i'll call him "pal."

Last night I was sitting at my computer, home from work and already in sweats, about 2 steps from a trip to the Social Pig with the roommate to acquire the necessary ingredients for chicken spaghetti, when my phone rang. From a number I did not know.

“Maybe it’s Otter!” the roommate shouted from the kitchen, mocking me. “No,” I said, sighing, “I have his number.”

For the next hour I was a giddy sort of amused. (I tend to dance around aisles if no one else is around and I am not required to do any buggy pushing with mom the roommate.)

About an hour after that (or maybe two – whenever Two and a Half Men ended and the depression that associates with Intervention set in) I got in that shaky sort of “I’m exhausted” mood that I tend to achieve. Also see: overdramatic and fussy.

Sunday night a friend of mine had sent a text saying she was in the company of the boy I had met last week. “Is he still cute?” I asked her. “He’s still cute and still has a girlfriend,” she responded. We’d done our facebook research, I’ll admit. And his “In a Relationship” status was enough for me.

So when he called from that unknown number I was shocked. SHOCKED. And when I listened to the message and heard that he was calling to see what I was up to this week and if I wanted to get a drink, I WAS MORE SHOCKED.

Obviously I immediately called my friend. “He called,” I started off. “WHAT THE FRENCH??” she interrupted. Mind you, she says that about most everything.

Sitting on the porch listening to the rain, I called him back. He told me about his weekend and his whereabouts. And when he asked what I was up to this week I told him that again we were doing our weekly hangout and he should meet up. So he said to call him. And I will. I’ll call him the same thing my dad called my mom the entire time they dated. I’ll call him “pal.”

Because that’s what you do when you find yourself in the same place you’ve been before, just with a different someone.

obligatory he's just not that into you post.

Subtitle: “He’s Just Not Into You” messes with my head.

Sub-subtitle: “I’m just overthinking.” (Grey’s Anatomy)

When I was 15 and a freshman in high school I went on my first date. I was so smitten with the boy. He came and picked me up, we went to Chili’s, I ordered what he said his mom usually got because I was shy and uncertain. He brought me home. He called the next night. It was fated.

I remember a month later I found out he had started dating a girl a year older than he. He was a junior, she was a senior. I listened to Brandy sing “Have You Ever” over and over again. (Don’t judge me.) My heart hurt.

When I was 16 and none-the-wiser, I went out with that boy again. This time was a double date. Afterwards we went to the house of the other boy and watched Friday and it was ohhh so romantic. I swooned over Ice Cube. The boy tried to unhook my bra. (FAIL.) And then he took me home.

Shortly thereafter he wrote me a note and handed it to me between classes. “I’ll always love you,” he wrote, as he went about explaining to me that his best girl friend, whom I had never met, had confessed her love for him. And if they didn’t try things now, he’d always wonder.

It wasn’t until the end of that school year that I got my first kiss. From Mr. Athletic. We had gone on a walk on the beach and he’d laid it on me. It was my welcome to the world of sandy kisses. He carried me back down the beach to the house. We kissed more on the couch in the room with our friends. And then I went to bed thinking, How am I going to get rid of this guy?

I had liked him for months but now? Now that I was sure he liked me? Now he was smitten and I was not. Over instant messenger he asked me to be his girlfriend. His girlfriend! I could’ve been somebody’s lady friend. Instead I told him I really didn’t want to date someone over the summer. Because, obvy, the summer after my sophomore year was going to be booked, you know.  He didn’t listen to Brandy but I hear he got good and drunk.

My freshman year of college was the year that I got good and drunk. At a fraternity function. I was dressed as a flapper and my date, my old friend from preschool who I’d always crushed on a little bit, was Mafia attired. We pre-gamed, we danced, we hit up a booth in the corner of the place and we kissed and we kissed and oh lord I needed a ride home and someone to tell me the next day whether that kissing actually happened or not. Which my date’s best friend was more than happy to do, as he told me how much my date had liked me and he was so shy and I needed to reassure him by calling him some (or, er, calling him back). But I didn’t, and he didn’t step up, and there was nothing lost. (Except maybe for a little dignity which had likely been spent on purple jesus.)

Two years later I was back on a dance floor in a frat house with a boy named Ben whose name I think I liked more than Ben himself. He tongue attacked me and tried to [in the bathroom] mack on me but all in all I left with most of my dignity and my phone number still kept to myself. (A trend I would later recognize.)

