date machine : michael thomsen

Date Machine: Moving to New York and Where It Got Me

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:09:00 GMT

It was lucky that we met.

When I look back, it seems impossible that I ever would have met N. Of all the things that had to fall into place, all the plans I made that didn’t work out, all the unexpected offers that led me into places I never though I’d wanted to go; at every step, one little change would have meant none of this would have ever happened.

If I’d been accepted at conservatory when I was 18; if I’d skipped the poetry workshop my sophomore year of college where my friend H planted the idea of interning at a movie production company; if I’d been accepted in the trainee program at the management company instead of leaving for Peace Corps; if I’d been hired at one of the random office jobs in LA I’d tried so desperately to get when I came back; if I’d taken my prejudice against San Francisco seriously and never moved there; if I’d decided to stay home last Easter because I was tired and didn’t feel like socializing; there are so many little details that could have thrown it all off. It was luck.

Before I met N, I thought I knew myself well enough. I had been through a lot, had fended for myself, taken lots of risks without any clear payoffs waiting ahead. I knew what I wanted out of life and I had a clear understanding of what I was going to have to go through to get it. I knew what I had to share with a partner and I knew what I would expect in return.

One of the first things I learned about N when we met was that she was moving to New York in two months. When we went out on our first real date I knew there was another man waiting for her in New York.

After our first meeting, I spent two hours on the phone with my friend S. I was convinced that I had to send N a wedding proposal in a text message. I knew this would have been fantastically stupid and so I begged S to explain to me in detail why I should wait for at least a second meeting before thinking about marriage. The proposal would have been a joke, and I would have meant it as one. But not really. Impulses like that don’t materialize at random. I’d never felt it before.

A week later we made plans to go out again. I was scared. I called my friend C and told her what was happening. We were about to start something overwhelming and inarticulate. It was like watching a whale coming up from under the ocean. I saw the smooth, alien surface rising just above the water and had no idea what it was. But I knew that it was big. I had already decided to go with it, but I was afraid of that choice. I wanted C to make sense of it for me; to tell me why I was going to do what I was about to do.

As N’s departure drew closer I didn’t feel like I had any place to do anything other than loosen my fingers and watch her slide away. That end had been beside us during every second we were together, even when I consciously turned my back on it. And when she left I watched her go.

N is the love of my life. When I was finally able to say that out loud without feeling embarrassed about it, I decided to move to New York. Love isn’t something you find, it’s something you give, and, though I didn’t know how to say it for a while, I wanted to give her everything. That’s why I moved. This is all I have to give someone. And I brought it to her.

We haven’t gotten back together. We talk. We go out together sometimes. When we’re together it feels like it did. But that’s not enough.

I’ve been lying to myself about the move since I decided on it back in September. I’ve tried to describe it in pure rhetorical terms. “This is all I have to give someone.” That sentiment describes the amorphous emotion that’s propelled me all this way, but it’s an incomplete description. It’s a sentence fragment.

I didn’t just come to give her something. I came to take something, I came to ask her to give me something back. Like giving someone a birthday present and watching expectantly as they unwrap it, there was an unspoken expectation in my coming here. I didn’t want to acknowledge that part. I didn’t want to say that part out loud. I don’t want to be that needy one, that demanding one. But I am.

My friend C told me that I’m in love with my own ability to be in love. When I wrote about coming here last month I said N had black hair. It’s not true. She has brown hair. I was wrong. I moved across the country for a woman whose hair color I couldn’t even get right.

The other week we had a fight. We were supposed to meet for drinks but she was in the middle of a busy week and had been out late the night before. I felt wounded. “I can handle not being your boyfriend, not being your sweetheart,” I texted her. “But I can’t handle feeling like an albatross, an asterisk appending your real life.”

How is somebody supposed to make another person not feel like an asterisk? How can anyone ask another person to make them feel differently about themselves? For all my opaque rhetoric about wanting only to give to her, here I am wearing my wounded emotions on my sleeve and wondering why she won’t do more to fix them.

