TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I live in Carrboro, North Carolina. There are 17,931 of us here, but it seems smaller, like the size of a camera hidden in the light fixture of a seedy motel and monitored at home by a registered sex offender. That’s also how living here feels sometimes—like people watch each other through windows and tell their friends whose beds have chains on the headboard and who sleeps with a teddy bear and who cries at Adam Sandler movies.

In a town where the co-op lawn is the hub of activity—the place where hula-hoopers in backless shirts and bare feet spin circles and beat the grass into dirty submission, where children run into your shins and then cry like babies when they fall on their diapered butts, where the rest of us grudgingly buy our carrot juice and hummus and talk about how coagulated the hot bar is—of course your neighbors’ behavior is public domain. There’s not much else to talk about. It’s like we’ve all given up on doing things and resigned ourselves to thinking about doing things. We all know each other, at least by terrible reputation, and we all talk. And I’m as guilty of stirring and spreading and meddling as anyone. More, even.

This didn’t bother me at first. I moved here from Portland, Oregon, where I was completely anonymous. I was every other early twenties gayelle, holding hands and working at coffee shops and riding bikes and reading in bars when there was no one to talk to. There was nothing about me that deserved attention, and I like attention, so, at first, Carrboro was a pleasant reprieve from anonymity. When I first came here, I planned on taking just a short break from Portland, just enough time to recalibrate after some significant life changes (i.e. falling in maybe-love or at least pitter-patter-love with someone who was not my girlfriend; subsequent break-up with said girlfriend; subsequent week of homelessness without pillow, clean socks, phone charger, or wallet; subsequent final fuck you; subsequent teary goodbye.). I thought I’d be here for a few weeks, maybe a month, and go back to Portland and find the girl I had fallen in maybe-love with and deal with the strangers and the anonymity and be happy and changed. That was two and a half years ago.

I stayed in part because my sister lived here and it was nice to have a built-in friend, someone who had to go on walks and split meals with me, if for no other reason than DNA and guilt. I also stayed because of the people. I made more friends in the first weeks of being here than I did the whole time I was in Portland. My friends have become my family. We spend our days and nights together. We talk about how someday we’re going to have a house that’s actually a lot of houses, one for each of us, with a big courtyard and an outdoor kitchen in the middle and mango trees and family supper and a sun that shines when we want to surf, which we will be able to do because we will have a beach and because we will know how to surf, and rain that rains when we want to stay inside and watch movies. So I like Carrboro. I like our fantasies and I like our fun and I like our nights that are like no other nights and our nights that are like all other nights. Or, at least, I did.

But now I’m done. I have no job, no money, and absolutely, definitely, unequivocally, no chance at ever, like ever, finding a girlfriend. I have ruined my reputation to the point that some anonymous Craigslister wrote that I’m “shady and everywhere” for all of Missed Connections to see. I once met a girl at a bar and our conversation naturally deteriorated from books and politics to sex and love. We agreed that men are stupid and women are crazy. I said something about how this person I had slept with the night before talked about furniture all the time and then the blood rushed from her face to her heart and she jumped off her bar stool and ran out without paying her tab and, yes, the person from the night before was her person. And even though I didn’t know that person had a person and was so drunk that I can’t even remember if we had sex and or maybe if we ate popcorn and cuddled, this is the story of my life in this town.

We are full of boredom and drama and we let things that aren’t real become real. I recently learned that I fucked a homeless man in an alley while still with my ex. And while it’s not implausible and maybe is entirely true that I did cheat on my ex, I can’t even sit on other peoples’ furniture, much less fuck someone with scabies and a shopping cart. I accidentally touched a dreadlock a few nights ago and had to bust through a crowd of sweaty people to get to the nearest bathroom and scrub my hands so hard that I no longer have fingerprints. I’d wash my sheets twice even if someone in a full-body snowsuit slept on them, so even if I liked to sleep with men and even if I liked to get shoved against brick walls, my neuroses make this scenario impossible. It wasn’t reality, but now it is.

I’m at the point now where I can laugh at these rumors, be flattered, even, that I’m the subject of stories and gossip in this small town, but my friends are trickling away, to New York or LA or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or to husbands and wives and jobs and children. Why be here, in this place of so much comfort and so little potential, when my family is leaving? I’m ready to be anonymous again.

