A Scarlett Letter

Okay, I'm feeling very conflicted about this whole dating thing.

So I go out with Paul the Virtuous on a real date. You know the kind with dinner and everything. It's a Friday night, which apparently for Paul the Virtuous means pizza and beer night. Which sounds fine by my. Who doesn't like pizza?

We order a pitcher of beer and a large pizza, cheese only on one side and pepperoni and mushroom on the other. As we start munching away, I notice that Paul the Virtuous is only eating the cheese side of the pizza. Turns out that every Friday since he can remember - ever! - he has eaten cheese pizza. His family had one of those religious types of things going on, so cheese pizza was the food of choice on Fridays.

This of course did bring up the question of religion, and as he is still doing the whole meatless Fridays thing, I figure he is somewhat devout. Not a problem, but not really my thing.

But he's not. Devout, I mean. He hasn't been to church in years. He's just a creature of habit, says he.

47 YEARS of cheese pizza every Friday? No tossin' in a pepperoni or slice of canadian bacon in there every once in a while? No. Never.

Well, okay then.

I'm thinkin' that this might be indicative of a slightly more rigid character than I had originally assumed, but hey. We've all got our quirks. But as the meal progresses, I begin to sense a theme emerging here. So I decide to throw a little curve ball into the conversation and see what he does with it.

He mentions that there is a pool at his building and I say oh, you should have told me, I would have brought a suit. Of course, says I, we could always shock the neighbors and go for a little skinny dip!

Now, I'm obviously just joking, this is a first date after all! Paul the Virtuous however, is not amused.

His face suddenly goes perfectly still and strained and he says with great dignity "There are only 3 reasons to ever be naked. Showering. Going to the bathroom. And The Having Of The Sex."

The Having Of The Sex?

And I don't even want to know why he feels the need to be naked when he goes to the bathroom! I'm not EVEN going there!

But I am rather astounded and feel compelled to ask, what you mean you never just dance around your apartment in the buff? Are you afraid of offending your cat? Three reasons he says, holding up the appropriate number of fingers, and looking appalled at the very idea of being naked in front of the cat.

What do you wear to bed, I ask? A t-shirt and sweat pants, says he. What do YOU wear to bed, he asks. A question to which I give the old Marilyn Monroe standard - Channel #5.

I swear to you on my mothers grave, that Paul the Virtuous looked like he was going to faint.

Needless to say, the date went rapidly down hill from there.

And when we parted ways, I'm not entirely sure, but I think that I heard him muttering something about a woman named Jezebel . . .

Neighbors

I collect grandparents.

While most people collect THINGS, like art, or birdhouses or silver train whistles, I seem to collect interesting PEOPLE. Elderly people in particular.

I've done this all of my life. From as far back as I can remember, while the other kids only visited the old lady down the street because she gave us candy and lemonade, I visited because I loved her stories.

So naturally, when I moved into my new apartment, I was drawn to the elderly woman who lives across the street, Giovanna Franca.

Giovanna Franca is an energetic 72 years old and is originally from Palermo, Italy. She immigrated to the United States with her husband when her three oldest children were still young, and her youngest daughter, who was apparently a surprise, was born here in the States.

Her English is, at best, broken and understanding her takes rather intense concentration, seeing as she speaks with a very heavy accent and uses mostly Italian! Fortunately she throws in enough English words here and there, that combined with her grand gesticulations, are enough to allow me to follow her train of thought. Mostly.

So when Giovanna Franca invited me over for breakfast this morning, I of course accepted. And quite frankly, I don't think that she would have allowed me NOT to accept! I believe that this tiny Italian woman has a spine made of tempered steel.

We talked of many things, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Of her husband, she didn't say much. When I inquired about him, she threw her eyes heavenward, started waving her hands around and speaking very rapidly in Italian. When she finally slowed down, she said with a roll of her eyes, "Much trouble." I decided that her husband was not such a good conversational gambit!

We looked at pictures of her family while she fed me pancakes. Five pancakes to be precise. Five! With enough syrup to float a small armada and my butter quota for the next ten months. No matter how much I protested that I was full, she just stood there spatula in hand saying "Mangia, mangia!"

After eating pancakes until I literally thought that I was going to explode, Giovanna Franca brought out the cookies! Yes, indeed I was now expected to eat cookies with my tea. Apparently she feels that I need fattening up.

Now there was no way on earth that I could possibly force anything else down my throat without my stomach vehemently rejecting it! So when she turned her back on me to wash the breakfast dishes, I quickly stuffed two cookies into my sock. Yes, I did!

I hobbled home stuffed to the gills with pancakes and trailing cookie crumbs behind me from my sock.

