A few weeks ago, I had the weekend to end all weekends (until this one, when it is my birthday, and I plan to be drunk for a week). I met my Pilot in the bar, and promptly (read: after 5 minutes) stuck my tongue down his throat, texted my friends, and whisked him off to a dvdbang.
I like to keep things classy.
We were…watching a movie….when he pulled away from me. “I want to date you,” he said. I laughed and kept kissing him. He pulled away again. “No really. You’re too good for a one night stand.”
“Stop with the bullshit,” I said. “Just have some fun.”
Later, afterwards, we were….I cringe to say it….cuddling, and talking. I KNOW. He brought it up again. “Really,” he said. “I would like to take you out on a date.” I sighed. “You don’t believe me?” he said.
“No. You picked me up in a bar, and we had some fun in a dvdbang.”
“Well, I really want to take you out for dinner.”
Listen, I said: I like sex. I don’t need sex to be tied to a relationship. “But women – ” Bullshit. I like sex – I’m not stupid. You don’t need to say any of this to get me into bed: I’m here already. At least I’m honest about my one night stands.
He shook his head angrily. “You don’t understand,” he said.
And maybe I didn’t. I gave him my number. “Prove me wrong,” I said as I got into a cab. And before I got back out again, he’d texted me.
Maybe he will call me again. Maybe he does want to take me out, for real. And maybe, if he does, I’ll even say yes.
But I like my cynicism – it keeps me warm and safe.
* my apologies for my blatant misrepresentation of and insensitivy to those who are actually developmentally challenged. I would rather spend my time with them than with the people this post is about.
The other night I went to a bar. Somehow, every asshole male with an over-inflated sense of self -entitlement and was ALSO at the same bar that night. Somehow, they all wanted a piece. It was like a competition, a fashion show, and they all brought out their best self-entitled behavior to model for me!
LIKE I’D BE IMPRESSED.
Asshole #1! is a man I’ve been working with for eight months. Our staff room functions largely like a high school cafeteria, and there is always somebody sitting at the wrong table. With that in mind, I try to approach any situation with an aim to keep the drama, conflict, and outright hostility out of the way. So when #1! kissed me the first time, I assumed he was just being drunken and silly. I laughed it off. The second time, I firmly took a step backwards, but didn’t tell him off because a) drama! and b) he was to drunk to understand, and I didn’t have the patience to drag it out until he sobered up. The third time, I was starting to get pissed off. This is not a man who has feelings for me. He does not secretly wish to date me. I have not rejected dates or broken his heart. I am, however, ignored until he wants to be made out with (passive voice chosen intentionally) every few weeks. Fuck off, #1.
Ok, you’re saying. A few unwanted kisses. A little bit of unprofessional behaviour, some discomfort at work. Doesn’t really sound like there were any olympics going on, even if kiss 2 and 3 happened on the same night.
Asshole #2! is a man I also have to work with (I’d like to point out that the necessity to work with someone immediately increases the stakes when embarking on assholery). I met him just a few days before and I need to work with him in the cafeteria/staffroom for four more months. He’s also married, but left his wife in his home country for the year. I agreed to dance with him. I did not agree to be fondled, felt up, made out with. I did not agree to have his tongue in my mouth. And I did not agree to be made to feel uncomfortable when, instead of telling him to fuck off, I quietly refused to dance with him again. I’ve already been made to feel uncomfortable on the dance floor, I am in the awkward position of either being gossiped about or causing gossip to happen to someone who just arrived, and I really really don’t need to justify my refusal to dance. What the hell was I supposed to be – a sex toy until his wife showed up? You don’t develop feelings for someone that are worth breaking up a marriage for in 3 days, so…..THE HELL?
Perhaps I need to rethink the priority list – #1 – telling men who cross boundaries to fuck off. #2 – avoiding discomfort at work. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Asshole #3! is a man I met at the bar. We danced, we kissed a little, and then we went our separate ways. It was fun, but we’re talking 15 minutes of fun here, not a relationship. A little perspective would be nice, here. He chased me out to ask for my number, and when he told the story later (to MY FRIENDS), he said that my demanding that he be polite to me and then kissing him and agreeing to give him my number was my ‘bitching him out and ruining his night’. He didn’t call me. I didn’t hunt him down. Clearly, neither of us were that interested. So when I showed up at the bar two weeks later, with my friends, and saw him with his friends, throwing myself at him wasn’t the first thing I thought of. He came to talk to me, and we made small talk (remember: we’ve never had a conversation!) and then he asked me if I remembered him.
“Yep!” I said.
