Charming, but single

Because I am quick to bemoan my lack of a suitable mate, I have gained somewhat of a reputation as being, well, one of those women who might just go get herself a sperm donor and take matters into her own hands. My friends know that I am a true blue lover of men, but they like to tease me just the same. I am an easy target because I am relatively loud-mouthed and free with my opinions. (Not me. No, never.)

As a joke a friend e-mailed me this column from MSNBC. “Will science render men unnecessary?” it asks. Her note was to joke that I didn’t really need a man because of advances in technology and biology that could create sperm from bone marrow. She was being totally silly, of course.

The author makes a good point – until the act of making a baby suddenly becomes less fun than it actually is, most people will employ the traditional method of procreating over the new-fangled way every time.

But truth is that there are so many other things about men that make them better than the alternative. If there weren’t I think I’d given up years ago. As would we all.

I complain a lot about what is wrong with the male of the species, which I do not pretend to understand. And maybe that is really for the best. Some things, like why they don’t call, are best left unexplained. Because, I tell myself, I really will appreciate the Good Ones when they come along.

So, in honor of those Good Ones, who don’t deserve the wrath they sometimes get, who are just as fed up as I am, who really will call, I present, in no particular order, Things I Love About Men:

• Their smell, sometimes musky, sometimes dirty, always irresistible.
• Long conversations about nothing over beers.
• Hands that wrap around mine and make them look downright tiny in comparison.
• How confused they are by really fancy high heels.
• That cute butt wiggle they do when you’re alone with them and teasingly comment on their backsides. The one where they rock their hips back and forth like a three year old imitating a chicken or a duck. So aware of how cute they really are.
• The excited looks they get when they’ve created something or built something or done something that they really want to share. Like a child or an excited puppy.
• Boxer briefs.
• Their odd loyalty to their pals.
• Ties.
• How easy it is to distract them.
• Their hands on the small of my back, just to let me know that they are there.
• How they take me seriously when I ask, “Is football the one with the touchdowns?” (Yes, I know. I’m being patronizing. But thanks for so sweetly explaining the game I’ve been watching since I was knee high to a grasshopper.)
• Deep voices.
• That flipping thing my stomach does when the right man is walking toward me.
• How easily I fit into the space next to them, in between their arms and bodies.
• When they reassuringly rub my knee under the table.
• Their inability to maintain a poker face when you they see you dressed up in a hot little dress.
• Their insistence that seeing you in sweats and a tank top is just as sexy. Even though they’re lying.
• How good my hands feel in their hair. (Or rubbing their bald heads.)

I could go on. Heck, I should go on.

Later.

For now, I think it is safe to say that when asked, “Will science render men unnecessary?” my answer is simply, “I hope not.”

Like many colleges, mine featured large strips of bars within walking distance of popular student apartments. My favorite little cranny of bars featured five establishments of dubious quality wherein Jagermeister-fueled students sought refuge from the storms of studying and being adults. It was a gem of an area, because you could hop from bar to bar all night, send someone to the convenience store for a case of beer before the bars closed and run by a pizza place on your way home. This meant that by the time everyone wandered the short walk from the bar to the Designated Late Night Apartment, stopping to crash a party in progress or possibly to swim in a stumbled-upon pool, rations had been secured and the party could continue.

I’d just returned to the South from my summer internship and College Roommate decided that my being back in town for a whole day was cause for celebration. As if we really needed one. To the bars we headed, selecting one of my least favorite of the bunch (my age and non-Greek status meant I hated two of the bars in this area, which were packed wall to wall with the underage fraternity and sorority pledges who truly wear on your nerves when you are a college senior). We probably picked it for the ridiculously priced $2 pitchers of beer.

I’d missed my friends and our Thursday through Saturday (and sometimes Tuesday and Wednesday) evenings of socializing. And since it was between semesters, attendance at all of the bars was down and a random mish-mash of people came to this particular bar, which made the evening a little more fun than normal – more room to move, to sit, to be. There was dancing. And vows that I would never, no never, leave again for almost three whole months. And drinking of beers in plastic cups.

