date machine : confession

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

amboabe — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:18:00 GMT

When I turned 30 I threw myself a big party. I convinced a bunch of friends to come to LA for the weekend.

It was like a big slumber party for two nights, air mattresses. Sleeping bags took over the living room floor and my bedroom was filled with everyone’s luggage. I was worried about turning 30 for a long time. I was 25 when I abandoned my career in the movies to join Peace Corps. I was almost 29 when I finally returned. I had to start my life over from scratch. I did odd jobs for a few months before settling into a job testing video games with a bunch of high school students earning $290 a week.

Most of my college friends had made formal moves out of the earnest squalor phase of their lives. They were lawyers, geologists, teachers, and homeowners. I wasn’t worried about turning 30 because I felt old or decrepit, but I was aware that I’d sacrificed any real vertical achievement for the sake or a series of barely connected horizontal ambles. At 29 I was driving my father’s 1994 Geo Metro and putting 3 weeks of my monthly salary towards rent.

The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t care. I was doing what I wanted to be doing; there was nowhere else I could have imagined myself. I wasn’t exactly winning the fight, but I was engaged in the one that I wanted to be fighting. When I realized that, I decided that I had something to celebrate.

This was also around the time I started seeing a 37 year-old woman. I thought about our age difference all the time. She graduated from college the same year I started high school. She never gave any outward signs of being uncomfortable with our age difference. I would make a point to avoid anything that drew attention to it. Every now and then she would reference her college days, or some high school stories and I would try and look straight through her, rapidly hitting the fast forward button in my mind.

I liked her. She was curious, giving, spontaneous, she had a pink streak in her hair and good taste in shoes. We got along well, and entertained each other with our differences. It was a great friendship with sex thrown in as a perk. Still, it was strange confronting the edge of a generation gap. Her favorite music seemed outmoded to me, and she spent money in a way that I had only seen middle-aged housewives or children of privilege match.

When we kissed her taste was neutral. There was no lingering musk, no trace of the fecund sex hormones flowing through her body. Her saliva tasted literal, perfunctory, not suggestive. Her neck always smelled of perfume, but there was a twinge of the medicine cabinet underneath. The bottoms of her feet were flattened and permanently callused the way my mother’s feet were. She had the same white sunspots and thick knotty calves I’d seen on my mother growing up.

I don’t know if my reaction had more to do with the fact that we were better suited as friends than lovers, but I sensed her age in everything. Even when I wasn’t thinking about it directly, the age difference hung between us.

When you’re in love with someone you can get over a lot. The other day my friend S told me about her husband’s penchant for trapping her under covers in a cloud of his flatulence. If I could one day learn to live with the stench of my lover’s shit, I’m certain that a waft of the pill box on the nape of her neck would be manageable.

Her age hung between us because, in retrospect, there was a lot of distance between us to hang things in.

A few months later I hooked up with a 22 year-old. I wonder what I tasted like to her? I wonder how I smelled for her? Was there the germ of grandfather’s old A-shirts in my sweat? Did my mouth have the beginnings of the staleness of an old man gone a few too many hours without eating?

Sex is a window of opportunity. The farther apart yours ages, the less incentive there is to go through that window together. You have to be in love with someone to make up for it, or else it becomes stilted and ghastly. When I turned 30, I realized that my own window had shifted. But I wasn’t ready to let it shift that far ahead. Not without a better reason than being “good friends.”

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: My Friend’s Girlfriend is My Girlfriend

amboabe — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:07:00 GMT

When I lived in LA, I was hooking up with a woman to whom my friend P had introduced me. They had dated the previous summer. She had just moved to LA and he thought she might need a friend in town.

During the few months that we were hooking up, I used to torture myself with the idea of her meeting my roommate. We were a bad match romantically, but I had never met anyone like her and I swept myself away on a stream of admiration. She was as smart as anyone I’ve ever known with an advanced math degree from a renowned university. Her fingers were always moving when she talked, opening and closing around some unseen shape.

She had droopy eyes that made her look perpetually drunk, and she drank heavily. She was cheerful and always welcoming; she had a habit of bringing random people from the street back to her house for parties or after the bars closed. Her living room was a patchwork cantina of Ivy League wine snobs, debauched beach bums, and whoever happened to be passing by on the street outside. In the middle of that she could still turn and look me in the eye and say something alarmingly direct and unflinching.

The first night we met, she hosted a small dinner party, then we went out to a bar in Santa Monica. She spent half the night in the bathroom crying over an ex-boyfriend. I watched her and her roommate go in and out of the bathroom for 2 hours with my friend and some other guy who she had slept with a week earlier. He had an exaggerated afro poof of hair and a strong jaw line with a dimple at the end. He quoted the lyrics to Peaches’ songs for the group and then would wait for us to share in his delight. “Suckin’ on my titties…”

I imagined her looking at us three leaning against the bar in the gawdy pinky light and bursting into tears, wishing her real man was there with her. Her private disappointments and public outbursts of joy made her seem reckless. Needy and self-sufficient. I was smitten.

She remained elusive the whole time we were hooking up. I liked her more than she liked me. It was never going to work, it would never be more than a series of drunken interludes. My roommate was my opposite in all the ways that made me weakest and most prone to failure with her. He was loud and arrogant and full of caveman bravura. I secretly worried about bringing her around for fear that he would fecklessly seduce her and then throw her out the next morning like an empty beer bottle.

A year later I was in San Francisco and they met in a group outing at a baseball game. They hooked up that night and they’re still seeing each other. I’m excited that they’re seeing each other now that my wet emotions have been taken out of the equation. They’re a good match and I hope that they’ll continue to find ways to be good to each other.

I’ve met a lot of the women that I’ve wound up dating or sleeping with through friends. It makes sense that there would be a natural crossover for friends and girlfriends in a group of people with an already strong affinity for one another. But we’re not supposed to date people our friends have dated. It’s off-limits; we’re supposed to ignore innate attractions out of deference and loyalty.

I’ve slept with four women who had dated friends either before or after. Sex makes people vulnerable. You can’t hide yourself when your totally naked with someone, and it can feel like a betrayal when someone you’ve been naked with leaves you and gets naked with one of your best friends. Bro’s before ho’s.

My ho’s are my bro’s too, and neither deserves a place above the other. And I wouldn’t care about either if they asked me to avoid having new experiences, following my gut and my heart, to protect their ego’s and insecurities.

I’d rather just sleep with their ex-girlfriends. And I’m sure one day they’ll be sleeping with some of mine.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

amboabe — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:28:00 GMT

The other day a woman I went out with a couple times sent me a Facebook chat to give me well wishes on moving to New York. We went out a couple of months before I moved, though that was long after I had already decided to leave San Francisco. I never mentioned to her that I was moving, but she had read about it here. “It would have been nice to know that before,” she wrote.

It probably would have been awkward first date conversation to mention the fact that I was moving across the country in two months because I was still in love with a woman I used to date. Would it be inappropriate to go for a goodnight kiss after confessing something like that?

Everybody has baggage. Everyone has unflattering stories or ongoing issues that they’d rather keep tucked away in a back pocket to prevent them from ruining the present moment. Being in love with someone else would is a whopper of a secret to take into a first date.

Expectations ruin everything in love. A first date should be the one moment of time between two people where there are no expectations. Two people come together because they’re both attracted to each other. You can go in looking for love, a stable partner, a good time, or a few hours distraction.

I don’t know what I was looking for with all the different women I’ve been out with over the last year. I don’t know what I’ve really had to share with any of them. I don’t think I’ve been closed off from the idea of finding someone new to love. I haven’t had much extra love to share with someone else so the odds of actually finding a new special someone have been low.

Finding someone to fall in love with is the great canard of dating, and it’s one I’ve been uselessly tethered to for the majority of my romantic life. I’d never understood the point of seeing someone if there wasn’t some rosy, romantic future insinuated against the horizon.

I was always looking for it; I had the dating equivalent of the hundred-yard stare. I’d listen to the women I was out with tell their stories while imagining what things might be like between us ten years down the road. How would we talk to one another in our first home, expecting our first child, one of us earnestly working their way through grad school. My eyes were glazed over with disengagement in the present because I was busy roleplaying in some imaginary future.

Now I have no faculty for looking into the future and imagining what might be there for me. The future is inevitable, and it’s always the things that are most unpredictable that end up having the biggest impact.

So should I have told women I was going out with that I was leaving? Odds are low that anyone would have gone out with me if I had. I did mention it to one woman who sent me an email through Nerve. She never wrote me back.

