I wrote this when I was 19.

Just went digging through some of my old journals and I’m sort of amazed at the girl I was. She’s so much neater than the girl I am now. I wish I had understood that then.

Anyway, I thought this was telling:

I never thought I would know the feeling of waking up after heavy drinking. Roll over and catch the faintest whiff of the beer spilled on the carpet and suddenly you just might vomit. Greasy skin on skin, dirty hair, smokey clothes. Upset stomach, fuzzy teeth, grey skin. Unexplainable bruises, angry neighbors, flaky mascara. Sleeping in jeans, bathing in sweat, sickened by yesterday’s perfume. Raspberry vodka on the computer, beer on the hand towels, smoke detector covered by a plastic bag.
2/28/04

A decade-long crush I didn’t deserve.

A guy, I’ll call him Blue, confessed last weekend that he’s been in love with me for nine years.

Nine years?

That means I was 14. I was in ninth-grade and I actually remember Blue calling me at home after several weeks of flirting and after-school Internet chats. But I got so nervous that I just watched his parents’ listed number pop up again and again on my Caller ID, a flicker of green and black on the phone’s face.

Nine years later, I’m 23, and I still do the same thing when his name pops up on my BlackBerry. I blame poor reception every time, and he never seems to fully believe me.

Blue’s a nice guy, but not one I’d want to end up with. He’s smart, but he’s blue collar. He’s funny, but sometimes a racial slur slips out. He’s cute, but years of beer and pot have rounded his features into handsome doughish-ness.

But he’s always been so sweet to me and has never tried anything inappropriate, even when he could’ve. He’s the one who pushes me away when I’m drunk and sloppy. But still, when I get drunk I act cutesy and wonder to him why he never calls to ask me out, when I know damn well he’s tried really hard to do this before. He’ll remind me of specific dates we were supposed to hang out that I flaked out. And I’ll say, ‘Ok, for real, let’s go out next weekend.’

Then he calls, and I ignore. Nine years of this. I’m the girl he’ll never be good enough to get, but that doesn’t feel good in the least. What feels even worse is that he says he loved me before I had contacts, before I had boobs and before I had blond hair. He loved me when I was hugely awkward and ugly, and I’m not just saying that — I really was all sorts of not cute.

It feels bad, because no one ever looks at me now and sees what he says he was able to see when no one else was looking.

A open letter to an asshole.

Dear X,

Since I drunkenly decided to sleep with you, I’ve noticed our texts and our conversations are a lot more one-sided. I wish I could say I’m digging the one-word answers and the unavailable behavior that came out of nowhere as soon as we woke up. 

I can only figure that I’ve been pitched into a pile of those girls, disposable sluts that obviously give it up too soon and aren’t worth getting to know beyond a quick hit. And it’s not like I can blame you. A lot of girls think we’re empowered and owning our sexuality by putting a lower value on the act of sex, but it seems that even if we loosen our morals up a little, the judgement is still there. You can’t have progress if the act of easy sex is still seen by one side as whorish and uninteresting. 

I guess, in my defense, I have to say that I’m still worth knowing. I’m not one of those girls. In fact, I’m not really part of any club but my own. Just because I decided to sleep with you doesn’t mean I lose my good qualities in the process. I happen to be really smart, really cute, really funny and really sexy. I’m sorry if you don’t feel the same, but you deciding to treat me as someone less than I am is your choice, not mine. It’s clear I’m writing this to feel better, yeah, but only because it’s natural to want to be accepted if you do the most intimate thing you can do with another person. It’s astonishing to me that you could care less about how I see you — it’ll never cease to amaze me that guys like you don’t care about what I’ll think about you after the act. You take what you get and really don’t care if I think you’re cool or funny or handsome. I guess it’s good that you don’t care, because your behavior proves that you’ve got a lot of growing up to do.

The fact that you are rejecting me stings and is a bruise to my ego, but you don’t get to take anything of significance away from me. If anything, you’re a lesson in judgement, a notch in the bedpost, a night that slips from my memory.

 

Fuck you.

/k

 

What happened to romance?

I thought it was kind of silly when Carrie Bradshaw fainted when her Russian boyfriend asked her to dance with him in the park on their way to the opera. She said something along the lines of, “take it easy. I’m American!”

What I’m dealing with now is not a cultural barrier of any sort — at least not the sort of barrier Carrie was dealing with — but with the complete and utter lack of pacing when it comes to dating. Why is it that we have to move full-speed ahead to the finish line (sex) when we meet someone new? Is it just the people I’ve met or the person I’ve turned into? I have no idea. I feel like texting has replaced talking and making out on the couch has replaced dinner dates.

