She's Writing a Novel

Me: ...
Russian lover: @$#&%*#$!
Me: But...!
Russian lover: $%*&$*#!
Me: Ok then! Fine.
Russian lover: !!!!
Door: Slam!

Some arguments are like a hit deep into left field with two outs and two strikes...they are the last rally of some lurking bad mood, the last efforts of an off day. You didn't see it coming, although you felt that it was possible.

And nothing is worse than a lovely evening molested by a petty fight sparked by divergent expectations or mismatched dispositions. Having spent an evening traveling parallel, it is a harsh awakening to see that somewhere between the street and the bed you've gone in opposite ways that come round to a collision. And then you stand stubbornly locked until one of you breaks the tensile moment and leaves.

Time and space deflate hostility, and later sex will reinstate the effortless congeniality between lovers. Until then, words hang over heads like jagged icicles, looming menacingly but mostly merely dripping until they disappear.

Me: Shoes that look this good are too painful to wear by the end of the night.
Russian lover: That's OK.
Me: What do you mean, "That's OK"? Don't you care that my feet will be hurting?
Russian lover: I do care, but they won't be hurting.
Me: Why not?
Russian lover: Because by the end of the night you won't be on your feet; you'll be on your back.

There are compelling images of human tragedy, and then there are the depressing images of human mediocrity. I'm fortunate enough to live in a society where I am all but spared the former; it's the latter that I see daily.

The Woman Wearing Nude Pantyhose with White Sneakers:

This woman causes my heart to clinch in fear. There was a survey done which found that women, no matter how well they were doing in life, were still afraid of ending up as homeless bag ladies. And it's true, most of us are neurotic and suspicious of our own success. But women who have climbed high enough not to fear falling to bag lady status are terrified of falling to Woman Wearing Nude Pantyhose with White Sneakers status.

You see this woman at 8:45am and 5:15pm, walking briskly down the sidewalk toward the bus stop or the subway. She is forty-something now, but she let herself go at 28. Those white sneakers? She used to wear them to aerobics class in the eighties, before she turned 28 and let herself go. She wears those Reeboks because damn it, they are still in good shape even if her ass isn't.

This woman telegraphs that she hasn't had sex in decades, and that she may never have sex again; she has a cat, and houseplants, and borrows paperback romance novels from the library. She's never been married and hasn't changed her hairstyle since 1989. She'll never leave her job, where she is considered reliable and passive, and where a young crop of ambitious twenty-somethings laughs at her dated makeup behind her back.

You see this woman and you wonder if it was ever different for her; if she was ever young and beautiful and in love. You wonder if she was ever someone just like you are today, and you decide that maybe she was, and then you wonder what kind of terrible thing happened that changed all of that forever -- a broken engagement, a broken heart -- was it a slow or sudden resignation?

She is the kind of woman that Oprah loves to get her hands on for a makeover and a firm talking-to. I wonder if Oprah also looks at women like this with fear, seeing the version of herself that could have been, the frightening shadow of possibility that lurked behind the self who found love and success. It's less terrifying, less depressing, to think that it's not too late for this woman to be saved from her nude hose and her white Reeboks; if she can be convinced to cut her hair and throw out the blue eyeshadow and put on high heels again...if she can be saved from neutering herself out of lonliness, then we know that at least there is hope for that alternative self we hope never to become.

The other day I noticed just how often I used "real quick" as a suffix to my sentences.

If I'm with someone and I have to leave them to use the bathroom, I say "I just have to pee real quick." If I'm stepping outisde the apartment to go to the store, I say "I'm just gonna go to the store real quick." If I'm running errands, I'll say "I'm gonna pick up the laundry real quick" or "I have to drop this off real quick" or "I need to use the ATM real quick."

What the hell? Why do I do this?

Maybe it's a need to assure people that while I may have to go, I'll be back before they have time to miss me or need me. Or maybe I have some deep-seated existential fear that I'll be completely forgotten in the time it takes to buy some stamps, so I better buy stamps real quick. I don't want to abruptly interrupt my social flow with any person, so I want to reassure them, and myself, that my absence will be as temporary as I can make it.

I also do it when I ask for things. "Can I see this real quick?" "Can I borrow this real quick?" "Could you do this real quick?" I suppose because it's easier to get what you want when you can convince someone that it will not be either long-term or time-consuming. If someone says "Can I borrow your scissors real quick," you hand them over without really thinking. But if someone just says "Can I borrow your scissors?" what you actually hear is "Can I borrow your scissors indefinately?" and you instinctively hesitate.