I was dancing with this guy I knew marginally because we were in the communication school together (in different concentrations) and saw each other in the halls. We also possibly had some mutual friends. He was a little taller than I am with a goatee and glasses, a year or so older than I was. I remember looking at College Roommate and shrugging my shoulders as we all shuffled our flip flops across the dirty floor, dancing spastically to a spectrum of classics like “Jesse’s Girl” and whatever marginally offensive rap song about shaking the body part du jour, as if to say, “Him? No I don’t know where he came from either?” After a few songs, he’d put a hand around my neck, pulled my face to his and we were kissing. And we pulled back, looked at each other, laughed and returned to making out. Because after countless beers and at age 21, I didn’t need many more reasons to kiss a boy.

We hugged and parted ways at the end of the evening, our friends lightly ribbing us, though they’d probably all done the same thing, if not that night. We didn’t exchange numbers. This never bothered me.

When school did start a few weeks later, I remember awkwardly smiling as I passed him in the hall a few times, but we never kissed again. Truth be told, I doubt we ever talked again.

Flash forwarding a few months, I was flipping channels on the TV screen when I saw a familiar face. It was Random Drunken Make Out Guy, now an advertising rep for a local cable company, encouraging businesses to increase their sales with cable advertising. I was only mildly mortified when this commercial would air – pretty much all of the time, by the way – and my friends would giggle and point out that he was my Random Drunken Make Out Guy anyone who would listen. I’d think, “Surely, this only happens to me. Because of course MY Drunk Guy ends up on the TV. Surely, I am the only college student to endure such mild embarrassment on a regular basis.”

But time passed and I found many more Random Drunken Make Out Guys in the bars, including, but not limited to, an ROTC guy who was swung me around on the dance floor and almost sent me careening into a pool table with his exuberance and later pushed me up against the fence that surrounded the outside deck while he kissed me in front of all of my coworkers, some older guy from Pittsburgh, a friend’s ex-boyfriend and a slew of guys who left me thinking, “How the hell did this happen?”

Like The Dentist.

Fresh out of dental school, he was at the bar with some friends and I ended up making out with him – that is all, Scout’s Honor – in his car in the parking lot. This turned out to be quite problematic for me later, as he had a girlfriend, but I challenge you to determine if an unmarried person has a significant other by looking at him or her. Chances are you can’t. I certainly couldn’t and it wasn’t really my responsibility to ask the guy who was flirting with me all night if he had a girlfriend who, say, happened to be good friends with one of my coworkers, who happened to find out later and call me on it.

Oh, hindsight.

I never called him, especially after I found out he had been seriously dating someone. My friends teased me mercilessly for my Dentist and homewrecking ways. I was mortified when a pal reported that she could barely keep herself from giggling when she unknowingly scheduled an appointment for dental work with him.

But in every college life, a few bad decisions must be made. I’ve outgrown my Kissing Anyone phase, though it was fun while it lasted.

So you can imagine my horror a few days ago when I looked up to a familiar face on the TV screen to see my Drunken Kissing Dentist in a commercial for his own dental practice. Oh, and did I mention His Girlfriend from our Night of Tonsil Hockey is also a dentist, his wife and his partner?

Em-barrassing.

The moral of the story: Making out with me will make your dreams of being in substandard local television commercials come true.

Don’t worry, I didn’t become unsingle in the past five days. I haven’t posted because I have had a slight spyware-adware-trojan-worm-grayware problem. (Or whatever it is that you call it when programs and files and God-knows-what-else overtake your computer and you get crazy popups and they will not go away, no matter how much your try to bargain with your computer. (“You can have my e-mail password, but not my PIN number!”) No matter how much you bang on the keys and scream, “But I only use Mozilla Firefox! I don’t file share! I use three different anti-spyware programs!”)

It got so bad at one point that I woke up at 4 a.m. the other morning convinced – convinced! – that someone was in my bedroom because I heard talking. Once I realized that I was, in fact, alone in my bedroom – typical! – I tracked the source of the noise to my laptop. And when I opened it, I found at least 40 popup windows, including more than one talking popup, which was the source of the imaginary intruder.

I seem to have it somewhat under control now – at least to the point that I can remove everything for a little while. And then when I restart? Boom. All back. So I unplugged from the Internet (really pissed the spyware off, FYI) and thought about the problem and decided that the best thing to do would be to draft someone else with more knowledge of these issues and skill at PC maintenance into the War to DeSpywareify my laptop.

