Annie was unimpressed when I mentioned this holiday to her last year, and given the tiny parasite adorable baby girl she’s caring for 24-hours-a-day right now, this year will probably be no different, but here’s a reminder for the rest of you:
March 14th is Steak and Blowjob Day.
“Well, of course I’ve been in bed with several women at once. I am a rock star, after all.”
– Sting
-or- That Chick With The Kid
Following my breakup with Army Girl, I went something like a year without seeing anyone. In the meantime, I (finally) moved out of my parent’s place and moved into an apartment with an old friend on campus.
I remember being pathetically lonely at this time, and being excited when my roommate and I joined the Orientation Program. I was excited because there were lots of attractive women in there, and I hoped I would end up dating one of them. Sure enough, I met a woman really quickly. We talked at bit in class, but didn’t hook up until the retreat for Orientation.
The retreat took us all to the beach for a weekend. Guys and Girls were separated into different rooms, but the day ended pretty early and there was plenty of time left to socialize before everyone crashed in their respective rooms.
She and I hit it off really well. A bunch of us all started playing truth or dare one night, and she and I were practically making out during the game.
Following the retreat, we started dating, but it was supposed to be very secretive (yeah, right). She was really concerned that people in Orientation would figure out we were dating. I didn’t care as much, but I could respect that she was worried so we tried to be inconspicuous. We sat apart in class and barely spoke, though I remember one day where during the class break she took me to her office on campus and we made out for a few minutes… :)
She lived across the river, maybe a 15 minute car ride away. She didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t drive and kept trying to talk me into taking the bus to her house, which I was really opposed to for some reason I don’t remember now.
Here’s the strange thing. I knew all this time that she had a kid. She had been in the Navy, and apparently slept around as much as she wanted (which was quite a bit). She was always protected when she did this, but when her and another guy got serious, somehow she got pregnant. They threw her out of the Navy and the guy dumped her.
So now she had a three year old kid, who was really cool, but that’s kind of an odd situation. She was only a few years older than me, but at the same time, she was a parent!
I did my best to cope with this, but it’s a really strange thing when she doesn’t put the kid to bed until midnight, and then he walks into the room while we’re having sex.
The kid thing was tough to roll with, but I was getting used to it. What was hard was the fact that she obviously was more into the kid than me. This is understandable, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to be more into me than the kid, but I did feel neglected a lot of the time. The hardest thing was that she was such a different person than me when she was around her kid. When we were alone, we got along wonderfully, but when the kid was around, she was mommy and everything was different.
But despite all that, there was one thing that kept us trying. The sex was fucking incredible. I’m not exaggerating. This is the best sex I’ve had. She knew what she wanted, she knew what I wanted, she knew how to keep us both happy… oh man. I tried things I’d never tried before, and I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most everything good that I know about sex I learned from her.
As time passed, I think she started realizing that she didn’t like me when she was in mommy mode, which was more and more often, since we were mostly hanging out at her house. One day, we had a huge fight about something really stupid and she ended up driving me home, telling me about all the stuff she didn’t like about me on the way. By the time I got home, I was so pissed at her that I didn’t care about the sex, I just wanted away from this psycho bitch.
I still feel that way. We only dated for a couple months, but I think I’m better off without her. I miss the sex, but that’s not the most important thing in a relationship, even though it can feel that way sometimes.
I found out recently that she ended up marrying the guy who got her pregnant and they’re moving somewhere better for the kid, and she’s dropped out of school. I can’t help feeling that she doesn’t really want to be with the guy, but is just doing it because she wants the kid to know his dad.
Following the break-up, I move on with my life. It was the summer following my senior year, and I spent a good chunk of time cutting off all ties with all my old friends. By the end of my senior year, I hated everything about high school. With just a couple exceptions, I stopped talking to everyone from my high school.
Summer ends, and I begin attending PSU. I like PSU, and I begin to make new friends. For what must have been a little over a year, I enter a dry spell. No romance in my life at all. This was probably partly of my own will, and partly due to not having anyone I like enough to ask out. I experiment briefly with the idea of asking my best friend out, but chicken out at the last minute (for the best).
Around this same time, my friend got me hooked on Internet Chat. Oh God. I had no idea. Chat is like an addiction. Once started, it seems innocent enough, and then you discover that you’re spending two or three hours a day in a chat room in a lab at your school. In my spare minutes between classes, I would log into the chat.
Over time, I made some close chat friends. I even got really close to one girl. We flirted constantly. At some point, we decided that we really liked each other, and proclaimed ourselves to be dating. We were both well aware of the limits of the chat, and the fact that we lived in different states (me in Oregon, her in Kansas), but she was originally from Oregon, and was just going to school in Kansas. We had never met in person, and I had never seen a photo of her (she’d seen some of me on my website).
So while we were both aware that this wasn’t really “dating,” we referred to it as such, and spent a great deal of time sending email to each other and meeting in the Chat. After several months of this, she came home for the summer, and we decided to meet in person (or as we referred to it at the time, IRL (In Real Life)).