Of course, I only add "real quick" when I'm doing trivial things. I never say things like "I'm having dinner with an old friend real quick" or "I'm going to see the doctor real quick" or "I'm attending this wedding real quick." It's only when I'm doing the menial stuff of life that I feel the need to announce that I will be speedy about my business. Almost like I'm apologetic that there are actually things I need to do.

I'm going to try to cut down on this habit, if I can. It's so subconciously ingrained that I don't even notice it, but maybe once in a while I can break free from the pattern and say something like "I'm just gonna pee, and I'm gonna take as long as I need."

Mayonnaise has always skeeved me out. When I was a child I went to terrific lengths to avoid it; it wasn't enough to scrape it off something it shouldn't have been on in the first place -- anything mayonnaise had even touched was irrevocably corrupted. If my mother forgot and packed me a sandwich for school that had mayo on it, I just threw the whole thing out. Just seeing it made me lose my appetite, anyway.

One time at a sleepover, some friends and I played a gross-out game. One girl would sit on kitchen chair with a blindfold, and the other girls would put a nasty concoction together on a spoon and she would have to taste it without peeking. When my turn came, I bravely opened my mouth and went for it, expecting something like ketchup with pickles and raisins, or some equally disgusting combination of condiments and pantry food. But it was a single texture, a single flavor, that met my tongue. My eyes flew open with horror the moment I realized what it was, and I ran to the sink to gag and flush out my mouth as my friends giggled.

As an adult, I will tolerate it, occaisionally, in a tuna salad or a potato salad, but still nothing disgusts me more than seeing it slathered on bread. I refuse to put it on sandwiches or subs, preferring dry bread to a roll moistened with mayo. But people in delis have a hard time grasping this.

Almost every day I order a sandwich for lunch from the asian deli across the street. And every day I tell them what to put on it - cheese, lettuce, peppers, pickles. As soon as I'm done listing ingredients, the first words I hear out of the woman's mouth are "No mayo?"

Every goddamn day.

It's all I can do, sweaty and tired from the gym, not to snarl "Did I stutter?" Because look, I told you what I wanted on my sandwich and what I wanted on my sandwich did not include mayo. And every day you give me a funny look because oh my god, there's no mayo on that girl's sandwich. So by now you should have figured out that I'm the girl who never fucking ever has mayo on her sandwich and you should STOP ASKING.

Now I'm beginning to think this woman might just have a tic, because even when I rattle off my order, and conclude with "no mayo" to spare us the inevitable exchange, she STILL asks "No mayo?" It's almost like she's judging me at this point, and lord knows the last thing I'm in the mood for at 2pm on a workday is some bitchy asian chick giving me attitude about what I put on my sandwich.

I believe in creative passive aggressive solutions to minor problems that I've blown out of proportion. So in this instance, I'm thinking of ordering a side of mayo with my sandwich. Every day. For a while. Insisting that the mayo not be put on the bread, but every day have her tediously siphon a small amount of mayo into a small plastic container.

And then, when I suddenly and without explanation stop, I'm betting she won't go out of her way to bring up mayo with me ever again.

I dislike shopping, and it's hard to get in much female bonding when so many women want to shop like it is an olympic sport. I'm a sprinter when it comes to shopping, but most women are long-distance runners. I can only do one lap around a store, and then I'm done and looking for a cafe and a glass of wine.

The whole exercise is depressing: trying on bad clothes that cost too much money, and then self-loathing because the clothes don't fit right but buying them anyway to make yourself feel better only to later feel bad again because you spent so much money. I cut myself off from that cycle a long time ago, and I don't know how any woman could consider it her idea of "fun."

Even after losing weight and firming up, shopping didn't become terribly more enjoyable. But it did involve a lot less self-loathing. Sometimes, a lot of times, clothes don't fit right because, well, you could stand to eat less and run more. But when I completely changed my life and my body, and clothes STILL didn't fit right, I had to find another culprit. Because most women spend time obsessing about getting into a size 2 or 4, and I had always been one of those women, I assumed that once you reached one of the magical slim sizes, everything would fit like a dream. In fact, I thought you'd be able to just buy clothes right off the rack without even trying them on because hell, everything looks perfect on a size 2 or 4, right?