My life partner Small Fry and I will soon be taking leave from each other, not because we want to, but because she’s going to homestead up in San Francisco and get shit ready for the inevitable day in the near future when we’re selling our ovaries to rent bunk beds out there together. This is very, very bad. Even though I want Small Fry to spread her wings (legs) and make the West Coast her bitch, I’m a little concerned that the next person to domicile up in here might not be so in to watching BET through the neighbor’s window when our cable goes out.

I’m praying to Sapphos that I’ll find a new, more romantical life partner in the next month and we can just live together, but I put an ad on Craig’s List just in case. Shockingly, none of the responses have feel quite dreamy enough. Take, for instance, the following:

I’m going to study at unc and well I need a place to stay…
I’m a brazilian guy, i’ve 27 at this exactly moment (but everything will change next month anyway) and I’m going to study ethics and philosophy for my phd thesis in unc… well I’m not gay but I’ve already divided and have no problem (in fact we have good memories…)…
well I will receive a fellowship to my research so i will have money to pay you and well although theorically I will pass all 2010 year in unc I think that I liked your ad proposal of temporary sublet….
oh my name is Fernando like in the abba music (I didn’t like specially abba anyway but I have some hope with cat’s candle (sic??)…
I still in Brazil (i live in florianopolis in the south…) but i’m going in january 1st.

While I’m glad he’s divided that my gay face isn’t a problem, I’m a little turned off by his email address, brasillastud69@aol.com, so I’m going to keep looking. Know anyone who needs a place in or around Carrboro? I’m not nearly as terrible a housemate as you’d guess.

The listing:

Room for rent in two bedroom/one bath condo behind Johnny’s on Main.

Interested? Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Have any attractive, clean, and homeless friends? Pass it on!

krherzog @ gmail

My Virtual Girlfriend passed me an article in some Canadian weekly about the quarter-life crisis, a term you may not have heard before but a feeling you probably get every time you talk to your mom.

You: Great news! I found thirty dollars in a toilet at a bar!
Mom: You’re on birth control, right? God forbid there’s more than one of you in this family.
You: What? It was only pee. I washed it off.

The author basically summed up the last ten months of this blog in a couple of pages. I used to think the “theme” of this blog was I’m gay! And I drink. But this piece light-bulbed that it’s less about climbing cranes and sleeping with your girlfriend and more about how I wish I could take back almost every decision I’ve ever made, like, for instance, putting my Jerry Springer cameo on my resume.

You know how when you were a kid your teachers were like, “Katie H. You are too smart to be sitting under your desk. And take that paper bag off your head. You could be anything you want to be.” When you heard this, you thought, Hmm. She thinks I’m smart even though I just said that the capitol of New York is New Jersey. That’ll get me far in the world. Work? Shmurck. I’ll just coast by convincing people that my gray matter is above medium. Maybe at some point a teacher/parent/parole officer told you that you needed to actually work for success, but by that point, you’d already decided that work is for dummies and poor people.

And remember that test you took in third grade that sent you to the smart person classroom? The one that designated you “gifted”? How wrong is telling a bunch of premies that they are gifted, like your neurons were wrapped in Rudolph paper and dropped down the chimney? This is where is all started. You didn’t have to work very hard in school, so you didn’t. Who wouldn’t prefer to get stoned with other privileged slackers and fall asleep on the model mattresses at Bed, Bath, and Beyond rather than go to AP History or develop work ethic and/or life skills?

Everything in life can be attributed to some mistake your parents made (i.e. You have a drinking problem because your parents wouldn’t let you sip wine at dinner.), so you blame them for not making you prepare for adulthood, which is unfortunate because you actually are an adult, albeit one who uses up all the text messages on the family plan. Yes, it’s definitely their fault. You are in the midst of a quarter life crisis because your parents told you that you are smart. But it turns out you’re not. You belong in a trailer park, pit bulls chained to a stake in the ground, clocking third shift and spanking the kids. Your parents should have beat you instead.

But you’re not in a trailer park. You’re drinking an Americano at a coffee shop, standing at a counter instead of sitting down because you think that counts as exercise. You’re listening to NPR pod-casts on the MacBook your grandparents bought you for graduating from college. You were born lucky, and yet, you are twenty-six years old and experiencing that kind of crisis who should really wait until your forties to have. It’s not the sports car or the mistress or the new career that you want. You don’t actually know what you want, just that you want something.

You do not know what to do with your life. It’s the paradox of choice: there are too many options and too many things to dismiss. You could have been an archeologist but you don’t look good in khaki. You could have been a dentist but latex gloves make your palms sweat. You could have been a child star but the Mickey Mouse Club isn’t interested in little girls in Umbros and a bowl cut who only liked the Hansen Brothers when she thought they were girls.

