Dating for the Novice

Somehow I got listed as a dating blog on the Yahoo! Personals blog. Puzzling development, considering that until recently, the last date I had was an ill-fated Thursday night in February and before that I said auf Wiedersehen to the Austrian in July 2005.

Maybe I’ve been dating in my sleep. Or maybe Yahoo! sought to provide a sampling of skillsets — the uber-dater, the semi-pro, the novice.

In any case, I thought I better come up with something. So I give you: my least favorite and most favorite dates.

Least Favorite
New York, winter 1999. I’ve been dating Jon sporadically for a couple months. We have dinner at Avenue A Sushi, then a drink at Korova Milk Bar. We head back to his place to watch a movie, and pick up some beer at a bodega on the way. I select Amstel Light. His comment, “What is up with girls and Amstel Light? Do you ALL drink it?” We end up with it anyway. I walk into his apartment, and there on his kitchen counter are six empty Amstel Light bottles.

The End.

Most Favorite
This isn’t really a specific memory, just a general favorite: the first time a man takes your hand. It’s such a throwback to junior high and high school when All You Wanted was for someone to hold your hand.

There is this moment in My So-Called Life when Angela keeps ditching her geometry review sessions to make out with Jordan in the boiler room, and Jordan keeps Angela a secret, ignoring her in public, and Rayanne tells Jordan he can’t treat Angela like that, and then finally, in a moment that burst my heart to watch, Jordan takes Angela’s hand in the hall, for all to see.

The first time a man takes my hand, I’m 14 again, when I didn’t yet know my first hurt was only that, the first.

Lulled into novice-hood by the heat of someone else’s palm against mine.

Eureka!

I know you are dying, DYING, of curiosity to see what polish color I chose, but I did not manage to get my nails done today. I decided that if I was going to clean my apartment and car, best to do that prior to a mani-pedi. Tomorrow is another day.

But cleaning is not all that I did! Nay! I also found a shirt dress.

Soooo?, you may say. But I have been coveting the shirt dress that Chloe Sevigny wore in Last Days of Disco since 1998. Ask anyone. Ask Laurie, who has heard about this shirt dress many a time. Ask Neeta, who watched me try on an ill-fitting one in Club Monaco a few months ago.

It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen, this shirt dress Chloe wore and the way she wore it with soft blonde hair. Shirt dresses are a little bit man, a lot of woman. Like, I’m wearing your Brooks Brothers the morning after, but it’s a DRESS. Very Katherine Hepburn/Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks.

This is the only picture I could find online, and it’s tiny and you can only see the neck.

And today, I FOUND MINE. It is not pale blue, as Chloe’s was. First of all, because I am not stupid. I am 5’2″, and she is 5’9″ or something obscene like that and probably weighs only a stone more than me.

And mine is UPDATED. In truth, this makes me a little sad. I’d like to be straight 1980, the last days of disco, but I hate vintage shopping. I’ll do it now and then but the hunt tries my patience.

Anyway, I am ecstatic about my purchase. And also, did you see my new wallet there, which can double as a clutch?

Not bad for a day off. Eureka!

Lady of Leisure

I have designed my schedule this semester (I LOVE BEING A 3L) so that I have

a) no class that starts before 1:40
b) Wednesday and Friday off
c) only two finals

Suddenly I have an entire day to myself tomorrow. And enough leisure time to start thinking about things beyond my to-do lists. Like:

• Why, if they can invent stretchy jeans, can they not create a pair that doesn’t give you saggy butt by the end of the day? Seriously. I would pay good money for that.
• Paris Hilton’s album debuted today. Not only do I have to see her butt cheeks on Hollywoodrag.com once a week, but apparently she’ll be polluting my airwaves as well. THERE is a woman with too much time and too few panties on her hands.
• Jam. The Office. I know I’m a dork, but this preview gave me CHILLS. Thank you, Penny, for making me watch that show!
• What color should I get my nails done tomorrow? DURING THE DAY. Because I am a Lady of Leisure now. That’s my job. Lady of Leisure. La-la-la-Lady of Leeeesure. Lady Leisuremeister. Anyway, what color? I realized the other day I’ve been painting my fingernails in the same Ballet Slippers/Sandy Beach family and my toes in the darkest burgundy-red available since like 2002. What should I try?

Aren’t you glad I’ve been spending all my free time on valuable, world-altering thoughts? I’m sure I’ll have the cure for cancer or maybe just some cute new shoes by next week.

Bright Lights, Big City, Small World

I love L.A. Song by Beth Hart, the inspiration for last post’s title. She returns to L.A., just like I have. Returned to skies without stars. In Redding, the sky is plum full of them.

At my parents’, 8 miles outside of town, sleeping is weird. No drunk neighbors blasting Sublime, the only noise is the occasional car on our rural road. I used my brights driving home, something that signals extreme road rage here.

In L.A., there are no stars. But smog creates the most beautiful sunsets in the world.

My cell entry for my parents is Home. When do you think you stop thinking of your hometown as Home? I thought for sure by the time I was 30 I wouldn’t think of Redding as home any more, but I don’t think I’ll be undergoing any radical paradigm shift by January 3.

Anyway, one of the things I love about Redding is how small of a town it is. How you can’t go to the grocery store without running into someone you went to school with, how your hairdresser’s husband is your contractor, how your dad performed surgery on the only decent Italian restaurant’s proprietor.