Last night I hung out with Sean, I guy I met last weekend who had treated me really pretty nicely when I got too wasted to make it home and passed out on his bed. Nothing happened and he didn’t try anything … a first. We woke up and I was a little put off by the cuddling, but by the time he took me to lunch I was feeling comfortable with him. Usually when I’m in this sort of situation I like to get the hell out of there, but with him it was a okay because he wasn’t ultra-aggressive … just a little too affectionate for having just met me.

Anyway, fast forward to last night. We watched Gossip Girl at his place and got takeout Chinese. He tried to get me to cuddle but seeing as I’m not drunk I don’t really remember how … pathetic, I suppose, but I know a few girls who have this same problem. I get up to go but when I won’t stay and fool around he gets a little cranky.

Like I owe him some sort of physical affection at the end of the night, almost. Like he’s put the time in and this is what is naturally supposed to happen, almost.

This has happened before. I’ve dealt with guys who act this way and I usually give in to them acting childish. Then I end up hating myself. I didn’t let it happen this time. For the first time in my life I’m figuring out that I deserve to be respected by a guy, regardless of how I meet him. Just because I happened to meet this dude in a bar doesn’t mean I have to be on the typical ‘bar dating’ schedule of hanging out and then sex.

I finally think I’m worth someone waiting for me. This is a first. I’m a little nervous because I realize it’s been over a year since I’ve dated someone seriously — and in that time I’ve just been going nuts with partying and seeing guys who are horrible for me. What I once thought was getting it out of my system has ended up being almost paralyzing when I try to actually do what I think is the right thing. I don’t trust men at all. I don’t know how to cuddle and I definitely don’t feel comfortable with someone reaching for my hands or my waist when we’re out on public together.

I feel part like a monster. But the other part of me feels like I’m waking up. I’ll take it.

And as far as things go with Sean, I think it is at the very least a good strategy. If he never calls me again because he doesn’t think he’s going to get some play, then it’s probably a good thing.

A stroke of luck?

I’m receiving sporadic texts from Brad, my Wednesday one-nighter, but very distant and uninteresting stuff. Went out last night and didn’t hear from him, which didn’t surprise me.

What surprised me is that ended up meeting up with Sean*, someone I’ve talked to but never really hung out with. I had been out with friends was supremely drunk by the time he came to see me after his poker game, around 2 a.m. Over vodka tonics we got to know each other a little better, even though I was progressively getting more and more shitfaced.

And being the hussy I am, I headed home with him. He made me a Hot Pocket, got me a glass of water and fell asleep next to me without trying to get any. Shocking, right? In the morning he’s attached to me like a koala, patting my butt and rubbing my back.

“I just like to touch,” he said. “Just because I like touching doesn’t mean I’m trying to get anything from you.”

It’s rare that a guy says something like that and doesn’t follow it up with trying to pull my underwear down, but this was one of those times. And I didn’t know what to do. I remained wide-eyed and confused as he stroked my hair and pulled me toward him.

“What’s wrong with this guy?” I thought to myself.

It takes a lot for me to let my guard down these days, and cuddling like that was a more than a little startling. I’m always looking for the hidden motive, and with Sean it didn’t seem like there was one. It threw me. After a couple hours of this, I sort of gave in, just a little.

He took me out to lunch and in the light of day he was still nice, normal and sweet. He didn’t grow distant and kept me laughing with easygoing humor. I kissed him goodbye at my car and that was that. Now I’m sitting at home, reeling from the whole unexpected, respectful way with which he treated me.

So there you have it, my pathetic version of romance. I’m so fucked up.

Giving it up.

Let me tell you about my most recent foray into the world of meaningless sex:

If you told me men don’t know exactly what they’re doing when they’re trying to get you to have sex with them, I’d tell you you’ve obviously never been laid. I am 23 and I’m so jaded already. I have absolutely no trust or respect for the motives of men when it comes to dating and sex.

And if I can’t seem to find respect or trust for men, somehow, it fucks with my ability to respect and trust myself. Isn’t this wonderful?

His name is Brad*. When I met him, he seemed like a very cute, nice enough guy who will probably end up with a good job and a nice family. (P.S., he might really be all those things, but now I’m not sure I’ll know him long enough to find out) He’s one of those “cell phone guys,” one of those dudes who spends his days in the Verizon store sweet talking whoever comes through the doors. He’s very good at what he does, and you can immediately tell he knows how to captivate people whatever the audience.

He’s one of those dudes with three cell phones and gets call from random girls he can’t quite remember when you’re out with him. And, luckily enough, I’m one of those girls who laughs at him when this happens and pretends it doesn’t bother me. Why should it bother me? I have no claim to him.

So we’re out one night during the week and I assume we start drinking to make things as comfortable as possible. Pretty soon, after about seven Miller Lites, I’m ready to go to his place to play Guitar Hero with one of my friends. Said friend ducks out and we are alone in his car, singing along to Dave Matthews (cliche, I know … I’ve done this with probably three other guys I know, romantically or not) on the way to his place.

