Attacking Life with Comedic Jaws of Sarcasm. Recovering Dating & Relationship Blogger - Made it to Step 12 When I Got Married.

Category: Velvet in Dupont (Page 2 of 11)

Part 15: Look Around You Now, You Must Go For What You Wanted

2007: August – December

We were still laying in bed at 3 a.m. when I rolled over and said, “That’s funny, I’m usually gone by now.” He found that particularly amusing. It was just the truth. I’m not very good about staying around. I like to use the dogs as an excuse to go back to my own bed and sleep like a starfish. Seemed like I couldn’t really do that in this case because I had probably handed him my playbook over the past four years in my stories about other men.

When I walked out the door and got to my car, I texted one of my best friends who is also my real estate agent. I said, “I just fucked your next client. You can thank me later.” I’ll always be somewhat evil. I readily admit this.

I knew I would never make the move to contact him first. Thankfully, I didn’t have to. When I was ramming my car through the throngs of club kids at the intersection of hell and chaos, 18th Street/Connecticut Ave, he called to make sure I got home okay. We texted on and off throughout the rest of the weekend. On Sunday night, we actually, gasp, talked on the phone instead of texting. We were on the phone for 4 hours. We covered a lot of ground.

The second time I went to his house he actually looked at me in the middle of having sex and said, “You still see me as your boss, don’t you?” I was clearly very transparent. Guilty as charged. He said I would have to get past it. I asked if he still saw me as the employee. He said, “Not at all.”

We fell into a habit of seeing each other about once a week. Weekdays would be filled with texting foreplay, weekends would bring the adult activities.   We had really scaled it down to quite an efficient operation. Rarely would I stay over. Never would he come to my place. At one point in time, about a month in, I stayed pretty late – for me. I woke up with major dry eyes and went looking for my eyedrops in my bag. While I was digging around for them, my phone started vibrating. It was 4 a.m. K was calling. He had been driving through town on a trip up north and wanted to see if I was home so he could come by. I told him I wasn’t. The ex-boss walked out and saw me on the phone. It was a pretty uncomfortable moment – not because I couldn’t be honest with him, I could. But because I figured he would think I was just juggling him and others and I didn’t want him to think that. He responded by saying, “Let’s go out to get breakfast.”

I think that looking back at this time period makes me depressed. I don’t know why but knowing him now and how he is, and knowing what these five months were like from the startup until the holidays – it was weird. He was evasive at times, didn’t seem as into me as I was into him, was busy with work and trying to keep the company afloat – which would prove to be an effort in vain, and he was probably still seeing someone else. This time of his seeming apathy was when I would put my job search in New York into full force. I really really wanted to leave. Truth be told, I still do.

By October there were signs that this was moving to a new level. We would sleep intertwined with each other which was all very new for me.   I’m used to relationships where I get up in the middle of the night and sleep on the couch. In fact, I can’t recall one old boyfriend where I didn’t routinely do this. We talked about this place we were getting to one night and he said, “It just feels so good when you walk in the door.”

December is probably where we turned the corner. He hadn’t even see my condo until he came to a tree trimming party in December thrown by my real estate agent bff but even then, he didn’t stay over. All the years of the friendship and now, we were totally in relationship retrograde. It was out of sequence for the way relationships typically go. We had already done the getting-to-know-you and had become friends. Then we weren’t friends. Then we reconnected to rip each other’s clothes off.

Somehow though, all of this was very unsatisfying. I don’t think at the holidays of 2007 I could look back and say that the last five months had been anything other than sex. It was getting there, slowly. Not fast enough for me to be convinced that I wouldn’t have traded the sex back for the prior friendship we had. I’d waited over four years to get to this point, and suddenly, I wanted everything and was all about instant gratification.

Even though we had made some progress in the way of having some pretty deep conversations about each other and us as an “us,” it didn’t seem like it would go far. He was still mired in a separation that didn’t seem to be making any progress toward a divorce and my heart was, is, and probably always will be in New York City. And speaking of New York City, he wanted to go up there for New Years Eve. His now estranged wife and kids were in Europe, so he had no hangups in his way. I had somehow thought we would see more of each other in that timeframe. We didn’t.

He had half assed invited me to New York but then the next thing I knew, he was driving up there alone. Very very weird. Really weird. He told me I should come up, but I refused to drop the dogs last minute on someone for his half-assed invite, and I didn’t go. I don’t chase men. I went to a friend’s house for New Years Eve and at that party, I made a resolution to move to New York in 2008.

Part 14: So Much Water Moving Underneath the Bridge, Let the Water Come and Carry Us Away

August 4, 2007

It took the ex-Boss two and a half weeks to text again. I figured he was chickening out and I started to lose hope. I wasn’t going to text first, that just isn’t my style. I prefer to sit and wait instead of hunt and kill. Besides, truth be told, I had done enough over the years. Subtle or not.

The text I received was on a Friday afternoon. He said that his kids had found a sweater hanging behind my old office door and he would like to return it. I found it funny that he had to invent some lame excuse when we both knew what we were doing. We had waited almost four years for this moment, who were we kidding?

We made plans for that evening. I promptly went into panic mode, questioning what I was doing. Wondering if the whole time it was his soon to be ex setting a trap for me. I thought about not going, for about a half a second, then got in the shower, got in the car, and blasted Alice Cooper’s Poison 10 times in a row while I drove to his house.

When he opened the door he looked, just, great. Just like I remember from three months earlier. This was perhaps the longest we had gone without seeing each other since we had first met. And that night of texting was the longest, most drawn out foreplay we could have ever enacted.

We started with the Bombay and Tonics. We talked the stupidest small talk for hours. I mean, hours. I swear, I really thought when I walked in that he was just going to rip my clothes off and we would fuck like we were in the conjugal visit trailer, but we talked so much I started to wonder if anything was going to happen at all. We caught up on what we had missed in each other’s lives. He told me the separation had been so horrible that he doubted he would ever get married again. I said I couldn’t blame him. I told him one day I would job hunt again but for now I just didn’t feel like it. He said he couldn’t blame me. Oh my god. I think we’re back to the fucking friend zone. Eek! 911, 911! Help!!! I’m drowning!

When I was getting up to pee for the third time, at this point, sufficiently drunk, he asked why I kept going to pee.   Maybe not so obviously, I was totally nervous. But I didn’t want to admit it. Now that I was here, in front of him, it seemed like we wouldn’t be able to take the long platonic history we shared, shake it up, and let a ferocious sexual encounter take place.   As I closed the bathroom door on round #3, he said, “When you come out of the bathroom I want to know why you are peeing so much.”

I sat on the toilet and I just didn’t have a good answer. “I’m nervous” seemed so lame after the night of x-rated texting. It seemed even lamer considering we had waited so long for this moment. I finished, flushed, washed, walked back out there where he was sitting on the couch. Taking a page from a recent Jordan Baker seduction story she told one night, I bit the bullet, crawled into his lap, and straddled him in that way that conveys that my horse is going to win this race.

A line had officially, forever, been totally and completely crossed.

He grabbed my face and we started to kiss. A mad, passionate kiss of two people who had wanted to kiss each other for 3 years and 10 months. His hands were in my hair, knotting my hair up in his fists, and we had our tongues so deep inside each other that we could barely let up for air. I think my nose started running and I just didn’t care. The whole place could have burned down for all I cared. I was sick of waiting.

The mad makeout continued for a while but I just wanted more. Like all of you who have been commenting as such, I was there too. More. More. More.

I backed off his lap, stood up, took his hand, and we walked into the bedroom. It was time. I didn’t want to wait any longer. I was done waiting. Fuck waiting. Waiting is for Catholics.

Part 13: So Much Time to Make Up Everywhere You Turn, Time We Have Wasted on the Way

July 17th, 2007

He answered at 10:30 p.m. Obviously I don’t recall the exact back and forth but I’ll try to recreate it as closely as it played out.

Ex Boss: Where did you hear that?
V:
M from the Baltimore office said that’s what people have been saying.
Ex Boss:
I haven’t heard that.
V:
Well I doubted people would tell you to your face.
Ex Boss:
I never heard anything like that.
V:
Okay. I figured maybe you had and just wanted to spare my feelings.
Ex Boss:
I can’t understand why people say this about us. We never gave off any indication we were interested in each other. No flirting. No goo goo eyes. Nothing.
V:
I don’t know.
V: Wait. What people?
Ex Boss: The Baltimore office, my ex.
V: Oh. I don’t know. Everyone knows I only date lunatics.
Ex Boss: Yes, and that’s not me. Besides, I would never do something like that because I was married, and then separated, but you and I worked together.
V: Worked.
Ex Boss: That’s what I said. Worked.
V: Right. Worked.
Ex Boss: Are you just repeating me?
V: Just clarifying the tense.
Ex Boss: Okay. I’ll bite. Do you think something eventually would have happened with us?
V: Yes. I do.
Ex Boss: I wouldn’t have done anything when we worked together.
V: Again, worked. Past tense.
Ex Boss: Since we’re being honest, I did used to want to ask you about your waxing.
V: What do you mean?
Ex Boss: Well, you were so open about it. You would say you were going to get waxed and I would wonder what you looked like after.
V: I probably would have shown you had I known you were curious.
Ex Boss: That would have been great. I would have loved that.
V: You would have been too shy.
Ex Boss: I don’t think so. If you just pulled up your dress and showed me in your office? I used to think about that.
V: Again, you should have asked! I worked for you – it would have been the least I could have done.
Ex Boss: It wouldn’t have been enough for a quick peek. I would need to see it all.
V: We could have figured something out.
Ex Boss: I used to want to watch you pee. Is that odd?
V: Um, no.
Ex Boss: I just like seeing everything. Total exposure is good for me.
V: You tell me all this now when I can’t do anything about it!
Ex Boss: Why not?
V: I don’t work there anymore! I can’t act out the “at work” part of the fantasy.
Ex Boss: We can make believe. Or we can meet at the office one night.
V: That would be fun!
Ex Boss: What would you want to do?
V: An open ended question. Scary.
Ex Boss: Why? I just told you what my fantasy about you was.
V: Suck your dick while you sat in your chair.
Ex Boss: Now I really regret not knowing that I could have just asked you for this when you were working there and you would have done it!
V: I don’t like to say no.
Ex Boss: I will admit that I masturbated once or twice thinking about you.
V: Why didn’t you tell me?
Ex Boss: I couldn’t tell you that!
V: Why not? I had sex dreams about you and I used to tell you. Sometimes.
Ex Boss: It wouldn’t have been right.
V: Well you can stop with that now. We’re past all that.

The conversation continued for several hours over the night. There was the usual graphic talk of what we want to do to each other, followed by the requisite sending of pictures. He sent me the most amazingly beautiful picture which I have long since deleted but it is forever etched in my mind. It would be the after-product of all this long overdue texting talk. With one perfect dribble front and center. Uh, yum!

V: Wow. We’ve really crossed the line now!
Ex Boss:
You and I have talked about all the things we want to do to and with each other. What line? I think we crossed it a long time ago.
V:
Point taken. It’s still fun.
Ex Boss:
I’m trying to figure out how this will work.
V: What do you mean?
Ex Boss: Do we just become fuck buddies?
V: I don’t know. You’re the deal maker. Why don’t you make a deal?
Ex Boss: I just don’t see how this works.
V: I find it hard to believe you have come all this way for words.
Ex Boss: At the very least we should just get together for old times sake and have a few drinks and talk, right? And see.
V: That’s a good place to start.
Ex Boss: I’ve got to juggle kids but I’ll call you soon when I can and we can figure it out.
V: Sounds good. I love anticipation.

Texting ceased at 6:00 a.m. I was exhausted but I had a hard time wiping the smile off my face for the rest of the day. You may ask why neither of us picked up the phone. It’s a debate we had often over the next year or more. Mostly because the culmination of so many years of sexual tension and a probable emotional affair and it was so tense, and yet so exhilerating. Picking up the phone was like an implicit dare that neither of us wanted to risk. Finally having the conversation – by text, by snail mail, by morse code, it didn’t matter. It just mattered that the conversation was finally being had. I didn’t want to alter one thing about it.

Part 12: She Said “I Need You to Hold Me, I’m a Little Far From the Shore and I’m Afraid of Sinking”

May – July 2007

I chronicled my cross-country trip on another blog which has since been deleted. It was the summer of getting my head on straight and deciding to be a grown up. I’m not going to lie to you. I had a pretty bad emotional breakdown. I’m not going to lie to you again. It was long overdue.   I never grieved the end of my relationship with K, and because of that, I believe I was never able to really have another successful run at a relationship.

FreckledK had to come to Phoenix and pull me out of the depths of hell. We spent several days roasting by the Hilton’s pool, eating Mexican and partying in Mesa country bars and Scottsdale biker bars where we had the grand honor of meeting a Porn Producer. After spending several weeks with her and my other good friends out in Phoenix, one of them remarked that he hadn’t seen me eat or mention being hungry for three weeks. He was right. It was bad.

Being in the wrong relationship was painful. But deciding to end somehow had a backlash that was more painful. Why?

Because ending a mediocre relationship in your mid-thirties takes a lot of work when the ball is in your court. You wonder if this is your last chance. You wonder if you’ve been too picky. You wonder if this is your last chance. You wonder if you were too hard on him. You wonder if this is your last chance. You wonder if you’ve become inflexible. You wonder if this is your last chance. You wonder if you aren’t meant to be with anyone ever in life. You wonder, god damned it, if this, for the love of all holy hell, is your last fucking chance.

Ultimately, 95% of people probably settle. They probably tell themselves: I’m getting older, and I don’t know who or what else is going to come along, so I better pack it down with this person and make the best of it. And ultimately many of those people live to regret it, and either get divorced or tough it out in misery and loneliness. But, if you’re me, you cannot settle. Because only having 90% 80% 70% of the package just isn’t good enough.

The decisions I made on the trip broke down into the following:

1) No More Partying

2) No More Wrong Men

3) Prioritize and start making decisions based on those priorities. i.e. If it doesn’t get me closer to my goal, then I’m not doing it.

On the road trip, I had another very vivid sex dream about my now ex boss. I woke up with that feeling like we had actually had sex. I was at your house. Sorry. Hope your sheets survived. I texted him – I think it was my way to throw a bone out there. He didn’t respond right away, then sort of blew it off when he did respond by asking me how I was. Damn it ex boss, I want to discuss my dream! We went back and forth for a few volleys but it died out. Sad. We used to have a good friendship. I missed that. It was awkward now. And it was also over.

I came back to DC in mid-June. I was hell bent and determined to move to NYC once and for all and blow the DC falafal stand to hell. I interviewed but the jobs were starting to dwindle in my field.

In July, I got wind through a friend that my ex-company was closing the Baltimore division. One of my friends called and said that my ex-current-ex-Boss was trying to save her job. He was going to tell them to keep her on for a few more months because he knew she was a single mom and he (we) both knew her from the prior company. She told people at work and they said: “Please! The Boss was fucking Velvet for years and he couldn’t save her job, what makes you think   he can save yours?”

Huh?

I said to her: That isn’t true.
She said: Its none of my business.
I said: Believe me. BELIEVE ME. I have a tell-all blog. You read it every day. If I was doing something as scandalous as   nailing my boss I would have SURELY mentioned it prior to now.

She didn’t believe me. She really didn’t believe me.

Thinking he probably wouldn’t answer, I texted him anyway. It had been several weeks since we spoke. It felt awkward – like all these people thought this –   did he know this? Did he discourage these rumors? I started to question him, and wonder if he was just one of those guys egging the rumors on by not denying them.

I texted around late afternoon that day: “Did you hear the hot rumor that you and I have been fucking for years? I seem to be unable to recall this mindblowing sex we had.”

He took his time, about six hours to be exact, before he responded.

Part 11: She Said, “I Feel Stranded, and I Can’t Tell Anymore If I’m Coming or I’m Going”

Jan – April 2007

Over the holidays, Sherlock and I had broken up. In mid-January, I thought he finally had his head screwed on straight (never) and gave it another go. Ultimately, I did what women do – I choose the least of the evils. Sherlock was a decent guy when he tried to be, and I thought that if we could just get past the bullshit drama, we would be fine. I had no interest in “getting back out there.”

In March I decided to buy a beach house from my company’s extra inventory. I brought Sherlock along for that metaphorical ride, with him thinking it was “us” and me knowing it was “just me.” Near the end of the whole process The Boss said a bunch of times “Don’t buy the house, it’s not a good deal.” I thought it was.   I sort of knew something was off, but he had his chances and it never materialized into anything so what the fuck. Why was he trying to stop me from doing this? I finally admitted to myself that perhaps there was a twinge of protectiveness or jealousy with respect to Sherlock and so I limited the conversations about Sherlock to almost nothing. Then for the rest of March, I barely saw the Boss.   But I had a dream which I wrote about on a secret, now dead, blog.

Well, now, I had a sex dream about my boss. This isn’t the first one, but this was the most graphic. In the past, I’ve woken up and known that it occurred in my dream, but didn’t have details. In this dream, there are details. I remember us for some reason being on a trip, or in a hotel or something, not at one of our houses. For whatever reason, we had to lay next to each other because there was only one bed. When I looked over, I pulled the sheet and realized he was rock hard. Fuck. Me.

My jaw dropped to the floor and I reached over and and tried to put my hand around it. My fingers couldn’t even close around it, it was so thick. Then he rolled over on top of me and we started making out. At this point my clothes were off, though I don’t recall them being off when I was first in the bed, and I don’t remember actually taking them off. He gets on top of me, and we had sex with him on top of me, then he rolled over and I was on top. It was getting really hot, and then just as we were about to change positions, the inevitable happened.

I woke up. Fuck.

I’ve gone through varying stages of wanting to fuck my boss. I was really attracted to him when I first started working for him 4 years ago. Then I met his wife and my attraction waned. But then he filed for divorce and I was the one he would call to bitch about his wife. Nothing has ever happened with us. I never got the indication from him that he would even want something with me. We’ve had some late night texting. There have been some late nights of emailing. But, it all seemed pretty on the up and up and I never got any indications of any interest. Except maybe once.

When I got together with the crazy Asshole, my boss said, “I hope you know what you are doing.” I said, “What? What do you mean?” He said, “He’s a mess. And he’ll inevitably screw your life up.”

We don’t cross paths a lot anymore. But he was at work yesterday. And last night, the sex dream.

I suppose it was already in my head that Sherlock was not the man for me. And you know what happens when you have a sex dream about someone? Then you want to have sex with them.

April was the big month of change. I went to a friend’s wedding in L.A. and was witness to another friend unravel on a drug-induced spiral and suddenly, I was done. I never want to be the girl at the wedding giving the maid of honor speech blabbering on about nothing that makes any sense. I never want to be the girl who everyone is whispering about. I never want to be the girl who my soon-to-be mother in law catches snorting coke on the toilet at the rehearsal dinner.

