I admit it: I am a huge fan of anything with an ‘adult content’ warning. If it looks as if it may contain something even remotely sexual; I will open it, touch it, read it and even smell it.

My name is Adrie and I’m all about sexy.

I was up to try and make a deadline at about 4 this morning and during a self imposed coffee break; went to the Diesel site to look for a pair of shoes I had seen while in Europe and ended up on this page dedicated to their new fragrance “Fuel For Life”. Well, spank my ass and call me naughty–didn’t the site have two of my favorite things–a hot guy (shoulder length dark hair is always a plus!) and an adult content warning!

This site was way too fun and way too intriguing–so much so that I stayed on for about an hour and almost missed my deadline.

First; all the models are just fucking hot and scantily clad! Next, there’s a little game you can play where they help you find your perfect match and finally; the models are hot! (Did I already say that??!)

BTW — That’s the hot model up there on the right –a.k.a.: inspiration for my mornin’ o’ self-lovin’! He looks even hotter in motion while topless and drenched in rain. Drip. Drip. Drip.

This game lets you spin a wheel and “enter the experience”. I’ll have you know that looking at the initial model with the shaggy hair and great lips helped me to ‘enter’ my experience… twice!

Anyway, you answer a few flirty questions and it takes you to this park with other names scattered across the grass. You click on the name of your choice and get to indulge in a chat with men and women of many tongues. (I could have said ‘languages’, but I seriously have ‘tongues’ on the mind this morning)

Anyhow, it’s just really cool and certainly did its part to help get me off… on the right foot today.

I haven’t actually smelled this perfume yet, but I’m thinking it smells as delicious as a hot, slippery night of sex… minus the musky, sweat smell of course.

Talk about suggestive advertising! I have been plagued by visions of naked, dewy bodies writhing around, tangled in sheets and smellin’ all sexy and sweet–all just from visiting this site. I must be horny.

Anyway, if anyone has any Diesel hook-ups I would love to sample me some asap! (Note how I use this as a mooch-opp? Feel free to send along gifts anytime.)

Guys seem to be moving in slow motion in regards to what women will and won’t do. I see it everyday with the men I deal with and the ones that I am related to and realize that they really don’t get how far women have come when it comes to sex! Many guys are still livin’ ol’ school and thinking that they need to throw in some sweet words or pretend that they feel something that they don’t just to get laid.

Newsflash: Women like to get fucked without the romantic entanglement just as much as the next guy!

Men keep making the same mistake over and over: they aren’t upfront about the fact that all they want is pussy. I know that I’m going to get a shit load of emails from men saying that the reason for this is that women want more, or that we’re too easily offended or put off by such a brazen request, blah, blah, fucken blah.

It’s time to get your tail out from between your legs and fess up. Repeat after me: I think you’re hot, but I am NOT AT ALL interested in a relationship. I would however love to lick and pleasure every inch of you on a no-strings basis.

It’s that simple.

It may seem brash and chances are that you’ll encounter a few rejections, but that’s no different than your odds when you ask a girl out on a regular date—whatever that is these days.

Example of why your way doesn’t work:

Boy sets out having no interest in a romantic attachment.

Said boy then meets uber sexy girl who also happens to be sweet and all around amazing.

Boy carries on as though he is smitten—‘hooked’ if you will.

Boy and girl have many conversations about everything under the sun.

Girl starts to have very strong feelings for boy.

Girl also believes that he really cares about her and is as smitten as he claimed to be.

Boy still wants to fuck said girl, but nothing more.

Girl starts to see that boy doesn’t really feel the way he claimed.

Sadly, girl is in so deep that she’s torn between her contempt for having been misled and her strong feelings and desire for him.

Girl and boy have wicked, amazing, mind-blowing, toe-curling, ultra passionate sex.

Girl tries to not care for boy so much and just enjoy the moment, but is confused by boy’s occasional expressions of tenderness and wants to believe that they actually mean something.

Boy and girl start fighting when her resentment floats to the surface.

Girl decides to forget boy exists even though it is really hard.

This goes back and forth for awhile and boy periodically sucks her back in by saying things that he knows she wants to hear.

Eventually girl gets sick of games and wonders why boy had to pretend that he wanted more instead of having been upfront. Her physical attraction was enough that she would have been more than happy to fuck him silly, NSA, if he had been upfront and not allowed (encouraged) her to feel more. Now girl is so exhuasted by the games that she has given up.

Now boy will probably never again enjoy the sweetness of her pussy, her soft, vanilla scented skin or the feel her amazing touch again.

