Charming, but single

Not a lot happened today, I’m just in the mood to write for some reason. (Insomnia’s a bitch.)

I ran some errands, spent some time at the bookstore, but did not buy any books for some odd reason. (Normally bookstore gift certificates from Christmas don’t last nearly this long.) I know that the main reason I can’t buy any books right now is that I’m in the middle of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, which is as good as it is long. (And it is very long.) I’m about 350 pages into the 800-some-odd-paged book. While it’s not something I would normally read, because I’m not a Russian nobility enthusiast, I am enjoying it. The writing is quite good and the translation I’m reading is very clear. Cheers all around.

After the bookstore I sat at a coffee shop and read for awhile. Had a latte. (It was supposed to be an au lait, but the barista foamed the milk and I didn’t really feel like complaining.)

I talked to the aforementioned best friend from high school, who did, in fact, have quite a humorous story to tell. I’ll spare the details, since it’s not MY story. Basically, she ran into this guy at a bar and he was like, “Do I know you?” and she replied, very matter of factly, “Yeah, I had sex with you about four years ago.” (This does not sound as funny as it really is … imagine just deadpanning to a former hook-up who didn’t totally recognize you that, yeah, you had slept with him.) Anyway, he tried to get her number and she managed to not have to part with it, and he came by her table later where all of her friends laughed at him because she immediately told them the story. It was amusing.

On the matter of T and the late night phone call, she said I should call him and wake him up one night and see what he says. (I’m not going to do that.) She also said I should just keep the number in my phone and call him later and totally ignore the question of how I knew it was him calling. (I will probably not do this either … I don’t want to admit that I reverse-phone-numbered him. That’s so cyber-stalkerish. Googling someone is acceptable, but using an internet directory to check their number off of the caller ID is pushing it. And yes, I Googled him. His name is a bit too common to really give me any good dirt, unfortunately.)

Hopefully he’ll call again and I’ll actually answer this time. I put him in my phone under a pseudonym — albeit a very OBVIOUS one to anyone who knows the full backstory. (Which has not yet been fully detailed on this site.) It’s probably not obvious enough to tip off random people who look in my phone, however. (I have a tendency to do like pseudonyms in my phone. A friend once changed B’s entry in my phonebook from his name to “Playin’ Me.” It stayed for months.)

I hate that I’m now sitting by the phone waiting to see if he calls again. I hate being that pathetic, passive-aggressive woman, but I don’t have the cojones to be the aggressor in this situation anymore. He joked that he likes passive women who stay in their place — but I’m almost 100 percent sure that was said to annoy and tease me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been burned in the past, but I don’t know if my ego could handle him brushing me off if I called him. At least now I can rationalize not calling him because I can claim I didn’t know it was him calling because he didn’t leave a message, even though I know that’s total bullshit. (Or maybe I’ll just get drunk this weekend and throw caution to the wind and call him. It’s not like I’m a Rules girl who can’t call a boy.) (Most likely, I’ll just obsess about this for the next few days.)

Dear God, I am too good at being neurotic.

Witness the following e-mail exchange I had with my best friend from high school, who now lives in another city.

Best friend: “I have the most funniest story in almost forever. I look like a complete whore, but those days are behind me.”

Me: “You look like a bigger whore than I did when I was standing on the side of the street waiting for my friend to pick me up from shacking on New Year’s Eve? I’m impressed.”

Best friend: “Actually, no.”

I am conflicted, as I feel both shockingly bad that I out-whored her but still surprisingly proud that I beat her at something.

I am so odd.

So this is odd. I finished blogging last night and settled in bed with my puppy, who did not want to sleep at all. AT ALL. The only thing remotely interesting on TV was “Iron Chef America,” so I set the sleep timer on my TV to five minutes after it ended (1 a.m.) and figured I’d barely make it through half of the show before I was out.

I was correct — I must’ve fallen asleep around 12:30 a.m., well before my FoodNetwork crush Chef Bobby Flay served his food to the judges.

So, I’ve been sleeping for less than an hour when my cell phone rings and vibrates. Like crazy. This wakes up my puppy, who then wants to lick my face and play. It pisses me off royally. I silence the damn thing and then open it to see who’s calling. The number isn’t in my phone and I don’t recognize it, so instead of yelling at the caller, I assume it’s a wrong number and go back to sleep.

This morning I wake up still slightly annoyed that someone called me at 1:12 a.m. on Monday morning. I checked my messages and there were none. So, I reverted to my journalism days and plugged the number into one of those reverse phone number search engine thingys.

Who was it? None other than T himself, calling from his house.

At first I was excited — he called me! Then I was bummed — after 1 a.m. and without leaving a message!

Asshole.

So, this confirms that he’s just looking for a booty call, which is fine. I’m just annoyed that he didn’t leave a message … now I can’t call him back without having to pretend that I don’t know who it is, since he knows I don’t have his home number and he didn’t leave a message. I consulted a friend for guidance and she suggested that I call the number today and act like I was calling to find out who woke me up last night, then act surprised that it was him. This way, she argued, I could talk to him AND keep the number to call it later.

Yeah, I so totally hate him.

So it’s been a few days, and in a way things have been both exciting and boring.

For starters, I interviewed for and was offered a job I really wanted. I was offered the job on Wednesday (via cell phone while I was at my other, crappy, job), and given my months-long search for a stable professional job in my area of expertise that offered health insurance, I didn’t hesitate to accept right on the spot. I was, and still am, thrilled. The money is okay. Much more than I’m making now, but not so much that I’ll be drinking only $9 martinis, wearing only Enzo Angelini shoes and getting mani-pedis every week. But, enough to support just me, pay down the student loans and start saving to buy a new car in a year or so. This I can handle.

