Hostage situation-written September 2nd 2011

I'm hiding in my bedroom. Seeing that on the digital page before me makes me shake my head in shame.

I'm 30 years old and I'm actually hiding in my bedroom. Thinking in the same thought patterns I did when I was grounded to my bedroom as a child.

If I went downstairs and didn't make a sound, could I get a book I want to read? 
If I made it to the living room, I could get to the pantry for a snack, what do I have in there? The kitchen is a no-go too risky for being spotted.

No there aren't members of ETA or the PKK in my house, there are however, children (which at times can be equally terrifying).

In December (right about the last time of the last entry) I left the dating circuit when I found someone who I didn't want to run away from screaming; or run right to my my computer to blog about. But this someone did have something that I said I'd always wanted, and had never had before... 3 kids.

Fast forward a few months and we started living together and I began working from home rather than spending 2 hours a day commuting to my office 70 miles north of where we live.

Since my bedroom is also my home office, it's off limits while I'm working and after working today I quietly shut down my computer, put away our laundry and sat down with my computer for the first time in 9 months.

It's not that I don't like the kids or that they aren't a lot of fun, they certainly can be, and when they say things like "what does meka leka high like a tiny ho mean?" (Peewee's Playhouse reference) or when the middle child asked when they pulled in to the parking lot of my office in Grand Forks N.D., (I work for a big .com company) "are we on the internet now?" my heart does kinda melt and along with  my composure.

I am now one of those people who starts conversations and changes the subject with the phrase "you'll never guess what the kids said or did today."

But along with the cute questions come the sassy attitudes when they don't like an answer and whining and crying and messes. Oh my yes, the messes. Tiny bits of paper all over the rest of the house because they get stuck to socks and then tracked to other rooms, not just the table where the cutting was done (and the paper and scissors still wait to be put away from).

Even if I saw the cutting take place, and scissors and paper in their hot little hands,  when it comes to picking up the mess, the response is the same "it's not mine." The wrappers from candy, the pieces of a Lego project, the hexbugs, the beads, it never ends, it winds up in every move of the house until it gets picked up through nagging or sheer exasperation by me or my boyfriend one way or the other the mess is created every day.

My room has become my safe haven, the one clean(ish) room in the house where I don't have to look at someone else's mess or listen to 'can I's' or 'I wants' and I don't have to hear the echo of my mother's voice in my own saying the same frustrated parental catchphrases I heard as a child... "It looks like you stirred your drawers with a stick," or "I'm going to stop buying these toys if you don't take care of them." or the one word that sums up the whole new experience...Karma.

Secret Moments

While in Rome, as the old adage goes, you do as the Romans do; while in Holland on the other hand, I discovered that doing as the Dutch do can lead to very funny miscommunications and awkward moments.

It's a bit of a sore point for me, (and maybe U.S. citizens in general?) that I don't speak any languages other than English and really weak French. But honestly, unless you have grandparents or parents who immigrated, there really is no opportunity to practice and perfect those skills and time and again I hear from people who did learn their other tongue elsewhere end up with archaic and passe vernacular. In other words, we're doomed to botch the language either way no matter what!

At any rate, I decided try and place an order at the take away facing my friend's apartment using the little Dutch that I had picked up in my three visits to the Netherlands. I approached the man behind the counter and said, "two koketten and two fries, thank you," realizing quickly that I didn't know how to say "one with mayonnaise and one without."

The man replied in Dutch and I had to explain that I had used the extent of my Dutch when I ordered. He laughed and asked what sauce I wanted to which I replied, "one with mayonnaise, and one with vinegar if you have it?" He laughed at me and said no, as if I had asked something really silly but then said, "but perhaps you would like curry sauce or peanut butter on your fries" continuing to giggle as he lowered the fries into the fryer.

I couldn't tell if he was making fun of ordering vinegar (which is very common in England by the way and tastes way better on fries than mayonnaise or ketchup in my opinion) or if he was in fact trying to say something else but it came out peanut butter instead of Thai peanut sauce or something.  I stood there with the best smile I could muster and waited for my order.

The two men who were eating had obviously heard my exchange and one of them had taken interest in the American who couldn't order her meal with the proper dressing. But not in my recollection of any experiences, foreign or domestic can I remember a more bizarre opening line than "What... is... your... secret moment?"

Very confused and slightly unnerved, I turned around and said, "excuse me?"

The guy behind me smiled (with a bit of food stuck to his front teeth) and said, "it's written on your bag."

I looked down and sure enough in no larger than 12 point font scrawled between the handles of my canvas bag from Victoria's Secret, was the line "what is your secret moment?"

Rather than make that connection between myself and the famous undergarment store or it's catalogue (which I'm sure are recognizable internationally) I casually replied with, "Oh it is? Huh, I don't know I got the bag for free," glossing over the awkward question hoping he wouldn't notice.

He replied, "It's your bag and you never look at it?"
"Nope." I said as the man behind the counter handed over my purchase, and I briefly nodded at the inquisitive man on my way out of the shop and said "bye" hoping that he wouldn't follow, which thankfully he didn't.