I had also suddenly started having these very vivid dreams about K. Totally out of nowhere. I had a dream we were on our cross-country trip in 2001 and we were at a gas station out west somewhere. There were these beautiful mountains in the background, and K and I were just exchanging words about nothing in particular but it was so comforting. I woke up with two thoughts. First – Sherlock is not the one. Second – where is K? Is he alive? I knew I was going to end it with Sherlock once and for all. I knew with Sherlock’s track record, the end was not going to go well. (It didn’t. He threw a bunch of leaves at me and tried to keep Thora. Wtf. Then proceeded to contact two of my friends to beg them to talk some sense into me.)

That week, the Boss told me I was being laid off. I said, “You just made it easy on me. I need to get out of here and away from this guy, so this comes at a perfect time.” I also wanted to find K and see if he was still alive. The Gift of Fear says you need six weeks to break stalker behavior, so I planned a cross-country trip for May 5 through June 15. Exactly 6 weeks, to make sure I could get Sherlock out of my life for good.

K sent me an IM that week. We have always had this relationship where we just know it’s time to check in with the other one. We had a very long and very deep conversation about us, our past, our love, our drug habits, and his recent release from 90 days in rehab. K is stubborn enough to stick to his guns, and he wants sobriety so very badly. He tried to give me some words of encouragement to break my own cycle, but that was done. I left it in L.A. and have never gone back. I didn’t need rehab. I needed to wake up. K and I briefly discussed a relationship, but somewhere in that drug-induced haze, he had conceived a child with someone. Now he had a baby.

I think somewhere around week two, I found out Sherlock had a new girlfriend. But I persevered on my trip instead of running back home. See? He was never the one.

For the first time in many years, I was free to go wherever I wanted. But the further I got from home, the more I wanted to go back. That’s the funny thing about being born and raised on the east coast. Going west always seems fascinating, like it holds promise of new and better adventures, but in my heart, I’m an east coast girl and I can’t change that.

Part 10: Part of Me Says Let it Go, Everything Must Have a Season

2006

By the end of 2005 I had burned through my supply of men to date so I had to get resourceful in locating more. I was feeding blog fodder and it was quite hilarious – at the time…you know…before people got murdered for answering ads off Craigslist. For me, 2006 goes down as the year of hellacious relationships.

In January we finally got into our office and began setting up shop. There were a couple more people working there but everyone came and went at different times and we rarely saw each other. When my boss did arrive to work on the days I was there, we would play catch-up. It didn’t matter how much time had passed, there was always a lot to discuss. We were like Regis and Kelly, only without the audience.

On February 8th and 9th, we had a conference in Dallas. Everyone from all over the company flew to some hotel, where we were lectured for two days on how to buy land by Ned Flanders. I went to my room the first night around 6 to lay down for a minute before figuring out what to do for dinner. I had / have friends in Dallas and was considering going off to find them.

The phone rang. It was the Boss. He told me to meet him at the bar. I went down there and he and I started drinking. We drank. Drank. And Drank. I really thought that if anything was going to happen, it would happen now. Another Bombay Tonic please. Then some cockblocking President of another division literally sat in between us and stayed. Somewhere around 10:00, me, Boss and Cockblocker went out to find food, ate, drank more, and really got annihilated. Something of note happened at the restaurant, but for the life of me I can’t recall. I think the other Division President did or said something about me to the Boss when I went to the bathroom. I have to consult my source on that one.

We got home Thursday night late. The Boss chose the following Tuesday, Valentines Day, to end his marriage. There was a simple conversation, followed by a door slamming, a bottle of pills, a Britney Spears style hair shaving and subsequent threats of suicide. Kidding. Sort of. Well, not really. Years of verbal abuse by the Mrs. X and he had finally had enough. It took him about 14 years longer than it would have taken me. I would have left on the wedding night after the shit she pulled. Ladies, please. The men all know that women change after marriage. Try not to have your first meltdown during the wedding though, mmmkay?

My lovelife was moving along somewhat. I was seeing the ill-fated “New Jersey” at this point. Dick. I hope that after me, someone had the good sense to teach him that a grand gesture like pushing to spend Valentine’s Day together, then ending things by email is sending mixed messages.

Late one night in March there was a long email exchange with the boss. The content was mostly innocent, but once I mentioned going to bed, and he responded by saying, “great, you had to throw the bed in there,” it was another one of those lines that was just now blurred.

By the way, nothing happened in Dallas to prompt the mention of divorce a few days later. If there was anything that would have or could have happened in Dallas, it didn’t, and we came back to DC and back to our lives as usual. I should correct that to read that nothing physical happened in Dallas. Emotional? Jury still out. He said no. I think yes.

By June of that year, the Boss moved out and into his own place. I know, it was weird to me too that he told his wife he wanted a divorce on Feb 14th and then waited 4 months to move out. But, see aforementioned pills, suicide threats, lather, rinse, repeat and he didn’t want to leave until he felt things were stable. The night he moved out was a Friday. He called me to wish me a happy weekend. I was stunned by the sound of his voice. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I just got the boys and I have a bottle of wine and we’re going to sleep on the floor tonight.” He sounded unbelievably happy. Different. I told him this was like I was talking to someone I never spoke to before. He asked what I meant. I couldn’t describe it then. I can’t describe it now. He sounded like a totally different person.

About a month after that, some chick showed up at our office with this freaking ear to ear joker-style grin, mom jeans that were a little too high, and went into the Boss’s office. They went downstairs to the bar to have a drink. Wow. That didn’t take long.

In July, I met Sherlock. We had the ups. We had the downs. By the fall we were somewhat stable and it’s always a good idea when you’re barely somewhat stable to discuss co-habitation, right?   One Friday in the late Fall, the Boss asked me what I was doing that weekend.

V: My boyfriend and I are looking for a place to buy together.
The Boss: I hope you know what you are doing.
V: Do I ever?
The Boss: I wouldn’t want to have to write you up.
V: What are you talking about?
The Boss: You know. He’s nutty, and that stuff will trickle into work.

I guess this was the second time a line was crossed. Or the ninth. I wasn’t keeping track, I just knew then that his comment popped out of nowhere. Later that night, I made up an excuse to not see Sherlock so I could sulk. I cannot explain the pit in my stomach, and how much that conversation hurt me. I didn’t want to have job-drama, or boss-drama. We weren’t the same we once were. We had a schtick at the old company and that seemed to have disappeared.

Around 10:30 or 11:00 I texted the Boss and said, “Do you really think that I’ll start messing up at work if I move in with him?” He texted back and said, “No, you’re still thinking about that?”   The next night I went to Sherlock’s and when he and I were having sex, guess who pops into my head. (I know, I know.)

I tried to get back to normal at work as quickly as possible. I would go weeks without seeing anyone. It was boring, lonely, and hard to stay motivated to drive almost an hour when I could just work from home. When I saw the Boss it wasn’t for long. He was in my office once just chatting about the latest meltdown from the camp of the ex-Mrs.-Boss.

V: Does she think you’re having an affair?
Boss: Yes.
V: Does she think it’s me?
Boss: Yes.
V: Oh my God! Should I call her?
Boss: Uh, no, that’s not a good idea.
V: Wait, we’re friendly. I need to tell her.
Boss: Yeah, um, I wouldn’t do that. I told her I would never have sex with you.

Then we just looked at each other. Awwwwkward.

The ex-Mrs.-Boss surfaced at the office one day. I felt this insane desire to convince her that I was not fucking her husband, nor was I the reason her marriage ended. But when she came and sat down in my office, she looked so painfully thin. I told her she looked good. She said, “Yeah, well, when someone rips your heart out of your chest, what do you expect?”

Part 9: You’re the Only One Who Knows Me, and Who Doesn’t Ignore That My Soul is Weeping

2005

January marked the last month of my Boss as my Boss at the old company. He gave his notice and left. The day he left, the sadness was palpable throughout the office. A lot of people saw him as the savior, the one who was going to rescue everything and everyone, and let me tell you, when you see the person you pin your hopes on get up and walk out the door, it sent a message loud and clear.

The Boss was going to a place where he could create his own company from the ground, up. I asked him if he would consider taking various people with him and he said that he couldn’t. I’mplicit in all of these conversations had been the obvious – that I would be the only one going. He said, “I don’t need them. But I need you.”

I quit shortly thereafter to go with him and began the process of finding, constructing and decorating what was to become a high profile office. The Boss and I went from daily interaction to talking once or twice a week by phone. I got Satan’s Death Flu and ended up in the hospital. Then I was renovating my condo, and I couldn’t get the piece of shit contractor to finish. I lived among drywall for MONTHS. I dated a string of losers, all of whom were incredulous at the lack of construction. Losers would come and losers would go and that damn drywall sat leaning against my wall for months.

That time is also a blur because more of the snow and because now instead of dating just 2 guys like in 2004, I embarked on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. It wasn’t good. It started with some guy I met the night Satan’s Death Flu struck. He hung around for several weeks until I was ejected from the hospital and he stole my vicodin. The vicodin I needed to manage the pain it took just to   SWALLOW WATER so I wouldn’t end up in the hospital again. I did get down to my preferred weight at this time though, so that was good.

Starting with him, I perfected the fine art of throwing men out of my house. I think this was the order, and yes, they are real names because who the fuck cares anymore: Derek who stole my Vicodin, Bret who asked if I would consider having sex with him despite having a fight on our first (and last) date because he thought leaving work at 3:00 in Reston for a 6:30 date was normal and showing up very early was also normal, George who lopped 10 years off his age and thought I wouldn’t notice, Mike who could have had staying power but we just drifted apart, Josh who conducted an entire “relationship” over text and whose rampant non-stop use of the word “amazing” made me want to punch him in the balls, Jeff who was such an amateur liar that it resulted in my throwing a sandwich at him and the Bartender who did nothing but encourage my partying and bad behavior.

Somewhere between Mike and Josh? Velvet in Dupont was born. June, 2005.

That summer was a hot one. I had a routine of walking my dogs late at night and I loved it. I loved being in the city, I loved walking the puppies around with no leashes and teaching them how to stay and not cross the street without my command. I loved half-ass working from home. All of it was great.

One night on one of my dog walks with my neighbor/friend, A, my phone rang. It was the former-current Boss. It was about 9:45, a little late for one of his calls.

V: Hey!
Boss: Hey, I’m sorry to bother you.
V: If you were bothering me I wouldn’t have picked up.
Boss: Well, I just took my phone, got up, walked out of the house and now I’m walking around Home Depot with nothing particular to do.

I knew exactly what he was talking about but I was still stunned in silence.   I think it was the first time that we possibly crossed a line.

He said he was sorry for calling, that he didn’t have anyone else to tell, and he got off the phone pretty quickly. My friend A said, “Don’t do it.” I said, “What?” She said, “Just don’t do it.”

A few nights later, around the same time, the Boss called again and apologized for calling the first time.   This time he was on a “walk,” and said when he took his phone to leave, his wife accused him of going to call someone. They had an argument about it and he left anyway. He wasn’t really looking for my two cents or advice, he just wanted to vent. I remember him saying the words, “Just, listen. Just, listen. I don’t have anyone else I can tell so I need you to listen.”

My response after he spit it out?

“Your perfect trifecta has shifted. They say there are three aspects to your life: work, home and relationship. For the last few years at the other company, things have been such turmoil. Now you have a job that’s wonderful and our company placed you in a brand new perfect house, so you have no more work drama and no more house drama, and you can focus on the other area – the relationship.”

He said, “No, that’s not it.”

But he called me back the next morning and said, “Can you explain the three aspects again?”

Part 8: You Know I Can’t See Through the Haze Around Me, And I Do Anything To Just Feel Better

2004: May – December

Now that I had Thora, I was officially ready to move on with my life. I was still dating the Baltimore Rockstar but it was winding down. The Rockstar and I ended things in the end of May and I moved on to the Metro.

In other 2004 relationship news, my Boss and his wife seemed pretty good. After the day of that first interview, I mostly abandoned the crush I had on him. He and his wife seemed like good friends. Sometimes she would come to work and sit in his office and read a book. It would always surprise me to find her there, but everyone liked her. She started doing some light work for the company and this meant she had her own things to do and her own people to see when she came. Sometimes she would sit at my desk and we would talk for an hour. Other times when she was looking for The Boss and not able to find him, she would call me and we would talk.

In the beginning of the year, she had said that the Boss mentioned to her I just got out of a relationship. I told her about it and also I told her I was dating the Rockstar but that I didn’t know where it was going to go. She had been married young and had several children, then divorced and married my Boss, and they had two kids together. In all, she had six. She told me once during one of our conversations, “Don’t do what I did. I was an idiot. You have plenty of time. Don’t be in a rush. You’re only 31. Get married at 35 and have a kid at like, 36, and only have one. That’s all you need.”

I thought everything between them was so perfect, though occasionally I would get glimmers that not all was right. Sometimes the Boss would have to leave work because she was home having some sort of tantrum. He started telling me that there were some anger issues that would escalate and he would have to go home to deal with it and be the buffer between her and the kids. I sort of understood that like all marriages, nothing is as it seems.

The rest of the year workwise was a clusterfuck. There went my perfect balance of work, home and relationship. The company had gone awry in so many areas, there was a brewing sexual harassment suit, a bunch of unhappy people, a major Human Resource intervention and no houses were getting built. It was a colossal disaster. The details were so unbelievably ridiculous. The Boss and I tried to just be normal in this sea of crazy but it was impossible. We had this routine of doing a Monday catch-up of what we did with our weekends, then a Friday rundown where we would watch these two stupid videos online.

And this one:

The Boss was getting calls by the end of the summer to go work for other companies and I was so depressed. I kept thinking we could just fix it if he stayed, but he didn’t think it was fixable. He wavered on some of these offers.

On a Sunday night, we had the following email exchange.

The Boss: The growth they are projecting is incredible. With our talent, and compared with the “talent” around us, it would be stupid to bail. We need to figure out how to take it over, make great progress and great money.
Me: I agree. I can’t follow you to a no name builder anyway. We need to take over here. I’ve already made my mark. No one knows it yet.
The Boss: Great. I need help.

By the end of the year, he got a call from another company that he entertained seriously. Prior to my big trip to Italy in November, 2004, he called me to say, “I hope you’re coming back because I cut a deal for both of us to go to the new company.” I wasn’t excited. Change isn’t always good. I knew the grass isn’t always greener. I came back from Italy and he and I silently prepared to leave the company after the holidays.

I found an old email that for some reason I saved. It was an exchange between us when he was with his kids at a doctor’s appointment. We were having a conversation about the kids in the waiting room where he was and he said, “Everything you do points to kids in your future.”

I responded: If I was having unprotected sex and longingly looking in the windows at Baby’s R Us, then I could see how you would make that statement. But, I continue to poison my body with Bombay and Tonics and stay out until 6 a.m. But no matter how drunk I get, I never forget to take that little pill…

That was the kind of relationship we had.

I dated the Metro for 2004’s May-December romance, with our last time seeing each other being New Years Eve, going into 2005. I believe he probably got just totally sick of my shit. I had this backlash after the breakup with K. I knew drugs were to blame for our demise, and then I started doing them often instead of just here and there for fun. When the Metro and I were at a party New Year’s Eve, someone gave me something which I threw in there on top of a bunch of other things and I turned into a pile of mush. He practically had to carry me back to his place. I believe that’s when he decided, “I’m done.”

It was upsetting. I really liked him. It didn’t stop my whirlwind tour of self-destruction though.

Work got worse before it got better. I partied more than anyone should. I started getting totally ridiculously reckless with it. It began to consume me. What a mess. Then I lost the Metro dude after New Years Eve. I consoled myself by buying a condo in D.C.

Bye Bye Maryland!!!

Part 7: Will it Make it Easier on You Now You Got Someone to Blame

2004: Jan – April

I spent the entire year finding myself. I had been with K for so long that dating again was sort of ridiculous. I had no idea what I would want in someone. I met the Baltimore Rockstar, a Dave Grohl lookalike who I had a pretty nice rebound relationship with for several months. We were opposite in many respects, but he was a lot of fun. We’re now Facebook friends, and he’s one of those people you just wish nothing but good things for. I could not have asked for a better rebound than him.

Working for the New Boss was good. The company was screwy but I appreciated stupid things like, oh, having direct deposit and not having to chase someone across town for my paycheck. I was making decent money, and I had a schedule to my life finally. No more bouncing around from school to home to meeting friends to do projects to the house of a man who didn’t appreciate me, back home to get something, back to work, etc. Home was good. Work was good. Relationship on the fence. With the trifecta almost back into some sort of balance, it was just me and Sammy, but we were happy.

K’s former roommate called and said he was in Virginia for a meeting. My friend and I went and met him at his hotel, and took him out in D.C. At this point in time, he decided to confess. K was doing meth. Doing it. Selling it. Couldn’t live without it.

I was like, “Um. WHAT?”

The stories he told me about what K’s life had become sent me into a spiral. I do believe that I lost it. Hearing about strippers and theft and car break-ins and lies so convoluted, it made my stomach turn.

People. I had no idea. None. I seriously thought all the lies, all the flaky and all the crap was because he had another girl, and/or was still trying to punish me for cheating on him. I had been so close to his family for so many years, that I just felt like someone needed to help him. That someone wasn’t me though. I did the best thing I could think of. I called his brother and sister-in-law to unload this information on them and beg them to get him into rehab.

K responded by leaving me several voicemails that he was going to kill me and ruin my life for ruining his, and that I would live to regret what I had done.   Then there were threats of sending naked pictures of me to my parents. I temporarily panicked, but then my brother said, “He can’t even remember that the time lag between your phone calls is weeks, not hours, and you think he can function enough to print the pictures, address an envelope and mail them to mom and dad?” Point taken.

It died down. Thankfully. I saved those voicemails for a long time to remind me of who he had become.

K called on a Friday in April hysterically crying. Hysterical. He said he went to L.A. and left Thora with his dad’s friend and Thora had run away. I cried. I spent days on the phone calling the entire state of Georgia. A lot of people felt she was better off wherever she was, because K had been so neglectful. I was only now finding out Thora went days without food and water. Everyone was looking for her though. Then K’s mom called crying after 24 hours with no sign of the dog. I wanted to scream at all of them: CRYING WON’T MAKE THE DOG COME HOME!!! She said she was driving around all day looking for Thora and when she went to K’s house, he was on the couch sleeping. Welcome to my fucking world for the last six years lady. Welcome. Pull up a god damned chair, get your ass some sweet tea and get comfortable, because we’re gonna be here a while.

That addiction paralyzed him so much, he couldn’t go look for his fucking dog. Fuck him. I decided he didn’t deserve to get her back. I was going to find her first.

I placed an ad in the Macon Fucking Telegraph on Monday. The ad went in on Wednesday, same day my Uncle decides to die! My luck rocks! I drove up to Pennsylvania on Thursday for the Friday funeral. When all was said and done, my brother and his wife were coming back with me to Maryland for a few days to kick off their vacation. We stopped for food on the way out of town, and when we were sitting at the table the phone rang with a 478 area code and it was not a number I recognized. I knew it before I   picked up the phone.

