date machine : love machine

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: Show Me Your Penis

Love Machine: The Three-Year Itch

amboabe — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:06:00 GMT

How long can you stay in a relationship? Two years? Three years? Ten, maybe? I'm terrible at long-term relationships. I've never been in one that lasted more than a year, all things considered; and even then that period has been spiked with turbulence and uncertainty.

My friend B told me she starts to feel restless sometime during the third year of a relationship. That seems like a fair amount of time, right when the thrill of discovery wears off. After the rush of falling in love and the secret thrill of shared intimacy, the third year of a relationship leaves you with a simple human being. Nothing more or less. The great universal answer becomes a stupefying anti-climax.. Spending time together can be fun and exhilarating, but it must also start to feel like genuine work. It's the moment the love adrenaline wears off and the weight of the yoke starts to make your neck sore.

Realizing a relationship is going to require work and patience isn't such a terrible thing, but the three-year marker is when many people figure out just how much effort that really entails. It's when you realize the really hard stuff is yet to come. So it's natural to ask yourself if you really want to put yourself through all that for the person you're with. The answer is "no" more often than we like to admit.

Of course this is all conjecture, since I don't have any direct personal experience to reference. I've never gone that long because I've never found someone I knew in advance I wanted to fight for, and who also wanted to fight for me. I get nervous when I'm dating someone and I don't feel my metaphysical babies tingling in the ether. I fall in love easily, and hard. Being with someone and knowing I'm not in love with them makes me deeply uncomfortable. I worry that I'm pulling some sham on them.

But then, what begins as ambivalence and unassuming fun can just as quickly become fond familiarity. In the absence of other options, and not having any particular motivation to seek out new ones, a simple fling can turn into piece of luggage; a burden that's cumbersome but filled with caring nostalgia, if not quite passionate love. I went through this with one of my first girlfriends. We started seeing each other in the summer. We hooked up lots, laughed together, and teased each other. There wasn't any thought of relationship in my head. I didn't really understand what was happening, but I didn't stop to think about it.

Until I stopped to think about it. It had been three months and things were changing. It felt like the teeth in some universal gear had been moving all along, but only now was it becoming apparent. The improvised fun was becoming predictable. The jokes were starting to ring hollow, picking up hard edges that hadn't been there before. I wanted a relationship, but I thought that was something that inevitably happened. I didn't realize it was a choice you have to make; to look someone in the eye and agree to stay with that person to the exclusion of all other romance.

I started to think about whether or not this was the person I wanted to be in a relationship with. Things had been fun and easy but the accumulated weight of those brief few months started to build into a looming expectation. Where is this headed? I started to wonder if I wanted to commit further to a person who I had never had a serious conversation with, whose teasing felt like it was turning into bickering. I didn't want it. She seemed hurt. She said she didn't understand why we couldn't just keep having fun together the way we had been.

We could have. But I kept thinking about all the things I would have to close a door on to do that. I didn't want to do that for her. So I left.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: The Gun Show or Is That All You Got?

Love Machine: Morning Breath Kisses

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Love Machine: Morning Breath Kisses

amboabe — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:46:00 GMT

I've always been especially self-conscious about my breath. I grew up with an older brother who made great sport of trapping me in clouds of reek that came from his various orifices. I have especially acute memories of the fetid air that came out of his mouth in the mornings. As a pissed off teenager it was easy to come to the conclusion that my brother's breath smelled that way simply as a reflection of what a horrible person he was: loud, obnoxious, prone to tyrannical outbursts of violence. How could his breath not smell like a dying possum in a sewer?

This was the first time I ever considered the fact that I also might have bad breath in the morning. I didn't just consider it, I took as an irrevocable fact. I could never really get a sense for the state of my breath, whether it was rancorous or neutral, but the memory of my brother's breath from my childhood always left me suspicious that common genes left me susceptible to all his physiological shortcomings.

This is an unfortunate because I am fond of morning kissing. Waking up with someone, seeing their face inches from your, the first light of day swelling at the blinds, it's hard to think of something to do other than kiss. Life is too short, filled with obstacles and reasons things fail or fall apart. Waking up close to someone I care about, I've always felt a dopey sense of luck. It makes my body want to speak, and the most instinctive language is kissing.

The great cosmic joke is that, in this happy bath of gratitude, there's eight hours of digestive exhaust and stale bedroom air to stand in the way. Touching lips for the first time in the morning, still in bed, no time yet for tooth brushing or gargling, is a kind of blunt physical intimacy. It's a test, to see if your love and attraction can stand up to the physical realities of your partner's most unromanticized form. I know that I, for one, look like a bleery-eyed pile of trash in the morning. Even after a full night my face goes pale, my wrinkle lines deepen, and my hair turns into an entropic molding.

After turning over and seeing your lover's eyes already open, looking at you softly, there's a hint of trepidation in leaning in for the day's first kiss. Add in a night of boozing and cigarettes and it's almost too much to think about what fallibly pungent vessel it is that you're foisting on her.

With the women I've been in love with, I've never had any revulsion from breath or unflattering body odors. I still remember some mornings with one woman, the first touch of our dry lips, nudging them open softly, breaking the shy seal of morning mouth. The first warm breath mixing together, dank and fecund, slowly rubbing the wetness from the inner lip outward. The first shy probe of the tongue, not wanting to overwhelm the other person, slowly widening until the whole mouth is open and the kiss is becoming sexual.

Two women I've dated had the distinct taste of broccoli in the morning. I remember noticing it for the first time, recognizing the taste, and then quietly marveling at the fact that I actually liked it. If this were my brother, or some one-night stand, it might have been overwhelming. With someone I cared about it was sweet, another part of them that I wanted to touch and hold (or lick, as it were). That's the great trick of falling in love. It can teach you to crave everything in life, even the things that once might have been nauseatingly inconceivable.

I'm not sure if I have a "type" of woman, but if I do, I imagine her breath tastes like broccoli in the morning.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Making a Scene

amboabe — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:43:00 GMT

It's easy to run off at the mouth about love. Especially when sex is involved, words tend to flow with an earnest conviction. Big promises are made. There is an element of theatricality to romance that's impossibly seductive. My instincts are not extroverted ones (though I can be awfully gabby when my defenses are down). I'm usually quiet and speak in mumbling fragments, occasionally punctuated with a dry zinger. But I have been seduced, on more than one occasion, by the lure of the spotlight; imagining myself on stage, engaged in a grand act to symbolize the depth of my feelings for someone.

When I was fifteen, I cut class after lunch and caught a ride to another high school with one of my friends. My friend S went there and I was sunk in love with her. I didn't have a car and she lived on the opposite end of town and had her own boy issues. We had become friends talking on the phone almost every night for over a year. I wanted more.

My friend dropped me off in front of her campus and I hopped the fence. It was still lunch period for them and I was immediately caught by one of the roving hall monitors. I told him I was just visiting and wanted to see S for a few minutes. He knew her and took me to the area where she was eating with her friends.

I was excruciatingly embarrassed. We had never seen each other in person before. It was 1993. There was no Facebook or Google. The only thing I knew about her were the general descriptions she had given to me over the phone. Pale, blue eyes, blonde hair, freckles. I had no idea how she would react when she saw me. I felt like a disgusting skink with a dirty mullet and floppy shorts. I had hoped she would be under a tree in some remote corner of the schoolyard.

Instead, she was eating in the band room with thirty other students. I had a full audience staring at me as soon as I walked through the door with the lanky guidance counselor who explained that I had stopped by from one of the other schools in town to say hi to S. The room rippled with gasps and wide-eyed stares. S blushed and looked at me in amazement. I felt like I wanted to burrow a hole in the ground and crawl away to some subterranean nest.

Nothing dramatic happened. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. I didn't have some grand proposition or a dozen roses stuffed into my backpack. I just wanted to see her. We talked outside for ten minutes then the lunch bell rang and the guidance counselor told me I had to leave. I gave S a quick hug and then followed him off campus.

I felt a dizzy sense of relief that nothing catastrophic had happened and that she hadn't run screaming from me. I was also stranded in a part of town I had never been in before and had no money for bus fare. So I walked home. It was an eight mile walk and took me close to three hours.

