Amends Tales: Summer Princess Reached Out!

 A few weeks ago, something really nice happened! I wasn't even sure if it was real until I checked in with a mutual friend. I thought it might be a catfish situation! A friendfish!

I hadn't been in touch with Summer Princess since I left the camp job a week early in August. This is partly because I was embarrassed/finishing up trauma work, but the main reason was! After The Future Mrs. Summer Princess found out about my crush, she had written a few unhinged, gently-threatening-yet-somehow-friendly DMs and texts, and I wanted absolutely no part of any of that. I missed Summer Princess but I never would have imagined she would miss me!

But she did! She messaged me on Instagram to apologize for her fiancee's notes and for how bad everything had gotten. She said she valued our friendship and would understand if I just told her to fuck off.

But of course I didn't! Her fiancee had every reason to be protective of her, and I was being so weird. But Summer Princess said she knew there was nothing to be protective about!

With OCD, I've had to train myself not to seek reassurance. When my mind tells me I'm bad and scary, I'm practiced in just telling myself "Maybe, maybe not." But knowing that Summer Princess liked our time together and felt safe meant a lot to me. My heart filled up with fluffy pink relief.

We don't talk often, but I'm so happy to consider her a friend again, to be out here rooting for each other. I like when I'm playing Animal Crossing and my Switch tells me what she's on there playing. I like being able to send her a K-Pop Demon Hunters song to wish her a happy Friday.

So, a friendship appreciation post. If you've been here for me reading or in person or *swoons* both, just know you're appreciated and loved. I want to take better care of my friendships, cause I would be absolutely NOWHERE without you.

Amends Tales: The King of Carrot Flowers

 

Now we're a two-person book club! :D

I promise I will eventually get back to the hotness, but I have a few platonic updates I want to share first!

Back when BFF Formerly Sweetie and I were first together, there was a third pal with us all the time. I'm naming him the King of Carrot Flowers because we were and are talking-about-music soulmates, and the early 2000s were a very Neutral Milk Hotel-y time for me. For us all!

King of Carrot Flowers was with us ALL the time! On Sundays, Sweetie and I would do the big New York Times crossword puzzle, and then head over to his place to watch The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle. We all went to see Rilo Kiley (Openers: Tilly and the Wall! Tapdancer as percussion!) in the dead of winter in a very subpar car. He was in our wedding.

He lived right by the nice pool in the park, we swam there and agreed that yes, it DID look like those Ice Mice candies inspired by the Harry Potter treat trolley. We drove weirdly far to get ice cream, and I got blissed out and swoony about the albums he played on his first-generation iPod, plugged in with the aux cord. He burned me my first and only copy of my favorite album, The Execution of All Things. It conked out in my car's CD player about 5 years ago.

Modest Mouse. Of Montreal. The first time I learned what a collective effervescence is, I was flirting with a religious studies grad student in King of Carrot Flowers's kitchen during a snowstorm disco party.

He used to housesit for us when we were away. He was our cat's favorite because he always brought sushi.

The song he kept on his MySpace page: 

Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would just hit refresh on his page over and over, just to feel connected to him.

We LOVED each other as friends and it's not at all surprising that I got a crush! Almost immediately upon marrying Sweetie, I fell into a WHAT IF I NEVER SEE A PENIS AGAIN panic so of course I would want to bi it up with this very romantic (to me) friendship.

I confessed the crush one night, walked over to his place after a spat with Sweetie and, to the soothing sounds of The Colbert Report, told him I was having feelings for him. He was very kind about it but said he wasn't interested in sharing with Sweetie. Polyamory was a few years away, I didn't even know the word yet.

If you've been a reader for any length of time, you can guess what happened: I felt sad and rejected and picked a fight to get space from him. That space lasted for about twenty years!

Then, the other month when I was babbling to BFF about how much I love dorking out about stuff with Guy Next Door, she said, "Why don't you call (King of Carrot Flowers)? You guys loved talking about music!"

So I did that thing where you send a friend request out into the universe and never expect to hear back. But I did! He accepted my apology and said "We're all better at giving each other grace these days."

It felt like I'd found a missing puzzle piece. We've been in touch ever since and I could not be more grateful.

Thank You Note: Cute Car Place Guy

 

 

A couple of Thursdays ago, I was having a very annoying day, which in 2020, sometimes feels like an OH NO THERE’S NO MORE CIVILIZATION day. (Oh trauma-brain, not always helpful!) My internet was down so severely that they scheduled a guy without making me perform any restarts! My Animal Crossing villagers inexplicably stopped talking to me—I’m not proud of how upsetting this was! I thought it was a puzzle but a quick Google showed me it was just a fixable glitch. I thought a nice drive to the gorgeously be-leafed nearby state park would take the edge off, and it did, but OF COURSE the tire light was on.

 

During our weekend election fun/BFF time, Sweetie filled up the tires for me (I’d gotten rid of my air compressor in a flash of Tidying Up madness year before last. I am not great at life sometimes!) and the tire light went off, but I still wanted to get it checked out. I’ve still got some savings from the 600$ a week pre-Mitch McConnell-actively-starving-people-to-death times, so I was braced for new tires. I planned to get a ride from the car place and wait at home, these aren’t really sit-around-in-public-catching-up-on-the-New Yorker kinds of days.

 

OH, Cute Car Place guy. So cute he could be made-up, but isn’t. Tall, Black, with long locks and a beard and the most lovely attention-to-detail hands. Younger than me, but not by too much. He is so, so friendly and sweet. He deserves all the paragraphs.

 

My car’s name is Valentine because that’s when I got her, back during the earlier and smuttier days of the Kitten Calendar. We were in for her February inspection year before last when I decided I would ask him out by sending a very polite note to him at work. I never heard back, so I figured he was taken or just uninterested. (Or! Says my ever-hopeful brain, maybe he just didn’t get the card?)

 

This time, when I brought Val in the following Monday, he seemed disappointed that I wouldn’t be waiting around like I usually do. “Did someone tell you you can’t? You’re always welcome to stay here with us.”

