M-4-DoubleEw

It's back. Here are my favorites from recent postings in the M4W Craigslist personal ads section.

Dominant / Rugged / Tall / Assertive / Masculine - 34 - (NYC)
I’m a Durango.

sometimes the stars are aligned - 61 –
To cosmically, magically, miraculously allow you to bone a dude already receiving the AARP magazine. Thank you, universe! O God, you are truly wondrous!

HELP! Do you have BIG LABIA? This is a real post! - 35 -HELP! THIS IS A LABIAMERGENCY! SOUND THE LABIALARM!

electrician looking for someone to spark with.... - 21 - (stamford)
Ba-zing, motherfucker, ba-zing.

Any women like men that show off the body in skimpy underwear/swimwear - 45 - (CNJ/NNJ)
Showing off my body in skimpy underwear is very different than showing off the body. It’s like seeing a shooting star when you find a simple case of article misuse that can turn your run of the mill pervy sentence into a serial killer’s one-liner.

Girl Boobs (Chinese) - 34 – pic
This sounds like something on a badly translated menu.

How would you like a long sensual mass and oral sex for u (optional) - (Downtown)
Oh fuck yeah babe, I’ll read from the Gospel of Mark real slow, and then I’ll bless that big, hard Eucharist...

I'm sick of games, how about you? - 22 - (Chelsea) pic
Word, if I have to play one more game of Chutes and Ladders I’m offing myself.

latin male looking for them freak ladys - m4w - 30 - (new jersey)
No. Problem.

I'm in a relationship but.. - 38 - (Upper West Side)
…I’m also on Craigslist being a dirtbag. (No fatties.)

In need of real "lady" - (Queens)
I’d love a “woman” to let me “touch” “her” “vagina.”

Every Inch of your Pussy......(no sex) - 30 - (Astoria)
No sex? What sentence begins “Every inch of your pussy” and does not include sex? Every inch of your pussy will be treated to a lecture about the Algonquin roundtable?

How I normally operate... - (Manhattan)
With a plastic knife in a room I made in my basement. What?

Today’s gold star goes to a poem that manages to be horrifying and entertaining all at once; the title is the kind of cutesy and nonsensical phrase that makes me want to wretch, and the triple use of “sore” in the first stanza made me cross my legs defensively, but picture a dude reading this aloud on a Vaudeville stage and it’s kind of (but just KIND of) endearing.

CUTIE DEAR BEAUTY(POEM) - 45 (Sac CA)
Cutie dear beauty, this poem is to you.
Its about all the things I want to do.
I want to make love to you, like never before.
And when I am done with you,you will be,sore,sore,sore.

To me lovemaking is an art.
Its takein 45 years to profect my part.
Twenty years ago,you would pay a high price,for me.
A male escort,the best that can be.

I am hung like a horse, and easy on the eyes.
Tall,dark,and handsome, I must not lie.
I love to make love, and the best that can be.
Looking for someone, someone like me.

So don't be afraid, to give me a try.
You never know, I might be the guy.
I can last all night, and part of the day.
You see my darlins, I am really good in the hay.

But you will never know, unless you try.
I am the best of the best, could be your guy.
I am respectful,honest,and wild in always.
I have had many woman say. (that i was there greatest lay)

You will never know,unless you try.
So here I am, simple guy.
I would love someone, to share my heart.
We will never know, unless you start.

Finding an Excuse to Use the Word "Hinterlands," Mostly.

"Kathy," she said to herself, "you're doing it all wrong."

See, it kind of works. This tidbit is a telegram from my most remote psychological hinterlands, but occasionally when I'm feeling lousy or stupid or stupidly lousy, I do this thing where I turn my interior monologue into third person prose to gauge how ridiculous it sounds. If I wind up with something that rings a little Days of our Livesy, I know I'm being melodramatic. If it chimes kinda CSI, I know I'm too angry. Miss J-caliber quip? Scale back the bitchery. If I end up with Smiths lyrics, it's time for an Italian ice and some sunlight-derived vitamin D.

It's probably a legitimate problem, though, if you can read your life back to yourself and have it sound like a bummer. For the last month or so my narrator has managed to be fairly pathetic, a little bit indulgently "woe is me," and, worst of all, pretty on point about the suckage of several factors. There's that idiom that's proving annoyingly true about never being able to have an apartment, a job, and a relationship you love while living in New York.

"Kathy, far from attaining any of the big three, had fumbled even the most easily juggled balls: the shitty iced tea mistaken for the good one not once, but three times at the bodega; a misplaced phone and iPod; a favorite pair of shoes devoured by one of her canine roommates; vacation days misspent whining about bad iced tea and phones and shoes."