Now, for those who’ve never chatted, you can’t really imagine the nervousness that accompanied this event. I’ve been talking to this girl for months. We’ve developed a relationship based not on physical attraction, but on similar mindsets. Our relationship was centered on the fact that we got along with each other. This was new for me. But meeting IRL was a new step. It opened new possibilities. Certainly it brought along the possibility of greater intimacy, and a possible sex life, but it also brought along a rather large worry.
I remember being deeply ashamed of this worry, but having it nonetheless. What if she was ugly? I got along with her wonderfully, but what if I was completely not attracted to her physically? This sounded shallow to me at the time, and it still does, but it remained my big worry.
Finally, we decided to meet at the mall. We did, and much to my relief, she looked fine. It was funny, but the meeting was pretty awkward, even though we both knew each other very well. I think this was because we couldn’t do small-talk because we already knew everything about each other. So we sat in shy awkwardness and ate a meal and agreed to meet again later.
The next meeting was easier, and they continued to get easier. Eventually she took me home to meet her family. Her dad shook my hand and introduced himself firmly, doing everything short of announcing that he had a gun (a fact that I already knew, since she and her sister had been teasing me about meeting their cop dad for some time now). But after the initial firm introduction, I think I got along with her family fairly well. They put up with my presence, and didn’t seem to mind me being around. For the most part, though, we tended to get together in my town (she lived a few hours away).
Eventually, we started a physical relationship. I don’t remember exactly when or how, but after awhile, we were having the best sex I’d ever had. We got along amazingly well, and I think that intimacy helped the sex a lot.
I could say more, but I’m suddenly feeling bashful, so I’ll leave it at this: The sex was wonderful.
I was still living with my parents at this point, and I think they knew we were fooling around, though they may not have known we were having sex. I lived in a room in the basement, mostly out of the traffic pattern, but sometimes my mom would come downstairs to do laundry and catch us under the blanket together. It was never a big deal though, and mom accepted my predictable young excuses with a grin. (“Sure, you were just taking a nap with your shirts off.”)
We went out for a good five months. I guess at some level I knew that eventually she was going to leave to go back to college, but I guess part of me was hoping she would transfer to my school or just drop out (not unreasonable, since she hated her school). She stayed an extra month, and then announced her decision regarding her future, which took me completely by surprise.
She was joining the army.
When I say “completely by surprise,” I need you to understand that I was stunned. I couldn’t have been more stunned. It was as if she had announced her intention to move to Antarctica, or become a man. It was that shocking.
I hate the army. I have never ever seen it as a respectable place with respectable people. My dad was in the National Guard, which seemed to be slightly more laid back, but even so, his Guard stories repelled me. I had a few friends join the army, and I had no respect for them. They seemed to come back physically dumber. Clearly there is a need for people to join the army, but I wanted nothing to do with it.
And I had just assumed she felt the same. We had never discussed the Army. So she carefully explained to me the reasons. The money was good, she would get a complete education as a nurse, and be able to enter the work force immediately after her four years of service, unlike going to college, and they would pay her for doing it, instead of her paying. In the long run, I was forced to conclude, she was right. She would come out with a good education, immediate entry into the job force and a nice savings account, whereas the opposite would happen if she continued in college.
But there was one downfall. We wouldn’t see each other barely at all. If she went back to college, we could visit on breaks and stuff, which already seemed unlikely, but this was unbearable. two months basic training, and then assignment to a military base.
By this point, we had already said I love you. I’m not sure if it was true or not. Certainly, I felt strongly for her. More strongly that I had felt for a woman to this point. Maybe it wasn’t love, but I think if our relationship had continued, we would have grown to love each other.
We discussed the possibility of her getting assigned to Fort Lewis, just a three hour bus ride north into Washington. Over the next few weeks, we still saw each other and made the best of the time we had left.
Then she left for basic. We agreed not to break up, and to get together once she got out of basic (she would have a week or two off before getting assigned). The months passing incredibly slowly.
I was totally fucked, mentally. For the first time in my life, a relationship ending was having a large effect on me. I had mood swings really badly, and swung from angry (at her) to depressed to momentarily happy back to angry. I wrote poetry. bad poetry. I didn’t care. I’d never written poetry before, and had no intention to continue, it was just a way to get the crap out of my head.
It slowly dawned on me that despite what we had said, the relationship was over. I tried to hold some hope, though and waited.
Eventually, basic ended and she came back, but everything was different. I could see it in her eyes. She was a completely different person now, and I was the same guy, maybe in love with her. When she visited, she spent all her time swapping military stories with my dad. We had sex, but it wasn’t as good. We agreed to end it, and she got assigned to a military base in Georgia.
My dad explained to me why basic was such a life-altering experience. He reminded me of how important Outdoor School was to me. I loved Outdoor School because in a brief week, I became very close to complete strangers, who came into our new relationship with no preconceived notions about me. New opinions formed, and trust given freely. It was very liberating to a high school student chaffing under his parents.
