It's not you, it's me

[TRUE STORY: I got home from Anna & Talia's joint birthday party Saturday night at approximately 3am and instead of going straight to bed because I had to be at work in the morning, I stayed up eating instant oatmeal and watching the Chris Rock documentary, Good Hair. Why? Because I make unique and horrible decisions when I'm drunk. (Side note: those unique and horrible decisions used to involve things like, hooking up with strangers and/or general drunk drama. Now they involve fiber-rich breakfast foods and documentaries about African American hair. Meghan McBlogger: this is your life.)

I got home from work tonight and was like, "well, I'll just take a wee, tiny little cat nap and then wake up fresh and rejuvenated and write something. It's now 2:47 in the morning. I fail. Again. AND THEN! I remembered that Tulane Chris sent me two blog posts last week! Yep. No big deal. But he kind of SAVED THE DAY. No Post Monday avoided! And I want to make sweet, gentle love to him on a bed of hot oatmeal for it. Soooo, enjoy that mental picture. Take it away, Chris.]

After my mother, my boyfriend, and the Catholic Church, I am the first to admit my faults. I’m short-tempered, gassy, and lazy. I have combination skin and for the life of me can’t understand economics. I eat practically no vegetables and will sleep with almost anybody. But you know what I’m absolutely the worst at? Dating. Not in a sitcommy, “There are no good guys, I’m 32 and still not married, Chandler and Joey have a duck in the house” wacky way. I’m just bad at it.

Full disclosure: I am amazed that I have a boyfriend. I never wanted one. It seemed like too much trouble. Dating was a way to get laid, pure and simple, so I went into it with a bad attitude, the same way I approach most things. My shortcomings were as follows:

- I am terrible at small talk because I genuinely don’t give a good-God-damn. I can’t talk about my upbringing because I grew up in a boring town with weird people, so I can either talk about my town’s Slovak Heritage Museum or I can talk about my mom’s friend Bev who lived with us and was a topless waitress for the Lord. Both of these are bonershrinkers at best. I can’t talk about music because I simply don’t care about it the way other people do. It doesn’t make any sense to me to use “bands I’ve heard of” as a status symbol, which is why I hate Decemberist fans – they were so busy talking to each other about other bands and so concerned with BEING SEEN AT A DECEMBERISTS SHOW that I couldn’t hear the fucking music. I wanted to make lampshades out of all their fucking ironic Nintendo tattoos. I can’t talk about travel because I’ve been to Israel, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, and no one ever knows what to ask me about those places, so unless someone wants to talk about religious violence and weird birds, I’m still out of luck. I can’t talk about politics because I have weird political beliefs and I can’t stand earnestness. The second someone starts talking about “Getting out the vote” I just leave, because there’s no way I can get it up after that. The only safe topics are really pets and food, and that only gets you so far.

- On some weird inherent level, I don’t understand people who don’t go on dates at least somewhat planning to have sex. Intellectually, I know that some people do it to “meet people” or “have a good time,” but I can’t feel that. So whenever it looks like the evening is not going to end in sex, I get uncomfortable because I cannot fathom what this other guy wants. Does he just want me to buy him dinner? Does he want to “get to know each other” first? That’s a wash, because asking someone you know or, God forbid, respect, to have dirty sex is awful. If some stranger won’t do it, who cares? If someone you like won’t do it, then there’s A Conversation About Feelings and Boundaries.

- I hate having them over to my place, because then they’re in my house, and what if they won’t leave? Going over to His Place is bad too, though, for totally different reasons. SO many people have such DULL apartments. It was especially terrible when I lived in Austin, because there are so many boxy apartment building superstructures that it was like having the same one-night stand reflected over an axis or with different carpet. Also, most gay people have the same fucking wall art. Sarah Bernhart with absinthe in 1900? Wow, never seen that over some dude’s shoulder before. I also hate having sex with people with really tidy apartments, which – again – most gay people seem to have. I was always afraid I’d ejaculate on something that would have to be dry-cleaned.