 

He noticed I was due for an oil change (THAT light hadn’t come on, I work from home so I’m really not driving much.) and even though my maintenance plan had expired, he gave me the oil change for free. (Like Rory Gilmore with her Prius, I take Val to the dealership even though you’re not supposed to. I like her to have a home.)

 

This sounds way more like a praise letter on the Awesome Etiquette podcast than an entry in a sex blog, but as I’ve been learning with my Perfectly 1993 Guy story, kindness is sooooooo hot. The thoughtfulness, the care, the multipoint inspection the frequent update-texts from his work number, I can’t overstate the happiness it bought me. I spent days in a gentle cloud of I-talked-to-the-cute-guy well being, It’s kind of dazzling the difference one cute, kind face can make.

 

And Val didn’t even need new tires! When I came to pick her up, I high-fived Cute Car Place Guy with elbows like I’d learned to do at all the post-Covid protests. I missed his warm end-of-appointment handshakes—oh handshakes. Even though my mask was on, I’m sure he could see that I was smiling. It’s possible I was glowing. A light I don’t feel too often, a sweet little heart-lamp, fluttered on and the world was a little more full of hope and joy. Obviously I sent him a (non-ask-out) thank you note. Of course he texted an effusive work text when he got it, and that made me shine for like seven more hours. Thanks, thanks, thanks.

From The Museum of Bad Advice to The Library of Love (And Knots.)

Before I head-argue with BetterHelp lady any more, I just want to stop and celebrate the creative surge and series of breakthroughs I’ve been experiencing during and following my Quarantine Crush adventure! I’m never sure if its super-ethical to consider people muses, (Past and present muses, feel free to weigh in! Not here because the comments are turned off.) but QC is a powerful one anyway. Since Zooming with his poetry reading, I’ve written poetry I’m excited about for the first time in years, revived an old poetry series, made however many drawings and paintings, tried new drawing styles, gotten a new perspective on my business life, and written like a jillion paragraphs here.

I even signed up to read from the Kitten Calendar at an old-fave local reading so I’d have a way to re-experience rope adventures!

Miracle of miracles, I’ve even learned to love dressing up for Zoom events, including pretty shoes for no reason!

Whether or not I can justify the tears to a narrow-minded therapist, crushes fucking WORK for me, and they often lead to more friendships as well! (Angel Face is still one of my main inspirations—he invited me to Online Goth Night on Friday and I am TOTALLY going!)

Romantic lovewise, though. I know I can’t control if I ever find the requited version again. If I don’t, I think I can probably handle it, because I almost always feel completely full of all the kinds of love in my life: friend-love, family-love, work-love, talking-about-Gilmore-Girls-love, art love, book love, nature love, and of course good old fashioned self-love. Actually, I think I’m pretty amazing at love, even as I’m still missing a person or people.

It has really struck me in the past few days how simple, how ordinary, my romantic wishes/fantasies/hopes are. I don’t think it’s crazy or demanding to hope that someday before too long a masculine person will be sending me songs for smitten reasons, not for just-friendly reasons like QC or for opportunistic predatory reasons like Bill. And maybe, just maybe, that song-sender will know all the knots.

Because of my age and other particulars, it’s easy to see my romantic hopes as lightning-strike bonkers. I sure thought of it that way while I was divorcing, but I had to make room for that imaginary guy anyway, I had to try. Such an ordinary wish, to be like-liked. It happens to people all the time. I know that I deserve it as much as anybody, that no amount of self-as-project can make it come along any faster or slower. It comes when it comes. Until I get there, I fall, I get giddy, I cry, I make art. It’s a pretty good plan.

I am WILDLY underemployed this summer, so I need some CDC-friendly adventures. I need to be always writing paragraphs. So!

1.      Learn one knot a week. Think about how much the Republicans would resent me using stimulus (ha) money on a new set of shiny peacock-blue ropes.

2.      High Fidelity without the visits. I feel pretty resolved about all of my past loves, but it would be fun to visit them in my mind and heart. Since I already lavishly paid tribute to The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, I’ll start with the guy after that. The guy who sang Rage Against the Machine on amusement park rides. The guy who looked like Eddie Vedder at just the right moment. The guy who was my first sex/love combination. Ohhhhh Full Name Guy, you’ll be a summer treat.

That way, until I find my next human true love(s) I’ll have all the rope-love and paragraph-love to keep me company. Thanks for reading, wish me luck!

Quarantine Crush Part Seven

Just a few weeks of poems and songs. Writing with QC was amazing, a reunion with him and with California and with myself. I’d given up poetry for all kids of good and bad reasons, and it felt so good for my brain to start working in those patterns again. The joy of taking a heap of disparate images apart and putting them back together again into something that makes, if not sense, then its own version of sense.

With the poetry and the songs and the chitchat and the Zoom came the LONGING, powerful enough to make me sob, and the grief. The pain of leaving my friends twenty years ago felt fresh  and as I waited for the next text or poem, the missing him, the missing ALL of them but especially him, almost physically hurt. Okay, it did, a little bit, physically hurt.

I wanted us never to have been apart, or to catch up all at once, or for us to keep writing together forever (not just til quarantine ended and we went back to our lives) or to toss all of the metaphors out the window and just say stuff. Like Carly Rae, I wanted to cut to the feeling. I guess that’s what I’m doing now.

I thought, in those dreamy, jangled, waiting-for-the-phone-to-buzz nights (better than thinking about death tolls or presidential gaslighting or maternal gaslighting or the fact that I’m going to gave to canvass for Joe Biden or that there’s always a new how-many-fingers to know…) about dancing with QC at my wedding way back when. It was the only few minutes of my life I can honestly think of as getting “swept off my feet,” a surprise jolt of happiness as clear as any of the best naked adventures. QC was the only man every to truly LEAD me on the dance floor or anyplace, for that matter. The giddy delight of letting his arms guide me. Feeling like…whoa. I mean, WHOA and laughing in glittery delight. (Yep just gonna say delight too many times.)

