Just a Suggestion

First off, why does everyone always want to talk on the phone?  I hate talking on the phone.  I only even call my parents two or three times a month on average.  Fine, maybe it's four or five or 13 because I generally have questions Google can't really answer like:

• Can you send me this childhood favorite recipe?
• How badly would we say my hand should be bleeding before I go to the hospital?
• Are you absolutely sure I don't have some long lost sibling who wants to live in Florida and take care of you when you're super old and if not, have you heard it's never too late for adoption?
• The Kardashians are younger than me and they're freezing their eggs for publicity - should I be doing the same?
• Will you pay for it? Why not?  Fine, agree to revisit this later?
• A mosquito bit me - do you think I have West Nile?  And how long would we say I should wait before picking up and going to the hospital?   
• Do you think that because I am alone in this big house in the suburbs for the weekend, I am more likely or extremely more likely to be murdered during a thunderstorm by the killer from I Know What You Did Last Summer?  

And then I mostly get hung up on.  Whatever, you get the point.  Sometimes the need for additional phone calls arise, but it's basically all for emergency situations only.  That's essentially the relationship I have with the phone function of my smartphone.  More smart, less phone.  So, no, I would not like to catch up over the phone this week.  I will almost certainly be having a chardonnay or bottle thereof.  If you'd like to catch up with me while I do so, beautiful. 

Anyhow, on to my original suggestion.  Maybe don't ask someone out, make plans and then and only then go on to tell them that you're fighting off a cold and may get them sick.  That's, well, sick.  Either just fail to mention it all together, or do the polite thing and excuse yourself and reschedule.  Meeting for a drink is not like trying to catch a triple rainbow, folks.  We signed up for internets dating and made it through the tedious introductory process; we're both interested parties here.  At least we were both interested until I could only picture you snotty and sneezing. 

Vennifer

Latte Me Tell You Something

OK, that was so cheesy I just gagged.  Sorry.  Anyhow, here's the deal:  I would not like to maybe get together later in the week for coffee.  Unless it is at 5:30am and we are two crazy roosters on the way to Soulcycle - in which case I think we would have already found that we are soulmates - I am never going to want to meet for coffee.  Caffeine after lunch is a sure fire way to make sure I never go to sleep again and lay in bed stewing about how much I resent you for a date I was never really into in the first place!  And frankly, I'm a little concerned that you don't understand after work hours are reserved for chardonnay... and bourbon.

Short post, but it needed to be said. 

Vennifer.

My New Boyfriend

Hey there.  How goes it?  Happy Friday to all, more pleasantries, yadda yadda yadda.  I just wanted to take a hot minute to introduce you all to my new boyfriend.  He's a real tall drink of water, don't you think?  Sitting there so regally casual (that's not a thing) in that chevron stripe chair.  Or maybe it's the ghost chair?  I can't be sure.  He's always switching seats and whatnot, but he's also always telling me the nicest things and encouraging me to drink more wine.  I previously thought I was the only one who got him, but then I turned on the RNC, saw ole Clint Eastwood and was absolutely thrilled to realize I wasn't alone in my connection with invisible chair people.  What. A. Relief.

OK, listen, he's yelling at me to go to the airport now.  Don't want to be late!

Happy Laborless weekend, everyone!

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Last night I had dinner (read: 6 bottles of wine) at a friend’s apartment.  She told me the tale of a man she knows who has two wives, one in the city and one in the Hamptons, meaning he’s essentially not legally married to either of them.  It was then I realized my own dating stories are bush league.  I apologize for that and plan to do better moving forward.   

So, ever the one to be cool as a cucumber and never overreact in a given situation, I took back to the internets to do a deeper dive into Mean Mike and IA’s alleged working relationship.  Naturally, I’d completely and unnecessarily overreacted at first.  They do not work together, nor did they ever even overlap.  The link was old and outdated as was easily verified by simply clicking on the current “Team” link for their company.  Game on.  A few flirty emails over the course of my raincation later, there was a date on the books.  

