The Non-Joys of Unrequited Crushes

27 Feb

The first time it happened, it was kind of magical – he was an actor, he had amazing hair, he couldn’t have been sweeter.  I wrote about him in my diary for weeks afterwards.

Oh, and I was 6.

I’m talking about my first crush, not the first time I had sex, pervert.  (Hahah I did that on purpose.) (I’m back!  It’s been forever!  Hi!  Bonjour!)  (Also by “actor” I mean that he was once an extra on an episode of Power Rangers.  Still counts.)

I’m pretty sure that starting to have crushes at the exact same time that I obtained coke bottle glasses, orthodontia and a school uniform despite not going to a school that required uniforms (thanks again, Mom, it was really great dressing like a Mormon with unshaven legs all through elementary school) was a cruel joke played on me by a clearly unmerciful God.  For the next decade, every crush I had was unrequited.  A few notable ones from the plethora:

-       The cute Filipino breakdancer in 5th grade who was a sensitive artist.  So sensitive and so artistic that he drew a flip book of me blowing up in a fiery crash to depict how little he wanted to date me.

-       The male cheerleader I met at JV Cheerleading Camp (no real story here other than the fact that it took me 4 years of cheerleading to realize male cheerleaders don’t want to date female cheerleaders)

-       My 10th grade crush, who in response to “Hey, I kind of have a crush on you,” replied with “Oh.  Cool.  Do you think I should get a haircut?”

I grew up on a lot of teenage romantic comedies, so I had a pretty firm belief in the fact that if Ethan Embry could end up with Jennifer Love Hewitt, it was going to work out for me.  That’s not to say that I took any comfort in that thought, while waiting patiently for Seth Green to romance me in a bathroom (I was really, really into “Can’t Hardly Wait” in elementary school, sorry).  No matter how far fetched the crushes were, since the age of 6, they always brought me the same anxiety.  Not just the write his last name next to yours in cursive on your textbook sort of adorable anxiety you see in movies, but the type of anxiety that induced nausea every time you saw him so much as smile at another girl, and could only be subsided by rereading an old note he passed you even if the note just said “Can I copy your algebra homework? ;) ” because he may have smiled at the bitch in homeroom but he winky faced you and that had to have some intense underlying subtext, right?  Let’s just say I was listening to a LOT of Celine Dion at the time.

Needless to say, not a lot of dates materialized for me in those days.  But things got better around the time I hit 16 and I ended up not only dating a great guy, but getting my cheesy rom com moment by dating THE guy – the whole class president/captain of the track team/impossibly cute/impeccable teeth/would go on to a top 5 law school guy.  And even though I once had to ask him at the start of our relationship “I know you said you love me, but do you LIKE like me?” (we hadn’t kissed yet, how was I supposed to know if the love he felt was sisterly?  As desperate as I was for my first kiss, incest was out of the question) things seemed to be turning a great corner – my inner Ethan Embry got his (her?) big win!

And that’s the point where I assumed things had changed in the crush game.  The next few years were spent with mini crushes that were far more realistic – I’d usually end up only liking the guys that liked me, leaving a lot less time for overwrought anguish and a Celine Dion CD that got consistently less play as each year passed.  By the time I hit my 20s, I figured I’d grown out of the unnecessary anxiety that came with schoolgirl crushes, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

So imagine my giant fucking surprise when at 23 I realized the anxiety I was feeling over someone was the all too familiar dreaded crush.  It happened again at 24.  And then again at 25.  I’d somehow regressed back to my least comfortable state of anxiety.

The problem with crushes is right there in the word – they crush you.  Sure they can be fun, especially when they’re brief and tied to the guy you made out with despite the fact that he called you Mindy Kaling, but it’s the ones that stick with you that fucking blow.  At 11, my major worries in life pretty much consisted of how to dress like a backup dancer from a Limp Bizkit video, whether my mom would let me wax my arms in junior high, and if I’d ever understand how dividing fractions worked, so I had a lot of free time to focus on my crushes.  (In case you were wondering, I did dress like a Fred Durst groupie, hair removal was allowed, but I still have no idea how to cross multiply.)  At 25, juggling a crush is the worst addition to a life that’s already buried with trying to start a career, not default on mortgage payments, and having to build my own Ikea furniture.  Taking dramatically to my bed because the 20something I met at the bars only texts me with vague plans wasn’t something I made room for on my color-coded Google calendar.