Truly a moment that made me realize, both in 2003 and in 2020, what I’d missed in not at least having tried to claim him. Most of my Sliding-Doorsiness has worn off by now, but ohboy. I know (partly) missed out on someone so special and super, super hot. All of the Doms and Masters and Tops in this blog so far (Still so much thanks guys!) had a tenuous, theatrical command, just playacting compared to that dance. I wonder if I’ll ever feel led like that again, if I’ll ever let anyone. I hope so.

(The writing side of this being led, the part where my brain tried to make me think I needed his permission to write poems, that part wasn’t so fun. But that’s on me.)

The longing, the time-slip, the time-travel wishes were all too much after a while, but it felt too gorgeously life-affirming to give up. Mixed in with the dreaminess was the covid fear making everything so much more fraught—if he wasn’t writing back, did that mean he was dead? There wasn’t really any way for me to know, and I was sure no one would think to tell me. I wished I could ask for all of his emergency contacts, and all of THEIR emergency contacts, and so on. It wasn’t making the normal serotonin-drop of crushes any easier to navigate.

Sometimes I thought I knew what was going on for a second. Some of the songs that he sent were so explicitly romantic that I would hold out my phone to no one or to the cats and ask “Are you HEARING this?” Where is a slumber party when you need it?

Then, he wrote a very good poem wherein he was in a lot of danger, past and present, and I felt heart-wrenched and helpless toward those dangers. For some reason, that meant it was time to ask if he meant the songs. I told him I DID mean the songs, then tried to sleep while I waited to hear back.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part Six

By the time QC and I started chatting again, my Big East Coast City had been on lockdown for a month. I’d lost my morning job and (I hope temporarily) lost 2/3 of my client-hours from my own business. I was worried that all the work I’d put in building a life for myself would disappear forever, and like everybody else, I was worried that somebody I loved might die. I had Sweetie to hug, high five, and talk to, but having an ex-wife as a quarantine buddy has its own fears and strains.

My mom, a state away, wasn’t social distancing and my Trumpish Favorite Aunt had no problem trolling me about it. “Who dies, dies.” said Favorite Aunt in a text, presumably meaning herself, her grandkids, my mom, whoever. Meanwhile, mom shifted into full-tilt gaslighting mode, suggesting that I might be causing coronavirus or at least making it worse with my fear.

I wanted to be Helpful Science Person and try to stem the tide of disinformation, but a stop by a semi-estranged cousin’s facebook page convinced me that reaching out to most of my family was futile. I felt hurt and panicked and irresponsible to know that there are some places truth and science just can’t reach.

But, for all of those sad scared feelings, I knew I was safe. The flowering trees in the neighborhood were just going completely bonkers, I had books and funny podcasts and watercolors. In my neighborhood, people had been putting up rainbows everywhere for kids to find on their walks.

One Sunday afternoon, I’d just finished doing some melancholy/cheering work errands while driving around singing George Michael’s Faith at the top of my lungs, and I decided to take a nice fast walk. When guess what!! The friend who was soon to be QC texted and said he wanted to be writing more. I’d wanted to be in touch with him better for a good long while, and I wanted to keep writing too, so I suggested writing something together. By the time I got home from my walk, I had a poem!

Writing to/for/with him was easy and fun at first! It gave me such a joyful feeling of completeness, an oasis of oh! This makes sense! In a life that felt like helplessness and chaos a lot of the time, what a pleasure to just let something new sprout and exist! The first one I wrote wasn’t even really a poem so much as it was just listing off a series of things that made me feel grumpy, but he took it and ran with it, someplace good.

There was no reason this had to be about falling for him. Maybe if I hadn’t included a link to a (completely uncute, unflirty) song in one of the poem emails, (It was William Shatner covering “Common People,” seriously the un-woo-ing-est song) and he hadn’t mentioned that he was listening to an album with the most wildly sentimental first song (see above), then maybe I’d still be all cool and friendly and writing all the poems.

(But probably not.) (And not that I’ve ever been cool in any way.)

Nevertheless, songs were exchanged, and the time difference between us meant that he might have been offhandedly sending links between work tasks or palling around with other folks while I was in bed all swoony and cozy and susceptible. Not everything was sincere and moony, but he’s much more folky/songwritery than I am. It was easy, with his song choices, to slip into  mostly-chaste twenty-years-ago-love without (all-the-way) meaning to, but also not really minding.

It was only a few nights, really, of waiting for the buzz of my phone, listening a couple times, knowing exactly what to send next, then dozing with a warm, briefly untroubled heart. I forgot, I guess, that that kind of thing is like a nine-millionth-date to my emo self. I got my heart into a little bit of a tangle.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course!) Part One

How’s your shelter-in-place? I’m doing okay now that the Pelosi money started coming in. Sweetie and I considered moving her into my apartment for quarantine, but I’m so, SO glad we decided to be a quarantine household while still in separate apartments—our wonderful, wonderful separate apartments.

To explain how I got to Quarantine Crush, we have to go back twenty years. Why not?! Time means nothing anymore. In 1999, when I was twenty-four, I left Small East Coast City to go to art school in Fancy Southern California Beach Town. I chose to go to school there because a. I wanted to go to California and b. The name of the town sounded pretty.

Obviously, this person becomes a poet. I was half-assedly taking my art classes, pining for my newly-ex girlfriend back east, working in a dress shop in true rom-com style, and walking a bajillion miles of canyon and beach. One morning when I was crying in the campus courtyard because I missed the ex, a guy I thought was cute invited me to a poetry reading, and that was that for like the next ten years of my life. (Wouldn’t it be awesome if the art school guy was Quarantine Crush? He isn’t, even I’M not that much of a rom-com.)

Southern California was the place where I felt both most alien and most welcome. The poets were almost instantly one of the Friends-style families I’d been collecting for the entire Nineties.  We spent Christmas and New Years together, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t have a car! In Southern California! How did I do anything? Poets! They drove me everywhere, which is really, really saying something in a place where every single thing is at least forty-five minutes away. My mind is absolutely dazzled by the sheer number of hours my friends spent shuttling me back and forth to readings, despite the fact that I never gave them gas money (I never, never, had any money ever) and I sometimes forgot (or just didn’t know) my freeway exit, and my personality was a complete nightmare, I’m sure.

