I was off key, a little sharp

I decided after three months not to renew my subscription to one of the very popular paid online dating sites (VPPODS). This is my last week there and today I decided to clean house. I took down most of my pictures. Left a little message on my profile and closed communication in its various stages with some dudes.

It might appear to the outside observer and most of my friends that I was not taking the process seriously. And in a sense this is both true and not. I did sincerely try to think about the questions that were asked of me and answer them honestly. I had considered offering up some of my excruciating attempts at serious, sincere, self-expression but I will spare you the nitty details.

I spent hours and hours pressed up against the computer screen looking for something. Looking for a sign of life, of heart, of humor, of vitality, a spark, recognition of singularity. It's my excuse for not blogging. (as if one was needed)

To begin, I answered the question: what are you most passionate about?

"Learning new things, being exposed to new ideas, making connections. The point at which you gain a deep understanding of a person or an idea or a process. Situations and relationships that liberate and empower people and individuals. Live music."


Pretty vague, eh? As I thought about this, I realized that of late, passion and inspiration have been lacking from my day to day. I don't have an all-consuming passion in my life. It seemed somehow dishonest to leave my profile as it was. So I changed it to:

"I am most passionate about lunch. I get an irrepressible yearning for it every day."

Which is true. Everyday, I think about lunch all morning. I don't stop thinking about it until I have it. And the next day the process begins anew.

I explained myself this way:
"Most of the multiple choice boxes don't seem to express anything that I would say to describe myself or anyone else. My job is the thing that takes up most of my time but it is not who I consider myself to be. Who am I? I am a petal in the palm of the universe. Who are you?"

The profiles on VPPODS, my own included, made me think of that line from the Smiths (this reused from my myspace):

"You shut your mouth
How can you say
I've gone about things the wrong way
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does"
- The Smiths



We all do. And there's nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with the need to love and be loved. There is nothing wrong with feeling lonely and admitting to that fact. Somedays, New York feels like the loneliest of places. But it can happen anywhere, even in a big crowded room.


Today, I spoke with a fella who believes that sex is like glue. Having it binds to people together emotionally. He thought that you needed to be careful about sex because you might get stuck to the wrong kind of person and when the glue wore off you would be really stuck.

Not always, but yes, sex often does facilitate emotional attachment. There are chemicals in the brain that help facilitate this.

Upon later reflection, the glue analogy strikes a chord with me because for months and months I've felt like I am meeting people but they don't make an impression on me. They don't stick. I have become teflon or rubber and someone else in the room has figured out how to be glue. It goes both ways. I'm pretty sure that I am not inspiring all that much gluey-ness in others. When I meet someone I want to get sticky with they can't get away from me fast enough. (Okay maybe my concept of glue is a bit different from his, but you know what I mean, right? Right?)

Sometimes even sex is not enough to make a connection sticky. And in this city, there are so many forces at work to pull two people apart.

To find someone who sticks, would be amazing. To find someone who could be the cheese to my macaroni. Yeah.

So as part of cleaning house today I put up this:

"The course of true love never did run smooth..."
This little black cloud in a dress is letting her subscription run out this week. For the usual reasons: match never responded to my request for communication, I'm taking a break from dating, I'm just not ready to take the next step, I think the distance between us is too great, I think the difference in our ages is too great, the dog ate my homework, I've fallen and I can't get up, I've got an early squash game, I am allergic to the phone, and the ever popular - Other.

Take care of yourself and good luck in your search.

I'm relieved to be off the site. But also sad. It was a hopeful thing to do. And it was fun to get all that email from the VPPODS and the dudes who hang out there.

But here I am again in the regular world. Itching for a reason the throw my heart out ahead of myself, not knowing if I can beat the throw and run fast enough to catch up to it. But maybe it's not about having a reason. Maybe it's about doing it and coming up with that reason as you try to beat the throw.

Maybe the first step is to seek passion and inspiration.

sunday girl talk, out of context

A: "Please don't tell me that he has a small uncircumcised penis."

B: "Oh, I don't know. I never asked him."

Love and looks are not enough

Today I ran across an article about animal shelters that are giving cats and humans personality tests to try to determine compatibility before adoption. When looking for a life companion, looks are not the only thing that matters.

What a great idea. I hope it works better in interspecies relations than it does on certain online dating sites.

