Charming, but single

I haven’t written a listblog in many many months – perhaps not since 2005, though I haven’t the time to re-read my blog to confirm this. Since I can’t organize my thoughts into a post, I’ll just list ‘em out.

Question of the day:

• I happened upon the MySpace profile of a guy I’d e-mailed with back a few months ago Match.com, but we lost touch when my membership expired. He’s friends with a woman I see at the Cigar Bar a lot, who recently added me as one of her friends. To message or not to message? That is the question.

Cheesy Song I’ve Been Dancing Around My Apartment To Whilst Wearing Fuzzy Slippers

• “I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne – Because I am damn precious. Also, I can do it better, natch.

Other Songs:

• “Beautiful Disaster” by Jon McLaughlin
• “Never Again” by Kelly Clarkson
• “Tell Me Bout It” by Joss Stone

Goals for the week:

• To the gym thrice
• Find a cute hairstyle, as long mane needs a trim
• Cook chicken tortilla soup

Update: By popular demand, a soup discussion.

I was thinking of trying this Rachael Ray recipe for Chicken Tortilla Soup, despite its terrible cheesy name: Why-the-Chicken-Crossed-the-Road Santa Fe-Tastic Tortilla Soup. (And the terrible picture online. I saw Rach make it – yes, I call her Rach, we’re tight – on her show and it looked really good.)

I was thinking of doing some substituting and changing because Rach is all about “learning the method.” And I think the “method” here is cooking your veggie base, pouring things into a pot and garnishing – and yes, I know how to do all of those things already.

For starters, I’m not going to roast my own red peppers or corn since I don’t have a grill handy. However, I think that my neighborhood Fancy Organic Mega Mart probably sells roasted corn or roasted corn salsa that I could substitute. (And I know that they sell roasted red peppers, both in the jar and on the olive bar.) I’m also going to up the garlic. Three cloves in an entire pot of soup? I need at least five or six.

I’d probably sub veggie stock/broth for chicken because I’m used to cooking with veggie stock. (I was veggie for years.) Also, I will nix the poultry seasoning and go with just freshly ground pepper, a cajun seasoning called Tony Chachere’s and smoked paprika to season the chicken.

I’m also not a huge fan of the zucchini here. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE zucchini, I just don’t always like it in my Mexican-style food. I want it to be crisp and I feel like this would make it too soft.

Also, since it is soup, I’m tempted to start with “the Trinity” (for the uninitiated, that’s finely diced celery, onion and bell pepper) because I can honestly tell you that I’ve never made a non-cream based soup that doesn’t start with a fine chop of celery, onion and bell pepper. I figure, why start now?

And, oh yeah, I was thinking that at the end, I’d add a can of black beans, drained and rinsed, because if there is one thing I know for sure, it is that anything plus black beans equals something better. And I’d serve with fresh lime slices as a nice garnish and cilantro only, because cilantro is superior to flat leaf parsley for anything Tex-Mex.

And I wouldn’t mix the tortilla chips in with the soup because they’d get soggy and I live alone and so I have to eat a lot of leftovers and the thought of soggy chips in leftover soup makes me want to throw up. Also, avocado? I’d probably put one on top of each bowl because I love them so.

See why I don’t have a cooking blog? Is there anything left to her recipe except for the canned tomatoes and cheese?

After a long day I slipped into my apartment literally seconds before a deluge of rain poured down upon the world, which caused me to do a little “I didn’t get soaked” dance in my entryway. I rustled up a quick and dirty dinner of chickpea salad, leftover tuna on crackers and Pinot Gris – oh the fabulous life of a single young professional woman, all Wheat Thins and wine.

The wine simply was not chilling quickly enough in the refrigerator. I don’t know why I don’t just keep a bottle of white wine chilled at all times, but that’s neither here nor there. Planning is not my strong suit.

I slid the bottle of wine into the freezer, vowing to check on it in 10 minutes. After my close call last week, I would be vigilant in my monitoring of the chilling wine.

And then my Mom called. And then Prom Date texted about going to the cigar bar. And then Josh Groban was singing with an African children’s choir on “Idol Gives Back” and you can see how many many many things distracted me, and where this story is heading.

I remembered the wine at around 10 p.m., when I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a half glass of wine while I do my writing before bed?” And then I padded into the kitchen in my fuzzy slippers, dancing around while I selected a glass and located my corkscrew.

I peered into the refrigerator and reached into the door where the white wine goes, right in between the Smucker’s Sugar Free Syrup, a random can of Miller Lite circa May 2006, low sodium soy sauce, Newman’s Own dressing and two bottles of sparkling water. Not feeling the thin neck of the wine bottle, I opened the refrigerator all of the way, bent down on my haunches and, seeing no wine, promptly came to the paranoid conclusion that SOMEONE had been in my apartment.

