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Sour Grapes

I woke up a few minutes ago with my heart racing, unadulterated rage coursing through my body. I’d been having repetitive nightmares about last night, when I went to two of the oddest, most high-schoolish parties I’ve been to since high school. Both were heinous new (and old) media clusterfucks, and both contained unfortunately high concentrations of people (well, okay, two, but it feels like a lot to me) I’ve fucked. Or will, in all probability, fuck (why did that brand-new boy show up? the thing I was liking about him was that he’s not part of this world). Also out in force: people who would like to fuck me, but likely never will. Also: people I’ve fucked with, people I’ve fucked over. And one person, in particular, who I can say with complete certainty I’ll never fuck again.

The nightmares were about him, of course. Jake! I thought I was so over him. I mostly am! But there’s still this huge part of me that wants to punish him, or protect the world from him. I wince, of course, when I see girls fawning over him. But I’m not deluded enough to think that my impulse to warn them away has anything to do with protecting them. True, I don’t think he should be loose in the world, working through his issues on unsuspecting, vulnerable easy targets. But there’s no way any of those ladies is as easy a target as I was. And anyway, I don’t care about them, or him, really. I care about myself and my wounded pride. I care, mostly, about the idealized self I glimpsed, momentarily, through his eyes: a beautiful prize, something that someone as pretty and poised as he is would be proud to wear.

Ugh, and he is so pretty, and he so knows it, and it’s exactly that overweening confidence that makes him — made him! — irresistible. But my dreams last night weren’t about romance, they were about anger and competition: him fucking me over (professionally!) and me feeling impotent to stop him. And when he creeps into my fantasies, this is the context: I’ll flash on his prettiness — like, him asleep and innocent-looking at dawn, gold summer sun coming in through the window and slicing bands of light across his muscular back, his cherub-in-a-painting ass — and then immediately my thoughts will turn violent. It scares me, actually, how much the idea of hurting him (which I’d never actually be able to do; he has great reflexes from years of martial arts training) thrills me. Mostly I imagine the satisfying crumpling sound as my fist connects with the cartilage of his beakish nose.

And then I feel weird and gross and pathetic, because another odd truth of the situation is that there’s still this part of me that likes him. Not LIKES him, but just sort of sees the value in him as a person, likes talking to him, values his smarts and his skills. Above all, I think he’s funny and talented. He might be evil, but he’s interesting, you know? And how many people can you say that about? The other boys I’ve been killing time with lately, while they’ve got a ton of compensatory charms, don’t ring that bell. There’s nothing about them that makes me want to investigate, to get to the bottom of it.

But I’ll never figure Jake out. Duh! I’ll have to settle for trying to figure out me. Because seriously, what the fuck is going on there.

 

Fruit and Labors

Yesterday I went to Southern Maryland to pick grapes at my grandfather’s vineyard.

I know it’s not a normal grandfatherly hobby, growing grapes on a spare few acres of a friend’s tumbledown plantation, and I’m very grateful that I don’t have a normal grandfather.  It means I get to spend at least one day a year experiencing the satisfying thwock of ripe bunches hitting the bottom of a basket and later the even more satisfying squish of ripe bunches being run through a press, destemmed, pressed again, and turned into gallons of juice that will sit in oak and metal casks until they become a completely decent species of wine.  The vineyard at Cremona (that’s the name of the plantation) is one of my favorite places in the world.  No part of it actually technically belongs to my family, but every inch of it is suffused with my family’s history, and with my own history.  Here is the willow tree I climbed as a four year old, now split by a thunderstorm.  Here are the overgrown formal gardens I ran through as a teenager, terrified because I thought I had a giant black and yellow spider climbing up my back (it was a butterfly).  Here is the narrow spit of land that you can only get to via canoe where my terrible Kenyon boyfriend Nick and I passionately, stupidly fucked, grinding sand into our knees.  Here is the fig tree whose branches concealed me and my high school boyfriend Chris as we made out in tender, sweet high school style.

I don’t even remember being there with William but we must have gone together several times.  All my memories of being with him and doing things with him blur together; there are too many of them.  Six years’ worth.  I can’t think about William right now, which means that I really can’t think too hard about the last six years of my life.

He’s being kind of a dick, you know: emailing me passive-aggressively about how I’m better than my job, about how he hates reading about my dating online (so don’t read [website I work for], William!).  “How did you think I would feel when I read that?” he asked, about a recent thing I wrote about the acceptability of going dutch on the first date.  I didn’t think about how he would feel.  The point of our breakup is that I don’t have to think about how my actions will make him feel anymore.  I do care about him. It hurts me to know that he’s hurting.  His voice on the phone can still move me to tears.  I still love the sound of his voice.  I still love him, I guess.  It’s weird how long it’s taken me to realize it.  Or maybe I’ve known, all this time, that all I’ve been doing with all these other boys is filling up that William-shaped hole in my life, nuzzling into their shoulders the way I always did with him, biting their earlobes the way he always loved to be bitten.

