A Typical Wednesday

Because I know you all are curious, this is how my Wednesdays typically go.

I wake up.

I wake up feeling sore as a result of yesterday’s trip to the gym.

I look at my phone, hoping to see 3:02 A.M. Instead I see 5:48 A.M. I make no attempt to relish the twelve minutes I have left until my alarm goes off, and instead rise from my bed. Even though my arms and back ache, I do twenty-five push-ups and twenty-five sit-ups anyway. I take a shower, get in my car, and begin my drive to work.

On my drive to work the new Britney Spears’ single comes on. I change the channel. I listen to Alanis Morisette and Melissa Etheridge and Sheryl Crow pour their souls from my speakers. I realize I relate to angst-ridden older women more than I should. I make a mental note to spend my upcoming weekend drunk and immature and listening to bad music like a normal twenty-two year old, I make a note to attempt to sleep with a stranger, someone with an exotic name or distinctive profession. Deep down I know I won’t do any of these things. In the darkness of the morning, when the roads are empty and the rest of the world sleeps, I begin to feel disconnected from the normal people that surround me in life, the people whose perception of reality is so different from my own.

As I pull into the parking lot for one of my jobs, a before-school program for elementary students, I’m snapped from my thoughts by the realization that I forgot to eat breakfast.

A mother comes in to drop off her child. She has a complaint. She wants to know why I put her child in time out for running in the cafeteria earlier in the week. As I attempt to explain that running is against the rules and that I was looking out for her son’s safety, she ignores me, instead claiming that I was simply “singling him out” and “being mean.”

I wonder why we’re arguing when both of us are in agreement that our top priority is her son’s well-being. I’m reminded of passionate arguments with lovers of the past, that feeling of wanting them pressed against you one moment and wanting to shove them out of bed the next. I suddenly realize that some strange part of me, a part I usually attempt to ignore and suppress, wants to sleep with this woman, forge a new connection built on a foundation of bickering and mutual goals. I attempt to ignore and suppress the feeling. I entertain a brief fantasy involving Alexander Rybak and Sendhil Ramamurthy. It helps and for now the feeling fades away.

Around 7:33 A.M. I tell a child to stop calling another “gay” even though he’s probably right.

Around 8:31 A.M. I shout “Girls, stay off the pole,” as the girls swing around the tetherball pole. My coworker glances at me and raises her eyebrow with a laugh.

At 9:00 A.M. I leave work, ready to savor the short amount of free time before my classes start. I suddenly remember I need to get gas, and lose some of that free time.

Halfway through lecture I realize I still haven’t eaten breakfast.

I spend the break between classes taking trips to the bank and post office.

Halfway through my second class I realize I still haven’t eaten breakfast… or lunch.

Throughout my day I exchange text messages with people I know I shouldn’t be talking to. I talk to them anyway, knowing that my conversations with them are helping to restore sanity and balance into their lives. I know that once they are repaired and functional, my job will be done. They will have no further use of me and we will fall out of touch. I accept this as okay even though I know it isn’t. I feel responsible for the well-being of these people in the same way I feel responsible for the children at work. This probably isn’t normal or healthy. I make a mental note to spend more time worrying that I describe most of my behavior as abnormal and unhealthy.

At 4:00 P.M. I go to work at my other job, a health sciences library. My coworker sharing the front desk with me is one of the newer recruits, and has yet to get used to my bizarre behavior and intentionally awkward oversharing. My previous coworkers were just as weird as me and understood. I miss that.

A woman comes in looking for a book. I do my best to help her, turning the monitor to her so she can see what I’m doing as I search the catalog. As our search for the book continues to yield no results, she becomes angry, misplacing her anger towards me instead of the situation. Like the discussion with the mother in the morning, this woman and I share the same goal but aren’t working cohesively to achieve it. I bite my tongue to restrain the laughter trying to escape from my mouth, because the entire situation just seems so incredibly ludicrous to me.

At 6:04 P.M. I realize I still haven’t eaten breakfast… or lunch… or dinner. I go across the street and buy some overpriced Chinese food. Some Wednesdays it will be overpriced Italian food. Other Wednesdays it will be overpriced deli food.

When I’m not conversing with coworkers or assisting patrons, I take advantage of the library’s silence, reading books about skinheads and drunk rednecks and sexual deviants and prison inmates, the kind of stories that I relate to even though the lives of the characters are so different than my own.

At 11:45 P.M. I get on the intercom to tell everyone it’s time to get the fuck out of my library. I wonder if I actually said “fuck” or was just thinking it. I make a mental note to eat more. I make a mental note to sleep more. I turn off the lights and wish my coworkers good night.

I get home at 12:07 A.M. and make sure my alarm is set for 6:00 A.M. I crawl into bed exhausted, but relaxed.

As I begin to drift into the immaterial void of sleep, a nagging thought begins to scratch the insides of my head.

What did I forget to do today? Wasn't I supposed to like, hump something? That's what people do on Wednesdays, right? No... it wasn't humping, it was something else...

There’s a stirring in my gut and I remember. I climb out of bed and walk to the bathroom.

Because nothing ends a day better than a late-night poop.

One Night Stands

As a young twenty-something, I’m sort of expected to participate in the classic one night stand, a few passionate beddings with strangers filled with nothing but lust and hormones. I’m supposed to be sneaking away in the morning or waking up with an empty bed and a head full of foggy, sexy memories.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been there, if I tried to claim otherwise my friends would step in with a “Hell no” and an “admit it, whore."

