Category — Dreams & Visions

The years since FK have been full of those Single Girl cliches that you read about in magazines and relationship books. Traveling, having fun, cultivating friendships with women, being busy busy busy, so busy that I’m not supposed to even notice that I’ve not found The One.  Busy not looking for anyone (he always comes when you least expect it, or some other pandering bullshit), busy not having expectations, busy being fulfilled in my career, busy building a life. To say that the men I have met in those years have not managed to spark a morsel of  real interest would be an understatement.

The last dates I had were in the summer of 2008. I thought I had met a pretty cool guy. He worked at Home Depot. I LOVE Home Depot. I used to walk through the model kitchens and bathrooms in there.  We had a great first date at a cafe–Intermezzo is one of my favorite first date places. Conversation was good, so we decided to go to dinner at a nearby restaurant. He was great to talk to, told awesome stories about his time in the Army in Germany.  As he walked me to my car, he saw that I had a pair of windshield wipers in my backseat. I sheepishly admitted I just hadn’t made the time to switch out my wiper blades. He suggested we meet the next day for brunch and a walk thru the Park and he would switch them out for me.  I was excited. I kind of liked him.

We had a pretty cool 2nd date. We ate, then walked down to the park, sat on a bench in the sun and talked and fed the ducks. Laughed about our favorite movies and episodes of Family Guy. He never did switch out my wiper blades, but we had a long, full summer day together. After which he didn’t make further plans with me.

I was determined to not be daunted by that.  Meanwhile I am messaging GreenEyes like crazy. “What do you think? Does he like me? Will he ask me out again? Should I call him?” After getting a series of  ”Calm your ass down” messages from her, I relented. Go with the flow. I’m breezy!

On occaision,  he would call when he got off work, and we’d talk for a few minutes every night. Since he worked retail, his  schedule varied wildly but after a few weeks he made another date. YAY! We met at Outback t in the Perimeter, and then after lunch he invited me over to his place. I didn’t have any weird feelings about him, so I went. We ended up watching a couple of movies. He was all close and touchy feely  (hand holding and such) but didn’t try to kiss me and didn’t go for any heavy petting. Except for that, actually, he didn’t make any moves at all.

He seemed nice. I liked him. We got along, and he made me consider doing things I normally don’t do, like sit at a sports bar and watch football. There are few people I will do that with.

I invited him to my place for dinner. We watched a movie and ate. He sat all the way on the other end of the couch. Didn’t make one move. Conversation was still great, but I was already feeling the slide.  The slide to the Friend Zone.

One day we were talking and the language changed. The things he started saying,  and how he would say them, couched between ‘friend-like’ phrases. This was something I used to get on FK about, like calling me ‘buddy’. I hate being called buddy.  This guy would call me up and say, ‘Hey bud, what’s up?’ One day he decided to give me some advice on how to attract men.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if the advice didn’t start with  ”If things don’t work out with us, you should be more open to meeting new people, instead of sitting in the house all the time.”

While he was right, he pissed me off by offering the advice in the first place. If he wanted me to leave the house more often, why not invite me out? Why am I getting advice on how to attract someone besides him?  I gave up, right there. He was, to me, brushing me off, trying to pawn me off on someone else already. I stopped answering the phone when he called. Eventually he stopped calling.

This is what happens. I meet someone, it goes okay, and after a date or two, I become “the friend”.  Or we might have a few dates and the guy says,  ”I know you want to wait, but I can’t. It would be unfair of me to try to push you into doing something you don’t want to do– but we can be friends. “ Oh, thanks for playing, here’s a consolation prize! My friendship!

*flips the bird*

Dudes, I’m not trying to be your friend. I have male friends. That’s not what I was looking for with you. I can’t do the Friend Zone. I can’t be demoted from Someone Special to Someone You Know. My brain and my heart don’t work like that, and I know I shouldn’t be ‘that’ attached to people right off, but I have to really like someone to go out with him in the first place… it’s just not that easy for me.