A year later she moved away for college and I never heard from her again. But I still remember the tingle of walking onto the metaphysical stage. I forgot my lines and lost the part, but it felt good to try.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Love Machine: My Mother

amboabe — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:08:00 GMT

Last year I started using the phrase "love of my life." It had never occurred to me to say it before. I had been in love plenty, and at various points felt like I would have been ready to make a life-long commitment to those different women. Still, I never would have thought to say one or the other was the love of my life. It's an ugly phrase to me. It's written on greeting cards, said in shabby television shows for very special holiday episodes, and scrawled into high school diaries with dizzy abandon. I'm sure I don't know myself well enough to speak for what will happen during the remainder of my life. I can't predict where I'll be in the next few years, so how could I expect to honestly say I know how I'll feel? How could I come to such a conclusory statement, speaking for an entire lifetime?

Parents allegedly form the romantic model that we're instinctively bound to pursue in our lives. Some people want to replicate mommy or daddy to continue the peaceful domesticity of their childhoods. Others fall in obstinate love with their parent's diametric opposite as an extension of developmental anger and personal autonomy; to reject the unhappy models of their upbringing.

I was wholly in love with my mother when as a child. I swooned over her, found her scent in clothing and furniture, clung to her indulgently, romanticized her into soap operas so that all the faceless actresses in tight clothes and red lipsticks became ciphers for her.

I think I was twelve the first time I told her I hated her. I was trying to impress on her the fact that I needed to be driven across town to a friend's house and spend the night there. She was sitting in bed reading the paper and barely paying attention to me. I don't remember her reasoning, but she stood firm. I wouldn't be going. I felt betrayed. How could this woman stand in the way of my momentary happiness to such an unreasonable degree? I needed fun and play, exotic foods from the pantry of my friend's house, the luxury of his unfamiliar toys and videogames.

Instead I was shackled with the tedium and monotony of my own room and my own things. I could feel tears coming on the more I thought about it. I remember spitting out the words in a last gasp of brinksmanship to show how painfully serious my need was. I stormed out and sat on the floor of my room feeling spurned and abandoned. My dad followed me in and tried to mediate, explaining her position in some rational terms that I didn't pay attention to.

When I was in high school I fought with my mom like an entrenched solider. My parents' marriage was failing and she hammered against my father, bending every personal shortcoming into a metaphor for how he had stopped caring. As this was happening, I followed right behind, bending back the responsibility for their onset fighting so that it pointed back at her. She was the one picking all the fights, creating all the conflict.

When I was seventeen I saw my mother cry for the first time in my life. I was driving around with her one gray afternoon, running errands when she started talking about why we had started to fight all the time. She started explaining her side of things, the sense of isolation and of not having a partner who cared about her. I pounced on the rhetorical opening, describing at length what a faithless and selfish partner she had been to my father.

Those arguments were rote by that point, they were thoughts I had let fly at her before. They always seemed to bounce off her impenetrable hull like foam pellets, becoming less and less impactful the harder I tried to hurl them. This is the part where I want to stop writing; where the memory starts to taste like battery acid, becoming shameful.

When I was finished talking, I saw her face soften in a way I hadn't seen before. We were stopped at a red light on Shaw and Palm in Fresno, CA. She was staring straight ahead at the stopped traffic in front of us. "It would just be nice to know that someone was thinking about how I feel," she said. Her face pulled against itself, something cracked in her cheek muscles. Her eyes looked wet and I saw the first line of a tear fall down her cheek, like the trace of a small finger.

When you fall in love with someone for the first time, you get swept away on a wave of your own emotion. It feels like you're being filled with thoughts and feelings that weren't there before. It animates you and it's something you can see in someone else. It's like being doped together. You feel the warm high spread through your body and your thoughts, and when you look beside you and see the same glazed over look on your lover's face, it feels like you've arrived. Watching my mother cry at a red light, knowing that it was because of something I had done, I felt like I was at the far end of that narcotic tunnel.

When the dim shape of those words, "love of my life" began taking shape in my head, it wasn't on the upslope of some ambrosial high. It wasn't the gauzy idealism of looking at a new lover and feeling surprise at having wound up with them. If there's one thing you learn from your parents it's that you can't ever walk away from them. You can cut them off, stop talking to them, tuck them away into a mental lockbox and pretend they don't exist. But they're always there, the whispering voice you hear when you're alone and defenseless.

I was in the hospital last week with my mother. We would walk laps around the 5th floor as part of her recovery routine. In one room we kept passing, a woman with white hair was lying flat on her back. She was crying out someone's name, over and over again. "Ben! Beeeeeen!" She would arch her hips upwards and push her chin towards the ceiling with each call. She sounded like she was in trouble, had fallen and wouldn't be able to rise again on her own.

The love of your life: the person you miss most when there's nothing else left.

Previous Posts:

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

amboabe — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:42:00 GMT

I've developed the reputation of an ego-centric fop with some of my friends because I talk about certain people I'm sure have crushes on me. Not everyone is in love with me, I'm told over and over again with disgusted head nods. That's not what I think, but it's obvious when someone you're impartial to is attracted to you. It gets harder when you're attracted to them back. With people I've really liked I go almost blind to their cues of attraction. I have to rely on friends to translate their behavior into digestible niblets because I'm usually too busy deconstructing all the reasons they wouldn't want me.

My friend S went on a date with a woman this weekend. He emailed me after it was over and said he was ready to fall in love with her. He sent her an email the same night and told her he had a great time and wanted to see her again the next weekend. She wrote back three days later saying she had a nice time meeting him but was too busy to pursue a relationship. In my head that sentiment is followed by a sad face emoticon.

Talking to S about it, my natural reaction was to denigrate the woman. It was the end of the day and I was tired, I had been traveling all afternoon, lugging bags around airports, train stations, and shuttle vans; but I'm never too tired to turn into a surly bitch for show. Clearly this woman had to be in the same league as protozoal slime to have not appreciated S's finer qualities. She must have been a mule, a dim-eyed trough of experiential excrement.

I hate it when friends do this with me. Swallowing the vinegar of rejection isn't soothed by hearing someone dehumanized, especially when they had been such a fond point of reference a few days earlier. What hurts about being rejected isn't the idea that someone doesn't like you, it's the dislocation of realizing you had heedlessly flung yourself after someone who you weren't paying attention to.

It's an unknowable abstraction that sparks first attraction, a sporadic collection of setting, energy, humor, style, and physical cues. There's no accounting for how and when it will happen. What doesn't help bring it about is need. The times when I've been out with someone and felt some internal push for companionship, an urge to quell my insecurities about myself and my circumstances with validation from a woman, I've failed abjectly.

Rejection is funny, ultimately. It's a joke of probability, and there's little need to personalize it, especially after a first date. I remember the first time I was turned down. I was in seventh grade and had asked E to "go around" with me after slow dancing together at an afterschool dance. She thought about it overnight and met me on the playground the next day with two of her friends. She presented her fist to me with the words "push me" written over a blue dot. I pushed the dot and she opened her fist. The final judgment was written on her palm. "Let's just be friends."

One time I was dancing with some friends in a college bar that we used to go to when we were still in school. I had left my drink on a runner bordering the dance floor and at one point I walked over to re-intoxicate myself a bit. Two undergrads were standing near where my drink was and their eyes went wide with apprehension as I walked towards them. The alpha undergrad stood between me and her friend and nodded her head incredulously at me. "Sorry, we're not interested," she said.

I've been told "no" in a lot of different ways, but I had never been rejected in advance. Apparently the simple idea that I might have something flirtatious to say to either woman was so distasteful that it needed preemption. I loved it. I reveled in that story for months. It delighted me to have caught such a brief glimpse of myself through the unflattering lens of their eyes. It was like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror.

Rejection is worst when you need something from another person. The frame of mind that's brought a person to such a lowly state of desperation only makes things worse. Nobody can give you anything. You are the only thing you get in life. The only possession you have is the one you get right from the beginning: your naked and shriveled body crying helplessly in the doctor's arms.

Previous Posts:

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

amboabe — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:55:00 GMT

I'm bad at letting go. When I was a kid my grandpa gave me 500 Danish crowns one summer. It was a lot of money and I wanted to treat it solemnly. I couldn't imagine buying something like a toy or candy with it, though those were the only things I really wanted at the time. I saved it instead. I took it back to America, thinking I would wait until there was something really special to use it on, something that would then become a physical keepsake of my grandpa. I put the bill into a book, keeping it pressed and in perfect condition.

Years went by and I couldn't think of anything to buy, the longer I waited the more attached I became to the bill itself. Soon it looked less like money and more like an ornate shred of art from that country, I could see all the little dotted lines swirling around one another to form the picture of royalty. The bill itself started to become the keepsake and I wound up never spending it. Once it became symbolic, I couldn't deal with the idea of converting it into something other than what it was.