- There are still people who don’t use condoms. I… what? Granted, I’m going to bed with people I don’t know terribly well, but I don’t want fluids just hither and yon, flowing like the mighty Nile.

- I’m not wild about emotions, so I don’t see the point in dating someone unless you’re completely head-over-heels or need a project to get you through a boring patch. I’ve known so many people who were always having these passionate, dramatic relationships, and it made me tired just to watch. Dating someone you dislike just so you’re not alone is incomprehensible to me – I’m dating someone I love despite preferring to be alone. I don’t understand wanting someone there just so someone’s there. I’d legits rather cut.

- I have night terrors. Not often, but regularly. So occasionally, I’d go home with some guy, Things Would Happen, and then in the middle of the night I start screaming in my sleep. Not like a little cute talk in my sleep, like actually screaming “No, no, no, no, no, no!” while sound asleep. Try talking someone into being friends with benefits after that. I do, however, take comfort in the fact that I turned into the story about The Guy Who Had Night Terrors.

- One guy insisted that we have sex to Linkin Park. VOM.

So, see? I have literally none of the skills required to be a good date except good table manners and being a decent lay. If Giant Camel ever leaves me, I plan to just write my phone number on men’s room walls. It may not be glamorous, but those boys seem to know what they want.

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

"Sorr."

“Sorr who?”

“SORR ABOUT THE BAG”

Help control the pet population. Have your white trash spayed or neutered.

[Quick note from Meg: Not to break the fourth-wall or anything, but I'd like to share with you the email Tulane Chris sent me with his post for today:

I almost asked you to see if you thought this post was too coarse, and then I read your post about suicide and asking readers for recreational drugs.

HAH! It's funny because it's true. Ok, sorry, I'm done now. Back to Chris!]

Being friends with Meg is stressful because she’s so funny. Having an attractive friend sucks, but at least you can claim to fall back on your personality. Meg has a much better personality than I do, so I have to fall back on my SAT scores. (Those of you who were at the bar meet-up will remember me as the person behind Meg to the left, wearing a sandwich board that read “750 Verbal, 720 Math.”) I was reading Meg’s archives at work the other day – because Thursday is “File Your Own Damn Paperwork Day” – and I found her post about having to clean up blood with post-its at work. The wackiest thing that ever happened to me at my current job was when one of my co-workers gave me a Xeroxed Reader’s Digest vocabulary quiz and I got a perfect score, and so I put it on the fridge and everyone thought I was an asshole. (They were right, but they based it on the wrong evidence.)

She’s not even a bitch about it. If she were, I could just hate her in the face and be done with it, but she’s all gracious and says things like, “Oh, thank you for saying I’m funny. You’re funny too, and I mean that” and then makes a joke about a Llama Adoption Robot that kills the room. Sharing friends with her is like being her parasitic twin. She gets to be the funny one, and I get to be the one Bawbawa Wawtews says is “so brave to keep going on with his one kidney and control only over a vestigial flipper.”

So now I share a blog with her, and it’s a whole new level of crisis. Meg has a more interesting life AND tells stories better than I do, so here I sit trying to even FIND a sow’s ear to try to make into a silk purse. I got lucky last week because EVERYONE apparently has some emotion or other about widescreen movies, and so if I haven’t touched hearts, I’ve at least touched nerves.