But still! They drove me and drove me and DROVE me and that strikes me as such an act of unquestioning, unconditional friendship love that I really wish the Sex Tardis were up and running so that I could take it on a little platonic stopoff at the millennium to be more grateful.

Quarantine Crush only crystalized as a deep sort of one-that-got-away-situation after a few years of pressing like on his gorgeous nature photos on Instagram, but in retrospect, I can’t help asking my younger self WHY DID YOU NOT KISS THIS PERSON? Right up there with the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, he’s in contention for The Actual Best Guy. Let’s add a “so far” so I don’t get the blues.

I’m not even sure if I knew him before the day I leapt into his arms. We were competing in a Slam Championship. His voice was (and still is) such a ravenous, glorious bluster. When he finished his poem I didn’t stop to think, I didn’t wonder if it made sense, I just jumped, and he held me without difficulty, and theatrically carried me out the door.

Of course shelter-in-place and too many corona feelings and counting the hand wash seconds would make me hanker for some leaping, to see what kind of advice me-in-my-twenties might have. The results were…mixed, but decidedly THE BEST.

Welcome, Gilmore Guy: Part One, A Walk in the Woods

Friends, I love being single. I aspire to reach Kate Bolick heights of spinster fabulousness, and I think that I do. But this story starts where so many of them do—a gentle, long-fluttering crush. About a month ago, curiosity bubbled up and I (sort of) asked out a friendly acquaintance I’ll call Steven. (because Universe) He spent the better part of a day with me, painting watercolors and falling asleep in front of my favorite movie. (Slacker. I would blame exactly NO ONE for falling asleep in front of it.) At no point during that day did I find out if he liked girls or boys or both or neither, most importantly whether he liked me.

So, in the middle of the night, (I knew he’d be up, he’s not a morning person like me.) I texted to ask him if he’d mind snuggling. After I sent the text, my heart was pounding in that dizzying, vexing, nauseating way that I hadn’t felt in a while, and when he sent back a very kind no, I was SO MUCH SADDER than I’d expected to be. Even though it was late, I called Sweetie (ex-wife, now best friend, only call-in-the-middle-of-the-night person besides the hotline I use for panic) and SOBBED.

As unpleasant as that was, there was something healthy about it too. Irksome as an unrequited thing always is, I felt like I’d returned to a vital part of myself. I used to let my hoo-ha steer my life so much more, and it felt like a relief to have turned to that compass, even a little bit.

(Before we leave Steven, I want to report that he and I settled into friendship faster than I expected, because he’s a treasure and also probably because of the next part of the story.)

            I went back to regularly swiping through Ok Cupid, at least to remember to keep snuggles a priority. (I gave up on Tinder a long time ago because guys kept being mad at me for being a person.) Because it’s election season, my OKC profile picture is of me meeting Hillary Clinton. The picture (which I also keep by my front door for strength, along with the times I met John Lewis and Cecile Richards) served the dual purposes of both being a conversation starter and (presumably) weeding out most of the Trump monsters and Bernie bros. (Some trolls still get though, though, my OKC inbox is not THAT different than my textbanking-for-Democrats inbox.  Any opportunity to push back, I guess…)

            Every once in a while, though, somebody says Exactly. The. Right. Thing. And I have to resist the temptation to screenshot it so I can show ALL the men what the exactly right thing is. It’s a very nice bonus when the guy typing the right thing is a cute black guy with dreamy eyes and who lists Gilmore Girls as one of his interests!!!

Here is the exactly right thing to say to me on OK Cupid—or anywhere: “Wow, you got to meet Hillary Clinton! I think she is a majestic woman and I really wanted her to be our president.”

Majestic! *swoons*

            Plus! This guy lives right in my beloved neighborhood! So we made plans to spend a morning on my favorite local hiking trail. I had him meet me at the library, since my number one most exciting reserve had just come in. (Rich People Problems! CANNOT get enough of Kevin Kwan) I nervously caught Pokémon in one of the pretty chairs outside the library as I waited for him to arrive.

            When I saw him, I felt immediately special because he’d clearly dressed with care. (Now that I know him a little better I’ve realized that he probably ALWAYS dresses with care, but still.) He had on a vintage jacket and a yellow gingham shirt—picture-perfect for the woods.

            And cute. Long locks, those dreamy eyes, and yay! Close to my height. He’s fit in a way that made me worry I was too fat for him. (Sorry, no amount of feminism has banished that annoying thought.) Spoiler alert, I wasn’t. Despite my worries and jangled nerves, we felt like a match to me, a sort of “Yeah, this could work.” moment.

            As we walked through the woods on that beautifully cool grey early fall day, golden color just beginning to tinge the leaf-edges, I was delighted to find out that he was MAYBE MORE OBSESSED WITH GILMORE GIRLS THAN I AM. He even listens to the Gilmore Guys podcast. It dawned on me then—

            “Hey! It’s September 21^st! Have you seen Demi Adejuyigbe’s video about that?” (Google “electrolemon September,” you really need to know.)

            “No—what are you doing later? Why don’t you come over and we can watch it and some Gilmore episodes? I’ll make you a cocktail?”

            Um, yes. Wait, he watches Gilmore Girls AND makes fancy cocktails? Are you KIDDING me? I requested mojitos and he said he’d have to pick up some mint, but I happen to have plenty of mint in my yard. Clearly, part two of this date was mint to be.

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on an MRA, Part Four

In a piece of administrative bad luck, both the Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager and I took sick days on the Monday that followed that Friday snit. The Store Manager was out again on Tuesday so there was no meeting, no resolution. CPAM had clearly been told not to talk to me about anything that wasn’t work related. Why would this be a solution? Barring me from small-talk could only serve to further separate me, not make me feel safe or included. I shouldn’t have to be ready to, for example, confront a rape apologist in order to rate a slot in the cheery work chitchat.

