Hard Hat: I met him online and I promise before God, when I saw his picture, I was like – yeah, this won’t work. Why? Because in the picture he had on a hard hat and was emerging from some crevice in the earth. OK, so it was a manhole, not a crevice in the earth. Same difference. Unless it’s Zack Randolph, I’m not really a blue-collar girl. But Z-Bo could get it.

But YET AGAIN, I ignored that initial MEH and pressed forward. We exchange text messages – so much simpler than texting although it’s horribly impersonal and can be done while you’re on a date with someone else (not that I’d know… Ahem.). He quickly reveals that he has… wait for it… seven kids. Ages 7-19.

I do not want children at all and don’t think I even want to parent in any way ever, at least not in any way that requires more responsibility than the responsibility I have now for my dog. (I know this is contrary to the maternal urges women are supposed to have, but I’m just being real.) And this will seem horribly shallow – but unless you wear a hard hat as part of your job OWNING EVERYTHING UNDER THE EARTH, I am not sure how you can have 6 dependent kids and have any spare money to do the things I’d like to do, reasonable things like movies and dinners. That’s a LOT of child support.  So I quickly exited stage left.

Then, there was Drummer Boy. This was a good one. You’ll be glad you click on “more.”

Drummer Boy likes percussion and I’ll leave it at that. He has a slamming body that you can feel just from giving him a hug. He’s easy on the eyes and none of our mutual friends had anything horrible to say about him, so we started going out.

We were not a good fit for more reasons than I could possibly fit in this space, but this was the WTF straw. I don’t know how we got to talking about this, but I asked him if he’d ever had sex with a man and he said, “No, but…”

OK, as a straight woman who doesn’t want to date gay or bi men, there is no way “No, but…” has a good ending. Turns out that several years ago, he met a man dressed as a woman. The guy came on to him, and gave Drummer Boy his phone number, said he lived in the area and they could hang out sometime. Drummer Boy said he went over to the cross-dresser’s house but left without doing anything. R-i-i-i-i-g-h-t.

At first I was like, well, he could still be straight… But I consulted two straight guy friends (hardly a statistically relevant sample size, but still…) and they said that no way would they accept a piece of paper with a cross dresser’s phone number on it, much less roll over to dude’s crib.

I’m glad I asked the question, but dang. How do I keep running into such losers? The universe has a sense of humor, that’s for sure.

Calling Cookie Monster

Friends keep telling me I need to write a book about my dating life. I think the book has already been written, plus without a happy ending, it’s just pitiful, really.

But I do feel compelled to chronicle – why, I have no clue – last week’s romantic clusterf***. Within five days, FIVE romantic prospects evaporated into thin air. Poof. Be gone.

There was Cookie Monster, Spike Lee Wannabe, Mini-Jerk, Hard Hat and Little Drummer Boy. Details will be fuzzed a bit to protect identities.

First, Cookie Monster.

Met dude on an online dating site (yes, it’s incredibly lame, but desperate times call for desperate measures). We traded e-mails  although I was a bit put off by his insistence that he be paired with a very attractive woman. He was NO Idris Elba, so why would he require a Halle Berry?

Plus, he said he was 5-4. Which means he was really 4-11 because short guys always lie about their height and I don’t blame them because who wants someone who can’t reach the stuff on the high shelves? Generally I of 5-1 stature prefer guys over like 5-6.

BUT… he lives in DC, a city I could definitely see myself living in, so… wth. We trade phone numbers and he called.

OMG OMG OMG.

This is where a webcast of me imitating his voice would be appropriate, but I am so not doing that, mainly because I HATE how I look on camera. Plus, imitating his voice hurts my throat.

But…. dude calls and he is utterly unintelligible. His voice is exactly like Cookie Monster, except I can usually understand what Cookie Monster says.

I had to ask him to repeat all of the four sentences he said like eight times until I finally did what I HATE to have done to me – I asked him – can I call you back? when I knew I had NO INTENTION ON THIS EARTH OR IN THIS LIFE to ever call him back.