The lesson here: STOP LYING!

Be upfront about what you want. It is not women who complicate things; it is this miscommunication from day one that fucks up your chances of having the most incredible sex of your life without complications of the heart!

The icicle Christmas lights framing the roof on my dad’s house in suburban Atlanta (AKA country back woods) have been hanging up since I was a senior in high school.

That’s 7 seven years. For seven full years, Christmas lights have been up at my childhood home. My dad argues that it’s easier to keep them up then to take them up and back down again. This is also the same man who loves being at home so much that we used to order take out from Waffle House. In fact I didn’t even know that you could eat inside Waffle House until I was a senior in high school. During my adolesence, my mother designated Wednesday as Eat Out Night. Her idea of eating out? We drove up to the main drag by the interstate and got to choose from McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wendy’s or KFC. If we were lucky, she’d let us choose treats from two places. My brother’s idea of a fun time includes sipping from Miller High Life 40s while driving in circles around the parking lot of the mall twenty minutes outside my town.

It’s time for me to accept the truth. I am black but I still come from a family of rednecks. I told my grandmother that I was thinking about taking a trip to Paris. She asked me how far outside of New York, France was. This same grandmother remarked on Thanksgiving after I got back from the store with a gallon of milk that “Only a Muslim would have a store open on Thanksgiving. They got no religion.”

From the ages of birth to around 5 or 6, white people were a mystery to me. From what I’d gleaned from my family and television, whites didn’t go to church, they were constantly disobeying their parents, and most problems that befell any member of my own race could be attributed to some white person some where around. My parents instilled the fear of racism in me early on and I remember several sleepless nights after I learned about the Klux Klux Klan. When we had a mock school election in 1988, I was in second grade and confused on who I should vote for. My dad told me that Republican stands for Racist so I immediately penciled in my vote for Dukakis. I thought that all white girls must be so happy because their hair was just like a Barbie’s and their moms let them wear it down instead of in braids smothered in hair grease that pulled at their scalps with the weight of the multicolored barettes that hung at the ends of them. I used to get really uncomfortable in elementary school whenever history class would lead to any kind of discussion on civil rights. I always felt like all the white faces in the class were on me so I often raised my hand to let everyone know that neither my parents nor my grandparents had never been and were not currently slaves or sharecroppers.

The racial makeup of all of the public schools I attended was 50/50. But somewhere along the line, maybe in 1st or 2nd grade, it became obvious to my teachers that I was maybe on a faster track than the rest of the kids in the class. Seven-year-olds rarely spit out 20 page long stories complete with illustrations. And rarely were other second graders indulging in books of poems by Frost. So I was put on the accelerated track and as is usual the stereotypical case, my classes went from being salt and pepper with a little Asian and Mexican sprinkled here and there to being mostly salt sprinkled with one or two Jews.

My school days, and then my college days and now my work days, I’m the lone dark face. In most cases, if a white person were to show up and be surrounded by black people, he or she would be a little apprehensive. Everyday I show up and I’m the only black person in my office but thoughts of a white mutiny never really cross my mind.

My roots are back in Georgia, with my very black family in my very country town. No matter how citified I try and make myself, the expensive jeans, the iPod, the roll of the eyes at slow moving tourists along 5th Avenue. . . .I’m still Brandy from McDonough. The girl who spent her first five years not knowing that white people bathed. The girl who until college thought that a real meal out was Chili’s or Applebees. The girl who’s dad’s house has Christmas lights hanging from the gutters and the bushes year-round.

Reentering the city of Milan never fails to make me emotionally unstable. I go hot and cold on this city like menopausal women on drugs. New York and I have clean, adult relationship with one another. Open communication. A stable living situation. Work. Independence. Contained craziness. Reasonable expectations. Good things. With Milan on the other hand, I’ve lived a kind of drawn-out, over-dramatized fairytale with fifty-six encores and five rewritten last acts. And all fairytales inevitably end in bitter disillusionment. As my train pulled into Milano Centrale, I was filled with dread upon entering my old stomping grounds, and stomping grounds is really the most effective way to put it, because I stomped through this town to death. I over-trampled it, if that makes any sense. I don’t think there’s one Milanese adventure, experience, or romance I missed out on during my time here. I’m Done with the city. Done with a capital “D.”

Despite that fact that my relationship with Milano has been permanently poisoned with disappointment and is technically over, I continually return looking for a good time. I’m still searching for satisfaction. I want Milano and I to settle the outrageously high bill of emotional instability it charged me. Now, finally, that search is over.