I was scared when I came in and in fact asked if I should leave, but CPAM became friendly again pretty quick., joking about his unicorn-ness and bonding over the music. I even wondered if Friday (and I guess the whole rest of his microagression-o-rama) had been a fluke, just a snit. I felt sheepish to have been so upset.

But then, while we were working happily together in the back room (that darn back room!) with a recently-back-from-vacation grad student, he asked, apropos of nothing, if she had ever heard of the documentary “The Red Pill.”

(FYI: https://dailyreview.com.au/red-pill-watched-dont/61240/)

            I hadn’t heard of the movie, but my hackles went up. I knew that “Red Pill” mentality was one of the Men’s Right’s Activist, deep-Reddit monstrosities that has become the part of the toxic misogynist soup we’ve all been swimming in. In their parlance, “taking the red pill” means realizing that (white) men are actually society’s most oppressed category and that one of the ways to correct this “imbalance” is…rape. I also knew that the Red Pill/ MRA movements are tied intimately with white supremacist movements.

            After a few minutes of him summarizing the “documentary” and me saying “that’s TERRIBLE” a lot of times, he continues to double down on men’s vulnerable status. (NOTE: Men ARE vulnerable and harmed, but he wasn’t realizing it’s heteropatriarchy, not rape survivors, who make the rules.)

            I asked him to change the subject, but he said “I’m not talking to YOU. This isn’t work related.” And stalked away. I walked right after him.

            “I thought we were going to get along,” I said calmly but forcefully, “But you CAN’T be sexist at work. The people you’re talking about are rape apologists.”

“No, they’re not. You’re just saying that because you disagree with them. No matter what I say, you’ll hear what you want to hear. Besides, it isn’t work related.”

            “It IS work related because I don’t feel safe at work. This is a microagression, no, a MACROaggression!”

(As if he would know what either word meant.)

I went back to working on the books, but my body didn’t want to be there. After he evoked the Men’s Rights Activists, the trauma of the 2016 election, the “Lock her up” mobs, the way Trump had recently threatened to forcibly take “Pocohontas” Elizabeth Warren’s DNA to test and mocked the #Metoo movement in the same sentence, it felt like all of that was in the room with me, and it was. The store was presided over by a giant photo of the college’s mascot, a white colonizer, rape and murder in his puppet eyes. How does any woman get through a day on that campus, or in America, or anywhere in all of history?

            I went home. I called the HR hotline, called my therapist, called (ex-wife, BFF) Sweetie. I felt helpless, scared, worthless, panicked, but more than anything else, I felt angry—for the time theft, the money theft, the ELECTION theft brought about by misogyny in general and the MRAs specifically. I felt like I would never be safe anywhere.

Earlier this week, I watched “To All the Little Girls: The Untold Stories of the Sixty-five Million”, https://www.toallthelittlegirlsdoc.com/watch Rebecca Morgan’s story of her work on the 2016 election and it’s aftermath. After the election, Becca was diagnosed with PTSD, and in some ways, I think the whole country has it. I know I do. It’s hard to shake the idea that I have to fight and scrap for survival, that we all do. I don’t know what healing looks like, but I do know that I’ll call out hate (and call HR) just as freely as I call Congress. My heart aches for whatever genuine friendship was there, for having left another thing I liked. I don’t know where we’re going, but I know whose side I’m on: mine.

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on a Men’s Rights Activist, Part One

I remember when this blog used to be mostly cuteness and sexy adventures. I hope it’ll be those things again someday, but it’s 2018. Dietland is a show, I write to congress so much it’s starting to feel like a diary, and I have new stupid story about clashing with an ignorant white dude about once a week. So here we are.

About two months ago, I started working at a nearby university bookstore in the mornings. I mostly loved it—my commute was only three songs long (meaning, for several belty weeks in a row, the first three songs of George Michael’s Faith…) and the work was emotionally neutral. Best of all, hooray, the assistant manager was a cutie-pie pansexual guy with a great talent for iterating entire (original, not remake) Will & Grace episodes and an ability to endlessly process the new season of Kimmy Schmidt with me.

Unfortunately, the whole staff seemed to have a gentle South Park vibe, a we-pick-on-everybody kind of casual prejudice, but I was new and I thought I could change the culture with friendship, kindness, patience and love. Did I mention the three-song commute?! I had Faith indeed and I thought I could avoid blowing up about prejudice just this once, that the culture of the place would change if I just patiently explained what was wrong, little by little. It was a self-serving mistake, and it bit me in the ass. At this point, spoiler alert, I’ve realized I can call HR just as often as I call congress, though I don’t think they’ve invented any cute Resistbot-style apps for it.

So I bonded with Cute Pan Assistant Manager and indulged my sincere love of stacking textbooks—there really isn’t a better workout in the world. Despite the giggly blush of new friendship and reminding myself this could never be like the Mister Makeout Music situation, there were hints that our pop culture bond didn’t transcend CPAM’s general lack of awareness. A few days into the new position and already DEEPLY in friend-crush territory, I was sad to overhear him chitchatting with other members of the team about “the obesity problem”

I haven’t weighed myself in a while, but last time I checked, I was hovering around 300 pounds. At 5’10,” that places me squarely in the “extremely obese” category on most charts, and that’s what it says on my medical records, but this has never rung true to me. I’m healthy, active, and the problems that arise from being fat come more from the outside than from the inside.

I’ve spent a good chunk of this year looking at #fatshion for ideas about how to femme it up, listening to the She’s All Fat podcast, (https://shesallfatpod.com/) answering all of the questions in The Body Is Not an Apology (https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/) and reading/watching/obsessing about Dietland. (https://www.amc.com/shows/dietland/full-episodes/season-01/episode-01/episodes-1-2)  I’ve gotten in the habit of Instagramming myself in cute outfits and tagging @whatfatgirlsactuallywear. So I have no patience for the way that talking about the “obesity epidemic” lends a sheen of science to prejudice and serves to legitimize diet culture, that creepy little cousin of rape culture. I’ve had quite enough of any and all efforts to make women smaller, literally and figuratively.