Now, my dad said, imagine that same experience times 10. It’s a longer experience at basic, with more people, and stronger emotions because of the shared experience, and the physical element.
She was a completely different person. She called me once or twice from her new base, but only when she was confined to her tent due to illness and was really bored, and then all she had to talk about was the army.
Over time, I slowly moved on with my life, but I still think that if she hadn’t joined the army, our relationship had amazing potential.
::HATELIFE IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND JOINING THE ARMY::
-or- How I Narrowly Avoiding Having Good Sex With An Attractive Woman
It’s really hard to come up with different nicknames for these women and not just use their real names. After awhile they all sort of sound alike “The Freaky/Psycho Something Girl.” Oh well. On the off chance that one of them finds this journal, I don’t want to have to deal with them flipping out that I used their real names online. It’s already happened to me once. I posted some awful poetry once, and The Girl Who Ruined High School found it and got REALLY mad. Oh well… that’s another story. Today, I’m talking about Freaky Family Girl.
Let’s see… it would have been fall term of my senior year. I must have just broken up with the girl I cheated on High School girl with. I was still sharing a locker with that girl and life was pretty much sucky all around. Then I got a temporary respite. Outdoor School! A whole week away from all the people that hate me! And while I was there, I met a girl. We flirted around quite a bit, and all of the sixth graders concluded that we were married. We never kissed at Outdoor School, I don’t think. I do remember holding hands one night at the counselor meeting, which already felt pretty naughty. It’s something about the environment at outdoor school… you just don’t feel right doing much more than that.
So following a good week at Outdoor School, we hooked up. High School Girl was furious. As near as I can tell the reasoning went something like this: “Just because I don’t want you doesn’t me someone ELSE can have you!”
She didn’t stop me though, and I started seeing this girl regularly. I didn’t have a car (I still don’t), so she always had to drive me around, but she lived in town, so that wasn’t that bad. We went to different high schools, but still saw each other several times each week and every weekend. We never said I love you. We had a discussion about it, and decided that neither one of us really knew what love was, and that we didn’t feel comfortable saying it. So we said “I like you.” Which felt really dumb, but at least we weren’t deluding ourselves.
She had a huge family. A couple older siblings had already moved out, but there were at least four younger siblings in the house, along with innumerable pets. They had cats, dogs, ducks, chickens, and just about anything else you could possibly imagine as a pet. Her dad worked at a tech job at PSU, and never really said much to me. I don’t think he cared much about me one way or another, which was a nice change from High School Girl’s parents, who hated me.
(That reminds me. I forgot to mention the reason High School Girl’s parents hated me. It was because one time she decided to tell them about our sex life (or lack thereof). I’m sure in their minds, I immediately became the boy who stole their daughter’s innocence. They hated me.)
So her dad could have cared less about me, but her mom was always really nice to me. We seemed to get along well, and she seemed to approve of me.
Their house always made me uncomfortable. The animals and small children living in permanent filth and noise was just too much for me. But we were there all the time. She rarely wanted to leave.
She had a really odd relationship with her parents. They would smoke weed together one night, and be accusing each other of theft the next (as near as I can tell, her parents had access to her bank account and would take money from it, but she wouldn’t get a new one).
It was really uncomfortable all the time. We would make out in her room, and people would be running up and down the hall, and sometimes they would just open the door. Who knows how we ever felt safe enough to have sex. We did have sex, though it really wasn’t very good. I wasn’t happy with it, and I’m sure she wasn’t happy with it.
In hindsight, I think I was just too nervous at her house to perform well. I remember one time she pulled me into her closet and tried to go down on me, but I was so worried that someone would come in that I couldn’t get hard. Eventually she gave up and stomped off.
At the time, though, I had no idea. I kept thinking maybe it’ll get better soon. But I never felt comfortable around her family or house. The relationships between parents and child were all so dysfunctional, and every time I came over, someone was angry or crying.
I remember at the time feeling that the relationship couldn’t last, and that’s probably part of why I never really got into a deep relationship with her. I was sure it was going to end when we both graduated. I was going to PSU, and at the time she wasn’t sure where she was going (if anywhere). I didn’t think our relationship could survive much strain.
After what seemed like forever, we ended up deciding to break up. Oddly enough, I remember this as a good break up. It was clean and mutual. We both just decided that it wasn’t going to work and broke up for the summer.
After going to PSU for awhile, I found out that she ended up coming to PSU also. I never saw her on campus until she got a job at my favorite pizza place. I still see her there all the time, and she just pretends she doesn’t know me.
Now that I write this one out, I realize that our relationship wasn’t that bad. But it wasn’t good by any means. We were never very close, and I think the sex problem took its toll on us. Add that to the fact that we were constantly reaffirming the fact that we didn’t love each other and the fact that I felt horribly uncomfortable around her family and home, and it was bound to end eventually.