Soon after my arrival, I popped my Italian TIM scheda into my American phone to use my Italian phone number and start calling to see who was around. It’s impressive that this miniscule SIM card, the size of a thumbnail, digitally contains my entire Italian life. Seven years worth of being here in Italy, or back and forth. That’s seven years worth of drunken handouts of my number, seven years worth of friends, work contacts, and social advancement. Well, this time around, when I popped in my SIM and unlocked my phone, instead of instantaneously receiving obscure casting texts message from agencies that still have me on roll or nighttime invites from PRs who still think I party here, I got an error message: “Unregistered Sim.”

I stared at the phone in utter confusion. Unregistered? Me? I’d had this Italian phone number since I was a child! I proceeded like most people do in a state of panic: I rushed to the Internet. I pulled up TIM’s website and quickly called them from my old apartment’s home phone. I then pressed my way through six zillion automated questions.

No, I did not want to hear about TIMs new promotional service “MaxxiTim.”

No, I didn’t want to check my credit balance.

No, I’m not having trouble sending and receiving MMS messages.

No, my cell phone had not been stolen.

After intense number punching and some annoying music that felt like the audio equivalent of glitter, I finally reached an extremely pleasant Italian woman who sounded like she had a perfect manicure and envious thick, black hair. I quickly described my predicament and gave her my phone number. She asked for my name and the last four digits of my social security number and confirmed that I was in fact the owner of my phone number. Thanks, I knew that. Next she delightfully informed me that I had five euros of credit on the phone. Fabulous!

“Now, I don’t really know how to tell you this Signora,” she went on tentatively. “But on the 17th of July 2007 your number was bought by someone else.”

My face twisted in horror. “You mean TIM sold my number to someone else,” I corrected.

“The phone hadn’t been used for some time.”

“I used it in November and December of 2006. I’m only in Italy every few months,” I rattled in disbelief. “That doesn’t mean you can re-sell my number. I’ve been a loyal TIM client for seven years.”

“Eh,” she made that insanely annoying apologetic Italian noise. “Mi dispiace, Signora. I don’t know how else to put this. That number is no longer yours.”

Amazing. My entire Milanese existence had been obliterated. Who was the poor shmuck who took over my number? Was he receiving random text messages and calls from people searching for my Italian self? I wondered if those people who always wanted to chop off my locks in those hair shows were still texting me. How was he dealing with that?

“There’s an infinite amount of numbers in the world,” I melodramatically proclaimed to the nice sounding Italian female TIM worker, who I now was convinced was a conniving slut. “Why did you have to sell mine?”

The TIM worker had no explanation for this, “Sadly, signora, it’s like this. The only advice I can give you is to go to a Centro TIM store and confirm the information I’ve given you.”

I told her I was never buying another TIM card again and hung up. Mature, right?

Aside from the existential crisis this news caused, it was also a major inconvenience since I’d now be forced to stay on my American number while in Milan, where Cingular financially rapes me with fees like $1 per international text message.

Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, anyone I’d want to see is not in the city anyway, so contacting them is actually irrelevant because they’re all in Sardinia, Formentera or the mountains. Every club is closed, the majority of stores don’t open, and me and my friend were forced to hike almost a kilometer from our apartment to find an open pizzeria in which to nourish ourselves this afternoon. In short, Milan in August is the visual equivalent of a city after an atomic bomb scare.

The plot thickens, however. In a drunken stupor last night I had the genius idea to call the asshole who had the balls to buy my phone number a mere month before my arrival, and give him a piece of my mind.

“If it’s a guy,” my ex-roommate Star said, “I bet you can convince him to give you back your number.”

So I called my old Italian self from my American phone hoping for a male voice on the other end. Instead, I received an Italian error message to the extent of, “Blah Blah Blah Blah TIM, Blah TIM, This phone number does not exist.” This is actually GOOD news because it means my number has most likely not been resold. Had it been resold and active it would have rung, or I would’ve gotten a different error message informing me the owner had their cell switched off. (I’m really familiar with Italian cell phone error messages, it’s like a second college degree.)

Tomorrow I plan to go to a Centro TIM (assuming I can find one that is open) and get to the bottom of this whole mystery. Is this God telling me to once and for all give up on the paradoxical, difficult, glitzy city that is Milan? Is it really time to throw in the Italian towel?

My heart goes out to the unfortunate TIM August worker who’ll soon have to deal with me.