Post-college I experienced a lot of boredom. This is also known as no dating potential. Casually recognized as just plain no date invitations. (Um, I was used to it, so who are we kidding?)

I found an attachment to a guy friend I’d met that meant spending most nights at his house. We never did do anything but talk and sleep and spend inordinant amounts of time together. And he, Mr. Beat, was a guy that soon became someone I wanted to beat over the head with a stick. I was attached. To him and to his conversations. (And now, I can honestly say, not to the way he looked.)

One day, some time later, we did finally kiss. It had followed jaeger, produced zero sparks, and taught me a lesson that Garth Brooks has tried many times before to instill in me. That being thanking God for unanswered prayers.

The search continued. After pina coladas laced with moonshine, I found myself on a Sunday funday in August of 2007 on the backporch of the Slumdog Bachelor’s house realizing what the words “good kisser” meant. I got up off that porch and into my car that night to go home and counted down the years it’d been since anyone had good and kissed me. The next morning before work I told the roommate of the little bit of dignity I’d spent the night prior and she decided the following week to test my best kisser theory. (No harm done; Slumdog Bachelor never was on my radar to begin with.) I continued to act all Judgy McJudgerson on guys that followed. Guys who continued to go without my number. Someone I’d known in college, Dreadlocks who had been my super secret special crush, McHottie’s brother Otter. I continued to kiss ‘em and leave ‘em and Oh! They never called because they had no way to! And I didn’t want them to anyway! So all’s fair, right?

Well, if we’re being honest, they never tried to get my number. And the one or two that did have it? Yea, they never tried to use it.

So while saying no big deal, I wasn’t that into them either, can be both helpful and true, it really makes me think. It’s pretty simple: I’m just looking for the guy who’s my exception just as much as I am his.

“I don’t want to be ‘sort of dating’ someone. I don’t want to be ‘kind of hanging out’ with someone. I don’t want to spend a lot of energy suppressing my feelings so I appear uninvolved. I want to be involved.” He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo.

this just happened.

McHottie, sitting in my office signing some letters, started tapping his pen, “What’s my brother’s number…?” He was saying it to himself, his blackberry down the hall in his own office.

I tried to muffle my laugh.

“Ugh – Give it to me,” he said, turning to me.

“606…”

“606? That doesn’t sound right,” he said, getting up and walking down to his office.

Less than a minute later I could hear him coming back, turning the corner into my office.

“Of course you have his number…” he said in a tone full of so much irritation I couldn’t help but LAUGH OUT LOUD.

“You love me and you know it,” I said to him.

“Yea… yea…”

we'll call them ghosts.

There was a moment yesterday when you cocked your head back with laughter and I thought, “Wow. You look so much like your brother.” I couldn’t say it. (You’d kill me.) So I sat there in silence, for just a moment. And I thought about him. I thought about him, to myself, thinking, “How cute is he?”

I’m not dwelling. I’m not even concerned. I’m not letting the fact of all of this affect me. That you don’t bother to even wonder why and what happened. Because maybe you know and you keep on knowing and you don’t want me to voice it because you are afraid I just might. “You’re not who I thought you were and I don’t have time for the guy that you are,” is what I’d say. If I cared enough to say even that.

“Why does he irritate you so much?” I don’t know. “Why do you have such an aversion?” I’m not sure. “Can’t you even just be friends?” Yea, I don’t think so.

I like everything about you that I know. Except there’s this one thing. Beyond that, you make me laugh. Beyond that, you make me smile. Beyond that, I know you’re better than most.

There is something about you I can’t help but hold on to as much as sometimes I wish I’d just let it go. But you’re there. You’re solid.

Do you laugh when you think of me? Do you even think of me? Did you just want to know me, even just a little bit, because of who my father is? Does it bother you, how closely we end up working together sometimes? Does it occur to you that, for once, you’re someone who is more awkward than I?

I can’t believe it possibly hurt you that much. I find it hard to believe what I’ve been told, over the past two years, as to why you find it hard to be my friend, hard to forgive over something that happened 8 years ago. I find it difficult to believe you don’t recognize my voice or my number when I call you to catch up. I find it amazing how excited you act to see me when you least expect to.

I saw you called again Tuesday night and didn’t leave a message. And the fact that you haven’t texted me in months? Yea, I realized that too. But the other day, when I was out running and I thought about you? I thought, man, I really want to get those earrings back that I left at his house. And that was it.

dream catcher.