I got a new cell phone last week. In moving everything over from my old phone I encountered one hurdle. I can only bring around 30 of my saved text messages from my old phone. Which is a problem because I've got close to a hundred old texts, received and sent, that I've held onto like little emotional trinkets.

Most of the texts are from the last woman I was seeing. I sent a text to my friend P on Saturday to see if he knew a way I could save all the old texts intact (without forwarding them and losing the original sender and time stamp) and he immediately sniffed out what I was doing. "Do you really think that's a good idea?" he wrote me back. "What's that going to accomplish?" I've got lots of saved stuff, I protested, not just from her.

There's one text I got from J two years ago. "The avocados are freezing but it is good for the wine, life is good." I remember the night she sent it to me. We spent the first few months of our friendship hooking up here and there. I started to fall for her and took her out for dinner one night (which consisted of a cheese plate and a few glasses of wine). I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend, though I was careful to phrase it in an adult way with lots of parentheticals and qualifiers. "That's not going to happen," I remember her telling me.

A few months later, after we hadn't seen in each other in a while, I remember getting that text late one weeknight. I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom writing a videogame review of something called "EA Playground." The text came unprompted, a small reminder of the lingering fondness still between us. So I saved it, to remember that moment we had, which was left behind. A little rag taken from a time and place where I used to be but can't go back to.

I've got folders in my email account created to save old emails from women in my past. I've still got a bankers box in the closet that has the one letter I ever got from the first girl I fell in love with. She wrote it to me from a summer school class while she was trying to learn how to type. The whole thing was printed in dot matrix, except for her signature, which had a little heart looped into the cursive.

Now I have a dilapidated old flip phone with a bunch of old text messages trapped inside, little flags, moments that I might otherwise have forgotten by now. Looking back over them, trying to figure out which should be deleted, permanently tossed into digital oblivion like abandoned binary rags, I remember one of the last nights she was here. I rented a car and drove into the countryside to see her one last time. We stayed up until 5AM, walking by the house she grew up in, seeing the deli where the Russian vendor used to give her free piroshki because she was so pretty.

When the sky started to lighten it was time to go. I drove back into the city, feeling like I was in a narcoleptic quicksand, trying to keep awake just long enough for the hour drive to the rental place. After I dropped off the car, I stumbled into the BART and rode back to my neighborhood. As I sat down I sent her a text, saying that I had survived the drive and was safely returned. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the glass window and put my iPod on shuffle. I remember the song that was playing, something I hadn't heard in years, "Gates of the Garden" by Nick Cave. I started crying. It felt like I was losing an organ, but there was no physical pain, it was all brain sadness and numb body.

A week earlier, I sent her an entire sonnet as a text. I remember sitting at my desk after lunch, copying three lines into a single text, then saving it as a draft so I could copy the other lines and send the whole thing at once. I remember making sure to start with the last three lines and work back to the beginning so that she could read it in order. The first time she told me she loved me, it was in a text message.

It's been nine months since she left. Before I got my new phone I hadn't looked at any of those old texts in months and now I'm going to have to start deleting. Many of those scraps are going to wind up left behind. I don't want to let them go.

"Still think you are cool :-)" I remember the night she sent it to me. I remember the one I sent to her that it was responding to. Click. Now it's gone.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

amboabe — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:33:00 GMT

The stupid thing about aphorisms is that I can never remember where I heard them first. At some point in my life someone told me that you're never supposed to go to bed angry in a relationship. It might have been a greeting card, a sit-com, or in a paperback I leafed through during a lazy summer. Now I've absorbed it as a subconscious truth without having ever really thought about it for myself. When I think back on it, there are plenty of times I've fallen asleep angry, lying next to someone I loved.

One time was in Madagascar. I spent my two years there orbiting around in an unrequited love for T. Towards the end, things had reached a sad point of strain. I was coming to grips with the myriad reasons why things hadn't worked out between us. I was withdrawing. The closer we got to the end, and the further I withdrew. I tried to let my emotional investment in her fall away.

Seeing her those last months reminded me of the loneliness at the pit of my bowels. I still loved her but I realized I didn't fit in her life in the way I wanted. I would make a point to sit with other people the few nights we were in the capital together during our final departure conference. One of the last nights together was in the Peace Corps flop, crammed into a twin mattress in the top bunk of a room shared with six other people. We fell asleep back-to-back. I didn't know why we were even sharing a bed. It seemed like a structural formality, or a social obligation since beds were in short supply.

I had a terrible nightmare that night. I dreamt I was walking through a bright and sandy village with lots of roadside stands made of bamboo and palm fronds. I walked through some huts and wound up in a dugout canoe with a Malagasy person oaring me down a rivulet, steering away from the ocean. T was in another canoe heading in the same direction. My friend M was in the canoe with her. M was seeing T's best friend and had a natural friendship with T, free of all the weighted angst that dragged on all of our interactions. They were looking away from me.

Soon my canoe started floating aimlessly T and M kept moving onward at a steady clip. I watched them move further away from me, heading inland.

I woke up with a sharp inhale, sweating intensely. I was filled with sadness. It was almost 4AM. In my sleep I had turned so that I was looking at T's back in the darkness. My heart was beating fast and my brain felt like a gyroscope rotating on a wobbly axis. I turned back onto my side so my back would be to T.

I heard T exhale behind me. I felt the mattress shift as she turned over. I couldn't tell if I had woken her or if she was still sleeping. She pressed her torso into my back and reached her across my shoulders and chest. I put my hand on her forearm. She exhaled loudly, like a vent. I was worried I was too sweaty in her arms and shifted away on my hip a few inches, but she pulled me back even closer and didn't let go.

I felt my brain slow down, her skin was familiar under my hand. It smelled like what was underneath all the perfume, and scented soaps, and mango moisturizer that was her chemical trace. It was the unadorned version of herself, the smell of a body without an apologetic medium in between. She'd told me she loved me before, but I never believed her. She never acted like it, when she said it to me it sounded like an aphorism, like it was the next line in the script of our own private sit-com.

In the morning I told her I had had a nightmare and asked if I had woken her. She said she had slept the whole night through.

Don't go to bed angry. Or else do.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There a Happy Ending?

amboabe — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:06:00 GMT

When I was growing up I believed in the idea of being a virgin until marriage. My parents were religious and I had to go to church with them every week, but my reasoning didn't have anything to do with god. I came home after school one day when I was six or seven and watched an episode of The Phil Donahue Show in which the subject was people who were saving themselves from marriage. One of the panelists was wearing a white wedding gown, and while I don't remember anything that was said on the show, I felt swept away by the idea. It was like I had suddenly been given the words to articulate a romantic impulse that had been welling up in my little adolescent body.

The idea that two people could be predestined for each other, so connected that they should preserve their most intimate selves until the day when they could finally be together was revelatory. Over New Year's my friend C told me, with eyes rolling, that I'm in love with my own ability to be in love. Watching Donahue as a wide-eyed kid I felt like there was a missing half for me, going about her life unaware of my existence. It was my task to find her, and preserving my virginity as some hairless expression of my faith that we would be together became an imperative.

It's good to be six years old.

As an adult, the idea is silly. How could love be a force for holding you back from experiencing new things? Of all the women I have been in love with, I can't imagine wanting any of them to forgo an experience simply out of deference to me. This is an image of love as a yoke, a weight of obligation slung around your partner's neck, constricting them with your need for emotional constancy. It's so easy to fixate on the process of finding love, the simple nursery rhyme of discovery. The real feat of falling in love is figuring out how to live with it for a lifetime after you've stumbled across it in a bar, classroom, or friend's party.

I have no idea what I want. I want constancy and comfort in the same way I want to eat the whole pint of ice cream in one sitting. It's perfectly logical until the instinct has been sated and there's nothing left but wallowing and bloat, the dizzy afterglow of having gorged on something rich, sweet, and lacking any real sustaining qualities. I don't know if I can be in a long-term relationship. The six year-old controlling the knobs and levers of my heart wants it.

How can you stay together with someone for a long period of time, lives intrinsically connected, and not become a burden to one another? Love is a terrible thing, I think, because it's never enough. It's always beset with semantics and obstacles that take an increasingly heavy toll on two people the longer they try and stay together. Having watched my parents fight and torture each other while I was growing up, it's tempting to imagine they both would have been more content and fulfilled living separately.

Like childhood, love eventually transforms from melodic idealism into a pragmatic riddle. The charm, wit, and closeness become repetition and predictability, with a healthy dose of wrinkles and morning breath to make the fading luster seem even more indignant.