“Did y’all lose a dog? I reckon my neighbor’s keepin’ her.” (That’s redneck-speak.)

I called the neighbor and she emailed a picture and it was indeed my Thora. We raced back to Maryland where I left Sammy with my brother and wife and grabbed my friend and drove all night to Georgia. The map indicated that she was 1.5 miles from K’s house, but I chose to drive the 700 miles to go get her. The map also indicated she crossed a highway to get where she did.

When I pulled up in front of the house, 14 hours later, Thora came bounding around from the back yard, jumped on me, then jumped past me and got into the backseat of the car, crossed her paws and looked at me like, “Bitch, what took you so long?”

I brought her back to Maryland, and she and Sammy were reunited and it feels so good!!!

When I got to work Monday my boss said, “How was the funeral?” I said, “You’re not going to believe the weekend I had.”

Part 6: I Can’t Be Holding On to What You Got, When All You Got is Hurt

2003: September – December

My interview was at 8 a.m. on a nice fall day in September. I’m not very good in the morning. I think I was late. The receptionist had me fill out an application and then wait in the conference room.

The man I spoke with on the phone walked in and I was a little taken aback. I just didn’t expect him to be so…um…sexy. (Think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts!) The interview was barely an interview because we regaled each other with stories about the man who was my former boss. I just told the truth. And I got the job.

The new Boss wasn’t ready for me just yet, so I had a few weeks to get some things in order. I planned to go back down to Atlanta to get to the bottom of what was going on with K. Now that I had a job in Maryland, I was going to stay there. And nothing was going to stop me from trying to get K to come back with me this time.

That evening when I was laying in bed, the image of the man who was my new Boss popped into my head. I thought that it would be hard to work for someone I was attracted to. I recalled a wedding ring and discussions of a wife and some kids, so I just decided to let that little attraction die off. But not before I had a round with the former version of the Magic Wand – the Rabbit.

I got to Atlanta in mid-September and K was working on a movie. I barely saw him, but I spent a lot of time shopping with my own friends who still lived there. K would check in with me and I would see him at night and on his days off. His roommate was a childhood friend of his and one night he and I were watching TV when I said, “There’s a message on the machine.” The roommate played it and it wasn’t a message. It was a conversation between K and a girl, discussing him waiting for another girl to come over. My heart sank. I asked the roommate what was going on. He didn’t have a lot to say that I didn’t already know – K was lazy and flaky and couldn’t be relied on, even though he was allegedly making good money, he could barely remember to pay the rent. But he didn’t know anything about the girls on the machine, and he assured me of that. He said he and K didn’t talk much anymore, and asked if I noticed they were really not friends anymore. Nope. Didn’t notice. Was too busy fielding my own freeze-out to notice anyone else’s.

I called K and ripped him a new one. I told him if he was going to continue to punish me for my cheating on him over a year ago then I was going to check out, I had been trying to make this work for a year and I’ve got nothing in return. K had very little to say. We somewhat resolved things to an amicable place, but I left shortly thereafter. I left without Thora, which broke my heart. And in hindsight, I should have grabbed her and taken off when he was at work. But I didn’t. Sammy and I returned to Maryland and I started the new job and moved to Rockville.

Life was MUCH better in Rockville than my former sleepy hometowns of Columbia and Baltimore. I liked the people at work better and I liked the people in my apartment complex better. But I kept holding out for K to just come back around. It was like I didn’t even know him anymore. He accused me one night of interrogating his roommate about what he was up to, and I told him that the conversation we had wasn’t like that at all – in fact, it was initiated by his roommate entirely. Big fight ensues, K disappears off the radar for about six weeks. I had this very vivid dream about him and that he needed me, but in the real world, I couldn’t get him to return a phone call or an email. I resolved that he was gone, and began to consider a weekend run to Atlanta to steal Thora back. I had all but given up on any contact when he resurfaced in late November.

In a rare moment of clarity, he had passed the exit on some highway in Florida where my parents lived, and he decided to call when I popped into his head. Odd that he could remember what exit they lived off of when he had never been to that house.

I tried to give K one last chance. We talked on the phone on and off through the rest of the fall. One night he said his roommate was treating him badly or some other lie I believed, and that he was sick of him. My sister-in-law had asked me to just bury my feminism for a second and try to repair it, even if it meant having him move in with me and footing the bills while he got his act together. So, I told him he could come up to Maryland and live with me while I paid the bills and he figured out what he wanted to do. He said, “I know that. Oh. My pizza’s here. I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”

When he hung up I knew what I had offered was a great deal and a big deal for me to just agree to support someone, and he blew it off. He also promised to call later, which, according to his past behavior, meant I would not hear from him for weeks. I was right.

When he called several weeks later, the week of Christmas, he was unaware that we hadn’t spoken in three weeks. He thought we “just spoke the other day.” He also said he had finally forgiven me for the cheating and wanted to get back together. The truth was he had been thrown out of his house by his roommate. Suddenly his party was over and he wanted to live with me in Maryland. It was just too late. I can’t explain it, but it was too late. Three weeks prior? Sure. I would have taken him in. But now? Nope. No way was I going to be someone’s “last resort.” Something clicked in my head when he ended our conversation to eat his pizza three weeks earlier, and I had officially moved on.

Part 5:You Ask Me To Enter, Then You Make Me Crawl

2003: May – September

I had one residual MBA class on Saturdays that would finish in the end of June. I had essentially dismantled my life, and Sammy suffered dearly for it. He went from having Thora and K, to being alone for most of 16 months while I was in school and working. So, I promised that little dog a big vacation.

I googled “dog vacation” and the first place that came up was a place in the Keys – one of my favorite places on earth. I planned to get in the car and drive both Sammy and I from Baltimore to Islamorada in the Keys. I booked it for the week of the 4th of July and the week after.

Prior to leaving, I found out that the Developer screwed me in such a silly way on a money issue.   Screwing me over pennies, after everything I did for him, did not make me happy. I cleaned off my desk and went home without saying goodbye. I left the next morning on my two week trip to the Keys. I didn’t plan to go back.

I had a great time just being alone with Sammy, teaching him to swim, reading, sleeping late, and laying out. One of my coworkers called me to give me a peptalk to go back to work. I was unconvinced. The Developer knew I was pissed at him and he was apparently scared I wasn’t coming back but he wouldn’t call and talk to me. He just kept needling the coworker to call me. Instead, the coworker convinced him to raise my salary and pay my vacation time.

On the way back to Maryland I detoured through Atlanta. No change with K. He wasn’t going to move to Maryland anytime soon and was still really flaky. We spent a few days being the “old us” but then I left. I was pretty bummed out driving back and really wanted to go back to Atlanta for good to try to fix it. I really believed we were meant to be together.

When I got back to Baltimore I listed my condo on the market and began the motions to get out of the area. The Developer did offer me a regular full time job at non-slave wages, but I continued putting my resume out between New York, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. I had spent a year and a half in grad school waiting to leave, so I was going to leave. The only caveat was how the hell was I going to interview? Finding something in town would be easy enough, but in another state? The Developer expected after my recent vacation that I wouldn’t be taking any vacations soon. How the hell I was going to get the time off I needed to solve my relationship and job woes was beyond me.

I have heard that there are three aspects to a persons life: Home, Work and Relationship. At any given time, one of those three has to be in constant turmoil because that’s how we are as humans. We get settled in our house and relationship and suddenly we want a job change. We love our job and we realize the house needs to be bigger so we move. Think about it – when have you been satisfied in all three areas? For me, it was relationship turmoil? Check. Job turmoil? Check. House on the market so turmoil there? Check. Not good.

The day of settlement arrived for my condo. I was going to make lots of money for doing basically nothing. The Developer forbade me to leave work to go settle on the condo. He insinuated to a coworker that he was going to fire me if I went. He didn’t like the idea of anyone making any money at all, especially since the money I would make was going to render his paychecks useless for a while. So, I called my dad. This is exactly how the conversation went, I shit you not.

V: Dad. He’s going to fire me if I go to the settlement.
Dad: How much will you make by going to work tomorrow?
V: I don’t know.
Dad: Is it safe to say $250?
V: Sure.
Dad: And how much would you make by going to your settlement tomorrow?
V: $50,000.
Dad: Um, lemme ask you. Did you just get an MBA?
V: Yes.
Dad: Are we done here?

Went to settlement, collected my cash, got fired. In. That. Order.

See, there was a method to the madness that was my former boss. He liked that we were all struggling. It enabled him to say things like, “Instead of going to the office tomorrow, meet my wife at the furniture store and load a five piece sectional sofa into the company truck and bring it to my house. Set them up where she wants them.” He used to send me to these properties in the ghettos of Prince George’s County to do the most insane shit. I had to go to some mail order bride’s house to try to convince her to sell her land now that her husband was in jail. In jail for killing people. I should have had my own bodyguard. The Developer used us like slaves. What a prick.

When I called my dad and said “He fired me.” My dad said, “GOOD!”

I had already begun the job hunt, weeks prior. I had answered a bunch of ads in the paper that weekend and got several calls.   Homebuilding was great back then. At this point I realized something: national homebuilders all had local offices. I didn’t know this before. I would look at the headquarters of a builder, see it was in Texas or California, and think I didn’t want to move there, so I didn’t pursue them. But then I found out they all had regional offices.

A man called me holding my resume in hand. Because my job with the developer read as “current,” and the company name was just an acronym, he asked me who the owner was.

V: The Developer
Man: Oh Jesus. Are you there right now?
V: No.
Man: I hate that guy. He learned all his tricks at this company we both worked for in the early 90’s. What’s he up to these days?
V: Um…same old stuff. Still fleecing people for pennies. He fired me last week.

“Why don’t you come in for an interview?”

Part 4: Love is a Temple, Love – a Higher Law

2003: January – May

School proved to be an ass kicker. I was really plugging along though, adding the A’s to my prized collection. Work was work. The Developer was a dipshit. But knowing that someone is a sneak and a thief is much better than not knowing. I can combat almost anything with humor. Someone at work said to me, “You have this way of insulting him and he thinks it’s funny.” It’s how I got by. I remember the Developer telling us some story about his kid’s baseball game and how there’s a snack shack which had the best fries, and how it was like “this little   slice of Americana.”

I was in the next room and I screamed out a giant, “HA! Americana? So you pulled up to this little slice of Americana in your $80,000 Mercedes with your $200 shirt and $400 shoes? Do you even HEAR yourself?” Idiot. I held a grudge because during my first few weeks working for him he had played dumb on something and basically set me up to take the fall for it. The story is too long to get into, but when I realized I had been had, I checked my loyalty at the door. Despite the fact that we had to grovel and chase him all over Maryland for our paychecks every payday, I needed the job because I wanted the career it represented.

K and I had been communicating. February was the big snow where we got 2 feet and he had driven up from Atlanta. When we saw each other, it was like old times. We were snowed in for 4 days. It was better than old times. When enough snow melted for me to go to work, I did so, leaving K at my condo. I didn’t know that he would begin a full blown all out search through my condo for evidence of what I was doing in our year apart.

The big fight blew up about my “overlap” of him with Jack, and then we repaired as best we could and he left. I was so ready to graduate school and get back down to Atlanta to just start over. “I don’t know” was all K was saying. I wasn’t really listening though. I just concentrated on finishing school. K was acting weird, and it registered somewhere in my subconscious, but it was not on my radar enough to really address it. In a nutshell, he became really unreliable and flaky. I thought it was because he was still mad at me for the whole Jack thing.

In May I graduated and since I had all A’s, and a 4.0, I was the Graduation Speaker. K came up to go with me to gra-jumm-u-ate. With my entire family in tow, I informed K that there would be none of his disappearing act on graduation day. No retreating to the bathroom for 4 hours. No going to walk dogs. No going to take a shit. He would disappear into the bathroom for hours. I was stumped. It was totally mystifying.

True to form, 10 minutes before we were going to leave for my graduation, K proclaims he needs to go to the store to buy cigarettes. I had the foresight to tell him no, and to get in the car.

My graduation speech was full of a lot of mental sweat. I spoke about how I took a chance and it paid off.   I spoke about quitting my job and taking my boyfriend and dogs and driving cross country, how mad my mom was, how dangerous and irresponsible she said it was, how we made it home alive and slightly poorer, how September 11th happened a week after we arrived back in Atlanta after six months on the road, how someone in the towers that day woke up wanting to quit their job and drive cross country and here I had just done that and yet they were the one who didn’t have their life anymore. I spoke about taking chances and taking leaps and throwing caution to the wind. I spoke about my friend Laura who also had an intense reaction to September 11th, who wanted to quit her high-travel job working as a shoe designer traveling to the depths of China every month,   how Laura wrote a resignation letter to Kenneth Cole on her last trip to China. And how they found that letter among her things when her body was shipped back to the states.

I talked about following the status quo and how that person would never be me. Ever.

Part 3: We’re One But We’re Not the Same

2002

Starting grad school and a brand new job on the same day was probably a very dumb idea in hindsight. Couple that with a budding inclination toward involuntary anxiety attacks and the demise of a relationship I thought would last forever, and well, 2002 goes down as probably the worst year of my life. I was determined to get A’s in school, I was determined to do well at my job and I was determined to keep Jack happy. He had a growing habit as the Bowie town drunk and it was difficult to manage. More difficult to manage when he started snorting. Less difficult when I joined him. That entire fucking year is one big blur.

Working for the Developer was fascinating. He put me onto all sorts of projects and let me cut my teeth on most things that would be “out of reach” for a woman. My office nickname became the Pit Bull. If there was some drama that needed managing, I got the 10 p.m. phone call with the instructions of what I would be doing the next day. Your mission should you choose to accept it would be to manage the building and leasing of an entire office complex in Stafford, unknowingly fleecing homeowners in Prince George’s County and finishing a bankrupt townhouse development in Dunn Loring.   I quickly proved myself and became the recipient of the song and dance that the Developer and his wife would eventually step out of the business and they wanted to groom someone to be in charge. That someone was me. This was all very fun. For about six months.

That’s when my love affair with working for the fine upstanding developer was replaced with reality. I was really working for a born-again Christian who behaved as though it was his God given right to screw anyone and everyone out of a nickel, myself included. I was crushed when I realized what was going on. But there wasn’t a lot I could do. I was in school full time and this was a rare job that would allow me a flexible work schedule to continue going to school at a marathon pace. The real estate boom was just beginning and I was happy to be settled into a company, albeit one run by a total cocksucker, to learn what I could.

By the end of 2002, I had been enrolled in the Spring and Fall semester, both summer sessions, and the quarters program which met on Saturdays. When we went on to Christmas break, I had finished 10 of my 16 required classes with straight A’s. I was also having serious doubts about Jack. I turned 29 that year and he was 43. While I was once the focus of his whole mid-life crisis, that was transferred to the drunks at the bar. He had days of binge partying which I could not keep up with, nor could I monitor any longer. Then he stopped going to work. I realized that the primary aspect of his attractiveness lie in his job as a Construction Manager. In those mornings we would lie in bed willing ourselves to get up, he would take about 20 phone calls and I would just sit there in awe, listening to him discuss the finer points of   punchlists and as-builts.

Friends at work took to calling Jack, “Puddy,” after David Puddy on Seinfeld.   We broke up and got back together more times than Puddy and Elaine. God. The night he went running down Route 301 calling me a bitch on a coke infused high when I had to go home and finish a Management project. Jesus. Sometimes you just look back and shake your head.

I really started to miss K and the stability, and we shared a few phone calls discussing the possibility of a reconciliation.

Part 2: Well It’s Too Late, Tonight, To Drag the Past Out Into the Light

2001

I met K when I was 24, in December, 1997. We instantly fell in love and even though he lived in Atlanta, I packed up my crap and left the city that never sleeps for Dixie.

K and I celebrated our four year anniversary by breaking up. Well, this was the first iteration of that plan, anyway. We had lived in Atlanta until April, 2001, at which point we hit the road in search of a different life. A different life meant one which included less southerners. Hitting the road meant we quit our jobs, put our things in storage, and drove cross country, with a puppy Sammy and a one year old Thora. Pause for the cuteness nestled in the back  of the Ford Explorer:

 

“I’ll roll up my own window mommy.”

When we left Aspen, I turned around to look at my puppies. Sammy was gone. I started shrieking like a lunatic. K said, “But he got in the truck.” I was screaming that he wasn’t in the car and to turn around. K looked in the rear view mirror and spotted the eyebrows. Sammy liked to sleep in the luggage compartment.

“Oh Sammy? What are you doing back there?”

We were somewhere in Wyoming in the middle of an August night, driving on a steamy stretch highway and K was sleeping in the backseat with the dogs, when I first suspected our relationship might be over. There were deer on both sides of the road and I was freaked out that one would jump in front of the car. I kept clicking the lights to bright, then back to regular if a car approached. K heard the clicking and got up to ask what I was doing. I explained to him about the deer.

K: That is going to make it worse, because deer are more likely to jump out in front of the car if they are startled by brights.
V: But I can barely see 10 feet ahead of the car without the brights!
K: That’s fine, that’s all you need.
V: Not when I’m going 70 miles an hour!
K: I can’t sleep. I’m exhausted. Please just stop doing that.

K went back to sleep and I said to no one in particular, “That’s the problem here. I’m trying to look far ahead to the future and he’s only looking at the present.”

That was probably the beginning of the end for me. September brought our trip to an end and it also brought September 11th one week later. We had decided while on the road to move to Maryland so I could go back to Grad School and once and for all, get my MBA. I was starting in January, 2002, so we wanted to settle in as soon as possible. Once the towers were hit though, I figured our economy was going to crash with it. For reasons not entirely related to going where the jobs were, I continued on (with my things, and the dogs) to Maryland while K stayed behind in Atlanta. We each had jobs; they were just jobs in different cities.

I ended up hating my job in Maryland and considered going back to the familiar. K’s mom said, “It’s not so bad if you say you had a change of heart and just decided your home was in Atlanta.” It would have been so easy. So unbelievably easy. But sometimes the easy road isn’t good.

The fall brought a change of leaves I hadn’t seen in years, due to being down in Dixie. It also cooled my feelings for my relationship. And it also brought me to make a very bad decision – I cheated on K with a man named Jack. It was less of the one-night-stand variety of cheating and more of the full-blown-relationship cheating. I’ve written about Jack here. The details are still hard because I know what pain I caused by that selfish action. I have a few regrets in life – and one is cheating on K. No one deserves that sort of pain. Somewhere in my teen years I was cheated on, and since then I adopted this attitude of making sure I cheat in almost every relationship. I felt like it was my ace in the hole. It’s a losing bet every time. And to do it to someone I loved? Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

By the end of 2001, I was headed back to Atlanta to take care of the breakup in person. K sensed this was coming. They always know, don’t they? That’s when they pull out all the stops. Four years in a relationship where the best present I got was an incredible hit of acid, and now he busts out the diamond necklace. I couldn’t accept it. I’m not a material girl. I returned the necklace, and we broke up.