But after a binge of 90s teenage rom coms, I’m choosing once again to lean into the wind.  Unrequited crushes suck, but they also remind me of the fact that when I first had them, I wanted nothing more than to be a grown up and to not feel that way.  Now that I am a (quasi) grown up, I’m ready to accept that I’m going to be the Ethan Embry far more times than I’ll be the Jennifer Love Hewitt – but I’m also choosing to believe that one of those crushes will ultimately work out.  It may take a while, but honestly?  Can’t hardly wait.

(Seriously though, you should watch the movie.  It’s on TBS all the time.)

Girls & Friends

2 Oct

My most hated sentence out of a girl’s mouth is “Oh I don’t have girl friends; I’m a guy’s girl.”  Mainly because this is a complete lie, right up there with “I only weigh, like, 115 pounds,” and “Of course I’d have a threesome for your birthday!” and partly because it would give credence to my friend Dan’s theory that girls aren’t actually friends with other girls, they just have girls that are useful to keep around for one reason or another, and I don’t know if you’ve ever met my friend Dan, but I refuse to let my future illegitimate children grow up in a world where he is right.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m often pegged as being “one of the guys,” due to my rabid love of Sportscenter, my dislike of shaving my legs, and my (until this week) 16-week undefeated fantasy football team (I don’t feel bad – I can take one week of CJ Spiller being hurt, given that I’m the only person who had the foresight to even draft him) (I digress).  But I also love my girl friends – who else is going to honestly tell me that not only do my new hipster glasses not go with my dress, they also don’t go with my face?  So when someone introduces me to a new girl who is hilarious/smart/has an enviable closet that she’d seemingly let me pillage, I am all about it.

It was under these exact circumstances that I met Bridget – a recent LA transplant who I met through a friend at a pool party.  It was BFFship at first sight – we talked about how we’re both writers, how we share a love of Jews (to be fair, she is Jewish), and that we’re in agreement, Scarlett Johannson IS the absolute worst.  The phrase ‘girl crush’ may even have been thrown around.  When she called me the next day and suggested we grab drinks next Thursday, it was an instant yes.

Cut to the next afternoon, and I get a phone call from my friend Kenny – the one who introduced me to Bridget – that went a little something like this:

Kenny: Heard you have a date with Bridget this week!
Me: Two women can’t be friends without you trying to sexualize it? Really? Men are pigs.
Kenny: Calm down, Susan B. Anthony, you know that Bridget is a lesbian right?
Me: Oh. So? Lesbians can have straight friends too, homophobe.  I’m an ally.
Kenny: Yes, you’re an ally who is going on a date with a lesbian.  Check your texts.

Kenny then proceeded to text me a screenshot of a conversation he had with Bridget, in which she expressed her excitement over our upcoming date.  Apparently girl crush had been taken a little literally by her, and despite Kenny assuring that I may be an idiot but not a lesbian, she was still game to go out if I was.  Obviously I couldn’t cancel now – it’d just come off as a hate crime! – so off we went, to the closest bar I could find with the strongest drinks (in retrospect, also not a great idea).

Two Chimays and one awkward hand graze later, Bridget and I were actually having a great time – surprise, surprise, gays are people too, and as far as people go, Bridget was awesome.  Her stories about Jewish summer camp were hilarious (and jealousy inducing), and she couldn’t get enough of hearing all the ways my dad had indoctrinated me to become the most annoying Lakers fan ever.

And then came the inevitably awkward end of our drinks (she didn’t let me pay) – I had to cut them a little short to make it to my weekly softball game, and I had practiced the speech in my head at least 10 times of “This was so fun and I would love to hang out again, but I’m not interested in you romantically.  Please don’t hate me or I’ll probably cry.”  Except that when the conversation came around, it went a little more like this:

Bridget: This was so great!
Me: I know, right? $5 Chimays are kind of unbeatable.  And perhaps bootlegged…
Bridget: So, do you want to get dinner at Cecconi’s next week?
Me: That would be amazing, yes.

What?!  I have no idea.  I think it was a combo of my need to be liked and a 9% alcohol by volume beer, but that yes just poured out of my mouth.  Plus, you have to hand it to Bridget – she was a Rules girl.  She made plans (via phone call!) a week in advance.  She asked me out to a nice dinner, and not just Joe’s Pizza “because it’s walking distance” (sorry Joe’s, but your white pizza quality has been dropping significantly).  Plus she’s Jewish.  Other than the fact that I’m not really into vagina, this was the best dating experience I might ever have.