Facebook makes it worse. You look at the profiles of friends and acquaintances from your past, back when you had potential, and you judge. Marriage? Babies? Jobs? What happened to you? When did you become your mother? When did you become my mother? They are still paying off the wedding that was mostly attended by their parents’ friends, sure to be divorced and alone and broke in ten years, just like the rest of us. At least, you tell yourself that.

But would it be nice to sleep beside someone you actually love, someone who isn’t grateful for the unspoken agreement that you pretend to be asleep when she leaves, someone you sleep with because you actually want to, not because of some idea that picking people up, getting what you want, makes you somehow desirable, worthy of attention, possible to love?

Or maybe you aren’t like this. Maybe you cook dinner with your partner instead of binging on Velvetta and making elaborate plans to shoplift your way to a new life. Maybe you wake up in the morning and get out of bed because you want to, not because you thought of a clever Facebook status. You might be twenty-six years old and exactly where you should be, on the path luck set you on, content with the choices you’ve made, with the job you have, with the person beside you. Or maybe you are like me, twenty-six years old and still looking for the person or the job or the thing that will save you.

I wish I could say that I just rescued a puppy from a gun-wielding panther or found a large patch of marijuana while trail-skipping, but it’s been kind of slow around here lately. One medium funny thing did happen—I dropped out of grad school. This in itself is not really all that interesting as my life as an aspiring proletariat isn’t much different from my life as an aspiring master. When you own no textbooks, never attend class, and enrolled in school only to be able to say, “I’m in graduate school,” you don’t really feel like a student so much as a creep for only venturing to campus because there’s a lot of shade and the girls are cute. Here’s the medium funny part: you have to write your reason for leaving school on your withdrawal form, and as, in the words of my grandmother, “the dumbest smart person around,” I wrote, “I’m quitting because school makes me want to kill myself.” I turned in the form at five o’clock the Friday before Labor Day, when, presumably, everyone had left for the weekend. I’m guessing that someone glanced at my form on the secretary’s desk and made a phone call or two, because an hour later, the DEAN called me. It’s a strange experience to explain to a college administrator that if anything made you want to bake your brains in the nearest hotbox, it would have to be way more interesting than school.

Now that my formal education has come to an expensive and unsuccessful conclusion, I’m in the job market. I haven’t had much luck, which is surely more the symptom of North Carolina’s 11% unemployment rate than my absolute lack of experience and/or references. I’ve had to get a little creative with the job search, like sending, for instance, the following email to a local roasting house:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

I actually got a response to this, which went something like, You’re funny. Maybe we could talk. Send a resume.

My response:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

Shockingly, I didn’t get a response to this message, so yesterday, I sent the following:

Dear [Redacted]

Love, Katie

Again, no response, and the only person who fully appreciated this, er, cover letter, was my friend Melanie, but she walks her cat on a leash. In Harlem.

A solid crush is the umbrella to most life’s rain drops. Ice cream truck changed it’s route? Netflix queue out of order? Soon to be the only Wal-Mart greeter with active menses in the history of the big box? Just look to the nearest XX chrome pairing for relief.

I was recently telling my therapist about a crush I had on a girl I didn’t know very well. I was like, “Yeah. I don’t know what it is. I like her tattoos, but she’s not really funny and I don’t generally like people who can’t make me laugh, and I definitely don’t like people who I can’t make laugh. She didn’t even LOL when I told her about the time I ran naked across a golf course when the security guards busted me for swimming laps in a water trap, but I still want to gay marry her and shit.” My therapist, who, after a year of hearing me couch bitch about not feeling like work should be necessary necessity for a lady of leisure such as myself, suggested that I was only crushing on this girl because I didn’t want to get a job. I was indignant. Suggesting that my heart shiver was a result of poor work ethic? Bish, plz. But once season two of Mad Men came out on DVD and I had hours to spend contemplating Peggy Olson’s bangs, I kind of forgot all about said crush and even had to pause for a moment when she called and think, Who? Did I give my number to a bar stranger again? Gotta stop doing that.