In the beginning, I forced myself to go on dates to shake myself out of the depression of seeing someone I loved leave. I was dating by rote, forcing myself to go through the motions. All I wanted was some momentary distraction, the relief of a few hours away from all the little empty spaces I was suddenly discovering all around.

That changed. I started meeting interesting people, and was having enjoyable experiences with them. It was hard to not compare them to what I had felt before, and every time I did I would see the watermark still above me, how high the wave was when it broke.

That was when I stopped thinking about dating in terms of the future. I stopped imagining what would come next with the people I was seeing. I stopped speculating about how viable a pair we might be over the long term, and started thinking about how entertained I was in moment. I began to enjoy going out for the absurdity of it; the stilted formality of it; the possibility of some unexpected joy on a Wednesday night, like kissing a woman I’d just met at a stoplight in the pouring rain.

If I’d made some mention of the fact that the future would be much harder and more complicated with any of those women, we probably never would have had met each other in the first place. That’s all a date ever is, an opportunity.I didn't want to miss any just because I was headed in another direction.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

amboabe — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:31:00 GMT

I fall in love quickly. How much do you have to know about someone before you know you love them? It’s a yes or no question, and when you know there’s no need to sally about and over-qualify things. Yes. Me. I do. But does the same apply to sex? How much do you have to know about somebody before you let them into your pants?

I don’t like having one-night stands but I’m a hypocritical opponent of the practice. I once slept with a woman before I’d even spoken to her. It was a New Year’s Eve party in Madagascar. I was drunk and with some friends in a small room we had convinced a local to convert into a makeshift disco for the night. The woman came in with her friends close to midnight. I thought she was a French tourist.

After an hour we wound up dancing close to each other and soon we were grinding. We started kissing without saying a word. After a few minutes of making out I picked her up and she wrapped her legs around my hips. I carried her down to the beach nearby and we had sex until the ocean water turned chilly in the pre-dawn air.

At one point I heard her moan my name and I stopped short. Not only did I not understand how she knew what my name was, but I was shocked to her speak with an American accent. It turns out she was another volunteer and we had friends in common who’d told her about me. I had no idea who she was.

When the air turned cold and the giddy booze high gave way to lethargy we decided to walk back to our hotel rooms. We hugged good night and went our separate ways.

Another night I went out with a friend who invited a girl he used to date out with us. We went to a bar and after a couple of hours, the girl pulled me outside to the back patio. She told me I was cute and said something nice about my hair (swoon). We started kissing and an hour later we were in a cab on the way back to my apartment.

We had athletic sex for a couple of hours and then I started to feel the onset awkwardness of being in bed with a relative stranger. Absent a deeper attraction, her body seemed like a foreign object in my arms, not something intimate that I wanted to get closer to.

After the second hour I tried to roll over on my side and pass out, but she was wide-awake and horny. She kept finding new ways to get me hard and I thought it would have been awkward to suggest we fall asleep with a bouncy erection. So we kept having sex until she was tired enough to fall asleep.

I was sullen and selfish the next morning. I had started wishing I was alone half-way through our night together. The sex was technically great, but I didn’t want to have great sex with someone I wasn’t that excited about. In the morning all the sex between us was gone and we were just left with the same two relative strangers who had jumped at the chance to sleep with each other the night before.

I offered to buy her breakfast but she had to be at work soon. I walked her down the street to her car. We hugged and exchanged numbers. We’d had sex and didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers.

Sex covers a much broader spectrum of people than love. There are people I immediately know I wouldn’t want to have sex with. But most people are question marks. All those strange new faces and bodies moving past each other on the sidewalk, in the subway, in the tight corridors of bars and restaurants, in between cubicles in offices. Sometimes the only way to find out whether or not you really want to have sex with someone is to jump in and try.

It’s easy to seduce someone with your clothes on, to draw another person’s imagination and sense of optimism. When you’re naked there aren’t any tricks of seduction left. There are always a million reasons why things can’t work, and only one reason why things do work; one opaque, immovable, physical gesture, an affirmation. Yes.

You never really know until you’re already there.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

amboabe — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:51:00 GMT

A few years ago a friend asked me if I would be willing to donate sperm to her and her partner should they choose to have a child. The idea freaked me out and made me excited all at the same time.

I don’t like children nor do I get along with them all that well. They seem so helpless and inexperienced. Of course they have good reason to be, and I was just as helpless, if not more, when I was a kid. I marveled at some of the stupidest things in the world. One Sunday when I was four years old, I forced myself to watch a full episode of Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. When it was over I sprinted into my father’s office to tell him what I had done.

What would you do if a small kid lacking even a full set of teeth and the ability to wipe himself came bounding into your office to announce he had just watched Charles Kuralt for a full hour and a half? There are some people with an instinct towards patience and nurturing; selfless creatures able to set aside their own agendas to help shape a new life in a healthy and stimulating way.

When we were younger my friend P told me that I would be a terrible father because I’m too selfish. I was shaken at the time, but the more I think about it the more I think he might be true. I don’t know if I could listen to my child enumerate the lore of Dragonball Z or tell tales of fishstick wars in the cafeteria with a straight face. Would I have the restraint to not nod off midway through or take advantage of the time to catch up on deleting old text messages?

Still, I’ve wanted to be a parent for a long time. I remain uncomfortable with my selfishness, and for whatever life is worth, I feel like there’s nothing more meaningful than passing something along for the future. The idea that I might be able to cheat my way into half-accomplishing that metaphysical task seemed like a good deal. I could have the satisfaction of passing along my helical secret for another generation while avoiding the more uncomfortable challenges of actually raising a child into a healthy and functional adult.

Now that I’m “freelancing” for the foreseeable future I started to wonder whether or not it would be worth it to become a sperm donor to earn a little extra money at the end of the month. I know the money in sperm donation is marginal, but fifty bucks is still fifty bucks.

I decided that I couldn’t give sperm to my friends because I didn’t think I could handle the idea that my child was out there in the world without my being able to be a regular part of its life. I may have no idea how to handle a child and my brain flips over at the thought of returning to those adolescent discoveries of all the things taken for granted in adult life, but if a part of me is reborn somewhere in the world than I want to confront those things.

Also, I was in love with one of the women involved and I thought that might be a little awkward.

Now that my own immediate survival is slightly less certain, the idea of auctioning off my future babies seems like a much more realistic possibility. Maybe there is a place in the world for my junior, and maybe it might be better if I have nothing to do with him or her. Maybe it’s an even trade: fifty dollars for an anonymous scrap of immortality, playing happily in the green fields of a ranch house out in the country side, flying a kite or chasing raccoons through the forest. I’d masturbate to that.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

amboabe — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:45:00 GMT

My dad came to the city for an afternoon to help me mail some boxes the day before my move. As we were talking about times to meet, I mentioned I had an appointment for an HIV/STI check.

My dad was quiet for a second, then said "Uh huh. Well, how about the next day then."

I grew up in a religious home. My parents are Seventh Day Adventists. My brother and I had to go to church every Saturday morning growing up. We had to observe the Sabbath too, which meant from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday we weren't allowed to watch TV or spend the night at our friends' houses. Caffeine, alcohol, pork, and, certainly, pre-marital sex were also frowned upon.

I took all of these restrictions as unavoidable inconveniences when I was a kid. When I was sixteen I read the bible in its entirety and tried to believe in my parents’ dogma. It didn't take so much. The more I read and thought about it, the less I believed.

By the time I left for college I was on my way to leaving their religious cocoon for good. Caffeine, alcohol, pork, and pre-marital sex all worked their way into my day-to-day life (though the sex part was comparatively tricky for a long while). I would happily debate the principles and rhetorical validity of religion, but with sex, I would almost never make reference to my own life. And my parents never showed any interest in learning more about my sex life.

It was taken as read that I would avoid sex until marriage. I didn't want to go out of my way to be dishonest with them, but there weren't many occasions to bring up my sex life in the course of normal holiday conversation. It's not that I don't want to tell them. But I never feel like I have a reason to. I assume both of them were virgins until they married so I'm not sure how worthwhile it would be to have a conversation about having sex with my best friend's ex.

I don't avoid the topic, though. I sent them links when I first started writing here. I'm not proud of a lot of the stories I've told here, but they were all choices I made and have become a part of who I am. I don't want to hold that back from my parents.

I have no idea if they read any of this. They never bring it up, and I rarely mention it. I don't have children so I'm not sure what it's like to cross the last border of sexual reckoning with a son or daughter. What is it like for a parent to reckon with their child's sex life, especially when it is based on such different choices from their own?

After my dad and I had dropped all my boxes off at the post office and finished the last round of errands for the move, he looked at me sideways and then looked down again. "So when will you get the results of your test?" he asked.

