Auld Lang Syne

It's the same thing every year. Everyone is always sooooo anxious to get the year over with by the time New Year's Eve rolls around, including myself. All of a sudden it's like the year turned to total shit. Rarely do you hear someone say they will miss the current year. This year is particularly huge because we are moving on to an entirely new decade. So I'm going to honor 2009 by listing my 9 favorite things about it:

(In order of occurrence)

1. Scored a major promotion
2. Started a torrid love affair with a villainous reality TV star
3. Made my first appearance on a radio show
4. Went to the horse tracks for the first time
5. Ended torrid love affair with a villainous reality TV star (though still receive entertaining texts)
6. Traveled to New Zealand (!!!)
7. Sat inside a Delorean
8. Relearned how to ice skate
9. Started writing again

While I'm definitely looking forward to more good things to come, the goodbye will be bittersweet. Farewell, decade. I never even knew your name.

The Art of Seduction - Part II

I'm only 150 pages into this book and I already feel like I'm loaded for bear. It's New Year's Eve and I'm fully equipped to trick some bastard into sucking face with me at midnight, FTW.

The Art of Seduction

I've been wanting to read this book for a while, and nobody bought it for me for Christmas...so I just bought it myself. It's called The Art of Seduction, and it's by the same dude that wrote The 48 Laws of Power, which inspired our beloved 50 Cent so much that he actually collaborated with the author to make his own book, The 50th Law. I figured if 50 Cent believed he experienced any sort of success due to this authors' words, then I might have a chance as well. Hell, if I have even a fraction of the success that 50 Cent has had, I'll be drinking champagne with diamonds in it while stretched out by the fire on a bearskin rug in no time.

The inside cover of The Art of Seduction says: "Get what you want by manipulating everyone's greatest weakness: the desire for pleasure. Be Ruthless. Reign Supreme." I'm...totally on board. The book is almost 500 pages, which I didn't expect. If there are 500 pages worth of information on how to seduce someone, then I've been doing it all wrong for years now. I think I've only been operating from 2 pages of info up until now.

Well, time to change. I'm gonna finish this book by New Year's Day and then I'm gonna manipulate the fuck out of every guy that crosses my path. There will be no survivors.

Superfail.

I forgot to suggest Scenario D, in which I receive absolutely zero acknowledgment from The Comedian. I figured that probably wouldn't be a possibility, but that's exactly what happened. I wore my favorite dress and made my cheeks extra rosy. I don't know what I expected. I guess I hoped, at the very least, I would be able to have the chance to take some of the power back, but that opportunity never presented itself. The room was small, too. It required effort to ignore me. What a waste of a pretty dress. I'd say I felt ugly if I didn't already feel so invisible.

I'm not gonna go back to that trivia again.

2 drink maximum

There's another bullshit comedy trivia thing tonight and I'm actually going to attend. The Comedian will be there, of course, and while I think it's probably been long enough for me to be in the same room as him without wanting to rip my heart out of my chest and stomp it on the ground so it stops stinging sogoddamnmuch...you never know. I truly am a glutton for punishment. There are only a few ways this could possibly go:

Scenario A: The way that would work best for me -
Comedian: Hey, sorry I've been such a jerk. Let's start over.
Me: Ok! (smile and take sip of champagne while girlishly batting my eyelashes)

Scenario B: The way it will probably go down -
Comedian: Hey.
Me: ...hey. (blink a lot, bite my lip, and try to look like I'm not even bothered)

Scenario C: Worst-case scenario -
I enter the room and the music stops while the spotlight is rerouted to my face and I'm met with a chorus of crickets and that trumpet sound that's played when someone fails on the Price Is Right.

