Listmaking

• 15 things to do before you turn 30
• 30 things you should know by 30
• 3 Kinds of BFFs You Will Have Before You Realize the last F Doesn’t Count For Anything Unless You Make It Work, Because Work Is All There Is
• 10 Kinds of Guys You Will Date In this Lifetime, Or “Really? 10? Maybe if you quit strumpeting around, you’d be married by now, after all you are 27* (almost)”
• Food That Actually Helps You Lose Weight
• Pets You Will Have Before You Realize You Have Too Many Pets
• Alice, Stop Making Lists
• No really, just stop
• The point being: You will meet people. You will go places. You will go places where you will meet people and see things that debunk whatever notions you once held of said place or person. It’s called expanding your horizons, or realizing what an idiot you were to think people or places or things could be categorized so neatly into your twenty-something brain. 
• Things that humble you into seeing the bigger picture
• Like, how the world is very large, too large
• People are worth the benefit of the doubt,
• or they can be afforded the chance to change, 
• …and no one is intentionally evil or even mean. A little selfish bordering on sociopathic, maybe. People just are what they are, and you (being what you are) will sometimes get hurt in the process. As much as it sucks, we move on and hopefully learn a thing or two and quit with the stupid fucking lists of “Guys I wouldn’t date” or “Red Flags” or “Dealbreakers” because who knows, you just might like someone who happens to be in Crocs and white pants
• (LOL, that will never happen)
• Forgiveness is on every list. There’s a Mountain Goats song for everything.

*Someone actually threw the “But you’re 27! How can you not have marriage plans?” card at me. I bet my weekend was better than your weekend.

One for the Ovaries

Or, “Ovulating all over WordPress”

Featuring the men who make my vagina do triple handsprings. Yes, vaginas can!*

Fuck being busy. Here’s a picture of my cat.

I was weeping–WEEPING!–tears of JOY while doing the research necessary to make this very important entry happen. I also looked up “Cast of Delicious Man” but Google had no idea what I was talking about. This show exists, I swear, but now I’m having doubts as to whether I was reading the titles correctly. Instead, it kept giving me pictures of Rodrigo Santoro dolled-up in full Xerxes, which was NO. DO NOT WANT.

In the interest of making this list a little less Waspy, I would have added a few other OHMYGOD SUPER CRUSHES, but I work at a University and these are people I might run into, so I guess that’s not happening. Instead, I plucked out pictures of people I’ll never meet in real life anyway, which exponentially lowers the chances of awkward suprise encounters.

• Matthew Inman, you guys. And he has a hat!
• 
• 
  Shugo Tokumaru! Lalalahee ha lalalal hahahaha doot doot doot doot clink clink tap tap tap *insert random lines in English here* tok tok tok
• 

• 

  Ah fuck, I’ll just take the whole cast with a double shot of Wyatt Cenac.

• This is Nicholas Rombes. This list originally had dudes like Josh Homme and Mike Patton, but I realized as I got older that I don’t need the kind of action that will make my panties explode, I just want…love. And people to overthink it with.
• 
  Yeah, gay. Do I look like I give a fuck?
• 
• 
• Are there no pictures of Nikil Saval larger than 50×50?

• 

  At this point, I noticed that most of the very white and sort of Jewish or at least Jewish-looking dudes I searched for were followed by suggestions that they were gay, so here’s a picture of Chris Messina with an attractive woman, because Chris Messina = not gay.

---

I was going to write “Yes, vaginas can do that!” But went with my instincts for writing amazing copy instead.

To someone and for someone

Love to me was being a responsible person. To someone and for someone.

from “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #3

There’s a picture of me on a friend’s camera (Or there was? I’m not sure if it’s still there) from last summer. I was getting ready to leave his apartment, tossing things into a handbag as quickly as I could and making other things small enough to fit into another tote without having to hassle myself with folding, all the while trying to make sure I didn’t forget anything (I still managed to forget my toothbrush), as the drill usually goes when you’re moving from one place to another over the course of a few weeks. There was a train to catch and a few blocks to walk before that. And he said, “Alice,” and as soon as I turned around I heard a click.

“Deer in the headlights. I love it.”

Before that we were talking about breakfast, about the agenda for the day while relishing the lack of an agenda. I just had to catch the train back, he was enjoying the last of the weekend. I was enjoying not knowing what we were or what I was doing there or what I would be doing next.

“You’re welcome to stay longer,” he said. Still, I didn’t. I don’t know what part of sticking to a plan while not really having one factors into our responsibility to other people. The best part of being on vacation is usually that commitment to myself and to what I know I want to do. And even before he asked, I had already quietly promised myself that I would leave by noon and play the rest of the day by ear without him.