"I got it back already," I told him. "They can do most of it on the spot now. It was all negative."

"Mmmhmm," he said.

He looked straight ahead, one hand on the steering wheel. I wondered when it was that he last had sex. I didn't ask.

Previous Posts:

PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar

Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?

amboabe — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:37:00 GMT

How long do you have to date someone before you can start calling them your girlfriend or boyfriend? Is it even something you have to worry about asking?

A few years ago, I dated a woman for five months. I started to think of her as my girlfriend. I wasn't seeing anyone else, and we spent a lot of time together. By the third month we would talk almost daily. Texts were exchanged throughout the day, evenings were spent eating together or cocooned on a couch watching television.

I wondered whether we had crossed some formal threshold without realizing it. I remember sitting on her couch one lazy night, we were watching television, a show I would have found tedious under any other circumstance, but watching it with her gave it a new bearable quality. "This is what I would be doing with my girlfriend on a Tuesday night," I thought to myself. "So are you my girlfriend now?"

The more I thought about the question, the less I cared about the answer. I wasn't seeing anybody else and I didn't feel the need to look any further. I felt content. I had someone to laugh with, someone to eat and drink with, and someone to curl up beside on the couch at the end of a stupid Tuesday night. I didn't care if she was seeing anyone else. It didn't seem like it, she never flaked on me or had excuses spilling out of her purse at inopportune moments.

Things were comfortable and convenient. It was so easy that I thought it might be better if she were seeing other people. It might have made things seem like less of a concession. Getting together with someone because it's easy is never good news. The longer we went without confronting that piece of semantic housekeeping, the easier it would be for me to leave when the comfort became too much. Three months later I was seeing someone else.

I asked a woman last year if she would be my girlfriend. Actually, I asked her if she'd be my girlfriend "for six weeks." We had been going out for a couple of weeks and I'd known she was moving away from the start. The finish line was set hard and fast up ahead. I didn't ask her because I wanted to know what she would say. It wasn't a question. I knew what we were together.

In the space of a few weeks she had become a bright new center of gravity. She wasn't comfortable or easy, but inevitable. When I got her texts at work they didn't feel like surprising reminders that she existed. It was, instead, like seeing a wave finally reach the shore after having watched it build and come in from out at sea.

When I asked her, I knew the answer already. It was a declaration, not a question. It was a confession. I want you to be my girlfriend.

It's an arbitrary label to apply to someone, and it doesn't really change what's between two people. Call it a banana, but a label doesn't add intimacy or security, it just alleviates the stress of worrying about what comes next. Calling someone your boyfriend or girlfriend is like coming in out of the rain. There's an instant feeling of relief and security, as if you've accomplished something and can now sit back and enjoy the fruits of romantic achievement.

"Yes, I'll be your girlfriend for six weeks," she said, smiling in the dim bar light. It didn't change anything. It felt good to give an outward showing of how strong my feelings were. It was nice to see her smile because of it. That was all.

She left six weeks later. All I had left was a stupid placard with some old title on it, oxidizing with each passing minute.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

amboabe — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 06:17:00 GMT

When I worked in the movie industry, flirting on the phone was a daily phenomenon. Rolling calls, confirming meetings, setting up auditions; my routine was punctuated by suggestive little conversations with women I'd never met.

I was still freshly hatched from college and reeled with the idea that I could pick up the phone and call someone "darlin" or "sweetheart" in the course of an otherwise perfunctory exchange. It felt like foxhole romance. Two overworked assistants managing the tentacular tyranny of a cranky producer or agent, finding a quick minute's respite before the paperweights started flying and neck veins bulged.

One of my boss's best friends was an agent who was also working with us on several different projects. In the course of the day it wasn't unusual to place ten or more calls into his office, and so I wound up forming a close phone flirtation with his assistant L. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was ever attracted to her. She was definitely smart and attractive and full of self-confidence, but those adjectives could be just as reasonably applied to a horse.

Her voice was loud and assertive. She spoke quickly and without meandering over uncertain details. She sounded almost asexual, and it was with a little jolt of surprise that our conversations came to an end with a dollop of casual affection. "Thanks, hon." "Talk to you soon, sweetie."

After a few months I asked her out. I was worried that I might have been running away with myself. Maybe I had taken something out of context or misread off-handed friendliness as something it wasn't. I wondered if I was wedging an irreparable wall of awkwardness into an important working relationship. But I was wrong on all counts. I asked her to drinks and she happily accepted.

The night we were supposed to meet, we both worked late and she called to suggest we have dinner instead. When we were talking about where to go I mentioned a distaste for sushi, which she immediately picked up on. She loved sushi and was determined to teach me how to enjoy it properly. We agreed to meet at some sterile Beverly Hills sushi place that doesn't exist anymore. It was glowing white and had an enormous fish tank that was so blue it looked digitized.

I was broke. I had a small mountain of student loans to pay off and was barely making enough to pay rent. I had no idea how much she made but she worked for the biggest agency in town. I assumed she had to be doing a lot better than I was. Still, I didn't think twice about agreeing to the restaurant. My boss had business lunches there. I saw the receipts in our expense reports, sometimes as much as four hundred dollars for lunch.

It was stupid, but I felt giddy, like a kid dressing up in his father's suit. I was having a date at the same place my boss went to close deals and argue for greenlights.

When we met outside the restaurant I knew I was immediately out of my element. I was wearing puffy jeans and a button down shirt from TJ Max that my mother had given me for my birthday. She was wearing a form-fitting skirt suit that I'd only seen women wear on television. She looked like Heather Locklear on Melrose Place. I felt like Skippy from Family Ties.

When we were seated, she ordered a sampling of almost everything from the pared down menu, including two of the three kinds of sushi that were seasonal and didn't have any price next to them. This was when I started to realize things were going to end badly for me. I was trying to do the rough math of all the things she had ordered but it had flown by so fast and the menu was barely intelligible to me. Words like "Uni" and "Tobi-Tama" weren't a part of my twenty-three year-old vocabulary. I lived with three other men in a shabby two-bedroom apartment piled halfway to the ceiling with empty beer bottles. I spent $30 a week on food.

After we had ordered I stopped caring about the bill. I was excited about eating something new. There wasn't any romance between us, it was obvious from the first minute. We talked almost the whole time, but there was a dryness to it all. It felt like we were both trying to make the best of an evening that neither of us was all that enthused about continuing.

Just as the waiter brought the check, L got up and went to the restroom. I had planned to pay the whole time, but watching her excuse herself right at that moment I suddenly felt ridiculous. I felt used. Not only did the date suck and the mysterious luster of our flirtations had been irrevocably lost, but now I was stuck with $150 bill for a bunch of briny rice balls.

I learned two things that night. Don't ever invite a woman to dinner unless you really care about her. More importantly, I really like sea urchin.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet

amboabe — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:37:00 GMT

On Wednesday the US Ambassador to Madagascar said the country was "on the verge of civil war." He encouraged his staff and any other westerners in the country to evacuate while commercial flights were still available. Over the last several months protest and violence have been ebbing and flowing, led by the Mayor of Antananarivo's claims of corruption and fascism against the sitting government of Marc Ravolmanana.

I lived in Madagascar from 2003 to 2005, working as a health educator for Peace Corps. It's hard to reconcile the country I lived in with the militant urgency that comes through in reports about the looming conflict. As contentious as things become in our country, as much economic turmoil lies ahead, the prospect of living in a country at war is incomprehensible. War is an abstraction in the west, something we've left behind. It's a wedge for arguments between red and blue, the socio-political equivalent of a giant foam index finger pointed at someone else with guilty insinuation. We still fight wars, but they don't happen in our homes. They exist out there, in pictures and on television.

It's sad to think about the migration that happens in advance; the flock of friendly foreigners finally reaching their limit. Bustling regional capitals gradually transform into muted cities of boarded-up storefronts, curfews, and eyes peering down onto the street from a window. Then one side opens fire, and the other side fires back.

I was evacuated from China in 2003 during the SARS epidemic. There was no impending war and no real danger, but it was still a terrible experience to go through. I got the call on a Friday afternoon, I had twenty-four hours to pack my belongings and travel 700km north to Chengdu where we would be flown to Beijing and then home to America. I had been in country for almost a year.

I spent the rest of the evening with the other teachers at the mining college where I taught. We had one last dinner together at the school restaurant, an impromptu banquet with lots of speeches and measured words of gratitude. I felt sick and weak. I guzzled glass after glass of beer with each toast and still felt sober and joyless. My blood pressure dipped and I could barely feel a pulse in my neck.

