The Sports Report

People keep asking me, “Biscotti, are you athletic yet?”

No.

But I have been doing some athletically related activities:

(1) Intramural Bowling
The above picture is from our first “match” which we easily won – I am the lady in pink when everyone else is wearing gray. I had the highest score for game 1 and the lowest score for game 2. This is what a coach would call an “inconsistent player.” But we don’t have a coach, except for the digital coach on the scorebox while the pins are being cleared, so no one can call me that. By the way, the electronic coach may or may not be sexually harrassing me – after a split, it flashed on the screen, “you’re open for business” Um, hello?

(2) Training for the half-maration
Hmm, what to say? Training has been spotty, but I am up to 2 miles. That is probably a lifetime record for me.

And that is absolutely it. The rest of the time I am flexing my buff brain muscles to enter stats commands into Stata and telling undergraduates to write in complete sentences.

Eating at the Somebody Else’s Boyfriend Buffet

Here’s the things about being single: you cannot avoid people who are in relationships. There are no clear demarcations between SingleWorld and TakenNation. And it seems like many citizens of TakenNation have valid passports into SingleWorld that they use quite frequently.

These are muddy waters, folks. One version of the market theory of relationships suggests that people are always looking for a mate, even if they have one. Basically, people are open to the idea of an upgrade. And perhaps others don’t necessarily want to trade in, but they just want to assess their own current market value.

But when singles are looking and takens are looking, the numbers don’t add up. Some single people are going to get squeezed out.

Singledom is like going to a restaurant that has a salad bar attached to a buffet. The single person is relegated to the salad bar only. The relationship people order the buffet… and the salad bar is included. For the starving singleton, the buffet food is tastier and it’s off limits which makes it even more appetizing. As the single people take another piece of limp lettuce from the salad bar, they look enviously at the great variety that is over there but out of reach. And they angrily look at the buffet people who dip into the little salad bar while clutching their already heaping plates.

Look, I don’t want to eat at the Somebody Else’s Boyfriend buffet, but they keep showing up and asking for my croutons.

Mesexual

Some friends and I were talking about same sex attraction and I told them that the only female that I have ever really been extremely attracted to is myself.

Ahh, sweet narcissism.

Emotional Sex

It seems like every time I get into an AIM conversation, people want to talk about having unemotional sex (the subject of unemotional sex, not having unemotional sex with me…well, usually).

Conversation #1 (male friend)
We were talking about the difference between making love and having sex. I say that sex is sex, whether you are in a relationship or not. And that making love is qualitatively different than sex but that not all relationship sex occurrences are emotional and transcendental. He asks if I have ever been in love. Since I do not believe that I have ever truly been in love, we decide that I can no longer talk about love because “talking about love when you have never been in love is like talking about sex if you are virgin, you just don’t understand.” Fair enough.

Conversation #2 (my younger sister)

Since I never had an older sister to show me the ropes, I have always encouraged my younger sister to be honest and knowledgeable about sexuality and relationships. I was telling her that no one should have sex with high school boys because they basically use sex as an advanced masturbation technique and they simply cannot control themselves even if they have good intentions. I told her to wait 5-10 years until she can be with one of that small number of men who come to realize that their male orgasms feel all the same, whether they beat off or have sex which then leads them to discover that the female orgasm is so much more interesting and sex becomes an arousing game for them to see how far they can push a girl’s excitement level.

But I’m afraid that my young sister is already jaded. I asked her about love. And she said, “Live and learn and fuck love.” To which I (jokingly) replied, “Or live and learn and then just fuck.”

Conversation #3 (female friend)

Likewise, I was catching up with a friend from college and we were talking about why it is so hard to maintain and find relationships. I said that it is impossible to find the male equivalent of an attractive, intelligent and interesting female because those who are also tend to be entirely self-absorbed and deceitful.

It seems that the price we pay for high status, high quality guys is a broken heart. So, I say, don’t let them break your heart. You can still get involved with them, just don’t get emotionally involved. You deserve to have fun, but they don’t deserve your emotional investment. They don’t want it anyway.

My friend asked how this was possible. And for a long time, I wondered this as well. I could not understand how people could have sex without getting emotionally involved. And then, I thought, even if you could have unemotional sex, why would you want to?

I am certainly not advocating rampant promiscuity or reckless sexual behavior. But I wonder how much better off our sensitive souls would be if we were as careful and discriminating with who we give our hearts to as we are with whom we have sex?

If we are too young for marriage and the people we date are not marriage material, then what are we left to do?

You get emotionally attached, get your heart broken, get fed up, try a relationship, have it be the most awful thing you’ve ever experienced, date around and be endlessly disappointed. After a certain amount of trying and caring and wanting and pining away only to be met with disappointment, crushed expectations and hurt feelings, there is only emotional exhaustion. And maybe it is coping, maybe it is a copout, but if you are young and free and have the opportunity, I think it is ok to have fun, to give up on love for a little while and just experience people without throwing all of your baggage at them.

