Not Funny Not Bitter Holiday Post of Luv

Good morning, class.

Today I have decided to give you all a Valentine's Day present, in the form of a handy (and uncharacteristically serious) Guide to Love. I will share with you - FOR FREE - the most important lesson I've ever learned about love. Am I saying it's the most important thing to know about how to love people? No. I'm saying it was the lesson that I most needed to learn. Your mileage may vary.

Our lesson today comes to us, as all great lessons do, from the Book Movie of Forrest Gump.

I was going to embed the scene here, but it doesn't appear to exist anywhere on them internets. It's the very very very very very last scene - not the one with the title "Final Scene" on all the YouTubes, the ACTUAL final scene right before the credits. Where Forrest and Little Forrest are waiting for the school bus. Little Forrest starts to get on the bus, and Forrest, looking concerned, yells, "Forrest, don't..." Then he pauses momentarily and says, "...I wanna tell you I love you." Bust out your DVD copy and re-watch for full effect.

The lesson comes in two parts, and it's all clearly stated in Forrest Sr's parting words to his son:

Part I: "Forrest, don't..."
THIS IS ME. THIS IS HOW I ALWAYS AM WITH PEOPLE. My side of a relationship ends up disproportionately filled with:
"Don't go"
"Don't drive too fast"
"Don't forget to call me when you get there"
"Don't date that jerk"
"Don't leave me"
You get the idea. It's all well-intentioned, but it's also all clinginess or bossiness or worrywarting. And the truth is, people do what they want to do. Every time, no exceptions. If they want to stay out late, they will. If they want to date guys who take advantage of them, they will! If they want to leave you and never look back, they will. If they want to do drugs, they will. And if they want to harm themselves, they'll do that too. Not saying there's anything wrong with trying to help people, but when you've passed the point of helping and become a broken record, you need to say something else. And when that happens, you have to be sure you say the right thing.

Part II: "I wanna tell you I love you"
Everything from "Don't do drugs" to "Don't date that jerk" to "Don't drive too fast" is just code for "I love you". And when you just say that instead, everything - everything - gets a lot clearer, really fast. So now, every time I hear myself about to say "Don't..." or "I wish you'd..." or "You should..."; I try to stop myself and say "I wanna tell you I love you" instead. Because I do wanna tell them that. And maybe you do too. Because even if they go and do something stupid that means I never see them again, that is the thing I will never regret having said. Ever. Happy Valentine's Day :)

via workisnotajob.com

CRUSHED: A Practical Guide

I have a confession to make: I'm a real person. I have feelings and relationships, I do Yoga...I know, it shatters your whole vision of me. I'll give you a minute. Ready to continue? OK.

As a person with feelings, I have, on occasion, burdened other people with my feelings and/or had the feelings of others foisted upon me. It happens to the best of us. So yeah, I DID click on the link to a spiritual self-help article about dealing with unrequited love. You wanna make it into a whole thing?

This is a serious subject, of course - nobody likes having their heart broken - so it should be treated with respect and dignity. I get that. On the other hand, though, sometimes the best advice isn't necessarily the most practical advice. I mean, people have been telling me to "love myself" for years. It's easier said than done, and when you're sitting on your couch in a pile of discarded Kleenex, you need something a little stronger. So while I certainly don't have anything against that kind of advice, and think it's a wonderful long-term plan, I'd like to offer you more immediate relief. Think of it as the difference between getting physical therapy for an injury (long-term), or taking a Vicodin (HELL YEAH!). And so, without further ado, here are 10 steps you can take to turn your heart-splitting anguish into a mind-numbing stupor from which you can safely emerge at such time as the danger has passed.