Sunday night I dreamed about him. I woke to blitzes in my alarm clock, repeatedly. 6 am. 6:10 am. 6:20 am. And so on.

Between pushing each snooze button he returned. I had run into him at a hotel we both happened to be staying in. I had had friends in town with me who were nowhere to be found. Who were trying to find a local to buy drugs from and when they called, they gave the dealer my number. The dealer then called my hotel room and out of shock I told him I’d meet him around the corner. I stepped out of my hotel door. I rounded the left corner and saw the shady vehicle where it was parked, running, with a male sitting in the driver’s seat looking towards me. I skipped across the 4 lane road to a convenience store and went inside as if that were my purpose. And from there, I went back to my room, avoiding eye contact with the driver, the dealer, who had expected me at his car door.

I don’t know how it happened or how it was I found him, but Otter (McHottie’s brother) was in the room next door and that is where I ended up, fearful that someone would come looking for me, thinking that I had been responsible for a set up of some kind.

I remember telling him that he scared me. You’re all this and I’m.. not.

I remember telling him that what I wanted was something, someone, safe.

I remember feeling like I was.

When I finally woke up around 7 (snooze was no longer an option), I crawled out of bed and into the shower. I thought over my dream and tried to remember it in vivid detail. Detail that appears to remain but much of which is lost.

I had thought the day before this dream that I was finally certain about something. That I was running. Scared. And for the hills. I had thought I’d finally figured out who and what I wanted. That maybe it really was black and white. And the reason it has taken me so long to get here was because we needed a story to tell. I had thought, I know my ending.

Then I dreamed of someone entirely different.

wishing.

The guy in the cubicle next to me picks up the phone when his wife calls by saying, “Hello baby.”

I wish he wouldn’t.

I saw Mr. Beat as I pulled into the parking lot this morning. He waved at me and I waved back. He lifted his arm to look at his wrist watch, as if to say to me, You’re late. And I beat you.

I wish he wouldn’t.

I heard the other day about a man I know who is having an affair. He has a beautiful wife. And children.

I wish he wouldn’t.

When I wrote about McHottie’s brother Otter, I wrote that I did not expect him to call. That I knew he wasn’t going to. Intrinsically, I thought I would see him sometime not too far off. Deeply, I wanted him to desire me in some way, to want me, to want to see me. There is this fear that he would be added to a list of disappointed hopes.

I wish he wouldn’t.

McHottie, himself, has been so stressed out by work for months. Sometimes it’s as though his smile disappears, the life draining out of him. He lets his work get to him so much.

I wish he wouldn’t.

El Boss, too, isn’t having the greatest time. Sometimes it can be so difficult for people to understand the plight of your cause. Though I think things are manageable to him, this situation that has been created for me at work – this awkward, awkward situation – is manageable for him, because he is away from the office so frequently. He comes in, does what he needs and leaves, not soaking in his surroundings.

I wish he wouldn’t.

My mom thinks my sweet sweet dad works too hard and too much. His old law partner said to me on Sunday at lunch, “Sometimes being a partner in a large firm isn’t all it’s cut out to be,” as he looked over at my dad, who looked tired and worn. Even I know he does what he does out of obligation, out of need, out of a desire to help an industry he believes in. Even I know it’s true. He works too hard.

I wish he wouldn’t.

Tomorrow, ah tomorrow, there is another meeting in the office at which I expect Cute Boy to be in attendance.

I wish he wouldn’t.

a windy road.

He was the same guy he’d always been. As though a year could change me entirely but some things, those feelings imbedded in me, never changed. My nervousness? Still the same. The gravitation? The same.

Sitting there next to him I wondered how it would be to have never felt that again. To have never met up with that familiarity. To have never spoken to him again. These thoughts I wondered knowing that they will, some day, come.

I could hear him telling a mutual friend of ours about his ex, when asked about the breakup. “She says she still wants to be friends. But she gets mad at me when I don’t respond to her right away.”

The thought registered with me and stayed with me until later. Later when I was home, I sat in my room reading I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Having to read the pages over and over, I danced around my thoughts of who I want to be. What girl I want to be. What person I want to be.

I have always had this strong and pulsating desire to keep myself from becoming or ever being the girl that guys talk about, or the girl that they repel from. I have constantly lived by the desire to be the voice of reason. And if that means I’m just their friend, then just their friend I want to be. Because to anyone, I do not want to show my very own crazy. Which I’m certain lies somewhere within us all.