I don't know if that's true, but it's what I fear. When I was six the idea of promising away the whole of my life seemed like an imperative. Now that I've seen all the ways I've changed up until this point, it's a scary idea to think about promising someone I'll still be with them when I'm sixty. Especially when there's a six year-old in control of my heart.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

amboabe — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:23:00 GMT

My least favorite thing about the holidays is the leaving. I enjoy the family rivalries, the inevitable clashes of different threads of family and friends. I'm indifferent to the added stresses of holiday crowds in airports and on the freeways, but saying goodbye over and over again is hard. We can live farther away from the people we love and stay in touch with the various digital wonderments of fiber-optics and satellites orbiting overhead, but there is no replacement for sharing the same space. That's the inevitable conclusion I arrive at every year during the holidays. Arriving home, dropping the ungainly weight of my bags, opening the windows to freshen the stifled air of my dormant apartment, looking out on the streets below, familiar but filled with strangers flowing past in their indifferent rushes, I feel small and alone.

I take my parents for granted. As they age and I sink further into my own separate self they seem like weathered fragments from my past. I remember a time when they were the alpha and the omega of my life, the twin horizons over which the sun rose and set every day. I remember sitting on my father's lap reading The Little Mermaid aloud in the library at UT Austin, where he spent a summer teaching when I was four. He was a titan, his voice shook through my body as it animated each line of the fairytale. It was a force of nature, like a rainstorm of smiling words and warm imagination.

I remember the indulgent swoon of being in love with my mother. I crawled into bed with her and my dad one Sunday when I was three, hanging from her neck kissing her cheeks and lips. When she would take me shopping with her before I had started school I would venture out into the department store sprawl and bring back tight mini-skirts and red nail polish for her. I wanted her to show herself as the diaphanous monument she was to me.

All those experiences are tricks of perspective. Age and inexperience help to curve the lens in a way that makes the world seem intimate and hyper real, but it changes again and again. That doesn't make those experiences any less real. I hate leaving my parents' home after the holidays every year. I inevitably grow bored and stir crazy there, eating their food, listening to them argue, watching their cable, and making nice with their friends. Leaving always feels terrible. I spend my last hours in their home quietly packing, sulking and feeling leery about wherever it is that I'm off to next. It's like breaking up with the same person over and over again, but each break up is framed by the incremental creep of age.

I don't understand break-ups where people walk away from one another and never look back. With one exception, I am still close with every woman I've ever loved. Relationships are hard work, and the idea of lifelong coupling is a statistical hail mary. But saying I love you is a concession of permanence for me. It doesn't mean you agree to have fun together until things get too painful and then you agree to call things off and never talk to one another again. Those onset hardships are inevitable, as is the reframing of one's point of view over time. But how can you stop loving someone?

I've always experienced breaking up as a concession to semantics. You reach a point where it stops making sense to keep your own path hemmed in by your partner's; it stops being what you want. I've never fallen out of love. Letting go of someone because you realize you can't keep climbing the mountain together is a terrible and sad thing, but that's never made me want to let go of that person. My parents were the first two people I ever fell in love with. I don't want to live with them anymore, nor am I interested in having them directly involved in guiding my vessel as I keep pressing forward into new places. But I don't want to let them go. I loved them, and I love them still, even if they don't much resemble the romantic titans of my infancy.

Their faces have changed improbably over the years, without my noticing. Their physical infirmities are full of subtle new wrinkles, unassuming new pill bottles in the medicine cabinets. They make strange noises when they breathe. My childhood toys are all gone. I sleep in the guest room now. The room I grew up in is hundreds of miles away from my parent's new house. So it's sad when I pack my bags and walk to the front door, headed to the airport, knowing that there's no forgotten scrap left behind in the guestroom. The semantic ties have evaporated. Love is like gravity. I know I'll be back next year, and the year after that, but only for a little while, so long as they're there.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings

Love Machine: What Work Is

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog

amboabe — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:40:00 GMT

According to convention, men are dogs and no more loyal than their current options. I don't like this stereotype. It makes me purse my lips and flatten my toes against the insides of my shoes. So there must be some truth to it. I've noticed that I sometimes have a wandering eye when I'm with women. Walking down the sidewalk arm in arm or sharing a table in a coffee shop somewhere, the jingle of the door opening and the stirring of color in my periphery draws my attention away. When that blur in the periphery comes into focus and becomes a woman I can't help but get drawn further into a look, like some dog hearing a distant barking.

According the stand-up comedian, men are always looking to trade up. They are satisfied with their partners so long as they don't have to face the fact that they might have gotten a better deal somewhere else. But what actually constitutes a better deal when it comes to a significant other? What is it that a man is wondering he'll find when his left eye catch on a passing woman?

If men are dogs then they can't be looking to trade up. Dogs are creatures of territory and powerful associations with a pack. I had two dogs growing up and I doubt either of them would have gone AWOL from our family home had they been tempted with a new home in the mountains with an endless supply of fresh bones to gnaw on and open lawn stretching to the horizon. One word from my father, one whistle, one jingle of the leash and they would have come sprinting back home with tongue happily flapping out of their mouths.

While it's impossible to erase the instinctual tether of home from a dog's mind, they are easily distracted. Likewise, I'm a creature wracked by distractions. The number of times I have opened and closed Facebook while writing these modest few paragraphs borders on dysfunctional. The same impulsive urge to toss a glance elsewhere is no less powerful in public. I immediately feel guilty for it. Sometimes I'll force myself to not look, to keep my line of sight trained directly on the woman I'm with, becoming distracted with my own rigidity in the process.

Is it an insult to look at other women, or men, when you're with someone? Is it an insinuation of disloyalty, the psychic tic of a wandering libido?

I can't think of seeing someone in terms of options. I understand the logic behind the idea, but it is totally incongruous with every impulse I've ever had when engaged with a woman. Everyone is surrounded with options, on all sides. Every single person walks out their door in the morning and passes someone else on the street that they could sleep with or date. Having options is hard work. Options can lead to opportunities, but those opportunities require effort, making, articulation of a specific desire, and the execution of a plan of action. Every option is a risk in its own way.

Some women are upset by knowing their men look around. They want to feel like their company is enough to consume their man's attention. His curious energies should all be applied towards her or something safe and innocuous, like the boat in the back yard or college sports.

I don't know why I look at other women. But I always look back again. The glance is never more than a second or two, before disinterest settles in. I look away, sending my eyes out over the vast lawn, pricking my ears up, and then return to the woman across the table. If men are as loyal as their options, what does it feel like to watch a man's gaze return to your face again and again and again?

Previous Posts:

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings

Love Machine: What Work Is

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Love Machine: What Work Is

amboabe — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:04:00 GMT

I work a lot. I have a day job, to which I apply at least 50 hours a week, a short film in the last stages of editing, writing here, and a smattering of freelance writing gigs. Seven months ago I wasn't doing any of it (save the day job). When I'm single I fixate on work. My brain wanders with haphazard ambition and I'm not capable of telling myself I shouldn't bother trying something because I won't be able to pull it off. I like trying. In some ways it's torturous sitting up till 3 or 4 in the morning on a random Wednesday night returning emails, creating shot lists, making line-item budgets from scratch, or dottering over a rewrite. Some days I have no idea why I'm doing any of it, or who I'm doing it for.

When I was a junior in college I started interning for a film company. A few months later I added a part-time job to avoid having to pull out more student loans. The year before I had been a foppish undergrad, lazily trotting my way through four classes a quarter. Then suddenly I had two jobs and a full course load. There's nothing special about that experience. There are lots of hard working people in the world, more disciplined, productive, and put-upon than I am.

Still I remember that year, walking into the careers office on campus and looking through the internships list to see if there was something there that I was interested in. Since that year I've usually felt entirely uncomfortable if I'm not actively engaged in at least two different jobs at any given time. That was the year I discovered the vague shape that my adult life would wind up taking, at least through my twenties. It was a shape of hours and hours of work, most of it self-motivated and with only the vaguest idea of what I was hoping to get out of all those late hours and jarringly early mornings.

I remember one night I had to stay up to finish coverage on a script, and I made a fresh pot of coffee at 2AM, poured the entire pot into a Big Gulp cup, drank every last drop in twenty minutes, and still managed to pass out dead asleep two hours later when I was finally done. The next day my boss read the coverage report in 3 minutes, put it back in his outbox for me to file, and it was never seen again.