I was little-kid hurt that my seeming new friend would other me that way, especially at work, so I gently pulled him aside about it. “I just want to be treated like an equal,” I said, and though he denied having said anything, it felt like he heard me. I ended the conversation with “It’s not you, it’s the patriarchy,” and we happily went back to debating whether or not Erasure is a good band. (OBVIOUSLY THEY ARE)

We were happy and giggly together. Though it seems really weird now, it felt like we were a ridiculous new kind of soul mates. He was a close talker and sometimes a chat really felt like a cuddle. At least I know I still turn into a complete fool-o-rama when someone is cute, it gives me hope for better days.

I taught him what the word “unicorn” means in poly slang, and he kept me up to date on all of the cutie-pies breezing in and out of his life. Work days felt charged with compersion for his exploits and it reconnected me with a need for warmth I hadn’t felt in a while. It felt sweet and dangerous and I don’t know why this always happens to me at work—there’s really no excuse.

It SOMEHOW came out (because he brought it up) that we were both switches and I happily acknowledged inwardly that I would know exactly how to order him around in a non-coworker version of the world.

Next Time: Micro(and MACRO)aggressions are not cute.

Lady Work Crush, 2010: A Story of Cultural (In)competence (Part Three)

            I took a few days off and lay in bed with a cat sitting on me, deciding what to do. I went into the afterschool classroom in the in the middle of the day when no one was there, gathered up my stuff and left a note. I ran into one of the kids on the way in and the guilt just killed me. I felt like I was abandoning the children I’d been there to serve, because I was. Despite LWC’s perception that I was mean, the kids really did love me a lot, they always do, and I loved them so much too.

            I’d already written to the C.E.O. and other higher-ups during one of the witch-hunty meetings over the summer, and I wrote to them again at the end. This is one of those shitty experiences you hope has a good effect in the long run.

            A nice friend who worked at another school made me a card and had everyone sign it at the all-site meeting. It was sad but I hoped that future LGBTQ AmeriCorps members would be treated more hospitably.

            When I look back on the whole situation, I feel pretty humbled and mortified. Though homophobia was certainly a thread that ran through the whole experience, unwanted workplace advances DO need to be taken seriously, and she certainly deserved to be free of them. But at the same time, I never deserved to be treated with that much suspicion, that much distrust. Though the distrust was understandable in some ways, and I should have been much more willing to take time earning people’s trust, it still hurt, it still did damage, as did kind of having a car aimed at me.

            As I went deeper into the education field, the distrust factor got deeper and drownier. I found it very hard to stay in touch with my best qualities when people kept assuming the worst, and by the end, I was a threat to kids, I was part of a racist system and solidly part of the problem. I have to take responsibility for that and keep trying to bridge the gaps that separate me from African American people, from men, from straight people. The things that separate us hurt so much, and I know I can only do little things to fix the broken connections.

            If I were to run into LWC now, I would apologize for sending her the poem, for making her uncomfortable, for letting my frustration and loneliness impact her job. She probably wouldn’t apologize for aiming a car at me. Straight privilege seems insurmountable sometimes, and I am really, really sick of it.

            All of this informed my not-quite-love story with Mr. Makeout Music—the fear of meetings, the self-consciousness, the worrying about coercion, the general feeling like I might be the bad guy. But I’m gratified to say, this is a wholly different workplace (Well, it’s also a hetero attraction, but still.) Everyone on his team has been cordial and sweet and my own department head has been a patient, encouraging listener. Yesterday as the kids and I made a kindness chain for Christmastime, I felt things shift back into their normal, loving work ways.

I’m sorry it took me this long to realize I’m not back in the scary LWC situation. For all of my getting upset about Mr. Makeout Music greeting me with fear, I brought my own mess to the table too—fear of meetings, fear of oppressing him, fear of being too much and too many. As I revel in the space we’re giving each other and the freedom to grieve the lost connection, I feel aglow in the kind and accepting workplace I helped create.

Lady Work Crush, 2010: A Story of Cultural (In)competence (Part Two)

            At the time, Sweetie was working an hour and a half from home, on a good traffic day. It was a sacrifice she’d made so we could move to our new city, a sacrifice which my mother reminded me semi-daily was my fault and mine to correct.  Sweetie and I usually talked on the phone during her long commute, but the guilt and all of the dinners alone, combined with my insufficiently examined white lady issues, added up to a toxic soup of guilt and loneliness.

            While I was feeling this emptiness and longing to connect, Lady Work Crush developed a deep connection with the Mean Boss Girl, and they started to call each other sisters. Of course I would never want to begrudge anyone friend- or sister-love, but their bond made me feel even more alone, especially since their friendship included the detailed reiterating of SVU plots and I had to ask them to tone it down, to their great annoyance.

            We had a long series of snow days that February, during which my AmeriCorps hours got hopelessly behind and during which I wrote a love poem about Lady Work Crush. I mentioned it in passing and she said that she would love to read it. I hemmed and hawed and then sent it via facebook. I cringe every time I think about that decision, how it made things uncomfortable for her and unsafe for me.

            The next day at work, I saw contempt flash across Mean Boss Girl’s face as she took a call from LWC. There was another meeting. LWC said I’d been “taking it out on” the kids because I was upset that she didn’t like me back. I didn’t think that was accurate but it still gives me so much shame just to type it. She stated and reiterated that she prefers men in a way that still looks a little bit like protesting too much.

            I said that I understood and accepted her rejection, but that I also felt like I wasn’t being treated fairly, that this wouldn’t have had to be a meeting if I were a man. I said I thought they were making me into the bad guy in a way that made me feel unsafe and unwelcome at work. I’m not sure if that was true or if I was just embarrassed and hurt and trying to diffuse the shame and rejection like I always do. Probably it was both.

            LWC was LIVID at the end of this conversation, and that work night ended with her getting in her car, turning up the radio all the way, and speeding in the direction of my closeted male coworker and myself. I don’t want to be too dramatic, she only KIND OF aimed the car at us.