I looked around the gathered faces, people that had been innate parts of my life six hours earlier. They looked eerily separate, like severed fingers in the road. Our connection was so fragile that a sixty-second phone call in the middle of the afternoon was capable of breaking it irrevocably. I felt like a liar and a coward. I had told these people that I loved them. I had told myself that I loved them. And now I was leaving without a whimper of protest.

I packed my bags and took the 2AM train to Chengdu. I was there in the early afternoon. I holed up in a hotel with some other volunteers and went out with a big group for our last night in country. It was a morose evening. Everyone was trying to behave normally, joking and gallivanting, but it felt hollow. All my laughs tailed off quickly and eye contact was fleeting.

I stumbled back to the hotel after closing time with a woman I had dated on and off during my time in China. I liked her a lot. We hooked up after a few weeks in country and saw each other throughout most of training. I got freaked out at a certain point because I was falling for someone else and S kept an emotional distance that made me uncomfortable. We were sent to different ends of Sichuan province and I only saw her every two or three months after that. We tried to be friends, but we had a special knack of hooking up after a few drinks.

We stumbled back to the hotel. Peace Corps made us share hotel rooms and my roommate was already fast asleep when we returned. We had started kissing in the bar and continued to make out on the long walk back to the hotel. We decided to go into the bathroom. She hopped onto the counter and straddled me as we kept kissing. Soon enough my pants were down and my shirt was off.

We had just started having sex when, in a fit of drunken bravura, I picked her up and swung her around onto the upper portion of the toilet bowl. We started to have sex while she leaned back on tottering porcelain. After a few minutes there was a loud crack and the upper portion of the toilet came apart with a loud crash.

I held S up, precariously wedged between the wall and the jagged remains of the toilet. Everything felt ridiculous. We were having sex in a hotel bathroom while someone was sleeping on the other side of the wall. Broken porcelain and toilet water covered the floor. I looked at S and realized my heart wasn't into it.

I tried to reassemble the bigger pieces of the toilet into something that looked normal, then climbed into bed with S and fell asleep. A few hours later there was an urgent knock at the hotel door. She was on an earlier flight and had to leave for the airport. It was just after 8AM, and a weak gray light was coming in through the window, the perpetually overcast smog of Chengdu masking the sunlight.

It's hard to know where the borders are. What are the hard and fast lines that separate two people? Where is that final point on the map where you cross from one person's domain into another's? I got up and gave her a hug at the door. I kissed her on the cheek. She smiled her gentle little smile, lips closed softly over her teeth. I let her walk into the hallway without reaching out again. "Bye," I called after her, just before the door shut.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Nerve Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant

Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

amboabe — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:39:00 GMT

When I was in high school I imagined that being able to hold out for more than three or four minutes was a rite of passage. Watching porno and listening to other men talk about their sexual experiences I figured it was something that just inevitably happened, like baldness. I was wrong.

I always experience a moment of doubt when I'm sleeping with someone new and we're about to have sex for the first time. It's hard not to get carried away on the wave of excitement and physical discovery, which is usually when I start to wonder whether or not my sprinkler head is going to go off too soon after entry. There are few things quite as soul crushing as feeling like you've got to apologize for something after sex.

I have a decent understanding of the varying levels and intensities of my own arousal and what it means for my prospects of coming. With a little extra management and thought it's easy enough to keep everything at a maintainable level of arousal without getting the sneezy tingles. Still, there are times when it all evaporates into a vague momentum that suddenly materializes in a few irreversible seconds of spasm.

It's nice to think that lovemaking can be reduced to a handful of colloquial rules of thumb, but sex always surprises me. I can't think of a single experience I've had where there wasn't something new or unexpected. I'm surprised enough by all the subtle shifts and new aspects of my own body: a fleshy callous felt from the underside, the tangle of my hair in the mornings, the veins of my forearm. The more you get to know something, the more it changes.

Having sex with someone new is a flood of new detail. Feeling the touch of a new hand, the taste of a new mouth, the sweat of skin, a new rhythm, new contours; there's so much happening all at once that keeping track of my own arousal slips a few notches in importance. Then the moment is irrevocably at hand.

Other times, I come too soon because I just don't care about lasting longer. I get infatuated with my own immediate feelings and don't want to moderate them at all. I want the galloping rush to carry me in as far as it can. This is usually the least satisfying kind of sex. In the moment it seems like a great idea; the impulse to keep pushing farther and faster is totally logical. Then it all evaporates, the starry chariot that seemed to be ascending heavenward minutes earlier is transformed into a sweaty hulk with only a distant echo of that thrill left inside.

I suspect this kind of low-level joy, the natural equivalent of popping a whip-it, is what makes it so easy for men to celebrate sex as something worth bragging about. This kind of sex is the ego running unrestrained, the dog off the leash bounding through the park with no understanding of where it's going or why.

For how much anxiety I've experienced over coming too soon, I've never gotten any real flack for it from the women I've been with. "Don't let it get to your head," S told me the first time we had sex for a good three minutes.

I look at orgasms during sex like punctuation in a paragraph. They don't make me tired, or lethargic. They're energizing and they make me more interested in continuing. It makes me hungry to see and feel even more of my partner. When I masturbate, I avoid doing it late at night because it will keep me up with a racing heart and restless mind.

There's something private about having an orgasm. It can be like a little departure, watching your partner leave her body for a moment, eyes closed, moving in a silent rhythm of her own making. In the best cases, both people can go along to the same relative height, like looking at someone on opposite sides of an elevated chasm. Coming early is like being on a pretty mountaintop and not seeing anyone else, it's pretty and lonely. Narcissistic and irresistible.

Previous Posts:

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Nerve Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant

Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate

Love Machine: My Mother

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Beacause…

amboabe — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:57:00 GMT

The times are grim for abstinence organizations in America. Under George W. Bush organizations that promoted abstinence in sex-education received more than $175 million a year. When the Obama administration submits the first draft of its budget to Congress later this year, chances are high that spending on abstinence-only sex education will disappear.

I'm not sure what the main thrust of my sex education was in high school. I only have two memories from the class, which wasn't available until I was a senior. There was the expected bevy of STD slides blown up to cataclysmic proportions on the overhead projector. I've sat through this presentation at least ten times in my adult life and I still can't remember which disease is supposed to burn and which one causes lesions. Is The Clap gonorrhea or syphilis? I still have to look it up.

My other memory is of an assignment where each student had to make a graphic lifeline for themselves, starting with the important events of their childhood and continuing on through a speculative adult lifespan. I remember only one kid in the class of thirty included sex in his timeline. Everyone else was busy reflecting on poignant family trips, big games, or memories of close friends. D left all of that out of his timeline and instead told us all about how he lost his virginity when he was fourteen, and how it was one of the most important experiences in his life.

He didn't go into any more detail and he didn't anoint the topic with undue nostalgia or verbal wisteria. But he admitted to sex being an important and cherished part of his life in front of a room of his peers without any irony, self-deprecation, or cheap punchlines.

I was still a virgin at seventeen, and mostly convinced I would remain so until marriage. I had no idea what sex was beyond the whispered rumors in hallways and the lusty pantomimes on television. I understood the mechanics. The diagram of how sex happened was perfectly clear, but I didn't ever stop to think that it might actually mean something beyond the elliptical unicorn fantasy I had about it.

The problem with abstinence-only education isn't anything inherent to the idea of celibacy. It's more that it seeks to limit a person's understanding of sex outside of their own chosen practices. There's no great trick to protecting yourself from STD's nor to understanding how the reproductive system works. The pervading mystery is why, in spite of all that simple and easily available knowledge, our instincts still push us towards irrational choices in the throws of sex.

I've made a lot of irresponsible decisions with sex. I have been lucky to have avoided any life-altering consequences, but every time I've had unprotected sex with a one night stand or someone I should have thought more carefully about protecting, I knew what I was doing. I realized my behavior was illogical and carried the possibility for unintended circumstances. But my feelings were so strong in the moment that my logic was overruled.

The tragedy of sex education has been a fixation on the facts in a vacuum. Sex ed is an hour spent looking at penile chancres on a big screen, or a week spent caring for a symbolic baby doll. We describe everything that surrounds sex, but we still don't talk about the act itself and what it means to us; why it matters. Everyone has different answers to that question, and there isn't any final truth to arrive at, but shouldn't that spectrum be a part of the education offered to children?

What is sex to begin with? At the end of his life Akira Kurosawa said he understood less about what makes a film then when he first began half a century earlier. Growing is a process of discovering the extent of your own ignorance. The more sex I have, the less certain I am about what it is. It's good. It's bad. It's thrilling. It's exhausting. It's scary. It's surprising. It's beautiful. It's slow. It's fast. It's happy. It's sad. It's lonely. It's transcendent. It's an obligation. It's a delight. It's a new discovery.