Only time will tell. But if I know myself at all, I'd say it's probably best to stay away from any sort of alcohol, or I'll certainly make a mess of things. The place demands a 2 drink minimum (which I think is incredibly annoying) so I'll probably just have to stick with two $5 Diet Cokes. Or flask my two alcoholic beverages and give them to a homeless person or something. To be continued...

t4m in LA area

Many moons ago, I was mixed up with this chef that lived up in Portland. I met him through a friend and we sorta hit it off (I guess) and I even went up to see him for one whirlwind weekend. Not surprisingly, things didn't work out between us. But we kept in contact and for a while I had fantasies of us meeting somewhere in the middle and starting some sort of magical Pacific Northwestern life together. He'd cook me dinner and I'd sing him songs and we'd snuggle on the couch and lament over health care and foreign policy while the world outside cried for us and everyone else.

Like all telephone relationships, the novelty began to wear off quickly. I became tired of waiting for this guy that I liked to come see me, I knew he never would, and the words of Mark Knopfler in the song "So Far Away" became less and less romantic. We started picking each other apart each time we talked, and eventually it got to the point where we were just mean to each other over the phone.

One night I must have said something that was the straw on his proverbial camels' back and he hung up on me. A few days later I started receiving phone calls from all over the country. All men. None of them would identify themselves, nor would they tell me how they got my number. One dude eventually said he got my number from Craigslist and he was calling regarding my ad for the motorcycle for sale. I posted no such ad. Strange things were amiss, but I figured there was just a misprint.

When the next guy called, I asked if he was calling about the ad. He said yes, and that he would be in town the following week and wanted to make an appointment with me. When I asked him what it was that he wanted to make an appointment for, he said "Uh. For some company." (What.) Then I asked him to read the ad aloud to me because I had suspected there was a misprint, and the dude says to me "Shit, really? Man, that's fucked up. This ad says you are a transsexual escort in the Los Angeles area, and it says your name is Lindsay."

I swallowed the vomit in the back of my throat and immediately started thinking about who it was that I could have pissed off enough to do something like this. The fucking chef. I called him up and screamed for about 10 minutes straight while he laughed uproariously and I begged him to remove the ad.

Well, he didn't remove the ad, and I continued to receive calls for another week or so. Looking back, it was the best thing he could have done because any feelings I had felt for him before had completely disappeared. It's been years since then, and he's apologized and I guess I don't care enough about him to actually be bothered anymore. Now he's married to some chick that I swear he hated up until the day of their nuptials, but at least he isn't my problem anymore.

I've been receiving an absurd amount of "wrong numbers" lately, and I can't help but think that there's someone out there that I've pissed off. More importantly, what does this new ad say about me?

I'm grouchy.

I've been 30 years old for 48 hours now, and there still have been no great epiphanies. No new wisdom came along with my jump to the next decade. I'm still just as confused as ever. I'm not really sure what I expected to happen, but I definitely anticipated there would be some sort of change. At the very least, I figured the anxiety I'd been feeling for the past year leading up to the actual event would dissipate. Nope. I feel old, and yucky, and nothing any person in their 30s says is going to make me believe that this is better than being younger.

I need some more backup

Everyone has a person they text when the person they really want to talk to isn't contacting them. I've got about 3 or 4 backups. It's a tricky business, though, with these backups. You can't overtext because then they'll think you want more than just a little bit of attention, and you can't let it go so long in between texts that they've lost the desire to return said text. I don't even keep my backups saved in my phone; they live on a list tacked to a bulletin board in my room. Every now and then, when I'm feeling blue because my crush isn't crushing back, I'll visit the list and call on my backups for reinforcement. Usually I'll get a text back and my wound is bandaged and I feel better. But occasionally I'll call for backup and nobody shows and it makes me want to throw darts at the list tacked up on my bulletin board, but I usually just decide to cut my losses and call it a night. I don't even have any darts. I need to find some more reliable backup so I don't run into this again. Or maybe I should just start liking guys that are legit so I never actually have the need for any backup.

bad grammar makes me [sic]

I totally fell in love with this Englishman when I was backpacking through New Zealand. He laid it on so thick, man. First of all, he was absolutely gorgeous. Secondly, that accent. He spent all of our time together completely mindfucking me into thinking that he liked me. It was glorious. First it was him getting drunk and telling me I was beautiful and had a perfect nose. Then it was him asking me to watch TV with him in his bed. He said he wanted to come to Los Angeles and rent a convertible and drive across the country with me. I was so smitten. At the time I paid no mind to the fact that we had never even kissed. I actually romanticized the fact and told myself it was better that way. I would kiss him at the airport when he came to see me in Los Angeles.