My mom likes to quote me as a child announcing that I was a "get-get-get boy" one Christmas. As a child, my avarice was fierce and unhinged. I lusted after toys, games, tennis shoes, brand name t-shirts, and non-generic cereal with an intensity that was physical. I ached to possess things. There's nothing quite as disappointing as getting what you want, I discovered. Toys always turned out to be cheap plastic assemblies that became tedious after a few minutes. Shoes fell apart. Fruit Loops didn't taste any better than the generic stuff my parents bought in giant plastic sacks at cut-rate prices.

At some point in my adolescence I decided I wanted to start giving instead of taking. I liked letting things go, handing them off to someone else and, in the best case scenario, seeing them become happier for a little bit. When I was trying to break into the film industry I thought my life calling was to share something with the world at large, some effulgent message of raw human experience that I simply couldn't hold inside. Like a man-child of ego and inexperience I thought the world needed me and my creative expressions to help evolve it into something better. In another era I might have started a religion, but in the late 90's I realized the best way to save the world was through filmmaking. (When I was a teenager I thought I could do it by being in a band, and when I was ten I thought being halfback for the Oakland Raiders would accomplish the same goal of world salvation)

The only thing that's ever curbed my work habits has been dating. I actually took a sick day this spring, the first one I've ever taken, just so I could spend the day with a woman. I worked late last Friday and was stuck for more than an hour waiting for the next bus to take me back into the city. I remember some nights earlier this year, waiting in that same spot and feeling my blood pressure rise with each passing minute the bus failed to arrive. I remember my foot anxiously tapping on the grooved rubber floor watching old bums amble their way out the back door. I remember getting off the bus two stops after my normal one and power walking through chilly black nights, then slowing a block before my destination so I wouldn't be sweaty or out of breath when I met the woman I was seeing. Even then I sometimes wouldn't be able to help myself and I'd trot the last half block up hill and around a corner. Last Friday the only thing waiting for me in the city was more work. It could wait.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

amboabe — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:13:00 GMT

It's cold tonight. As the weather has changed over the last few weeks, inching towards another fifty-degree California winter, I've started sleeping with a t-shirt on. As I was pulling my pajama pants on earlier I realized that I haven't slept naked in months. The only time I ever go to bed naked is when I'm sleeping with someone. I remember the first time I tried to sleep naked by myself. It was unsettling; I kept pulling against the sheets, trying to turn away. It was too much sensation to feel the cotton weave of the sheets muzzle against my bare skin.

When I was younger I struggled to fall asleep when sharing the bed with a woman. Being so close to another body, hearing their breath, smelling their skin, feeling their inhales nudge their round bellies against mine; it was sensory overload. I spent nights and nights lying besides women, wide awake. As I got older the foreignness of another body in bed next to me subsided. The persistent touch of the blunter parts of our bodies, the breath, the warm echo of old sex, it all became a comfort instead of a lingering alien encounter.

I've gotten into the habit of walking around my apartment naked in the mornings and on weekends. Almost the entire west wall in my apartment is a big sliding glass door with a tall window beside it. I always forget that most anything I do in my apartment is visible from the street until I walk to the dresser for a fresh pair of underpants and look down on all the people walking on the sidewalk.

Being naked in the daytime feels natural. It feels apt, like a precursor to something active, undoubtedly sexual. There's so much to distract in the daytime, the sounds from the street, the intensity of all the details the sunlight brings out, the subconscious urge to go out and be productive. Being naked and alone at night is scary to me. I like the idea that my nudity at night is tied to sex. Being naked with the night sky above, in an empty box stacked on top of dozens of other empty boxes, the loneliness is amplified.

The touch of the cold air and the rustled sheet aren't unsettling because of the nakedness, but because of their indifference to it. Shouldn't a thing that touches me so intimately have more of a purpose? Shouldn't there be more to say with all the waiting nerve endings of my body than to lay limply across it in the dark?

I picked out t-shirt to match my green pajama bottoms tonight as I got ready for bed. It's cold, my toes are slowly drifting towards numbness padding around my hardwood floors. The air feels sharp and metallic against my bare arms. I pulled the t-shirt over my head and looked at myself in the closet mirror, happy to think that my pajamas match. Happy that they'll be a gentle buffer against my cruel sheets so that I'll be able to sleep tonight without having to think about the all the indifferent spaces between the threads.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message

amboabe — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:45:00 GMT

I got my first cell phone in 2006 when I finally came home from Peace Corps. One of my old college friends replied to the group mail I sent out with my new number exclaiming that hell must have frozen over. I love talking on the phone for long meandering wrinkles of time. I hate being the first one to say goodbye, especially with people I care about. Two nights ago I spent two hours and twenty-four minutes on the phone with my friend C. Over the summer I fell asleep with my phone open, resting on the pillow next to my ear so it would feel like the woman on the other end wasn't so far away.

Talking on the phone is patently confessional. There are no physical distractions to lure your eye. I find myself fixating on the physical appearance just as much as I focus on words when talking to someone face-to-face. On the phone, I don't have to stare at the budding pimple just to the left of the ear lobe, or wonder if I'm making too much eye contact, then snap to halfway through a sentence and try and play catch up.

Over the phone, all that extra energy can be focused on the voice, the timbre, the inflection, the stumbles, the spastic I-don't-know's that serve as the connective tissue between unwilling sentences. When I was fourteen I spent a night prank calling random numbers with my friend J. The last number I called, which formed the pattern of a right triangle on the number pad of my parent's phone, went through to the house of a girl I'd never met before. I heard a rounded and curious young voice answer and the joke I was about to tell suddenly seemed completely beside the point. I said the only other thing I could come up with. "Hi."

We spent an hour on the phone that night, revealing little tidbits about each other in calculated increments. I can't remember what we talked about in specific, but I know it wound up being something religiously-oriented (she went to a Christian high school, as it turned out). In the same way that something in her voice had subverted my faux-cocky bravura, there was something in her way of thinking, both deliberate and vulnerable, that drew me in. This was S, the first woman I ever fell in love with.

We spoke four or five times a week for more than two years. She would call me from the bathtub, soaking her sore muscles after color guard practice; we'd watch Melrose Place together over the phone; we'd shut out the lights and crawl into bed together, each in our own room, our words comfortably meandering past each other. We would talk for two and three hours at a time. I only saw her in person twice over those two years. We went on a date once (she had to drive because I didn't have a car), and I snuck onto the campus of her school to share lunch one day. That's it. When I was sixteen she graduated from high school and moved away. I never spoke to her again.

Now that I have a cell phone, I send text messages like an amphetamized chimpanzee. Aside from functional convenience, it's so alluring to know that I can send someone any little message I want and touch their day almost instantly. When I was still living in LA I broke up with a woman I had been seeing for four months over text.

We met at a friend's birthday party. She had bleached blonde hair with a pink streak in it that seemed out of place with her business-chic cloths and stalky frame. I was immediately attracted to her. We talked for a while, then I walked her to her car when she had to leave. She gave me her business card and a quick peck. We went out for real a week later. After a late dinner I walked her back to her car again, and we kissed for three hours steaming up the windows like it was prom night. We stayed at it until 2AM and I remember some creaky old neighborhood watch patrol man knocking on the window to make sure things were okay. "Yeah, we're doing great. Thanks."

She was a TV executive, a few years older than me, and had a busy schedule. I was working two jobs and trying to raise financing for a movie in my spare time. We still managed to see each other once a week. She used to tease me about how stoic I was. "You're my little science experiment," she would say to me. She had never dated a man as aloof as I was. When I come across as aloof with women, it usually means I don't trust them or fear them in some way.

We spent a very comfortable few months together with no pressure to discuss where things were going. Neither of us pressed to have a conversation to label what we were doing together. I liked her. I genuinely admired her. But there was something ridiculous about her. She made a lot of money and would freely use it to do things like hire a nutritionist to tell her what kinds of almonds to eat. I don't find that objectionable in the least, but I knew that her way of living wouldn't ever be a way that I wanted to live.

Love is inevitable, at least for me. Not necessarily falling in love with people, but I can't help loving almost anyone I've known after sharing some amount of time together. It's like I have love autism. After a few months, I started to feel it happening with her. I wasn't falling in love, but my lazy affection was solidifying into something L-shaped. This made me deeply uncomfortable. I didn't want to love someone older than me, who spoke about the difference in four star hotels in Berlin versus London, who paid someone to tell her what to eat.

I realized I had to stop seeing her. I didn't want to care for her any more than I already did. I didn't want to share the semantics and practicalities of her life in a way that inevitable love would make necessary (for me at least). So I started avoiding her calls. After a week of trading voice mails and some too-convenient scheduling conflicts she left for a business trip. When she came back I was canvassing a film market trying to convince toothy Canadian investors to give me half a million dollars to make a movie. She sent me a few texts over the first couple days of the market. I sent flat, minimalist replies.