Well, I was wrong. Very, very wrong. It turns out that total crap comes in all sizes, and just because it's expensive and the label would make your friends writhe with envy doesn't mean it's not crap. In fact, the fancier the label and the higher the reputation of the brand, the more likely they are to try and sell you crap. They know you will give them the benefit of the doubt, and they turn around to make that benefit of the doubt into a very tidy profit indeed.

So, being a size 2 or 4 means I spend just as much time in the dressing room as I did when I was a size 6 or 6, except now I don't spend all that time hating myself and fighting back tears. Now I spend it loudly berrating the sweatshop finishes on "Italian" labels and wondering what kind of disfigured fit models designers are using these days. Now that I know clothes should fit me, I know that it's not my problem when they don't.

The Russian lover is partly to blame; he taught me all about the ways a woman should look when a woman looks good, and is never afraid to tell me that whatever I have just put on my body makes me look ridiculous. He is also never afraid to tell the other hapless women in any given dressing room that whatever they have just put on makes them looks ridiculous, although most of them are less grateful for that information than I am.

The Russian lover has ensured that while at times I may be out in public nearly naked, I am never out in public looking like my boyfriend lied to me before we left the house. I blame timid boyfriends and husbands everywhere for the absurd abuses of fashion I have to witness every day; maybe if more men were willing to step up and say "Just say no!" when the women in their lives step out of the dressing room, the clothing industry would finally have to raise its standards. Granted, more women would also have to be willing to just say no to the ice cream and the french fries and the beer; they'd also have to still be willing to sleep with their lovers even after being told that the $500 dress they adored on the rack makes their ass look like an ottoman.

When I was younger and without a boyfriend, I tortured my brother by making him assess my outfits before I went out. But I had no one else to ask, and I felt like I had to get a second opinion, no matter how unqualified or disinterested. One day he was finally fed up with having his sister back into the doorway of his room yet again with yet another new pair of pants asking "Does this make my butt look big?"

"NO!" he told me. "You know what makes your butt look big? Your FAT ASS makes your butt look big!" And then he turned around and slammed the door.

He came out a second later, apologizing profusely, terrified he had just made me into an anorexic. I was still laughing, and told him not to apologize, that it was about time he told me the truth of the matter. I never asked for his opinion again, though.

Years later when the Russian lover told me that my butt was just within his parameters of acceptibility, I got quite offended. I didn't know what to do with the whole "I like your butt but I wouldn't like it if it was any bigger" sentiment. I decided to be sensible and fixate on the "I like your butt" and ignore the "but." I also made sure to hit the gym, so that I would never have to go back to the butt I had left behind.

I adore the internet. I cannot imagine how I could do my job without email, or how I would survive my job without websurfing breaks throughout the day. I don't need enclopedias or card catalogues to find information, and I don't need a phone book to find phone numbers. I don't need a newspaper subscription to stay caught up on the news. I don't need stamps or envelopes or even a checkbook to pay my bills and manage my finances. Life is better, faster, easier.

The other day a customer service person informed me that in order to change one line of the address on my credit card statement, I needed to WRITE and MAIL a LETTER to the company in South Dakota. I informed her that I understood that might be the way they still did things over there in India, but here in American nothing is accomplished via letters. Ok, so I didn't actually. I just clued her in to the absurdity of having to send a letter with the exact same information I was giving her right then over the phone. Then then I hung up and tried a different customer service number, and the American woman who answered and I had the matter settled in two minutes and wished each other a pleasant afternoon.

But there are some things I don't like about this age of internet business and commerce. For one thing, all the different log-in names and passwords and pass phrases and security questions and security images and whatnot. I appreciate the need for it, obviously, as I do not want to wake up one morning and find that my entire life has been hijacked by some opportunist immigrant. At the same time, the amount of content I have to keep track of to log in and accomplish things is daunting. When will we reach the era of retinal scan website log-ins? Because I'm getting tired of trying to remember passwords like hungryhungryhippo4ever. And as scammers and hackers get smarter, the requirements for creating passwords get tougher, and I'm running out of ideas.

Speaking of running out of ideas...creating an email address for one of the major email services is now nearly impossible. It took me almost half an hour to find an email address that wasn't already taken. It was annoying, but more so depressing. I used to believe I was somewhat creative; now I think of creativity as just a matter of getting to something first. Luck is always lurking as the primium mobile of the universe, apparently.