If it does, I might start carrying a stopwatch and monitoring a man's noises and blink rate as indicators of sociability.

Meme via MomVee

The instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, right?)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-5
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Lessons learned from doing this meme?

I have the attention span of an gnat. How is it that I so rarely finish the books that I pick up to read?

I apparently also have the memory of a goldfish. I have this feel that I have actually read a few of the italicized books ... I just can't remember.

And apparently I went to the kind of schools that never assigned books to be read. *blush*

hypnotized by food

me: Oh man, I want fried chicken soooo bad

CK: yeah? HA!!!!

me: I'm getting the shakes over it. *url for Korean fried chicken shack.* The website is for shit but the food looks like chicken

CK: That's always a good thing to say about food: looks like chicken

A Resume Builder

Today, folks at work remarked on the skill with which I uncork champagne bottles.

Remove foil and wire.
Point the bottle away from yourself and other living things.
Grab the cork so that the top of the cork is nestled in the palm of your hand.
Slowly twist it up and out.

It ain't no thang.

What the world needs now

is more synchronized cycling.

May is NYC bike month. Wherever you are, get thee some pedals to push and a helmet and ride ride ride!

Starts and Stops - Seis de Mayo Resolutions

Last night was my first Cinco de Mayo outing. For whatever reason this is the first year that I have gotten around to it. And it was instructional.

I woke up today with a throbbing head and a queasy belly and a list of resolutions:

Start carrying more cash.
Stop hugging random strangers who are smoking outside of bars.
Start learning to calculate tip and what people owe while inebriated.
Stop using my "outside and trapped in a well" voice, outside at night in the city.
Start refusing free tequila shots from drink reps.
Stop drinking without food.
Start improving my pitcher pouring skills.
Stop sharing my intimate details with people who know those associated with them (the details that is).
Stop tipping cab drivers more than the fare to Brooklyn.

It was stupid, glorious and more than a little painful. Bad for the body yet somehow good for the soul.

Oh, and it turns out that when I talk to cute dudes while hungover, I don't sweat or blush. Of course, I am in too much pain to flirt, but hey, it's a start.

There's something about you, that makes me sweat

How does that first spark feel, when you meet someone? Is it a tickle? A tingle? What does it sound like? A bell? A gong? A full orchestra with piano? The sound of a building crashing down?

When I was in high school, it was nausea. My stomach would drop. The more nauseous I was, the more I suffered, the more I liked the guy. SM made me super nauseous.

A couple of years ago it was trembling. The feeling of a quiver. With SE it was a total quiver.

During my first Mystechs tour I would light up like a lantern and smile really really big.
When I first really spoke with BE I did much the same.

And now? I heat up. I blush and sweat. Profusely. My glasses fog up. Happened over beers with B, happened the other day while talking to C and this evening it happened when I smiled at a guy on the train.

Online profiles don't make me sweat. This should be ideal. I could get to know someone without the embarassment and the flopsweat. But so far this process is sparkless.

So I might have to start running this spring and summer. That way when I meet hot men at the park it won't matter that I am blushing and sweating while chatting them up. They will think it's the run.

Inversions

After a very long flu-imposed hiatus, I have been doing a little bit of yoga. I took a three weekend class for beginners who are interested in preparing to take intermediate classes. I have long understood that I am not actually advanced enough to take the crazy yoga flow 2 classes that I am so fond of at Laughing Lotus. I fall a lot. A lot compared to the rest of the class.

After taking the weekend sessions I have a clearer sense of why that is. I had thought that I was not flexible enough and that my gut was getting in my way. These things do factor in. But additionally, as CK pointed out to me, I am not strong enough yet for a lot of this stuff. My core, my back, my legs, my arms.

Strength comes through more practice and maybe a more diverse program of practice with a variety of different teachers and on my own.

Yesterday, I was in a class in which we did handstands. We did a handstand prep in the middle of the floor. Downward dog, walk your feet in, lift one leg and then kick that leg up. And, I had this moment, where I felt it. I was there. Only one leg, but I was there. I think I even squealed a little. At which point I flopped back down. Close but no stand. It felt qualitatively different from all the times that I had huffed and hopped and kicked and kicked. I felt close. So close that a part of me was kicking myself and asking why I didn't just go with it. Why did I have to sabotage myself like that? While the rest of me was captivated by that feeling. It was like I had kicked up my leg and thrown myself into the great unknown. And the great unknown was there to catch me.