1. Go to Disney World. Trust me on this. You will see people a billion times uglier, meaner, ruder, more selfish, smellier, fatter, more acne-ridden, and just generally more revolting that you will ever, ever be. That in itself probably won't make you feel better, but what WILL make you feel better is the fact that all of these people are loved. Virtually all of them will be partnered up in some way, and many of them will also have children who love them dearly. No matter how crappy you feel about yourself in this moment, the message of the hordes of Disney World attendees is that you CAN find someone to love you. As my mother says, "There's a lid for every pot". As I like to say, "If you wait long enough, you'll eventually find someone as desperately lonely as you!"

2. Get really drunk and call the object of your affections to declare (or reiterate) your love. This is an excellent idea because when you sober up, you can know with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that nothing can EVER happen between the two of you because you will be far too busy trying to convince the federal government to let you into the Witness Protection Program. I speak from experience on this one. When they ask what murder you witnessed, you can't just say "The murder OF MY DIGNITY!!!!" No dice.

3. Write embarrassingly gut-wrenching poems about your situation and post them as your Facebook status. Here's an example to get you started:
How can you say you don't know me?
I gave you my heart
My soul
And you ripped them both out
And gnashed them between your incisors
You stupid jerk
I hope you get gangrene of the rectum
Yikes. You might think this serves no positive purpose, but once again, appearances prove to be deceiving! I myself have never taken the "horrifically wince-inducing Facebook poetry" approach, but I've seen other people do it ad infinitum and frankly, it's hilarious. If you're gonna sit around and mope, you could at least try to bring some joy to someone else's life; that's all I'm saying. Oh - and should you post that poem and have someone mistake it for song lyrics or an excerpt from a more famous poet, simply re-post it, adding your name and the date at the bottom. I mean, c'mon - who WOULDN'T want credit for that work of genius?

4. Attack the source. Your heart is killing you, right? I mean, the pain is so terrible - it physically hurts to be so unloved. Solution? Deep fry everything, eat salt by the spoonful, and adopt the motto: "It isn't dinner without a dozen Krispy Kremes!" This will definitely show your heart who's boss, and that you can stop it in its slimy little tracks whenever you so choose! See? Empowering.

5. Find someone new. This is the oldest trick in the book, I know, but you can't argue with results! The best way to get over someone is to find someone new to love! I mean, sure, your heart won't really be in it, and you'll spend all your time comparing the new person to your old flame. The new guy will be great on paper, but how could he hope to match the way your beloved used to smile? Or the nervous laughter you could elicit in the early days of your flirtation with no more than a knowing glance? But if you just give someone else a chance, you'll see that NO ONE ON EARTH CAN HOPE TO MEASURE UP TO THE LOVE YOU'VE LOST OH GOD WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME I GAVE YOU EVERYTHIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGG!
Abort! Abort! This one's a bad idea! What's #6? QUICKLY QUICKLY!

6. Remember what I said earlier about Vicodin? There's nothing wrong with literal interpretations. I'm just sayin'.

7. Watch Wicked Attraction. It's on Netflix Watch Instantly right now. I've been watching this for weeks, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's just your typical true-story-of-ghastly-crime series, but what makes it different is that it's always about two or more people working together to torture/rape/kill innocent victims. Usually these two or more people are involved romantically, and usually there's a point where the forensic psychiatrist says "There were no prior indications that Person A would end up being a violent killer - no previous convictions, no terrible childhood, no mental problems. It's just that s/he loved Person B SO MUCH and wanted to please them..." The takeaway here is that if you love someone, you might end up accidentally becoming a serial killer! I KNOW, RIGHT?!?! Being single has its perks, y'all. My bed might be cold. My back might be itchy. I might be a cold, lonely, bitter spinster. But I'm no murderer.

8. Participate in NaNoWriMo. I am! It's one of the reasons I've been so conspicuously absent lately, actually. The other reason being a hypothetical boy issue that may or may not have distracted me up until it inspired me to write this post. But that's as may be. My point is that NaNoWriMo is a wonderful outlet - like a journal, but more awesome. In my case, the second I felt an infatuation coming on, I wrote this alleged boy into my story as THE Good Guy of the tale. Once I realized he didn't care if I lived or died, I blew his character up in a massive explosion that left his limbs strewn around a cesspool! See? Empowering.