But lately, I’ve started to realize how small L.A. can be. I’ve run into old friends at the grocery store, seen Tobey Maguire’s preggers fiancee who went to high school with a coworker at La Scala, said hello to old coworkers at a Dodgers game and at Crustacean, and ran into a date who crushed my heart at Mastro’s.

It reminds you that maybe this huge, anonymous city isn’t so big. That you have to maintain your character even here because your mistakes will still be staring you in the face in the check-out line.

So when I ran into my heart-crusher? Who sat right opposite me at another table, there with his firm while I was there with mine? I said hello, how are you doing.

And at school, which started again today? Even though I would rather move from classroom to classroom in an anonymous fog, pretending I don’t see anyone? I say hello, how are you doing.

It’s a small world. I have to be part of it, even though it’s tiring and sometimes I’d really just prefer to be left alone, sitting somewhere where the only noise you hear is the occasional car down a rural road.

Out of L.A.

I’m heading out of L.A. tomorrow, up to Redding to commune with the sun and Penny and my parents, and these lovely ladies, my best friends from high school:

It’s good. I’ve spent too much time in my apartment and my desire for organizational and hygienic perfection has perhaps made me a little nutty. Tonight I CONSOLIDATED MY ADDRESS BOOKS.

I’m happy to head home, to a place where people have mullets sans irony, and where, when you take your cats to the vet to get sedatives so they can have a 2-martini lunch of an 8-hour drive, you don’t come out $600 poorer and with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome. For your CAT. Who, btw, now has her own PTSS bunker.

The vet in fact recommended I create several around my apartment, but shiite. I do want to date again one day, and I can’t expect to bring a man home to a cat shanty town.

You can’t tell your vet this, however. When he’s all enthusiastically describing the labyrinth of cardboard boxes you should be constructing to create a zen-space for your neurotic animal, you can’t really shout out, “MY GOD MAN, HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO EVER GET LAID?”

Instead, you build a little oasis out of your DVD box (which can be conveniently stowed in the event of guests) and hope to goodness it works.

MY GOD MAN, I NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS TOWN.

The Furry Contained

Uh, hello, blog.

I wish I could tell you I’ve been doing something exciting these last couple weeks to justify my absence. But instead, all I can tell you is I’ve been CLEANING HOUSE.

You might think that I’m crazy for spending five days straight cleaning my 500 sq. ft. apartment. But can I tell you? I FEEL AWESOME. I finally feel like my old self. I’ve crossed crap off my to-do list that’s been there for OVER A YEAR. Plus, I have eradicated my cat hair problem with this:

It’s funny. I won’t buy this really amazing smelling laundry detergent at Restoration Hardware because I think if I start buying designer laundry detergent, WHERE WILL IT END? First it will be the 600-thread-count sheets to wash with the detergent, and next thing you know I’m buying Kate Spade playing cards and refusing to serve anything but Kobe beef at my dinner parties.

I know my love for things being lovely and fancy and know that’s a road I just can’t start down.

But I will spend $400 on a vaccuum. But that’s about being CLEAN and EFFICIENT and somehow easier to justify (even tho, really, the reason I got it is so that I can have dinner parties without appalling my guests or sending them into allergy-induced asthma attacks). It was worth every penny! I’m not going to include photos of the cat-hair carnage wreaked on its first whirl around my apartment because a) it’s embarassing, and b) I don’t want you to hack up a hairball by visual osmosis.

Anyway, I guess I’ve accomplished some other crap as well:

• Secured myself a J-O-B when I graduate law school, for an awesome firm filled with awesome people, woohoo!
• Got my computer fixed, which means that everyone who signed up for a summer CD mix will be getting them in the mail later this week, just in time for fall!
• Watched the Giants lose to the Dodgers with Neeta and Penny and waved at Moises Alou
• Spent a lovely evening with Laurie, Drew, Faith, Gwen, and Allison

So I’m in a better place now, dear blog. A place where I’m more likely to have something to say besides, “meh.” A place where I’m likely to do more than hack up a ball of vitriol. Crisis averted, disaster contained.

The Furry Unleashed

The heat has broken, and my cats can come within two feet of me without getting heatstroke. So suddenly, they are all up in my bidness. And because they haven’t let me pet them in two weeks, the fur? It is a-flyin’. They are shedding at the rate of a carpet a day.

I’m not going to include a picture of this because a) I do not want you to hack up a hairball by visual osmosis, and b) it’s a little embarassing, and c) I kind of hate my stupid camera and want a new one. Do you SEE that picture above? That is supposed to be a beautiful clear view from my office, 35th floor, to the ocean. It is SO UGLY.

Anyway, today I went to a women’s tea at my firm, so we could be all empowered yet womanly and crap. And it was nice, to have so much estrogen in the room (sorely lacking in any firm, really). But then, all the wedding and baby talk started, and usually I am just fine with that, whatevs, maybe I’ll be there and want to talk about it some day.

But today, I am so damn grumpy, all I really wanted to say (nay, yell) was, “Hey! I kissed a 26-year-old PA last weekend! When really drunk!” and see if any heads would spin.

I did not do this of course. Instead I ate my mini-egg salad sandwich and scone and smiled. Legs crossed, back straight, hands and napkin in lap.

2.5 days at the firm left. Then Penny and I are up in Redding, tanning in a kiddie pool and doing yoga and escaping into books for a week.

So for the time being, the fury still leashed. But the fur, the fur, it is everywhere.