Day of, he asks me to meet him at The Wren on the Bowery for bloodys.  I’m in.  Maybe Mean Mike-who-hates-sports-and-TV-whose-father-grows-wine-grapes isn’t so bad after all.  He sends along his phone number (646…) for greater ease of communication.  I reciprocate.  A text pops up, “eww, I don’t talk to 917s!”  Excuse me?  Don’t push it.  You’ve already got two strikes with sports and entertainment and it is common knowledge that there’s a pecking order of NY area codes.  917 > 646 > 347.  In the eternal words of Bruce Hornsby and, well, 2PAC, that’s just the way it is.  

MM calls me while I’m getting ready, makes fun of me for living in Brooklyn, then insists he’s casually dressed and urges me not to wear pearls.  What?  You can’t throw out a hipster joke – especially when I’m nothing close to being one – and tell what I should or should not wear.  Also, don’t tell me how to dress, ever.  I’m perfectly capable of pulling together an appropriate ‘Sunday on the Bowery.’  He sounded fairly drunk, so I decided to wear, excuse my language, a fuck ton of sapphires and diamonds.  For good measure, I pour myself a greyhound “to take the edge off,” said alcoholics everywhere to enjoy while I finished frosting myself.  For better measure, I had a second.  What?  It’s refreshing.  And good thing I did, too, because MM was three sheets to the wind and loud as a marching band when he showed up.  The bartender and I make eye contact.  Collective eye roll.  BUT who am I to judge someone for being drunk on a Sunday afternoon?  Answer: no one.  Plus he was a lot cuter than his chosen photographs made him out to be.  

Within five minutes, we’d covered religion (also an atheist) politics (Libertarian) and sex.  The last one involved him asking what happens in 50 Shades (ummm) and what my chosen word would be for a see you next Tuesday.  What?!  Pass!!! I awkwardly sipped/inhaled my drink.  If that’s how this conversation is going to pan out, I needed to catch up and/or blackout.  It takes a lot to shock me, but I was not prepared to review preferred terminology for female anatomy in the first minutes of a first date.  

Somewhere between him blurting out James Brown lyrics at the top of his lungs as if he had some sort of musical tourettes (I know, I know – very PC of me) and mindless banter about what constitutes good, Irish whiskey, we had this conversation:

MM:      I feel like everyone always says they love to travel.

Me:        Well yeah, who doesn’t? 

MM:      starts to speak….

Me:        …cuts him off…. I mean, seriously, you’d have to have some sort of severe personality disorder to not love travel.   Don’t you think?  I understand that some people can’t afford it, and I’m sympathetic to that, but you’d have to be a real asshole to not have a sense of curiosity or desire to experience other places or at least want to travel.

MM:      I don’t like to travel.  I think it’s a big hassle.

Me:        Oh, well, er… sure, getting to NY airports could sometimes qualify as an entire leg of The Amazing Race, but it’s totally worth it once you arrive at your destination?  Oh, right, you don’t watch TV.  Well, it’s a multi-Emmy winning reality travel show on CBS.  So anyway, I need to run to the Ladies.

As I opened the restroom door to return to the bar, I saw him hand the signed check to the bartender and put his wallet back in his shorts.  (Shorts on a first date, really? At least they weren’t of the cargo nature.)  Anyhow, cheers to not being cheap, right? I think he also saw the writing on the wall with me, that someone who spends her weekends in the fall not only glued to college and NFL football, but plays out the screaming lunacy in color coordinated clothing and/or Super Bowl edition Cruz or Bavaro jerseys does not for him, a great love make.  More than fair and right back at you, MM, for not doing wanting to spend your precious few fall and early winter weekends doing exactly that.  At least now I can put this blog’s URL back in my Twitter profile, for I no longer care what he finds if and when he googles me.  

Until the next, failed social experiment, 

Vennifer.

New York is the Smallest 8 Million Person City in the World

I should never say things like "this actually happened last week" as if it’s some sort of pinnacle of ridiculous.  Other people could.  Other people lead pleasant and normal lives.  I envy the other people, because when I do something like that, when I dare to dance around any kind of sweeping blanket statement that implies even the tiniest bit of finality in a given situation, it’s as if I’ve tempted the universe to top it.  And top it, she has.  