9. Answer calls from telemarketers. Ordinarily I would advise against this - who wants to talk to those losers? But let's face it: the broken-hearted need someone to talk to, and your friends are only going to listen to the same crap a few hundred times before they change their numbers, move away, and/or get a restraining order. If other people are going to call you, why not make good use of that?

10. Win the lottery, lose 40 pounds, and become a Victoria's Secret model. I haven't tried this one myself yet, but I'm pretty sure it'd work.

SWF Seeks SEWVUV

Ugh. The single life. Regular readers (both of them ) will recall my many previous posts about my online dating experiences, and will probably be relieved to hear that I deactivated my profile last month after an escalating series of messages from some random weirdo. But "random weirdo" is not a very nice term to use, so I'll let you read our paraphrased conversation and judge for yourselves:
HIM (mid-June): Hi! You're pretty. Where do you do improv?
HIM (2 days later): Just bored at work so I thought I'd drop you a line. Send me a message!
HIM (early July): What's up?
HIM (one week later): I heard a funny joke today I thought you'd like. Chat me and I'll tell you
HIM (one hour later): IT SAYS YOU'RE ONLINE NOW! ARE YOU ONLINE? CHAT ME!
HIM (late August): We should meet up sometime.
ME: (cancels subscription to service)

So I had given up on finding love, and I've only grown more hopeless in the past week as I've learned that two of my celebrity crushes are Libras* (UGH!) and one of them is quite possibly gay.

Let's just say I've been working on my fantasy Golden Girls roommate roster and checking out retirement communities in Miami. Acceptance is the first step.

But then CNN ran a story about 5 great train rides for viewing fall foliage. CURSE YOU, CNN!

C'mon Great Smoky Mountain Railroad! You're killing me here!

I know they say that in the springtime a young man's thoughts turn to bikinis and foot fetishes or whatever, but I tend to be much more relationship-oriented in the fall than any other season. And I know some people say Christmas is the time of year when single people pine for companionship, but those people have never spent 2 weeks deadlocked in a fight to the death over whose family gets Christmas day and whose family gets stuck with the day after. Hell, if I ever do end up in a relationship again, we're going to be on a break from December 1 to December 30 every year. I simply cannot spend yet another Yuletide screaming "All I want for Christmas is MY LIFE BACK!" But I digress.

Fall is nice because there aren't any designated days that make you a horrible child if you don't spend them with your family, the weather's cool enough to warrant snuggly behavior, and it's a low-cost/low-traffic time for weekend getaways. I have many a fond autumn memory of Chattanooga, Athens, Helen, and even the beach...bundling up, exploring the scenery, drinking apple cider, eating in nice restaurants, staying in fancy B&Bs...and not paying for any of it!

OK, hang on - before you start calling me a gold digger, hear me out. It's not just about freeloading fun fall activities. Believe it or not, there are guys I could con into buying me things this very second if I wanted to, but that's not my deal. Half the fun is the companionship, and I'm extremely picky about guys - ask any of my exes. I also tend to be on the defensive when I first meet prowling boys, just because I know they can't be trusted. So if some random guy walked up to me and said, "Hey, d'you wanna ride the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad though Nantahala Gorge?", I'd pepper spray first and ask questions later. But if you've already got someone whose company you enjoy, and you want to spend hours and hours staring out a train window with them...c'mon, it's the icing on the cake if it's free.

It's just that getting to that point in a relationship is so difficult! You have to do that whole PowerPoint presentation of who you are and where you came from and why you aren't allowed inside Hardee's anymore. Then you have to tolerate each other's friends. Then you have to decide if you can stand to watch him talk with his mouth full of pizza for as long as you both shall live. Then you have to guess exactly what his mother will hate about you and try to fix it (or at least cover it up) before you meet her. Then you have to pretend to enjoy Dune or Star Wars or baseball... It's a whole THING. All that just so you can get on a damn train and quietly drink some coffee while looking out a window together!

