the awkward fairy

An email I sent to Marian, my best friend, one fine midsummer Tuesday afternoon:

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On the Fourth of July, I:

- Almost lit the house on fire.  Note to self:  Do not believe the guys at the fireworks stand who tell you that "nothing we sell will explode any higher than waist-height," since clearly they are talking about waist-height for Sasquatch.

Yesterday, I:

- Threw Adam out of my apartment at 10 a.m. so he would not be there when Nolan came to pick me up at 10:30 a.m.  I think I am a bad person.

- Went on an 11-hour maybe-date with Nolan, which was dive-bombed somewhere around hour 10 by a visit from the Awkward Fairy, in the guise of a Channel 9 newswoman.  I'm heading into a meeting right now, but do I have a story for you later.

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I'll tell you the rest next week, yes?

tabula rasa

Looking back through my (admittedly slender) archives, I find I'm pleased about something.

I haven't actively curated the contents of this blog. Since February, I've written what's been on my mind. The stories are from last decade, last month, and last night; they're here because they don't tug at my mental corners quite as much once I've written them down. But when I review all of my entries -- both the published ones, and the dozens of drafts -- I notice a glaring and gratifying hole.

He's not here.

I'm cautious about how I explain this. I don't want to afford him too much weight -- and any weight seems like too much. But (don't all good stories start this way?) there was this one guy. A real piece of work. Of course, before I figured that out, I fell madly in love with him; became blind to all his flaws; and dated him for the better part of three years with what became self-flagellating vim. The final detonation involved STDs, the Craigslist casual encounters section, and a girlfriend in another state he'd somehow neglected to mention.

Morgan later described it as a "we-burned-this-shit-to-the-ground breakup." Accurate, but requires a stage note: I was using napalm.

So you can see how, if I'd started this blog a few years ago, it pretty much would have been a monograph on this cretin. You all would be as tired of listening to me as my friends were back then. But here we are in 2011, and my archives tell me he's been mentioned only once, in passing. He was just background in a story about someone else.

I expect I will write about him at some point. That's okay. I did a lot of dating and drinking with him, and those tales are part of how I got here.

But meanwhile, my own journal betrays the fact that he's vanished from my mental radar more completely than I once could have imagined. And that, ladies and gentlemen, seems like something worth celebrating.

kindred spirit

We were talking about John Irving, which was in itself impressive. When I said that I'd liked A Prayer for Owen Meany much better than The World According to Garp, he plucked my hand out of the air and held it to his cheek for just a second.

Then he told me about how he'd discovered Owen Meany, back in high school. Actually, he mimed it with the beer menu. "I read it like this," he said, his nose almost touching the words. "I wanted to eat the paper, that's how much I loved that book."

I would have made out with him for that sentence alone.

like the movies

Summer of 1999. First day of high school orientation. I was, what, 14? "Painfully self-conscious" doesn't even begin to describe it. He was the leader of my orientation group, beautiful in the way that only unattainable senior boys can be -- olive-skinned, dark-haired, self-assured. I wasn't the only one who thought so; the whole female freshman population was in love with him by October. Because real life isn't like the movies, he did not ask me to prom.

Summer of 2007. I'd just graduated from college. One of my best friends was turning 21, and there was drinking to be done, so we were getting the party started on the steps of the birthday boy's apartment. And suddenly, over the salted rim of my margarita, there was Tony Caruso -- the senior god himself. He looked exactly the same. Maybe it was the tequila, but I found to my own surprise that I was now able to speak, walk, and breathe normally in his presence.

It wasn't until halfway through the evening, when someone in the group referenced our high school, that he turned to me specifically. "Wait. Did you go to [our high school] too?" he asked.

I couldn't suppress a grin. "You wouldn't remember it," I told him, "but you were actually my orientation leader. I'm Clare Alexandra."

