Brian spent the better part of Sunday evening watching Season 1 of MacGyver on Netflix.
Richard Dean Anderson, how many young boys did you define manhood for in the 80s?
Posts Tagged ‘Boys’
Molly Schoemann, Dog Person
November 21, 2008I’ve come to realize that in the search for a decent relationship, a pet owner is an especially good bet, particularly when the pet is a dog. Ownership of any animal means that on a basic level, an individual can handle a serious commitment; it means they can remember to feed something besides themselves, and that they’re used to dealing with shit on a regular basis. But I think a dog is still a special case. A dog makes you schedule your life around its need to urinate. A dog will come at you with love in its eyes and breath that smells like a zombie’s ass. A boy who owns a dog is a boy who is not afraid to come home every day to a creature that jumps for joy and gives him a look that says, quite obviously, “I love you I need you I depend on you for my every requirement take care of me forever.” This is no small thing to face. A dog may not be a child, but it is still needy and dependent and has a knack for embarrassing you in front of people.
There is also something nice about being in a relationship with a pet owner, at least when you like the pet and the pet likes you back. It makes your duo into a nice little trio. It gives you some shared responsibilities that make you feel like a team, and that teach you how to rely on each other and work together to make sure the dog is fed and walked and bathed. These are fairly minor tasks, no doubt; you don’t have to send the dog to school or teach it table manners, and you can walk around naked in front of it. But they are responsibilities no less.
I don’t know as much about the trials and tribulations of cat ownership. I have never actually dated anyone who owned a cat. I guess this is good, because I am allergic to them. This puts a slight damper on my enthusiasm, which is further dampened by much of my interactions with cats. I tend to get along best with cats who act like pointy little dogs. In fact, I have noticed that people tend to brag about their cats by saying that they are like dogs. This to me is telling. If cats are so great, why are they even better when they act like dogs? Why not just get a dog and save yourself the disdain?
I think that’s really my main issue with cats, is that they don’t seem to care for you particularly. You call to a cat, and he just stares at you from across the room, and then turns and continues walking away. You call to a dog, and his ears perk up, and his eyes get this look like, ‘Who, ME?’ and he can’t get over to you fast enough. Granted, it’s probably because he thinks you’re going to take him outside so he can finally pee, but still. I crave that validation. I want him to want me. I need him to need me. I need therapy.
I face enough coldhearted rejection in my daily life. When I get home, I want total, complete acceptance and love. Even if it comes with breath that could flip a tank over.
Let Me Say it Again
October 5, 2008If Brian didn’t want the kind of girlfriend who would force him to watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he would not be dating me. End of story.
PS it is so sad! And French! And subtitled!
PPS I cried at the end. He did not.
Jumping for Boys
September 23, 2008Excited by the prospect of going out to dinner, I decided on a whim to do my hair last night. Twenty frustrating minutes later, I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. I apparently have a huge gap of experience in the field of hair do-ing. True, I can’t remember the last time I made my hair do anything except be in a ponytail or a bun. But just because I don’t usually do my hair, does that mean that now, at the age of twenty-seven, I can’t do it, even if I want to?
Clearly, it does.
I now regret all of the opportunities I missed out on to learn and practice this useful skill. Countless sleepovers during which I dreamily allowed friends to curl my hair and straighten it and make it do things, all while I was busy watching Teen Wolf and picking at my cuticles, and not paying the least bit of attention to style or technique.
The bizarre hairdo I ended up with that evening looked like something my four year old niece would have come up with if she’d been playing with my hair while sitting on the couch behind me watching Hannah Montana. Eventually I gave up and went back to the bun.
There are two kinds of women in the world, I realized. Those who have acquired experience in the ways of hair and are fairly competent stylists, and those like me, who are constantly asking the first kind to do their hair for them.
I realize that some skills are innate—while others must be learned and practiced. However, I am now more aware than ever that I am bad at distinguishing between the two.
Take jumping, for example. A few years ago spent a weekend in a cabin in Vermont with a bunch of people I barely knew. I was one of the youngest people there, which made me feel super cool, and perhaps a bit overeager. At one point, the guys in the cabin began competing with each other to touch the floor of the cabin’s loft bedroom, getting a running start and leaping one at a time; and mostly missing. Guys who were just barely taller than me were almost making it, but I was the only girl there who seemed to want to try it myself.
