I went on a date a few weeks ago. It was probably the first date I’ve gone on in over a year. It wasn’t awful, but we knew there wouldn’t be a second one. Towards the end of the night, she invited a friend to meet up with us. At one point, while my date…
Category: Relationships
Thoughts and Readings on Being in a Healthy Relationship
Being Chill – Not the Look I’m Going For
“Jenny’s” dating profile says her weakness is “super smart polymath builder/makers.” I look up polymath to confirm that I know what it means. Ironically, doing so also confirms that I’m probably not what Jenny is looking for. She likes complex cocktails – also not my thing. She has starlink and works remotely for weeks at…
This Is a Lot of Words, Many of Which I’m OK with
It wasn’t supposed to play out this way. I stayed in last night so that I could go to bed early, wake up early, and be productive: read, write, run, a little bit of work, a little bit of job searching.
Then I looked her up.
They say when you don’t know where to begin, start with a clear and simple statement of fact. Of course…
Breakfast Conversations
Every once in a while, the fishhook of longing will catch me by surprise and yank me gasping towards the surface of some distant memory. The feeling is a little hard to describe. It’s a mix between envisioning some version of the future that I’d like to see come to pass and remembering some version…
Grumpiness, That’s What I Bring to the Table
Some days, I’m just grumpy, at odds with the world, and probably heading in the wrong direction. Wednesday was one of those days. I was fine earlier in the day, but then two things happened that sent my grump-ometer into the danger zone. First, I read an article in The Guardian about how single women…
Let It Be Known…
At the corner of Fillmore and Pixley, just a few blocks from my apartment and along the route of my evening walks, is a building that was recently painted bright red with white lettering advertising a new dating app call Known. In the traditional click-bait style of tech-based hype and obfuscation, the building converted to…
Valentine’s Day. Again.
Today is Valentine’s Day, again. My friends who work in the restaurant industry are working longer hours today – special dishes and menus, overbooked reservations, and covering shifts for people who want to celebrate. Yesterday, as I walked to the grocery store to get a bottle of wine to go with my solo dinner, I…
These Last Few Mornings…
Monday morning. After a fitful night of sleep in which I dreamed about being given two abandoned, tamed, and not yet fully grown lions to care for and trying to get someone from animal control to help… a night in which I woke in a tangle of sheets and quilt, I had a quick breakfast…
Falling Out and Politics
Not long ago I had a falling out with a friend. The falling out had been a while in the making. I think it started in early August when a woman he might have, kinda, sorta liked asked me to walk her home. He felt snubbed and sent some drunk angry texts to me: “Fuck…
Things Were Easier Then and I Was More Open
I have a lot of… regrets isn’t quite the word I’m looking for, but it’ll have to do… a lot of regrets about the fact that my last big relationship didn’t work out – which, jeez, was almost six years ago (or as one online calculator tells me 2,156 days, but who’s counting). It’s not…
Content, Yet Wanting More
Saturday It’s mid morning and I have little to show for it. Worse yet, I don’t have a plan for the day. Still tired from a late night (concert followed by the bar), I woke a little before 8am to the sound of the foghorn. After breakfast, I moved to the sofa where I’ve been…
What I’ve Known Influences What I Want
It was while reading a poem that begins with drinking white wine from jade cups in Szechuan China that I tried to imagine different lives, more exotic lives, lives I haven’t lived, lives I may never live. I started to write my own version of it – late-night dinner parties with interesting friends; stars and…