It was much nicer time than the date that I had the next day . . .

Mystery Date

First Dates are a bitch.

You never know what's going to happen, or what to say, and invariably it's a bad hair day. Now with this Internet Dating thing, it's like that game "Mystery Date" that my cousin Dana had when I was pre-pubescent and innocent. It was a really stupid game. All you did was roll the dice and open a little door to find out if your date was Mr. Wonderful (dressed in a tuxedo and carrying flowers, I believe) or Mr. What-Were-You-Thinking (a kinda Johnny Depp Seattle Grunge reject), or any number of different types in between. I have no idea why, but I wanted that game really really bad.

Ha! Be careful what you wish for . . .

After weeding out a bunch of the internet date prospects and conducting the obligatory telephone screening process, I set up a few coffee dates. The coffee date is our societies currently accepted way of meeting a blind date. With the coffee date you can always say Aw Gee I already made dinner plans, gotta-run-see-ya -bye. This way you haven't tied yourself into an excrusiating evening of dining with someone who keeps talking incessantly about their ex who left him at the alter or all the ugly, fat women who are pretending to be Jessica Alba, and how could they do that to him, never mind that HIS photo was taken his senior year of high school and that quarterback physique has long since turned to fat and there is more hair on his back then there is on his head.

So, anyway, I arrange to met this man, Bobby the Bearded, at a coffee shop. I get there before him and seat myself at a table and soon enough a man approaches me with that oh-thank-god-she's-not-a-dog kind of smile on his face. I look around somewhat frantically, hoping that there is actually some other woman that this man is smiling at.

Because this is not Bobby the Bearded.

And it was indeed yours truly that he was smiling at. Now, I have no clue who this man is, but he knows my name so obviously I must have set a date up with him.

My mind is racing and I'm wondering if I somehow set up dates with two men at the same time, and oh my god what if Bobby the Bearded shows up too and how in gods name did I get myself into this mess and who is this man?

People, you can't make this shit up!

Now, at this point it probably would have been a good idea for me to fess up to my mistake, apologize and say gee I'm really sorry but who the hell are you? But nooooo. I stand there dumbstruck with this idiotic smile on my face and quickly usher him to a table behind a palm tree where I am hidden but can see if Bobby the Bearded shows up.

Conversation is rocky at first, and I'm certainly not helping matters by having my attention divided. But as the minutes pass and Bobby didn't show up I began to relax and concentrate on my date. Now, by this point I have totally missed my opportunity to gracefully explain that I don't know this man's name without looking like a total moron. So I just stay quiet and hope that something he says will jog my memory and I'll be able to figure out who he is.

Before I know it a couple of hours have passed with some light and lively conversation, and when we are about to part ways, he asks if he could see me again and I say sure I'd enjoy that.

Of course I suddenly realize that I still don't know his name, and I'm thinking that this would probably be good information to have at this point, and I suspect that just calling him Bubba won't go over so well.

Thinking quickly (why I couldn't have thought as quickly earlier will forever remain a mystery) I ask him to call me the day before our date to confirm, cause you know how flaky people can be ha ha ha (oh if he only knew). See I figure if he calls then he'll have to say "Hi this is so-and-so". This way I will actually know his name when he picks me up and if that didn't work I figure I can always rummage through his glove compartment when he's not looking and find his car registration or something.

As we are walking to our respective cars, at long last, Mr. Mystery mentions his cat who has this unusual name and the light bulb, dim tho it may be, finally clicks on!

Sure enough, when I got home and grabbed my date cheat sheet, there he was, just below Bobby the Bearded. Paul the Virtuous with the cat of the unusual name. I must have written the date down under the wrong name.

I still don't know what happened to Bobby the Bearded. And quite frankly, I'm a little afraid to find out!

Internet Dating Part One

Okay, don't laugh, but I signed up for Match.com.

I KNOW!

I'm not even legally divorced yet, and quite frankly I'm not even entirely sure that I really want to be dating again. It seems like an awful lot of work. But everyone seems to expect it, so I guess I just kinda wanna see what's out there. You know kinda cast out a line and see what's biting.

And man-o-man are they biting!

I put a decent photo of myself on my profile. It's nothing special, just a couple of shots that I snapped with the camera built into my Mac. Certainly not the best photos of myself, but not the worst either. I guess that if I do decide to meet anyone, I'd much rather have them say "Wow! You're much prettier than your photo!" as opposed to "Gee. You didn't mention that you were an expert with Photoshop."