I hit a patch of terrible timing with IA and thought, well, loon in my head, there’s three ways you can approach this here.  You can go crazy girl on him.  You can say that’s not good enough and walk away from it completely or you can continue seeing other people in an attempt to keep irrational at bay and see if the tides turn when this young gent has some actual time on his hands.  

Reasonable thoughts and subsequent reasonable actions coming out of me are about as common as Halley’s Comet, so I’ve gone with door number three.  I mean, does it still bother me that he had to sit at work through my [fab] birthday party and that our respective week-long vacations are on different weeks?  Sure, but this isn’t a place for whiny, sad thoughts.  If it was, however, I have some whiny-ass, sad thoughts I’ve been keeping to myself, my chardonnay and my cat.  I digress.  

So this guy Mike reaches out to me and he’s kind of a dick.  Being a girl and nothing if not predictably stereotypical, I’m instantly interested.  Mean Mike tells me, among other things, that he “hates sports and TV in general,” then asks me to tell him 10 random things about myself.  Eye roll.  Even though a man’s hatred of sports falls just under “drives molester van” and “general serial killer vibe” in my ranking of red flags, I decide I want to pursue this for the story. Also, he told me his father grows wine grapes, so let’s sprinkle on a little genuine interest/potential for opposites attract kind of thing for good measure.  

I ramble off nine mostly uninteresting and generic things about myself and then ::bats eyelashes even though it’s over the internets:: say, “10 – I’m concerned you might actually hate me because I’m absolutely fanatical about sports – football in particular – and about 95% of my job, which I love, is based around the television industry.” He replies almost immediately telling me not only that I may be right, but that my answers didn’t exactly help the situation.  Again, eye roll, this is going to take some finessing to move forward.  

By finesse, I mean silent treatment for four days.  Why (WHY?!?!) does that work so well? Whatever, Mean Mike asks me to get together for a drink, making sure to note he’s only free through Thursday and his – and I quote – “dance card is full this weekend.” Then, in a move that finally gets the bizarre ball rolling here, he throws in his real email address for greater ease of communication.  

Obviously the first thing I do is Google it.  That’s when all the air got sucked out of the room.  The first link spells out for me in great detail that he happens to work at the exact same small, private investment bank as IA.  It’s a 20-person team.  What. The. What. How does shit like this always and only happen to me?  Do you know how many banks there are in NY?!  Seriously, could he not have worked at a different one, on a larger team, with the ability to get lost in the crowd?  Even Deutsche Bank midtown vs. downtown, or something of the like, would be more ideal in comparison.

In the end, I have no idea if this is a setup or more likely in my case, just a very, very curious coincidence for three people living in ‘Merica’s most populous city. And I don’t know that I’m going to do anything in the way of finding out either.  I mean, up till now, my action plan has been to sit here, staring at the Google with my eyes bugged out, gabbing to any friend who will listen.  Like I said earlier, I am trying to stay away from the outwardly-expressed crazy girl behavior, but this latest development makes an awfully enticing offer to give in.  I suppose the moral of the story here is maybe don’t put all your eggs in a Tiny basket.  It can get messy.  

Until the next, tragic disaster in my personal life, 

Vennifer. 

This Actually Happened Last Week

Just like Liza Minnelli manifests around gay (at least according to the cinematic atrocity that was Sex and the City 2, a film I have seen no less than 13 times, whatever) ridiculous manifests around me. 

Last Wednesday evening I set out on the dual mission of rooftop champagne with friend followed by a late date with IA.  In spite of technically living in Brooklyn, it is surprisingly and delightfully easy to catch a cab in my neighborhood.  However, having them pull up directly outside my front door is a luxury for which I’ll hurl myself into the street.  Caught up in the satisfaction of not having to hunt down a ride, I failed to notice the exceedingly shellacked gentleman also trying to make his way to Mannahatta.   It properly scared the proverbial shit out of me when all of a sudden he was there, keeping me from closing the taxi door.  