I jumped upright, swiftly slammed the door and pressed myself up against the oven, peering over my left shoulder back toward the dining room.

If someone had been in my apartment, I reasoned, they must clearly still be inside, hiding in a nook or cranny or closet or in the bathtub behind the scary shower curtain, just waiting for me to rustle through the refrigerator for a beverage and then pounce. (Yes, I watched CSI tonight, why do you ask?) I felt my body tense up as I slowly slid my slippers across the floor of the kitchen. I was about two steps into the dining room when I remembered where the wine was.

Frozen solid in the freezer.

I don’t know why this bottle froze and the other didn’t. Perhaps it is the grapes? Are Argentinean grapes less likely to freeze than Spanish ones? Could it be price? Would a $13 bottle hold up better than an $8 in the face of subzero temperatures?

Regardless, I can report that my apartment is intruder-free, I have a bottle of Pinot Gris defrosting in my refrigerator and I am instead sipping lemon-flavored sparkling water as an accompaniment to my writing.

Which, FYI, is not nearly as inspirational.

Saturday night (or early Sunday morning), I returned from a night of beers with Southern Belle and friends at sports bar, not quite tired enough to sleep, but not in the mood to cook up any early-morning mischief.

I put “Little Miss Sunshine” into the DVD player, climbed into bed and rolled onto my side. I pulled my laptop right next to me – I am in the habit of checking all of my e-mail accounts before I go to bed and then again first thing when I wake up in the morning, which is a testament both to my sad over-dependence on technology and also my clear lack of alternate late night and early morning extracurricular activities as of late.

I was signed onto a chat program, which I didn’t notice until I heard the Ding! and received a late-night message from The Nurse, who apparently took a break from his busy schedule of drinking dirt cheap beer in a crappy bar, balancing multiple girlfriends and impregnating women to virtually drop in on me for the evening.

Now, I typically withhold judgment on Drunk, Late Night Messaging of the Ex and the like. Lord knows I’ve been an offender, multiple times with The Nurse, in fact. (Before I knew about the pregnant girlfriend, obviously.) We get lonely, we get weepy and even the smallest bed seems far too empty on a given night so we reach out, hoping to feel familiar fingertips to reach back.

That said, I have little sympathy for a man with a girlfriend, a pregnant one, no less, contacting me with less-than-virtuous intentions at a less-than-appropriate time. Clearly frustrated and looking for some sort of amusement from me, 90 percent of The Nurse’s IMs were veiled attempts to get some action. From mentioning a certain act and pointing out that it was one his girlfriend doesn’t enjoy to asking if I still lived in the same apartment – when I pressed out about why he cared, he responded only, “Curiosity” – he was on the prowl.

I didn’t ask about his girlfriend, his soon-to-be-born child, his job, his life or do much more than respond in short phrases. I should have told him to take his crazy libido and wandering hands and shove them so far up his posterior that he turned himself inside out, but I didn’t. I am, after all, the scorned one in this situation and it was slightly gratifying to think of him trying to elicit a late-night invitation from me and being shot down each time. I am only human, immature warts and all.

I bid him goodnight and said that I was going to put my tired, half-drunk self to bed.

“Well, tell your half-drunk self goodnight, then.”

His attempts to be cute simply infuriated me, and then I couldn’t really sleep, which is so unfair because I’ve lost far too many moments of sleep over this man who constantly proves himself to be useless and annoying with a mind that has only a single track – to someone’s bed. Quickly.

Update the First: You can now get Charming, but single posts sent right to your inbox, courtesy of Feedburner. You can click the link below or on the right in the sidebar. And if anyone knows how to make the little form where you can enter your address work in WordPress.com, please, by all means, let me know. Also, seriously, I might effing PAY someone to extract my site from WordPress.com and set it up in WordPress.org.

Subscribe to Charming E-mail Updates!

We’ll see how this works. I believe you will get a day’s posts sent to you at midnight so that when you get to work you’ll have something fun to read with your morning coffee. Of course, I might decide that I hate it and then delete the service. My prerogative and all that good stuff.

Update the Second: Slowly updating the blogroll.

Update the Third: Go read the real content below this post, because y’all know I get pissy when I compose some lovely post and then it gets ignored in favor of some short throw-away “Look at this new thing I added to the sidebar!” post. I mean, I already have TWO additional posts (in various states of complete) for this upcoming week and I, swear, I will withhold them if necessary.

(Totally kind of joking. Need more coffee.)