In January, I would be starting graduate classes at school, in a new relationship, in a new city, and I would also be starting a new job. It was enough change to bring on a full depression.

The job would be with a Land Developer. I was probably more excited about the job than anything else. The aforementioned Jack was a Construction Manager and our brief time together taught me that I liked his job more than my own at the time. I marched into a placement office and announced: “I’m going back to grad school full time and I want to work 30 hours a week for a construction business. What do you have?”

“We have the perfect job for you, working for a great guy.”

 

Part 1: I’ve Been Sitting Here Trying to Find Myself, I Get Behind Myself, I Need to Rewind Myself

And so it begins.

I feel like the Velvet / Mr. X love story is somewhat hackneyed. Velvet was a tell-all blog for so many years, then, much like any normal person would, I became secretive and only put out bits and pieces because what was going on in my personal life was so, well, personal. It just didn’t seem that the internet was a place to rehash it all. It wasn’t up for discussion. It wasn’t up for scrutiny. It wasn’t up for criticism. It wasn’t up for envy. It wasn’t up for anything but mystery.

Truth be told: Velvet & Mr. X is perhaps the greatest love story never told. It is probably the only thing I could fashion into anything resembling a manuscript that could become a book because of how incredibly it unraveled.   Weaved throughout the story of how we met and how we fell in love are the recurring themes and lessons so simple and intuitive that I learned no amount of matchmaking or other romantic engineering (like the internet) could ever have been a success. I’m very much a believer in fate. I always have been. And the man and I are proof – When it’s meant to be, it will be.

I don’t know if I have the patience to   recreate all the encounters, all the history, all the details needed to accurately tell the story. I know that if I were to ever try to sit down and write it for real, the manuscript would probably be rejected by every publisher as cliche and predictable because they would see the ending as clearly as I saw that first day post-Lasik.   Anyone. Anyone that is, except Mr. X and I. So while everyone who knew us figured we were messing around the whole time, we were the only ones not privy to that rumor. We were both going through the motions of respective relationships with other people. And we were both failing miserably. Obviously. See: Velvet Archives for me, Divorce Court for Mr. X.

Things are moving ahead so fast right now that I feel like we’re making history faster than I can retrace it. And discussing the here and now doesn’t make as much sense because the meaning is lost on people who don’t know the history. So I have to bridge that gap.   It’s not going to be easy to recreate these years, but I do like a challenge so I’m going to try. I’ve wavered with closing down the blog once and for all and just moving into oblivion with my perfect little life. But that’s not fair. It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to Mr. X to not tell the world (or the few readers left) just how wonderful he is. It’s not fair to the friends who have stuck with me through all these years.

And perhaps what hits home most of all, it’s not fair to the girl who came here to read about the escapades, the men – more bad than good, the bad dates, the boyfriends, the hopes, the drama, the depression. The girl who encounters Pick Up Artists in clubs and wonders when the world became so shallow. The girl who is still looking and still stumbling over all the wrongs wondering if she’ll ever find the one.

There was one overriding conclusion about me over the past years that people would convey either in comments or in emails to me. The readers were rooting for me. So I just want to tell any of those originals who may be left, and anyone I picked up along the way – I won. I won the full jackpot more times and for more than I could have ever thought.

Starting with my next post, I am hijacking my own blog and going back to the old days. I’m going to do what Mr. X and I discussed as taking two people and tracing their movements through life and showing how they bump into each other, and how timing and such can bring them to each other only when it’s right. I can drive myself nuts with this stuff though. I start thinking: I wouldn’t have met him if this hadn’t happened, and that wouldn’t have happened if this didn’t, and that wouldn’t have happened if that other thing didn’t work out.

But I have located my starting point – The time period where the foundations were made for Mr. X to enter my life and I will tell you THAT story. I’ll tell the story that was going on at the same time all the other crap I was writing was going on, except it was the story I didn’t realize was a story.   I’m not sure how long it will take, but it is overdue in my opinion. It’s a whole new venture for me – and for us. So I do hope you will join me.

And Then (We’ll) Settle Down, There’s a Quiet Little Town, And Forget About Everything

The Love of My Life and the two furry loves of my life went to the beach this weekend. (Do I have to clarify that I mean Sammy and Thora? Because I know how your minds might think that two furry loves of my life are, well, something else.) In case you missed it, this weekend was the undoing of the semi-annual season change. Winter. Summer. Winter. Summer. In the fall you may notice it as the ass-fucking weekend where you’re frolicking alone enjoying 70 degree temperatures, when BAM, all the leaves are on the ground and are subsequently covered by 4 feet of snow. This weekend was the fortunate reversal where we go from 30 degrees to July practically overnight. Joy.

X, the dogs and I piled into Speedracer. We have been looking at getting an SUV as a third car between both of us. We need something bigger than the two-seater Speedracer, and Mr. X’s vehicle doesn’t fit the kids and the dogs. (I told you Mr. X has kids, didn’t I? No? Oh. Well he does. Two. And one of them told me Friday that I was soooo cool. I’ve waited 36 years to hear those words. Soooo cool. Don’t you forget it! ) Anyway, while we’re in the car, this conversation took place at exactly 5th and Florida, still in Northwest.

X: So Mike from the car dealer at the beach called me. He said they got a new truck in this week off a lease and it’s gray.
V: OMG! How much is it?
X: I don’t know.
V: What color is the interior?
X: I don’t know.
V: How many miles are on it?
X: I don’t know.
V: Didn’t you talk to him?
X: Yes.
V, officially becoming my mother: And so did you find out anything besides there’s a car and it’s gray?
X: No.
V: (inaudible grumbles)

Occasionally I would pipe up with another question, realizing, I would be better off shutting up and waiting until we got there, since Captain Detail had found out exactly nothing about the truck. I did make sure to open the windows in Speedracer enough times to get dog heads and dog slobber at our ears as they tried to get their little muzzles out the window, just so Mr. X would realize what we’re destined to deal with if we don’t buy a school bus a bigger car.

We arrive at the dealer and I just want to inform you that spending 4 hours inside a car dealer on the first Saturday of the year when it hits 80 degrees is not the ideal place to be. It was worse for Sammy and Thora who were inside Speedracer in the parking lot. And wait, it was worse for Speeedracer, whose engine I left running and A/C on full blast so the dogs wouldn’t die. And wait, it was worse for my wallet as I burned through most of the gas in my tank. Finally I asked if I could bring the dogs inside. Permission granted. I should have asked hours earlier.

Then begin the negotiations. The truck price was $22,800. I have been doing research and that was a very on target price for what we wanted. But Mr. X decided, based on no relevant information, that he wanted to pay $18,000. So we go back and forth and then Mike has to go talk to his manager. A minute passes. Then two minutes. Mr. X says, “No takes only 2 seconds.” I was convinced they were going to eject us from the deal KITT style.

They return with all the paperwork showing all the money they spent on the car. Detailing. Oil changes. Service. Car Fax. Blah. Blah. Blah. Then the manager comes over and explains why the price is already low and they can’t do it at $18 because they would lose money but maybe just maybe we could meet in the middle somewhere? So we say okay, they say okay, everyone says okay and we discuss something around $20.5. Then the manager gets up to go back to his desk and turns around and says, “We’ll just do it at an even $20.” Um. What? Then they run our credit.

Mike: The manager said you two have such good credit you can buy three cars if you want.
X: Oh no! We only need one.
Mike: Hold tight for Elvis.

Did he say Elvis?

Oh. Yes. He. Did.

Out walks an Elvis impersonator who is perhaps the funniest highlight of the entire weekend. He is honest, funny and straightforward. I like him. He reminds me of my dad and most of the old people back home who like to “tell stories.” Well, except he has more sideburn and more pompadour.

Elvis is entertaining us with stories about how he tried to buy a house in the same subdivision where we live and how there were all these problems (no, really? Is it related to the message boards and the people on there?) Then he’s printing some papers and he says, “Let me grab those off the printer out in the hall.”

He gets up to leave to go to the printer and as he’s out in the hall, beyond earshot for the answer and beyond sight for our reaction, he says,

“So when are you two getting married? I’ll sing at your wedding.”

Women Seeking Men; Murderers Need Not Apply

I know several people who found their spouses from Craigslist. I know people who found furniture from Craigslist. I know a lady who found and bought my Harley off the ad I placed on Craigslist. I know people who found apartments, cars, bikes from Craigslist. You see where this is going, right?

It was only a matter of time. Now we know that people have been killed for using Craigslist.

Warning: Using Craigslist may be hazardous to your health.

Generally speaking, anything you find on Craigslist should be tossed back like a hot potato. There are a few exceptions, but very few. I’ve become obsessed with this story. I cannot stop reading the news on it. I’ve dragged Cube, Phil and Hammer down with me.

I love when people say, “Oh it couldn’t have been him, he is such a great guy!” That’s my favorite part of the news whenever some idiot unravels and does something really stupid – all the idiots who come to his defense. Besides, I bet there were warning signs.   Think of all the times Sideshow Bob got loose and tried to kill Bart Simpson?   About 40% of the people I know right now who could snap and murder someone. And   when they came to interview me? I’d be all like, “Yep. I knew that mofo was going to slit someone’s jugular one of these days. I’m just glad it wasn’t me!”

A simple little name search for Philip Markoff on The Wedding Channel turns up their registry.   Because Pottery Barn yanked their registry list (I really wanted to see the Ginsu Knife Registry anyway) and because they pulled down their website AND their cache, I don’t have a lot to go on. Which brings me to a digression…how are they smart enough to get their website down and yank the cache which necessitates knowing the html code, yet, the idiot was too stupid to mask his IP address when soliciting hookers?

Anyway, one would have thought his fiancee would have been slightly clued in after what she wrote on their “story.” Right now it’s not rendering well in IE, so if you have Firefox, you’ll need to use that.)

Credits go to Phil for the “Editing!”

*By the way – people kept signing their guestbook last night and then getting deleted.

The Fire in Your Eyes Keeps Me Alive

We spent a rare but much needed weekend in town. Being that we’re Greek, Mr. X and I had plans for Sunday which was our Easter. I love that the Orthodox Easter (or as I call it, “Greek Easter”) happens after regular Easter because all the candy at CVS is half price already. Win! Anyway, this was the reason we didn’t go to the beach. He asked what I wanted to do the rest of the weekend.

“It’s time to start cleaning.”

You see, my summer plans include the exodus of myself and dogs from the city to take up residence with the man in the burbs. This means we have to consolidate two households into one. This means I have to figure out what to do with all the furniture I cherish so dearly. Thankfully there’s that mostly empty house at the beach…and the garage…sigh.

I needed to address what’s in every drawer, every closet and every orifice, with enough of a break inbetween to ensure my own orifice is, well, you understand.

Friday night I did my customary evening 3 miler, then came home and began to clean. I started in the bedroom closets. I opened a paper bag in the bottom of one closet and it ripped while I was looking in it. Several things I had long forgotten I owned came spilling out all over the floor.

Five dead and no-longer-in rotation vibrators. All the usual suspects were there. The rabbit. The dolphin. The little plastic one that was my first. The broken bullet. Some of them were malformed, not from use, but from time I suppose. Maybe from neglect. Poor wittle wabbit! I looked at Mr. X and said, “What the fuck am I going to do with these?” He asked if I wanted them. I said no, because let’s be honest. Who needs anything else when you have the Magic Wand? So he said, “I’ll take them. I’ll throw them out in my dumpster.”

Well, that was enough of that. Cleaning was suspended until Saturday morning, we headed off to Larry’s Lounge to enjoy the unbelievable weather and make out with the Megatouch Machine. En route, Mr. X is holding the bag with the five broken vibrators inside a hat box.

V: What are you doing with that? Putting it in your car?
X: I’m just going to throw it out on the way.
V: You mean in a garbage on the street?
X: That’s right.
V: But the homeless people dig through the trash looking for food.
X: Well, I think all they’ll find in this bag is your DNA. Did you ever wash any of these when you were done?

Eauuuuu!

He had absolutely no problem dumping that bag in the first trash can he saw. Well. Make that the second trash can he saw. The first one was in front of my building and before he could even think about it I said, “Don’t you dare!”

Cleaning commenced Saturday morning and after several hours and some Bloody Mary’s, we were ready for dinner. I’ve been following a strict South Beach diet for 6 weeks. I completely revamped my life. Since March 2, I have been all-South-Beach, all day, all night. I’ve run close to 60 miles. My clothes are falling off of me. Mr. X says I look wonderful. Everyone who knows me has said I’m melting away. And you know how much weight I’ve lost? Five pounds. That’s right. All that work for Five. Fucking. Pounds. That’s a major frustration. So I decided that now I’ll be taking weekends off my diet. And so off for pasta we went. Yum fucking yum. We ate at our favorite restaurant and I rolled my fat ass out of there 1000 calories richer, so to speak

We went back home at which point I discovered I’m officially 84 years old and my back was in major pain from being hunched over drawers and closets all day. I had to sleep with an icy hot on it. Hot as in hot, yes. Hot as in sexy? Not so much. Nothing screams, “Buddy are you sure you know what you’re doing with this whorebag like, ‘Baby, can you take off my Icy-Hot?'”

Sunday we went up to Baltimore to spend the day with Greeks. All I’ll say about that is, “There’s one in every family.” You know the one. The asshole? This post is too long as it is, so I’ll just leave you with this: Don’t look in any Dupont Circle garbage pails until after next trash pickup, if you see Icy-Hot’s on sale anywhere in the metro area please let me know, and the Psychiatrist is the person who probably most needs to be hauled off in a straitjacket.

Christos Anesti!

I Have More Than What I Wanted, But I Wish That I Had Started Long Before I Did

I knew Mr. X a long time before we met. In my heart, I always knew that. It’s a spin on the old cliche, “When you know, you just know.”

When I was five I had my first in a series of celebrity crushes.   I cycled through all the celebrity crushes the other day and tried to determine what it was about them I liked. Then I realized, “Holy shit. All my celebrity crushes remind me of Mr. X in some way.” At least, in terms of personality, he reminds me of them based on a character they played.

Celebrity Crush #1, 1979 – 1981: Greg Evigan

You probably know him from BJ and the Bear. He’s BJ. Not the bear. Mr. X does NOT remind me of a monkey. Just need to make that clear for you in the back, okay?

 

There is a picture of Mr. X when he’s about 27 at his mom’s house. They look incredibly similar. Mr. X won’t see this. He’ll text me in five minutes to tell me he looks nothing like BJ NOR the bear. But I will beg to differ.   Okay, so we established that this is how I like my men to look. Next!

Celebrity Crush #2, 1980: James Garner

Ohhh the Rockford Files. What a good show. I learned at 7 years old that for a man to be an alpha, he doesn’t have to be a loud, authoritative assmunch who shits on everyone in his sight. He can be that alpha more effectively without all the power bullshit. Because let’s face it, when a man is really truly an alpha, he doesn’t have to go repeating it at every chance he gets.

That’s my man, fo’ sho. Mr. X isn’t aggressive, but he gets shit done. And everyone thinks he’s their god damned best friend which can be mega-annoying because everyone wants to drain his time. Anyway. Pause for hotness.

 

Damn, Mr. X even dresses like this. Blazer/no-tie. Hmm, maybe there are more similarities than I realized.

Celebrity Crush #3, 1981 – 1984: Tom Selleck

Mmm…Magnum hotness…

 

I don’t know what it is about him specifically that makes him the epitome of cool. He was still cool (and smoking hot) when he dated Monica on Friends. Mr. X is so freaking “cool” that his kid’s freaking teachers call him for advice. I swear he gets the weirdest live-and-non-facebook “friend requests.”

Are we sensing the theme by the way? Older men, dark hair, drop dead sexy?

Celebrity Crush #4, 1995-1998 Tommy Lee Jones

I know. By the mid 90’s I was too old for celebrity crushes. But yet, when I saw The Fugitive, I was hooked. TLJ is the kind of authority figure a woman needs.   The man just has got it going on. He can take control of a situation and command everyone’s attention, loyalty and respect.

 

Everyone looked to Mr. X to fix things where we worked a long time ago. The ship was sinking and Celine Dion was singing “Nearrrrr, Farrrrrr, Whereverrrrrr you arrrrre…” but damn if everyone didn’t pile in to Mr. X’s office asking for lifejackets and direction.

Celebrity Crush #5, 1991 – Present: Michael Madsen

Swoon! Move over Brad Pitt, who was that hottttttie in Thelma & Louise?   Michael Madsen, you can fly to my desert location and bring me money anyday you want. This is my Mr. X. Saves the day. Saves the year. He always has a “way out,” he can always “fix it,” whatever “it” might be. I need that in a man. It is probably one of the most important characteristics for me – the guy has to know how to trouble shoot. He cannot get us lost in the ghetto and then freak out and not know how to get out of it.

MM gets two pictures because he’s just so hot.

 

Best gunman evah! Mr. Blonde…

 

Somewhere wrapped up in all my crushes and the love of my life, Mr. X is the composite man I’ve desired for the better part of 30 years. That’s why I tend to believe that despite what I said about not having a type, I really did have one all along. I’m sorry it took me so long to find him, or for him to find me, but now that I have him, I won’t be letting go.

Because what they say is right, when you know, you just know.

I Read the News Today Oh Boy

I’m not sure whose stupid idea it was to not get cable (mine) but the beach house of one Velvet and Mr. X hurts for some quality entertainment. Wait. That implies there’s no sex. That’s not true. We don’t hurt for x-rated entertainment of the self-made variety. But once that’s done, we’re relegated to our Amish exile. Since the neighbors are crazy…yeah. Anyway.

You can only watch your man paint the kitchen Caribbean Yellow with one opposing wall in East India Spice while you do crossword puzzles and stay warm by farting under the blankie because the effing heat is broken in your brand new house and no one knows why for so long before you get positively bored. With a half dozen crabs swimming in several bottles of beer in our stomachs, we sloshed out of the Claws Crab House in Rehoboth and on to the sidewalk. Both of us saw it out of the corner of our eyes. Simultaneously reaching into our pockets for change we ran toward that beacon of hope sitting on the street corner, fighting to get there first.

The newspaper machine! It had been at least three hours without contact from the outside world, and almost four hours without television. Unless you count that singing waitress at Claws, Holly what’s-her-name in the Milton Theatre production, we had spoken to exactly no one but each other. We were desperate to know what we missed.   Or at least to know what was going on in the Cape May/Lewes/Rehoboth Corridor.

Thank GOD we picked up that paper! You know what they say. One city’s news is another city’s hamster cage bedding. Well, maybe they don’t say that. But at fifty cents, this was wayyyyy cheaper than cable. And much   much funnier. Trannie Matchmaker has nothing on this shit!

Mr. X: Did you see this?
Velvet: Who the fuck is Corey?

I read the article. I still don’t know.

Okay. Fuck you. I read it twice. I still don’t get it. Thanks for calling me out.