            There was a meeting with the boss’s boss the next day, wherein I was asked to sign a paper saying that I wouldn’t make any more advances on LWC. Now that I’m thinking about it, I only made one advance and accepted her “no,” so it seems crazy that there was a paper. I said again that this wouldn’t be happening if I were a man, but I signed it. I also told the bosses that this was a homophobic workplace and I didn’t quite understand how to fit in there anymore.

A Little Polyphobia, Two “I Love Yous” and a Blocked Number

            In the past, I’ve always found a way to diffuse my shame and sadness at the end of a love story by making the guy into a villain, which only one character in this blog every really was. The hurt is normal, the shame is my problem and my responsibility, and the rejection is not personal, so I want to treat the end of the Mr. Makeout Music story as kindly as possible.

I’m not sure what made me think I should be as out with him as I was. Maybe it was our mutual love of Steven Universe, the fact that he used to write erotica, or just the attraction making me all shiny and self-love-tastic. The librarians who supervise me at work range from queer-friendly-and-ready-to-learn to genderqueer and poly-leaning, so I don’t really feel the need to hide my queerness or poly tendencies. It’s not like I’ve talked directly to the kids about it, but I never worry about them overhearing. They all know by now that my ex-wife is my best friend, that I enjoy handsomeness, and that I’m active in LGBTQ and feminist causes.

There have been a couple of painful misunderstandings, but for the most part I feel safe to be myself—it’s part of why I love the job so much. Through honesty and careful conversations, I’ve helped make it a home that accepts me.

And before I tell this story I should say, it’s not like I haven’t acted polyphobic before. In my frustration and failure to fit and find love in the poly world, (Or, it sometimes seems, any world…) I’ve lashed out and been judgmental, impatient, and pushy in ways that I really regret. I’m grateful that my poly friends have been so generous and patient with me while I figure out what the heck my deal is.

Anyway, so Mr. Makeout Music. I REALLY missed him over Thanksgiving break. I wasn’t due back at the library until Tuesday, but I started wanting to sing out his name around Monday night. When I walked in and saw him at the front desk, everything seemed to go really well. He knocked me out telling me that he’d tried to watch some Gilmore Girls for me! We had a little awkward moment when I told him I didn’t like the book he’d leant me (Y: The Last Man, because apparently he thinks feminism means murdering all the men through childbirth…) but I felt like we were settling back into an easy flirty rapport and I was so delighted to see him.

He came to visit my department almost right away and we were talking about how awesome Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was. The conversation randomly wandered to my arbitrary dislike of Helena Bonham Carter (It’s probably because she killed Sirius Black!) This topic opened a surprising and irritating can of worms.

“I think she had some kind of love triangle thing a while back? Although, that doesn’t seem right. Why would I not like a love triangle, they’re kind of my thing.”

“Children’s department…” He said warningly, and I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

“I’m not ashamed of being poly, and I don’t expect you to be, either.”

“I’m not ashamed, but they’re kids. There’s a time and a place.”

“You don’t need to protect the kids from me.”

“I need to protect them from everything.”

I was completely shocked by this exchange for several reasons, mostly because we had been talking about all the topics for months and months! Never anything it was inappropriate for the kids to hear, but definitely things more scandalous than a love triangle, which is the basis of like A THOUSAND Disney movies. I didn’t like his assumptions about what I was saying and the fact that flirting and being me was suddenly something he thought he had to control, something that was suddenly wrong. It was one of those loss-of-trust moments that’s hard, maybe impossible, to come back from.

When I got a crush on somebody at work, what happened next was what I was afraid of. I asked him to come into the meeting room and talk just a few minutes before the kids were due to come in and make paper snowflakes.

I told him what it’s like to have grown up queer, to have so often been perceived as a threat to children. The bad thanksgiving was weighing on me so much and I’m sure that made this more fraught than it otherwise might’ve been.

Though we’d spent months sneaking in flirting into a million different library conversations, he kept insisting that I’d been talking about sex in front of the kids this time. He kept repeating the “time and a place” thing. I think when I said “love triangle” he heard “threesome.”

It was Annoying Heteronormativity 101. I explained that some of the three-or-more relationships I know are families, that I was talking about love rather than sex. If he wouldn’t feel bad for talking about his family, I shouldn’t have to talk about (VERY VAGUELY ALLUDING TO,) other kinds of families. He was really mad and defensive, but he did try to listen.

From there I told him how hurt I was that he acted so afraid of me back when I took his hand, that he was sometimes treating me like a threat. Not as much the rejection part, but the fear. He insisted that he wasn’t afraid, but it did look like fear to me, then and now.

I started to sob and he said “Ms. ________, please don’t cry.” And came over and sat right up against my side, so sweet, so loving.

After some more back and forth about polyphobia/rejection/election, he said “Ms. _______, what do you really think of me?”

“I love you,” I sobbed, and cried the ugliest, snottiest tears you ever saw.

“I wasn’t expecting THAT answer! To tell you the truth, I really do love you too.”

So that happened. In the midst of all the mess and misunderstanding, we love each other, in whatever way. It counts for something, although right now I can’t imagine what.

I genuinely tried to keep being friends, but I was madder than I wanted to be about the threat-to-kids thing, and he must’ve been mad too, because the next time he came to visit, he was grumpy and he kind of glowered at the paper snowflake I’d made him. (Pink and blue for gender harmony. Maybe that was a stupid thing to say.)

After a few minutes of him grouchily making one sixth of a snowflake and me trying to be professional/lighthearted/friendly, he said he had to go to dinner and left the snowflake there. I felt disproportionally sad about that. We’d given each other so many pieces of art, from homework margin doodles to a leaf rubbing that he named “Ms. ________ in Autumn” because the colors reminded him of me, to watercolor galaxies to me singing out his name, to these paragraphs, and his forgetting the snowflake made me feel like I couldn’t give him one more unrequited thing.

It wasn’t about the snowflake, of course. I texted him about it after work and we got in a really dumb fight that ended with me telling him he was using the wrong “your.” He was mean and I was mean, and I blocked his number and deleted the thread.