So it’s not like he was a face-eating hobo zombie on bath salts or anything.   He actually seemed perfectly nice.  He was just a clean cut sort of dude who was wholly obliterated.  He was also wearing one of those “hello my name is” stickers and it said, “fucks on the first date” in the white part.  He begged me to take him to the city with me, pleading that he was so drunk (umm, yeah) and was desperate to get back home.  He offered to pay for the cab.  I said I’m perfectly capable of covering cab fare to the Flatiron.  Anyhow, after a lot of nonsense back and forth and a lot of Jim Halpert looks from the driver, I said, “Fine! Don’t touch me! Don’t barf on me! And we drop me off first!” 

We set off.  Here’s the conversation that ensued en route to the bar:

FOTFD (fucks on the first date): You’re so beautiful.  Who are you texting?

Me:  A guy I'm seeing.  Not that it’s any of your business. Please stay on your side of the cab.

FOTFD:  I’m so drunk.  I’ve been drinking all day.  I’m so drunk. He’s not going to answer you. 

Me: No one is debating that.  And he’s actively answering me.  He thinks I should get out of this cab.

FOTFD:  Come on, you’re beautiful.  I’m a nice guy.  I want to be your friend. Here’s my phone.  Put your number in it.

Me:  I’m definitely not giving you my number. 

FOTFD:  Fine, give me your email.

Me:  No, I don’t have an email that doesn’t include my full name.  It’s fine.  We’re just sharing this cab. That's all.

FOTFD:  I’m a nice Ohio guy.  Come on.  I’m a TV producer. 

Me:  I’m sure you are a perfectly lovely person.  Who do you work for?

FOTFD:  MLB.  We’ve been so busy with the All Star game and we finally had a day off.  I’ve been drinking all day.

Me:  Again, I totally believe you there.  And I work with their ad sales dept.

FOTFD:  See?  Let’s be friends.  I’m a nice Ohio guy.  Where are you from? 

Me:  I’m from Florida.

FOTFD:  Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn, fuck Florida.  Everyone is racist down there. 

Me:  Right.  There are a lot of racist people there.  Also, I don’t live there.  I live here.  I have for nearly eight years.  I have no plans to return. 

FOTFD:  Noooooooooo I bet you’re just as bad as everyone else. 

Me:  I assure you I am not.  I really don’t give a shit who or what anyone is. 

FOTFD:  Look at my arm next to you.  We’re not the same. 

Me:  Anyone with functioning eyesight can see that.  I assure you I am not a racist person. Not in the least. 

FOTFD:  Touch my arm.  Touch a black man.

Me:  OK.  …oh hey look.  Nothing happened.

FOTFD:  Fuck Florida. 

Me:  OK.

This went on for a while longer while he simultaneously tried to convince me he was going to see his girlfriend and assured me he wanted my friends to be friends with his friends.  Right, I don’t get it either.  Around this time, I got a text asking me to stop off for ciggs before heading up to the roof.  I saw a Duane Reade and screeched for the cabbie to pull over and let me out.  Just as fast as I’d hurled myself into that cab, I launched my ass out of it.  I’d had enough.  FOTFD hadn’t.  He leaned across and grabbed my arm imploring me to not go.  The cabbie meanwhile was alternating between having unspoken, judgmental conversations with me through the rear-view mirror about being irresponsible and looks that said, “Please don’t leave me with this loon.”  

In the end, I got a free inter-borough cab ride, addressed race relations and gave him some rep’s biz card so that we could be friends in the future.  You’re welcome. 

Vennifer.

Please Take a Hint

When a guy doesn't like sports, it not only nominates him for a lead role in The Red Flag Diaries, but in my mind, it justifies me no longer paying attention to anything he's saying and/or not being particularly kind for the rest of the evening.

#Single4eva

So you're telling me you've never seen The League, you don't watch football on Saturday OR Sunday and I'm just going to go ahead and safely assume you don't play fantasy (Team Fritatta 2012!) no trips up to the Bronx?  Or the Garden? And you're wondering why I ran out of there last night?! I wasn't entirely sure that you weren't, in fact, an alien! 

Vennifer.

This is Where I'm Coming From

Mom: How's it all going?
Me:  Good, I guess.  I'm still seeing the Florida guy and IA.  They both seem to like me (...at least until they find out about this blog I have).
Mom:  It must be your hair color.
Me:  Mom, I think you're supposed to be a little more encouraging than assuming someone your only daughter has been seeing for almost two months must like her solely on account of her hair color.
Mom:  Well, they like girls with dark hair.
Me:  OK, I see we've entered the stereotyping phase of this conversation. I think we're done here.  But really Mom, if anything, I'd have to imagine they'd generally prefer blonds.  It's comparatively more exotic.