After I returned home we exchanged a few awkward emails. He was not great at responding, and I'm not great at waiting around. I told myself it was better this way. In my mind, he would always remain perfect, so I let go. And, like every boy, it took a good two weeks of not seeing or hearing from him to get him off my mind. As always, it worked, and I was up and thinking about a new guy before I knew it. I think I sent The Brit a "how are things?" email about a month ago when I saw that he had been tagged in some Facebook photos, but I didn't receive a response.

Until today. My phone buzzed while I was sleeping last night to let me know I had a new message. 99% of the time it's some sort of junk email that arrives that late in the night, but my curiosity kills me every time and it's impossible for me not to check to make sure it's not something important. I had new mail from The Brit! It took everything in me not to sit up and read it right there, but I wanted to have something to look forward to in the morning, so I put my phone down and saved it for the next day.

Today I woke up and it was like Christmas morning, only instead of candy in my stocking, I had a delicious email in my inbox. I got up, made some tea (it's only appropriate when reading an email from the UK), and plopped myself in front of the computer in anticipation. I went to my inbox, clicked on the big fat illuminated "1", and started to read.

"How are you my love?...england is good but it's cold! hope your well. xx--"

Sigh. That doesn't give me much to work with. I told him I was good and that Los Angeles was warm and that I had started writing. I actually gave him a link to this blog! (Hi, J! :/) A boring response to a boring email. Lackluster. Ugh. But then I realized that I don't really have anything to say to a guy that I met 3 months ago and haven't seen since, other than the fact that he should have used "you're" instead of "your,"and I felt better.

So maybe not a love connection after all, but he will look great in photos with me when he eventually comes to visit in Los Angeles, so that's a bonus.

You're no gymnast.

One of my first online dating experiences was with this teacher guy named Julian. He seemed sort of boring, but I figured I had to get over my fear of meeting these people in person, so I decided I'd practice on him. We spoke on the phone before we met up, and I should have noticed the red flag then, but I figured he was just nervously talking about himself nonstop because it was our first time chatting. He seemed nice enough, though, and safe. We agree to meet at this little bar in Koreatown the following week.

Dude shows up 45 minutes late and is totally unapologetic about it. He immediately launches into this tirade about how terrible his ex-girlfriend was, and about how she is desperate to be with him. "She was a gymnast, you know, and having sex with gymnasts is extra fun because they are super bendy. You're no gymnast, though...you're statuesque. (...) Oh, but she's a dumb bitch because she's dating this bald male nurse instead of me and she's also clearly not very smart because she hasn't realized that her new boyfriend is gay because all male nurses are obviously gay." This is the shit that was coming out of his mouth. I'm also pretty sure he worked in some sort of racist comments about our Korean cocktail waitress, too, but he passed it off as being acceptable since he teaches English as a second language. What?!? This dude was lame. I was mostly pissed because I never even got a chance to say anything, and I felt like I was ripped off by the whole experience. I certainly didn't get better at dating by holding my tongue for hour-long increments.