I’m stupid right now because of unrequited love. He’s stupid from love, too, and whatever else is keeping the friendship from being what it was. Nobody’s the bad guy, nobody’s wrong, nobody’s the patriarchy (Well, he’s a little bit the patriarchy.) Just a thing that didn’t go where we wanted it to. I can’t try to be gracious and cute about it anymore right now. I can’t quite get to magnanimous and sparkly and generous about it. We can’t fix it right at the moment and I can’t wish myself fine about it.

If I’m going to trust my heart, I have to trust the heartbreak too, and give it time, and take myself gently and firmly forward. Onward, and, more than anything else, outward.

Love, A Bad Thanksgiving, and Whatever Comes Next

I’m on vacation this week from the library and it’s given me enough space from Mr. Makout Music to really think through what our flirtship means/meant. Of course, there’s the simplest meaning, that it was a sweet attraction that didn’t work out and is now awkwardly in the process of becoming whatever’s next. The meaning we share is straightforward, kind, and a little sad, but my own side of things feels more complicated.

It’s hard in times like this to not get annoyed at my heart, at my romantic imagination, even at the sex drive I worked so hard (and only somewhat successfully) to embrace. It’s hard not to feel like we lost parts of what was nice between us because I just had to try and make things progress, but maybe things just progressed on their own, the way things tend to do.

A few months ago when he first suggested a too-emo-for-the-library-playlist song, I really did try not to let the song’s feelings run away with me. When he suggested I look up The Internet while I was doing my data entry in the basement at work, I ended up so swoony/squishy that I could barely walk up the stairs to my department. I thought I should probably try to stem the tide of feelings sweeping in with the lyrics, and I did try not to think he was telling me something with the songs. I know what music does to me, how it accelerates the heart’s processes and wakes up not-wholly-earned devotion. But sometimes, I just have to let it.

He told me once that he likes romantic music because he has a hard time expressing his feelings, that songs help him do so. He looked in my eyes when he said it, and after that I let the music take me where it wanted me to go, where I wanted to go, where it turns out I’d really missed going.

Still, I tried to be so careful this time. I asked and re-asked what he meant by things. I asked for as much definition as I reasonably could. I asked if the attraction was mutual before we were ever alone together, and he said it was. I hope it really was, that he didn’t just say it to be kind or to please me. I’ve found the best way is to take him at face value, to just try and straightforwardly believe what he’s told me. It’s hard.

My peer counselor at the local LGBT center has urged me through all of this to focus on facts, to concentrate on What Is. By that measure, he’s showed me hours of care and affection, given me so much without expecting anything in return. I appreciate the vulnerability it might take for a shy guy to come find me almost every day, to share some of his deepest stuff at work, in front of the kids and everybody. He said to me once “I want to hear all of your stuff and I want to tell you all of mine.” What a sweet, open thing to say, and I so much hope it might be true again after the awkward simmers down.

Yet in spite of What Is, I struggle not to see myself as somehow coercive, as an ugly, fat someone who was romantically deluded to think that someone like him could be attracted to me. My mind is so ashamed of the Stupid Delusional Crush Girl story that I superimpose it over every situation, though there are of course different reasons behind every connection and not-connection.

If I hadn’t been fighting the story so hard, would I have been in such a hurry? Would I have given him more space to make the first move and therefore be more comfortable, less pressured, more free? Maybe, but the problem with that line of reasoning is that it’s always going to be sexist to feel bad about being too forward, not just sexist but also counterproductive and counter to the only person I can manage to be—my barreling-forward, enthusiastic, soaking-wet-underpants self.

I know that the man for me is probably bolder, more available, probably more experienced by a lot, but right now I don’t want some stranger. This is the begrudgingly-go-back-on-OK Cupid phase of getting over someone, resenting them all for not being him, even though I know the next guy will feel equally best and equally-only when I’m with him, just by the virtue and magic of attraction. I know that when the next ones come along, the tide will come in and things will shift into place just as easily and emphatically, because bodies and hearts know what they’re doing. They’ll take us where we need to go.

Like most of America, I had a very hard Thanksgiving. Things aren’t good between my mom and me, and I was unable to keep great gusts of election rage from screeching out as pie was being served. As I drove home in the middle of the night blasting Arcade Fire and Frank Ocean, I couldn’t wait to be back safely in my city, in my apartment. I’m thankful that I’m amazing at rage driving.

My life is entering a new phase now and it feels both lonely and spiderweb-strongly connected. Friday night phonebanks at the feminist bookstore three doors down, marches as often as I want to go, a community art show to make a sanctuary for anyone made afraid by the election results—these things are home, who I really am, and I want to leave my tragically Trumpified family members behind long enough to settle back into who I really am.

I know that I’ve partly been focused on Mr. Makeout Music because crush-sadness is easier to deal with than election sadness, but the best thing I can do for both sadnesses is to take care, to find a way to appreciate myself as I really am. In that self, there’s anger and loss and a divorce I haven’t yet managed to finish. There are unsettled hurts on both a national and a personal scale. There’s an ocean of rage and an ocean of joy.

            But there’s also this simple and sheepish-making fact. I love Mr. Makeout Music. And I also love his “no.” I want to be as close to him as I can but also respect What Is, his real life and my own. I want to step back and let him be where he is, respect and support his goals, be someone accepting and unconditional. I want to let myself move on and find the enthusiastic, mutual, available love that I really do know I deserve, but I haven’t yet let go of the thread between us, of those suddenly-deep conversations, of the safe space his presence made for me right here in the middle of pussy-grabbing America.

            It is a hard time to be (STILL) trying to learn to connect with men. Part of the reason that I get so attached is that deep down I really, REALLY miss them. As independent and strong and spinsteriffic as I am/want to be, it feels like part of me is missing. I am happier with a man to love, and I really hope I get to feel what it’s like for a man to love me back someday. The joy I felt when he and I were so near to being a thing, it was beautiful, a breeze of relief in my heart, that magical unlatching that happens sometimes, that seduces me so. It was wholeness, it was being myself. Even as I try my best to let him go, I want to believe in that joy, to feel like I deserve it, to take the light with me even as I walk away. It might take more bravery than I have, but I’ll try it.