“Well, why didn’t you come to talk to me?” he said.
“Well, you didn’t call me,” I shrugged.
“I guess you don’t want to hear my REASONS, huh?” he said.
“Uh, not particularly.” Could he not understand that I just didn’t care? He stormed away, stormed back again.
“We just kissed,” he lectured. “That doesn’t mean anything. What exactly do you want?” Uh, I want to be left alone by men who aren’t interested in me, who I am not interested in, and who somehow want me to still feed their ego by being all over them after they don’t call me. I don’t need to have my evening hijacked by some egotistical asshole who gives me lectures at the bar because he’s feeling neglected. What exactly did I owe him?
Asshole #4! is a man that I have spoken to for a collective 4 minutes over 6 months. The second 2 minutes occurred at this bar, where I reminded him of my name and where he had seen me before. Then we both turned away. I began talking to another man, he began talking to…someone. Next thing I knew, he had grabbed me and was dragging me away from my conversation.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he said. I guess he saw my face, because then he said, “What the fuck’s your problem?”
“You,” I said. “You are my problem.”
“Why the fuck am I your problem?” he yelled.
“Because you’re grabbing me,” I said, pulling my arm away. Up his hands went in the air, defensively.
“SORRY!” he said. Like maybe I’d done something wrong in asking him not to touch me. Like maybe I’d requested something completely unreasonable by wanting to decide which part of the bar I was in by myself. If he was my boyfriend, I’d have broken up with him on the spot, but he didn’t even have that excuse for stopping a conversation with another man. I don’t know this man. We are not friends. We’ve never had a relationship.
By the end of the night, battered and exhausted, I went home and called my mother, who told me that ‘girls who drink are unattractive’ and that I ‘must be driving all the good men away’.
ouch.
From Students:
“Ouch!.. Teacher, do I say ‘drat’ or ‘shit’?”
“Clooney – what is it you are pretending to throw at me?”
“Ddong”
“Teacher! You are single, so every night, you watch 19 TV, yes?”
On the Great Wall of China:
“Hey, remember that time I couldn’t walk because I had too much sex? This is going to be way worse.”
At the bar:
“We’re not in Russia…..we’re in CHINA”
Over lunch:
“I have no problem with crotch hair. Sometimes you just have a little *cough cough* because there’s a hair at the back of your throat, but no big deal.”
“Oh yeah? Sometime I have a little *cough cough* because there’s a penis at the back of my throat*
I think I figured it out.
On Sundays I watch a show called ‘Man Vs Wild’, and something’s been bugging me about it. Something was reminding me of something and I didn’t know what.
I think I figured it out.
When he’s grunting, lifting something heavy or climbing up a sheer rock face or hauling himself out of a hole, the grunting and heavy breathing sound exactly like my most recent ex did when he was having sex with me.
I promise he was more sexy than he sounds, but now I don’t really think I can watch that show anymore.
I want to have sex.
AFN Korea (American Armed Forces Network) is showing ‘Coach Carter’ in honour of Black History Month.
Can you believe it? Yeah, me neither.
I’m finished my hell month of intensives, and I’m back on my regular 8 hour day schedule. That means, I’m still waking up at 8 or 9 in the morning, but I don’t have to work until 2pm. What the hell am I going to do with 6 hours in the morning? So I get up at 9, but around 10 I start thinking, “You are wasting time, girl. You could be doing something far more useful. You don’t have to be at work until 2. What are you doing up at 10 dicking around on the intarweb? That’s not how you were raised!”
And then I agree with myself, and I go back to bed and sleep ’til noon.
As well as a better schedule, I also have all new classes. Some of the new childrens are already scared of me. That’s how I like it – terrified children. It’s good for my ego. I have a Clooney, an Alfonso, and two Stellas. I’m going to have fun. This is what happens when stupid white people refuse to learn Korean names.
I am starting to spend way to much time with my new friend, who is as dirty and sarcastic and offensive as I am, but is also five years older than me and is the first friend I’ve had who says he wants to marry his girlfriend and means it. Somehow, he manages to balance talking about splooge and running ahead to open doors for me, and knows what to order for me when he gets to a restaurant ahead of me. Yes, what to order at each different restaurant.
Which means he’s perfect.
Oh dear.