“Hold on. I don’t find jump much. Do I actually know what I am doing?” I never asked myself that crucial question; I just assumed I had the skills necessary to compete. I took a running start, jumped with all my might and made it about two inches off the ground. A dozen guys I was vaguely trying to impress roared with laughter. I now know that I have absolutely no vertical jump whatsoever—although I had clearly assumed that I did. Now everyone else knew too. This is what we call natural selection at work.
Dinosaurs in Carland
September 13, 2008I drove to a job interview today in Brian’s Tahoe. To call his truck ‘big’ is an understatement. It feels like driving a building—a lurching, mutinous building, that doesn’t particularly care for the directions you give it, so it obeys them on its own time. Brian’s last truck was a twenty-year-old Landcruiser, so I guess he likes them that way. When I first got in the passenger’s seat of that Landcruiser, I thought it was the largest truck I’d ever ridden in. Brian’s form in the driver’s seat to my left felt like it was four feet away. Now, in the Tahoe, we sit even further apart. I never would have thought it possible, but it is even bigger.
When I am driving it, which is only when I absolutely have to, I sometimes forget how I look to other cars on the road. Since I feel small and timid behind the wheel, I assume that other drivers can sense my meekness, and are going to try and crush me. Chances are, though, that all they actually see is a monstrous blue Tahoe. When I realize this, I suddenly feel like a tiny bunny sequestered in the head of a giant rampaging killer robot. I’m sure everyone has those days.
Picture This
September 8, 2008Brian recently developed five rolls of film that had been sitting around the house for the last three years or so. About twenty percent of those photos involved the dog reluctantly wearing clothes. Mostly socks.
I think both of us might need hobbies? or children? or medication? Or all of the above. Tell me we are not alone.
Moving In
August 19, 2008For a long time I was inherently opposed to the idea of living with a boyfriend. In fact, I thought moving in together was a bad idea for any couple. I never mentioned this resistance to my friends who were cohabitating, but deep down, I always visited their shared apartments with a sense of doom in my heart. I didn’t have to tell them it was a mistake, I thought smugly, because they’d eventually figure it out for themselves, when one of them had to move out abruptly when their relationship ended. And THEN how were they going to divide up that living room set?
As you may have guessed, my opposition to cohabitation was not moral, but practical. I simply assumed that every couple I knew was eventually going to break up, and breakups were clearly harder to deal with when you were living together. This may sound morbid, but not when you looked at the way things worked all throughout high school and even during college. Couples got together, they dated for a while, then sooner or later things didn’t work out and they broke up. It was just the way things went. Why make things more complicated by having to decide who got the futon?
Perhaps I held on to this idea for a bit too long, however, because I continued to entertain it after college, and to apply it to couples who were still going strong after five years or more. Even then, I waited patiently for the other shoe to drop.
“It’s going to be tough on them when they finally break up,” I’d think to myself, grateful that none of my relationships had ever lasted very long. I had clearly been spared a lot of pain.
I am not sure where this enduringly fatalistic approach to relationships came from. My parents, still together after thirty years, have set a good example of marital stability for me. I have always assumed that I will eventually get married and live with my husband without worrying about who gets the entertainment center in the event that we divorce. It’s just the linear progression from dating to marriage that I am cloudy about. Marriage is supposed to last; but boyfriends are only temporary.
A year or so after college, came the first wake-up call. My friends began announcing their engagements. It was pathetic how startled I was by this news, every single time. This wasn’t the inevitable tragic ending I had predicted for all of these couples! I was happy for them, sure, but I also felt left out. Breakups I understood, but a vow of lifelong commitment? What was that about? It was like being the late bloomer during puberty; only instead of a flat chest, it was my capacity to comprehend lasting dedication that had not yet developed.
