He's just not that into me?

Slisette — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:28:24 GMT

I met Chris a few weeks ago, during the course of a beer soaked day. I was at a golf tournament, which is code for 'outdoor boozefest.' I don't even golf. I began with a Coors Light at 9 am, and progressed slowly but surely through the cloudy, hazy hours onto Harpoon, Newcastle, and Guinness. My beer selection darkened as the sun moved through the sky.

So, it is clear that I have an alcohol problem. I drink too much and too often, and once I have one drink, I can't stop. Alcohol is my drug of choice, it takes me away from myself, and for a long time, it was a pretty effective escape mechanism. But this was to be the day that I quit the bottle. At one point during this long day of drinking, I found myself in the back parking lot of a bar, staring intently at the smoking, wooden pipe that was being shoved in my face. Attached to the pipe was an arm that belonged to a man who was saying, "Come on, just go for it! One hit. It's not even pot, it's hash, it's so good, you'll love it!" At 28 years old, I have solid knowledge of the effect that pot has on me. I have spent enough evenings curled up on the couch, sucking down pints of Ben and Jerry, waving goodbye to my friends as they proceed with our evening plans without me. Pot immobilizes me, and makes me operate under the belief that every sentence I utter broadcasts that I am a complete idiot, and that everyone knows it, so I'd better shut up, etc, etc, etc…enough such experiences and I finally decided to stop smokin the ganja. It was easy to give up, until it's 4 pm on a day that I've been boozing since 9 am. It's at that point that my frontal cortex is too busy getting whacked on hops and malt to deal with the pipe in front of my face. "No, I really shouldn't…" the words are coming from my lips, but my hand is reaching for the drugs…until a voice pops up from behind my left shoulder, "So don't." And I look over and there is a smiling face with bright blue eyes, reminding me of what I already know. I know how to say no! I've done it before, and even survived! He opens the back door for me and lets me back into the bar, thankfully having not inhaled. I can't even describe how grateful I was, how simple it was to just walk away, having made at least one good decision that day.

We begin to talk, and I get mesmerized by those eyes. So blue, with long eyelashes, and such a nice guy. I don't recall if he was terribly interesting, but I was drunk, so clearly, I was spellbinding. At least in my opinion. Stories so good I had to tell them twice. But for some reason, he put up with me, and we ended up hanging out for the rest of the day. Saw a comedy show in the evening, and then headed to another bar where there was an art show I'd wanted to see. It was at this point, when I offered to buy him a beer, that I found out he's sober. A year and a half sober. And here he was, hanging out with my drunk ass (I later found out that he really liked my ass: "I just want to take a bite out of it!"). I took him home, and I continued to drink, as is my way. He slept with me in my bed, but we did nothing more than make out, because I was trying to be chaste. "You want to be chased?" he said. "No, y'know, like, chaste. Like, well behaved. " He's not the sharpest crayon. Unsurprisingly, he remained very respectful. We woke up in the morning and I swore not to drink again, and then told him he had to get going because I had to get dressed and get a move on. And, I had that morning after feeling. His snoring sounded exactly like my ex. He had chest hair that crept up onto his shoulders. Once the alcohol was removed from the situation, it didn't seem to groove as smoothly as it had the night before. The most remarkable thing about that morning, though, was the insistent feeling that I was done drinking. I can't divorce that feeling from the fact that I took home a sober guy. Something about him felt right for that moment, felt delivered from the universe. These are important times for me, and he's an integral part.

I was surprised when he didn't get in touch with me. I wasn't exactly desperate to see him again; I was wallowing in my new found sobriety, feeling like going on a date would be a challenge in social interaction that I was not quite up for. And I was kind of busy. But regardless, there's that nagging feeling...I know why I'm not that into him, but why isn't he into me?

And so, despite myself, I got in contact, and eventually we hung out again. I needed him to be my guide through a sober date, but he wasn't really able to deliver. We went to a movie (my idea -- real creative, huh?). Then we walked around. Then he said something about having to work early in the morning. I mean, seriously?

I can't stress enough that I am really not that into this guy. After swearing off dating a few weeks back, I've been so grateful to have the time and energy to devote to myself -- a much more difficult project than any man I've been with, but also so much more rewarding. So, getting all twisted over a dude is really not on the agenda. But I can feel that energy creeping back in...thinking about him, wondering, waiting for the phone to ring. But you know? I have other shit to do. There were thunderstorms this morning and now the sun's emerging. My cat is asleep on my pillow, I meditated for a half hour, and I have jobs to apply to. And shit, it's almost noon already.

Single...

Slisette — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:40:04 GMT

Right. I'm not Carrie Bradshaw, but in this section, I intend to give my inner Carrie her voice. The soothing sound of the laptop keystrokes, the pensive expression, the Manolo Blahniks in my closet (fiiiiine, the Steve Maddens from TJ Maxx). It all adds up to the exciting life of a single girl in the city. Except that this city is Boston, where the bars close at 1 am, the restaurants stop serving food at 10, and the expectation seems to be that Sunday mornings are for dressing in our Puritan bonnets and sitting our butts in church pews, and we can be found churning butter in the afternoons. But I digress. The differences between myself and Carrie go deeper than the cities we inhabit and the shoes we wear. At least I hope so, goddammit.

I have been compulsively dating since the beginning of the fall, when I finally moved out of the apartment I had been sharing with my ex-boyfriend of 3 years. You don't leave a 3 year failure of a relationship to go husband hunting, or at least I didn't. I wasn't dating so that I could get tied down, or at least not metaphoricaly tied down. If you had asked me then why I was so frenetically flirting, I would have said that I was just having fun, kissing toads, screwing toads, relearning myself as a sexual being, confirming my ability to attract, and creating fantastic stories to be told over drinks with my girlfriends. In retrospect and in truth, my motivations were mostly that shoving my energy off into a man made it so that I didn't have to deal with it myself. The excitement, the roller coaster ride of discovering a new dude distracted me from the scarier, more important work of discovering myself.

I posted my first article yesterday, about my new obsession, my sobriety. I think in some ways, I was misunderstood, as I do not mean to undertake a lifetime of abstinence, but rather to experiment with what it means to stop drinking. This comes after I have also given up dating, at least, compulsive dating. Look, the truth is that I have an addictive personality, so I smoke compulsively, I eat compusively, and I drink compusively. In the past year, I have gotten a grip on the eating, though I'm still not sure how that happened. Then, in the past few weeks, I've sworn of dating and drinking, and I'm sure smoking is soon to follow. In their places, I think it might be fun to finally write down the stories that I told over drinks to my girlfriends. The ones that caused them to say, "S, you have got to write this shit down." It feels it's been done (ahem, Carrie Bradshaw), but I'll put aside my perfectionistic penchant for originality and do it again. Please let me know what you think!