Until I realized something even more awkward than the fact that I was going on a second date with a lesbian – I had spent the entire evening talking about sports, and then cut it short to make it to a softball game.  Combine that with the fact that Bridget is drop dead gorgeous, and not only must she have thought I was indeed batting for the other side, she probably assumed she’d be the lipstick lesbian in our new relayshe.  Cue even more unnecessary neuroses, and mocking from all of my guy friends.

We did indeed go to Cecconi’s (she paid AGAIN), but that was the end of it – I worked up the courage to tell her on the record that I was never going to take a dip in the pool of feminine grace, which she laughed off because she said she pretty much already knew, but it was fun to see me spin out.  She also has stayed a good friend since (and it was on her suggestion that this blog post was even written), so all in all, not a complete failure – unless you count my complete and utter awkwardness, apparently.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had something like this happen…maybe it’s time I stopped playing softball.

Tags: , , ,

Dating in the Digital Age

15 Aug

While I realize this is a blog, sometimes a picture (or two) really is worth a thousand words.

Some background:

M is a boy.

C is a girl.

M is a fraternity brother of my best friend, D.  He is also a good friend of mine.  D recently forward me this text from M, asking him what he knew about C.

C is not only a friend of mine and loyal reader of this blog (the only one, perhaps) – she is also D’s best friend from his hometown.

If you can keep up with all the relationship algebra, the rest of this should be fun.

D forwarded me this text from M a few weekends ago.  (It should be noted that D’s wireless router name is stupid, and I will absolutely use this public forum to call it out.)

This was M’s text to D, after what sounded like a lovely evening.

After laughing my ass off for about 15 minutes, I immediately went to C’s Facebook, in hopes of leaving a cryptic wall post making fun of this.

Imagine my overjoyed glee when I found this gem instead.

C’s Facebook status, after HER lovely evening with M.

And this is why dating in the digital world is 100x harder than our parents ever had it.

PS – I only tease those friends who allow me to do so, and if I can offer any comfort to those of you will call me out for putting my friends on blast – M & C seemed to reconnect via this very Facebook status, hence my comment above about being increasingly uncomfortable still being on this chain.  I sure do hope they let me give the toast at their wedding!

Vacation Mistakes

11 Jul

Some of my best friends live in New York, which means that I am constantly plotting my escape from LA to go drink in the city until 4 AM.  I am only allowed to visit once a year however, due to the fact that I keep hooking up with their fraternity brothers.  In my defense, these are East Coast guys who smell like they might summer in Nantucket, and say things like “lax pinnies,” “croakies,” and “Sperry Topsider.”  I don’t actually know what any of those words mean, but I’m drawn to them the way normal girls are attracted to British accents.

In relation to this, I also recently invented a theory to make myself sleep a little easier at night: all people (me) are sluttier on vacations.  It makes sense in my head – in your hometown, you can spend multiple weekends rounding the bases and pretending that you aren’t more of a sinner than a Catholic schoolgirl in the 60s, but when you’re on vacation, you have mere days to get it in (literally) (sex puns!) (I’m going to die alone).  The downside to vacation hookups, however, is the lack of vetting you get to do prior to playing naked Twister.

As it turns out, this combo of cute New Yorkers + my cockamamie vacation hookup theories is precisely how I found myself in quite the vacation-related hooking up jam a few short weeks ago.  Here are the very specific things that happened to me, that you don’t want to end up happening to you:

Waking up in Queens

I am too cheap to pay for a hotel room, so I make do when I visit NYC through an elaborate web of couch surfing with tangential friends – however on a 6 day trip like the one I just took, I felt bad being an unwanted houseguest for that long on my friend E’s couch.  So when a round of at the bar tonsil hockey with one of E’s friends – we’ll call him Scott – led to Scott inviting me to his place for the night, it seemed like the polite thing to do so as not to wear out my welcome at E’s.  (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) Except that all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t on the FDR anymore, I was on an expressway.  And then I was in Queens.  I realize Queens is sort of a lovely place if you squint out of one eye while tilting your head to the left, but it is also something you need to prepare for.  Manhattan expects you to be of loose morals, but when you walk of shame in Queens, you better be ready to be judged by every Hasidic Jew in a 10 block radius.   Plus, there’s something summery and romantic about having a summer fling in the city.  Have you ever heard of a summer fling in Queens?  Not so much.

