Ladies and Gentlemen….. MY TRIUMPHANT RETURN!! *cue music*
Or… to keep up with the times…
Bet you thought you thought you’d seen the last of me.
Yeah, I took an unexpected party (Baggins style, yo) and by party I mean fiesta, and by fiesta I mean siesta. I realize two months of slacking may seem excessive to you, but think about the bears! …tangent aside, I do realize I missed important things to write about (Christmas, the much needed farewell to 2013, and uhhhh… that, over there) and I still refuse to write about them. So farewell to Christmas (seriously people… take your decorations down already!) and fare-freaking-well to 2013. It’s been a delight. (By delight I mean tremendous disappointment, mental anguish, and soul-numbing mush-bucket.)
Anyways, on to the blog. The topic this week shall go big and bold as I start this new year. I am going to discuss relationships/men/dating etc. Will this be a hot mess of written bashing to all the men who have wronged me in my life? Well, it may very well be a hot mess, but I will keep the bashing to a minimal/anecdotal caliber. Quite frankly, there have been so many more life changes that deserve my attention and emotions so much more.
So my point is, I’m ok, I’m over all of it, I’m a completely sane person who is soooo much better without another person to validate my existence, blabbity blabbity blah.
Who knows, maybe I may get a lyrical tattoo reaffirming me to stand my ground, live and let die, eat more cheese, you know.. the usual tropes. That’ll teach them.
Anyways after the breakup, I spent my days (read:months) wallowing in self pity and remorse.
An average weekend mapped out as follows.
– 18 hours of alternating between My Little Pony and Breaking Bad marathon sessions.
– 2 hours of obligatory familial interaction to avoid snap judgements of deteriorating mental state.
– 10 hours of in-depth social media stalking.
– 12 minutes spent for meal production. (Includes microwaving tacquitos, easy-mac, and entire cans of corn (when feeling healthy.))
– 20 minutes of precariously balancing soda cans, Ben and Jerry’s containers, personal pizza boxes, fruit snack wrappers, and yogurt cups (when feeling healthy) into a small trash can in a feat of engineering prowess rarely seen outside of a Jenga game.
– Remaining time spent in a hazy mixture of watching Beaches, The Notebook, Pocahontas, and Forrest Gump with intense nap sessions that result in dreams so vivid it tends to blur reality.
Eventually I got out of those self-destructive patterns and got into new, seemingly more healthy ones, like searching for the special someone that would fill the emotional void in my life.
At first I would attempt to go out in real life to attempt to meet some dates. But being from rural America, this pretty much leaves a bar as your only option. While some guys seemed nice, quite a few were brashly open about their less-than honorable intentions.
It would usually play out like this:
Just.
Like.
This.
Don’t get me wrong. I love myself a man with a giant, meaty, throbbing… vocabulary just fine, but that doesn’t mean you go whipping it out at the first gal who bats an eyelash at you. (Actually, yes, double entendre aside, whip out the vocabulary immediately.)
I realized that the rural bar scene wasn’t my thing and moved on to bigger and …. (I realize ‘better’ should go there, but it just doesn’t feel right) things: Online Dating.
Now this brought on a whole bucket of awkward.
But so was my single life.
First, upon creating my profile, I was met with an eclectic barrage of messages from members who had viewed my profile. At first, my full inbox excited me and made me feel better about myself.
But upon further investigation, I realized that my inbox was just a cesspool of deviants ranging from:
1. The boring men who lacked in basic conversation skills.
-“hey”
2. The 40+ year olds who had a disturbingly ‘youthful’ side.
-“hey u r beautiful. i would love to show a pretty girl like u how much ive learned over the years. if u like older men i can make u feel realy good.”
3. The geeky men with lush neckbeards who actually read my profile.
They saw how ‘nerdy‘ I am, and wrote something heartfelt as follows:
..except in their mind the conversation would go along the lines of:
“You complete.. my Aggro deck.” (click for translation)
“You had me at ‘Thanos could totally pwn Galactus with the Infinity Gauntlet’.”
*please note that I am not a nerd-hater and I’m sure these men were very nice people, I just realized that there were many things about them that I probably couldn’t relate to.
4. The dude-bros that probably should be in a relationship with themselves.
-“Hey ur hot. Wanna meet up sometime? I like going to the gym a lot so I do look as good as my picture. I hope you do 2. I hate when girls don’t look as good as their pic.”
Once I recognized the true terror of the culture I had immersed myself in, I acted accordingly.
To be honest, it didn’t play out that way (it was sure close.)
I met (read: anonymously clicked on profiles) a variety of men who seemed to share a lot of interests. But I realized that to move past the messaging stage into actually physically meeting these people (who may or may not be completely shady) created too much anxiety for me, and too much effort to overcome that anxiety and actually ‘make it happen’. So my online-dating days ended with a quiet fizzle. (Much like how my sabbatical from the blogosphere occured).
So now I’m just in a place where my desire to go out and actively find a person to date consistently loses to my newly found self-esteem and faith in the fact that the ‘right person’ will come along.
Feel free to check back in a few weeks to see if my old friend, desperation, comes roarin’ on back to kick that healthy mentality in the metaphorical balls.
Until next time people!
Oh! Em! Gee! 