Velvet: My mom’s Lazy Boy in Connecticut looks like this.
Mr. X: How does she sit in it?
Velvet: It’s not pretty. She flipped it over and tried to fix it and something snapped and went through her hand. She ended up in the E.R.
Mr. X: Are you kidding?
Velvet: Sadly no.

Mr. X: Look! He always answers his phone! Let’s call him now!
Velvet: It’s after midnight…

Velvet: No! Stop getting up to show me shit in the paper!
Mr. X: But I just want you to see her profile picture! Look at her black tooth!
Velvet: And that’s probably her good side.

Mr. X: This is someone’s job? To be a Wii Therapist?

Is it me or does she look happy? And what does “the matter of the disposition (or not)” mean? Do some people leave the body behind? And their tagline is “Honored to Serve All Communities & Denominations.” Really? Even the Jews. Because excuse me, but I think offering a Jew anything resembling a cremation might be a tad insensitive.

Two pedophiles, one butch Mommy Dearest teacher, a kid front and center with a look on his face like he was the last victim of the dork in the tweed blazer, a white kid on the left whose ass still hurts from his turn as the hole, a kid on the right practicing the harmonica for his role in the school production of Deliverance, and a dog. Best Kindergarten class picture ever.

Been Around the World

Mr. X and I took a whirlwind trip through Europe this weekend! Be jealous. Well. Sort of. We did it without airplanes. We did it without leaving the confines of the beltway. Sort of.

Italy: Saturday Morning
I finally got to cross off something on my to-do list. It is a rare moment when I find something about D.C. that I love. For City Paper’s “Best of,” I had several votes of my own, but I didn’t submit them because I hate letting a great secret out. So my hairdresser? The best. But I’ll never tell. My favorite restaurant? Better than the best. But I’ll never tell. But Saturday morning, Mr. X and I trotted off in search of something I had heard of before but had never ventured out to find.

I feel like I’m channeling Cube right now with a post about a D.C. attraction.

Litteris is this little Italian Grocery Store and Deli hidden in the much grittier Northeast but in a neighborhood I can’t help but liken to the Canal Street of my childhood when my parents would drag us down to the Bowery in the wood paneled Ford LTD…

Litteri’s had excellent reviews and since I have been in search of how to make a low fat low calorie Cannoli, this was the place to start. And end. We spent a lot of time and a lot of money, but it was well worth it and we’ll soon be going back to visit the store again, probably when I run out of Cannoli shells.

Germany: Saturday Night
Craving an Indie flick, Mr. X and I decided to head to E Street and catch The Reader. That movie was so good. That movie was so good. That movie was so good. That’s all I can say about that. Only one thing would have made it better. If the guy in front of us didn’t pull out his nail clippers during the previews and start cutting, wait for it, his TOENAILS in the theatre. And it wasn’t like, “Oh, my pinky toenail is hurting me,” it was more like, “Now would be a good time and place for a pedicure.” It was beyond gross. When I was saying loudly enough to Mr. X so that hopefully the guy could hear, “THAT IS SO GROSS THE GUY IN THE NEXT OFFICE AT WORK CUTS HIS NAILS AND I AM OFFICIALLY MORE GROSSED OUT NOW THAN I AM WHEN HE DOES IT.” Mr. X said, “Well, then don’t look now.”

Who doesn’t look when someone says “Don’t Look?” Really. That’s the last thing to say when you want me to not look.

I looked.

Very bad idea.

Greece: Sunday Morning
So I met the mom. Mr. X’s Greek mother who, unshockingly, is like a clone of my own mother – not in appearance because believe me, my mom is fighting age by use of bottled color much like her daughter, but they are like in the things she says. I was amazed. I swear if you disguised their voices like they do for the witnesses on the true crime shows, you would totally think they were the same person.

“Everyone in Athens is so rude. They never want to help you they just tell you to ‘go over there.'”

“Mr. X if you had taken my advice, you would have been much better off.”

“Aren’t you going to eat something? You should eat something. Your diet won’t be hurt by this lard soaked sugar-laden cherry turnover, will it?”

The best part might have been when she asked me if I loved Greece and I was like, “Um, no, not so much.” No, wait. The best part might have been when she started telling me a story in Greek and I was like, “Huh?” I telepathically said to Mr. X, “If she’s not yelling gamisu, gamoti or skata, then I really don’t understand, because the only thing they said in the direction of my brothers and I were the swears.”

That was that. She loves me. All parents love me. I said as much to Mr. X. Actually, it was more gloating in the way of, “Ha ha, compared to your ex wife I am your mothers DREAM! I went to grad school, I have a job, I don’t have kids I’ll make you support, she loves me. She might love me more than you.”

He said, “Keep that up and I’ll tell her you beg me to fuck you in the ass.”

Touche.

 

D.C. Cops Suck Ass Part 11: I Swear Chief, It’s Not Cocaine All Over My Face!!

It’s no secret that we’re suffering a bit of a crime wave here in the city. In addition to the dramatic rise in car breakins in Dupont, we now have a Spiderman-Burglar on the loose. The criminal(s) have been getting on to rooftops and breaking in by climbing through roof access or skylights.

A couple weeks ago, I came home to find most of my neighborhood cordoned off. I heard through the neighborhood grapevine that Spidey had struck again, this time breaking through a skylight on Corcoran and New Hampshire. The cops, typically a day late and several dollars short, were giving their report to the news teams who had showed up to cover this “breaking news.”

My neighbor told me after his car was broken into that he had a witness who called the cops and they were “within 30 seconds of catching him.” Sure. I believe you. Where’s that powdered donut? Anyway, apparently the cops have been promised that anyone who gets this guy will get a full day off with pay. As if their job isn’t cushy enough. Please. I spit my bailout tax dollars all over that bullshit.

So now I’ve noticed something. Cop cars parked all over the place. At the corners of several blocks in Dupont. The cars? Unoccupied. Yes yes, can you imagine being at that planning meeting?

“Let’s increase the perceived police presence in Dupont. We’ll call this new initiative PPP. Perceived Police Presence. Got it? We’ll synchronize our watches and park all our cruisers at the corners of every block. That should do it without having to work very hard.”

“Uh…Captain? What were those letters again? Three P’s? Is that a new bar? Do they have donuts there?”

Do you morons think this criminal is stupid? He’s been evading you for months and you think a handful of unmanned cars are going to throw him off? Even me, a mostly law-abiding but sometime Stop Sign roller has it figured out. I bet Spidey could break into one of these empty cruisers, eat a dozen donuts inside and you all wouldn’t even know your car was broken into. But you would know the exact variety of donut he ate, I’m sure.

Money For Nothing and Chicks For Free

Mr. X has an ex (the ex-Mrs. X) who is, how shall I put this nicely. Um. Batshit crazy, frighteningly angry and certifiably insane. Yeah. That sums it up. When hearing stories about her, I find it funny to climb to the top of my pedestal and make fun of her. It’s so easy to do. However, I realize that this makes Mr. X feel not so special about himself because ultimately he did make the decision to be with her for a point in time in his life. He’s not a tit for tat kind of person but I know that if he considers ever going into defense mode and bringing up my sordid past he certainly has a wealth of material.

Well Mr. X, love of my life, I present to you: the latest news of the ex you and I call, simply: “crazy guy.”

In case anyone forgot, Crazy Guy is the one who bought a house a block away from me after swearing for the better part of a year that he was not, in fact, stalking me, and “I don’t know how you could accuse me of stalking just because you had 18 missed calls from me inside of an hour, I show up in bars I know you go to, follow you to concerts 60 miles away even when you tell me not to, jog by your dog park and I’m sitting outside your building in my car right now!?!?!?!?!?”

A piece of information landed in my lap this morning which will probably make Mr. X scream with glee. I am officially part of what I truly hope is a one-member club: “My ex-boyfriend is now an infomercial-guy.”

Yes yes. It’s true. I have sadly discovered that Crazy Guy is now hawking products on a horribly designed website complete with “before/after” graphics and tons and tons of !!!!!!!! exclamation points.

I have officially had, inside my body, the cock of a ShamWow, Snuggie, Dual Action Cleanse, Time Life Series, Ped Egg, Oxi Clean, Ginzu Knife, Mighty Putty, Bedazzler Kaboom Billy Mays!!!!!! I tried to send the link to FreckledK but she couldn’t even bring herself to look.

Mr. X? You may begin your fun-making but ACT NOW! IF YOU BEGIN YOUR FUN-MAKING IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES, I’LL GIVE YOU AN EXTRA FUN-MAKING SESSION FREE! THAT’S TWO FUN-MAKING SESSIONS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE! BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! I’LL ALSO THROW IN THIS POCKET SIZE FUN-MAKER WHICH IS YOURS JUST FOR TRYING THE DELUXE PACKAGE! YOU CAN KEEP IT EVEN IF YOU CHOOSE TO RETURN THE WHOLE ORDER!!!!!

!!!!!!

!!!!!!

!!!!!!

I Was Born in a Small Town, and I Live in a Small Town, Probably Die in a Small Town

Mr. X and I have a beach house on the Eastern Shore in a new community. Since both Mr. X and I have worked for builders and developers, and since we’re no beginners when it comes to new homes, we were pretty sure we knew what we were signing up for.

Obviously, we were wrong.

The first time we saw a bunch of people outside in their yards we calculated the average age to be roughly 84. Surprisingly though, the residents of the community are tech-savvy enough to have started this message board on Yahoo. It wasn’t hard to find and register, and apparently they have not locked it down from the public. I foolishly signed up to receive every email message that posts to the message board and as any blogger knows full well, it is extremely hard to sit on one’s hands when a stupidity parade is on display.

The people who we share this community with, are, well, how shall I put this. Really. Fucking. Stupid. Mr. X has implored me to not respond. I am not to jump into the fights about the incompetence of the management company. I am not to reply that I worked for several developers. I am not to reply that I work for a management company. Nothing. He does not want me to end up on the Board out there like I am here in D.C.

So, the message board. I read probably three dozen replies to a post that started with someone stepping in dog crap and morphed to people wanting to put the dog crap on the offenders front door, to a fight about “poop stations” and I had to shut down by the time they were planning to stomp through the neighborhood en masse with white hoods and capes to lynch the offender. Oh, and I know what you’re thinking. It’s not me. I may rarely abide by the leash law, but I always pick up the poop. Always.

Suddenly this thought popped into my head: I live in fucking South Park. Except it’s Eastern Shore Park. Here’s the video interpretation of what our community message boards look like:

The other day someone posted about wanting to plan a bus trip to D.C. I politely replied saying I lived in downtown and would help them with anything they may need on this end. For me, that reply was really pre-damage control, as I’d rather make nice now so as to not get annoying notes on my front door about my dogs being off leash. I texted Mr. X that I had done this and conveyed my motives. At the same time, another thread was growing in replies debating the type of tree we should plant at the community entrance.

“I like Bradford Pear trees.”

“Oh no, I had those in my last community and the roots rip up the sidewalks.”

“Yes, my neighbor’s son’s bookie’s baby-mama had one out in Atlantic City and they didn’t like it. Wait. Maybe that was a Maple. Forget it.”

So Mr. X decided to reply to my email about helping them plan their D.C. old biddy bus trip and he pulled amateur hour 101.

Reply. All.

Even though he replied to my email it still copied to the entire message board. That shit landed in the inbox of 100 some odd retirees and busybodies with nothing better to do. Nice going Mr. X. Real nice going. If we get kicked out of Del Boca Vista Eastern Shore Park Sun City, I’ll kick your ass.

Eyes That Shine Burning Red

Oh D.C. You are so predictable. If there’s anything I can count on you kids for, it’s consistency. I can practically write your very own personal ad. “Enjoys voting for Democrats, jumping on bandwagons and getting “bailed out.” I noticed a new little habit of yours though. “Also enjoys running through Georgetown only when it’s 65 degrees, wearing Black Dog apparel.”

I happen to have two black dogs, but neither of them is a tee-shirt. Mine crap outside. I also happen to run just as often when it’s 15 degrees outside as when it’s 65. So having to share what was formerly a deserted path with you amateurs really pisses me off. And that you all look and dress the same? Criminal. I had to see way too many Black Dog tee shirts last night. Way too many.

I’m currently on the company warpath. It seems that someone, I’m not sure who, invented this great idea that when it’s your birthday, you get a corporate wide email complete with graphics. It used to be that they would send the email out to everyone and put all the names in the “to” box. But then a couple things happened. First, the graphics would take up so much space on the server that the email system would crash. Then we’d get messages from I.T. telling us to hurry and delete the birthday message. The second would be that inevitably, people would hit “reply all” to say “Enjoy your day.” Reply f*cking all? Really? Ugh. Now, for the stupid people, they put all our names into the “BCC” box.

Anyway, it came on to my radar that with my birthday coming up, I was going to receive one of these emails. So I planned to take the whole god damned day off to avoid this exercise, especially since I HATE my birthday. It’s just the day I was evicted from my first rental. I cannot stand when adults make major deals of their birthdays. I’ve heard of people renting out clubs for birthdays. I’ve been witness to people saying, “Great, you’re being mean to me during my birthday week.” it’s a week now? Oh. My. GOD. I just think it’s so, juvenile. What’s next? The Tooth Fairy? Well, if I had to choose, I’d like the tooth fairy to leave me Percoset instead of a dollar. I’d be much better off. So would you.

Anyway, I digress. I can no longer take my birthday off because someone scheduled me for a very important beating meeting that day.   I have to be at work. So, plan B. And I’m not talking about the morning after pill. I just spent the better part of yesterday (and today) ensuring that I will not be the recipient of that birthday email by accessing the corporate drive, and eliminating my birthday from any and every list I could find.

I am the company black sheep. But at least I ain’t the black dog.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

Please Tell Me Why the Car is in the Front Yard and I’m Sleeping With My Clothes On

This past weekend was the Drunken Housewives of Connecticut Reunion part two, which required a drive through Tony Soprano-land. Crossing the George Washington Bridge which currently carries a totally absurd $8 toll, I wondered if I should apply for recessionary pricing. The tolls to Connecticut are a freaking killer. I now understand why no one ever leaves Connecticut. By the time you get through the GWB and the Jersey Turnpike, you’re fucking broke.

At the risk of being labeled a stalker because of my now third consecutive love letter to my new lover, Facebook, I just have to say: Thank you.

To say I miss these women would be an understatement. They just don’t make friends like the ones who you have known for 60% of your life. Exactly 21 of us showed up, as well as a few guys and a lone ex, a cop who heard from one of his coworkers that his high school girlfriend was in town and at the local watering hole. When he came in you could see him trying to plot exactly how he was going to get to his ex, my friend who was oh so cute in high school but bloomed to Supermodel Status as an adult. Watching him maneuver the room was like   a game of Pac Man. He kept trying to get to the much coveted last dot, the Supermodel, but got detained by several other people in the bar who wanted to talk.

I turned to Supermodel and said, “This is just too good. Where’s my camera?” I managed to get several pictures of their encounter, my favorite of which is him staring at her boobs and her looking at me taking the picture. That had to feel good for her, and as she so aptly put it, “Yeah, I would guess he jerked it on his way home to his wife.” Awesome. Totally Awesome.

After we stumbled home around 2:00 a.m. (we’re too old to go to Port Chester anymore to take advantage of the 4 a.m. bar closings) I was instantly sobered up by reality:

I had smashed into a huge rock in my friend’s front yard and popped my tire. We took to task the idea of calling AAA. At 2:51 a.m. They arrived an hour later to tell me they couldn’t help me other than to tow me, but said, almost gleefully, “Nothing is open on Sunday.”

What? What kind of piss ass little town is this I grew up in? Nothing open on Sunday? We’ll see about that.

The next morning my friend texted me from her driveway to tell me to get out of bed so we could fix my car. We opened the phone book she had from 2004 and started calling all the tire places. It was true. No one was open. The one place we did find said they didn’t have the brand of tire I needed. We left on a mission. Costco, Sears, Mavis and a bunch of mom and pop shops. No tire, no workers, closed closed and closed. I then had the bright idea that would save my ass.

I called Daddy. What proceeds is the most absurd conversation I’ve had to date with them.

Me: Dad. Where do you get tires fixed?
Dad: Look in the phone book.
Me: I already did that. There aren’t that many places and they are all closed.
Dad: Did you call the place we went a couple years ago?
Me: Yes. Closed.
Dad: How about Sears?
Me: They don’t have the tire.
Dad: What about the spare?
Me: It’s flat.
Dad: Oh, well, call your brother and tell him to look in my third desk drawer and there’s a mechanic’s number there. I’ll call him and ask.
Mom, now on phone: That’s too hard! Don’t make her do that! Did you look in the phone book honey?
Me: Yes. Um. Let me call you back.
Dad: You’re supposed to bring your brother back to the city! I’ll call him and tell him to take the train.
Me: No don’t tell him anything yet. I’ll figure it out.

An hour later they called.

Mom: What are you doing?
Me: We’re looking for a tire place.
Mom: Well don’t waste all day, you need to get on the road.
Me: Mom! The tire is here in the car with me. How the fuck am I going to get on the road with only three wheels? It’s not a tricycle!
Mom: I know, but the snow is coming.
Me: Yes, this I know. I’m doing the best I can!

You see, I don’t call home for obvious advice. Calling home is what the natives refer to as a “last resort.” I will only call there when I’ve exhausted all my other options.

Finally we found a place that was open and I went in with the tire. The guy was taking my information and he asked for my address. I gave it to him and my friend K saw from the other side and said, “Your dad’s name just came up.”

Are you fucking kidding me?

I called back to my parents, sunning themselves in Florida and said, “I ended up at Firestone. They had you in the computer.”

My dad said, “Oh yea, I go there all the time.”

Jesus. Christ.

When You Come Close to Selling Out, Reconsider

I really mean to update more than once a month. And, yes, thank you, things are better than they were than when I last posted.

Last week at work, my partner-in-secret-but-plentiful-tattoos popped her head in my office to say, “Careful with Facebook. Our president is on there now.” I said, “Ohhhhh nooooooooo.” Our president is, oh, how can I explain. Classy with a side of perfect etiquette. She makes Jackie O look like an extra from a Jim Carrey movie. Just seeing her in the hall makes me stand up straighter and run to the mirror to check my lipstick. You just have to know her to understand.

Later, I saw a girl I’m linked to in the copy room and I said, “Why did you have to re-friend me? Did you get drunk this weekend and friend someone by accident and have to delete your whole profile?” She said, “No! Our president is on there! I had to make a work safe profile.” Jesus. Christ. I wondered if I should do that. It turns out all this started from my boss who accidentally sent a Facebook friend request to everyone in her personal email book. Though, my boss is cool. I wouldn’t care if she knew about this blog. Wait. Let me think about that while you keep reading.