But it's not something that fits on an overhead projector, regardless of whether science or religion has had the last say in drafting the facts.

*Second picture taken from the Slice Blog by Jessica Yatrofsky.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Making Your Online Dating Profile

Sex Machine: Sex with 19 Year-Olds

Love Machine: Making A Scene

Nerve Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant

Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate

Love Machine: My Mother

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

amboabe — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:37:00 GMT

So a while ago I wrote a tear about some women I've been with being too passive in bed. One of the many things wrong with that argument was the assignment of a gender stereotype based on an incomplete series of experiences. I've never had sex with a man, so I never really considered that a lot of women might have similarly dispassionate experiences with passive men. Earlier this year, I found myself having sex in the same room that my friend A was hooking up in. I remember looking over periodically, seeing him draped on top of his date in a Romanesque recline. He looked like he was idling away an afternoon on one elbow, nibbling grapes out of a bowl with his mouth.

He and his date were still mostly clothed and making subtle head movements that looked tender and sweet. What looked like a coy moment of prom night hesitation on the threshold of sex was water being tread to make up for the lack on an erection. At one point, after they had spent an hour kissing , A said, "If you can get me hard, I'll show you a good time."

It was a sad little gauntlet being thrown down. We can have sex if you're willing to do the heavy lifting.

A word about A, before you get out the torches and pitchforks: he's a disaster of a man, but a lovely one. The first time we met he farted loudly and without apology, as if flatulating were a kind of greeting. He is also a spectacular alcoholic. I booze a lot, I binge drink. A is a drinker in excess of my understanding of alcohol intake. He drinks so much his doctor gave him an Adderall prescription so he could concentrate in class (he's a grad student) in spite of his hangovers. I can't think of a time I saw him when he wasn't wearing something with a hole in it. At the wedding he was wearing a pair of shoes one of our friends had found in a public trashcan and given him as a joke. He laughed and then put the shoes on.

If I didn't know A, I would be inclined to write about how men are acculturated to treat sex as an acquisition, the ultimate expression of which is being so alluring that your woman is driven into a sexual frenzy through sheer proximity to your alpha-ness. The ideal scenario is for this man to smugly put his arms behind his head and watch his subject blow him, then ride him, then curl up in the crook of his shoulder and fall asleep in cartoonish exhaustion.

A is not that stereotype, even if I might have described him in a way to support that conclusion. Nobody is that gender stereotype. I got that wrong before. Sex is a communal activity, something two people decide to share with each other. Sometimes you wind up in close quarters with someone you thought you would want to share with, but at the close range you realize your assumptions were wrong. You have less to give them than you thought, there's nothing to say.

I've been in A's position before, with someone I didn't want to be with but didn't realize until it was too late. I faked it. I went through the motions begrudgingly. I lied. I blamed the fart on someone else, explained it away as some weak spot that other people have, but isn't a part of me.

A never got hard that night. He was too drunk and hopped up on pills; in a bed he didn't want to be in, with a person he would feel bad about having disappointed in the morning.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You with The Cardigans

amboabe — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:09:00 GMT

I was in college the first time I heard "Love Fool" at my friend R's apartment. She was drunk and really stoned when she put it on and the first thing she did when it started playing was apologize for having chosen it. I liked the song fine, but wasn't really paying attention. The rise to fame on the sparkling froth of that song made it easy to dismiss The Cardigans as some fly-by-night producer's invention. A few years later I ducked into a coffee shop to get out of a rainstorm and heard First Band on the Moon playing on the stereo. I listened to it while sipping black coffee, trapped indoors, waiting on the weather to lighten up. That's when I realized that I really like The Cardigans.

I liked the self-deprecating lilt in Nina Persson's voice and the straight-laced fuzz pop that played beneath it. When I heard their version of "Iron Man," like a dilated pastel lullaby of Black Sabbath's rusted metal angst, I was convinced. It was surprising to listen to a band that I had already dismissed and still find something that I responded to so strongly. "Does this mean I like bad music?" I wondered to myself.

A while ago I confessed my affection for The Cardigans to someone I was seeing, trying to explain the allure of Persson's confrontationally vulnerable lyrics. I euphemistically invited her back to my apartment to "listen" to The Cardigans. She rolled her eyes and scoffed. At my place I had to turn off the Cardigans record after two songs because it was too distracting.

I've got a long history of getting attached to crappy music. I wore out my MIlli Vanilli tape in high school. Long after the controversy about the fake singing had subsided I kept listening to the cornflake pop, indulging my teenage yearnings with their glossy sledgehammer of musical emotion. My affection for The Cardigans is probably closer to that indulgence than I care to admit. It's easy to look back a few years and dismiss who you once were based on inexperience and stupidity, but it's something else to do that in the present tense. When I was single and stuck in Prague through the dreary gray months of a winter, that music had been like a sparkling diamond.

Years later, in a new room, hearing all of that defeated indulgence was embarrassing. It wasn't that the music was so bad, but more that I had underestimated how I had changed in the intervening years. It was like trying to have sex with someone surrounded by a peering wallpaper of embarrassing high school pictures of myself. I wanted to have fun and enjoy my body and the body I was with, but suddenly felt like I was trapped in a wallowing flashback from an unhappier time.

Listening to music with other people is such a different experience than listening to it alone. When you're with someone else music is meant to stay out of the way, to be a subconscious lubricant. Alone it becomes physical. It gains intensity and layers of meaning that aren't there when your attention is trained on someone else. Playing The Cardigans was like trying to give someone a gift that I really just wanted for myself. It was selfish and callous and stupid.

So instead, I put on "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey. Listening to her rap along to the ODB breakdown was just about as smitten as I've ever been. I had never listened to the lyrics before that night. I still remember the first line, hearing it in duplicate tumbling from her lips like a begrudging confession of her own stake in the song. Me and Mariah, go back like babies and pacifiers. Swoon.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House during the Holidays

amboabe — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:04:00 GMT

Christmas offers a lot of opportunities for debauchery, from indiscrete meetings under the mistletoe to accidentally hooking up with someone from IT after the office holiday party. Going home for the holidays can become a long stretch of time in the suburbs with nothing to do but randomly run into some old friends from high school at the local good times bar, buy a round of jager bombs, and suddenly wind up sleeping with the gawky Goth girl from History class in your old bedroom. Christmas is one of the few times of the year where two consenting adults can still wind up shushing each other in bed for fear someone's parents will hear.

When I left home for college my parents moved to a Southern California. I grew up in Fresno, a tacky central valley city where shiny new pick-up trucks were a status symbol. The city was once a loose blot of agricultural sprawl populated by hard-handed grape farmers and Mexican migrant workers. While I was growing up in the 80's and early 90's the cheap cost of land and the cozy relationship between contractors and city councilmen contributed to a construction boom that saw tract houses and strip malls mushroom. There was an uneasy balance between the earnest old time farmers, the gawdy noveau riche contracters, and the slickster real estate agents with sterling silver bracelets that kept everything moving forward.

Everyone in my high school rallied behind the same idea that Fresno sucked and they couldn't wait to get out. LA and San Francisco were the two urban dreamscapes that most kids in my class dreamed of escaping to after graduation. There weren't many kids who talked about staying in the central valley, getting an office job, marrying, and settling down a few miles from their parents. No one wants to talk about settling down in high school. No one's willing to admit that one day they'll have to cut their losses and make a deal, trading freedom and ambition for stability and familiarity.

I don't know anyone in Fresno anymore, and I don't get to go back there for the holidays. When I come home for Christmas it's to a strange new suburb, where everyone is always a stranger. There's no one to go out with and nowhere to go out to. One year I went to the bar at a T.G.I. Friday's with my brother. It was crowded with people eating fried breading and drinking Bud Light. It was the socio-sexual equivalent of being in 10^th grade gym class.

Christmas at home has been a historically abstinent time for me, but New Years Eve is where I have, lately, been confronted with a lot of those old high school-age issues of where to go with someone you're hooking up with, and how to be quasi-discrete. Over the last five years I've been in a different city for New Year's, usually sleeping on someone's couch or sharing a hotel room with some friends. Hooking up with someone can become a bit of a logistical challenge. How do you invite someone back to your friend's apartment to have sex on the couch while four other people are passed out on the living room floor? How do you separate from a group of friends in a strange city and follow a relative stranger back to their house (or the parents' house) without worrying about how to get back home again?