I am such a girly girl when it comes to just about everything but romance. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a sappy chick flick that ends with a big Hollywood kiss as onlookers clap and cheer. I have watched Only You an endless number of times and still cry like a fool during that last scene where the scrumptious-in-that-drugged-out-and-tattered-sorta-way Robert Downey Jr. kisses Marisa Tomei when she gets on the plane finally having realized that she loves him. Fuck! I’m crying right now! But when it comes to the men in my life? Let’s just say that certain romantic gestures make me wanna hurl in a not so pretty way. This makes things very confusing to the men who want to woo me.

Being the kind girl that I am, I have decided to break it down to make it easier for any man who wishes to continue to woo me from here on. (*Nuno take note**)

What I DON’T like:

Bad icky love poems—rhyming or otherwise

Hearing I love you so often that it’s said out of habit more than feeling

What I DO like:

Well written poetry with a sexy or raw edge (Important: said poetry does not have to be written by you if you are not a wordsmith. Just telling me that you thought of me when you stumbled on it is romantic enough.)

Your time… because I know how precious it is.

Showing me that I am worth your time is the grandest gesture of all.

Damn! I am a great catch!!

I saw this and it brought up every single weird uncomfortable feeling I ever had as an eleven-year-old being forced to learn about periods. There were the awkward sex ed sessions in gym class which lucky for me was taught by my neighbor. So I got to listen to her tell me about sex, test me for scoliosis, and THEN I got to rake her leaves. Lovely. There were also all of the equally embarrassing seminars my mom made me go to with my Girl Scout troop in which we were all required to sit in a circle and tell the group what “being a woman means to me.”

So when I was aimlessly internet surfing this weekend and I came across this, you can see why I had to post it.

One of my pet peeves is when people try to make something cool for kids’ sakes. Kind of like the dancing veggies who proclaim how happy and healthy they’ll make you, or Macgruff the crime dog telling kids how fun it is to just say no. Personally, I think that we should just tell kids the truth–go ahead and jade them. If I were a lecturer at a middle school this is how my “Welcome to Reality” speech would go:

“Hi girls. I’m Brandy. And I’m here to let you know that periods are NOT cool and interesting. In fact, having one really sucks and as soon as you hit 16 I recommend birth control so at least then you’ll only get the red monster for three days which will make only three days a month in which you won’t really be having sex.”

“Drugs are awesome. I’m not saying give them a try now–middle school isn’t the best place to cultivate a drug habit. Wait until you get a little money in your pocket so that you can get premium stuff. Don’t settle for the dime bags that kid sells in the eighth grade boys bathroom.”

“Boys suck. They always will. Ladies I know you think he loves you. He doesn’t. He just wants to touch your developing breasts and he wants you to touch his developing penis. It’s okay to do these things. But just don’t fool yourself into thinking he wants anything else. And please make sure that you’re letting more than one boy touch your boobs. Very important to keep those options open.”

This is probably why I’ve never been asked to speak at a middle school.

I need to know what it is about meeting someone who sets your heart and loins aflutter that automatically makes all other men want you too. Seriously, you spend months…years, playing solo with no worthy man in sight, but the second you meet one and make the decision to commit; all of a sudden you have a line up of suitors at your door—good ones at that! What the f#ck??

It’s as if their coming out of the woodwork for f#ck’ sake! Two years in this building and only in the last couple of weeks have I seen this handful of hotties that have been stopping to chat as we walk our dogs or go pick up the mail. Where were they before?? And at the grocery store? Now they have the gusto to approach and ask me for my number and a date? Come on!! As fabulous as my tan looks; I think it’s more the scent of forbidden pussy that is wafting past and bringin’ em’ in.

It isn’t even just that more guys seem to want you, but you also end up running into ones that you wanted once upon a time, even more than a new pair of Manolo’s on the 75 percent-off table! Seriously. I have run into two men from my past this week who I used to lust after in the most inappropriate way. It makes me think that God is throwing temptation my way to see if I’ll bite and misbehave. To that I say:

Hi God. It’s me, Adrie.
Thank you for all the eye-candy that you have sent my way as of late. With all due repsect; I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not gonna work. Just cuz’ Eve was weak enough to cave doesn’t mean that I’m going to. So, feel free to send along all the loincloth-clad Adams you want, cuz’ I’m ready for them and all of their firm, juicy, delicious apples. You can throw in a snake too, cuz’ no matter how long and persuasive; I will not be swayed to take a bite no matter how satisfying and scrumptious it may seem.