I looked at my Facebook. Now, let me be clear on something, people. I have high school and college friends, and I have blog friends. And those two worlds rarely meet. Well, sometimes they meet, like with the Blonde, the PHD three and the Freckled one. But other than that? Yeah, if you think I’m letting pictures or personal information get out there after the whole last-name-gate of 2006, you are sorely mistaken. That’s why FreckledK, one of my dearest friends, is not my Facebook friend. Sorry FK. You are allowed to theive my newsboy hats, diet pepsi and harass my ex boyfriends to give me back my god damned lamps but you have scary bloggers on Facebook and I’m happy in my anonymity.

Magic 8 ball says, “Don’t do it! Damage Control is not in your future.”

That said, the reverse is also true. I don’t want my work-related real world on my blog or in my blog world, save a couple trustables. This is a very old story, we’ve all been around the block with this one several times over the years. However, it is still an issue. But did I put the Velvet link on my Facebook? Hell yeah. Because the people in my friend list are the people who scraped me off the floor of many a bar in the Harlem-Hudson-New Haven corridor; they are the people who helped my shellack my bangs straight up from my forehead in 1988; they are the people who called me in sick to school, from the school payphone. Cha-Ching! They are the friends of my youth, high school and college. And a few from after. But you get the point.

So now I have to worry that someone at work who I couldn’t trust with the material in this blog, will somehow see the link on my info page, the link I don’t care to remove, and then scroll through the archives.

This prompted me to tell a trusted coworker (who I have known from prior to this job) about the situation and she started reading some archives at her desk. Then she called me on the phone with two conclusions.

D: Wow. You had a crazy life. You were really bad!
Me: I used to be.
D: You are a really good writer.
Me: I used to be.

And so that is my long way of saying, I’ve had writers block for the better part of a year. I’m not good. I read back two years ago and I’m impressed at some of my own turns of phrase that I cannot comprehend where that talent went. When I lack that talent for whatever the reason, I just don’t feel like producing because it seems fake and contrived.

So, I apologize. I’m going to try harder. And I think if I get any Facebook requests from people at work who I would rather not know I was a dater of most of Northwest, I’ll just delete and block. Because that’s mature, right?

But Come the Wee Wee Hours, Maybe, Baby, The Gypsy Lied

I know. I’ve really sucked it for the last month. I promised and I left without delivering. I’ve been busy. Way busy. I have a lot of work and little concept of a recession outside the doors of my office. The blog even crashed on the server for a little while and I didn’t even flinch.

I bought a beach house. It was a mostly miserable settlement process. I had the usual fights with the family around the holidays and a fight with the man. I have refrained from living my life online because it just doesn’t seem worth it. My life was relatively boring anyway for quite some time there. The other night I found myself wanting to vent and when I thought of grabbing my cell phone and venting to someone, there just wasn’t anyone I could come up with who deserved to hear my venting because it just sucks so bad and so when some poor unsuspecting girl at work asked me in the bathroom how my weekend was, I bust out in a sea of crap that she probably didn’t see coming. Shit. And I only told her half of it.

As hard as I try, I’m never without drama. Sometimes in a good way. Sometimes in a bad way. And you know what they say, when it rains, it pours. Twenty four hours can change someone’s whole world. It did mine. I’m not sure that’s a good thing though. I’ll get through it. Sammy, Thora and I will get through it. We always do.

And How Did YOU Celebrate the Birth of Baby Jesus?

Obviously, I have become the major suckage at posting. I can’t even promise to try to be better. I don’t wanna.   While blogging in general will never jump the shark, my own blog experience has probably lamed itself out so much so that it’s like one of those feeder fish swimming along the shark that has just been jumped. So, I feel that I’m in the homestretch. I’ll try to go out strong. And by going out strong, I mean, I’ll finish up all my drafts and prepare them for public consumption.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mr. X: Baby? What was that video with the Grape Stomper we used to watch at work and laugh for hours over?

Velvet: Um, that thing they had on DC 101 that happened in Atlanta. Hold on. I’ll check Youtube.

I think that happened 11 years ago, though it just hit my radar in 2004.

We laughed for 10 minutes. Until I realized that there was a “related” video in the sidebar. So I clicked it.

HOW ON EARTH DID WE MISS THAT? Though to our credit, it did just air in November.

Best. Clip. Ever.

Stuck On a Rollercoaster, Can’t Get Off This Ride

On the flip side, you just can’t pay for entertainment this good.

At the company “holiday party:”
“Let us bow our heads and pray.” Um. what? I looked around the room to the mostly bowed heads thinking, “Am I in a cult?” I looked to either side, flanked by two Jews and a Pakistani, myself mostly an Atheist except for my belief in fate. We kept looking at each other and giggling. Did no one in that room besides us think that was just wholly inappropriate for work? This is what I get for working in Virginia.

On an Email from I.T. this morning:
“Whoever spilled sugar in the Xerox machine, please be more careful next time.”

On a mass Email from someone I don’t know to our entire company, a month after I first started:
“Blah blah blah, Betty’s daughter’s cousin’s nephew’s babysitter’s mailman has the cancer and needs bone marrow. Please reply and let me know if you can donate.”

In the Office Next to me, said to a Coworker:
“Do you think it’s wrong to clip your nails in the office? This one (points at me) says it’s wrong.” Said coworker, my friend D, replies in disgust, as do several other coworkers. I walked D down the hall and said, “So now you know why I begged you to come work here. It was my goal to surround myself with people who are not idiots. I’m not sure if I’ll make it though.” I’m going to start getting my Brazilians done at the office.

Blow Out the Candle, I Will Burn Again Tomorrow

Well, it’s official. I tried to hold out. I tried to fake it. I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I tried to reason with people and explain that the things they do seriously impede my progress in achieving their goals. I emailed an outline for how to make minor corrections to change everything. No response. I emailed again. No response again. I plead for everyone to get software training and to stop coming to me. I beg people to write things down when I teach them how to do something mega-complicated like insert a row and hide a column on Excel. I ask why everyone comes to me and why everything gets dumped on me. I also ask why I am suddenly responsible for a software I have no training on, and I’m not in IT. I’m in fucking Finance. Crickets.

I. Hate. My. Fucking. Job.

Tomorrow I get to go listen to my boss give a speech that I wrote. A speech that talks about how far we’ve come, blah blah blah.

What a fucking joke. I wonder if it can even be read with a straight face.

What I plan to do is convert myself from one of competence to incompetence. I plan to watch several deadlines come and go and to not have the work done. I can’t wait for the clients to start complaining about wonder-child who can do no wrong, Velvet. I cannot wait. Then, perhaps, someone will listen.

If this economy was any better at all, I would be so out of there.   This will be the place where I probably walk, and not give any notice at all.

That will be fun.

Slip of the Tongue

In more shopping news, Mr. X and I hit the “As Seen on TV” store in the always-deserted Georgetown Park Mall. If there is one two things you can count on in DC, it’s that tourists will always fuck up your day and if you go shopping in the Georgetown Park Mall, you will most likely be the only one there.

Mr. X decided to take advantage of the fact that no one was around. He picked up a “massager” from the shelf of the “As Seen on TV” store and put it against my trapper keeper. For a brief moment, I felt sheer ecstasy vibrating through my body.

Me: We must buy that!
Mr. X: You felt that through your jeans?
Me: {smile}

I was so happy that I would be able to “one-up” our girl FreckledK with her high marks for the Hitachi Magic Wand. However, I pass this on to you with a disclaimer:

If you are going to use this:

 

Make sure you are wearing something thick. Like snowpants.

Cold November Rain

And so it begins. Every Christmas it never fails that I end up shopping mostly for myself. This year, I’m afraid, will be no different. The bargains are just too amazing to pass up. Oh. Ended a sentence with a preposition. Sorry. Trying again: The bargains are just too amazing to pass up, bitches.

There. Better, yes?

Mr. X and I went out Friday to begin our holiday shopping. I warned him ahead of time that my “holiday shopping” excursions are usually very selfish, narcissistic events. We planned to go to Georgetown, then Bloomingdales because, as we all know, say it with me: “It’s like no other store in the world.” Mommy is at fault for my Bloomingdales addiction as it is the only place she would take me shopping for clothes since the 70’s. Well, until they closed that Bloomingdales and made it into a UConn satellite campus. Then we trekked to the Fag Ship Flagship at 59th Street. How I miss not living close to that store…

We blasted through Georgetown in a couple hours and headed north to Bloomingdales the Eurotrash Mothership in Chevy Chase.

The racks were marked at 40% off. Oh. My. God. Having worked in the buying office from hell, and for the dandy designer from hell who seems to be having his own holiday discount issues, I know all too well that you just don’t go deeper than 30% before the holidays. You just don’t. It’s retail-suicide. Having to take discounts deeper than 40% must have the entire garment district in 911-panic mode. Makes me wonder if they are cutting back severely on their cocaine orders. Or at least not risking bringing it to work anymore for fear someone uses it as an excuse to include them in the next round of layoffs.

Racks at 40% off made me positively gleeful. And they were allowing coupons and gift cards back. What the hell is going on? How bad is retail really doing?

On to Lord and Taylor. Mr. X shares my sentiment that Lord & Taylor has careened downhill faster than Britney did in the post-Federline years, but we poked our heads in anyway. Racks? 50% off. This, my friends, is where I obtained the coups of the month:

 

Chantelle Bra
Original Price: $64.00
Final Price after discounts, coupons, additional % off: $15.99

 

Wacoal Bra
Original Price: $51.00
Final Price after discounts, coupons, additional % off: $16.23

 

Le Mystere Bra
Original Price: $72.00
Final Price after discounts, coupons, additional % off: $26.99

People, screw the economy. Get out there and take advantage while it’s out there for the taking. Mr. X and I refuse to acknowledge a recession. So should you. It’s the only way to get through this. Besides, if that’s not a reason, how about this?

It’s tax-free DC week. Go! Run! Get those bargains!

My Best Friend Said You’re the Best Lick in Town

If there is even the remotest possibility that as an adult, you may become a teacher at a very hoity-toity Connecticut private school where the famous of the famous send their children for a high quality education, you might want to consider not starring in your own personal rendition of the Great American Strip Off, no matter how far away you are from home.

Let’s bring it back to 1996. My high school friend, K, and I went to a party in New York City. Someone rented out a bar in Union Square for a bash. At some point during the evening, I left and K decided it would be funny to take off her underwear in the bathroom and then rejoin the party and hand them to her boyfriend. Unfortunately, when she exited the bathroom, the heel of her shoe slid across a particularly slippery and freshly waxed floor and K went tumbling to the ground showing everyone a particularly slippery and freshly waxed vagina. Also very unfortunate was that she was wearing that dress of the mid 90’s. You remember it. You saw it on those girls in Queens whose boyfriends had neon lights under their cars – hoochie, tight, spandex, – not the kind that just floats back down to its original location.

K tried desperately to pull her dress down to cover her goods, but the debacle resulted in a Sunday morning phone call to me where she said, “Everyone saw my cooch!”

I actually didn’t believe her. I thought she was making it up for the comedic effect. And who could blame her? Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

However, six months later, we were at a bar drinking the night away with Connecticut’s finest. In walked a man who I knew from an old temp job I had out of college. I said hello and introduced him to K. He looks her up and down, smiles and says, “Yeah, I remember you. You were at that party in the city that night…panties in your pocket.” K turned beet red. Then she turned to me and said, “That guy saw my cooch!”

What K doesn’t know is that this was the source of much comedy in my family. The other night after I came home from our reunion, my dad said, “Was cooch there?” I think that will forever be her name in my parents house, which isn’t so bad considering they can’t remember to open the garage door before backing out. No. I’m not kidding about that…

And speaking of the reunion the other night, K said, “There’s a postscript to that story by the way.” I said, “Yessss?”

“That guy is married and has a kid now. And he’s in my class. And I didn’t put it together until he came in for a parent teacher conference. And then, during our meeting, the expression on my face must have suddenly changed because I realized that this guy who I was trying to talk to all serious about his kid’s future, this guy is the guy who saw my cooch!”

And If I Had the Choice, Yeah, I’d Always Wanna Be There

Ten years ago this month, I left Connecticut to move to Atlanta. Since then, I’ve lived in the ATL, Phoenix, Baltimore and D.C. Connecticut will always be home though. They don’t make friends like they did in high school…ones who will help you hairspray your bangs so that they stand upright from your forehead, or ones that will call you in sick to school from a payphone!

Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, ten of my high school friends and I found each other and organized a “reunion” this past weekend. Kids, I never had so much fucking fun in my life. I told Mr. X enough high school stories last night to probably make him wonder if he could trade the 35 year old me for the younger, more reckless version. Well, maybe not.

Anyway, I’ll have to break the weekend into a few posts. There’s just no room to cover it all in one.

My “longest friend” as I call her, my kindergarten partner in crime and I still are in regular contact. Of the eleven of us, all have been married except me. Two are divorced and I’m far beyond impressed at their strength to see a situation as a loss and get out. (Probably the reason I haven’t been married. Too scared I wouldn’t be able to leave.) Two had major problems conceiving babies. Another had major problems in labor and delivery – enough to make me reconsider having a child ever. One had a C-Section and felt them cutting her. One is pregnant now. One just had a baby and still dragged herself out to see us. One affirmatively does not want kids. One lives in Delaware. I’m in DC. One is in upstate Connecticut. But the rest of them are within several miles of each other. See, Connecticut is one of those places that’s so nice that people never really complain about it. And for the most part, they never leave. I wouldn’t have left except Atlanta Boy tricked me. I’ve been trying to claw my way back there ever since.

We covered a lot of ground this weekend. Catching up on 17 years of details in everyone’s lives, as well as in other people’s lives who we knew but weren’t in our little circle with was difficult. I’ve lived a boring life compared to what’s happened to some of our high school classmates.

One of our guy-friends was arrested in a major drug and gun sting operation when Federal Marshalls disguised as Fed Ex guys delivered his drugs to his front door. (Who has drugs fed exed to their house?)

Two of our classmates who never liked each other in high school somehow saw fit to get married and have kids. However, big problems in that marriage, a cheating husband, and they are on their way to divorce-land.

Some chick I worked at Pizza Hut with (shut up!) dropped dead from a heart attack. In her 30’s. More drugs.

My high school boyfriend allegedly married someone who looks just like me.

One of the best stories, however, came from inside our own group.

It seems that when you catch your husband cheating on you, finding a charge for match.com on your joint credit card isn’t the lowest low. Nor is finding his profile on match where he says outright that he’s married but looking to mess around. Nor would it be the day you kick him out of your house, having waited through holidays and children’s birthdays with the knowledge of what lay on your credit card bill and online.

It would seem that the lowest low would be a couple years later, when your now ex-husband tells you that through a series of operations we know as “transgender,” he’s going to become a woman.

The Sunday morning mass emails among the girls simply said, “You win.”

Top Ten Things I Won’t Miss Now That The Election Is Over

10) I’ll finally be able to retire my naive hope that Giuliani will pop his head out from under a Yankees bleacher and say, “Just kidding!” and get his ass back in the race.

9) That I won’t have to listen to people whine about how sad it is that Obama’s grandmother died, as if they knew either of them. Please. That’s not sad. He’s forty-something. He had a grandma all that time. Try losing a grandma at 8 because there was so much space between generations because your parents and grandparents chose to do something novel like, oh, wait to have kids when they could afford them instead of popping them out every 16 years and having five living generations at a time and expecting the rest of the country to pay for the kids. Now, that’s sad. Did I digress? Oh. Maybe.

8 ) The word “Maverick.”

7) People shoving election paraphernalia in my face or under my windshield wipers.

6) Having to listen to people complain about how Bush being in the White House for 8 years ruined their lives for one reason or another. It’s old already. It was old back in 2003.

5) Minorities everywhere bitching and moaning about how they are being held back by the white man. It’s all you now kids. Let’s see what you do with it.

4) The fear that Cindy McCain could be our First Lady and we’d have to follow her fashion choices for at least four years. Yikes.

3) That maybe for the 2012 election I’ll have more faith in one candidate over another to actually make up my mind earlier than when I’m standing at the voting booth.

2) Wondering if John McCain will take off his blazer so I can see what’s up with the arms.

1) That the worst of the economy is probably behind us as evidenced by the elation in the streets Tuesday and the lines for the WaPo on Wednesday. Public positivity alone can correct the economy, fuck your bailout.

Time to buy buy buy. Stocks. Real Estate. Get going. Because in 10 years when the Dow is at 15,000 and real estate prices are on the up and up, we’ll all be kicking ourselves wishing we bought more foreclosures and invested more in our 401K’s.

FINALLY THE TRUTH!

The title is a line from my favorite movie, Almost Famous.

Anyway, BJ sent me a link today, but I see that it’s made Yahoo’s Homepage, which means, in my world, it is offically news. I’ll edit with my comments, in italics.

Greenspan denies blame for crisis, admits ‘flaw’

WASHINGTON Badgered by lawmakers, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan denied the nation’s economic crisis was his fault on Thursday but conceded the meltdown had revealed a flaw in a lifetime of economic thinking and left him in a “state of shocked disbelief.” Deny deny deny. Doesn’t change the truth. And why the fuck did it take so long for this to land on people’s radar?

Greenspan, who stepped down in 2006, called the banking and housing chaos a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” that led to a breakdown in how the free market system functions. And he warned that things would get worse before they get better, with rising unemployment and no stabilization in housing prices for “many months.” No no buddy. This isn’t a once in a century tsunami. YOU are the once in a century tsunami. And your century is almost over. Please die.

Gloomy economic reports backed him up. New jobless claims soared to just under 500,000 for last week, and Goldman Sachs, Chrysler and Xerox all said they were cutting thousands more workers. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrials bounced erratically all day before finishing up 172 points after a two-day drop of nearly 750.

The financial crisis even prompted the Republican Greenspan, a staunch believer in free markets, to propose that government consider tougher regulations, including requiring financial firms that package mortgages into securities to keep a portion as a check on quality. If he was a staunch believer in free markets, hmm, why all the interest rate cuts? Why not let those “free markets” be free?

He said other regulatory changes should be considered, too, in such areas as fraud. Oh good. Let’s blame this on the banks. Yes, you had nothing to do with it.

Also looking for solutions, another banking regulator told Congress the government was working on a loan-guarantee plan that could help many homeowners escape foreclosure as part of the $700 billion bailout legislation. That plan is being discussed by the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, who is pushing the idea.

Greenspan’s interrogation by the House Oversight Committee was a far cry from his 18 1/2 years as Fed chairman, when he presided over the longest economic boom in the country’s history. He was viewed as a free-market icon on Wall Street and held in respect bordering on awe by most members of Congress. Well, most of Congress is fucking stupid then. Because if none of those bastards could see that by making the dollar cheaper and cheaper and cheaper that the free market was going to respond, in kind, by bringing the idea of get-rich-quick to predators, then all of Congress should be shot.

Not now. At an often contentious four-hour hearing, Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary John Snow and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox were repeatedly accused by Democrats on the committee of pursuing an anti-regulation agenda that set the stage for the biggest financial crisis in 70 years. It’s a little late Demmies. Maybe when all those people pulling down $30K a year were getting half million dollar houses, maybe you should have said something other than “Everyone deserves the American dream.” No. They don’t. Not if they can’t afford it.