Screw it. Maybe they'll let me bring my cat.

*As my wise friend C once said, "Never date a Libra. Libras are criers. It's exhausting."

Let's Just Get it Over With

You may have noticed that I keep referencing online dating, and that is because it is an endless font of inexplicable human behaviors that make me laugh. And that is because if I didn't laugh at them, they would make me cry.

I think the biggest problem I have right now is that my profile is basically blank. As a result, the only people who message me are people who just liked the picture or are literally writing to every woman on the site. I keep trying to fill in my profile, but...I mean, come on. This is what the form looks like:

• My Self-Summary
• What I'm Doing With My Life
• I'm Really Good At
• The first things people usually notice about me
• Favorite books, movies, shows, music and food
• The six things I could never do without
• I spend a lot of time thinking about
• On a typical Friday night I am
• The most private thing I'm willing to admit
• I'm looking for
• You should message me if

Is it me? That's too much information to demand all at once. I might as well just publish a thousand-page autobiography and have the inside back cover read: "If you got this far and didn't want to gouge your eyeballs out, call me". Anyway. I keep trying to fill the stupid thing in, and I can't. Because I just don't care anymore. Besides, if I'm going to take the time to answer that many personal questions, I won't have the stamina to maintain the false veneer of cheerfulness throughout. Something's gotta give. Which is why I decided that instead of filling that out, I'd just come here and tell you...

What I'd Like to Say in my Online Dating Profile

• My Self-Summary

*THIS PROFILE IS CERTIFIED FREE OF DUMB DOUBLE-ENTENDRES AND CHEEZY, FLIRTATIOUS PICKUP LINES.* I have yet to meet anyone who self-identifies as an "objectivist", "libertarian", or "foodie" who didn't make me want to claw their eyeballs out after talking to them for a minute and a half. I am a person. I have needs. They include, but are not limited to, M&Ms and silence. I'm sure you have needs too, but frankly I don't want to hear about it. First chance I get, I'm moving to the UK. So don't get too attached. Not that I was going to give you a chance to. 

• What I'm Doing With My Life

PISS OFF! What are you doing with YOUR life, jerkface?  

• I'm Really Good At

Grilled cheese sandwiches, consumption of

Pointedly ignoring small children

• The first things people usually notice about me

The fact that the word "thing" has been made plural in that sentence makes me suspect that I am more or less supposed to make either a crass reference to my breasts or a dreamy reference to my eyes. But I'm going to buck the system and be honest: most people don't notice me.

• Favorite books, movies, shows, music and food

I don't really know why I would fill this out. I've read enough guys' profiles to know that you probably enjoy the Terminator and Die Hard movies, any number of God-forsaken bands I can't stand ranging from Nickelback to Rammstein, SPORTS, one or more TV shows with lots of female frontal nudity (Californication, The Tudors, Boobs McGee: Private Detective,...), and steak. You are all so original. In the unlikely event that you remembered to mention a book, it will have some cringe-inducing title regarding the length of your workweek, the location of your cheese, or how you're gonna be Six Sigma Certified in NO TIME! Or it will be something by Ayn Rand, in which case DO NOT CONTACT ME OR SO HELP ME YOU WILL REGRET IT...

And of course, you don't really care what I like. This section only exists so we can look for commonalities. So have a look: I like The Bell Jar, Catch-22, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Robert Harris's Imperium, which I'm currently reading and quite like. You've never heard of any of the TV shows I like, because they all originated in the UK. The last movie I saw in the theater was Potiche. I like a lot of music you routinely make fun of, like Tori Amos, Björk, and Imogen Heap. Oh, and I'm a vegetarian, which is something else you'll mock me about while thinking you are hilarious.