Guitar Hero in his room leads to Royal Tenenbaums which leads to kissing and touching. I call time outs. I’m not ready to sleep with someone so soon … we’ve known each other for a matter of days, after all. But kissing keeps happening because he keeps rolling me over to nuzzle my neck and say sweet things. At this point I’m able to forget his constantly buzzing cell phone on the night stand. I’m okay, at this point, with feeling like a girl might’ve been lying here just before me.

Clothes come off. I call time outs and cool downs until it becomes useless. He keeps kissing and saying the nicest things.

I give in. The sex is hazy and sensual and good, the kind of sex I know I’ll feel horrible about later. Afterwards he turns away and I turn away and we fall asleep, because we both know it’s silly to cuddle with people we don’t know or care about.

Morning comes and I wake up hungover and thirsty. I miss work. We watch a movie and cuddle and throughout the movie I feel him growing further and further away. By the time he gets in the shower to get ready for work we are barely speaking and I’m resisting the urge to pull back the curtain and get in with him just to feel a little bit of what I felt last night.

He’s not getting my jokes and not laughing and I know, deep down, me giving him sex gave him the power to not want me if he doesn’t have to. In fucking him I fucked myself, because no matter how many times a girl tells herself she just wants sex, the way the guy looks at her afterward has never changed. I’m a girl who gives it up after only an hour or so of persuasion. It’s my fault for not holding out, right?

But what if I felt stuck? What if I just gave in, in part, to get him off my back? And even though the sex was good, during it I knew that I was once again throwing something away.

I get home and I cry, because no matter how much I think I”ve changed, I’m just the same. I’m still one of those girls, notching the shit out of my bedpost and telling myself I’m deserving of so much more than I get.

Waking up next to someone I don’t like.

Last weekend, I spent the night in an Indianapolis hotel room with one of my closest friends, Tori*, and a new guy friend I made through work. This guy, Brian*, also brought along two friends, Brent* and Kevin*. No one besides Tori and me knew each other that well, so the night was a little bit random but pretty entertaining. We drank, we danced and eventually I found myself doing some inevitable, hard-core flirting. This happens every time I meet guys: I single out the one I find cutest or funniest, go for them and eventually end up playing kissyface and smudging my eyeliner.

This time, it was Brent. He’s tall, decent-looking (though, admittedly, better-looking while I was drunk) and the last time we’d met I mentioned to Brian that I thought Brent was attractive. So what do we do? Grind on each other at Ugly Monkey, take tons of drunken pictures in the cab and eventually make out in the Marriott elevator on our way up to the 15th floor.

Nothing happens beyond kissing, mainly because I’ve been down that road and 99% of the time it’s a dead end (sorry to use what sounds an awful lot like a cliche).

I wake up and things are normal. All of us are hungover, laughing and sharing stories about the night. Things were fine until someone comments on “America’s Next Top Model,” making a racial slur.

You name it, these three guys said it. They bashed Jews, blacks, gays, Indians, the Chinese, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Amish people, retarded people, women … and not just in passing. This conversation lasted about three hours. They made rape jokes and looked up gross videos on YouTube. And the most vocal guy of all? The one whose face I sucked on drunkenly in the courtyard just hours before.

I’d rather wake up next to a 60-year-old, or Carrot Top or a rabid Doberman, for God’s sake. The last thing I want to do while wildly hungover is hear about how ugly/stupid/poor/pathetic (insert non-white-guy word here) is. Scratch that: Hungover or NOT, I just don’t want to hear about hate. I’d rather sit there and have him insult me — well, he indirectly did — than tell me horrible stories about the mean things he and his friends have done to (again, insert non-white-guy word here). At least I’d defend myself. I wish I had said something instead of staying silent, exchanging looks of horror with Tori and just biding my time until checkout. I guess I was afraid of sounding like a “feminist bitch” or something else along those lines.

I’m sure they had some mean stuff to say about me after we’d all gone our separate ways. I should’ve just said something. Now I have to look at my Jewish family, my Black best friends and my Chinese little cousin and know that there are people all over the place who spout hatred toward the people I love and do it without a second thought. I’ve gotta look at my family and know I didn’t do anything to try and protect them.

Worst hangover I’ve had in a long time, and it hurt long after the headache wore off.

A very bad one-night stand

Let me tell you one little thing I’ve learned about one-night stands: If you want one bad enough — and you don’t have three eyes or a cleft lip — you can make it happen. I consider them some form of recreational drug I can’t say I take often, or even seldom, but when I do, it just feels groping around in a college dorm room all over again.

Guys in bars pretty much go to said bars to graze, horny beasts in white striped shirts that smell of Burberry or Sean John. And, oops, girls in bars are probably there to play the boyfriend game. It’s almost a cruel trick of nature: Thanks to loose morals, text messaging and a total lack of social navigation skills in this new world, we’re all in the same place wanting different things out of the night. I’m not saying all girls want to find a boyfriend when they go out, but I really rarely hear one of my friends say, ‘I just want to find a piece of ass.’ And they’re pretty slutty.