Finding the one white person in Queens with an Indian fetish

While I’m sure this was supposed to be a compliment, the last thing you want to hear post-hookup is someone gleefully whispering, “Just so you knoooow – I had an INDIAN girlfriend in college.”  I never know what to say to this – “Congratulations?” “Thanks!” or “Oh, she’s probably one of my cousins.”  I realize that I have a year’s worth of blog entries chronicling my love of Jews, but objectifying due to race is just plain wrong when you’re not me.

Hooking up with a Republican

I’m not sure what part of my California born, Indian-American raised, big liberal public school in NorCal college graduated-self screams “Republican enthusiast,” but when Scott told me he wanted to show me something cool and then pulled out not one, but two membership cards to the Republican National Committee, I knew shit had officially hit the fan.  Not one to back down from a fight, this led to a half hour debate on politics, Obamacare, and the religious right.  It ultimately culminated in the only compromise a Republican could offer a Democrat: “Don’t worry though, you guys are totally killing it in foreign policy.”  So. Hot.

Having to take Public Transportation

As if getting into Queens wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the little fact of having to get back to the city.  It is akin to the Incredible Journey, except that there’s no talking dog, so it actually just sucked.  To be clear, I am all for the subway.  Even though it can be kind of gross, the magic of getting from point A to point B without sitting in an hour of traffic while old Persian men cut into your lane is thrilling.  Things I’m not in for?  Catching a bus hungover at 9 AM to get to the subway.  Or catching a bus ever.  I realize this makes me sound like a spoiled cunt, but when it comes to buses, I will own it.  As it turns out, the bus was actually rather nice and even air-conditioned – but given the fact I didn’t expect to end up in another borough to begin with, and was still reeling from Mitt trying to take away my health care even though I haven’t turned 26 yet, having to get on the bus seemed to be a nightmare.  I’m 42% convinced it was just a ploy to somehow keep me from getting to my local poll station because I’m brown, but I guess we’ll never know the truth.

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, I also ended up covered in mosquito bites which landed me in urgent care – which wouldn’t have been so bad if it was unforeseen, but not so much when Scott’s friends only response to my stint in the ER was “Oh Scott didn’t tell you his place is totally infested with mosquitoes? Bummer.”

As evidenced from my past mistakes, I already have problems with vacation dating to begin with, but vacation hookups apparently add a whole new layer of issues.  To be clear, Scott was wonderful and lovely and aside from his dubious political affiliations, a good host – but also a very good example of why a quick pre-scan of someone’s Facebook page is never a bad thing.  I suppose I only have myself to blame, but I can take some solace in the fact that having been mosquito bitten in my lady parts will make sure the same mistakes never happen again (until my next trip to New York, that is).

Mistakes I Have Made on 4th of Julys Past

3 Jul

It’s my blog and I’ll be lazy if I want to.  Rest assured a very real post is coming through next week about the perils of vacation hook ups.  Until then, this place holder of all the (completely true) mistakes I have made on the 4th of July will just have to do.

1. Do not convince your very prudish LDR college boyfriend that your first public appearance together should be a day before the 4th of July party with all of your best friends and no one he knows.
2. Do not then do so many shots of straight Captain Morgan that your old crush has to pull you into the bathroom and force his own hand down your throat so that you throw up.
3. Do not bite the hand of the person who is trying to save your life. Literally. You almost had to get your stomach pumped if he hadn’t forced you to yak. Biting his fingers because you’re annoyed is not an appropriate response.
4. Do not come down from blackout wasted to just “normal wasted” at 3 in the morning. And convince your very prudish LDR college boyfriend that he should “stop being a virgin and just do it already,” while sleeping on an acquaintance’s couch.
5. And when he does just do it already, do not ask 30 seconds later “Oh that was it?”
6. Or follow up with “Oh it was! No it was good! I’m really proud of you!”
7. Do not then go to a family barbecue the next day, still drunk.
8. Or fall asleep hungover at said family barbecue by noon.
9. And only wake up when your dad pours water on you and asks you to explain to your nieces and nephews why Aunt B can’t join in any of the volleyball/Frisbee/veggie burger fun.
10. Don’t do all of those things in the span of 24 hours, effectively ruining all future 4th of Julys for fear of the drunken mistakes you might make in the name of life, liberty, and patriotic country love.

God bless America!

← Older Entries

%d bloggers like this: