s talking to – I demand to know if he thinks, for some reason, I’m incapable of looking after myself.”

That’s probably as accurate a picture as I can paint of what it’s like to deal with me.

Now him…the recent villain of the piece…he’s afflicted with the same damn set of emotional paradoxes. Or at least the male version of them. He's just as emotional as me too, only he's stuck with the macho inability to rant and rave when aggrieved.

And this. Both of us have good-sized betrayal issues (I know, who doesn’t?) stemming from our relationships with parents of the opposite sex. Both of us are hyper-sensitive to rejection – real or imagined - and both of us are disposed to think death is preferable to indignity. Our honesty levels (along with our tactless blundering) are about the same. Our sensitivity to undercurrents is very close and we are both very observant - except when it comes to ourselves. Our certainty that only we know what’s really going on is the same. We are independent, passive-aggressive and horribly stubborn. We laugh and cry and care about many of the same issues.

That's why we understand one another, why we connect effortlessly, almost always. Except, of course, for the times when we don’t connect and the whole thing proceeds into the toilet with great haste. And then comes anger. And pain. On both sides. Have you ever seen the tarot card, "The Tower?" It's like that when it happens. Babel. Suddenly we need a universal translator because we are from different planets and cannot make ourselves understood.

Having blabbed my own hurt and innermost feelings all over this blog, I feel compelled to emphasize now that I was talking about my feelings, my interpretation of the whole sorry fiasco. That’s all I knew at the time. And so I write it out and he, this unnamed man whose side of the tale you never hear, comes off sounding like a cad and a bounder. And it’s just that he doesn’t get a speaking part here.

Officially, as narrator and the recently distraught, I want to clarify: he isn’t a cad. My boyfriend is not a twat. And his last two weeks were about as lousy as mine. Only he couldn't talk to anyone.

Just for the record.

On the thirteenth day

By the 13^th day, anger has flamed into ashes and blown away. The emptiness of loss hollows a space that fills repeatedly with tears. I can’t think badly of him, can’t live with the last furious words I said to him. I can’t summon outraged dignity and hurt pride.

I call to leave voice mail, tell him I hope his upcoming biopsy is over with quickly and the results show he’s holding his own. The wish for his good health is real, but only the top layer of the message, which is I am still your friend, no matter what. I call when I’m certain he’s not there, because I’m not challenging his decision.

And he responds to the message sounding like it’s the first time he’s breathed in two weeks. We talk for two hours on the phone and I say, “I’m glad we could have this conversation. I’m glad it didn’t end in anger.”

He says, “Are you free? Can I come over so we can talk in person?”

At the end of the afternoon, he looks at the bead journal page – studies it for a minute before he says anything then,

“You really thought I was gone for good, didn’t you?”

“Every time.”

Maybe this time we’ve taught each other how to recognize the minefields. God knows, two people never tried harder.

Country and Western songs

The phone rings at 8:57 a.m. - but only once. It rings again at 10:00 a.m. and this time he doesn't hang up. By then, I assume, he's taken the requisite number of deep breaths and stiffened his resolve so that, after a long and almost entirely happy relationship of two and a half years, he can announce that we have not been very happy and now it's over.

He phoned it in. That's all I can think about. Two and a half years and he phoned it in.

It is, I think, the second time I have ever let him see me angry. Or more accurately, hear me angry. I don't argue or point out that we have one of these every six months and the rest of the time we are overjoyed to see each other.

"I hoped we could be friends, " he says, "but you don't sound friendly, and I guess that's understandable right now...."

Friends. Does a friend dump you on the phone? Doesn't feel very friendly to me. Feels downright sleazy, in fact.

And now, onward and hopefully upward - pushing off on my three unbalanced wheels, I'll just be continuing with the diagram and directions from hell.

India calling

The Scorpio advises me that my "I'm giving up men" post could be read as judgmental, that I left lots of room to offend. Being a male who was magnanimously excepted by me from the uncouth lot I referred to giving up, according to him, was not reassuring because it was so uncomfortably ambiguous. (I hasten to add that he does not read my blog, but got the idea pretty quickly from a verbal summary.)

Sigh.

I hate when he does that.

And he's right. You have to know me. Anyone who has known me for over five minutes realizes that the idea of me giving up men is a bit like the idea of me giving up breathing or orange lipstick or red hair. Not that I can't carp and whine with the rest of my beleaguered gender, and not that I don't have genuine complaints - but then, so do most of the men I know.

The entry was a little clip of my life. I was amused at how quickly my oldest friend dispatched the idea with the lack of ceremony it deserved. I was amused at KD, sarcastically offering to keep the ying/yang balance straight. But lest I offended more than one male person...