So, you know, just as soon as my little sister has some free time …

But yes, I will be writing this week. Promise.

P.S. How exciting is my life? Blogging and watching “Elizabethtown” for the 25th time. Hot.

Ed note: Edited for spelling. How typical of me to have spelling problems in a post about wanting to be a writer.

One of the really fantastic and equally awful things about blogging is that you have a record of your thoughts and experience. The lows and the highs. The hysterical and the downright creepy.

Fantastic because it gives me a chance to look back at how I deal with things and react to situations, for better or for worse. And awful because I realize how often I fall into ruts and get fed with things that really aren’t worth fretting over. I am my both my own best cheerleader and my own worst critic. And this is okay, I think, as long as I don’t build myself up too much or let myself fall too far down. A delicate balance. Something to strive for.

When I was in high school, I went through a month or so of being obsessed with Henry David Thoreau and “Walden.” Had we had MySpace back in, say, 1996, my quote would have been “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” It’s easy to think, when you are 16 or 17 and possibility seems to surround you, that you will do it all, try everything once, maybe twice for good measure. And it is just as easy to forget, when you are approaching 30, that this still exists and the possibility is there, if you look.

I always wanted to be a writer. But there is one moment that I remember, clear as day, when I knew I could be a writer. (And trust me, there is gulf between wanting and knowing.) I was in my junior year Honors English class and our assignment was to write a paper comparing a modern artistic work, be it a song, a movie, a painting, to the themes of transcendentalist writers like Thoreau. My paper centered on the songs of Counting Crows, because I was as obsessed with Adam Duritz as I was with Henry David.

I don’t remember what I wrote and I don’t have a copy of the paper, which is just as well because I’d just let my critical eye ruin an excellent memory and defining moment in life. I worked so hard on that paper, poring over the well-worn books of lyrics that came with my CDs, searching for the perfect phrase to express my generation’s soul searching. Never had I worked so diligently on a school project.

Of course the computer at my high school ate the paper, so I spent all night reworking it. (I once had a journalism professor who, when she would see me hunched over my computer, brow furrowed, looking over a printout of a story or column covered in red ink and copy editing marks, would remark that “writing is rewriting.” I am certain this phrase was born to keep editors from being burned like witches at the stake and/or because some poor soul found his or her masterpiece lost to technology or whatever they had before computers. Like fire. Or flood.) I was so proud of my paper that I turned it in a day early so that I wouldn’t fidget and ruin it. My English teacher encouraged me to take the extra day, but I refused. “It is finished,” I told her, like I’d just written some great masterwork instead of a three-page essay on a band I liked for my Lit class.

She saw something in my confidence and words that day. And she read this essay to each one of her classes, including my Honors class, which was full of girls I thought had more talent than I did. I kept my head down while she read each painstakingly prepared phrase aloud, just praying that they didn’t laugh or roll their eyes.

I remember everything about this moment – my teacher’s bright red hair and chunky jewelry, the rhythm she gave the words as she read, the dusty parquet floor squares of the first-floor classroom Seventh Hour where I sat, with my back to the window, pride welling up in my chest and a tear in the corner of my eye. I never thanked her properly for this three or four minutes, when I went from wanting to be a writer to knowing that it was in me somewhere, eclipsed by self-doubt and immaturity.

Maybe it is peeking its head out here, in these posts. Perhaps it will show its head in another format at another time to another audience. Could be that one day I will be tapped out, potential reached, possibility gone.

I wonder if one day, years from now, when all of this dating and nondating is in the past, I will look back on these words and stories and laugh or cry.

Probably both.
*Yes, this post title is from the quote: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein,” from Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith.

My Daddy – and no, I do not always call him “Daddy,” just when I’m being sappy or cute or when my car is making a weird noise – loves music. My parents liked to grill a lot of on the weekends when I was younger (they still do, actually), and almost every one of these weekend dinner memories is fantastic, with a soundtrack like The Eagles or Santana or Steely Dan or Pat Metheny or Peter Frampton or whomever struck my Dad’s fancy at the time. (And really great food, like beef and chicken kabobs, grilled sausage and juicy hamburgers – each time my Dad grills burgers, he goes around to everyone and says, “Who wants their buns toasted? Buns? Toasted? Come on, sit right here, I’ll toast your buns.” I still giggle like I am seven years old when he does this gag.)