Despite seeking them everywhere from the cab driver to the produce stocker, I don’t actually get crushes all that often. But when I do, I get them hard. I read her texts and emails to my seriously-over-it friends. I contemplate the merits of last name hyphenation and adoption versus turkey baster. I become a hand-holding gayelle, a table-for-two gayelle, a sober sex gayelle. I really feel like a one-gayelle-gayelle when I’m in crush. It is lovely. It is also, however, temporary. This isn’t because I’m embarrassed by the term “partner” or even because monogamy makes me want join Fred Phelps on the battle lines. It’s because when I like a girl—like like her like her—I forget that she is a real person. I forget that she is Judge Judy about sleeping late, that she talks about money all the time, that she thinks it’s weird that I have secret ambitions to be a renowned slap poet. In my head, she is inhumanely perfect.

But then, reality. I slowly realize that I don’t know her, that the person I love only exists in my head, that we aren’t compatible as friends, much less as foster mommies. I realize it’s the idea of her, not the her of her, that has me twitterpated.

Example. A year ago, I met a girl who I quickly became junk-struck over. There was something about her, mostly that she didn’t like me, which is generally what I look for in a partner. I mean, she liked me enough to make out with me, but she wasn’t exactly trolling Women Seeking Women for a food stamper whose only ambition is to get through the year without a DUI. Also, I may have said something about how if she wasn’t so good at face-sitting I’d never hang out with her because Pisces is the Heidi Montag of the astrological calendar. I may also have referred to her as a dirty bisexual and maybe also as women’s studies gay. This didn’t exactly work in my favor, and after she expressed her nonnegotiable lack of heart color for me, I started acting like a monkey on salvia. Among other dramatic gestures, I cut off all my hair in a moment of solidarity with Britney Spears because at the time I really felt like understood what she was going through. A construction paper scissor haircut is never a good idea but is an especially bad idea when you work at a salon and your co-workers make you wear a hat for a month and start calling you Patches. The crazy thing? I didn’t even really know this girl. I mean, we’re pals now and I’d still take her up on a bathroom make-out party, but I also know that the girl in my mind a year ago is the not the girl reading this right now and wondering what the fuck I’m talking about.

Back to the title.

Meeting people can be weird. They might be close talkers or look a little too deeply into your eyes or say that you remind them of their friend Barbara who is seventy but has great skin. Meeting people from the Internet is, by definition, weird, and writing a blog about your life puts you in an interesting position when meeting these people. So when I met my Virtual Girlfriend in San Francisco after a prolonged textual relationship, I was hell of nervous, like the kind of nervous you get before smuggling someone else’s urine into your parole officer’s bathroom. It’s not just that I was meeting someone from the Internet, it’s that I was meeting someone from the Internet who knew a lot about me before she was anything but Facebook pictures and status updates to me. She knew that I think I look like Nick Jonas even though the only obvious resemblance is that we are both white. She knew that my neighbor thinks that my name is Kyle. She knew that I once cured a yeast infection by sticking a dozen cloves of garlic in my vagine and that the next girl I slept with after that was attracted to me because she loves puttanesca. She knew not just what I think about the world, but what I think about myself. That I desperately want to be 12 years old again, a little girl in a bowl cut who gets mistaken for a boy, still convinced that success is inevitable, that the golden cloud will always be there. And what did I know about her? That she makes one of three faces when she’s drunk and happy. That she works a real job. That she gives good text. But after meeting her, after seeing her actual face and hearing her actual voice, after knowing just a little about her and about her life, I want to know it all.

Is this real? Of course not. She exists in a series of ones and zeros, in emails and text messages and the stories we tell ourselves about the future. But she is no less real than the others, the ones who live nearby, the ones whose hands I can touch and whose scents I know, the ones who become the size of myths as my desire for something, for anything, grows. At least is it time and space, not the sad truth that person in my head is simply a fantasy born of the hope for something different, that will keep this imaginary. Because she does exist. In my head and on the Internet and maybe even in real life, she is real and she is it.

Things have been a little sandpaper and sour milk around here since the intern left after realizing that she wasn’t actually getting school credit to convert Sinead O’Connor’s entire discography from tape to MP3 and sharpen pencils with a paring knife while I’m trying to sleep because the white noise makes me drowsy. Then the au pair went back to one of those Eastern European countries where they speak Pidgen or Elfish and live in ice castles after I paid her in coupons for hugs and back rubs. This was right before the babysitter left to go change diapers for the elderly and wouldn’t even finish ironing my underwear first. Fuck, I haven’t eaten since the cook quit when I asked her to clean the skank juice out of our spaghetti pot. Worse yet, I realized that I’m too old to be on the Real World and that no one wants to adopt a 26-year-old wayward youth.