This isn’t a traumatic, He Done Me Wrong song. I know that this is dating. This is what happens to millions of women who date. It’s a game of chance, it’s a game of numbers and it takes perseverance and a iron will to keep pushing through. Or maybe a lot of alcohol. Either way, I just wasn’t cut out for it. I felt rejected at every turn. When I asked men about why I end up there, in The Zone, I get a myriad of answers. Most of them involve sex- if I’m not giving it up, men are not interested.

I don’t understand, then, how some of my (admittedly thinner, cuter, more stylish and worldly) friends can go 4,6, 9 months of dating someone before they decide to take the step.  I feel like I offer a lot to men. I also feel like everything I offer is not enough if it doesn’t include sex on date two. Booohiiissssss.

I made the not very difficult decision to pull myself off of the market.  It was nerve wracking and my self esteem took a beating every day that I was out there. It’s hard work, being charming and open and trying to be the Right One, just in case He’s right around the corner.

I took down all my ads, stopped reading relationship books, stopped thinking about dating, talking about dating, wanting to date. I believed that I wasn’t what men were looking for. Some  said maybe my standards were too high. Maybe I was pushing them away, somewhere. I had no clue, all I knew was that what I was doing wasn’t working and I am hardly insane so I am not going to keep doing the same thing and expecting something different to happen. I didn’t like dating at all.  So I stopped doing it.

Years ago I eavesdropped on a conversation that a guy had with a girl. He mentioned that he was looking for the woman that made him do the relationship work. And then in the next sentence, said something about knowing that he could walk into a place, pick a woman, be nice to her and know that he was going home with her that night.  And that he would, because he could. All the commentary about what he wants doesn’t match what happens when his feet start walking and his nether region starts talking.

I’m so tired of lip service. I’m so tired of relationship books that tell me what to say, how to act, what to change, who to be in order to attract a man, without doing the same for our counterpart. I freely admit that I am a complicated, sometimes nutjob of a person.  Newsflash: Men are not the easiest to deal with either!

I hesitate to type this, like it’s an impossibility (sometimes I feel like it is), but I want to date. I want to return to dating, that is. I miss feeling attractive and desirable– those feelings, though fleeting, were nice when I felt them. I want to meet someone that likes me for me, that is interested in more than what I can do for him in an intimate setting, who ‘gets’ me.  I want to say ‘we’ and ‘us’  again. I only had one chance at that, with FK. It was nice.

I am really embarrassed to admit that I want to date, I want to return to my quest for The One. In fact I have held this post for awhile, simply because that sentence is there. If it was just whining and lamenting about dating, it would have been up on Tuesday.  It could be because after years of searching for it, it has eluded me, so I have insisted that I don’t want it. I don’t need it. It’s not for me. I don’t think it’ll happen for me. I don’t think I’m made that way. I don’t think men want me. I’m not the kind of girl that men are looking for. All of those phrases have left my mouth at one time or another and at the time I believe I truly meant them.

I don’t think I mean them anymore. If I do, I am tired of meaning it.

It makes me sickly nervous to even think about going on a date. I’m not the best dater anyway, but on top of that it’s been forever since I went out with someone. What will he think of me? Where would I even meet him, since the pool of viable online daters has severely dried up, here?  A quick romp through my usual haunts reveals men who’ve been there since 2005! And I know, for sure, that I am not physically ready to get back out there. I want to look and feel my best and be confident in myself. I’m decidedly not there.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t see bright eyes and a cute nose and full lips and (when I actually DO my hair) great hair and a rockin’ rack and a curvy shape. I still see that awkward, bucktoothed, blind as a bat, unfortunate looking creature that I was in my teens. It’s a picture I am trying hard to erase but even after I close my eyes against the image in the mirror, it stays in my mind’s eye. It is the picture of me inside my head, when I see myself. It is the picture of me that I think everyone sees. It’s that ‘assuming the worst that people could think about me’ and believing that and basing my whole experience on that assumption.