“The list of regulatory mistakes and misjudgments is long,” panel chairman Henry Waxman declared.

Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a “mistake” in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that “a flaw in the model … that defines how the world works.” No no no no no. All sarcasm aside, this is wrong. When you have the power to make a decision that has several hundred levels of execution of which you have no control over, you have a MORAL OBLIGATION to not set it into motion until you do your due diligence. Everyone knew the banks were really stretching it to give anyone and everyone a fucking loan. We all knew it when our newspaper delivery boy was buying a five bedroom house in Leesburg. Okay? EVERYONE KNEW. And it’s not EVERYONE’S job to protect the economy from destruction. It’s the people’s job who are in the decision making positions.

He acknowledged that he had also been wrong in rejecting fears that the five-year housing boom was turning into an unsustainable speculative bubble that could harm the economy when it burst. Greenspan maintained during that period that home prices were unlikely to post a significant decline nationally because housing was a local market. Well, housing WAS a local market. But banks are a national market. Seems like a contradiction to me.

He said Thursday that he held to that belief because until the current housing slump there had never been such a significant decline in prices nationwide. He said the current financial crisis had “turned out to be much broader than anything that I could have imagined.” Right, and this makes you an idiot. But more important than that, it makes everyone who hung on your every word an idiot as well. Because the world followed your every move like little lemmings, waiting for you to pronounce the word of God. And everyone was hanging on the financial equivalent of smoke in mirrors.

Greenspan’s much-anticipated appearance before the House panel came as the Senate Banking Committee held its own hearing on what the government is doing now to get out of the mess.

Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, who is overseeing the $700 billion financial rescue effort that passed Congress on Oct. 3, said the administration was not only working to get federal purchases of bank stock started quickly but also the program to mop up troubled mortgage-related assets. He also said the government was working to make sure that directives in the legislation to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure were being addressed.

Kashkari said the plan could include setting standards that banks should follow for reworking mortgages to make them more affordable. He said the administration was considering a recommendation to provide government loan guarantees to cover the reworked mortgages to make the program more attractive to banks. This isn’t fair, this isn’t fair and again, this isn’t fair.

“We are passionate about doing everything we can to avoid preventable foreclosures,” Kashkari told the committee. Stop fucking with the market people. Let them get foreclosed on. Let them file bankruptcy. And let the rest of us who saved our money scoop up houses at rock bottom prices so in 10 years, we can sell them for a windfall. There’s your free market economy boys.

The FDIC’s Bair told the same Senate panel that the government needs to do more to help tens of thousands of people avoid foreclosure.

She said the FDIC was working “closely and creatively” with the Treasury Department to come up with a plan.

Greenspan was asked to defend a variety of actions he took as Federal Reserve chairman resisting recommendations to use the Fed’s powers to crack down on subprime mortgages, for one. And opposing efforts to impose regulations on derivatives, the complex financial instruments that include credit default swaps, which have also figured prominently in the current crisis.

He said that outside of credit default swaps, the bulk of financial derivatives had not caused major problems. He said the boom in subprime lending occurred because of the huge demand for investment opportunities in a global economy, and he blamed the crash on a failure by investors to properly assess the risks from such mortgages, which went to borrowers with weak credit. The bulk of financial derivatives has not caused major problems? Have you ever heard of a domino effect?

As for firms that package mortgages into securities, he said, “As much as I would prefer it otherwise, in this financial environment I see no choice but to require that all securitizers retain a meaningful part of the securities they issue.”

On the billions of dollars of losses suffered by financial institutions because of their investments in subprime mortgages, Greenspan said he had been shocked by the failure of banking officials to protect their shareholders from their bad loan decisions.

“A critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down,” Greenspan said. “I still do not fully understand why it happened.” The only reason all of this is happening is because people are greedy. And you can’t change the greedy, me me me feeling we have in the U.S. Everyone thinks they DESERVE a big house and nice cars and flat panel TV’s. If people did things like our grandparents, saved up before buying, this world would be much different than the one we have which lives on credit.

SEC Chairman Cox told the House panel that “somewhere in this terrible mess, laws were broken.” And Snow said that lawmakers should have responded more quickly to his pleas for stronger regulation for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were taken over by the government last month.

In the meantime, Kashkari, the Treasury official overseeing the bailout program, said there has been much progress, resulting in “numerous signs of improvement in our markets and in the confidence in our financial institutions.” Still, he cautioned, “the markets remain fragile.” Ya think? Gas prices are dropping several times in one day at local gas stations.

Doggie Adoption Sunday!

Holly and the Homeward Bound Crew are coming up here with doggies this weekend!

Sunday October 26, 2008 at the PetSmart in Potomac Yard, 3351 Jefferson Davis Highway, Arlington, VA 22305. Their phone is (703) 739-4844.

They are bringing about 30 dogs ranging in age from 9 weeks to 3 years. All dogs are spayed/neutered, current to age on vaccines, dewormed, heartworm negative and started on monthly flea and tick preventative.

The adoption fee is $250, cash only.

All animals can be viewed on homeward.petfinder.com.

They also desperately need volunteers! Please email homeward@ellijay.com and let them know if you can volunteer.   This is where I’ll be because despite my type-A, “take no shit from no one” personality, Holly has been bossing me around like her little bitch ever since we waited tables in that sports bar in Connecticut in 1998 and she was running my food and fell on her ass. Apparently that was my fault, because I watched her fall and didn’t offer to help because I was very very busy talking to some beast of a man with a shaved head and a ton of tattoos. (Hello? It was Connecticut in the late 90’s. What did you expect?) I didn’t get a tip from that table, and Holly had fish sticks in her hair and we took it next door to the Villa where we battled it out until some drunkard fell off his barstool, but on the way down said, “You two should wrestle it out. I’ll get the blender and make some jello!”

See you there, bitches.

the way you can’t say no too many long lines in a row

as much a part of me as i was a part of you, for 11 years. food was eh. sleep was an elusive, precious commodity. sleep was for the weak. with you i am anything but weak. you were never where you were supposed to be. you were always lost in the shuffle of hats and cars and bottles of whiskey. i sometimes found you alone and in the strangest of places. i took you everywhere. i took you places you shouldn’t have gone. i took you places you expressly were not allowed. i cannot believe all the places you used to go. to work. to therapy. on airplanes to dallas and los angeles. to a club in new york city where you were spotted as you gripped my hand and my hand gripped you. on a company cruise. to the house of a person so famous and so unaware of what was going on that socks would be knocked off. you almost took me to the hospital. twice. you ended a relationship for me by hardening my emotions. you helped me drive all night to go get my things. i used you to enable me to destroy things and people and relationships. you brought people in my life who I didn’t need. you took people from my life i probably did need. you taught me not to need anyone. you controlled me enough to make decisions that sent other people to their lowest low, to their breaking point, to the point where they too turned to relatives of yours for consolation, to a point where my actions because of you realigned someone else’s life in a totally different manner.

sometimes i think about you and wonder how you are, but i don’t wonder enough to call. i see enough of you evident in others. i hear enough about you in bathroom stalls. i speak enough about you through stories.

there was a time i couldn’t envision a life without you.

naturally we swim to the surface, but not until we’ve reached the thud on the bottom. the point where we say that was fun, or maybe not so fun, but i’m done. you can hear the thud.

that thud was eighteen months ago from today, in Santa Monica, where I asked myself, what the hell am i doing? and then i answered…nothing, anymore.

The Smartest Thing You Did Was Take a Chance With Me

Take a forgotten horseshoe crab shell, a spare set of house keys and no particular plans for Monday other than retrieving that horseshoe crab shell, and you’ll find out that your man is running rampant in your life for a few brief moments…chatting with your dog walker, eating lunch at a neighbor’s restaurant, and using your makeup.

Fortunately he only used my MAC eyeliner to write me a note:

 

Variety Hour Part Five

Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m okay, just got wrapped up in life and life got wrapped up in me and “update my blog” hasn’t been near the top of my list, despite the fact that I’ve been way busy, but not too busy to still find the humor in things.

Because I’m feeling very ADD these past few weeks, interested in so much but not invested enough in one topic for a complete post, I bring back my one-time series, the Velvet Variety Hour!

Earlier (and funnier) installments can be found here. And here. And here. And here.

The Bailout
Cut the fucking shit already. Let’s lay some blame where it belongs. Alan Greenspan anyone? Greedy investors? Stupid homebuyers? Add all three to my list, but mostly that first moron because the homebuyers are too dumb to know any better, or in the case of the investor, too selfish to care. It’s not like I never voiced my Greenspan hatred here. And here. And I knew this was coming, though, I can’t say that I would have predicted this “soft landing” for three years, then a major crash as ARM after ARM readjusted and kicked people out of their homes. What a mess.

Anyway, is it foolish to point out again, a “self-correcting” economy? And would it be worth anything to say, “Hmm, maybe you, Greenspan, should have not cheapened the value of our dollar with rate cut after rate cut?” And would it fall on deaf ears to say: Fuck the bailout. Fuck it. Throw caution to the wind, suck up the imminent depression that would follow, and let the economy shake out and recorrect itself. We should have sucked down a recession after September 11th, but oh no, a fake war and the interest rate decline just prolonged the inevitable.

The truth is easier to swallow when it comes with a dose of hilarity.

My favorite part is where he says none of this will work and the government will throw more money at the problem. Yup. Your tax dollars at work. Complain to your Representative. Oh, wait, not if you live in DC.

The Election
Christ on a stick, is it not November yet? From day one of this crap, the only thing I have wanted is the one who will fix the economy. Neither of these mofo’s can do that. The wheels fell off the bus of the two party system a long time ago. Now what? Is it possible to “deregister” to vote? Can I sell my vote on ebay? There is certainly a lot of election paraphernalia on ebay, but no one is selling a vote yet. Hmm. Wonder why.

I can’t help but watch the Katie Couric / Sarah Palin interviews that have divebombed the internet. I told Mr. X, to me, there is nothing funnier than two women dueling it out, fighting tooth and nail to validate their recent promotion. Couric is just lobbing questions over the net that she hopes will prove she can hack it in places that aren’t the cushy, warm and fuzzy morning set of NBC and Palin is trying desperately to prove she’s worthy of the VP Nominee.

Work
Aah work. How you continue to be a hilarious source of comedic relief for me. Policies continue to be invented because people can’t seem to understand simple things like “working from home is not allowed in our company” or “wearing a miniskirt with a slit up to your pubes is inappropriate.” Now we have a sign in sheet. The sign in sheet is manned by the newly-hired receptionist. The other morning I was attempting to sign in when I was distracted by a flash of skin and satin. I looked up in horror to find that Ms. Newly-Hired was wearing a satin “I’m going clubbin” style halter top. Break out the strobe light I was so distracted that I dropped the pen. Yikes. It makes me miss our last receptionist – the one who got the New York Yankees tattoo and the Y was actually IN FRONT of the N, instead of just being one giant logo. Ha.

Ms. Newly-Hired called in sick today because her car got towed last night. Or something else equally unbelievable. She actually reminds me of someone else I used to work with – you know that person, right? The one who always has a story. Anyway, when we all started poking around her desk we uncovered a tornado of disaster, not the least of which is that she stuffed all our vendor’s checks in window envelopes, without the address showing in the window. I begged them not to fire her because she’s so comical. Someone aptly said, “She’s so…stupid.”

Facebook
Oh Facebook, how I love thee. When my BFF from kindergarten told me I had to join, I was reluctant. But then she sent me a link to my 3rd grade boyfriend and I was hooked. I have spent the last few weeks swimming through a sea of familiar, comfortable, and happy, remembering times when friendships were easy and you could take them at face value instead of wondering what people’s agendas were or which personality was going to emerge from their crazy-toychest. I used to wander through life with the same innocent take on friendships that I learned in elementary school, which was, 99% of people were nice. Once I got to DC I learned the hard way, after befriending crackpot after crackpot that you really have to be careful who you are friends with. Most people I’ve come in contact with seem to have “issues” that require medicine cocktails and shit, I’m tired of being around people when their dosages are screwed up and they use that as an excuse for being an asshole. Over it.

Hot Yoga
It is official. I think I might be addicted to hot yoga. There’s something so satisfying about getting your body to a point where it is so limber that you can push one hip from behind and the other from the front and hear about 40 cracks in unison. Granted, my bones crack like I’m 80 years old, but that shit feels good.

Sammy & Thora
The Sammy & Thora tattoo is in full force with the artist. I’m very excited. I had the perfect place for it, the middle of my back, but Mr. X mumbled something about having to be the one who sees it most and until I come up with an alternative, that’s where it’s going.

Weekend!
Mr. X and I are on our way out to the beach tomorrow to see the very beginnings of the house that is being built. For us. So I don’t have to waste away in DC on the weekends anymore. Yay!

You Don’t Even Know What It Is That You’re Fighting For

Today I laughed and cried.

Driving to  the Vortex  and hearing the September 11th stories on NPR made me cry and cry and cry. It seems like longer than seven years. As I said to K this morning, time is a fascinating thing. Seven years ago, I still had two years left in a relationship, had several to follow, had not yet started grad school, and never knew of a Mr. X in my future. What a difference a day makes? Try seven years. I’m in a much better place. I’m not sure if our country is but our naivety was ripe for a shakedown.

There was a cat fight at work today of epic proportions. I texted as such to Mr. X. He texted back, “Were you involved?” No, because, duh, nothing I could be involved in could ever be described as a “cat fight.” Then he texted back and said, “If no one’s car got stolen in the end, then it wasn’t you.” True true. Ruining lives is fun.

One of the members involved in said cat fight had to, gasp, actually do some work. Some people had their car towed for one reason or another and they came in to our office. Meow Mix spent 20 minutes in a very heated debate with them explaining why their car was towed. It went on and on. And on. AND ON.

The People: “It was only there for 72 hours!”

Meow Mix: “It wasn’t 72 hours. It was there for three full days!!!”

Stupid people can make me laugh for 10 minutes straight.

Because Sammy and Thora Don’t Want to Hear My One Liners About the RNC Anymore…

Here’s what was going through my head.

  • I love you Rudy Giuliani.
  • Blech. Thanks for mentioning religion as the core of Palin’s small town.
  • That was like a stab in my ribcage.
  • Sarah Palin is hottttt.
  • Mr. Sarah Palin is hottttt.
  • Mr. X and I are hotter.
  • Can you people with your Sharpie-written signs try harder next time?
  • I recommend Kinkos. Wait. Are they still in business?
  • Palin will help “special needs” kids.
  • Is a pregnant daughter considered “special needs?”
  • Palin’s parents are here.
  • Reminds me of my parents who would be sitting there talking to each other the whole time, asking when the guy was gonna come by with the coffee and snack cart.
  • Thanks a lot mom and dad, I’m the VP nominee and you still don’t listen to me.
  • There’s a lot of cowboy hats there.
  • Mmmm…cowboy hats….
  • I wonder what hair products Palin uses. Her hair looks shiny.
  • God damned it, why won’t they show the pregnant daughter’s belly?
  • That’s really fucking annoying.
  • How far is Alaska? Mapquest!!!
  • Fuck. AL is the abbreviation for ‘bama, not Alaska.
  • 3,620 miles from Dupont Circle.
  • 82 hours of driving.
  • OH shit, that’s only to Juneau. (Juneau took me three tries to get it spelled right.)
  • Um, hello! It’s another 755 miles to Anchorage!
  • What are they chanting? I can’t understand these hillbillies.
  • Why do I live in DC?
  • Oh, because I got kicked out of Atlanta.
  • And I stole that car in Texas so I can’t go back there.
  • Oops. Bet that’d come out when I get elected for VP.
  • And the drinking…
  • And the drugs…
  • “In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And there are some candidates, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.”
  • D’oh. Snap! She got them there!
  • I need her speechwriter on my payroll.
  • I don’t have a payroll.
  • I bet her haircut costs more than John Edwards.
  • Hey, there’s a leprechaun here!
  • Oh wait, that’s just Cindy McCain in a really bad color dress.
  • Damn it. I walked out of the room to get a snack and I missed something and now some old guy is crying. Whaddi miss?
  • Was Sarah Palin even alive when McCain was taken hostage?
  • Was Cindy McCain even alive when her future husband was taken hostage?
  • I think Palin’s daughter just jetted out.
  • Someone nudged her and said, “Pregnancy is great birth control! Y’all can’t get pregnant again!”
  • Stupid hillbillies.
  • Palin’s done.
  • Hey! The Cat in the Hat is here!
  • Oh, wait. That’s just the bottom part of the American Flag.
  • OH MY GOD THERE’S THE PREGNANT DAUGHTER!
  • Some guy with white hair just came out to kiss the family one by one.
  • Richard Dawson is here!
  • Oh, wait. It’s just John McCain.

Those Were the Best Days of My Life

Driving to work Monday, I heard an acoustic version of Summer of 69 that I had never heard before. Hearing this totally pure and organic version of its former self, almost (almost) sent a tear roll down my cheek it was just that good. I always liked the original version, but the acoustic version is unbelievable.

Monday night, I was laying in bed, wondering why I had not yet fallen asleep. It was well after midnight and suddenly this thought popped into my head: Years ago, Mr. X and I had some email exchanges that I recall, though not in detail. I wonder if we were to read them now, would they show any evidence of where we’ve ended up? It’s too bad I don’t have them anymore.

Or do I?

I jumped out of bed, fired up the laptop and started combing through my email. I’ve had my main email account for just about 10 years now and I thought there was no way in hell I’d have saved any of these emails, especially since I never could have known the importance and significance they would hold for me, right now, at 12:30 a.m. on a Monday night / Tuesday morning, a little over a year into the best relationship of my life.

When I found an email from October 2000 from the lady from whom I adopted my Sammy dog, I knew I had Oprah’s chances in a Supermarket Sweep that I would find at least one Mr. X email.

“Velvet, I located the information for Tippy…” [that was Sammy’s ‘shelter’ name]

Sigh. I cannot imagine my life without this little dog…the dog who has mysteriously managed to procure a subscription to “Cruising World” magazine. Then I found an email where I placed an ad in the Macon Telegraph in April, 2004 because Thora had run away from the home where my ex was living.

“Black mutt in Bolingbroke, ran off Thursday night during storm. One blue eye, one brown, answers to Thora.”

I never really wanted dogs, but they have taken such a hold of my heart that I can’t imagine life without them. That pet chinchilla was fun, but the dogs are way better.

Then I found the folder that contained a variety of emails, at the very bottom of which I found what I was looking for. Not all of the emails, but emails where he was my boss, and I was his employee and we were discussing work related issues, punctuated by brief asides of a more personal, though not intimate, nature.

From August, 2004, there’s an email where I complained to Mr. X about how we were all being treated at work with our workspaces and he jumped to our department’s defense and ripped some new assholes. There’s another email from later that month where he went head to head with our poor excuse for a Division President, and made the idiot look like, well, an idiot. I started forwarding these emails and then Mr. X called, asking why I was still awake and laughing at how all of this is coming back to him, things he had long forgotten. I said, “You know, it’s the forceful, in-control person in these emails who I fell in love with.”