I obviously decided that I didn't want to see this guy again, and I almost wrote the entire experience off as a waste, but there was one little detail that made the story worth retelling. Adam Brody (from The O.C.) was also on an awkward date at the table sitting across from me. Every time I glanced over it looked like he was sitting in the wake of a terrible joke he had just told, fumbling to bring things back to good. He was bombing. We exchanged empathetic glances a few times, and I almost wanted to just walk up to him and suggest that we ditch our dates and take off to do something way more interesting than what each of us hand been enduring for the past god-knows-how-long. Obviously I couldn't do anything of the sort, it's AdamfuckingBrody, so I just ended the night and walked away from Julian with a sense of disappointment. But, never to be defeated, I updated my Facebook status on the ride home to: "Lindsay just went on a date with Adam Brody." It's not entirely untrue.

FML.

I was riding the bus to work this one time and this enormous tranny got on at the same time as me. She was fabulous. About 6 feet tall, black, draped head-to-to in orange chiffon, with 3 inch talons to match. She sat directly in front of me. I was thrilled. I desperately hoped that someone I knew would be driving alongside me and see what amazing seats I got for this show. She then proceeded to do one of the grossest things I've ever seen a human do in public. She opened a can of tuna, scooped it out of the can with her bright orange claws, and sucked the morsels off as if she were a 5 year-old eating black olives off her fingertips. That wasn't even the worst part. What got me was that she was wearing an enormous wedding ring. That fucking bitch found someone to love her forever and I'm still combing through emails from psychopaths on my online dating profile.

Polanski

Ew. Polanski texted me tonight. Polanski is the guy I got into trouble with at the Halloween party this past year. Normally I have a very strict rule that I never make out with any guy that is dressed as a girl, as a pimp or anyone whose costume lacks creativity on any level, but I broke the rules for this one. He was mega-hot, boyish, and wearing a 3 piece suit, passing himself off as a "young Roman Polanski." Suuuuper lame, but what can I say...I'm a sucker for a man in a vest and tie.

So we end up becoming...wildly intimate in the laundry room of the house that hosted the party. The window in the laundry room looked out into the backyard, where all the guests were gathered. A few hecklers kept shouting and tapping on the windows. Interesting side note: I later come to learn that The Comedian was one of these hecklers! Anyway, the hecklers were annoying as fuck and in the heat of the moment, Polanski punched his hand through the window. Needless to say, we were asked to leave the party immediately.

Polanski got my number while we were waiting on the corner of the street for our respective friends to come collect us, but I honestly didn't anticipate ever hearing from him again. But he texted the very next day and asked me to come over to watch a movie! I'm not really used to having a random guy that I hooked up with ask me to hang out again, and certainly not so soon after the fact, so I accepted out of sheer curiosity.

I knock on his door and he tells me to come in, and I can barely open the door because the floor is so covered in...everything. There were mountains of empty food containers strewn about the floor, an entire closet's worth of clothing piled all over every piece of furniture. At one point, a kitten emerged from what I can only describe as a metric fuck-ton of papers and started eating from one of the half-empty food containers on the floor. But there he was, sitting on the couch, even more beautiful than I had remembered. The sight of his face was enough to distract me for the time being. Then I noticed something strange.

He had a friend there. A friend that didn't speak a single word the entire night, but insisted on sitting right next to me on the couch while making sure that Polanski's glass of gin and orange juice was constantly full. Eventually, the friend retreated to the bedroom (I thought this was a one bedroom place?) and turned off the light.

Polanski had called me earlier while I was in the shower to ask what movie I wanted him to rent, but I never got back to him. He rented The Gods Must Be Crazy. Interesting choice, I thought. Though, much better than the time I was on a date and the dude put on the movie Beer Fest and then asked me to spend the night with him while the naked breast montage flashed in the background. I didn't spend the night. Anyway, so Polanski makes the first move and holds my hand. About 30 seconds later he decides he wants to get comfortable and he lays across the couch with his head in my lap. About 30 seconds after that I'm met with the sound of his thunderous snores. He fucking passed out. I tried to wake him several times, but this dude was blacked out.