A lot has been written about love, but I just happened to start reading about it with Raymond Carver, and grown to appreciate the dynamics expressed about relationships in his stories – two people, claustrophobic tension coupled with a comfortable inertia, alcohol – these are just some of the things that regularly figure into Carver’s work. Two people together create a separate identity from the individual selves they regularly present to the world, and this in itself is a responsibility. How do you sustain that identity, enjoy living in its skin, and building on it until it eventually takes over what you previously wore? I wrote that summer about having no use for an identity I’d eventually leave behind the minute I packed up and said my goodbyes, but while transience poses these kinds of conflicts, they add to you, too. Those pictures on other people’s cameras are just part of the equation.

Being three months on the side of a mountain with somebody twenty-four/seven, you better get along. When you live in a truck… I mean, we’d go to bed and one turn over, the other turn[s] over. That’s the way it was. Because the bed was only so wide.

I didn’t know what I was doing there. I mean, I did, and I didn’t. I just knew I was there for myself with someone else. I liked who I was with him, but I usually like who I am with other people. I didn’t know who I’d be for him, or for anyone. I’m used to being a teacher or any other job title I’ve adopted over the past couple of years. I’m used to work. I date, I have fun, I go home and work some more. It’s nowhere near as melodramatic as it sounds here, it is what it is: and what it is is just another way to live. When we only have one life to live, the people we give our time to become as much of an investment as our careers and our education. They are part of our education and pictures can testify to what we learned.

#amblogging

 

So I do have beef with the whole fashion/food/travel/lifestyle blogging phenomenon, and it’s this:

I’ve been online since 9 am, this morning. Cumulatively, since our family desktop sputtered out its first screeches which signaled the information age coming to the Sarmiento household, I’ve been online since, I don’t know, ass o’clock? That I can use ass o’clock in a sentence and have someone else read it says enough about the times we’re living in. I know it’s not necessarily a generational thing. I know there are people still toiling away in medieval living conditions who will never know the pleasure of tapping away at a keyboard an allowing their thoughts to materialize first onscreen, in a string of words and sentences, before they become publicly accessible. But for a huge chunk of my life, my days have begun with checking if anyone is talking to me on the internet.

Thoughts Upon Seeing a Guy I Used to Date, Without Ever Actually Confirming if He was Indeed that Guy I Used to Date

• At least I wasn’t scratching myself.
• At least I wasn’t picking my nose.
• Maybe I should get my glasses, I’ve been squinting in his general direction for a good 15 seconds already. That’s not awkward is it? It might be for him, but for me it’s pretty much the opposite of awkward, considering how long I’ve been at it. What is it now, 20 seconds? Nope, not awkward at all. In fact, the opposite of awkward: let’s call it, “mockward”
• We could move out of mockward territory by putting our glasses on, so why don’t we do that, Alice?
• Or not…because that would mean that I have indeed been staring at a face I used to make out with, and this is a face that belongs to a person whom it did not end very well with. I think I literally said, “I don’t want to see you. Just because I don’t.” 
• Hey, at least I was honest, I mean I did not drag him into and around “You’re really nice and I’m sure you’ll find someone who’ll love you,” or worse, “It’s me. It’s definitely me,” territory. Do some people actually prefer that? I’m pretty sure they do. 
• I mean, technically I did say that it’s definitely me: I did not want to progress any further into relationship land and let myself out as gracefully as I could. 
• …But wait, popular media has taught us that anything worth fighting for is worth causing a huge embarrassing scene over. Should I have flipped the table over? Raised my voice? 
• What if I go over there now and say, Hi? I mean, what’s there to lose? That can’t be his girlfriend, right? Maybe if I put my glasses on, I could confirm if that vaguely human shape across from him is a girl…
• Then again, I haven’t even confirmed if the dude is indeed the very same dude. And I’m not sure I want to…but you do have certain instincts about people you once connected with on a level above friendly banter. These kick in the same way you look up the minute your date walks into the room. You just know someone’s there; the air around them changes, and you’re breathing that air, therefore…
• At least I wasn’t picking my nose or scratching myself.
• I really hate it when people are reduced to anecdotes. It’s been, what, two years? Look at how much hair I have now! (lets hair out of ponytail) Look, whatsyerface, look at all my hair! I’m a girly girl! Maybe you can text our common friends and comment on how long my hair is and how I got thinner as well!
• This is all because of yoga!
• What I’m wearing right now is also because of yoga, so fuck you, yoga! I am cursing you so hard, right now for my poor wardrobe choices!
• I shouldn’t have worn this stupid white shirt in this stupid weather.
• At least I resisted every urge to scratch myself.