On a more vain note, it’s great to know that when I go out and meet people and have to introduce myself, I no longer have to say, “Oh, I’m working retail, but I’m looking for a real job right now.” (This was always problematic because I always worried that I would offend someone by insinuating that retail or service-type jobs aren’t real. They’re real, they’re just not what I envisioned my official career to be, which is why I suppose they aren’t real to me. I’m a snob.) I put a lot of stock in what people do with their lives. To me, this is how you can tell a lot about a person’s character and goals. I’m a judgmental person at times — probably no more so than most people, but enough that I notice and try to curb it. So, I’ve always been a bit worried that people were judging me by my terrible job and lengthy job search. I’m always surrounded by people who are in professional jobs they love or who are finishing graduate or law school. I know I’m just as (or, sometimes, more) interesting and intelligent as these people, and I felt my job didn’t reflect that. (There’s a lesson in there about judging a book by its cover or a shopgirl by her wares. Consider it learned and let’s move on.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to being able to say, “I work in PR,” the next time I’m engaged in conversation with a new person. Maybe that’s superficial of me. Who cares. I’m proud that the bumpy road of employment and experience I’ve navigated has finally paid off. Anyway. Moving on.

Wednesday we went to a little martini bar to celebrate my new job. (We would have gone anyway, but me getting a job was a great excuse to drink more.) The drinks were cheap — two for $7 — even if they were on the smallish side. The watermelon ones were great. They’re definitely my new favorite. Unofficially, I think Wednesday night at the martini bar is going to be our new during-the-week drinking event. (Not as cheap as the old one, where we suffered through Monday Night Football for $1 beers, but still cheap, especially given my new employment.)

My good friend the law student was there with the guy she’s seeing, as was a girlfriend of ours, B, B’s roomie and the girl he’s seeing and several people who work with B.

Of course, B’s roomie (before B got there) floated the rumor that B is sleeping with a very attractive blonde woman with whom he works. I pretended to be interested in the gossip because I was happy for him. Really, it just pissed me off. I mean, of course I want him to be happy. I’ve been playing the whole “I used to love him” role very well for the past few months. This rumor was the first challenge to that, and I suppose I failed. When B got there I joked about the rumor with him. He denied it, saying that she’d crashed at his place because she was too drunk to drive. I didn’t believe him at first, but he pointed out that had he slept with her, he’d “still be smiling ear to ear.” (This did very little for my self-esteem.) Anyway, I think he’s telling the truth. He doesn’t have any reason to lie about sleeping with a hot chick to spare my feelings, especially given the fact that I’ve been quite open in my flirtations with new boys.

Still, it bugged me. I don’t want him to be miserable. I’d just rather that I were happy first.

What is NOT making me happy, however, is the lack of phone calls from a certain boy I hung out with on New Year’s. I am seriously annoyed — he ACTED like he liked me. Seriously, there was interesting conversation, cute casual touching and lots of laughing, not to mention the whole making-out-with-me-before-we-left-together thing. The same thing happened with him after a Halloween party. At that point I chalked the whole thing up to drunkenness, but after having such a great time at New Year’s, I lost sight of the “If he is not calling you, he is not into you” rule. But he still hasn’t called.

Part of me thinks we’ll just hang out at parties thrown my our mutual friend. This would be fine if he threw parties every weekend.

And now let the obsessing begin.

(Re: The post title — I couldn’t think of anything else to put.)

Had a pretty good day. I ran some errands and such. Not a lot to report about the day.

I almost didn’t go out. I had planned to do something with a good friend, but she ended bailing because she didn’t feel good. After making a few phone calls, I blasted off a text message to a girl I’m friends with but rarely hang out with anymore. This was a last-ditch effort, as the social circle that once linked us has spread out and broken apart considerably. So, I see this girl every few months for drinks.

Her plans for the evening hadn’t worked out either, so we decided to get a drink at one of the city’s nicer bars. (To say “nicer” may be an overstatement. The crowd that goes there is what makes it nicer, in my eyes anyway. It’s a slightly older, mid 20s to early 30s crowd that drinks pretentious martinis and other pseudo-fancy drinks. The music is better and you can generally sit, rather than hovering aimlessly in everyone else’s way.) I have a love-hate relationship with the bar. I love the atmosphere and the array of martinis, but I hate that I always spend too much money when I go there. I decided on Saturday that I wasn’t having even one overpriced martini — even though the cosmos speak to me. Instead, I opted for the less expensive wine.

We huddled in a comfy circular booth and gossiped. This girl is the source for gossip about people I know. (Yes, I know gossiping about other people is very high schoolish. And yet I don’t care.) I got a list of updated couplings, which was amazingly similar to the last list of couplings, a sure sign that I am old. I updated her about my boys, or semi lack thereof and she updated me on her current boys and her psycho ex. (Her ex is a loser that few people liked because he is generally just an asshole who didn’t treat her well at all.) Having both spent time in situations where we acted like psycho girls in love (her with the ex and me with B), we agreed that sometimes you just have to get your heart smashed in pieces before you realize what a fool you’re being. No amount of tantrum-pitching by your friends will do, which is terrible and unfortunate. (Although, I do admit that I wish someone would have taken me by the shoulders and shaken me after I let a certain boy make me cry in a bar in front of pretty much everyone I knew. A story for another day.)

This all plays into the whole theory behind He’s Just Not That Into You, a book that I am pissed that I like. Obviously, thinking “he’s just not that into me,” could have saved me time during the whole B situation. However, I’m annoyed that I can pretty much predict that nothing will happen with T if the book is right, which it probably is. Basically, that situation is one of convenience — we’ll hook up when we’re around each other, but he’s never going to go out of his way to see me.

And to think, the conversation was so nice.