Now if you will excuse me; I have to go get a napkin and splash some water on my seat. Oops! Face!! I meant my face!

The fact that I spent much of my trip with a hot, foreign tongue shoved down my throat has nothing to do with my not posting here as promised during those couple of weeks — really. Oh how I sobbed when I realized my Net connection was too slow and unreliable to write especially as I finally had something delicious to report!

This was my 20th year spending my summer vacay in Portugal and instead of going through the usual motions with blinders on; this trip proved to be enlightening and surprising and not entirely in my usual superficial sort of way either… well… kinda.

Things I discovered this year:

I am no longer as much as Lisbon girl as I am a suburban girl who hopes to learn to be a medium-sized village girl.

And happily, I have also finally discovered that not all men are cowardly and easily intimidated by me! There is at least one who knows how to say what’s on his mind; good or bad and knows how to take charge even in the presence of a strong willed and often times pig headed crazy sex fiend like myself!
This is not to say that I’m going soft on you all — on the contrary! This has just opened up a whole new world of things to laugh about, bitch about and kiss and tell about.

Oh! I also found out that a village that I thought consisted of nothing more than a couple of banks and greasy restaurants is also home to not one, but two sex bars — complete with Brazilian hookers and overpriced booze! Yes!! I really could feel at home there.

A big thanks to Vanilla Funk for this drawing of us. No matter how old and decrepid we get; she still sees us as the lovely “Vacation Angels” that we were 20 years ago.

I first became aware of my cankles my freshman year of high school.

Somehow I’d gotten lucky enough to go on a weekend beach trip with a handful of the most popular girls in my school. We all shared an Honors bio class taught by a teacher with a glass eye and was full of classmates who had all been plucked from the pages of an incredibly good-looking Abercrombie and Fitch ad. Our teacher asked us all one day who’d like to go to St. Simon’s for a long weekend because she had a conference and could bring a few students.

St. Simon’s is an island off the coast of Georgia, south of Savannah. I’d never been before and raised my hand immediately. I became one of the golden chosen ones and found myself on in a van under the guise of being one of the Popular People, sitting in a van and discussing the whether or not Express really made the best jeans.

All in all it was a fun weekend—one highlight was this new dance everyone was into that I learned called The Macarena. The other was the realization that I had huge ankles. And I can thank Rachael Carmichael for informing me.

We were at a beach gift shop and everyone was pouring over a display of these cute new ankle bracelets. They were thin strips of rope-like material with a string of colored jewels in a line down the middle of the bracelet. You could get different colors and the various colors meant various fun things like “green for honesty” and “blue for fun-loving.” This was a time in my life when I lived by Seventeen’s horoscopes and wishing on just about anything so I loved that the kitschy of these bracelets lay in the fact that you tied them around your ankle and with each knot you made you got a wish. Then when the bracelet wore out (which I figured would be about 2 weeks since they only cost $4) your wishes came true when the knots fell out.

Cute right?

We all bought one–I think I got green. We all went outside to the boardwalk to don our new purchases. Little exclaimations of “I got four knots!!” and “This thing is too big, I think” I noticed that I could only make one knot with mine and even then it was a little snug. What,were these things made for baby ankles or what? Did I get the wrong size or something?

Rachael Carmichael noticed my single knot at the same time as I did. She glanced at my ankle and then back up at my face. and she said,

“Wow Brandy, only one knot? You’ve got some big ankles.”

I know she didn’t mean to cut me to the core. I know that she was just making an observation because the next words out of her mouth were, “So are we going to get Dairy Queen now or go back to the beach?” She had simply stated what she saw.

I had big ankles.

In fact, now that I looked at all the lean slender calves leading down to perfectly bony ankles surrounding me, I wanted to disappear. I was skinny!! I’d always been skinny!! I hit 5′8 at age 10 and had only recently tipped the scales at my heaviest–119. How could I have big ankles?

I swallowed my hurt and pretended that this girl hadn’t just started me down a path to hating my cankles. I had fun the rest of my weekend at the beach and Rachael Carmichael even invited me to a party at her house the following weekend.

But I came home aware for the first time that there was something I didn’t like about myself.

All my friends had self-esteem issues–they were too fat, too short, too blonde, too freckly, too something. Being raised by one of the most vain women in the great state of Georgia, I was chock full of self-esteem. Even though I was skinny as a rail with huge crooked glasses and a somewhat unfortunate taste in floral print slip dresses and colored tights, I had never wanted to look different.