I don’t know how to block that image and those thoughts. I wonder do they ever go away? If I lose 100 lbs, will I still feel like a fat girl? If I got contacts and a weave, would I still feel like the ugly duckling?

If I decide to get back out there, muster up some strength and confidence and put my best foot forward and just keep pushing and keep going for it, could I still never find HIM? Could I still end up alone?

The scary part of asking those questions is that the answer could still be yes.

Sometimes I wonder about people and their defining moments. At what moment does someone go from someone who paints to Painter? Someone who blogs to Blogger? Someone who crafts to Artist? Someone who writes to Writer?

For some it might be when they start getting paid to do it. Or when others begin to call them by the title. Or when they’re recognized for it.

I wavered a bit on posting this here because I’d already written about it in my writing journal. It’s so not a huge deal and yet it is, because it is my first. A few weeks (okay, like a month ago) I wrote out an entry in my writing journal about how I was fit to be tied and full of jealousy because GreenEyes was writing for a national publication and here I am, calling myself a writer and I’m writing for diddly squat. I blog, but I only call that writing in terms of counting the words for my annual word count goal. It does help me express myself but I blog to blog and not to write or craft or create. It’s nothing I am doing on purpose to have my talent recognized.

So I decided to get off my literary ass and start writing something that could be posted somewhere and sit for eternity. I admit that I did not aim very high. I submitted a piece that I spent quite a bit of time on to a short story archive– the kind of place where they’ll post pretty much anything.  The other was a bit more discriminating, but too late, I realized that they hadn’t posted a story since Fall of 2009. The backlog, if they’re even posting new stories, is likely huge. I don’t even want to worry about that one.

I submitted my short story, entitled ‘Try To Say No‘ about a girl trapped in a friends with benefits situation that she can’t get herself out of, about a month ago, I’d guess. Maybe less time than that. Yesterday I got an email that it was accepted at short-story.net. WOOP!

I don’t know if, at this point, I call myself published. I may save that distinction for a more discriminating entry process. I DO know, now, that my work (besides the fanfiction that I have written which is strictly for fun) is part of an archive and will remain there until… well until the site goes down, I suppose!

What I do call myself, now, is writer. And not even tongue in cheek and rolling my eyes and pretending to be modest about it. I also need to call myself busy working on some other pieces. Like finishing my NaNoWriMo piece. It’s STILL not done. I may have to go back, in the story, and start from a different angle, or something. Or figure out how I want it to end and work my way backward.

Maybe I’ll finish it before NaNo2010 begins. : /

Paying my respects to a Civil Rights Hero. Happy Birthday, Dr. King.

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Courtesy Getty Images

There’s something about the image of a champagne bottle popping that makes me….nevermind.

So, it’s that time, again. December 31st. End of the year. That time when I look up at at the calendar and go ‘whaaaa? December 31st! Yesterday it was spring!? I’m not ready!’ But time goes on anyway, and I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be a new day of a new month of the first year of a new decade.

Blogs galore are galavanting through the last decade, remembering and celebrating and commisterating, noting how much different they were back then, or maybe how much they’re exactly the same, whether that’s good or bad. I’ve done my fair share of that in my head, and in conversation, but I haven’t felt led to do much of it here on the blog.

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Life is good, blog. Really good. The sun is shining. I’m in a great mood. Got a good job, a nice place to live, food in the fridge (figuratively speaking), clothes on my back (unstylish though I may be, I’m wearing clothes). I have all these material things that society has decided I should be happy about. I might be inclined to agree– I can’t really complain, and for October, that’s good for me.

But sometimes, blog, life isn’t good. Or at least it isn’t as good as it should be. It’s at those times, those low times, those bored out of my mind times, those times when I lay in bed and cry for no reason, that I start to think about the things I wish I had, or things I’m working to get and don’t yet have, or just….things. When life isn’t good is when I wish for change, lots of it, and NOW. [Read more →]