The third day of the market, all my meetings were over and nobody had been impressed with my pitch. I sat in a puffy armchair in the lobby of a Santa Monica hotel sipping coffee from a paper cup, thinking about work, salesmanship, convincing people to give you things. I got a text from her asking me if I wanted to meet for a drink later. I mashed my toes into the bottom of my shoes. "No," I thought to myself. I still have work to do.

I wrote her back that I couldn't, I had to go home and write instead. "I see. Well then, write well."

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

amboabe — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:36:00 GMT

I started talking to a woman at a party this weekend who confessed that she was taking a break from dating. I was immediately excited. I wanted her to hurry up and finish her explanation of how she had come to a point of general exhaustion in her dating life so that I could add my own thoughts. "I'm taking a break too!" I wanted to tell her. It was a thrill to have found such immediate common ground with someone I had only met a few minutes before. Everyone I knew at the party had gone home early. I had turned to the closest person I could find to strike up a conversation hoping to stave off going home early on a Saturday night. I didn't want to seem like I was hitting on her, so when the opportunity arose to disavow any immediate participation in the mating rituals of urban city dweller I felt giddy.

The idea that one can take a break from dating seems languorous and self-indulgent. It's like saying you're going to take a break from ice cream. Dating isn't easy, and it can feel like work, but it's always interesting. Even when it's patently boring, you can always learn something new about people or how you relate to certain kinds of people. And the possibility of romance sparking underneath the surface, like some exposed electrical wire, is always an exciting secret to carry with you throughout the day. I always feel an extra sense of adventure and purpose on days when I have a date.

In a lot of ways it's a privilege to be able to apply so much time and energy to the idea of finding a partner who'll fulfill some romantic ideal. I always wonder about the comparative success of arranged marriages, at least compared to the staggering divorce rates in the unarranged world. I wonder if it isn't entirely reckless to believe that you can select your own mate using a divining rod whose most important criterion is love. Looking at marriage as an effective partnership between two people who agree to set aside personal agendas for the sake of a family is painfully anti-climactic. But it's statistically more likely to hold fast than the woozy promises made under a lovespell on a hot summer night.

One of the most rewarding things about being in Peace Corps was seeing how quickly and totally all the socially constructed barriers between people can be broken down. I remember the first day showing up for staging and looking around the hotel conference room at the rabble of oat-fed college graduates looking attentively at the bullet points on a government-issue whiteboard. I couldn't believe I had traded my real friends and family for this group of sandal-wearing do-gooders. It was repulsive to imagine I was leaving behind a life I had so carefully built for this random group of people who were so earnest and idealistic that they almost should have been wearing helmets.

A few weeks later we might as well have all been menstruating on the same lunar cycle. Stripped of country, companionship, language, and possessions, the need for trust and intimacy become irrepressible; like the unavoidable urgency of oxygen when you've been underwater for too long. Bonds form and love grows like a flower sprouted in cow shit, no less strong or real for its crass beginnings.

Sometimes dating feels like hurling yourself against another person's outer barriers over and over again. Both sides want the closeness, acceptance, and intimacy, and neither side trusts the other will be able to provide them. So we fixate on politics and fashion, deconstruct taste in music or movies, and use them as barriers to keep from having to offer someone empathy. We circle each other in bars and coffee shops, evaluating, approaching, and dismissing; as if love were something you simply find and not something you give.

I was just about to start telling all of this to the woman at the party, the pudgy one with horn-rimmed glasses who I was worried would think I was hitting on her. Twenty seconds after I told her I was taking a break from dating, she excused herself to go outside for a cigarette. I looked around the room and didn't see anyone I recognized. Then I left.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Love Machine: I'm Not The Marrying Kind.....Or Am I?

spjv840 — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:12:00 GMT

I'm in this really weird state of mind. I spent the last couple weeks stressing over the fact that I might be pregnant. I've been pregnant before so I know what it feels like. Airheadgenius' post about pregnancy made me want to write a whole post about the subject but then I decided not to get into it. People would surely start spewing their political bullshit and quite frankly I have no interest in hearing it. But the last few weeks I felt that familiar pregnant feeling. My tits hurt just if you looked at them too long, I was eating non-stop and having weird bouts of nausea, weird crying jags followed by intense blow ups. I was getting ready to pee on a stick by the end of the week and have to face my boyfriend again with the bad news. If you know me, you know I'm as fertile as a goddamn flower bed, which is ironic because, for the most part, I don't want to become a mother. I love kids, don't get me wrong. I love when my nephew comes bouncing over and jumps on the couch and jumps on his uncle and begs for candy which I secretly give him and I love watching him torture the cat and playing with his uncles old Ninja Turtles toys from the 80's. But at the end of the day, I am glad when he goes back home and is someone else's responsibility. It has nothing to do with with maturity, selfishness or anything else. I just have zero interest in becoming a mother or having "a family" in the traditional sense of the word.

This morning I woke up in a strange mood. Relieved because my period had started, which also took a huge load off my shoulders. I don't think I could have gone through the pain and sadness that follows having to terminate a pregnancy.There was an other feeling on hand this morning, though. Marriage. Last night, while drinking many celebratory Obama beer and crying about this and that and freaking out at my boyfriend, we managed to have some kind of talk about the future without speaking directly about it. I'm one of those gals who doesn't really talk about feelings and other bullshit like that. I'm not going to try and get a guy to open up about his feelings or ask him what he's thinking every hour on the hour. That shit pisses me off. However, last night a lot of garbage flew out of my mouth. We'll blame the booze..it's always the best excuse.

My boyfriend and I already discussed the fact that we don't want to get married in a traditional way. We don't believe in church and have no wish to be married in one, behind one, or next to one. God will not be overlooking my wedding, should that day ever happen. But I want to marry him. I don't want to wear a white dress, have thousands of dollars spent on food, clothes, flowers, whatever the hell people spend money needlessly on for their wedding. I want to get married wearing a purple tube dress over my frayed jeans and beat up camouflaged Converse. I haven't told him about this. He doesn't know that I want to marry him. I've never wanted to marry before. I'm not even entirely sure I want to marry, honestly, but today, right now, I would love to say to him, "I love you, let's run off to Vegas and get married by Elvis and then have honeymoon sex in a big vibrating round bed"- this feeling might pass, just like heart burn after eating spicy chili (it does kind of feel like a bad case of indigestion), but maybe not. The morning after I had met him, I was completely enamored with him. I kept telling friends, "He's so perfect for me" and "He will be mine, you watch!" and I even blurted out "I'm going to marry him one day" - which was saying a whole lot becauseI don't think those words ever came out of my mouth before that, let alone after spending one night with someone. But I'm getting off track.

What makes someone the marrying kind? Is it a desire to have a family, a suburabn house with a goldren retriever and prescription meds for when your husband "works late" four nights out of five? Is it a desire to be with someone completely and utterly for the rest of your life? Is it a business deal like Lori Gottlieb wrote in The Atlantic back in January? Is it a need to be secure? Someone to look after you?

I don't think I'm the marrying kind.I don't know what kind I am, honestly.I don't particularly have a desire for anything mentioned above, except maybe wanting to be with someone completely and utterly. Maybe I'm just the kind that has finally realized that I can be secure in this relationship, that I don't need to worry about petty bullshit like I tend to do and that our little family with our cat, pit-bull puppy and all our plants is just what I want and need, and I don't need a ring to tell me that. Although, a cake right now with two little action figures on top would be pretty great.

So, are you the marrying kind?

Love Machine: Let's Make Babies

amboabe — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:17:00 GMT

When I was in my mid-twenties I decided that I would adopt a child when I turned thirty-two. I'll turn thirty-two next summer and by all accounts there's little hope for coming through on this promise. I live in a one-room studio and am nowhere near stable enough to convince any adoption agency that I'm parenting material. I'm still single so there's no immediate path for a more organic turn at procreating in the near future. I don't imagine being able to settle down in either respect over the next several years, and I think I can feel the beginnings of all my dead babies drying up inside me.

I'm not even sure if I want kids. When I was younger, having children was just another unspoken expectation. It was hard to imagine a life for myself that didn't involve mirroring the patterns of my parents. When the time came I would get a job which required a briefcase, then I would settle down and marry someone who looks good in a picture frame. A couple of years later a long beaked bird would drop a baby or two down the chimney. I wanted kids in the same way a lot of 8 year-olds want to be doctors: because they're told to want it.