He’s in the same fraternity as my brother, though, (SKEE-PHI) so I didn’t want to just be an ass. So I sent him a message on the dating site to say – Dude, I’m sure you’re delightful but I couldn’t understand a word you said and I’m just not sure how to have a conversation with someone who sounds like the blue furry dude except worse. (OK, I left out the blue furry part).

This brings me to Spike Lee Wannabe. This one actually stung. I met him when I was at a rare social outing. He approached me and in conversation, he said he’d made a movie, that a colleague had given it a good review. I was appropriately interested, probably said I’d love to see it, blah blah. Well, dude dropped off a copy of it at my job and when I got it (two weeks later when I actually went into the office and checked my mail) I was surprised, because I’d only met him in passing, although he said he recognized me immediately from the newspaper.

He was mildly attractive, a bit scruffier than I usually go for, but I thought – wow, he must be trying to make a connection, to bother to drop off the movie! I called him to tell him I got the movie, and told him I’d let him know what I thought.

The movie sat by my DVD for days, and then he asked to be my friend on Facebook. I friended him, and he said he wanted to take me for a drink when I’d seen the movie, to hear what I thought.

Me and my fast ass, I was like – haaaaaayyyy – do I have to have seen the movie to get you to take me out for a drink? He was like – LOL, no… So we make plans to go for a drink. The night we’re supposed to connect, he says he can’t do it until later that night. And me, having learned my lesson on this the hard way, I say – your wife/girlfriend isn’t going to mind you being out late with a pretty woman? And he’s like – she’s understanding.

WTF? I do a little more prying and turns out – and here’s where it still stings – he only wanted to hear what I thought about his film (it’s actually pretty good) because he was hoping that since I’m a newspaper writer, I could help him with publicity or some ish with his flick.

Honestly, that’s so not my domain and I told him so, but I was really disappointed, because I did think he wanted to get to know ME. Sigh. I can’t really blame him, though, he’s trying to make his dream happen – but I hate to grill guys right out the gate about their intentions, but I also hate to get my face cracked.

OK… I’m getting tired, so I’ll finish this later! Tune in next time!

There’s a saying – if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail. For a writer, this basically translates into – don’t be hollering and screaming and moaning about ish all the time, because people get tired of that, so mix it up already. I DELIBERATELY try to do that. I mean, I have a list of things I think I might want to write about, and I look at the mix. Too much education? Too much politics? Too much personal navel-lint gathering? A good columnist mixes it up.

I’m not great, but I try to be decent. So, this is why after the Tea Party’s absolutely DELUSIONAL accusation that I called Charlotte Bergmann a racial slur – that I did NOT call her and her spokesman had to admit, no, Wendi did NOT use those words – I wrote a softball piece. Slow and easy and over home plate. It will win no awards, that’s not the point. It’s to show the readers who are still paying attention that guess what, guess what – my life extends well beyond desperate politicians.

So Thursday’s column was about my late uncle who died Saturday. He was a true gentle man, in every sense of the word. I filed the piece and stayed up (helping a lawyer friend write an editorial for a paper where she lives) until now (5:38 a.m.). I checked out the comments a while ago and some buffoon says I am writing a self-serving free obit and I’m clearly an affirmative action hire.

I don’t care really what he thinks about me.  Say what you want, as many times as you want, and my paycheck will be the same. BUT – using my time of grief to take a completely unwarranted pot shot at me – that’s some shitty mess. Karma is a biatch, my friend. I wrote a nice note online (I never do that- but my faith instructs me to be kind to those who hurt you), but if he (or she – but my biases tell me that shes usually show a modicum of restraint) showed up to my house and identified himself, let’s just say I wouldn’t hold my Rott back. (Yeah, I’m still working on that forgiveness thing.)

When Vasco Smith and Benjamin Hooks died, the comments about them HORRIFIED ME. The men weren’t even cold in the ground, and bigots were just a dancin’ on their graves. Slumlord Buehler croaks (God rest his soul too) and people were tripping over themselves to say what a wonderful man he was. I was like – am I in some freakin’ alternate universe?