Anyway, as much as I love the internet and email and all of that, I am still adjusting to the pace of the virtual. I sometimes find myself fantasizing about a time when everything that could ever be important would show up in the mailbox outside your house in neat envelopes. Tangible and present, things you could put on the fridge or set on a side table or file in a letter tray. Reminders that could actually remind you because they were in your line of sight at some point, because they were next to the keys or between you and the ice cream. E-mail is a screen you can open and close and then completely forget about until oh shit.

I've always enjoyed and excelled at organizing the tangible, but now I'm learning how to order my intangible life. It's awkward for me, and it's an awkwardness the Russian lover cannot begin to appreciate because he is practically one with the internet. The internet for him is like some indwelling holy spirit; he can do all things through the internet which gives him strength. But me...well, it's like I have a huge crush on the internet and the internet doesn't even know I'm alive.

Slowly, I'm getting better at this new internet-based way of being alive. It's a crucial element in successfully fulfulling my personal theme for 2008, which I've casually designated in the back of my mind as The Year of Getting My Shit Together, For Real This Time.

I think that the Russian lover is not entirely convinced that it is not still The Year of Picking Up After My Girlfriend Who Cannot Completely Get Her Shit Together. Or, as he would likely refer to it, The Year of Improvement Noted, Grade: F.

It is all in an effort to make 2009 my Year of No Bad Surprises Caused By Irrational Lapses in Judgement or General Incompetence, i.e. The Year of Finally Doing Awesome.

When I was a young girl living on a pseudo-farm in the far reaches of the suburbs, I remember people talking about the "city folk." City folk weren't even really "folk;" they were a different kind of human species altogether. They were tough, cold-hearted, and cynical. They were unfriendly and suspicious. They were also glamorous, sophisticated, and conceited.

I desparately wanted to live in the city.

When I finally moved here about three years ago, I was still mostly a country girl. It was hard to remember to lock all the doors to my apartment. I left a gym bag on the backseat of my car one time, and the next morning the window was smashed and my bag was gone. I squirmed under the catcalls and comments on the street. I was confused by the belligerance of cashiers and the outright hostility from bus drivers. I was frightened by the aggressive panhandling. With horror, I witnessed people blatantly littering.

The city slowly changed me. In the suburbs, I had assumed the best about people. Now, I daily witnessed the worst. I started realizing that many stereotypes I had dismissed as unfair or untrue were, in fact, representative of reality. Mistakes were more costly in the city, so I learned to make quick judgement calls. I stopped being politically correct and persistantly polite. I learned to ignore everything, while at the same time being aware of everything. I learned there were a lot of people making a living exploiting human sympathy, so I became less sympathetic.

But I also learned to walk with confidence, and to stand up for myself. I learned to pay attention to certain signs and signals, how to navigate social minefields.

I didn't realize I had changed until I went back home to spend time with friends and family...and it felt different. They noticed that I was different; colder, harder around the edges, less generous in my evaluations. I'd become someone who could survive and even thrive in a city, but it came across as something frightening to people who left doors open at night and trusted strangers. And my habits were oddly out of place here; locking the car doors in the driveway, looking over my shoulder in the parking lot. And now all the country's smiles and pleasantries were as jarring as the city's rudeness had once been.

Utlimately, I was neither city girl nor country girl. I was a girl who was prudent at all times, never taking safety for granted even in the small-town parking lots or the comfort of home. And I was a girl with manners and respect; putting my garbage into trashcans, smiling at cashiers even if they only growled at me. I even still responded to bums' requests with a firm but cheerful "no thank you."

Naivete and niceness made way for savvy and shrewdness. I grew up on a suddenly accelerated schedule, and I still feel as though I have not begun to understand what I need to as I swing wildly around this learning curve. Sometimes I still feel wide-eyed and vulnerable, sometimes I still want a hand to hold. But feeling that and plunging ahead anyway made me stronger and more resilient than I would previously have thought possible; holding myself together because falling apart simply isn't an option has shown me that I can pull it together and keep going. And if I can walk a city mile in four-inch stilettos, then surely I can walk through anything.

Sometimes when I'm idly browsing one of the social networking sites, I'll come across long-lost acquaintences. The people I didn't have much to say to then, and have nothing to say to now. But lately I've been noticing something that almost, almost makes me want to speak up.