I was in Austin last year and spent hours making out with a woman in a dance club that I had gone to with a big group of friends. Closing time neared and we wandered to the parking lot where her car was. She seemed pretty insistent about me not coming back to her place (because she had a live-in boyfriend, I later learned). The only other options for us to continue down the carnal path we'd embarked on was in her car in a parking lot under a freeway overpass, or on the aforementioned living room couch with an audience of passed out revelers. We could have gotten a 2AM hotel room too, but those simple and obvious ideas are sometimes the hardest to come by in the cold night, hanging on to a strange new body in a foreign city.

A few years earlier I was on a remote island in Madagascar with a big group of friends for New Years. We rented a diesel generator from one of the locals and hooked it up to a sound system in an empty hut and threw ourselves an improvised party. I was sharing a tiny bungalow with five other people so, again, intimate space was not a freely available commodity. After dancing for a few hours I broke off with a woman and walked down to the beach. Actually, I carried her down while she straddled my hips like an overgrown papoose. There was a bright moon out and we started kissing in the surf.

Soon our scant tropical wear was bunched up in thoughtless crumples, pushed down off our hips. It was perfectly romantic to be naked on a beach under the moon, but after two hours I became vaguely aware that it was getting really cold and my fingers were pruning. Every gentle wave that lapped up onto our bodies was drawing away body heat, and a breeze had picked up, making it even colder. Neither of us had our own rooms. It was time to go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. We inched up the beach a little further out of the surf and returned to the metaphysical ringing of New Year's bells with each other's bodies.

An hour later I looked up and saw a couple of Malagasy men had pulled up a log at the line where the palm trees and undergrowth gave way to the beach. They were quietly watching us.

I tried to shoo them away but they were security guards for the bungalows where we were staying and they weren't moving. We tried to carry on ignoring our audience but this was the last straw. The sky had started brightening in the east and the cold wetness had sunk into my bones. I suddenly felt tired and we decided it was time to retreat to our separate bungalows.

This year I'll be in Seattle doing more couch surfing with another big and randy group of friends. I have no idea who I'll be kissing at midnight on New Year's Eve; probably no one, save the merri-go-round of anemic pecks from the small friends I'll be with. Maybe that's the better way of doing it. Or maybe I'll get lost up in the tinsel and champagne and wind up with some strange accountant in a park, my pants around my ankles and snow falling down all around. Normally, darling, I wouldn't do this kind of thing.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How to Fail at Seduction

amboabe — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:23:00 GMT

This is my second time using an online service for dating. In LA two years ago I signed up for my first account. I had no idea what I was doing or what to expect, but I knew at least three other friends who had thrown their lot into the anonymous internet wading pool so I decided to blow up my floaties and join them. I went on four tepid dates over the course of six months and canceled my profile. My strategy was to forget I had a profile for weeks at a time then come home after a night out with friends and drunkenly spam everyone I found remotely attractive with an avalanche of winks. The next day I would wake up and find a trickle of responses, most from women that I can't imagine having ever been attracted to in the first place.

In this second round of internet dating I've tried to be a little more careful about who I try to start a conversation with. Still, I've had some moments of fantastic stupidity. After my office holiday party last week I came home reeling from a shot of fernet that I had thought would somehow be a good gesture of camaraderie to share with a co-worker. Why my company has chosen to host their holiday party on a weeknight for two years running remains a mystery to me. Nothing says end-of-the-week productivity like a party with an open bar on a Thursday night.

As I was trying to reconcile with the painful prospect of four hours of sleep on a roiling stomach-full of chardonnay and Italian voodoo vinegar I decided I was also in the perfect frame of mind to check my emails. I saw that I had gotten a note from a pretty woman I had written to a few days earlier. I opened her email and didn't even finish reading it before I started composing a response.

I'm not shy about telling people when I think they're attractive. I'm not all that inspired by physical symmetry, but it's really the only barometer I use (in conjunction with age and occupation) when looking at people online. So I was all too happy to write back an innuendo-laden email to J. I used the word "us" repeatedly, made reference to astrology. To complete the circle of stupidity I tried to make a glib joke about her mentioning a trip to Argentina for the holidays as a "Central American" excursion. Drunk people are only charming when in like company, and even less so when the record of that awkward fumbling is viewed the morning after in harsh black and white lettering.

I liked J. She used exclamation points when she wrote to me. She was a painter. She teased me about the first few questions I asked her. I do not think I'll hear from her again.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex

amboabe — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:53:00 GMT

I went to bed early on Friday night. I felt guilty for not doing more to inaugurate the weekend with something social, but I was exhausted. Thursday was our office holiday party and I was out too late, up too early the next morning, and bleary eyed by sundown. As I was brushing my teeth I heard some moaning coming through the walls of my apartment. I was immediately curious because my neighbor is an older woman, near seventy, and lives alone. The idea of her having sex at 10:30 on a Friday night immediately tickled at my curiosity.

In the year that I've lived in my apartment I almost never hear anything from my neighbor. She cranks the TV up when Dancing with the Stars is on, and I've listened to some of her rambling diatribes on the subject when she's caught me on the balcony some nights. She gets visits from her son, who is the super for our building, and baby-sits her new grandson every now and then. Otherwise her social life is entirely comprised of television and her overfed cat.

The idea that she had suddenly had enough, decided to put on some lipstick, walked out to the smoky jazz bar on Twenty-Fifth Street and brought home some spot-bellied gentleman caller to listen to her vinyl collection was exciting. It's easy to take for granted the more basic physical needs of those around us. There is a fundamental shame about body function and nakedness that sits in perilous opposition to the idea of close-quarters living in an apartment building.

I feel an embarrassment some mornings when I walk to my dresser after showering and realize I'm naked and in plain view of anyone on the sidewalk or in the building across the way. I was looking at some porn clips in between bouts of writers block the other night without realizing that the volume on my computer was turned all the way up. As the trumpeting cries of the actors came blaring from my speakers I literally jumped out of my seat.

My neighbor on the other side is a young and attractive woman who just moved to the city. I hear her talking on the phone some nights or talking to her small terrier when he's acting up. I was certain that this blast of truck-stop porn was coming through loud and clear on her side of the wall. What would she think of me the next morning as we passed each other in the hallway, me late for work and her on her way out to walk the dog? She would see me as the anti-social porno monster with a Jenna Jameson screen saver and a weekly email updates from AVN.

When I lived in Madagascar people used to shit on the periphery of my yard every few days. I would look up from my desk and see some mischievous twelve year-old or a woman headed back out to the countryside after market day, squatting in the long yellow grass where a curb might have been had the scene been moved to America. If they would catch me staring at them emptying their bowels, they would say hello as if they had just stopped to tie a shoelace or pick up some dropped papers.

Sex was also conducted without much thought to the immediate surroundings. Families of six or eight lived in single-room huts, and when husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend wanted to have sex, it necessarily happened with a room full of relatives dozing right next to the lovers. Confronting those most basic physical functions was unavoidable, and it became meaningless.

Living in an apartment building in a big city should, theoretically, be similar. When I lie down to sleep at night, my head is probably four feet away from my older neighbors head. Two sheets of dry wall and some fuzzy pink insulation is all that separates us. When I snore, I'm sure it reverberates through the walls, when I share my bed with a woman I'm sure the sounds of sex are unavoidable.

When the only sounds I hear from her apartment are the announcer building up drama for the big finale on Dancing with the Stars it makes me sad. Is that how things end up? Thinking of her body, swollen with age, slack and speckled, still writhing on her bed, twisting the sheets, mixing her sweat with someone else's made me smile. I want to think of her in that way. I want that experience to be something she still seeks out.

After a few more minutes of teeth-brushing I realized it wasn't my elder neighbor, but the Guatemalan couple directly above me having sex. The moaning and the dull thud against the mattress sounding like a loop, two people perpetually falling, grappling with each other against the rush of air and unavoidable gravity pulling on their naked bodies. Maybe I should start looking more closely at some of those bored old men in fedoras sitting in the park on sunny afternoons, watching pigeons circle the garbage cans. One of them might wind up being a fan of Dancing with the Stars. Maybe they could use a date too.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

amboabe — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:09:00 GMT

Being set up on a date by friends is a terrible paradox. It's briefly exciting to imagine meeting a brand new person who comes pre-ordained as attractive, intelligent, and beguiling by people you know and trust. That excitement quickly turns into disappointment when the vague premonition of the person turns into a fleshy, detailed reality. Predicting attraction is tough, and being friends with a person isn't always the clearest lens through which to view their relative merits as a partner. The few times friends have tried to set me I've almost always been uncomfortably reminded of my own shallowness. I usually feel mildly slighted. Can it be that my friends think I belong in the same pool of attractiveness with this foul beast?