Now, this is not the first time that I've done the Internet dating thing. But the whole thing seems to have gotten completely out of hand. And I know that this is going to sound totally egotistical and like I'm one of those awful former cheerleader types that we all hate so much BUT . . . There are a whole lotta guys out there who if they saw you in public, wouldn't even DREAM of approaching you, who seem to feel that it's perfectly acceptable to approach you on the Internet.

And you KNOW the men of which I speak! Don't you turn your pretty little nose up at me and pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about! You know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

These are the homely, if not downright ugly, men with room temperature IQ's, no job, no money, who will need to take the bus to go on a date with you. Now, I'm not trying to be snotty or mean, it's just . . . . really. Do they HONESTLY think that you'll go out with them?

Some of the men who have responded to my profile are truly astonishing. And I swear to you on my Mother's life that I even received an email from a man recently released from prison. Or maybe he's still in prison. I'm not entirely sure.

And then if you take the time to send out a polite little No Thank You Wish You The Best Of Luck email to them they actually GET MAD AT YOU. They send back hateful email telling you how shallow and awful you are and just because they are 5'2" tall, live in another hemisphere with 57 dogs, and have a perspiration problem does not mean that you should automatically discount them.

But of course if you don't respond to them, they sic Miss Manners on you for not replying. Or they sent a multitude of emails to you saying simply Well? as if you should have jumped to attention the minute you received their email . . . or . . .Are you ever going to answer you snotty b#@$#? (Okay so I just made that one up. No one has really called me any names. Yet.)

But you know what worries me the most? It's not that I could end up going out on a date with a man who put a 30 year old picture up, or that he'll turn out to be a perv or stalker. I worry that I could somehow end up being someone ELSE'S Internet Dating Horror Story. How awful would that be? I can just imagine being at a party somewhere and everybody's laughing about this story about a crazed woman who spilled soup in her lap and then talked about the way the logs were stacked up in the fireplace and then realize that it's ME that they are talking about. It's kinda like that dream where you out in public in your underwear. Only worse.

Because it really COULD happen . . .

Drivers Ed

Driving habits of people seem to be different everywhere you go, each place having its own quirks that must be learned through experience.

And in my travels I've encountered some driving habits that are at best somewhat bizarre, and at worst downright terrifying!

In Egypt my taxi driver entered the freeway from THE EXIT RAMP, did a quick pirouette and headed towards my hotel. Granted it was 2 o'clock in the morning, but still! AND these maneuvers were all executed without his headlights! Driving at night without using your headlights on was apparently a common practice in Cairo at that time. Upon sensing another car approaching in the opposite direction, the drivers would flash their lights at each other and continue past at breakneck speeds. I found this a mite unsettling.

Now in Kyoto, they drove at night with their headlights on, but for some reason they turned them off when at a stoplight. Which I found curious, but something of a relief after India where I was quite startled to find myself sharing the roads with cows.

In Bangkok, rush hour has you dreaming wistfully about traffic on the 405 (for those of you unfamiliar Southern California and the 405 freeway, this is a place you do not want to ever be without reading material and a couple hundred sudoku puzzles) and half the population seems to have scars on their legs from injuries they sustained riding on the backs of two stroke motorcycles. Being woefully uninformed on my first trip to Thailand, I personally experienced rush hour in Bangkok from the back of a tuk-tuk, a three wheeled, open air vehicle. Tuk-tuks look really adorable and seem like a really good idea to tourists.



In Nepal, on the way back from the Chitwan jungle, my car blew not one, but ALL FOUR tires. All four! At different times. And while we weren't searching for tires we were flying around blind corners on the wrong side of the road on what was affectionately known as the Cowboy Highway. On the rafting trip down the river to the jungle we had passed many wrecked cars along the banks of the river below the Cowboy Highway. And on one particularly memorable stop, I saw people stumbling from a bus that had been driven off into a ditch.

Back in America, as a pedestrian in New York City, its every man for him or herself. People stand poised on curbs with cars whizzing past and . . . . wait for it . . . . wait for the break . . . here it comes . . . Now! Run! I was always grateful to have reached the other side of the street without getting trampled on by the swarming horde.

Conversely, back in Los Angeles, whenever a pedestrian steps one foot into the street all traffic screeches to a grinding halt all over the city. One presumes this is because seeing a person walking in LA is such a mesmerizing site that no one knows quite what to do.

But never, ever, in my life have I experienced parking lot etiquette like they have in my new town. In fact I'm not entirely sure that the inhabitants actually know what a parking lot is, let alone have an understanding about how it is generally used.