Thank god there’s one thing that always makes me feel less like I want to go Amish just so I can get my Rusmpringa on and have sex in trailers and join the union of meth lab line cooks: the Internet. The wide wide world is a series of tubes I would never ligate, not just because how else would I find a new nanny to write my status updates, but also because it has provided me with the perfect one-dimensional distraction. Yes, friends and lovers, I have an Internet girlfriend.

I can see you silently judging. Stop. It’s not even weird. It’s 2.009, people. It’s not like she answered the Missed Connection I posted about paying someone to hold the shower curtain away from my body every morning because when the plastic touches my skin I have to take a whole other shower which makes my Catholic guilt spike when I think about how many dolphins my water usage kills.

It’s a little less random than that, anyway. My pal “Clare” moved to San Francisco about six months ago because apparently Carrboro isn’t as “exciting” or “urban” or “cultured” or “gay” as “actual cities that people have actually heard of.” She lived in the Bay Area before moving to the Triangle a bunch of years ago but most of her old friends are too busy adopting dogs and talking about urban gardens to troll for strange, so “Clare” turned to Craig’s List’s platonic only listings. Again, don’t judge. It’s fine. Shit, you met your LTR in a bath house. The pals Clare found are very fun to hang out and laugh with and do whip-its with and one has a seven year old with a thing for Chambord whom I hope will be my drinking buddy in a few decades. The other is my Virtual Girlfriend.

Here’s what happened—”Clare” told her homegirl about this here blog, and, rightly assuming that I am an amazing lover, she friended me on Facebook. I’m still working my way through her 1500 photos, but we started writing shit on each others’ walls and calling each other Virtual Girlfriend or sometimes VG, which is kind of cute and kind of gross for it’s close proximity to that euphemism for vagine that everyone was saying after the Grey’s Anatomy/Oprah thing a few years ago.

In the midst of this Facebook romance, I started my summer project, Text Message From A Stranger, in which I posted my number and invited you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to anonymously text me about what you had for lunch or if you laugh or cringe when you see a cat on a leash or what you think about cryogenic afterlife. There were, of course, a few creepers. I mean, I did put my phone number on the Internet. Was it really a good idea to give my number to someone who would Google “gay centaur fucking a man”? Probably not, but there have been a few Internet strangers I’ve developed healthy textual relations with. Most have dissipated now that summer is approaching it’s natural death and everyone’s sniffing erasers and kicking leaves, but I was courting more than one phone stranger this pool season and I eventually started to feel like I was cheating on people whose names I didn’t even know. Not having one primary texter to cheat on gave me vertigo. Gays sometimes talk about fluid bonding, which is basically having unsafe sex with a primary partner and wrapping it up for the others with whom they make the love. It was like I was bare backing in the airways. (Incidentally, I think girl/girl safe sex is silly. I don’t care if you can get gonorrhea of the knee—I’m not eating plastic for breakfast. I mean, why did we choose to be gay? Because we’re allergic to latex. Besides, I’m pretty sure that gayelles are immune from STDs because if touching fussies could make you sick, my junk would look like a baboon’s ass, but I keep getting tested and I keep staying clean. Just sayin’.)

There was one particular texter whom I felt seriously serious about, 512 stranger. She seemed to really get me, like when she told me that the world has become unmanageable when an honest woman can get fired even after sleeping with her boss. And when she said, I’ma woo you, bitch, I knew that we are unlimited texting soul mates. Cat in a bunny suit or bunny in a cat suit? Trundle bed or a mattress on the floor? Can you break up with someone for using AOL? How about for wearing Crocs? So many questions to ask 140 characters at a time.

And then one night I asked Small Fry to freestyle for my anonymous texting soul mate. Small Fry, who is truly an amazing rappist and not just because she is white and miniature, laid some “sick beats” and some “tight rhymes” even though 512 actually answered the phone despite texting instructions to send it to voice mail and we had a freak out moment upon realizing that she had actual ears and an actual larynx. It was revealed right after Small Fry concluded her hippity hop masterpiece that 512 stranger is not actually a complete stranger at all but the complete stranger who was also my virtual girlfriend. This was the beginning of an actual three-dimensional meeting.

Yes, I met a stranger from the Internet and may have possibly flown 3500 miles across this gray nation to make out with said stranger via mouth rather than mind (and to see “Clare,” natch)—but I’m interviewing a new life coach this afternoon so it’ll have to wait. Sorry, 512….