Say what you want about me. Leave my family alone and have the decency (d0 you even KNOW what that is?) to allow me and anyone else suffering a recent loss to grieve. Hold your piss for another day, please.

My new best friend

I’d been waiting for it, looking on my porch, hoping this would be the day it came. And the wait was worth it. I was sooo not disappointed.

It reached places I didn’t even know I wanted touched. It sucked and sucked – and not in a bad way. In a way I’d wanted for a long time. Like it was on a freakin’ mission. By the time I was done, I was sweating – and that doesn’t happen too often, I admit.

At first, I couldn’t figure out how the parts were supposed to – fit. I almost broke a nail trying to get everything in sync, but once I got the rhythm, I was shifting and moving and working it OUT. Like it needed to be worked out. Like it hadn’t been worked out – like ever. It got so low, and I got low right with it.

Yes, today my Dyson DC25 vacuum cleaner arrived. I don’t think I was this excited last Christmas. I got an incredible deal on a refurbished one and I may be in love.

Our latest exhibit at the colored zoo: Black ministers who “whoop.” CNN did a piece on this (hat tip to my sister via FB) and while they actually put some reporting into it, it just felt all wrong. Like – look at how these hyper-emotional black folks preach! Wow – isn’t that odd? Let’s put get some academics to explain why these creatures behave as they do and  blam – a piece on our visit to the colored zoo.

Clearly, this kind of ish infuriates me. I mean, I know that there are white people who are clueless about black culture – if I had a dime for every white college dormmate who wanted to know why I didn’t wash my hair every day, I’d have at least $1.70

As anti-racism educator Tim Wise said: When you’re white, stuff about being black is never on the test. If you’re black, what’s important to white people IS the MF’ing test. (OK, I added the MF’ing in there. That wasn’t Tim – who is the keynote speaker at the Gandhi-King conference in Memphis Saturday.) So, good white people (and I generalize, because there are PLENTY of white people who have taken the time to expose themselves to different theological traditions because guess what, guess what – they VALUE differences and make learning a PRIORITY in their lives), please do not act surprised when you encounter something new at the cultural zoo. Act like you’ve been somewhere before – and then go home and Google it like a polite person would.

I am aware that we are ignorant of other cultures – and the only way to erase the ignorance is to LEARN.  There’s LOTS I don’t know about being Jewish, or Latino, or Syrian or fill-in-the-blank. But when I DO learn something, I don’t run around exposing how ignorant I was just a minute ago, all proud of the new ish I just learned that – if I had any real desire to learn about other cultures – I could have exposed myself to it already.

For those not familiar with  Memphis news, Jessie Dotson was found guilty this week of shooting or stabbing to death six members of his family, including children. A jury sentenced him to death by lethal injection and by the time all the paperwork is done and appeals finished, the state will have spent more to kill Dotson than it would have to incarcerate him for life (a fair punishment).

But the economics of it isn’t why I’m against the death penalty. And I won’t even go into how the death penalty is disproportionately applied to convicts of color when the cases are the same. That’s not my conflict with the death penalty.

The death penalty says, in effect, that a man (0r woman, or people) have decided that a life is utterly irredeemable and should be ended. I do not believe that. There is worth in each individual, and God/Allah/a higher power can transform what we believe is trash. Isn’t that the essence of most major religions, that the Creator has the power to work miracles? And when the state kills someone, this God-crazy country temporarily suspends its religious faith and calls for blood.

You can believe what you want. But if I am ever murdered – and I’ve told my family this, including my brother, who is an attorney and also against the death penalty – show my killer the grace and mercy he/she did not show me.

But one of the exercises in said article said to list “every time you remember being utterly, happily absorbed in an activity, no matter how odd.” And the FIRST thing that came to mind was when I lived in Nashville, and I was very involved in my church. Which made it awkward when I LIED and told them that I knew how to design in Quark and that we really should be using a Mac to design the church newsletter and after all, all we needed was the Mac and Quark and Photoshop and a few other programs and I could have that thing looking – not like a church newsletter.

And then – one day – the assistant pastor at the church called me in – and she’d bought everything I’d asked for and was ready for me to design the newsletter on Quark. Except I DID NOT KNOW QUARK.