"Clare?" You could see him trying to compare current-me with his faded library of mental snapshots from 1999. "Really?  But I think I would have noticed you..." He was actually flustered. He squinted at me a little more, and then finished with, "You...um. Wow. You grew up really nice."

I had a little moment, right there on Sherman Way in the warm summer air.  Tony Caruso had just looked at me with admiration, and had told me (in the most inarticulate way possible) that he thought I was pretty.  Sometimes real life is like the movies, after all.

Summer of 2011. I'd forgotten all about Tony in the intervening four years, but last week I stumbled across his Facebook profile. He's married now. (To a girl who looks a lot like me, if we're being strictly honest here.) And this story doesn't really have a point, except to say that I had another little moment, looking at his picture and remembering the cinematic summer night when he thought I grew up really nice.  If I was a motivational speaker, I'd tell all the high school girls that story.

¡andale!

Sometimes I draft posts and then forget to go ahead and publish them -- usually because I have been distracted by something shiny. Actually, it's better if you just assume that nothing in this blog is in chronological order. There are lots of shiny things where I am.

Yesterday afternoon was bad. The end of Charles, finally, in what has been a very indefinite and lingering end. It wasn't frank and amicable, like it might have been; instead it was garbled and dismissive and conducted via text message. (Text message!  Let me assure you, gentle reader, that this wasn't my idea.) The kind of end that leaves you furious and gagging on all the things you still want to say.

So I had to shut my office door and put my face in my hands for a while. Take a lot of deep breaths. Unload to Nick, who really deserves a medal for listening to me as much as he does. Violently staple things that didn't need to be stapled.

But then, more by accident than design, I made a few good decisions. It started when I tied my ass to my chair and finished the proposal I needed to write, without making any more excuses. Then my sister called, and I didn't yammer about my own problems because her day was definitely worse than mine. Then I went to a volunteer job and did some good work for some good people, in the company of some more good people. Then I came home and talked to my roommate, who also happens to be good people (although she'd object to the phrase). Then I looked through my high school yearbooks and laughed, and emailed a friend who is half a world away to talk about a good memory. And then a very handsome guy told me that he liked my prose and he'd like to read more of it. By the time I went to bed, I felt about a million times lighter and at least half as homicidal.

Which is all to say -- when you're sad, you have to do something. Do anything. You can't just sit around. (Which is what I did on Saturday, and let me tell you, it was bad.) Get yourself to where there are some people to talk to. Get some shit done. Get to work, Clare, get to work.

how it's done

The message popped up unexpectedly, interrupting my mid-afternoon malaise.  He had seen from my Facebook wall that I was planning on going to the preseason football rally at our mutual alma mater.  The least I could do, he said, was to let him buy me a drink afterward.

This was awkward because I couldn't for the life of me remember how I knew this guy.

He's on my Facebook friends list.  I remember accepting his friend request because he happens to share an unusual last name with a family of kids who went to my elementary school, so I figured he was one of them.  But once I accepted, I realized that all our mutual friends -- more than 30 of them -- were from college.  I must have met him at some point then, and promptly forgotten all about it.  (This happens to me more often than I'd like to admit.  I blame it on all the undergrad boozing.)

Anyway, after an hour of racking my brain, I had to give up and send him one of my patented "This is embarrassing, but I can't remember how I know you; pardon me/remind me?" emails.

The response came back that evening.  No need to be embarrassed, he said; we'd had a couple of classes together years and years ago.  He thought we might have been at some of the same college social events, too.  But really he was interested in getting to know me better now.  "Maybe a shot in the dark," he wrote, "but I saw that you were heading this way and I couldn't deny that I was long hoping for a reason to run into you."

Gentlemen:  Want to ask a girl out?  Want to do it in a way that is both flattering and respectful?  Want to make it quite clear to her that you are interested, not dabbling in the murky waters of friendship?  Of course you do, because then she'll say yes.  And that sentence, right there at the end of the last paragraph -- that's how it's done.