I told my mom and she said that it came from my dad’s side of the family so if I was trying to pick a fight to save it for him. “You have fat feet, Bran. Nothing wrong with that. When my dad came home he told me that I only had big ankles because my body was getting ready to support a lot of weight. He always knows just what to say.

I became aware at age 14 and that awareness has always been in the back of my mind. And now at 26 I feel I can finally say that I am okay with my cankles. They are sturdy and they keep me grounded. Sure I feel flashes of envy when I see girls in their cute strappy sandals teetering on 4 skinny four inch heels. I will never teeter. I will never wear any type of shoe that wraps up my leg in any way.

And I’m okay with this.

I’m living with my cankles.

Let’s all take a moment, close our eyes, and imagine a solar system in which our dating life and our ego were not intrinsically intertwined. What a simpler universe that would be. I’m guessing that in such a world, people actually say what’s on their mind and store bought CDs are actually easy to open. While I’ve strived to create such a world of emotional sanity for myself, it ain’t happening. Why? Because the older and theoretically wiser I get, the more I realize my ego is the evil brute force behind ninety nine percent of the bad decisions in my life – especially romantic ones.

Let’s use as an example the utterly pathetic love story that inspired me to write ‘The Grey Relationship.’ In me and my partner’s agonizingly subtle grey relationship break-up, he put the sexual breaks on the relationship before I did. Had I considered doing the same thing weeks, if not months earlier? Yes. Did I know this relationship was unhealthy and going nowhere? Yes. Was I hoping it would end soon anyway? Absolutely. Yet naturally I was filled with pure outrage when he decided we should maneuver toward the land of ‘just friends’ before me. Instead of being happy I put yet another worthless relationship behind me without a difficult and uncomfortable confrontation, I just feel rejected. My pesky ego then begins thumping through every fiber of my body screaming: ‘work to get this guy back.’ Suddenly, Mr. Wrong is Mr. Hard to Get. And every girl loves a challenge. An inner dialogue ensues that goes something like this:

Me: Why would I want this dysfunctional grey relationship to continue? The sex wasn’t even good enough to make it worthwhile.
My Ego: I bet the sex is good with the new Norwegian super model he dumped you for.
Me: He knew we mutually wanted to end things. It was a tacit understanding. He just took the initiative.
My Ego: ‘Tacit understanding.’ The drugs you’re deluding yourself with must be really powerful. Wake up! He doesn’t want you anymore.
Me: That’s fine. I knew this wouldn’t work out from the get-go. And I’m sure my hips have nothing to do with it.
My Ego: But how you smell might.
Me: He’s fine with the way I smell. At least…he was…
My Ego: Explain all the wasted hours envisioning what beautiful children you’d have together?
Me: We WOULD have beautiful children, so what?
My Ego: Honey, you’re future husband just DUMPED you like your months of faux intimacy didn’t even matter.
Me: (finally in nervous breakdown mode) GAAAAA! Do you think if I wear my red cocktail dress and slut heels tonight he’ll take me back?
My Ego: It’s worth a shot.

Hence my pride prevents me from acting rationally and letting a relationship come to its natural end. I think our female ego is one of the biggest obstacles to a clean break-up, right next to loneliness. And sure sexual rejection hurts, but when it’s in both of your best interests, you’d think a mature, intelligent human being would get over that and move on. Instead, I end up performing the emotional equivalent of running into a wall repeatedly until I slither, beat-up, into the fetal position in the corner, feeling rejected now not once, but ten times. I think this horrific image transitions into my next frightening, existential question: How much of why we date someone in the first place has to do with them, and how much has to do with our overly ambitious pride?

I’ll be first in line to admit that often, subconsciously, I’m attracted to someone for all the wrong reasons – chiefly being that they make ME look good instead of that they are good FOR me. Men that I feel make me look good are usually handsome types that can pull off wearing white linen pants or headbands. Neither of those qualifications mean they’re
a) literate
b) tolerable or
c) a good match for me
Therefore my initial attraction to the opposite sex is fundamentally distorted from the beginning thanks to my exhibitionist side forcing me to care so much about what the outside world thinks. When it comes to micromanaging and especially ending dysfunctional relationships, my evil ego whispers in my ear that I shouldn’t be letting that ‘catch’ get away. In reality, my ‘catch’ is an essentially unemployed partying playboy with no personality, no sensitivity, and no future that doesn’t involve jumping up and down on club banquette couches.

How to tame the ego? That’s another topic for another day. I’ll get back to you when I have some answers.