I joined my Mother and some of her friends and colleagues for an after-work going away party on Friday evening. Mom’s worked with the same people for years and they know me, sometimes by reputation alone.

I actually saw the guest of honor at Friday’s drinking extravaganza at the Symphony the night before. So when I arrived Friday evening, her friend loudly announced, “You know, when I told [Charming’s Mom] that I saw [Charming] on Thursday night, she said, ‘Oh really? Were you at a bar or something?’”

“Mother!” I said, with a modicum of horror. “I. Was at. The symphony. Is it so hard for you to believe that I was anywhere but a bar?”

“I just figured that if someone saw you somewhere out at night …”

The entire party of 15 or 20 people, many who remember me as a pig-tailed five-year-old, erupted into laughter. They have, I’m sure, heard the stories about my misadventures, which I’d like to point out are ENTIRELY TRUE and possibly even more hilarious when you know all of the salacious details that I filter from my mother, because sometimes parents need to be protected from the embarrassment sure to befall them if they knew about the carryings on of their clumsy, overly opinionated, single 27-year-old daughters who really were raised better than this, I tell you.

I soon forgot the jokes at my expense when Mom told the cocktail waitress to put my wine on her bill and shared a brie appetizer with me, because I am quick to forgive and easily bribed with triple crème cheese, especially when said cheese is wrapped in flaky layers of pastry dough that is lightly drizzled with honey and baked before being sprinkled with nuts.

After an hour of appetizers and wine, the group voted to move to a second bar – and really, I am quite impressed at my mother’s ability to hang with the best of them, because I certainly wasn’t expecting her to bar hop on a Friday night, when, frankly, my experienced bar hopping soul could have easily been soothed with a nice night in and the leftover Italian I had in my refrigerator.

We headed down from our relaxed, expensive, champagne and brie atmosphere to a loud, rowdy place with watered-down whiskey drinks in plastic cups and, much to my mom’s dismay, not a bottle of wine in the whole place. We joined our party outside on the patio and my mom set off to procure some beers – Blue Moon for me and Corona, the only beer my mom really drinks, for herself. She got nowhere, and I mean, NOWHERE, with her polite manners and patience, as a free downtown festival was wrapping up and a crush of post-work twentysomethings wrestled for space at the bar for their gin and tonics while a crew of motorcycle riders jostled for space to order Budweiser en masse. My passive mother, who believes in taking turns and the honor system, might have been better served in this crowd if she’d brewed the beer herself, so I said, “Let me teach you something.” And I grabbed her by the arm and angled us through the crowd and to a corner of the small bar, where I pushed her $20 bill out for the bartender to see and forcefully ordered our beers – manners be damned, we just needed two beers.

A loud guy in a T-shirt, baseball cap and fake Oakely sunglasses sat at a barstool next to me, carrying on about his exploits from the previous night, which included, but were not limited to, visiting a strip club to watch his ex-girlfriend perform, getting entirely wasted and apparently having sex with the ex-girlfriend stripper. This story, peppered with expletives and derogatory terms for woman, did not really impress me. It thrilled my mom even less, so you can imagine her great excitement when I ordered the beers and Fake Oakely Guy turned to me and dropped the best pick-up line he could think of, saying, “So, you gonna drink that whole thing?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, are you going to drink that entire beer by yourself?”

Now, had I been a less passive person and slightly quicker on my feet, I would have poured my Blue Moon right over his head and said, “Nope, I only wanted to drink half of it, so thanks for your help.”

Instead, I shot him a cold, silent look of disgust, a look perfected over nine years of being approached by tacky men in bars, and said, “Yes, the whole thing. I’m going to Drink. The. Whole. Thing.” And I turned on my heel and headed back to my group.

“See Mom, THAT is why I am still single. I’m supposed to swoon over some guy who dates strippers, curses loudly at bars and has the lamest of pick-up lines?”

Not five minutes later a somewhat intoxicated balding guy who appeared to be in his early thirties began circling our group and mumbling to people. I assumed he knew someone and just ignored him – right up until he wrapped an arm around my shoulders and began talking to me, slurring every third word and swaying as his drink sloshed around the sides of his flimsy plastic cup, nearly spilling with each move he made. I looked at my mom with big eyes, thinking that she could get this man, who was friends with someone she knew, to stop touching me. And she grabbed my hand and pulled me into her conversation, saying, “Do you know him?”

“No, Mom, I don’t know him.”

“Then why would he put his arm around you like that?”

I gave her a pointed look, wanting her to know that I was trying, but when I set out into the world, trying to find The One, all of The Not In A Million Years Ones and The Ones That Should Immediately Stop Touching My Back are the reasons that she didn’t have grandchildren.

“Mom, The pickings? They are slim.”