As a girl who is somewhere in between a boyfriend hunter and an ethical slut, I like to be in my ’sweet spot’ when out drinking. I like to be witty, charming and cute … hopefully just a mildly more confident version of the person I am while sober. I do not like to be bombed, drunk dialing my parents and dropping my cell phone in the toilet … it just doesn’t send out a ‘take me home to Mom!!!!’ vibe.

But that’s what usually happens. And that’s when the trouble begins.

I end up in strip clubs or in the lairs of 30-year-old men with aquariums in their living rooms. I end up spilling into cabs with my friends, accompanied by strangers whose names we repeat over and over in order not to call them something ridiculously off the mark. I end up around drugs and bad people, strippers and cheating husbands. The world of drunks is marked by one sick culture, but it’s a very happening social calendar.

The last one night stand I hopefully ever have saw me being horribly, horribly cruel. If the worse thing you can do to a man is damage his pride while he’s trying to seduce you, well, I gutted him from nose to navel:

Me: Okay! I’m bored
Strange Ass: What?!
Me: I’m bored. I don’t want to do this. You’re jackhammering.
Strange Ass: WHAT?! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT!
Me: I’m sorry. What was I supposed to do? Just lie there?
Strange Ass: Oh … well, I guess you have a point. At least you spoke up …
Me: Yup. Sorry. Night!

The gods are merciful. When I woke up, my conquest was long gone.

What I’m trying to say is that over the years, the drinking culture has somewhat impossibly shot my standards up. It’s just that feeling of having done this all before, and when you can take sex with people you don’t like or respect at face value, it’s pretty much worth nothing at all.

But don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel one way or the other when I hear about my friends notching up their bedposts, because I know once upon a time that was me. And who says, one night, it won’t still be me? Eh, passing judgment in these situations is silly. What bothers me, I guess, is the seemingly universal feeling that girls shouldn’t do what a lot of us do all the time, i.e. get it on with no strings attached.

And if I do end up, again, in a situation where I hook up with someone I don’t know that well or respect (and I probably will), whatever. They only have to last one night.

A girl walks into a bar.

About five years ago, I got my first fake ID. I was 18 and it was three days after starting college in Chicago. I paid 50 bucks to this random stranger in another dorm, and he made me and three friends absolutely atrocious Michigan IDs on his bubble-jet printer. The lamination peeled up around the edges and the ink was so faded you could barely make out the features on our faces.

But here’s the thing: they worked everywhere we tried to use them. Chalk it up to being a girl, with girl friends, walking into a bar.

So since then, I’ve been in probably about seven thousand bars. I don’t know what it is about the city of Chicago, but I swear it must be the most boozer-friendly town in our great nation … you can’t trip and fall without landing in an establishment that stays open until 4 a.m. for your drinking convenience. Thanks to this fact, I’ve told insanely personal things to strangers, kissed even more of them and, sadly, woken up in horror next to a select few.

I’ve wondered lots of times what, exactly, the appeal of a bar is. But I suppose it’s pretty obvious: Close up a bunch of frustrated, emotionally-stunted people up in a room, give them cups full of colorful liquid and watch the sparks fly. What’s not to love? I suppose bars let us do and say things we can’t anywhere else — when was the last time you groped a stranger in the supermarket check out line? — and I suppose bars are just things to do when we’re too lazy to try to be interesting. Instead of planning a dinner party or bowling outing, why not get drunk and burn your mouth on frozen pizza at four in the morning, while some strange middle-aged man fashions you a tulip out of a cocktail napkin?

Then comes the concept of the dance floor in the bar. This is universally recognized to be a disaster: Once you’re ready to get up on stage and shake some ass to horrible music, you’ve reached the point of no return. I’m one of those girls who gets out on the dance floor and doesn’t come off until it’s last call and my makeup has smeared down my face. My friends are more the type that like to hang back in the corner and fend off approaching males with mean eyes and bitchy comments.

That’s another interesting thing about bars — if you spend too much time in them, you learn to hate and mistrust the opposite sex. After years of learning that guys will tell you anything you want to get you to sleep with them, I tend to either take them for what they’re worth or ignore the whole lot of them. I have no idea what bars, cell phones and generally sluttier behavior are doing to damage the act of courtship, but I have a feeling all of them combined are a death sentence. What’s the point of even taking a girl out to eat if you can just feed her $2.50 bottles of Miller Lite on dollar beer Tuesdays? What’s the point of dating a guy when he’s exactly the same as the other dude across the room nursing a Jack and Coke?

I don’t have much of a point to make about this. I was just thinking about bars. I think I should stay out of them.