I have to stop calling my dad when I’ve been drinking. Somehow, he can always tell. Especially on the night when I called, and he asked me to call back in 5 minutes. So I passed out, and half an hour later I called, and got the answering machine, and left a drunken message, and hung up. But then he called me back, and it turned out I hadn’t gotten the answering machine at all: he had picked up, and said hello, and I had hung up on him.
i’ve mentioned this before, but i have been pretty lucky in the noise department. we are all packed in here very tightly, and i somehow got good neighbours on all sides.
i hear muffled telephones ring, the occasional conversation through the vent in my bathroom, a dog that sometimes gets let out into the hallway to bark at everybody who walks by.
i heard what i think was someone having awful, probably painful sex in the middle of the night. there was no rhythm to the angry banging. it was not effortless, or fun. someone was working very, very hard, and someone was lying there, apparently part of the bedframe, waiting for it to end.
i hear evangelists ringing every doorbell, every fucking doorbell with their incessantly whining für elise, first thing on a saturday morning until the tingling doesn’t leave my ears. i can’t help but think people might be more receptive to their message if they didn’t wake them up on saturday mornings, but maybe that’s too cynical of me.
but tonight. tonight my apartment is quiet. the tv is not on. i am not listening to music. and i can’t hear anything from the street, because i live on the inside of the ‘u’ my apartment makes. the lack of a view is just about worth not hearing the street vendors at 5am. so my apartment is silent, except for my typing and the meowing of a cat.
i have seen a cat in the hallway a few times. unlike the dog, it goes running back to its apartment when interrupted. i have no way of knowing if i am listening to the same cat, but she sounds exactly like one of my cats, idiotic enough to get herself locked in a closet. they used to sleep on shelves of towels or clothes, curled up in the back, and the door, invariably, would inadvertently get shut. a few hours later we’d hear the groggy, panic stricken cat, right after she’d woken up, wailing to be let out, and we’d have a mad dash around the house, wondering which cat it was, which closet it was, how long she’d been in there. and when we found ehr, she’d march out all “where the hell were you?” like she hadn’t been crying desperately, sure she’d been abandoned, a minute before.
it was usually the same cat who, at night, would wail her way through the house, not knowing where any of us were. one of us would, grumbling, pad out into the hallway to her, wave to get her attention (she’s deaf), and haul her back into bed with us, where she’d settle down, starting purring, and we’d wake up to her chewing contentedly on our hair.
and so tonight i am listening to the wailings of a cat, in my empty quiet apartment on the wrong side of the world, and mightily resisting the urge to go dashing out after her.
sigh.
this is a bad week.
it is not one of my worst. on my worst weeks, all of my underwear is dirty, my apartment is a mess, there’s no food in my fridge, and the milk is bad. i wake up in the morning and realize (again) that i have nothing to make lunch with and so have to go to mcdonalds for lunch. i forget to do laundry. i wait until every dish is in the sink before i start washing, and even then, i only was the one i need right now. i don’t go shopping.
but this is not one of those weeks. my apartment is a mess. the dishes are not done. but the clothes are clean, the fridge is full, and the milk is good.
i looked in the mirror yesterday and saw exactly what i will look like in 20 years. i saw where the weight will settle, where shadows are starting to settle now. i saw how my posture will deteriorate. i saw just how ugly i will allow myself to become.
i never used to worry about how i looked. i didn’t think i looked good; i just thought it was something not worth worrying about, or judging. i didn’t care. then i started having sex, and i did think it was worth worrying about, but right after i started having sex, i loved my body. it was like i discovered it for the first time, far too late, and realized just how wonderful having a body was. i started to notice it, then, but only to admire it, to feel it. i felt sexy and delicious, i felt suddenly aware.
even when that sex ended badly, when it stopped happening, i felt lovely. i felt myself walking down the street and knew exactly what my body was capable of.
but now, at 22, for the first, i look in a mirror and feel fat. not fat – i know i am healthy and not fat. i look – undefined. blurry around the edges. unspectacular. unlovely. unnoticeable. and i’d rather go back to not noticing my body, being unaware of its flaws, especially the ones i create. i’d prefer that to hating it, hating being trapped in its mundanity and ugliness.
mostly, i hate looking at it and seeing it as it will be. i see every flaw accelerated.
and it affects the sex i have now, of course it does. i said once, “my body is a trap, free only when it is a part of yours.” now, not even you can free me. and not since you have i loved a body, any body.
bodies should be loved. my body should be loved. by someone.
i recently had sex with no kissing.
i’ve always considered kissing very important – the most important part, even, of sex. i’d much rather have bad sex than bad kissing. i’ve even stopped when the kissing was bad, made my excuses, and refused to go any further.
good kissing is a skill. it’s a hard one to learn, an even harder one to teach, and damn near impossible to find.
and i recently had sex with no kissing.
i couldn’t kiss anyone – health reasons got in the way of my night. but boy decided to come over anyway. yes, the one night stand. a one night stand that is now a two night stand.