That's just a typical conversation between the Mothership and me, spending five minutes talking about my personal life before she inevitably changes the subject to tell me about some deal she got on Suze Orman style jackets at TJ Maxx and lets me know that she's basically cut out and snail mailed me half the Jacksonville newspaper.  Because why not just tell me to go to the paper's website and find the articles digitally?  Forget it.

Mom:  There's this really interesting article on how you shouldn't be posting all of this stuff on Facebook.
Me:  Mom, I'm definitely putting this whole conversation on FB as soon as we're off the phone.
Mom:  Jennifer!
Me:  K, mom, gotta run.  I've got to get out and peddle these brunette locks of mine while the getting is good.

So I don't have a horrible date story to follow here. I thought I would post a real gem of an email I got the other day.  Minus the poor kid's email/phone number, here is what he sent me, verbatim... well, verbatim with my internal monologue as I was reading .  This is what I'm dealing with, people:

hi jen, [already losing points - I'm Jenn with 2 n's - also I didn't realize we were on a nickname basis yet]

good afternoon!! how are you? my name is som - rhymes w/ ohm - and i'd love to get to know more about you. how was your wknd?

i live near princeton, nj, and work in finance. at present, i am helping a couple of friends with raising capital for their start-ups. i'm a former journalist w/ an mba.

activities wise, i am pretty much up for anything..i enjoy movies, theater, cooking, jazz music, reading nonfiction, surfing the net [wait, are you 65?], watching sports, working out, road trips and more.. [is anyone else feelinga little: "Dear Chase, I feel like I can call you Chase because you and me are so alike. I'd like to meet you one day, it would be great to have a catch. I know I can't throw as fast as you, but I think you'd be impressed with my speed. I love your hair. You run fast.  Did you have a good relationship with your father?  Me neither.  These are all things we can talk about and more..."]

my personality is also an interesting mix..i'm loving, giving, caring, passionate sexual [WHAT - seriously?!], gregarious, generous, aggressive and patient. [aggressive and patient? so you're bipolar?  NEAT!]

you can also find me on fb/linkedin/skype under som _________. feel free to google me as well. [There's no crying in baseball! You can't just openly encourage e-stalking!  That takes the fun out of it!]

som

som- - - - - - - - @gmail.com
(646) xxx xxxx


Oh, Som rhymes with Ohm, you are the 2nd person who has openly encouraged me to google them recently.  Is this what people do now, because it's super weird.  Right?  Is nothing private anymore? And not to belabor the point, but that really takes all the fun out of it.  If I'm into you later on, please trust that my friends and I are going to e-search the shit out of you.  What?  I'm a girl. It happens. As for now, please know you've dodged a bullet with my lack of interest.  On to the next shiny object.  There's an NYPD officer who has just reached out.  He is not an attractive man, but again, he's NYPD.  Not sure you can pass that up... at least once.  Just to try it.  Yes?  Thought so. 

Until the next failed romance,

Vennifer.

The Weekend Everyone Told Me I Wanted Kids

Staying in NY over a holiday weekend can be lovely.  For one thing, you don’t have to compete in the amazing race to spend four hours in stand still traffic on the LIE/Montauk Highway or try and wade through half of your fellow Tri-State area residents at Penn Station who also had the clever idea of ditching out of work to get the earlier train.  For another, you have actual free time that isn’t relegated to Friday happy hour, waking up early Saturday thinking about exercising, then sitting in workout garb for three hours while you work your way through “just one more episode” of Sex and the City on HBO On Demand, finally squeezing in a pathetic workout before you go to brunch, drink all day straight through the evening, pass out and then wake up Sunday morning wondering when it’s an appropriate time to put in a Seamless order big enough to feed any ten people while willing the sun to never shine again.  That’s what happens in a typical two day weekend, right?  The point is I stayed in NY over the Memorial Day holiday and there was definitely something in the water.  