Then we did this exercise where we run up to the wall, using the momentum to throw ourselves into handstand. Which again, I could barely do. I threw myself and at one point found that I had the right half of my body pressed right up against the wall and the left side of me hanging out in the air. In trying to pull myself away from the wall, I crumpled into a little mass of me. It was no fluke, I did this twice the second time during an exercise in which we did handstand on blocks. Same thing, I crumpled.

Part of it was being in a panic at being upside down. Part of it was that I was so disoriented in that upside down state that my brain could not figure out which limbs to control to accomplish the handstand proper.

I need to practice more and get stronger so that one of these days when I throw myself into the great unknown, it will catch me, and I will allow it to hold me.

won't live long with it, can't live long without it

Last week at work, there was a day in which I could not distinguish the feeling of love from the feeling of hunger. So I called CK to confer on this phenomena. After a bit of teleconferring, and based on the lack of an object for this emotion, we determined that it was probably hunger.

I went to the Dr the other week for a check up. My Dr is a cutie. He looks a little like John Larroquette during his "Night Court" days, only less greasy. My Dr is a wise guy (by which I mean funny) and doesn't seem to mind that I am one too. So he tells me that I am healthy with the exception of elevated cholesterol. Which led me for one week to try to implement the kind of diet that drives a girl to sneak ice cream and cheeseburgers in between austere meals. I call it salad in a pita with a slice of turkey. Horrendous. Without cheese, food became a lonely place and meals were dire.

So I have decided to embrace my mortality and my love of cheese. What is life without cheese? Culinary death.



Addendum: The Dr suggested that I stop having cream cheese with my bagel. I asked if butter was a reasonable substitute to which he shook his head. But he could offer me no alternative. The one that I have come up with is: peanut butter.

Learning Curve

I've been learning how to play the REM song "Everybody Hurts." Because I am trying to learn how to fingerpick. Developing the muscle memory takes a lot more time than it used to.

Michael Stipe looks deliciously good in the video.

Walking out of a yoga class the other day I overheard some people talking about the other classes and lessons that they are taking and it struck me that in NYC it seems like everyone is taking a class or a lesson in something. Perhaps it is now New York specific but I am struck by the number of people who are learning to play instruments, learning new languages, learning to dance, learning how to walk and sit better, learning how to do the hully gully, learning to cook, and so on.

On one hand I wonder at the money that people are paying to be taught things. On the other I kind of like that fact that so many people are interested in learning new things beyond their school years.

Can't fight this feeling

The onion in my fridge,
despite the cold and the dark, has put out tender green shoots.
Behind the door she can sense a change
and reaches out in search of the sun.

The trouble with online dating

The more I see them,
the more I want you.

I've read the book.
I know how it ends
and I can't help
but read it again.
You never know,
it might end differently this time.

Another Happy New Year

It is the Thai New Year today. I am catching the tail end of it.

To celebrate, I went back to A's yoga class which has become more impossibly hard than it was a few months ago. Murderous. I walked out of it, looked at myself in the mirror and thought, "Look at that happy face. Who the hell is she?" Well apparently, she is me after A's impossibly strenuous yoga class.

And then I had one crunchy taco at Taco Bell because I had a little over a dollar in my purse and because I had a powerful craving for that yummy plastic nonsense.

Which is probably not traditional but it was a good night nonetheless.

It's like this

In life, there are many things that we learn by example. I think among these is how to love. We learn how to love and be loving by doing but also by the examples around us and through the guidance of those that we know and love.

It may be valuable to meet a person's friends to see what kinds of examples they offer and what guidance they give.

I count myself to be very lucky to have great examples and wonderful guides in my life.

:P

There are people in this world who will draw you out, make you think that you share an experience in common and then leave you hanging.

I think those people suck.

Mr. Excitement

I took in this youtube of Jackie Wilson singing "Lonely Teardrops".

I have always loved this song. But the man. Good god, the man. He is lighter than air. I have never seen the like of him.

Astounding.

Saturday's Alright

I step out of the bathroom at CK's house to witness her watching an infomercial on hair replacement products. When asked about this she says, "I haven't watched TV in a month, it's fascinating!"