I’ve given up on every woman I’ve ever been in love with. I never fought for any of them, I never tried to make a case, never made a show of what I could give them besides a passive and easy-going friendship. When you fall in love with someone you ask them to sacrifice for you. You ask them to amend their own plans for the future to include you, to forgo all the new experiences they might have had with other romances, to never experience another person’s body after your own. It’s cruel. It’s a prison.

“I wish we understood each other better,” she told me a few days after I got here. “I am often surprised about it both ways, how we do and don’t.”

I don’t know how this is supposed to end. There isn’t an answer buried in any of this. There is no ending.

I remember looking at her in a bar the other week. We were talking about music. I had just finished tearing down The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips for being grating and overly saccharine. She told me it was about Wayne’s father dying of cancer, the adolescent dregs of super hero fantasy turned into a coping mechanism for the inevitable parting of everyone you’ll ever love. We went to see The Reader. I laughed the whole way through. I was filled with incredulity for the stodgy camera angles, the baroque dialogue, and the hackneyed soap opera plot. She liked the actor who played the young boy. She saw past the surface, the stupid superficial flaws, and found the pretty parts underneath. She left the theater with those. I left with my own stupid punchlines and in-jokes.

I admire her as much as anyone I’ve ever known. She’s strong in all the places where I would come apart. She listens where I’d jump in to filibuster and orate. She’s direct and unapologetic where I’d talk in circles and avoid having to answer.

It was lucky we met. I wish I had more to give to her than this, my wounded feelings and dusty luggage.

I remember one of the first nights we went out together. I invited her to come to a friend’s birthday party with me. We had seen each other twice before. I had been in her bed and we had kissed for almost two hours on her front step. Still, I was nervous when I went over to her apartment to pick her up. I didn’t know where we stood with each other yet. I was afraid I liked her too much.

We walked down the sidewalk towards my friend’s place. We stopped at the big intersection by Church and Market waiting for the signal. We were both looking straight ahead at the red circle shining in its black metal housing across the street.

I tried to look at her without turning my head. I could feel her body next to me in the cold night air. It was like a little ball of soft energy. It was good.

The light was getting ready to change. I could feel the seconds moving by. We would have to start walking forward again soon. I leaned down towards her without looking, then turned my head and kissed her on the cheek.

I stood back upright and looked straight ahead again, watching the stoplight. After a couple of seconds I looked at her again. She kept staring straight ahead, but a smile spread across her lips as she felt me looking at her. The light turned green. “Come on,” she said. I put my arm around her shoulders and we stepped into the crosswalk.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let's Keep in Touch

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

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

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

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

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

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

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let’s Keep in Touch

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:08:00 GMT

I didn’t want my last post to be a formal goodbye so I’m going to do all that formal housekeeping here, in my second to last post. My name is Michael Thomsen.

“Amboabe” was a dumb nickname I gave myself in Madagascar. After an extended rant about something marginal and self-reflexive my friend S, who was a fellow volunteer, said “I hear you barking, big dog.” Madagascar is a country defined, in large part, by taboos and there are a lot centered on dogs. Dogs are considered filthy. It’s taboo in many areas to bring a dog into your house. It’s taboo to feed a dog the same food that humans would eat. It’s taboo to refer to another person as a dog in any way.

Dogs are mangy and opportunistic lurkers, crawling through the filthy back alleys on a never-ending search for food and shelter. They’re turned away and cursed at every turn. Children amuse themselves by beating dogs with sticks or throwing rocks at them, giggling when they evoke a pathetic yelp.

“Amboabe” is a literal translation of “big dog.” Once I got to know people in my village, I would make joking reference to myself as “amboabe” to see how far I could bend the taboos. When I told Bernadiny, the tank-like nurse at the clinic where I spent most of my days, she scowled and said I was dirty. “That’s not alright,” she told me. “People can’t be dogs. That’s bad.”