There are legitimate reasons to think one's life has gone to crap, and those are obvious: a lost leg, for example, on top of a dead pet, getting laid off, and identity theft. None of these have happened to me, so it's imperative at this point that I cowboy up and come to learn there are worse things than a general sense of career dissatisfaction. Or money troubles that leave me uncomfortable but not homeless. Or health problems that end at an occasional migraine or hangover of my own doing. Scooped on top of each other like the worst ice cream cone in history, everyday problems just have a way of adding up unmanageably. My day-to-day is all dirty laundry and bills and humidity and paperwork I don't want to do and a troubling amount of dog poop. In the midst, it's easy to forget the good things, the fun things, the hours in the park, more complimentary rounds of beer than I should've earned through congeniality alone, a handful of eccentrically nicknamed friends, unsolicited work e-mails written just to make me laugh, situations that drop me on the balcony of a fancy hotel, 18 floors up, looking at a motherloving rainbow stretched over New York.

"Kathy remembered computer class in third grade, and could recall none of the lessons that revolved around a blinking green cursor at a DOS prompt. All that stuck with her were three options: abort, retry or fail. She was ready to choose whichever option would work, whichever was quickest keystroke for an exit into a new game of Number Munchers."

Side Blogject

Kai and I started a themed mixtape blog. You should read it and listen to it and marvel at our wit.

Those Mixtape Girls.

A Ghost Story with a Disappointing Ending

My bathroom is haunted.

Fifty percent of the people who hear me say this sentence give me the old incredulous eyebrow. The other half hug themselves and ask me not to freak them out because they "totally believe that shit, seriously." But allow me to present the evidence.

The bathroom of my apartment is very small and located all the way in the back, right off the kitchen. It's the size of a closet. I can successfully close and lock the door, brush my teeth, rinse and replace the toothbrush, and turn on the shower from the toilet. There's one tiny window I believe is painted shut--even if it's not, we've never opened it.

Weirdly, the light switch is outside the bathroom on the wall in the kitchen. There were quite a few times when we first moved in that I'd find the light on despite being pretty positive I'd turned it off, but I chalked that up to absentmindedness and the flagrant lack of concern belonging to someone who hasn't yet put the Con Ed bill in her name.

One day a few months after we moved in, Jes was taking a shower. There's a framed photo of a rubber duck on a tub that hangs next to the mirror on the bathroom wall, just like it hung in both of my previous apartments. Seemingly without provocation, the glass in the picture shattered. The photo stayed on the wall. We embraced the rational possibility that perhaps the glass broke after years of subjecting the picture to shower-related temperature change, but still, flying glass can be unsettling. Then, a few days after the picture incident, I came home to find the soap dispenser smashed to shards in the bathtub. The door had been closed all day so I couldn't blame the dogs. I theorized about floor vibrations from the heavy-footed neighbors and cleaned up the bits.

I will freely admit that I look for every excuse to believe in the supernatural, the slightly spooky, the undead, the hexed, the telekinetic, the psychic, and anything with even the most vauge Craft-esque appeal. At this point, I was ever so slightly thrilled that signs were pointing toward poltergeist. This is why I didn't entirely pee my pants when, while home alone, I heard a weird sound coming out of the bathroom. I opened the door to find both faucets running. I hadn't turned them on. Jes came home and, upon hearing the news, ran to her room declaring she would never pee here again.

Taking this as a challenge, about a week later the ghost did the same faucet trick. This time while Jes was in the bathroom. Watching the knobs turn of their own accord.

Provided our ghost is something more sentient than air in the pipes and a creaky foundation, I'm not afraid of him. Or her. I was convinced there was something demonic in as benign a place as the Woolworths in my hometown when I was a kid; that store felt infinitely more menacing than my bathroom does.

Besides, there's something sort of comfortingly adolescent about a poltergeist. If my ghost is the kind that wants to spook me with some running water, it's probably the kind of guy who would've tried to impress me by pulling my hair or mooning me. There are ghosts everywhere; in the peanut butter still smeared on my walls, in my look-at-me glasses, in the ever-present Brooklyn handlebar moustache, in bright red lipstick, in short shorts, and in every stupid notice me gesture by which we're all completely haunted.

Boys Will Be...Girls.

New Year’s resolutions aren’t my thing because at best I forget about them. At their worst they’re a constant reminder I’m failing at something I had an entire year to accomplish. I made the same resolution every year between eleven and fifteen (kiss a boy!) and managed to fall so spectacularly short each December (not even making eye contact with a boy who’s not my brother!) I gave up the practice entirely until this year. I resolved to dress like a girl more often.

I have a bad habit of dressing like the dudes I like. Going out tonight? Sweet. Dumb t-shirt, jeans, actual men’s boots. Occasionally I throw flannel and a leather jacket into the mix. The thing is that I actually kind of like clothes and, now that I lost some weight or whatever and can buy cheap dresses from those abominably wonderful bargain stores on lower Broadway (Extazaa WHAT WHAT), I’m endeavoring to do so. I think I’ve achieved some success.

This is why it’s funny that the larger issue of my failure at traditional girlitude, by virtually any other measure, has become a recurring theme in my life lately. It’s important to point out here that my preadolescence was informed by 90’s style girl rock, from Courtney Love (cartoony, psychotic) to Lilith Fair (crunchy, hirsute), so classic girlishness was never something to which I aspired. But at some point between then and now, when a friend helpfully reminds me to wash my hands after eating something spicy so I don’t accidentally make my dick burn when I pee, I ended up kind of Middlesex. All I was really shooting for was a little Tank Girl swagger.