I sat there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do, when the silent roommate came barging out of the bedroom and walked straight up to Polanski and slapped him in the face while screaming "HOW DID YOU KNOW IT WAS ICED TEA? HOW. THE. FUCK. DID YOU KNOW IT WAS ICED TEA???" Polanski didn't budge. Then the no longer silent friend looked at me with fiery eyes as if I should know the answer and I, with my eyes wide open and jaw dropped, mustered the only thing I could think of at the time: "I don't know. I'm new here." That was obviously not he answer that this dude wanted to hear, and so he turned around and stormed back into the room, slamming the door behind him. What. The fuck just happened.

I had to get out. I didn't even care about being delicate with Polanski's drunken passed out head, I just hopped up and let it drop wherever it landed. I stopped at the ladies room on my way out, despite my better judgment. It was gonna be a long ride home, and I wasn't about to hold it. So I'm washing my hands and I notice a bottle of pills on the counter. My conscience was screaming at me not to look at the information printed at the bottle, but I ignored it. This could be valuable information! What if he had an STD? Or what if he was on something like anti-psychotic medication? I looked at the prescription and didn't recognize the name of the drug, but I did notice that it had expired 2 years prior. There was half a bottle left, so whatever it was that he had, he's probably still got it. But that wasn't my main concern. The biggest shock came when I saw what his last name was. From the angle that I was looking at the label I could only see the first 4 letters: P-E-N-I. Terrified of what the next letter could be, I rotated the bottle 10 degrees. It was an X. His last name was Penix. I dropped the pills and got out of that place as fast as I could.

Anyway. He's been texting me ever since. That was the only time we had hung out, outside of the party, of course, and it was wildly unsuccesful. I have no idea why he still contacts me. I guess I've been texting back because I like the attention. But he uses babytalk in his texts, which nauseates me, and he never seems to really make any concrete plans. Also, his last name is Penix. No fucking way am I marrying a guy with that last name, so what's the point? Tonight he texted me the words "sweep tight, dear." I deleted his number from my phone. Later, Polanski.

Next!

So I got this email from a dude on the dating website that simply said: "Don't worry, I've cleared my inbox so it doesn't fill up once you start emailing me every day." Yuck. A month ago I would have been all over that shit, but I'm trying my damnedest to steer clear of the blatant assholes for the time being. I have a hard enough time with the *seemingly* nice ones. Plus, he's a lawyer. What would I have in common with a lawyer? Why can't someone cool email me? Like a shark diver. Or a scientist. Or a cowboy!

Science, you filthy whore.

Back in my younger days, when my heart was tender and naive, it took a lot more for me to get over a boy. I was working at a store slinging upscale silk resort wear to yuppies when my new age hippie friend Brigitte told me about Oxytocin. I'm not about to pretend like I'm a scientist, but here's what I know about it: Oxytocin, or The Love Chemical, is a neurotransmitter in the brain that is triggered when you interact with a person you are attracted to. Catching sight of them, hearing their voice, taking in a deep breath of their pheromones...these are all things that pull the trigger on that nasty little neurotransmitter and essentially render you powerless to your desires. So when the time came for me to realize that my current love interest, Tattoo Tim, was still hung up on his ex (who happened to share her name with me...that bitch), I consulted Brigitte about how to deactivate the reproduction of this terrible chemical in my brain so I could move on with it. "Six to eight weeks. You need to cut off all contact for six to eight weeks," she said. Great. What was I supposed to do? He worked right next door! What, was I supposed to slip out into the parking lot in a trench coat and sunglasses every day after work? Before I even thought of my plan, Tattoo Tim came to visit me at work. Panicked, I pulled him aside and told him, without any explanation, that I couldn't see or hear from him for six to eight weeks. I actually said that to him. And, bless his little tattooed heart, he just nodded his head and walked away. Luckily it didn't end up taking six to eight weeks to get over him because my next love interest, who had been in my periphery, made a dive bomb into my sights the second he heard I was giving up on Tattoo Tim. Unlucky for me, I didn't actually get to see if that research was true. Did it really take six to eight weeks?