After I graduated from college and had spent a few years working I began to have some extended conversations with my metaphysical self during all those lost moments (staring idly at a red light in rush hour on a Tuesday) that eventually turn into the shape of our lives. "Why am I here?" I asked the stoplight at Pico and La Cienega. Was I meant to be a script reader for a warship talent agency, to one day be able to say that my comments helped shape a Ben Stiller comedy that opened number three at the box office in some distant March?

I decided the truth must be to propagate the world for generations to come with some offspring willing to carry my wisdom forward. From a macro perspective, I imagined having a child would be an opportunity to take all the things I've done right with my life and make them even better. Beneath that, I wanted to hold a baby in my arms. Behind all the fancy rhetoric and strung out syllables, the drive to hold a child was really what I felt sitting in traffic.

It's so easy to romanticize the idea of having children, especially with all the patriarchal weight of culture and tradition. The strength of that romantic ideal can be a huge influencer driving people in a relationship to get even closer, especially after a certain age. Once the uterus starts sending out hormonal smoke signals in a woman's early thirties, the push to just find someone so that they can move forward into the childbearing sorority is powerful. Talking with a friend last night, she described that exact phenomenon. The guy's good enough, but the real prize is the crib and the country home.

I've never understood why men don't express more of the romantic side of having a family. Men seem to accumulate wife, child, and house as presumptive accessories. One of my friends still in LA evaluates women like suits, determining their worth based on how well he can imagine them at his family Christmases and office picnics. It's as if getting a stable wife would be the last criterion for total victory over life.

I could tell an adoption agency that I'd like to raise a child to pass on the love and wisdom that I've collected over the years, to help contribute something positive into the world. I could say that raising a well-educated and financially stable child would be the ultimate validation of my life choices, freeing me to gloat from the porch in my retirement. But the truth is that I'm thirty-one and I just want to hold a baby in my arms.

Maybe I should get a terrier instead. I would if I was willing to pay the extra $300 deposit for pet owners that my landlord requires. Don't tell the adoption people.

Previous Posts:

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do

amboabe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:53:00 GMT

I went on a cruise with my parents and older brother a few years ago. My brother had just graduated from medical school and I was going to be shipping out to China in a month, so my parents decided that we should all spend 7 days on a floating hotel sailing down the coast of Baja, Mexico. I had never been on a cruise and I wasn't looking forward to breaking that cherry with my parents in tow. The idea of being trapped in a giant metal boat with room service and closed circuit television for a week didn't sound like an ideal way to spend a week. But sometimes you have to close your eyes and take a leap of faith for the sake of the group. So I went.

The only thing I was looking forward to was the possibility of having an open bar on every deck. I understood that everything charged to my room key in magical ship-bucks would eventually show up on my credit card statement, but I was determined to treat the week like a mini-spring break. My parents would enjoy all the historical lectures and ballroom dancing, my brother would gamble in the casino, and I would lie by the pool all day and prowl the disco all night ordering drinks by color rather than name.

The stereotypes people have about cruises are true. It's only old people and hormone frenzied 19 year-olds you have to choose from for companionship. This was distressingly apparent on the first night in the cleverly-name Neptune disco, where all the 19 year-old boys in new white sneakers and saggy cargo shorts huddled on one side of the dance floor and all the sun-burned girls in mini skirts and flip flops nervously danced to the Backstreet Boys on the other side. It was like being stuck in a giant awkward silence between two factions who were clearly ogling each other.

Amidst the hesitant groundwork being laid for awkward 19 year-old rabbit sex, I found a cute blonde woman who seemed more appropriate for my demographic (I had just turned 25). She had just graduated from USC and was on a celebratory excursion with her parents. She was at the disco with her mother, a frisky-looking fifty year-old with a graying bob. I started to talking to the daughter (I can't even remember her name anymore), and we hit things off well enough. She was coy and aloof. She kept her body perpendicular to mine, but her eyes would linger over me a little longer than necessary when we spoke.

I was feeling particularly saucy so I asked her and her mother to come out and dance with me. They offered faux-protests while they walked to the dance floor and soon we were gyrating in a sea of 19 year-olds. We had a fun night, dancing and trading rounds of drinks, but nothing else happened. Around 1AM they retired back to their room so that Dad/Husband wouldn't get too worried. For the remainder of the cruise, I kept bumping into the daughter and her mother. They were always traveling in tandem. We would see each other at the formal dinners, wandering around the outer deck, poking through the library, at the disco.

I was attracted to the daughter, but I didn't know how to separate her from her mother. I thought she was attracted to me, but she didn't go out of her way to extricate herself from her mother's company. I felt awkward about pressing too hard for a more formal "date," if such a thing can be had on a cruise. So our interactions remained hygienically fun and photogenic. We must have looked like that perpetually smiling clump of cruise-goers happily reveling in a brochure.

As the cruise wore on, I became more and more restless. The claustrophobia began to set in, as well as a lurking dissatisfaction that the only things I was doing were eating, drinking, and whiling away afternoon hangovers on the pool deck reading John Fante books. I started to feel like I was in an R-rated hamster cage. I remember one morning, after an athletic night of drinking and dancing in the Neptune: before my eyes opened I was aware of a nauseating sway on all sides. Then the distressingly fuzzy hangover ache settled over me, my nerves shot from a night of alcohol-induced adrenaline flow, my brain cramping, my mouth dry and scratchy. Suddenly the blankets felt heavy and too hot. I opened my eyes and everything was pitch dark. There was no beside clock and no light creeping in from anywhere. I had no idea where I was.

I sat up and put my hand out against the far wall. I could hear my brother's sleep-breathing a few feet away. I followed my hand down the wall to the bathroom door. For whatever reason I didn't want to turn on the light and instead felt my way to the toilet lid. I lifted it and started pissing. I felt dizzy, my head started to tingle with the sudden blood rush from standing up. The boat swayed. I felt my knees buckle, and a grayish white flashed behind my eyes. Then somehow I was on the floor, in total darkness, my pants around my ankles, everything around me swaying. I had no idea what time of day it was. If there is a hell somewhere in the universe, surely it must be something like this.

From that moment forward I realized I needed to get off the boat. And there was no way off.

On the last night of the cruise I saw the daughter and her mother in the casino in the early evening. We stopped and talked for a few minutes. I asked the daughter if she wanted to meet me alone in one of the bars later. She hesitated, made some vague excuses. She said she liked me, but she couldn't leave her mom since it was the last night on-board. I had no idea what she was trying to say, but it frustrated me that we had spent a whole week chatting, dancing, and goofing off, and now she was pulling back.

That night at the disco I ignored the daughter completely. I spoke only to the mother. A ballad came on and I asked the mother to dance. I was on my way to being very drunk. I nestled my chin against the mother's shoulder as we danced. I whispered into her ear, "You're so beautiful." I felt her body react, not a shudder, but a simultaneous loosening and tensing. "Stop it," she said.

I nuzzled my nose against her ear, and started to nibble on the lobs softly. She inhaled through her nose and leaned her head into mine. I let the tip of my tongue run along the lower edge of her ear, then bit down on it. I looked back to the table where the daughter sat by herself, sipping a drink and watching. I kissed the mother's cheek, and dappled little kisses all the way back to her mouth. "Let's go out on the deck," I said.

"No, I can't," she said. She was worried about her husband, who was alone in the room, three decks below. I pulled back and saw her pale blue eyes, set against loose, weathered skin. I imagined her naked for a moment, the papery skin, the calluses, the sunspots, the veins. "What the hell am I doing," I thought to myself. I was trying to seduce a 55 year-old to spite her daughter because she didn't seem to like me as much a I liked her.

Looking back on it now, I still have no idea why I did any of it. It gives me chills, like someone's stuck a metal pole through the center of my spine. I wish I could erase the whole week from the ledger of my life, like meeting notes being swept from a whiteboard.

Instead, I'll just bad mouth cruises every chance I get and, hopefully, will never set sail on one again.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

amboabe — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:25:00 GMT

I was talking to my friend S last night who, after reading some of my posts here, wondered why I didn't talk more about some of my women friends who have been so ridiculously important to me. "Well," I thought, "what does friendship have to do with dating?" Then I remembered the two hours I had spent on the phone with S one afternoon, desperately begging for help because I was seconds from sending a woman I had just met a wedding proposal in a text message. I'm not normally prone to such desperate impulses, but without S's patient ear I might have engineered a small catastrophe, like a puppy dog run amok during high tea.