But I haven’t for months. Not participating makes me feel like an outsider, like there’s something easy-to-understand that I’m missing. My peers just giggle and hook up, casually toss around words like “slut” and exchange stories about the morning after. Sure I’ve accumulated some stories, but these one-time hook-ups don’t work for me.

Essentially, it always feels like masturbation.

Sure, there’s another person there, but that person doesn’t know me, and let’s be serious, that person is usually drunk. Chances are this person has no idea what they’re doing. I end up whispering quiet suggestions, moving a hand here, a mouth there. By the end I’m just playing with a sex doll.

That just isn’t fun for me, and I’d rather load up some cheesy porn on my laptop, make a snack (which is for some reason socially unacceptable when there’s somebody waiting to fool around with you, I thought this was AMERICA), and hang out with myself and a bottle of lotion than have to deal with all the extra work of manipulating some foreign body and then having to satisfy it as well. Maybe I’m just selfish.

So for now I’ll be content waking up alone and hung over, trying to figure out if my keyboard is greasy from lube or pizza.

But I know that most of the time it’s both.

Hey you guys I'm Internet famous. Well not really, but still...

I recently submitted an article to the necessarily honest, always funny Curvy Girl Guide.

Please don't ask how I know this website exists, because honestly I don't know how and when I stumbled across it. I've tried to connect all the sites I visit regularly and piece it together, but I haven't figured it out. I can only assume that this is what happens when you spend eight hour shifts working at the front desk of a library with Internet access.

The point is, I woke up this morning (erm, afternoon) to find that they actually published my nonsense.

This is so much better than the time the magazine I've been working for published 45,000 issues with one of my articles and misspelled my name as "Justine."

Danielle

This post is dedicated to Danielle, who wouldn't stop screaming in a jealous rage after I referenced another one of our friends on this page.

Sex

Let's talk about sex.

No, really, let's do it.

I should start by saying that writing this is probably a mistake. Because it implies that I get laid regularly, and while sometimes I wish that was the case, it isn't.

Unfortunately there isn't a high demand for skinny, neurotic, white boys in Columbus. You'd think there would be, because nothing says "sexy" like awkwardly bumbling through conversation and compensating for social anxiety with alcohol.

But let's talk about sex anyway.

Because politics and religion just piss people off. But I think everyone can agree that sex is a generally okay thing, in moderation, of course.

I know some of you have an incredibly distorted definition of the word "moderation," but I'll let that slide for now.

I have this problem, the problem being that I think too much, even when I'm capable of tricking someone into hopping into bed with me. You'd think all of my focus would be spent thinking about things that will keep me from ejaculating entirely too early, but my overactive mind stretches, speculating about the other people that have touched my bed partner in the past.

That awkward grope she just made at my thigh? She learned that on her first Homecoming when a Senior boy did it to her, and being fifteen, she thought it was sexy, because fifteen year-olds think everything is sexy. Nobody's ever told her how clumsy and uncomfortable of a move it is. I'm not going to tell her either.

The way he slides his finger down my side? He learned that from his first gay experience with somebody eleven years older than him, and he's been trying to find a similar experience ever since. I'm not that experience. Nobody ever will be. You can't just relive your first sip of alcohol.

That desperate grasp around my neck, the way the nails are cutting into my skin? It just screams past sexual abuse, and it's hard to maintain an erection with somebody so afraid of the world, so desperate not to be hurt again.

My mind spirals into a kaleidoscope of cocks and vaginas from the past.

And let's not even start with the blow jobs. Because what I see isn't just my own penis in someone's mouth, but every other penis that's ever been there. I imagine the mouth stretched into a perfect ring, crowded with dicks, like those old cartoons where the character would cram an entire pack of cigarettes into its mouth. Suddenly I feel like I'm in competition with every other imaginary penis in the room. There's a bartender from Atlanta, a football player from Cleveland, a stripper from Las Vegas. I know these are just characters I've imagined, products of the overactive imagination my parents have been nurturing since my childhood (thanks a lot Mom), but it doesn't make the feelings any less real, the envy and shame and embarrassment.

I can't give her what the lawyer gave her. I can't give him what the artist gave him. I'm inadequate.

I'm inadequate and I'm going to die alone with three cats, and I don't even like cats, and even though I haven't decided what the cats will be named, one of them will have a spot behind her ear and another will be overweight and the third will be orange with stripes. I won't tell the other two cats that the orange one is my favorite, because I won't want to hurt their feelings.

And of course, being in such a ridiculous, uncomfortable situation with my mind churning out completely insane scenarios, sometimes I laugh.

This never goes over well.

"What's so funny?"
"What's wrong?"
"You never take me seriously."
"What am I doing wrong?"
"Is this a joke to you?"

At this point I have to explain why I'm laughing.

And I'm met with answers like this:

"So what, you think I'm some kind of slut?"
"I don't get it."
"What kind of person do you think I am?"
"What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"Huh?"

But occasionally, someone will laugh, and think it's just as hilarious as I do.

These are the best people in the world, and I totally recommend sleeping with them, and maybe even going so far as to date them, hell, some of them might even be worth getting married or gay-married or partnered or whatever word you want to use.

Because these people are fun.

We can use all the big, meaningful words we want to analyze and over-analyze human interaction and relationships. We can make it messy and complicated and impossible-to-navigate.

But in the end, it's hard to deny that we're all just looking for a little fun.

And that sometimes we just need to shut the fuck up, relax, and let ourselves have some.