I’ve been “dude”-ed and “bro”-ed while making out. I’ve been half of the phrase ,“guys like us…”. I’m used to the “YOU ARE SUCH A DUDE” reaction after telling a story. This bothers me exactly zero approximately 98% of the time. I know these people, mostly guys, don’t actually think I’m a guy. Moreover, I know I’m a girl and that, like any other girl on the planet, my brand of girl is appealing to some. I have successfully seduced a dude with only my knowledge of 1980’s era professional wrestlers while swigging PBR out of a coozy and wearing a ripped sweatshirt, no make-up and dirty jeans. I’m fairly positive I belched. I’m fairly positive that’s gross. My point here is that the one thing I’m completely positive about is that grossness and being female not are mutually exclusive.

Ditto for being frank/pragmatic about sex and being female. Or not feeling particularly caught up in the idea of having a wedding and being female. Or having the ability to take a joke about being ugly or being fat or being a slut and being female. Or not smiling and being female, although that one caught me by surprise. “Other girls, they smile at people when they walk by. Like, as a rule,” my coworkers informed me. “You’re the only one who doesn’t.” I’m willing to own the idea that I might be completely unfriendly, but that doesn’t make me a boy.

I’m not exactly treading new feminist territory here. It’s just that the “you’re a guy” reaction whenever I do something particularly un-girly gets to me every once in a while because first of all, I’m not a guy and I never will be. The only time I even semi-wish I was is right now because I have cramps, the lady kind, and there is some proof I'm not a guy right there in your pudding. And second, I get guyified whenever I seem unemotional. This defines being a girl as having feelings that are easily bruised and being a guy as not having any at all. That’s good for exactly no one.

So, to settle. Yes, I am a girl. Yes, my fingernails are short and chewed and probably dirty, but that makes me more of a grubby third grader than a boy. Yes, I sometimes, ahem, interact with dudes without getting lovey-dovey, but that makes me more of a sociopath than a boy. Yes, my laundry contains so much flannel I’m releasing an album under the name L.L. Cool Bean, but that makes me more of a creature of comfort than a boy.

And besides. Some of that flannel is in dress form. Four months resolved and going strong, bro.

Short Dispatches from Vague Territory

I’m trying to come up with a runaway train metaphor for my life that isn’t horrendously cheesy and also doesn’t bring to mind the ride at Disney World or the Soul Asylum song, but I don’t think I can do it. And now I’ve just got that “like a madman laughing at the rain” part stuck in my head. But do you know what I mean, that feeling? Let’s stick with the rollercoaster over the 90’s anthem. An amusement park ride has rails; it’s clear you’re running along a path, however terrifying or nauseating, and it’s only the velocity that makes it feel dangerous. The scenery around you isn't all that interesting either--what's thrilling about an amusement park besides the speed at which average people whip into and out of sight? That’s the completely cheesy way I’m feeling lately, described even more smoked goudally. Havartishly.

On Lookers

I was on the train this morning with a herd of eastern European high school kids on some sort of group trip that necessitated being in this country, being on the subway and being in my way, but also being adolescently excited in that school trip kind of way that is, as yet for me, unparalleled in adulthood. Everyone involved in a school trip (teachers and parents and kids unleashed on a city with an itinerary and pocket cash) knows it’s bullshit and no one’s learning anything—or, at least, anything that will enhance a two-page essay for Global Studies. But the group swindle is a great phenomenon. Everyone plays along just for the sake of breaking the routine. Imagine if you, your boss, the president of your company and all your co-workers just agreed that for the next three days, yep, you all have “food poisoning.” Wink wink.

Anyway, someone asked me recently whether I’ve noticed how freakishly tall the riders of the L train are, and I actually had. L train commuters are Amazons. But I also think the L train is a freakishly beautiful train (for whatever reason that probably has to do with having a high net worth). The F, my old transit stomping grounds, was not a particularly attractive train. It was difficult to even find a train crush. I eventually found a clumsy dork who hummed along to his headphones, but my taste tends to skew nerdy and I’m not sure how many other hearts he would’ve set a-thumping.

The L is a different story. There are fashion people, for sure, who obviously work in their industry as a result of being beautiful, but a shocking proportion of the rest of the train is jaw-droppingly pretty too. My uterus begs me to procreate with half the dudes on every car so I can add their genes to my average pool, like so much Tang into tap water.

So, three of the foreign school trip boys were brave enough to swim away from the school of fish to take advantage of an open bench across the car from me. I would guess they were probably about 16, maybe 17, and all awkwardly tall and hulking. They sat on this scale of Cro-Magnon beauty that ranged from “Pirates of the Caribbean Extra” to “Likely Face of Next Prada Campaign.”

I’m not sure any of them would’ve known which was which. They were all equal parts swagger, which makes me think they were all equal parts uncertainty, which makes me jealous that boys can retain that idea that attractive is something you might yet magically turn out to be for much longer than girls do. Girls figure out whether pretty is in the cards by the time they’re 10; contingency identities, if necessary, are in place by middle school.