If there is one thing I have learned the hard way, it is that forcing something to be more serious or meaningful that it actually can be will only cause pain and disappointment. I think so many of us have this picture in our minds of the ideal relationship or the fulfillment that will come when we fall in love. But too often, we have that vision in mind and try to stuff any old person into that box. I am finding that you have to take the person first and build the relationship box around that specific instance. And sometimes, it will be a jack-in-the-box that you can play with for fun and sometimes you will build a sturdy box that will take you to new levels of intimacy and growth.

But the moral of the story is that we are too young to be boxed in by anything. There is no reason to settle, no reason to be lonely and no reason to not live an utterly fabulous life.

I Would Prefer Not To

One of my favorite American short stories is “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville. In high school, we read Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and many other greats, but out of everything I read, Bartleby is what has stuck with me.

In the story, Bartleby takes a job on Wall Street as a scrivener, a job that entails mindless copying all day. Bartleby works for awhile, but eventually stops everything, although he continues to show up for work and even lives there. When his boss asks him to perform certain tasks, he always replies with the refrain, “I would prefer not to.” At one point, his boss asks him, “You will not?” and he responds, “I prefer not.” Utter passivity.

My first job was making sandwiches at Subway. I distinctly remember getting into a long conversation (and by conversation, I mean, I talked) with the owner of the restaurant about worker dissatisfaction and meaningless tasks and I told him the entire story of Bartleby the Scrivener. His reply was a withering look of perplexed annoyance.

From that point on, whenever I have a task at hand that I feel as though I am too intelligent, too interesting, too wonderful, and too good to do, but I have to do it anyway because someone told me to, I always say, “Yes, of course. I’ll do that as soon as I can” as I whisper in my head “but I would prefer not to.”

My passive resistance is pretty much invisible. Last week, I missed my bus stop because I was so passive that I didn’t pull the signal cord. I figured someone else would do it. They always do. But for the first time, I was the only one getting off at my stop. I had to walk home from the next stop in 14 degree weather.

So I sure do know how Bartleby felt and maybe someday, I will be able to utter those words with a straight face and mean it. From Bartleby, I take away a lesson on assertiveness, but in the end, Bartleby’s alienation and apathy destroyed him. He decided that he preferred not to eat as well. And he starved to death.

Compassion

Last night, I was reading an article for my Ethnography class that was a personal account of the sudden death of the author’s brother who was killed in a plane crash. It was a powerfully emotional story of loss and grief. I found that it particularly resonated with me because I related to the author’s struggle to reconcile her life as an academic with her working class roots. Over Christmas break, I was thinking about how disappointed I have been that my family is not exactly like me and does not “get” what I am doing with my life. But reading this narrative really touched me and I recognized that I should not hold our differences against them but rather I should credit them for the many things that we share and how much they have shaped my life. I love my family deeply and the mere thought of losing any one of them devastates me.

As I was reading the story and thinking of my family, I became emotional. At first, it was the typical throat constriction, chest heaviness and eyes becoming moist. But as I imagined myself going through the rituals surrounding the death of one of my loved ones, I completely broke down. I cry easily about many things, but I avoid thinking about death so this line of thinking caught me by surprise.

I was curled up on the couch, tears streaming down my face. As soon as my tears became audible, my cat, Whiskers, quickly and deliberately came out of the bedroom to be near me. She hopped up on the couch and positioned herself near my chest and looked at me kindly. She heard my crying, recognized that I was upset and responded by coming to offer comfort.

It was an act of compassion.

Now, I am not one of those hokey people who believe that animals are really humans or that there are horse-whisperers and the like. But I do believe that animals have emotions and that they have the capacity to be sensitive to human emotion and react accordingly. I truly consider Whiskers to be a friend. And who wouldn’t want an 8.5 pound, ultra-furry beast of compassion and friendship in their life?

On Blogging

I have spent the past hour catching up on other people’s blogs. I am a fan of many blogs, but mostly the funny ones. I like it when people can take what is going on in their lives and make it witty. Wit is one of my favorite human characteristics. Anyone can make an obvious joke, but wit takes intelligence.

Some blogs are witty and anecdotal, some are like journals (woke up at 8am today…had a fantastic bagel, ohmygod, it was such a good bagel…and then I watched TV for a few hours, crazy how the TV just goes on and on, it never stops, hahahaha), some are like diaries (why do I hate myself? why am I not happy even when I am happy? Should you be unhappy if you are content? I think I’m unhappy because I have diabetes. If it weren’t for the fact that my body can’t regulate insulin, I would be happy. Oh yeah, and if I weren’t so ugly, too.)

It goes on and on.