The final blow came at a gathering at a new friend’s house. After a few drinks I found myself complaining loudly that everyone my age seemed to be tying the knot these days. I believe my words were, “It’s like some sort of plague of marriage”. It was immediately pointed out to me that everyone else in the room was either engaged or married. From that day forth I determined to proceed with a bit more caution in mixed company. I also realized that maybe it was time to grow up a little.
Within the next several years, my rigid, long-held ideas about relationships began to adjust and mature. I began to seriously consider the possibility of moving in with my boyfriend of several years. I told myself that my reasons were grounded in practicality: I already spent more time at his house than at my own, and I was tired of living out of my backpack and watching my groceries spoil because I was never home to eat them. Why not stop paying rent for a place where I spent a maximum of two days a week? This pragmatism made the move easier to justify, and allowed me to think that I was moving in for the right reasons—grocery reasons.
When I finally did take the plunge, I made sure I at least had a room of my own in my boyfriend’s place (which we shared with several other roommates). But even then, I still spent most of my time in his room. I hung my clothes in his closet, stashed my makeup in his bathroom, and left books I thought he should read on his nightstand. The fact that none of this drove him crazy was, I realized, a good sign. The fact that I no longer pondered who would get the electric toothbrush charger if we split up, also boded well.
Now we have moved into our own apartment, just the two of us. Strangely, unpacking, rearranging and decorating with my boyfriend has been pretty much the same as it was when I moved into places with my friends. Maybe it’s not that strange after all.
Free Movies
April 28, 2008When Brian and I are feeling movie watchey lately, we try to find a very random free movie to watch (thank you, cable plan that offers free movies and is affordable when split between 4 people). We have done this twice and have thus far not been disappointed. The first movie we watched in this fashion was called “They Live”. Directed by John Carpenter and starring Roddy Peeper (damn straight), it was thoughtful and engaging while still managing to be timefully 80s. The premise of the movie: Earth is gradually being taken over by skeletor-looking aliens who mask themselves as wealthy and powerful humans. You can only tell the alien from the human by looking at them through special (and hilariously dated) sunglasses. Looking through the sunglasses also reveals that every billboard, poster, newspaper and magazine in actuality has no content save the same few simple, subversive messages—“CONSUME”, “MARRY AND PROCREATE”, “STAY ASLEEP”. During the middle third of the movie, the ‘hero’ and his reluctant sidekick engage in a no-holds-barred alleyway brawl while the hero tries to get the sidekick to don the sunglasses. They beat each other brutally for over five full minutes, which felt like an hour. Every time one of them gets up and helps the other up and they start to laugh and you think they are going to stop fighting, one then sucker-punches the other. This kept happening until it was funny, and then stopped being funny, and then was funny again, and so on. Good free movie!
Shame is the New Pride!
April 17, 2008Read it Here soon!
Here Comes the Sun
March 16, 2008Yesterday Brian replaced our light bulbs with fancy new ‘Daylight’ bulbs. They are allegedly the same wattage as our old bulbs. The first time I walked in the bedroom they seared my delicate retinal membranes like tuna steaks.
“OW!” I said, and at the same time Brian said, “Isn’t it great?”
While it is true I have mourned the absence of daylight for the last few winter months, I do not miss it in my bedroom at 11pm. And this was no ordinary daylight. The aggressive, blazing blue-whiteness of these bulbs seemed to radiate from the very air molecules around me. It was the kind of nuclear glow in which you worry that you are about to see how your bones are looking these days.
I could see Brian’s fair Irish skin beginning to freckle as he lay peacefully reading in bed.
Realizing that his intentions were good, I decided to withhold judgment for a few minutes, at least until my eyes adjusted, or bled, whichever came first. I sat down on the bed and squinted around. The walls, which Brian had painted a cheerful yellow when he’d moved in a year ago, had a sudden manic intensity from the glare. Every crack and painted-over hair stood out in sharp relief.
“Hey Brian,” I mused. “These walls– did you use a base coat? They just look so patchy. I never noticed before….so many imperfections…”
I went into the bathroom, and confronted my own mug shot. I had aged twenty years. The face in the mirror looked like it had two children and three open warrants. That was it.
I got into bed with my sunglasses on. Brian pretended not to notice. Relationships are all about compromise.
Stumble It!