But: I don’t want to be with him.  I’m happier without him. I’m happy alone.  If he really loved me, he’d recognize this and he’d want me to be happy.  I need to be alone and learn how to take care of myself.  I can’t be with him in any way without giving up a part of myself.  I can’t go back; I have to keep moving forward.

It has to be this way. I just hate that it has to be this way.

 

Protected: Call History

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Bacon

Today a schizophrenic homeless man almost punched me in the face. Earlier, I waited half an hour for the bus.  Earlier still, I waited half an hour for a car service guy who’d said he’d be there “in five.”

Oh, and I had a shrill conversation with my ex-boyfriend William, who is holding my digital camera hostage because he can’t find the cord that would enable him to download the pix he’s taken with it onto his computer.  “Have you tried looking for it?” I finally said, after weeks of politely asking to have it back.  “You don’t need to get upset!” he told me, incorrectly.

Also, I found out my cat — my fucking CAT– has a urinary tract infection, and I paid $50 for his antibiotics, plus $20 for the (tardy!) car that took me to the vet, arriving exactly one minute before they closed.

Oh, right, and!  I got screamed at on the phone at 9:00 by someone I’d written about for work, some I’d previously admired!  And then, half an hour later, I got an identical incoherent lecture from that person’s publicist.

On top of it all, a few days ago the Internet decided to cough up a clip of something vaguely humiliating I did a few months ago, instigating another barrage of hatemail and creepy fanmail (ex: “You stoopid cunt” “Fuck Jimmy Kimmel, yr hot! Lol”) in my inbox.  I can’t even read this shit anymore.  I can’t believe I used to be fascinated by it.  I guess I used to care a lot more what idiots and assholes thought of me.

I still care a bit, of course.

So, all in all, a la Alexander, it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, made doubly so because I’m very, very tired.  But the reason I’m still smiling right now is that the reason I’m so tired is … well.

Ahem. Like I said, I’m not good at writing about sex, or maybe no one is.  But the way I feel about last night is the way I felt about bacon after I started eating meat again after 1o years of vegetarianism.  Which was: I wanted everyone to understand how important, how absolutely essential bacon is.  I wanted to tell people about bacon.  I actually did tell people, several times.  “Have you had bacon? It’s like a potato chip made out of meat!”  Bacon.  Man, bacon is delicious!

 

Protected: California, rescue me. . .

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Letters and Sodas

I went back to my old apartment to pack my things and William was there, and he stood in the kitchen with me, not helping, as I bubble-wrapped the grey and blue Otagiri Horizon dishes I’d eaten off as a child. They were the only thing I was taking from the kitchen. Well, those and my cookbooks and my collection of back issues of Cook’s Illustrated and my Cuisinart and my microplane grater. I didn’t even take my one really good knife and my mandoline slicer. Everything that we’d accumulated — read: everything I bought for us— during the three years we’d lived together seemed tainted. Or cheap. Or broken. Or just too much of a bitch to pack. Fuck, anything was a bitch to pack with William hovering over me, chainsmoking and making almost-jokes that I might have laughed at if we’d still been together. Like: after the Israeli movers came and put all the boxes of my books and dishes and my new couch in their truck, and we were pulling away, I got this text from William:

“I hope they gave you the Yid discount.”

WTF, William.

Speaking of offensive stereotypes, I find that Israelis tend to like the shittiest robot-voice late-90s dance music. The first song the Israeli movers and I heard on as we pulled away from my ex-apartment was the WKTU robot-voice standard ‘Do You Think You’re Better Off Alone?’

Sorry, Susan. But that is what happened.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last time during the move that I had to see William. He was also there when my friend Lori and I came by the next day to pick up my cat. We fought about the money he owes me for bills, and it was sad to watch him goodbye to the cat. And as I was leaving he asked me for a hug and I felt obligated and so I hugged him and as I did he said, very softly “I hate this” and for just that one second every moment we’d spent that close together came rushing back at me.

And I dreamed about him that night, too. Ugh.

The problem is how comfortable I feel around him, in spite of the fact that at this point I basically feel that he’s a crazy person who I sort of hate. And I know it’ll be forever until I feel that comfortable around anyone again. Or maybe I’ll never feel that comfortable around anyone ever again. Maybe we were too comfortable, and that was the problem.

So now I live alone. Living alone is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I can’t even tell you how satisfying it is to, for example, look down at the toothbrush cup and only see one toothbrush. It’s kind of like that Jewel song ‘You Were Meant For Me,’ only not wistful. Like “I brush my teeth and put the cap back on/and I know for a fact that it’s going to remain on/thank fucking God.” I really cannot recommend living alone highly enough. How wonderful it is to not have to think about or care about anyone but yourself and your diabetic cat, at all, ever! In fact, I was just now singing the praises of living alone to my friend Bennett on IM at like 10:00 at night. “Lol. I always need to live with someone so that I won’t degenerate into complete filth,” he told me. “Oh, gotta go, my boo is home!” “I want a boyfriend,” I caught myself thinking. And then that song came on my iTunes.

Music is so fucking psychic for me lately, right?

 

Protected: German Chocolate Cake, Part 2

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Protected: German Chocolate Cake, Part 1

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