I don’t want to be the girl that guys say, Why can’t she just get it? about.

I don’t want to be the one whose heart they break.

And I don’t want to be the one, ever, that they feel is too hung up on the past to move on.

So I thought about it.

And when last night I dreamed, I dreamed about…

McHottie and his brother Otter.

my easter reference.

“You need to separate your eggs from your basket,” she said to me on the phone Friday afternoon.

I had at that point wasted my Good Friday away. Maybe I had invested it in trying to bring together a friendship once torn so far apart. Maybe I had been spending those hours trying to prove my own mind wrong, trying to show that all those thoughts of unworthiness were unfounded. Maybe I had just sat there optimistically.

Either way my eggs are indeed not separated from my basket.

When Cute Boy called Thursday afternoon, I felt the trigger of an annoyance. I was told I had a phone call and that [he] had asked for Ms. Last Name. To which I followed with, “Who the devil? Oh – it’s that guy..” He was coming through and what was I doing that night? I wasn’t looking for a repeat of his last trip. I had plans. But he said he’d call me later. And he didn’t. Cute Boy is an example of my eggs being too close to my basket. He was my first experience of seeing someone I couldn’t get away from. There will be the inevitable professional run-ins. Which is quite different than seeing an ex at a bar. He will be in my office, around my coworkers, involved.

McHottie’s brother, Otter, leaves me confused. I don’t expect anything at all. In fact, I expect everything to be just the same. I don’t expect to see him soon. Maybe at Cup. I do know that I like thinking about him. Which is sometimes rare. And when I talked about him to a coworker, I feel like I came so close to saying that if he weren’t McHottie’s brother, things might just be different. McHottie’s brother? Eggs very close to my basket.

And then there’s Mr. Beat. Mr. Beat, yes, is a coworker. See what I mean? Eggs too close to my basket.

on national ag day.

Last Thursday night I cried myself to sleep. I talked to my best friend in LA for awhile. I stirred in self pity for a bit. I let myself be angry at a couple of friends. And then I drifted off.

On Friday I went to the birthday party alone.

On Saturday I drove home from McHottie’s brother Otter’s with a feeling of calmness. A feeling I haven’t usually felt. A feeling only fumbled by his relation.

On Sunday I had a friend tell me that I ruin guys for other girls. That I play hard to get or, more so, indifferent. So they don’t know how to deal with the girls that aren’t indifferent.

On Monday someone gave me the impression that they were surprised by the way I could float my interest. Well, I call it dating. You think they’re cute, you hang out, and sometimes you realize their personality makes them not so cute.

On Tuesday I watched the personalities of different guys. One with manners, that when another took the pool stick out of my hand so as to take my place in the game, he [Mr. Manners] ever so calmly took it back and placed it back into my hand without even stopping the conversation. Well, except to look at me and smile.

On Tuesday I also learned the value of kind words. My “I’m sorry I’m playing so horribly” went so well with his “you’re doing great.”

On one of those days someone told me I should call McHottie’s brother some time to see if he wanted to meet up for happy hour. Not really my thing to call, I said back.

On Wednesday I had a coworker ask me what was going on with Cute Boy. “Eh- I’m over that. He just, seemed to be trying too hard to impress me and failing too easily at that.”

On that same day I had a friend suggest a guy I should date that neither of us have ever met. “He has a girlfriend,” I offered. “Yea,” she said, “but he’s cute.”

This afternoon Cute Boy called me at the office to tell me he was headed through to go to the farm. “I’ll call you after I finish up this afternoon to see what you’re up to tonight,” he told me. He talked of future plans. He made me check my calendar. He said, “Bye sweetie.” I did not melt.

Tonight, I go out with my friend Meredith. She will be celebrating her new singleness. I will be welcoming her into my world.

unpredictable.

On Saturday I paid $5 for a woman named Mrs. Grace to look at my palm and tell me that I was surrounded by negative energy.

She told me that there is a man from my past I keep going back to. A man with which there is distance where there once was not and who with another woman seems to be involved.

She told me that there is also a man from my present. A man who likes me but who I’m still trying to figure out my own feelings for. I wondered why – if she did – she would make those things up. I wondered – because I don’t still think I’m caught up wondering about Cute Boy – who the guy from my present might be.

I wondered because that morning I had driven home from McHottie’s brother Otter’s house where I had stayed the night and where I had been kissed much better than by anyone that has kissed me in months.

“There’s gotta be more to life than just making out.” grease 2.