I made a point to laugh and make joking faces whenever I said it, but it was always received with headshakes and clucking disdain. After my first year, I noticed people had started calling me by the name. “Where is the big dog?” they would ask my neighbors when someone was looking for me. “Are you coming on the vaccine drive… big dog?”

The scorn was still present, but I could see the lips pointing upwards just a little bit every time they said it. Bernadiny started calling me Amboabe regularly, shaking her head at how ridiculous it was. There was no one else in town who could have been called a dog, much less request it. It was stupid. Absurd. Wrong. She would shake her head, as if she couldn’t believe what she was doing, and then laugh to herself when she saw what an joy it was for me to hear her say it.

Nothing happened when the taboo was broken. There wasn’t any ugly incident, the gendarmes didn’t storm the clinic, and god didn’t strike anyone down for blaspheming the human spirit. We laughed, and shook our heads. It was so stupid. “Beeg dug,” she would say in her broken high school English. “Eka, izay ty anarako,” I would tell her. That’s my name.

I write for a website called IGN.com. I freelance for them now, but when I was in San Francisco I was an associate editor. I wrote about video games and music. Before that I lived in LA and wrote for a smaller video game website called Nintendo World Report and had a day job at a big game company called Activision (the people that make Guitar Hero). I wrote a couple screenplays and came pretty close to raising $500,000 to direct one I wrote about kids in high school. It didn’t really come together and then I got offered the job in San Francisco.

If you want to read other stuff I’ve written, you can Google me. It’s not hard to find. Here are a few links just in case. Hopefully you’ll recognize the voice, even if the terms might seem a bit foreign. If you aren’t moved by my writing here I don’t know if any of this other stuff will change your mind. But it’s me, I wrote it.

Editorial: The Case for Six Days in Fallujah
*and here's a short video interview I did for ABC about the game.

Contrarian Corner: Mirror’s Edge

Animal Collective: Meriweather Post Pavilion Review

Writing for Date Machine has been one of the most consistently difficult things I’ve done over the last year, and this has been one of the toughest years I’ve had. It started with my grandfather dying, and ended with the possibility of my mother dying. In between, the love of my life moved across the country to live with another man, I got an STD, I feel into a depression and lost twenty pounds.

But I wanted to write. And so I would come home after work every night and sit at my desk for three or four hours trying to come up with something that would be worth reading; something honest, entertaining, and worth returning to. I tried to do it five days a week, after twelve hours in another office, and in between directing, producing, and editing a short film, and working on some other freelance writing jobs.

It’s been great to do it with Zeitgeisty and Airheadgenius. It probably doesn’t seem like much of a trick from your end, but on my end it’s been consistently frightening. It’s easy to be honest and unapologetic with your friends and people you care about, but it’s a separate thing to do it out loud and in public. It’s really hard to spend hours sharing something vulnerable and intimate and indemnifying, only to hit publish and face an anonymous swell of readers eager to evaluate, convict, and issue sentence.

We’ve fought amongst ourselves, and the end has been no different than the beginning in that respect; but I’m thankful to have written alongside them. It was always a little less daunting to climb out on the rhetorical limb when I’d see each of them taking their own risks everyday. Whatever I’ve written here, it would have been less without their camaraderie.

I’m also glad that you’ve been here, reading all of this. I’ve tried to give what I could of myself in every post. I’ve also asked for you to give me your time, and your energy in reading all these little stories and thoughts. It may not seem like it given how self-absorbed much of this must read, but I appreciate that time and energy more than you may expect. Whether you liked what I wrote or loathed it, you still gave me a hearing and that’s the most any writer could ever ask of any reader.

If you want to stay in contact, I’m on Facebook. Find me if you want to. If you’re in New York, buy me a drink. If you’re not send me a note.

Tomorrow afternoon will be my last post. I’ll try and finish in the same way I started, with some red meat. I’m kind of scared to write it, but I’ll be talking about everything that’s happened since I moved to New York.

See you then.