Now that I'm older, and my heart has hardened and encased itself in a briar of thicket, I've put a two week cap on getting over men. I'm 30, man. I don't have time to be carrying a torch for someone that doesn't carry one for me in return. But technology has made things tricky these days. Nobody talks on the phone. We text. Or email. God forbid someone actually says something to your face! But because of this, the interpersonal connections have become strange. We aren't hearing their voices anymore, or smelling their smells. Without those animalistic triggers, it should be a piece of cake to get over the worthless ones. I guess the ones that are actually worth spending more than two weeks of consideration on are the ones that actually do call, the ones that aren't afraid of a face-to-face, the ones that give your brain the opportunity to become addicted. Right now the only person that triggers my obnoxious love neurotransmitter is the stupid fucking Comedian. Luckily, since I can't even get that guy to return a text, this whole thing should be safely out of my system before the New Year. It's easy to say now that he's a jerk and that I shouldn't even waste another minute on him, but I'm tellin' ya, man...if he called me up on New Year's Eve and I heard his voice, I'd probably heat those words up and eat them in a white wine reduction with a side of haricot verts. I can't help it! It's science! Sigh.

Cute underpants are such a cockblocker.

Without fail, if I put on a cute new pair of underpants before I go out, I can barely get a gentleman to give me a handshake. But if I roll out wearing the last ratty pair on laundry day, I'm fighting them off with a stick. This presents quite a dilemma when I get ready for a date.

Online dating = Offline waste of time (usually)

Every few months or so, when I'm extra lonely, I reactivate my online dating profile. I mainly just like to get free compliments from strangers. And it works, too. Every few months there is an onslaught of positive feedback from complete weirdos, and I hang in there until I realize I'd rather just receive the (very rare) compliment from someone in real life and I deactivate my account again. I can only handle so many winks and boring emails declaring that my profile looks interesting, or that they, too, have a thing for Old Spice Pure Sport. Honestly, out of everything I have posted on my profile, that one tidbit gets the most attention. Rarely does a man contact me that I consider contacting back, but every once in a while someone will catch my eye. It never ends up going anywhere. This past year alone I've been on 6 or 7 useless dates with guys that were completely wrong for me. One of them even got a second date, but I was so bored (and turned off by his premature admission that he was obsessed with Disney films) that I practically opened the car door while he was driving me back to my house and did a drop-roll on my lawn.

Being the holidays and all, I felt an extra pang of loneliness and reactivated my account the other day. As usual, I received about 10 winks and 5 emails within the first 3 hours of my reactivation from gentlemen of all walks of life. One from a comedian (eep!) with a weird hangup about how many ice cubes he has in his drinks, another from a grizzly bear of a man that only said "you seem nice." Let me tell you, by the way, my profile does NOT make me seem nice. He was instantly disregarded due to lack of creativity. One dude told me that I was beautiful, but that he was not fooled by beauty in Los Angeles, and that I was probably just like the rest of them. Thanks? But one guy seemed decent. He's from Kentucky, so I'll call him The Colonel. A little on the short side, but he looks really cute in glasses and I liked that his profile said his favorite thing to do is nap. I, too, love a good nap. He winked at me, which I generally hate because it forces me to write the first email, but I gave him a free pass and made the move. So we've been exchanging the usual "get to know you" emails and we'll see where it goes. He says he doesn't have a Kentucky accent, but wouldn't it be sorta darling if he did? If anything, hopefully it will serve as a nice distraction from my current situation with The Comedian. That'll be enough for me.