At first I was puzzled. Was it my imagination, or had I just been forced to leap out of the way of three different speeding vehicles? In the parking lot? But having studied driving behavior in several different parking lots over the last few weeks, I have been forced to come to the conclusion that the drivers in this town consider parking lots to be alternate thoroughfare with an obstacle course thrown in for fun.

People drive thru the parking lots in this town with the intensity of a NASCAR race driver on their last lap. I know Hollywood stunt drivers who could take lessons from some of these ladies.

So if I suddenly vanish from view for a few days, don't worry. I probably just got clipped by a Mercedes in the parking lot at Michael's Crafts.

Just sayin'.

What a Handsome Lad

Oh lord, not the camera again.



Why won't she just let me sleep?



Maybe if I ignore her, she'll go away.

Paint And Purpose

I love paint.

The smell, the texture, the color. Everything. But especially the color. It can cause me problems, this love affair with color that I have. I'll start painting - a room, a piece of furniture, the cat, whatever - and become simply entranced. I'll stand stock still, brush or roller in hand staring at this marvel of color and texture, watching the light play across the surface and see within it's depths endless possibilities.

I watch paint dry. Literally.

For me, seeing the subtle change of color, the reflection of light and shadow across the surface of wet paint as it slowly dries is endlessly fascinating. Of course, watching paint dry can drastically slow my productivity, as I'm sure you can imagine.

But eventually I'll get to the second coat, because contrary to claims made by certain parties, I do not believe that there really is such a thing as a "One Coat Paint". I personally believe that this is a ploy that was created by the paint manufacturers so that they can charge lazy people more money. The manufacturers know that George is never going to paint a second coat anyway, so they dump a little extra pigment into the mix, tack a couple of bucks on to the price and good ole George goes home happy. So when Emily says, "Honey, do you think it needs a second coat?", George can say to Emily with a clear conscience "Naw! It's a One Coat Paint, Sweety! It's supposed to look like that".

A few pictures of my humble kitchen in the midst of it's transformational paint job.




Charming, isn't it?



See that black thing in the background? Therein you see the main problem with my kitchen. It has virtually no shelving, so I'm using an old bookcase for my dishes. I believe that this is what one calls "re-purposing". Re-purposing is what happens after one goes "dumpster diving".




I took the $50 ladder and left the $1200 sofa behind when I left Himself. My priorities are maybe a bit skewd.

It Could Be Worse

Wednesday is shot day.

I have this thing called Ankylosing Spondylitis. A really big name for a disease that basically means Ouch Dammit!

Since I have no desire to conduct a Health Ed class, I'll just say that diseases like AS and RA (Rheumatoid Arthritis) are autoimmune diseases that essentially cause your body to mistakenly attack itself. They are diseases that think they are being helpful. And like the guest who tries to be helpful by putting your dishes away after dinner, it causes no end of problems in spite of its good intentions.

So the doctors have put me on a drug called Enbrel, which I jab into my leg on a weekly basis. And it hurts. Now I know that with any luck this drug will help me in the long run, reducing the pain and fatigue that I experience on a daily basis, but still - that shot Hurts!

I suppose that it’s not really just those couple of minutes of actual pain when that needle pierces the skin that makes me dread shot day. I think that it’s also what the shot represents. This battle in my body that I’ve been fighting since I was a child. I guess that sometimes, I’m just very weary of the struggle and I resent the hell out of that shot because sometimes, it just doesn’t seem fair.

And heaven forbid that I should complain about it! Because then I get an earful about how lucky I am that it's only once a week, that I could be diabetic and need shots all the time, that I could be dying of cancer, that I could need dialysis, that I could - that I could - that I could.

Why is it that we feel the need to belittle our own experiences?

From the time that we are small children we are taught that our experiences, our feelings, the perceived reality of our OWN lives, has no value. Shut up and eat your food, no one cares if you hate brussel sprouts because there are starving children in Ethiopia who are suffering. And by all that’s good you better stop crying or you'll get something to really cry about!

As we struggle through life and encounter the pitfalls and stumbling blocks that happen to all of us, we are told that things could be worse. Why just look at that person who lost their job, or leg or home or child. Our troubles are nothing compared to that.

So we go through life negating our own suffering.

And I can't help but wonder, if we never allow ourselves to experience our own pain, how can we then understand the pain of another and learn compassion? Maybe it is only by standing in our own pain that we can finally move beyond ourselves and into the realm of kindness and understanding. Maybe pain, both mental and physical, exists to help us learn acceptance and tolerance of the frailty that is within us all. Maybe as pain carves itself into our own souls, it creates within us the desire and the need to ease the suffering of others.

Wednesday is shot day. So I’m going to feel sorry for myself. Just for a minute or two. For the sake of mankind, you understand.