There's no accounting for attraction. I barely understand what rippling threads pull my heart and loins towards the women I've fallen for, and it's seems the difficulty would only be intensified with a friend left in charge. The impulse to set up two friends seems more motivated by the need to join loose threads in the periphery than by a fully formed thought that these two separate humans would actually make each happier. It's more like an act of neatness. A few years ago my friend S, then happily in the midst of a relationship that would eventually become a marriage, suggested that I hang out with another of her friends whom she thought I would like a lot.

I met her for drinks (I'd write her first initial but I can't even remember it anymore – sorry S!). I knew as soon as I saw her that I wasn't attracted to her. She looked like a cartoon woodchuck stripped of her cel-shaded whimsy. Our conversation was doubly awkward, knowing that our meeting was not a product of our own devising. It felt like being a little piece on someone else's chessboard. We both agreed to come together as a matter of faith in our mutual friend, an act of blind trust and implicit desperation.

There's nothing that I want for my friends more immediately than safety. I want my friends to be well-insulated from the world, and swaddled away from any unnecessary stresses and traumas. I imagine a similar impulse guiding their process of selecting a mate for me, and suddenly I'm having a drink with the metaphysical version of a pair of mittens. Love isn't about safety or insulation. It's about one extended risk taken in slow motion. The implicit goal in dating is to find a partner for some longer period of time, and what's more risky than committing to someone for a long period of time? To speak without wavering about a future that is fundamentally uncontrollable?

Falling in love is like surfing a giant wave. You stand in the uterine pipeline, racing forward at superhuman speed, and in a precarious balance. There's no room to think about the precarious posture. A few inches left or right would be enough to send the whole endeavor in a tumbling disaster, roiling downwards to the ocean floor below. Your friends are like the nervous parents sitting on the beach watching you out on the open ocean, rising and falling in the giant swells and getting nervous. They wave you in, want to give you floaties for your arms, and a nice safe friend to go playing in the tide pools with instead.

I've been set up by friends twice. The first was when my high school English teacher told me that J up in the corner would be a good foil for my hairless poetic scrawlings. She was, for a little while. We had a lot of fun together, indulging long winding talks that were so preposterously self-righteous I wish there was a surviving transcript somewhere. Her pale blue eyes were merciless, and her thick hips and calves were tanned in a way that made me salivate subconsciously. I had an instinctual urge to want to taste her before I had the language or experience to articulate it. Then I fell off her wave and tumbled hard into the crashing undertow beneath. The second time was earlier this year. Swoon.

In both those cases, the set up was instigated by someone that wanted to see me challenged. I've become great friends with my high school English teacher, but while I was still his student he didn't much like me. His suggestion that I go chase after J for a few months was a mischievous one. I'm sure he must have enjoyed watching me squirm in an emotional scrum. What better way to repay his time for all those obnoxious essays he had been forced to grade than by watching me dangle from a thread of impossible love for a semester?

I've never tried to set anyone else up. The thought doesn't even occur to me. I don't think I'd have the heart to send anyone I care about off to dangle. And I don't think I'd have the heart to send them off for another milquetoast evening making nice with a stranger in the shallow end of the pool. Where would you even begin? Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

amboabe — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:15:00 GMT

I was a bridesmaid in my friend S's wedding in Philadelphia earlier this year. I flew in Thursday night, and checked into a hotel down the street from Rittenhouse Square. I was a wreck. I had been single for two weeks and was still reeling in sadness. I did not have my bridesmaid face on. S had asked me to give a speech at the reception. I wrote out a disjointed raft of words on the flight over, crying quietly above my laptop hoping the random stranger sitting next to me wouldn't notice. S#2 was going to be at the wedding too. I saw her in S's MySpace friends list a year earlier and hit on her. I met her in person once on a trip to visit S and some other friends but nothing came of it. When I landed in Philly S#2 was already there and we met for a drink.

We went to a dingy bar that allowed smoking and served twenty-five cent hot dogs. The first time I had met S#2 I was clutched with anxiety. Everyone in the group knew I had a crush on her and kept nudging me into making some grandiose play. Anything less than sex in a bar bathroom would have been a disappointment for them. I rebelled against the pressure by ignoring S#2 for most of the night, and when I did speak to her it was about impenetrable topics like the score in Midnight Cowboy and the difference between ketchup and catsup.

S#2 and I were among the first of the long-distance wedding party to arrive in Philly. At the bar she ordered Makers Mark and Budweiser as if it were a single drink. I went round for round with her, smoking and eating hot dogs. By the time the fourth round arrived I wasn't sure I should be drinking whiskey anymore. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth and I could feel the muscles in my neck going slack. I had been drunk under the table. S and her fiancée met us as I started asking the waitress for water, hoping S#2 wouldn't notice that I was now ignoring the full glass of whiskey in front of me and taking sheepishly small sips of beer.

After closing down the bar we walked back to our hotel, picking up some pizza along the way. It was late May. The city was hot and muggy at 2AM. I had just pierced my nipple and felt a craven urge to take my shirt off while we walked. And so I did. A garbage truck drove by and honked at me as I tottered along the street gutter. It felt good to be drunk. I was cheating, I knew, but it was still nice to actually feel good for a while; to not be swept away on the kaleidoscopic dirge of little memories of the woman I had been seeing. Glimpses of her bare feet on my hardwood floor. The taste of her mouth in the morning when I would nudge it open for a first kiss. The angle of her eyes, looking distractedly out the window. The tenuous shake in her voice at karaoke, nervous in a near deserted Chinatown dive bar. I had been living in a silent flood and it felt nice to be numb to it for a few hours.

S#2 and I went back to my hotel room, which I was sharing with my friend B. We ate pizza and watched cable. B announced that she was going to bed and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. S#2 looked at me and started describing some video she had seen on YouTube, trying to convince me of how funny it was. I was skeptical. She asked me to come up to her room to watch the video on her laptop. There are only so many times in a man's life that a woman asks him back to her room at 3AM to watch YouTube. Here was my moment, suddenly. That mythic window of experience had opened up before me, halfway between amateur porn and an awkward freshman pickup line. I accepted.

We got to her room, a narrow closet with a twin bed. I sat on the bed and she fetched her laptop from the desk then sat beside me on the bed. I started kissing her while she opened the web browser. She kept typing with one eye on the screen while we kissed. The video played. It was less charming than advertised. I made fun of her for thinking it was funny. She protested, defending her taste and sense of humor. We started kissing again. After a while we were undressed to our respective underpants. I felt overwhelmed by her body. It was so new and different. I felt the twinge of kaleidoscopic sadness again. I closed my eyes and cupped her face between my hands and kissed her. With my eyes closed, she was someone else. It was jarring to open them again and see her, a shock of blond hair, blue eyes, and pale beige freckles.

We kissed for another hour, trying to jack each other off. I didn't have condoms, and I didn't care whether or not she did. It was close to sunrise. My drunkenness was evaporating into a tired, pulsing distraction. As the numbness wore away I could feel sadness welling up inside my chest, like a ball of dim light, a sunrise over some polluted winter city. I looked at the clock and told her I should probably get to sleep. The wedding rehearsal was in the morning, and there was a lot of work to do.

I got dressed and went back to my room. The next night the entire wedding party went out after the rehearsal dinner. S#2 and I arrived separately. We looked at each other across the bar, intermittently. I felt sheepish and conflicted. I was sober again and didn't want to hook up anymore that weekend. My head was scrambled and my heart was upside down. But I liked S#2 and I didn't want to reject her. There are few things I like less than telling people "no." I didn't even know if she had any lingering interest in me. We avoided each other all night, then as I was leaving with the group I had come with I walked over to her. We made small talk, I asked how she was getting home, treading conversational water, then gave her a kiss and took off.

The next day I had to give a speech at the reception. I was terrified. Giving a speech at a wedding is mortifying. Bridging the gap between joyful pith and meaningful intimacy in front of a huge group of distracted onlookers is terrifying. Everyone that went before me was perfect, alternating personal anecdote with coy jokes about the bride's or groom's personality quirks. After postponing as long as I could B shoved me up to the podium. My veins dilated and my hands were sweating on the microphone. I skimmed the room for half a second, then looked down at my shiny leather boots. I had written a thousand words on my laptop, ambling sentences riddled with semi-colons and inconclusive parentheticals. I tried to pull the form of it from memory.

My point, like most things I try to express, was over complicated and awkwardly phrased. Words hung off the idea like an over-sized suit on a skinny man. It was all vaguery and guesswork. When you love someone you want their partner to be someone who'll take care of them the way you'd take care of them if you could. S still teases me over the speech. Everyone was really funny and short and then I went up there and made a sappy puddle of myself in public for a few minutes. "What the hell was that?" she asked me a few weeks ago over brunch.