The original relationship was good. But this? This relationship blows everything else away. I loved my job, but sometimes you have to trade something you love to get something you love more.

I Don’t Know Why You Gotta Be Angry All the Time

I know all of you two of you are dying for the update of what happened in New York. Let’s just say that one half of Team Gloom and Doom was their usual self and the other half of Gloom and Doom was also their usual self. Let me rewind a tiny bit.

Friday I had planned to leave work a little early. Then someone decided at 10:45 a.m. to call a mandatory meeting for noon with the requisite meeting request. I replied and said that I was leaving early and would not make this meeting. Friday we were getting off work at 2:00, but the last time I went to New York on a 2:00 Friday I sat in major traffic the entire way. So this time I decided my internal goal was noon to get out of the office.

At five minutes to 12, someone said that they overheard I would have to crank out six Proposals for new business. I’ve never even done this before, and considering that two other people are responsible for Proposals, I had to ask “why me?” The answer came back that one of the two is totally inefficient and the other one is running circles around the inefficient one and so therefore I got the prize (of more work.) Then that person said, “Pick up your stuff, and walk out right now.”

I’ve never done something so bold before but my weekend was in serious jeopardy. So I did it. I shut off the computer and left. My logic here was this: If they can allow the aforementioned inefficients continue to keep their jobs, and there are more than one of them, then I’ve got to be allowed one tiny indiscretion. As I stood at the elevator, I saw the food for that 12:00 meeting coming in, and I could hear the craziness of the office behind me. But, I left.

Mr. X was not prepared for my Houdini-like escape artistry and was not ready when I was. So I lollygagged around for a bit, then harassed with several back to back phone calls and texts. Finally I just drove to his house and stalked him in his driveway until he came outside.

It took several extra hours to get to NY as there were breakdowns and traffic everywhere. When we finally got there I needed several drinks. We went around the corner to a Greek restaurant (go figure) and ate and drank, and then the bartender sent us with her high recommendations to a very specific intersection in the Village. We followed her advice and meandered around several bars before I practically fell asleep and we took off back to the hotel.

I. Am. Lame. And I never said I wasn’t.

Saturday morning we got up and promptly went off to Bloomingdales (it’s like no other store in the world) where I bought a pair of deeply discounted hooker shoes and Mr. X helped. Then we went over to my brothers where we met up with Gloom and Doom. Everything actually went fine, Gloom and Doom were surprisingly chipper and in good moods. Mr. X and my dad did a lot of talking. And somewhere in between that talking, we went to lunch.

My brother has a friend from high school who was married for 15 years and is getting divorced. My mom says, “Velvet, did you hear about Elton and Kiki?” I said, “Oh yeah, that they are getting divorced?”

And there’s my mom, as usual, stabbing her ketchup-laden french fry with her fork while simultaneously stabbing me in the heart, saying, “Yup, fifteen years down the drain.” Opinionated? Yes. But opinionated doesn’t cover the adjectives I’d use here considering that Mr. X is completing a divorce and that she knows this!

This is standard-bitchy with my mom. You just never know what you’re going to get, but you know you’ll get her nasty opinions, without a care for how anyone else may feel sitting in her presence and she’ll think she’s right. If you were to even bother calling her on it and say, “What’s the alternative? Stay with someone for 50 years who makes you miserable just so you can say you didn’t get divorced?” she’ll keep going, putting her foot in her mouth even further and making herself look like more of an asshole, lashing out at anyone in her path.

Yeah, I know she’s from that generation and we’re from this generation, but again, here we have it. I don’t believe in voicing nasty opinions that take a direct shot at someone who your daughter said she’s blissfully, madly, deeply in love with. Nor do I do believe in staying with someone who makes you miserable just to say that you didn’t get divorced, or to borrow her famous line, to say you didn’t quit. Divorce is a pretty big deal, and I’m sure these friends of my brothers didn’t just randomly decide without a second thought to get divorced just like Mr. X didn’t wake up one day and decide that today he wanted sausage with his eggs and also, he’d like to get a divorce. So I’m not sure what makes the Gloom part of Gloom and Doom think she’s such an expert because she and my father have bickered for 44 consecutive years now. What a claim to fame.

So it’s been two days since that bullshit and for some reason, I’m madder about it now than I was on Saturday.

There’s more eating and drinking, drinking and eating, walking around the city and discussions of returning and then there’s a drive home. Somewhere around Delaware I said, “You know, the last time I was driving through here, you and I started that x-rated texting spree.” He said, “I remember that. That was fun!”

So we started texting each other, yes, even while sitting next to each other, and then it got slightly heated and we just couldn’t wait to get home so we could rip each other’s clothes off. It was a long 2 1/2 hours from the Delaware border. Very long.

Working Too Hard Can Give You a Heart Attack ack ack ack ack ack

I no longer know what to think about the Vortex. During the week I’m fine, I just plug along, call the stupid people stupid, and do my thing. But then Sunday comes and I’m misery with a side of suicidal at the thought of having to go back. So clearly, I’m kidding myself. The last job I had that made me so miserable that I woke up on Sunday mornings with gloom and dread, I ended up walking out of. That was fun. Fuck you, Rich’s Buying Office! Buying shoes ain’t that fun when you have an idiot for a boss!

It’s exceptionally formal here at the Vortex. I’ve had an ankle tattoo since I was 21, having proclaimed that day, “I’ll never work in an office that’s so stuffy that I couldn’t have this tattoo showing.” I’ve never actually had to eat those words…until maybe now. The other girl and I who have visible tats feel weird when they are exposed. Girls here weren’t even allowed to wear pants until just a few years ago. Pantyhose all summer long was also a requirement. One can still see the last vestiges of this dress code among the masses: Suntan Pantyhose. Formal. Stuffy. Zipped up. Working Girl. 1980’s. Two steps away from shoulder pads. Err…make that one step. Someone just walked by my office in culottes.

Anyway, I’m not sure what act of God or revisions to the workplace policy manual it would require for the people at the Vortex to understand that the workplace is not an acceptable place for personal hygiene and grooming.

Someone came into my office with dandruff all over her shirt to ask where a budget was located. As I turned to my computer to show her the super secret drive to which I only obtained access a few days prior but that she’s had access to for a year, she brushed all the dandruff, originally on her shirt, all over my desk.

Later the same day, the guy in the office next to me was having an extra loud personal conversation while clipping his nails. He clips his nails at least three times a week, always while on the phone. I was so stunned the first time it happened that I had to text one of my co-workers who was home that day. “Here’s what you’re missing by not being at the office…”

I fear that these things will eventually just become normal to me so that instead of cringing and saying, “He’s cutting his nails!” I’ll say, “Did anyone see my waxing strips?”

While lamenting my woes to Mr. X, and discussing my hatred of Sundays for the impending gloom of Monday, we had the following exchange:

Mr. X: If it ruins your Sunday, it could start to ruin your Saturday. Then your Friday. Then what? Then it becomes my problem.
Me: I know but hello, recession, not a whole hell of a lot I can do right now.
Mr. X: Well you’ll have to figure something out. How long have you been there? A year?
Me: A year? Try four months!!! It feels like a fucking year!!

Mr. X and I are off to see the Wizard, I mean, Mommy, this weekend where we’ll enjoy 48 straight hours of her begging me to move back to New York and me saying “But I can’t” and not really being sure anymore, exactly why I can’t.

Homeward Bound Needs a Hand

In an effort to keep your attention pointed toward things that matter when it comes to animals, I’m plugging Homeward Bound again. Actually, Holly came up with a great idea and since I’m all about helping animal groups WHO CARE SELFLESSLY (cough, Friendship, cough, stupid WHS blog) here you go.

Dogs available for adoption live at their kennel if there aren’t any foster homes available. You know, much like children in an orphanage. What? It’s true! Anyway, so the dogs cannot have toys and treats because they are pack animals and will become aggressive. They only get a towel to sleep on. Trust me, I thought this was mean, but it’s what the group has to do to ensure everyone’s safety – dog and human.

So they have found an alternative to the towel. They are getting the dogs real beds. Well, they look more like cots, but still. If you can help, it would be greatly appreciated. A bed would be optimal, but if you cannot afford the $48 – $52 for it, then click the donate button on their website.

Doggie beds sold here. Any size will work. Select “Homeward Bound Pet Rescue Inc – Ellijay, GA” in the drop down box.

As always, the doggies thank you!

It’s Not How I Planned It, I Got a Key to the Door But it Just Won’t Open

There are intense feelings of satisfaction and of accomplishment in finding my own way, physically and figuratively.

I know there are zillions of GPS fans out there. Spare me. The only person I’ve ever met who hated the GPS as much as I, was the checkout girl at Dupont Italian Market. Though, she had actually owned one and had specific complaints with its performance, or lack thereof. I just hate the idea of a machine telling me where to go and what to do. I’d end up ripping it out of my car, telling it to fuck off, and throwing it out the window.

“Fuck you! YOU turn left!”

My brother was going to buy me a GPS for Speedracer but I said no. I like the challenge of finding places on my own. Besides, having worked for Developers who develop land on unnamed dirt roads, most of what I would have needed from a GPS wouldn’t have been available. Some of the best “directions” I’ve received could never have come from a GPS.

“Make the second left into the property where there’s a big wagon wheel over the entrance. Now, the guy is in jail, but his wife still lives there. He met her through a Russian mail-order catalog. Just drive by her and if she comes to the front door with a gun, just wave and drive faster. I have an easement over her property so she has to let you pass. All the way in the back of the property you will see a huge pile of tires. Don’t get out of your car, there are a lot of snakes back there. Just wait for the guy there, and he’ll come and tell you what to do.”

I’m so glad I don’t work for him anymore.

Today I didn’t feel like doing any work. I consulted Yahoo’s homepage for news. Then I read this. My favorite part: “A GPS is not a substitute for common sense.” Gee, ya think? I know plenty of people for whom it is. In fact, I know plenty of people who live their life by a GPS of some sort.

“I have to finish grad school by 26, then I need to be married by 28 so I can have four kids exactly two years apart before I turn 35.”  

Sunday I was having a selfish, “me-day” where I blew everyone off to sulk in my bed about nothing in particular. Well, okay, maybe the whole job thing has burned me out already, but that’s a story for another day. When I was finally fit for human interaction again, Mr. X and I were on the phone discussing some plans we have for this weekend and next. He said something that just means so much and in the spirit of finding one’s way, I wanted to share.

“I realized how cool it is that we got to know each other for five years before anything happened.”

It was his way of saying that he knows this is a once in a lifetime deal. Well, that’s my interpretation. I also think it speaks so much to his personality, mine, and ours together. It might have taken us a little longer to get where we are, but it was well worth the journey.

So this weekend and next, we’re off, to take peeks into various parts of our future. I think we’ve decided where we’re going, but not exactly how we’re going to get there. The getting there part changes daily, especially with me, whose unpredictable reactions generated this text from the man: “Baby, you are all over the place.”

I wouldn’t trade it for any GPS no matter what.

What Have You Done For Me Lately, Part Deux

It’s “What has Velvet learned about dating” week over here and we’ve got our next installment. You might want to grab a snack because we’re going to be here for a few minutes and you’re going to participate in the class discussion. Ready?

This is exponentially more important in D.C. because people are in love with their jobs here for some stupid reason.

A man’s profession is very very important in decoding how he will treat you. Let’s take a look at some various professions and what you can determine from each.

  1. Lawyer
    Likes to argue. Will never let you win an argument. Will resort to confusing justifications to trick you into believing he is right. Compromise is not a word he knows well because any sort of compromise means that he lost. Losing is not in his nature.
  2. Salesman
    Look, this ain’t no Willy Loman type of salesman to which I’m referring. His title will be something important sounding like “Pharmaceutical Consultant,” “East Coast Account Executive” or “Surgery Specialist.” Sounds important but really isn’t. Basically if his title can be dumbed down to being in his car all day gathering road rage while he “calls on” clients, and his clients are doctors to whom he brings lunches and other goodies, then he’s a salesman. And a salesman, ladies, will tell you anything you want to hear just to get what he wants. For him, it’s all about making the sale. And goodwill won’t last long with him – it’s always going to be “Yeah, well what have you done for me lately?”
  3. Entrepreneur
    La Zipcode had an email from a man on match who “owned his own business.” Listen up: This is not necessarily a claim to fame. Do not pursue this man because you think he has endless supplies of money and vacation time to take you to Paris. The man who owns his own business (and works alone) most likely does so because he hates working with, for and beside others. He cannot get along well with people, and thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Thinking you are smarter than everyone else is much different from thinking other people are stupid. Other people are stupid, I agree that that’s true. But most of us are not so arrogant that we actually believe we’re the supreme of the smarts. There is a giant exception to this rule. If he has employees, and he treats them well (i.e., does not refer to them as a “stupid son of a bitch” daily) then you’re okay. Starting your own business isn’t necessarily a sign of antisocial behaviors if you employ and play nice with others. But if he has no employees? Get out of there faster than Britney turned white trash.
  4. Cop
    Good lord do I even need to go here? Cops are arrogant assholes on major power trips. Bossy and self-important, you’ll never have any fun in this relationship because it will always be about his job job job. His job will always take precedence over yours because sitting in the cruiser eating a powdered, strawberry filled while watching the Picadilly Cafeteria across the street for any suspicious activity from the Blue Hairs is way more demanding than anything you could possibly spend your day doing. The only upside here is that he has handcuffs, but it’s not enough of an upside when you can buy pretty much anything you might want, here.
  5. Military, ex-Military
    Run. Run as fast as you can. These dudes are fucking scary. They like order, routine, and think nothing of waking up at 4 a.m. and expecting you to as well. Something happens to our boys when they enter the military – they get that training to hunt and kill and it makes something in their head snap. Laid-back military refugees are hard to find. Most of them are wound tighter than the rubber bands around Star Jones’ stomach.

What professions did I miss?

Why don’t you take a bathroom break and when we come back I’ll finish it up.

Online Dating:

Men describe themselves as better looking than they usually are. Women describe themselves as worse looking than they usually are. To us, “a few extra pounds” means just that: five extra pounds. If we were 10 extra pounds, we would, in the spirit of honesty, describe ourselves as curvy. Men? Yeah. Anywhere from 5’2 98 lbs to 6’5 550 lbs they think is “average.”

The premise of online dating is that you answer a bunch of questions for both yourself as well as your potential mate, spin the wheel and start bidding. These websites seem to be set up for failure. If I took the people in my life who were great boyfriends, fun to be around and passed my sniff test, most of them would not fit into the little prescribed box of qualities I would select.

My first boyfriend was a smoker. I would “never” date a smoker. But I did. For six years. Mr. X has been married before. While this doesn’t necessarily rule someone out for me, there’s clearly baggage there that I’d rather not deal with. But in both cases, it just worked out to become a wonderful relationship. If I used an online questionnaire to weed people out, I would have never met the loves of my life. So you have to think outside the box, and you have to test and jump out of your comfort zone.

Since these sites continue to include generic profile questions, I would like to make a suggestion to them. The world would be much happier if they included a section on teeth with a picture of his chompers required. I would like for this section to include information about the color of teeth, as well as how straight they are. There are a lot of bad teeth online. Just sayin!

In fact, all online dating questionnaires should be destroyed. In their place, I’d like to suggest the following:

1) Please submit a letter of recommendation from your dentist with full dental impressions.
2) Who is your last ex-girlfriend and what is her phone number so she can be called in as a reference? Yes, I think you’re lying when you say she was crazy.
3) What is your propensity to be psycho, scale of 1-10; 10 being the most psycho? (Add 4 to his answer.)
4) How big is your penis? If you lied about the above and I get far enough with you to find out otherwise, you will live to regret it. So now is your last chance. How big is your penis?
5) Do you have any gifts that keep on giving?
6)Do you now or have you ever lived in a trailer park?

Any others?

Those questions would save a lot of women, a lot of heartache. Myself included. Though, as I said to Mr. X the other night:

“I would take 20 more bad relationships to get to this one again.”

And he said, “Well, lucky for us, you don’t have to.”

Good luck girls!

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

This post has been sitting in my drafts since December 2006. Considering I’m a “think-it-say-it” kind of girl, I’m not sure why I never posted this. But the advent of several friends suddenly joining match.com encouraged me to dust this off and finish it up. Hopefully you will reap the benefits of the extra 19 months this was aged.

Consider it a farewell to dating post or something like that. It’s about what I have learned from dating.

Oh, make your jokes. I know you will say that I’ve learned nothing. But you’re wrong. I have been taking notes.

What I’ve Learned About Dating:

Disclaimer: It’s very important to stereotype. Stereotyping can save you a lot of grief in the long run because the only thing standing between a dead on, snap-judgment first impression and giving someone a second chance is just two drinks.

Here we go. Pay attention.

1) Men tell you who they are within 5 minutes of meeting them. Don’t talk too much. You might miss it, and you’ll spend the rest of your relationship trying to figure out what he already told you. In the beginning of any contact, the guard is down. As soon as you say a few things to pique his interest, his guard starts slowly going up. The more charming you are, the less he will be his true self. And what he chooses to say in those first few minutes is crucial. Is he talking about his dying cat, ex-girlfriend, porn? Pay attention. It will help and or save you later. Trust me.

What’s tricky here is that this works in the reverse too – before you realize you are interested in him, you might tell him about that clit piercing. I’d recommend you pretend your other lips are pierced (closed) and don’t say a word. Smile and nod.

2) Chemistry is a tricky, elusive, thing. You will have chemistry with people who are good for you and people who are not. It is very very important to make wise decisions here. Otherwise you’ll find yourself ripping off your clothes in the front seat of a Lexus with some guy who looks like Vanilla Ice and only when you are looking for your bra do you realize there’s a babyseat in the back. Um. Not that that ever happened to me or anything.

3) Dating is a numbers game. What did your Grandma say? You have to kiss many frogs to get a prince? Yeah, that. Get out there and meet potential mates as often as you can. Because you just never know from around which corner the next love of your life is going to emerge. I guarantee you that if you went out on 50 dates this year, no less than two of those guys would become something important in your life. Are they good odds? No. They’re not. But is there a guarantee? Yes. Because there is no way you could date 50 men who meet your minimum requirement to even get to date 1, and not find someone worthwhile.

4) The balance of power becomes warped if you accept favors from men. If he’s a man you don’t want to date and he did some work for you or did you a favor, pay him for it. If he won’t give you a dollar amount, figure one out. But don’t let the payment be in the form of a date. Only American dollars work here. I used to fall for this. Some mongoloid would show up and hang a few pictures and then I’d find myself out on the pity-payback date. If he is a man you do want to date, thank him however you see fit, (a little cocksucking never hurt anyone) but if he constantly brings it up or tries to make you feel forever indebted to him, then fork over some cash (or swallow.)

More tomorrow.

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