Here is a little background for those of you who have not been following along: Meeting few (as in no) new men (who are age-appropriate and interesting/unattached) in my daily life, and being in the situation of adoring a man who is (as I've delicately put it in the past) "mostly unavailable," I took a shot at the Internet. And it shot right back.

Case in point: Let's call him Dr. G. He is a tall, very good-looking man, 39 years of age. He is of East Indian descent, born in Toronto, and lived for some time in San Diego. His profile is literate, witty and blunt. All the things that appeal to me. I send a wave. He sends one back. We begin to email enthusiastically back and forth. He does volunteer work in India. He's writing a book. I give him my phone number and he calls immediately.

We talk for an easy, lively hour and decide to meet for a drink the next day. He asks if I'll be home for a while because he needs to do something and wants to get back to me. Sure. No problem. At 10:00 o'clock, I email to let him know I'm going to bed and ask that he email or phone the next day to confirm a time and place. So far, so good.

By 3:00 p.m. the following day, he hasn't done either and so, in a fit of pique, I make a disastrous date with the man I end up calling "Fish Stick." This is where some of you came in, I believe. I'd run my profile on the Internet site for a short time and had already managed to figure out that the vast majority of men who were contacting me want to have sex before they knew my name or possibly without ever knowing my name. Even worse, a fair number of them were more interested in just having phone sex. But I've never been a person who's put off by reality, so I persist.

And it isn't that I got to be this age without figuring out that men are interested in sex. Hell, I'm as interested as they are, but I'm damned if the first warm body to arrive on the scene is going to be the one I have it with.

Is it generational? Am I the only person who likes to meet someone before beginning a sexual relationship? Am I the only person who's heard of HIV? And in truth, I was perplexed because the men I know, the ones I value, who are just as interested in sex as any other man, actually prefer to like a woman they're having sex with and even to have a vague notion as to who she is before indulging...

But I digress.

I take the date with Fish Stick Man because I'm at the fuck-you stage with Internet meeting. If you're dealing with a wolf pack, best to be a wolf. Didn't call on time? Next?

Moving ahead a few days, and one very weird but fairly funny (in retrospect) date later - Dr. G. calls back. We have another lively, interesting discussion. Suddenly I hear a sharp tone. The exact tone you hear when you accidentally hit a key on your phone while talking. "Is that your phone?" he asks.
"Nope." We continue for another minute or two. We've been commiserating over the crappy way people act on this Internet site. We're at the point in the conversation where I say, "I'm at the point where I've heard from so many idiots that I'm ready to give up sex entirely..."

And the sharp tone sounds again.
"Is that your phone?" he asks again.
"No."
"Just a minute.....Oh. It's India calling. I'll call you right back, okay?"

And that's the end of Dr. G. Leading me to the conclusion that, in terms of Internet dating, even the smart people are stupid. The most galling part, of course, was that everyone on the planet knows that a call waiting signal creates a second of silence, not a beep.

As it turns out, the galling part, like the bad date, turns out to be the best part of the whole Internet dating experience in the long run. I tell KD about the "call interrupt" and she can't stop laughing. Now, every other phone call we share, one of us will hit a button on the phone and announce that "India is calling" and the two of us nearly pee our pants laughing.

So, my friends...that was basically the origin of the "I'm giving up men" blog entry. Or at least part of it. I yanked the profile. But I burned for a while over the general lack of even common courtesy.

Meanwhile...here's to the men I care about...who are interesting, street-smart, slightly insane, honest, funny, educated and not - but all intelligent, all trying to live consciously...

To: the Scorpio, to Mark, Coyo, James C., Doc, Minor Diety and the gentlemen of my acquaintance from the blogsphere - I send you a curtsy. And apologies if they are in order.

She begins in the middle and ends there, too

A week or so ago, I gave up men. I announced it to Weedy.
"I'm giving up men," I said. "Except for the ones I already like."
"No you're not," she replied. This is what happens when you're friends with someone for over 30 years. They go around thinking they know you and they say whatever they think.
"Yes I am. I'm keeping the Scorpios, though. Well...maybe I'm keeping the men I'm already friends with, as well. And the blog guys."
But that's it. Scorpio the Older and Scorpio the Younger. Maybe one Virgo (if he ever writes again). And okay, I'm still talking to Minor Deity. But I'm giving up on the rest. Absolutely.
"I'm giving up men," I tell K.D. "I told Weedy that today."
"And what did Weedy say?"
"She didn't believe me."
"Well. I'll believe you then. Just to keep the yin-yang balanced."

I'm going to sit around waiting for the end of the patriarchy. And ironing my wimple.

Meanwhile, can someone tell me why men who blog don't seem to have the a**hole quotient of your normal average male? If you can't tell me, then just pat yourselves roundly on the back, crack a beer (or a jar of olives stuffed with feta cheese) and do an entry so that I can keep hope alive.