That night we all stayed out late. I had moved to a different hotel a mile away from the hotel I had stayed at the first night to be closer to the reception. We closed another bar and I wound up alone again with S#2. I walked her back to her hotel. I stopped at the steps to the front door. She stood a few steps up and lingered, both of us holding on to small talk. I yawned and said I was exhausted. I moved in and gave her a hug and kiss on the cheek. I backed away down the street and she walked up the remaining steps and disappeared into the hotel.

I drunk dialed someone on my way home, talking into the empty vacuum of voicemail as I stumbled through the old streets of downtown Philly. The red and brown bricks melded together into a dull crimson under the street lights. The only thing I had left were words, and I sent them through the phone mic in a soft voice, meandering through all the details of where I was, what I had been doing, and what time of morning it was. It felt nice for a few seconds, almost like touching, the 1's and 0's being translated into sound waves, recorded in some master server, archived for 14 days, played back later, on a Sunday morning, looking out a window at the bright and sunny sidewalk. It felt like I was somewhere else entirely.

Then I hung up, drunk and alone in Philadelphia.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Date Night: The F U Date

amboabe — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:39:00 GMT

I met M at a dirty bar decorated with large oil paintings of small breed dogs staring out winsomely from their frames. She was animated with a casual mania, dressed in tight black pants and thrift store boots. I had worked late and rushed to the bar to avoid being too late. We had arranged to meet at 9:30. I showed up at 10, riding on a wave of apologetic texts. M was outside waiting for me. We hugged and walked inside. She looked like a teenage boy in drag, like one of the dimpled teens I imagine might have dawned a wig and played Ophelia in the 17th century.

We settled into a booth pressed against one of the front windows. M spoke in a soft voice. I kept asking her to repeat herself, leaning in to better hear her. She spoke quickly but would slow down at the end of her sentences and punctuate her thoughts with a widening of her eyes. She disoriented me. I felt like I was watching a hummingbird hovering in mid-air, the rapid flapping of its wings almost imperceptible in the surrounding calm.

I mistrusted everything she was saying. I felt like she was trying to hypnotize me with ornamental motion and a kind of mystic explication of David Lynch movies. I noticed she wasn't opening her mouth much as she spoke. I started to catch glimpses of flickering metal in between her lips. "Do you have braces?" I asked.

She immediately pursed her lips and looked away blushing. "Yeah," she said.

I asked her to show me her braces. She didn't want to, but I pressed her. Seeing braces in the mouth of a twenty-eight year-old woman was immediately more exciting to me than hearing more armchair philosophy about independent film. I had braces when I was in my early twenties so I felt a basic kinship with her handi-capable mouth. The more reassuring I tried to be the more she shied away from showing me.

I realized I was being too nice to her. I knew as soon as I saw her that we didn't have a strong connection, and the more we talked the more I realized that we weren't a good match. I'm blunt, deliberate, and invasive. She was effervescent and insinuating, filled with a self-possessed mystery that I could never have taken seriously. But the fact that her teeth were literally strapped into a metal stricture so commonly linked to the torturous embarrassment of puberty was exciting. I had gone through that as an adult too. I wanted to share that with her.

My friend C insists the first time we met I told her to fuck off. We were sitting on a plane from Beijing to Chengdu and I was sulking in my window seat looking at the stepped rice patties cut into the gorges below. She introduced herself and told me about some mix tape her girlfriend had made her, then let me listen to one of the songs from it on her iPod. After three minutes trying to separate Tori Amos from the roar of jet engines I handed her back the earbuds. I asked if she ever had the experience of being unable to say anything in English after having been in a foreign country for a protracted period of time.

She said she hadn’t and quickly moved back to another conversation she had been having across the aisle. I didn't have anything to say about her Tori Amos song, but was feeling honestly overwhelmed with Chinese culture shock. She took it as a personal sleight against her personal confession, and spent the next several days stewing over how I had offended her. She retaliated by embarking on a small crusade to get me to like her.

Watching M squirm, I realized I was being too nice to her. Did she really want some guy to validate her discomfort with metal fixtures in her mouth? Was the sea change in my personality, going from half-hearted engagement in a chat about movies to fixated curiosity about something completely superficial, too much to handle?

We all like having our insecure parts teased. It's a kind of intimacy when someone can look at you, spot your weakest area, and tickle it with some well-placed movement. There's an exhilaration at having been discovered. The subconscious nakedness of it all can help to cement a link between two people sharing a common and personal frame of reference.

Conversely, there's something distancing about someone who seeks to only validate the people around them. Showering someone with attention, insinuated promises of kindness and understanding, is always self-reflexive. It doesn't point to any genuine understanding of the other person, but is a kind of self-aggrandizing act of personal generosity. It's about the other person trying to fit something that is your own into the box of their experiences. It's less sharing and more taking.

When M finally relented and gave me a few seconds of a wide-mouthed smile, showing off her parallel rows of metal, I was only thinking of myself. That's what I must have looked like when I was 22 and eating sushi with R, or asking bartenders to make anything so long as it was blue. I didn't like M enough to tell her to fuck off. Instead, we talked about David Lynch and Miranda July. Then we kissed for a while.

Close to midnight I walked her back to her bike. We said goodbye and I watched her flit away into the night, like some flannel appointed hummingbird. I'm pretty sure I'll never see her again.

*Top Image is "Swans are Evil" by Corey Arnold.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

amboabe — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:36:00 GMT

I started talking to a woman at a party this weekend who confessed that she was taking a break from dating. I was immediately excited. I wanted her to hurry up and finish her explanation of how she had come to a point of general exhaustion in her dating life so that I could add my own thoughts. "I'm taking a break too!" I wanted to tell her. It was a thrill to have found such immediate common ground with someone I had only met a few minutes before. Everyone I knew at the party had gone home early. I had turned to the closest person I could find to strike up a conversation hoping to stave off going home early on a Saturday night. I didn't want to seem like I was hitting on her, so when the opportunity arose to disavow any immediate participation in the mating rituals of urban city dweller I felt giddy.

The idea that one can take a break from dating seems languorous and self-indulgent. It's like saying you're going to take a break from ice cream. Dating isn't easy, and it can feel like work, but it's always interesting. Even when it's patently boring, you can always learn something new about people or how you relate to certain kinds of people. And the possibility of romance sparking underneath the surface, like some exposed electrical wire, is always an exciting secret to carry with you throughout the day. I always feel an extra sense of adventure and purpose on days when I have a date.

In a lot of ways it's a privilege to be able to apply so much time and energy to the idea of finding a partner who'll fulfill some romantic ideal. I always wonder about the comparative success of arranged marriages, at least compared to the staggering divorce rates in the unarranged world. I wonder if it isn't entirely reckless to believe that you can select your own mate using a divining rod whose most important criterion is love. Looking at marriage as an effective partnership between two people who agree to set aside personal agendas for the sake of a family is painfully anti-climactic. But it's statistically more likely to hold fast than the woozy promises made under a lovespell on a hot summer night.

One of the most rewarding things about being in Peace Corps was seeing how quickly and totally all the socially constructed barriers between people can be broken down. I remember the first day showing up for staging and looking around the hotel conference room at the rabble of oat-fed college graduates looking attentively at the bullet points on a government-issue whiteboard. I couldn't believe I had traded my real friends and family for this group of sandal-wearing do-gooders. It was repulsive to imagine I was leaving behind a life I had so carefully built for this random group of people who were so earnest and idealistic that they almost should have been wearing helmets.

A few weeks later we might as well have all been menstruating on the same lunar cycle. Stripped of country, companionship, language, and possessions, the need for trust and intimacy become irrepressible; like the unavoidable urgency of oxygen when you've been underwater for too long. Bonds form and love grows like a flower sprouted in cow shit, no less strong or real for its crass beginnings.

Sometimes dating feels like hurling yourself against another person's outer barriers over and over again. Both sides want the closeness, acceptance, and intimacy, and neither side trusts the other will be able to provide them. So we fixate on politics and fashion, deconstruct taste in music or movies, and use them as barriers to keep from having to offer someone empathy. We circle each other in bars and coffee shops, evaluating, approaching, and dismissing; as if love were something you simply find and not something you give.

I was just about to start telling all of this to the woman at the party, the pudgy one with horn-rimmed glasses who I was worried would think I was hitting on her. Twenty seconds after I told her I was taking a break from dating, she excused herself to go outside for a cigarette. I looked around the room and didn't see anyone I recognized. Then I left.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met