So, things around the apartment I could

—BREAKING NEWS—

I heard a fight out in the street just now, so we’ll be talking about white trash. You know how some parents have weird hobbies like model trains or swinging? My mother’s was hanging out with white trash. To wit:

When I was about eight, my mother once took an about-to-be-homeless woman in “for a few days” for eight months. “Bev” had an unusual relationship with the Lord. The Lord had gotten her a job as a topless waitress once (“I was pregnant and even breastfed, and I’m 41, but look!” she said as she whipped up her T-shirt. “Still firm!”) and they continued a lively correspondence. Regularly, Bev would go onto the front porch and have a cigarette while staring into space, and then come in and say “I was out having a smoke and talking to God, and do you know what he said?” Invariably, he told her to go ahead and do what she had already decided to do. Bev was an “artist” and custom-painted two and a half cement Virgins for our house. I say “and a half” because she never finished the one she made for me. An attempt to paint over a red dress with yellow had left her with a bloody-looking dress, and an ill-timed distraction while Bev was painting the face left her with a twisted, angry, stroke-victim mouth. This statue stayed in my room for five years, which I think gives me a good all-purpose excuse. Did Mom consider using one of these statues to make a “shrine for travelers” in our front yard? Is the sky blue?

“Hattie” had been raised on Guam by Satanists. She taught water aerobics, which is how she met Mom. Both of her children had spent time in the state mental hospital, and who had to go on play dates with them? Now, I was a really, really weird kid and at any given time had, at best, one friend, so I was fairly lonely, but even I straight-up could not stand these kids. After a few forced playdates and one nightmarish sleepover (“No, pants on, I think. Thanks, though”) they started just showing up at our house all the time. By now Mom had changed her mind and thought they were going to do a school shooting and wanted them to have a COMPLETELY NEUTRAL attitude toward me, so she’d go out and give them weird excuses about why I couldn’t play. Last I heard, one had gone into a home, and the other after MICROWAVING A CAT (who lived, thankfully, since it’s the only sympathetic character in this whole post) went into the Army. This scares me more than a thousand thousand Russian soldiers, probably because “A Thousand Thousand Russian Soldiers” sounds like a low-budget porno. The United Nations needs to close its hole about the damn climate and outlaw lunatics as weapons.

“Vance” sold reptiles, so of course Mom got on him like a hen on a junebug. He sold her a Bearded Dragon (doesn’t that sound like a middle school sex joke, like Cleveland Steamer?) and she’d go out there every so often to buy mealworms or, on one memorable occasion, biker do-rags with a sewn-in change pocket. She bought herself one with skulls on it and called herself “Big Momma Bones,” and wore it to a poetry slam (yes.) She gave me one with dice on it, which, full disclosure, I may or may not have worn to the same poetry slam. Anyway, years later, she ran into that guy again and went out to his house, and someone put meth in her Diet Coke without her looking and she was up for three days. Yes.

“Doris” thought her husband was trying to kill her by leaving rakes in the yard. She divorced him and moved to the country, and for fun she’d get drunk on wine coolers, put on a ballgown and dance around the house. She and Mom were planning to leave on a road trip to the mountains once, and Doris showed up in an evening dress. She had a mail-order degree from Antigua or somewhere, and we’re 90% sure she had sex with her cousin.

Technically, “Ross” wasn’t white trash, but he was a stray Mom picked up. He had been in the Peace Corps in Bingo-Bango-Bongo or somewhere until he had a malaria-provoked nervous breakdown. He lived with us for about six months. This was mostly weird because he was my teacher at the time. If you think you were weird in school, be the Kid Who Lives with the Awkward Teacher. The kid with the glass eye was way, way cooler than me. He also grew up to better looking, but I can gauge distance, so I feel like it’s a draw.

“Gwen,” Bev’s sister-in-law, married a man who thought he was a prophet. “Angelica” “Bernice”I Dream of Jeannie.) “Lana” had very widely spaced teeth that were a) brown and b) not remotely of a uniform length. “Royce” and “Deeann” lived with us one Christmas when it froze and then left with the VCR.

So, again, I’m at the end of a post with no clear closing. I guess the moral is “My Mom Can Probably Out-Weird Meg’s Mom.” I thought the slumming gene had skipped a generation since I’m an elitist loner, and then I got a call from my best friend from high school. She’s marrying an inmate live on the radio next month.

YOUR MOM IS SORR ABOUT THE BAG