Saturday night I went out with this guy who – I can’t make this shit up – goes by the name Sunny.  Already, I had the feeling this wasn’t a match made in pretend heaven.  Sunny is a reflection of his personality, so says he, and mine, well, we all know is anything but.  He tells me to meet him somewhere in the village, I text him that I’m late, and he replies that he’s at a Starbucks in Nolita drinking water.  Everything about this, down to the Ethos water that saves the kids in Africa or something, irritates me.  Now the cab driver is barking at me, and I’m all, “hold up hermano, you’re preaching to the choir here!”  

So I fetch Sunny out of the Starbys and we walk over to Po.  Of course, he didn’t make a reservation and because the place seats every bit of 20 people, there’s a wait.  We put our name in and go for drinks next door.  He orders whiskey on the rocks and, through the slight language barrier, proceeds to tell me - unprompted mind you - that he just got out of a long term relationship and I’m the first person he’s gone out with since it ended.  Neat!  

At dinner, despite the fact that I just ordered two chardonnays over drinks, he presumptuously orders red wine for us both.  I generally stay away from red wine.  You know how gin makes some people clinically insane?  That’s what a healthy serving of la vin rouge does to me.  We had two + bottles.  While I’m trying my best to keep crazy at bay; he looks up at me and blurts out, “Why don’t you want to have children?” 

Me: (chokes on wine) I'm sorry, what?

Sunny:  Your profile.  It says you only maybe want children.  I almost didn't ask you out. 

Me: Umm, my profile also says if you asked my friends what kind of man I'm looking for, they'd tell you someone who is obviously gay to everyone but me… oh, you're serious... well, you know, there's already 7billion people on the planet.  There are plenty of men and women out there hell-bent on adding to that more than staggering number.  I'm just not sure I am one of them. 
Sunny:  I think you want to have kids.

Me: You know what; I honestly don't know that I do.  I'm really not just saying that.

Sunny: I don't think you're being true to yourself.  I think you really want to have children. 

Me:  You met me two hours ago, so while I get that you don't know me all that well, I assure you that right now, I am not interested in putting someone else's needs before mine for the next 24 hours, much less the next 24 years. 

Sunny:  I think you just need to be honest with yourself and what you really want.

Me: OMG OMG please make this stop! So did I tell you about the iPhone app I want to develop?**

Sunny: Oh, that's a good idea and I could have my friends build that in 20 minutes.  I'd like you to meet them later.  We should go into business together on this.  

**I was previously concerned this would sound racist, as Sunny is Indian, but at this point I’m well over my red wine limit and the concept of Jennifer Jr was starting to make me nauseous.  Desperate times and all.

The next day on a friend’s rooftop, things were getting pretty serious with this gin and pureed watermelon concoction I’d made.  I was into it, for sure.  As I’m standing there relaying the tales of the previous evening’s revelry, a friend of a friend I’d just met about an hour earlier steps in and accuses me of wanting to procreate.  Like, when did I get a baby rattle tattooed on my forehead and not notice?  What is going on?  And what about a chick in a backless dress with a solo cup containing a shload of gin in it screams maternal to you?  I don’t get it.  Maybe I should stop baking cupcakes and cookies for people. Can I take another step back from this uncomfortable conversation without falling down the fire escape or actually, is that a solid action plan?

Dave (who is now a friend) is a preppy, fellow FloRida transplant currently residing in CT.  Unfortunately, bringing up the topic of writing code wasn’t going to get me out of this one.   I needed a different approach.  I assured him that despite having come out on the other side of my red wine coma looking pulled together, that I am not a terribly nice person and I’m  actually pretty selfish.  No dice.  Time to pull in the big guns:  the financial responsibility of having offspring and my desire to dwell in NYC till my end of days.  Right now, those arrows aren’t crossing anywhere, anytime soon and that leaves you with the option of having a weird, UES chemical baby at like 45-years old. 

I’ve always considered myself more of a downtown gal, currently on hiatus in Brooklyn.   To go ahead and state the obvious, I never saw Sunny again even though, strangely enough, he asked.  And as far as Labor Day is concerned, Jitney me.  I’m perfectly happy to be one of the city-iot lemmings flocking to the Hamptons.

Vennifer.