• The six things I could never do without

1. Regular appointments with a mental health professional
2. Facebook birthday reminders

3. MY CREDIT CARD
4. Scratch-off lotto tickets

5. My copy of The Rules

6. A package of rotting mushrooms shoved way in the back of my fridge. I don't know why, but I keep buying them. So I must need them.

• I spend a lot of time thinking about

How long I have to wait after publicly eating an entire pizza before it would be acceptable to stop pretending I'm full and start demanding frozen yogurt.

• On a typical Friday night I am

Eating an entire pizza and a Double Caramel Magnum bar in rapid succession in the privacy of my own home where no one can judge me.

• The most private thing I'm willing to admit

Yeah, right.

• I'm looking for

A relationship that starts at the 6-month mark so I don't have to do all the stupid getting-to-know-you crap. I just need someone to get the tater tots out of the oven so I don't have to keep pausing this documentary about Nazi art theft.

• You should message me if

In my experience, this is another one I shouldn't answer, because most of you don't seem to need a reason to message me. Instead, I think it would be more helpful if I told you why you shouldn't message me:

- You only have one sentence, and it's either a greeting or a comment on my appearance.

- You've already messaged me three times and I haven't answered. TAKE A DAMN HINT.

- You don't like: vegetarians, cats, liberals, "socialists", French people, English people, the proverbial Other, intellectuals, treehuggers, having a President who's smarter than you are, Apple products, cheese, pizza, Mexican food, the concept of wood sprites, public broadcasting, ketchup, Twitter, or Burberry perfumes

- You've already messaged me three times and I haven't answered. TAKE A DAMN HINT.

- You DO like: Ayn Rand (see above), the Tea Party, monster truck rallies, killing for sport, recreational arguing, subservience, CAMPING, math, Jersey Shore, or skydiving

- You are a triathlete. NO. THANK YOU.

- Your profile included 3-4 lines about how much you hate "grammar Nazi's". Feeling's mutual, pal.

- You've already messaged me three times and I haven't answered. Yes, I know that's the third time I've said it. It's irritating, RIGHT?

- You are more than 15 years my senior and you're going to try to flatter me by implying that you think I'm special because I "might" be "mature enough" to handle your awesomeness. It is your misfortune that I am "mature enough" to recognize a really lame play when I see it.

Can YOU Spot the Serial Killer?

Alright boys and girls, all these graphics-intensive posts have been taking forever to create/edit, so today we're going to use our imaginations! This ain't The Oatmeal. Word.

As I mentioned once before, I occasionally toy around with (and subsequently run screaming from) online dating. I just don't think I'm cut out for it. But I've tried a new site this time around, and while I still don't think I'm going to meet anyone other than Mr. Right-Up-Until-He-Opens-His-Mouth, I am very intrigued by their methods, especially since I've discovered Spot the Serial Killer emails. The concept is pretty simple:

1. Guys on the site rate you as they come across your profile.
2. If you're lucky (and/or your picture is sufficiently grainy and unfocused - go me!), a guy will occasionally give you a 4 or 5 star rating.
3. The site then takes that guy, throws him on a list with 8 other guys, and sends you an email that says "SPOT THE SERIAL KILLER!" "Someone Chose You!"
4. This same email invites me to play their game, which means going through this set of 9 guys, rating each of them. If I give a high rating to the same guy that gave me a high rating, the almighty computer will give us its blessing and automatically send wedding invitations to all of our family and friends.

OK, maybe it doesn't quite end like that. I think it's something more like "it suggests we should probably talk to each other instead of spending all of our time rating people on the internet". And that's kind of a weird suggestion anyway, because the second he stops being a person who wastes his entire life on the internet, we will no longer have anything in common. I digress. In my case, there are always 8 pictures of normal, happy-looking, reasonably attractive guys...and one picture of a man with a shaved head and a highly offensive tattoo, sitting in a dark room with his face illuminated only by the glow of his monitor, glaring angrily at the screen while picking his teeth with a hunting knife. Hmmm...I wonder which one chose me...