My family is not perfect. We have our disagreements. We fight. We disappoint each other. But I think the reason that I have so many fond memories of growing up and actually have fun spending time with my family is because, at the very heart of it all, we enjoy each other’s company. Maybe not always and sometimes not enough, but as long as you have that core love of another person (or group of people), an appreciation of their quirks and a desire to remain connected to them, most negative or annoying things quickly pass.

One bad habit I inherited from my Dad – and there are many, because we are very much alike, all stubborn and talkative – is listening to the same songs or albums over and over again. And not once or twice. No, I’m talking about 10 or 12 times in a row. He almost lost his life once for playing “The Way” by Fastball a good six times in a row on the car stereo before we were even able to get a half hour out of town on a family vacation. My Discman blissfully saved me from this one hit wonder on repeat. (The soundtracks to most family vacations were Jimmy Buffet and Billy Joel. We’d fly down the highway in a tan Astro van listening to cassette tapes of “Turnstiles” and “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” that my Dad painstakingly labeled with their names and full track lists, in his boxy engineer-like handwriting.)

For several months, Dad was obsessed with John Hiatt’s live album “Hiatt Comes Alive at Budokan.” He played it almost every weekend when he was grilling. And it is truly a fantastic album full of great tracks – “Have A Little Faith In Me” and “Lipstick Sunset” and “Drive South.” Years ago, he spent several weekends installing and wiring speakers outside to the stereo system inside so he could listening to music while he grilled outside or worked on one of the cars, and the music would continue inside as he went back and forth getting utensils or something to drink. My fondest memories of my Dad are him bursting inside through the door in the living room, singing, in his goofy Dad voice, “It breaks my heart to see those stars, smaaashing a puurfectly goood geee-tar,” while he strummed his air guitar or handed my Mom a tray full of grilled meat.

When he is singing, my Dad squints his eyes into small slits and curves his neck to the right and tilts his head, listening intently to the song, completely lost in the music, momentarily unaware of work or bills or anything else but really hearing the song, breathing it into his lungs and then back out again. (One of my other favorite memories is how my parents used to let us have “candlelight” dinners sometimes on Saturday nights. My brother and I loved this – our favorite menu was steak, grilled mushrooms and baked potatoes. And we’d all sit in near darkness, with candles on the table, their flickering casting the only light, and eat. We felt so special and grown-up doing this and my parents always indulged us.)

My Dad’s favorite song, and the one that always makes me think of him, is “Feels Like Rain” by John Hiatt. It is a beautiful song about a romantic relationship and I know that he loves it because behind his playful demeanor is a very sensitive man who loves his wife, his family and being outdoors. (Also he named his first fishing boat “Feels Like Rain,” and I can think of no higher endorsement of or honor for a song than this.) He spends time out at his fishing camp, down in the far far end of the bayou, where you can only get by boat, where there isn’t running water. And thank God, because it is so still and peaceful that if everyone could get out there and put up with using a bucket instead of a toilet, no one would want to do anything but sit out there in the serenity. My parents will build an on-land camp out on the coast when they retire and they’ve made it clear that they will be packing up a Jeep and going down there for months at a time, driving into town for groceries every two weeks and my Dad will fish, my mom will sit in a rocking chair with hot tea and read and in the evenings they will go on boat rides alone after they eat fresh-caught fish. (Also, should I have children, they can go to camp Grandpa and Grandma for two weeks each summer and we can all visit on the weekends, I have been told.)

And I can imagine my Dad bursting through the door to the camp one evening while my Mom is making a salad, extending a hand that’s holding a platter of grilled redfish, his eyes squinted and his head tilted to the side, singing that “We ain’t never gonna make that bridge tonight, across the Pooontchaaaartraaaain …” One part silly and another part completely serious.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d pay off my student loans first. They’d want me to.

And then I’d buy them a house on pilings on the coast, with a porch that stretches around each side, a place to dock the boat and a good roof to protect them when it Feels Like Rain.