Monthly Archives: September 2003

Yesterday, figuring that I should try something different from step aerobics every once in a while, I went to the hip-hop/funk class at my gym.

This turned out to be a big, big, big mistake.

The class was taught by someone whose name ought to have been Shoshana, though it wasn’t. She was a white woman, probably in her late thirties, with two pigtails. Not the type of person you’d think would be particularly good at hip-hop.

But you’d be wrong.

She showed us a combination (I suspect you don’t call them “combinations” in hip-hop/funk class, but I don’t really know what you do call them, so I’ll call them combinations) and I was like, okay, I can learn that. It’ll take me a while, but I can learn that.

And then she kept going.

And going.

Of course, every single other person in the class was having absolutely no trouble at all following her. But what not-Shoshana was doing was so complicated and difficult that I wasn’t even thinking about what a moron I looked like, because if I’d diverted one iota of mental energy to that, I would have tripped over my own legs and fallen and broken something.

After about ten more minutes of St. Vitusesque lurching, I came to a very simple realization:

I am not funky.

So I left, got some dinner, and went home to write.

Today I went to see The Magdalene Sisters. (I should warn you that this post contains a very small spoiler, if you haven’t seen it yet and are planning to.) I don’t know if it was this particular theater, or this particular showing, or what, but my friend and I seem to have managed to attend the Old People’s Matinee. So the theater was full of old people talking in normal tones of voices to each other, saying things like, “She says she did it because she wanted the other girl to suffer,” or “Oh, I can’t believe she did that! Can you believe she did such a mean thing to that girl? I can’t believe she did such a mean thing to that girl.” It was maddening.

At one point in the movie, there’s a scene in which one of the laundry girls is very clearly performing fellatio on a man whose face we don’t see but whom we understand to be the visiting priest we saw in the scene before.

From four seats to my left, I hear, “Mumble mumble mumble LESBIAN ACT mumble mumble.”

Let’s disregard the fact that the context indicates with crystal clarity that it’s the priest.

Let’s disregard the fact that the act of fellatio, even when seen through a window on a movie screen, probably looks quite different from the act of cunnilingus. (I have no personal experience of the latter.)

But even disregarding those things

Last night at cheerleading practice, the coach told me that he’s been reading this blog for two months. He came across it by googling “Cheer New York.”

I was absolutely mortified. I feel like I was talking smack about my boss in the bathroom and he turned out to be in the next stall or something. I kind of want to go back and count the number of mean things I’ve said about people on the squad so I’ll know just how petty and bitchy he now thinks I am.

The problem with this plan, of course, is that I’ll know just how petty and bitchy he now thinks I am.

Luckily, he seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny.

Go figure.

So when I was four or five, we went (as we did not infrequently) to my great-grandmother’s house to visit her. The grown-ups all sat together and talked about boring grown-up things, and I went into the kitchen and raided the maid’s stash of Reader’s Digest magazines. (I had, unfortunately, left my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles at home.) There was an article in one about vampires, which I started reading and which scared me a great deal. The more it scared me, the more avidly I read, and when I got to the end and saw that the article was to be continued in the next issue, I pawed frantically through the rest of them until I found said next issue, and continued reading. By the time the grown-ups were done talking and everybody was ready to go, I was quivering with fear, even though it was still broad daylight and we were in South Carolina, not Transylvania, where, according to the article, vampires were rumored to hang out. (The article suggested that vampires might actually be the stuff of legend rather than of reality, but I dismissed that idea with a haughty toss of my incipiently homosexual head.)

Eventually, after we got home and had dinner, it was time for me to go to bed.

And I wouldn’t, because of course the vampires were going to come and kill me.

I cried and cried—I will note that I did not scream—until my mother finally loaned me the gold cross she wore around her neck, at which point I went to bed willingly, if still terrified. I’d have been happier if I could have taken a stake with me, but I wasn’t allowed to play with sharp things so I knew better than to ask.

My Jewish father (I was being raised Jewish and eventually converted to Judaism) was understandably disconcerted by the whole gold cross thing, so he went out the next day and bought a gold Star of David for me to wear to bed.

It is a testament to his skill as an attorney that he managed to convince me it would do just as well as protection against vampires. By the time he was done sweet-talking me, I went to bed feeling as safe as any four- or five-year-old possibly could in the face of what terrors the world might hold.

And I tell you, I wore that thing for years.

Somewhere along the line, though, I lost it.

And now there’s nothing to protect me against the terrors the world holds.

Shit.

I know I promised vampires, but once again I seem to be proving myself a man not of my word.

Because I’m seriously thinking of giving up the search for love.

Not the blog, mind you; that I’ll keep (though I do have plans for relaunching under a new name at some point in the near future). Just the eponymous search.

What’s sending my thoughts in this direction is the fact that my failure to spark with the guy who liked Darth Vader was actually more than just a two-date event. We saw each other a total of four or five times before making out and discovering our lack of chemistry. (This in itself gives me pause—it wasn’t so long ago (check my “best of” section) that I’d be on my back for any number of people I’d never met, much less gone to dinner with several times.) And this fellow seemed so perfect in so many ways. In fact, I believe he’s the first person I’ve gone out with in a very long time who fulfilled all my criteria: smart, funny, cute, compassionate, stimulating, and a top. Yet in the end there was still something missing.

So what’s wrong?

I don’t know if it’s a question of the watched pot not boiling, or of my standards being too high, or of something else I can’t even conceive of. (I would write something about “the universe not wanting me to be dating somebody right now” except that descriptions of the universe as a sentient entity that actually gives a fuck about what happens to us make me retch.)

Whatever it is, I’m making a decision here and now. I’m not going to search for love anymore. If it finds me, great; if not, then I’ll . . . I’ll . . .

Well, I’ll just . . . um . . .

This may be more difficult than I expected.

I was going to write a post about my first encounter with the idea of vampires, but I don’t have the energy.

Why don’t you have the energy? you might ask.

Because I’ve spent the last hour creating a Best of the Search for Love sidebar, which you should be able to see over to the right. Those of you who haven’t been reading this blog from the beginning and don’t love me enough to go back and read every word of the archives can now browse through a selection of my (and others’) favorite posts.

Vampires tomorrow, I promise.

Yesterday I got an e-mail with the subject heading “Do you think about being alone

For September 11, I was going to write a post about how gross I find it when people get all emotional about today, and about the 3,000 people who died here, but didn’t bat an eyelash at the savage genocide in 1994 of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda or the million Somalis who have died from the war and famine that rack their country or the labor camps and torture and forced abortion and sterilization with which China is destroying Tibet but then I passed an ice cream truck and all rational thought was driven out of my head by a desperate longing for a chocolate sundae with strawberry sauce.

The number of people who saw fit to e-mail me on September 8 and tell me I wasn’t useless

Of course, there’s nothing like your dad’s coming to town and allowing himself to be talked into buying you a Massani leather jacket to make your feelings of fatness, age, and uselessness fade as if you had never been anything but svelte, nubile, and of inestimable value to everyone around you.