I need a new picker

When it comes to the holidays, there are two types of people. There are the people that live for that stuff: blasting Christmas music the second it turns midnight on Thanksgiving, spangling their homes (and bodies) with stars, snowmen and evergreen trees; shoving copious amounts of peppermint and gingerbread into their faces. Then there the ones that cannot wait for the entire holiday season to disappear as soon as possible. These are the lonely people, the bitter ones. Growing up, Christmas was my scene. My birthday is the day after, so I had to wait an entire year to have any reason to celebrate, and I was always the first to start counting down the days. Now I find myself in the second group of people. Let's just get this shit over with already. Tonight I sent one friend off to the east coast to spend a warm and toasty Christmas with her loving family, and I sent another one off to engage in holiday cheer at a company party (that will, no doubt, be loaded to the max with free alcohol, and Best Buy giftcards aplenty). People will be kissing under the mistletoe. Glorious, glitter-encrusted lapses in judgment will be made. And I will be sitting on my fucking couch thinking about how I messed it up with yet another guy and how I'm somehow lonelier than anyone else during this Christmas because of that very fact.

The Comedian. I saw him onstage at some bullshit Thanksgiving trivia thing that my friend Rachel dragged me to. He was exactly my type: tall, lanky, giant nose. He looked like a Lebanese version of Clark Gable, hairstyle included. I was too shy to go up and talk to him that night, so I did the pussy move and sent him an email on Facebook. He responded the next day and we shared a few flirty emails back and forth. Promising! The day after Thanksgiving I had a few drinks at The Troubador while watching some no-name band play and while also trying to hold myself back from smelling Robert Downey Jr.'s hair, who happened to be sitting right in front of me. The dude I hooked up with on Halloween...Roman Polanski, I call him...was supposed to come over to my house after the show. I sat and waited for an hour and he never showed. Feeling rejected, I decided to email The Comedian again. He was out and about at some karaoke bar on the east side and he invited me to come! So I talked my karaoke-loving roommate into hopping into the car and driving east. We got there about 30 seconds before the bar closed, but The Comedian conveniently lived a few blocks away. We already drove all that way...so I then talked my roommate into making an appearance at The Comedian's apartment. And so it began. The Comedian kissed me on the balcony, we came up with a getaway plan so we could sneak away and be alone in his room, we went wayyyy farther than I would have liked to have gone on the first night. I actually liked this guy. He was nerdy, and funny...I wanted to go on a date with him. So I had to make it weird, of course. In the middle of one of our steamier moments, I pulled away and told him I wanted to leave. Then I CRIED. He was a bit of a dirty talker, and the later the night got, the more sober I became, and his words began to make me feel really cheap. I was cheap. I showed up to the bar where he was at closing time and immediately accepted an invitation to his apartment. And the hooking up was fun, but I really just wanted to go on a date with him...thought maybe the hooking up could come later. But at this point, how can you go back? So he gave me this whole speech that somehow worked on me and then he did the one thing that you can't do to a girl unless you plan on calling her again: he tucked my hair behind my ear. I melted back into his bed and fell asleep. The morning after was moderately awkward, but I didn't think it was anything that couldn't be recovered from. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't text him for a few days. I texted him 12 hours later. But he invited me over again, so I forgave myself for lacking so much willpower. Two nights in a row seemed like a good sign. Maybe I would get to go on that date I told him I wanted, that he agreed to.