don’t JUDGE me.
all stupid decisions aside, when he rang my doorbell at 5:30am, i got out of bed, answered the door in my underwear, and let him in. and had some of the best sex i’ve had, without kissing. this shocked me. this amazed me. awed me, you could even say. i was not expecting this to be good.
the last time this happened, the boy in question decided to kiss me anyway. he waited an agonizing 5 minutes. i was expecting the same thing this time.
but he didn’t. not once either time we had sex. not when he showed up. not before we went to sleep. not when he got up, or when he left my apartment.
somehow it ended up being very intimate, which is weird, for two reasons: the first being, of course, that casual, one night stand sex is rarely intimate, even if it’s the second one night stand. and the second being that kissing is the most intimate, sometimes the only intimate, part of sex.
and now i have a wildly inappropriate definitely unrequited crush. and under the circumstances, a third one night stand would be very unwise indeed.
the question is, knowing that, will i answer the door next time?
whelp, two of my co-workers saw me bringing home a bottle of wine after work today. it’s going to take me a month to convince them that a) i am not teaching hungover tomorrow and b) i’m not a sad, lonely acloholic with cats. lots of cats.
listen. a glass of wine with dinner after a long and stressful day is CIVILISED, people. it’s not like i’m drinking it from the bottle at noon in front of Oprah on a workday.
they don’t know that i’m drinking it from a mug (i don’t have wine glasses yet. don’t JUDGE), or that i’m watching downloaded episodes of weeds on my laptop with a tub of ice cream, a bottle of coke, and a tube of grossly overpriced pringles, or that i’m on the second day of my period and as far into my depression as the drugs will let me go.
or that i’m getting crumbs in my bed and i’m far too lazy to do anything about it before i go to sleep.
i know. i KNOW. this is my own fault. there was no reason to have the period, except for my own goddamn hypochondria. i decided that in light of the fact that buying a pregnancy test is very difficult in korea, at least if you don’t know the language and don’t know where to look, that going through a week of hell to make doubly (triply!) sure i wasn’t pregnant was a good idea.
i do this every time, you know. its actually a pretty good thing i don’t get laid that often.
especially given how well it went last time.
ok, so i went out with a bunch of people i don’t know/just met. we went to a few bars, we played a few highly inappropriate drinking games, the like of which i was sure i’d grown out of in first year, and we went to a noraebang*. by the time we stumbled home, carrying cans of beer down the street, the sun was coming up and we stopped to get breakfast. beer and scrambled eggs go really well together at 8am.
well, one of them came home with me. i hate it when that happens! and he…well, he tried to fist me, shoved a finger up my ass so quickly and roughly i nearly cried, passed out under me, fell asleep naked and standing up against my door, and spent the rest of the night sleeping on my bathroom floor because he liked how cold the floor was.
when he sobered up he was quite lovely, actually, despite the fact that he was american, 32, and ‘pretty sure he had broken up with his girlfriend’. not that a girlfriend is any of my business, but: a girlfriend is none of my business. don’t tell me. you’re leaving in the morning.
then he spent the whole day and we…cuddled. which…i don’t…do.
ever.
he was supposed to be kicked out as soon as he was conscious.
and THAT is the magical night that led to this magical night, and i’ll be crampy and depressed and sleeping in chip crumbs for days.
because i am just neurotic enough, not only to like the bumbling idiots instead of the suave charmers, but to not then trust the safety measures i use, and willingly put myself through the very hell they are supposed to help me avoid.
i hid the rest of the wine in the freezer.
*noraebang – private singing rooms. drunken karaoke without an audience. amazing.
i live in a very small apartment in a very big apartment building. i am lucky – i can’t hear my neighbours. i can hear one of them coughing occasionally, i hear my next door neighbour’s doorbell, and water gushes through my pipes when somebody nearby has a shower or washes dishes.
but for the most part, all is quiet. no crazy neighbour stories to tell, and i am glad.
but sometimes, when i am walking in the hallway, i hear someone having loud, apparently fantastic sex. she moans in a korean accent. she’s very, very excited.
would you judge me if i started to walk a little bit slower? if i glanced around, trying to figure out which door they were behind, which apartment this was happening in? what would you think of me if i told you that sometimes, if nobody is around, i come to a full stop, and i stand in the hallway, listening?
what if i started to imagine what she was doing? if i tried to picture the scene, imagine what was happening? would you think less of me? would you think i was disgusting, or merely impolite?
i bought a purse from a korean rastafarian on the side of the street in seoul.
Can we smoke in here? 