I don't know what separates an intimate friend from a lover. S has seen all of my nasty, ugly bits: the weakness, the pettiness, the callousness, the immaturity. With people I'm seeing there's always a pressure to keep myself together. I always feel particularly attenuated to how I'm being perceived by the other person. It's absurd, admittedly. I have no idea what I really look like and feel like to the person looking back at me, but I'm always conscious of their look and want to do what I can to impart it with attraction and affection. With S, I don't feel any pressure to be anything other than myself. I probably respond by over-compensating with my more crass and vulgar side (the number of times she must have heard the term "bukake" in our phone conversations, sigh).

S was recently married and told me something astounding about knowing she was ready to commit the rest of her life to her husband. "I've not wanted to have sex with that man," she sad. "If he were ever in a position where he became physically incapable, I would literally wipe his butt for him. I would be okay with that." I always tend to become fatalistic and irrationally swept away in romance. Hearing S talk about love in such blunt terms, acknowledging the transient nature of all of those cues of attraction and infatuation we so easily mistake for love was totally stunning to me. Perhaps those observations might be obvious to the average person, but to my self-involved ego, I was agog that the true measure of love might be fecal in some way.

I remember one Thanksgiving my father had to excuse himself from the dinner table because my grandmother had shit herself while we were eating. She was old and mostly senile, living in a nursing home. He took her to the bathroom and helped her clean herself and changed her into new underwear. I had never seen love in such a literal state before. When you love someone things shift. My grandfather was engaged to another woman when he met my grandmother. He had to break off the engagement and go against the wishes of his whole family and risk alienating most people in the tiny town where he lived to follow after the woman he loved.

Those two experiences have become the bookends of love for me. You begin with something so overwhelmingly life-affirming and beautiful that you risk everything you have to make it work. And in the end, you're left with someone who can't remember their name and shits their pants when there's too much butter in the gravy.

I love S, but I don't know if I would clean up her shit. I probably would, but I would be angry about it and I would hold it over her for the rest of her life. Maybe that's the difference, finally. We don't resent our friends for not being willing to wipe up our shit after we've lost control. But in love, there is an unspoken expectation that the other person be ready to put up with your everything, from the cute quips to the tragic incontinence, and still look you in the eye and say that you're charming and lovable. Love is cruel and unfair in that way. It's a harrowing thing, and would probably be fatal were it not for friendship.

Here’s to you S. I love you. May you never have to wipe my butt.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Love Machine: Infidelity of How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

amboabe — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:25:00 GMT

When I'm seeing someone new there are two ideas I use to torture myself about the other person. The first is that I imagine that the woman I'm seeing used to be a man and is secretly waiting for an opportune time to spring this sensitive bit of post-op information on me. The second, much more common way, is thinking that they're off sleeping with someone else on nights when we can't be together. I don't take either very seriously; both ideas pop up and evaporate again fairly quickly after they've bubbled into my brain. The sex change notion is admittedly ridiculous. So is the fear of being cheated on, at the end of the day, but it seems to strike a much deeper chord.

I have never cheated on anyone. To the best of my knowledge, I've never been cheated on either. I'm also not all that concerned with the idea of being cheated on. It's a superficial insecurity I have when I'm seeing someone. The idea pops into my head when a call gets forwarded to voicemail some night I was hoping to come over: of course she can't answer the phone, she's busy thumping some random bartender from the corner dive. And he's probably got better abs than me, a bigger cock, and can hold out all night without coming.

The fear that your partner is cheating on you is almost always self-reflexive. It's a subconscious way to lacerate yourself with your private insecurities and the extent to which you take it seriously can be a real danger sign that you've got less invested in your partner as a person than as salve for all of those psychic weak spots. Sex is a powerful and intimate thing, but it's also a body function driven by wants that are frequently beyond our ability to rationalize. For all of its ascendant potential, its still a base and animalistic act, no more important than a glass of water as the Leninism goes.

There's a certain evolutionary logic to the fear of infidelity. I'm sure proto-man's worst fear was the idea of someone else laying seed in his partner because it represented a direct threat to his ability to carry on his lineage. I don't think I could ever begrudge a partner the fulfilling of some basic physical satisfaction. At the same time, we're not cave people anymore and the choice to enter into a monogamous relationship with someone and then double back on that promise is almost always an indicator of something amiss. We're complex, psychological creatures now.

I remember when I separated from the last woman I was seeing I couldn't even bring myself to masturbate for a month after she left. When I finally did I barely even felt the orgasm. I looked down at the opening on the tip of my penis as I was coming and it seemed like a sad little mouth wailing forth some fluid version of a whale song, mourning. The body, the form, and the function remain, but the special purpose had gone away. That's why the notion of cheating has never seriously occurred to me when I've been seeing someone I loved. I definitely register interest and attraction in other people, but there's such a gap between the gratification of a good fuck with a stranger and the kind of ecstatic experience of having sex with someone you love that it's not seriously comparable. If the form and function supercede the intimate purpose of the act, than there's probably a huge impass in the way you relate to your partner.

Then again, I'm thirty-one. Thinking about the kinds of statistics that Peggy Vaughn popularized (60% of married men wind up having extra-marital sex, 40% of married women) I wonder what happens to that high-minded ideology after twenty years with the same person? Does sex with a long-term partner inevitably return to being a basic body function, the proverbial glass of water? If it does, should it matter if your partner gets their water from a different faucet from time to time?

Previous Posts:

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Date Machine: Kissing on the First Date

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Celebrity Confession: In Which Kevin Spacey Bangs Ass

Love Machine: How I Date on the Internet

amboabe — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:42:00 GMT

Dating on the internet is both impossible and absurdly easy. As Zetgeisty noted, it's the simplest way in the world to create the illusion of a social life for yourself. It's something that's fundamentally unfulfilling because it makes something unquantifiable fit into a query boxes. Even in the best of circumstances, there is always a vague sense of disappointment when you meet someone you've been talking to on a dating site.

All the time and energy spent exchanging emails and phone calls in the buildup to going on a date can be fun and alluring, but it's tantamount to shadowboxing. It's two strangers talking to themselves willfully consenting to let the other to use the vagaries of their lives as a psychic swank rag. When you finally get to meet in real life and realize that the magically sensitive and charming person who was such a delight in your inbox on Tuesday mornings has now become a slouching mouth-breather with just a few too many freckles, how can you not feel disappointed? I've accumulated some simple tactics you can use to stop delegating the ups and downs of your romantic life to relative strangers over the internet.

First, the most positive change you can make is to stop spending so much time and energy on the pre-date emailing sessions. Everyone starts over from scratch the very second they lay eyes on somebody for the first time. If you see someone you like in the papyrus scroll of names and faces, say hello. If they say hello back, ask them out. You don't have to hear about their grandparents, or their job, or the great summer they spent in India their junior year of college. You don't have to go out of your way to make the other person feel charmed or comfortable. It's enough to just say to someone that you find them interesting or attractive. If they feel the same about you, then great! Meet up in person and find out if there's something real to it. The worst thing you could do is spend a week emailing about nothing because you don't want to jump the gun and appear to eager or desperate.

Another huge trap to doing anything social on the internet is that it can become a surrogate way of living. You can get just as stuck living a fantasy life on a personals site as you can wasting hours on Facebook. If you don't have a specific reason to log on, don't. You don't need to see who's emailed you or winked at you everyday, especially if you're just going to ask them for coffee next anyway. The internet should enhance your life, not become an addicting distraction. Finally, for every internet date you have, go on a real one. This sounds harder than it is. You'll be much happier and satisfied in the long run if your time with internet dating is just something you do on the side, rather than the desperate obsession that becomes an umbilicum to the life you've always wanted to live.

Go live that life now. Try sending someone a friend request in real life. Send someone a wink in the coffee shop tomorrow morning. Say, "Hello, I think you've got cool hair," to someone's face. Don't think about your life in terms of rejection. Think about it in terms of having a good time with yourself. Go forth and amuse yourself, and don't apologize for doing it in the company of others. Some will be charmed and want to walk with you a while down the road, others won't. Fun is divinity, it's total honesty, and it's a kind of blind commitment to the people you're surrounded; it can be inordinately attractive. So go talk to someone in public that you're attracted to for whatever reason, and say something that is meant primarily for your own amusement. See if they play along. Most will. Then when you return home at the end of the day and see some random person in your inbox it might be easier to have a little perspective about it all. They're probably going to be ugly anyway.

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Intimacy; or A Trip To The Dentist