Which brings me to the point of being utterly, happily absorbed. I played that ish off, and asked where the manual for Quark was. I took that brick of a book home and read it every night, literally falling asleep with my face in the pages for at least a week. And when I got a chance to design – I could stay in the church office for HOURS, designing my little heart away.

I miss that.

So, earlier this month, on an online dating site, I run into a guy who I  went to elementary school with. I don’t think I’ve seen him since then, but I was eager to reconnect, if only just to catch up on what had happened since we were 12. We traded numbers online, talked by phone a bit and my intuition tells me this: Some ish has gone down in his life since 6th grade. I wasn’t sure what, specifically, but my instincts are rarely (ever?) wrong.

We meet at a Mexican joint last week and he is fine as HELL. OMG. He says he was chunky in elementary school (I have no memory of this, specifically), but all that has turned into thick and fine. The conversation is great – he’s generous with the compliments and wants to get together again. His haircut is like perfection, his pecs won’t stop, his lips are full and juicy and he SMELLS. SO. GOOD. *pauses to catch my breath.

So later in the week, he asks if he can come by my place. No biggie – I feel safe, I’ve known this guy since we were 12, right? (Correction: I KNEW him once, long ago. This was my takeaway – I KNEW him, I don’t KNOW him.)

He comes by and sits down and we get to talking. He goes ON and ON and ON about how black people, because of the melanin in their skin, are connected to the earth’s magnetic forces in a way white people can never be and all this religious mumbo-jumbo about the original people and Moses and who Pharoah really was and I had to stop him. I’m like – did you spend some time in prison? Because that’s the only place I can think of where you’d have the time to learn all of this stuff. (He said he hadn’t been to prison, but I’m not sure I believe him for reasons that will become clear later.)  I mean, he’s on some other level that I really had no interest in going to because I’m just struggling to deal with what I can see, here and now, to be worried about what it really said on the Pyramids that were in the Americas that the “man” had destroyed.

So then, I’m like – so what happened since sixth grade? College? What? He starts describing bits and pieces of different jobs – but it’s not adding up. (I’m a journalist, I’m like, yeah, you just left out 1998-2004 – you wanna fill in those years?) He’d alluded at the Mexican joint to some kind of troubles that were impeding his job progress, but at my house, sitting on my couch, he drops the bomb – he used to be a pimp.

Excuse me? He repeats himself – he used to be a pimp, but he wasn’t into it really serious or anything. I’m like – um, but you had women out on the streets, selling their body and giving the money to you. He’s like yeah, but it wasn’t that deep.

I am completely baffled at this point – not afraid, because I just didn’t sense I was in any danger – but just not understanding how HE doesn’t understand how if you have ONE woman out ONCE having sex and giving you the money, that’s some pretty shady ish you were involved in.

I guess what I was thinking was showing on my face, because THEN, this NEGRO has the audacity to say – hey, don’t judge me. And I’m thinking (but did not say) – you just told me you were a pimp. That’s all I CAN do, is judge you.

It gets worse. He was like – well, I would never put YOU on the street. You could be my bottom girl. You could just go collect the money from the other girls.

I’m stunned. Just – ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

So, needless to say, I suddenly come up with something I had to do early the next morning and I show him to the door and tell him to take care. He sends me a text before he must have left my property that read: ‘I enjoyed u babe keep that up and ull be my bottom b in no time.”

I did not respond. He hasn’t called me since and I sure as hell have not contacted him.

But he did make me wonder – what signals may I unwittingly be sending out that would suggest to him that I would in any way be receptive to, or find acceptable pimping? The exploitation of women is a bad thing. At all times and in all forms and I’m no prude (I did watch “Pimps Up, Hos Down”) but WTH?

Pimpin'

This is mainly a test to see if some updates are working, but please, someone, ask me about the pimp I inadvertently had a date with, so I can share that absolutely bat-caca story. OMG.

In fact, if anyone reads this, submit a comment as to which of the above you’d really like to hear about, and I will blog about it this week.