A lot of girls I know from a long time ago, back when I was incredibly naive and way before I became a heathen strumpet, have gotten married. Predictably so; few good evangelical Christian girls go on to become bawdy fornicating apostates the way I have. But an alarming number of them have gone on to marry young men with raging gayface.

I don't know these young men, obviously, and I know nothing about the couples' relationships. Still, the sexual naivete encouraged by evanglical Christianity means that the young women are innocent, inexperienced, and unlikely to even consider the possibility that the boy who is marrying them might turn out to be gay. To be fair, many of the young men may not know it themselves, having been discouraged from exploring their own sexuality. But a lot of them probably do know it, and also know the social price they would have to pay if they were to come out. Or they just can't accept their own reality, having been taught that homosexuals are hell-bound degenerates. So, the young men marry good Christian girls and everything is OK until twenty years and three kids later he can't take it anymore and gets busted for soliciting a blow job at a truck stop.

I remember reading an article not long ago, where a married thirty-something woman pregnant with her fourth child found out she had syphillis. She was understandably baffled, considering she was a virgin when she was married and had only ever slept with her husband of 15 years. The scenario didn't leave much of a mystery, obviously; she confronted her husband and found out that he'd been having unprotected sex with lots and lots of men. Naturally, she was shocked.

But then she began thinking back on the marriage, and it started to make sense. It had been really easy for them to stay "pure" before the wedding, because he never put the moves on her. And even on the wedding night, he didn't seem terribly enthused about making love for the first time. And then then there was the fact that the only sex position he ever wanted was from behind with her lying face down on her stomach.

I felt bad for the woman. At the same time, I wondered how stupid you had to be to end up married to someone for 15 years and not catch on to the fact that they were not sexually attracted to you or anyone of your gender.

But the reality is that if you've never slept with anyone else, you would not necessarily catch on. You wouldn't know that you were just some guy's beard; if you were an unsullied virgin practicing a homophobic religion, it would not occur to you that a man would marry you to keep his penis-preference on the downlow. You can't figure out you're sleeping with the enemy if you've never slept with an ally; if you've never slept with anything at all, you're not just refusing to try before you buy -- you're leaving the store blind and broke.

Which is to say that I don't actually feel that bad for all these proper Christian ladies having their middle age scandalized by the homosexual antics of their good Chrstian husbands. Most of them would have been quick to judge the women who tried on many men for size before settling down; maybe now they understand that ultimately the women who've been around the block are the ones most likely to know the way.

When you move to a new place, it takes a while to find your "people." Not just friends or lovers, but all those people that populate a modern life. A hairdresser, a dentist, a mechanic, a vet, etc etc. The people you make appointments with. You're paying them, entrusting them with your car or your cat or your hair, so you want to find good people. A city has lots of people to choose from, but it also has lots of useless scum. It's nearly impossible to find good people without trial and error, even if you have recommendations or reviews to go on.

Finding a gyno is, perhaps, the hardest of all. Malpractice suits have driven ob-gyns out of the state, and women are left to fight for appointments with those who remain. These days, it's easier to get a table in a coveted Manhattan eatery than it is to get a qualified professional to take a peak at your vagina. And while having a personable and highly skilled specialist look things over is ideal, by now most women realize they may have to settle for anyone at all in a white coat who knows which oriface is which.

At this point I think I've gone through more gynos than lovers, but I'm hoping to find "The One" soon. The gyno with whom I can settle down with and have a monogomous relationship; the one my vagina can grow old and gray with.

Ok, so it won't exactly being going gray, considering there is nothing there to turn gray anymore. That was long ago removed by a laser and a delightful gay man named Jonathan. If you're going to have a laser fired at your Special Purpose, I would highly recommend that you entrust that laser to a delightful gay man such as Jonathan.

Anyway, wouldn't you know it, Jonathan's partner turns out to be a well-regarded gynecologist in the city. So now I have a personal recommendation for an excellent gynecologist. During the examination I will see if I can manage to avoid making an awkward joke about his partner getting me all groomed and good to go for him...something about lying naked on my back with my feet in cold metal stirrups turns me into a real comedian.

It is strange to think that both men in this couple will have seen me naked. And while I know it's absurd, I keep picturing them at the dinner table one evening chatting casually about my lady business over gnocchi and chianti.