I get to his house the second night and it's more of the same. The physical chemistry was decent. He smelled good. When he fell asleep, he faced me, but he didn't hold onto me. I wanted his arms around me. The following morning was cold and distant, and it seemed like he couldn't get me away from him fast enough. No kiss goodbye. Still, I thought maybe he was just tired or something. Who knows how he acts in the morning? I certainly didn't, I barely knew the guy...I just slept with him. So I sent him a "thanks for a fun time" text a few hours later, only to be met with no response. I did some more convincing to myself. He's probably busy. He'll call this week. We'll have a date by this weekend. We had fun, why wouldn't he want to see me again? When I hadn't heard from him by Wednesday, I sent him an email. A pathetic email. I asked him to hang out with me. I told him I liked him. I said I wanted to make a fresh start, and that fucking asshole never responded. It's hard for a guy to ask a girl out, I've been told, but try being a girl asking a guy out. Doubly hard. And this guy didn't even have the balls to tell me he wasn't interested. So I sent him a "fuck you for not responding" text and received...nothing. Oh, he called me while I was in a movie, that one where Sandra Bullock plays the blonde Republican soccer mom that adopts an enormous homeless black kid (I wanted an excuse to cry), but he didn't leave a message. Still pissed, and thinking that he actually felt bad and that's why he was calling, I decided to make him wait a day for a response. He made me wait long enough, I thought. The next day I sent him a text letting him know I was in a movie when he called, and I asked if he had a message for me. No fucking response. Then I start thinking "fuck, did he accidentally dial my number? Do I look like an asshole AGAIN?" There's just no way to come back from that. I'd made it weird enough the first night when I fucking cried, and now I'm contacting him after he's rejected me 8 million times. I let it go. But I knew I would be seeing him in a few weeks at this other work thing that Rachel asked me to come to, so I had to come up with a plan.

The original plan was to be surrounded by a bunch of awesome dudes that gazed at me adoringly, but by the day of the actual event I was just hoping to avoid any sort of confrontation at all. If I weren't wearing a completely obnoxious Christmas sweater, I would have hoped to remain unseen, but that...didn't seem likely. I get there on time, and I'm stuck in the lobby of this uber-hip LA hotel alone...in this sweatshirt. I was the first person to arrive, and the SECOND person to arrive was...The fucking COMEDIAN. To his credit, he tried to be kind, but I didn't make it easy for him. I didn't know I was going to be so upset when I actually saw him. I was choking back tears while trying to shoot him looks of disgust...no easy feat. I was convinced I would vomit on my lap. Thank God he felt uncomfortable enough that he left my side and went somewhere else. I couldn't believe he was just going to act like nothing had happened. Like everything was fine. I was thisclose to leaving, but then I realized I'd look like a total pussy, so I hung around and ordered a drink, which I promptly drank in 15 seconds. After the first drink started warming me up, and the realization that the night would seem like an eternity if I didn't get out of my current mindset, I decided to extend an olive branch and send him a "truce" text. He accepted, and for some dumb fucking reason I instantly forgave him for everything and actually thought I might get my chance to get my stupid date with him afterall. If anything, I thought we'd get drunk enough and have more cheap sex, which I was fine with at this point. Not so. Every time I tried to talk to this dude throughout the night, he favored the opposite of what I was saying. It was like everything I said made him feel like he needed to tell me how he thought my point of view was wrong. Never a smile. Nary a laugh. I wanted to see his dimples. I saw them from across the room while he talked to another girl, and I wished he had saved some for me. He was more handsome than I had remembered, I wanted him more than ever...and he treated me like some sort of disease. And despite the fact that I was this itchy rash that he couldn't get rid of, I then thought it would be a good idea to text him and see if he wanted to hook up. What. Is wrong with me. I received no response, of course, and I went home sad and wondering what it was about me that he found so repellent. He sure didn't think I was when I was in his bedroom. I can't even get this guy to fuck me again! So of course I couldn't stop there. I had to send him an angry email the next morning asking him to stop being so mean to me and of course he responded that he had no idea what I was talking about. So now I'm the creepiest fucking person ever and I still can't get it through my thick fucking skull why he doesn't like me. It's obvious. He never liked me, and I can't let it go. And why do I even want the attention of someone that was so quick to disregard me? Why am I wondering what he's doing tonight? I don't like him enough to be broken-hearted, but my ego is bruised and I want him to be the one to fix it. This will never happen, and I will realize this in 2 weeks when I haven't heard a single thing from him and when I've set my sights on a new dude that will blow me off in a similar manner. My stepmother is rarely quotable, but she once said something to me that completely rings true: "Lindsay, you've got a bad picker." Yeah, well. Where can I pick up a new one?