I write my blog as though I am having coffee with a friend (By the way, Biscotti goes very nicely with coffee). Each post is some issue or topic that I would talk about in a casual conversation in public with someone I like. I have a pretty good sense of who actually reads this, but it is public domain so I don’t feel comfortable writing about extremely personal things and I tend to like most of the people who I know read this, so out of respect for them, I will not use this as a public day planner.

And for my “fans,” (all 15 of you as far as I can ascertain) I apologize that I do not post more regularly. I will try to do better, but I would rather aim for quality over quantity.

I remember reading about this study that some behaviorists conducted with chickens. There were three groups of chickens – the first group was fed every time they pecked, the second group was fed every third time they pecked, and the last group was fed at completely random intervals. After doing this for quite awhile, the researchers stopped feeding all three groups. The first group stopped pecking immediately, the second group stopped shortly after, but the third group never stopped pecking.

I like this study for several reasons. First, chicken behavior somehow beautifully illustrates the way that infatuation often manifests most severely with a person who sends mixed signals and inconsistent attention. If it is all random, you can never give up hope. You always wonder if maybe the next peck will get you what you want.

But more germane to the issue of my intermittent blog posting, I hope that you all will continue to peck persistently even though my posts come randomly and I promise to feed you more regularly.

Well, I’m a softie, too

People are assholes, even the nice ones.

Whenever I date a nice guy, I tend to act like a bitch. And whenever I date an asshole, I start acting like the nicest girl in the world. The nice guy-bitch thing happens because I know that deep down everyone has a mean side. Everyone lies, everyone judges, everyone has flaws. So I try to push his buttons to see what his breaking point is – to find out just how nice he really is. As for the assholes, I act so nice because I have a martyr complex. Suffering with an asshole can somehow be more satisfying than behaving badly out of boredom with the nice guy.

The other day, I went to this room with a treadmill and a bike (calling it a gym would give it too much credit) that my apartment complex has to work out. It was 11 am and a man was already on the treadmill so I went to the bike to wait until he was done. I noticed that he was watching Little House on the Prairie on TV. We exchanged happy glances as Mary, Carrie and Laura tumbled down the prairie in the opening montage, and I realized that I was in the same room as a real, live, genuine nice guy.

Here was a guy who watched the Hallmark channel while burning calories. This fact alone made me think that this was a guy who would never forget his girlfriend’s birthday, who probably talks to his mother every day, who would call sex “making love” – hell, he would probably cry while making love.

Here’s to you, Mr. Softie. I hope you find a nice girl to pass the Kleenex.

Ripped from the Headlines

I love work. Work keeps my mind busy. Work makes me happy. I have decided to become a workaholic. Out of all addictions, work is the most positive.

The past few months, I have been worried that I might never marry, that I’ll never have kids, that I’ll spend the rest of my life with Whiskers (and clones of Whiskers that I make). But now, I see that if you have a purpose and meaningful work, your life can be rich and rewarding without a soulmate. At least with work, no one can destroy the results that come from all of the hours you’ve put in.

I wondered if I would have to be a single mother at 40 and do it alone. Now, I wonder if I will even be alive at 30. There is a distinct possibility that I might be murdered by a South Asian meathead. (<-big clue to the police when bits of my body start turning up in Lake Monroe). I will be the Chandra Levy of Bloomington. It will be a huge torrid news story and then Law & Order will “rip it from the headlines” and Marla Sokoloff will play me. My dying wish is that my episode of L&O will be from the Criminal Intent spinoff and both Chris Noth and Vincent D’Onofrio will be in the episode (forget McDreamy and McSteamy, those two solving crimes together is the most orgasmic hour of television imaginable).

My poor mother.

Cracking the Whip

My second semester of grad school is in full swing and it is already kicking my ass. I am taking Statistics and have been hit with the news that I need to complete the “front end” of my Masters thesis by May 1.

I am also toying with the idea of running a half-marathon with some of my cohort friends. I usually jog to keep in shape and clear my head. I do not seek physical discomfort so I tend to go at the pace and distance that my body tells me it likes on any given day. So the idea of discipline and pain and regimented workouts defies all of my fitness beliefs. We will see how it goes. I have been slowly increasing my distance, but if I haven’t made great strides in the next month, I will quit. This is part of the reason why I have never been a great athlete. I don’t care who wins and I don’t mind quitting. Oh, yeah, and I have no physical ability or agility, either.

I just have this nightmare image in my head that I will run the half-marathon and finish dead last. It’ll take me 14 hours or something ridiculous and my finish time will be 40 minutes behind the “hero” runner – you know, the miracle guy who has cancer all through his body but still managed to have the heart to run a marathon between his chemo treatments. Yep, I’m pretty sure he could beat me.

I know, I know, the race is only with myself. It’s about time that I become a disciplined person. Why not do it both academically and physically in four months? Why not, indeed….