Snappy

Out downtown with a girlfriend and a few of her friends, I noticed this man in a white button down shirt who seemed to have a rather odd way of dancing. His left hand gripping his beer, his head tilted slightly to the side, he would hold his right arm at about eye level and begin snapping his fingers above the heads of the other dancers on the floor.
When the girl next to him turned around, obviously unnerved by how close his snapping had gotten to her head, he retracted his arm as if it were the cord of one of those self-winding vacuum cleaners and then casually took a sip of his drink.
I made the mistake of watching him repeat the act two or three times which prompted him to come over to our table and literally inch his way closer and closer to the tiny corner I was in between the sound booth, the wall and our table. Thankfully, my girlfriend and the other girls maintained their buffer zone until one of them had to pee and in the middle of rocking out to some classic 80's tune a hand few by the left side of my face with a *snap *snap.
Unfortunately, I couldn't ignore the first one and just gave him a strange look and the subsequent two I decided that since the look didn't work, maybe ignoring him would. It didn't. When one of the girls returns from the bathroom, she pulls this gentleman aside and starts talking to him. At which point, my girlfriend says, "Oh, no here we go," apparently the conversation I thought they were having (i.e. how that is NOT a good approach to meet women) was not the conversation they were actually having.
In a matter of moments the two were headed to the bar and by the end of the song she came back with a smile and a beer in hand as he continued to tag along behind her. She sat down at her chair and giving him a few further nods as he tried in vain to keep her attention and then she just started very blatantly ignoring him.
Now it's not that I had sympathy for the guy per se, he had been very rude and frankly quite stupid in his approach to introduce himself to any of the women at the bar, however, now he had been invited to our group and our area and the cost of his admission was one lousy drink.
When she got up to dance his attention turned back on me again and he asked, "why won't your pretty friend dance with me?" Of all the many colorful things that raced through my mind I politely said, "I don't know," and left it at that.
Eventually he did move back to the dance floor and resumed his snappy dancing, but this time he added another hand motion and began feeling women's backsides. After one or two women turned in repulsion and a brief conversation ensued in which the woman would walk off the dance floor utterly disgusted, he had finally found someone who left the dance floor with him. Two minutes later, the woman returned. Two minutes after that, so did he.
At the end of the night, I had been separated from my friends, they went out the front door, I went out the back, and it was via cell phone conversation that I found out where "snappy" had gone next. While my girlfriend was talking to me about our going out opposite doors, her very inebriated friend whom she was driving home began talking to someone who was trying to escort her down the street. When my friend approached a conversation ensued that was even more horrifying than any of "snappy's" previous behavior.  Disoriented and wanting to drunk dial ex boyfriends and go to after parties,  Snappy apparently told her that each of those actions were not good for her and that she needed to trust him and he would take care of her.
In a very understated and matter of fact approach, my friend simply asked, "Do you want to go home with him?" and with a vigorous shaking of her head 'no,' her worse for wear friend left Snappy to wander down Broadway alone.

Just Not That into Him

      Nearly every other commercial on TV seems to be for a dating website and there's a new one popping up practically every day it seems, each one claiming that their method of introducing potential partners is the best or most successful. It would seem that there are only so many ways to re-invent the wheel, but by adding more structured questions, interest inventories and hoops to jump through before talking to an actual person, the dating websites may indeed be different, but the result is sadly the same.
      My date on Monday night and I had been through the 4 rounds of structured 'get to know each other' emails, exchanged real email addresses and even phone numbers only to meet up at the coffee shop to discover that there was no spark between us. He had a good job but a serious lack of charisma. The guy before him was the exact opposite- tons of fun but no real goal or guarantee of stability.
      No matter what popular movies or media claim, that tingling feeling that you get when you meet someone you like cannot be manufactured or supplemented by common interests. Unfortunately, no matter how hard dating websites try to offer an alternative to organic meetings between two people and the creation of that spark, I fear that they'll never be able to establish real relationships or anything more that amusing dating stories.

Heather does dominatrix... badly

When I told one of my close friends this story over lunch her response was to shake her head and ask, "Why on Earth do you go and meet with these men?'

This isn't something I haven't asked myself a million times but the answer is fairly simple: curiosity. At first my blog was simply a way of conveying stories about funny situations to my friends but now I think of it as a kind of experiment in sexual anthropology. So when this guy contacted me a few months ago, it took a while for my confidence to build enough to match my curiosity.

Like many guys on online dating sites, it took all of two minutes for the conversation to gravitate towards sex, but this conversation was different, this chat bypassed kinky and took the fast track to freakville. He was into B.D.S.M. which stands for Bondage, Dominance and Sadomasochism.

Usually, I hear from people who like a little tie me/them up action or the occasional spanking or fingers tightening in the hair without severe pulling. However, this guy was different, his sexual palatte included sucking on toes, collars and leashes and other bodily fluids from pee to puke. Which is in large part why it took me months to actually meet with this guy at all.

Finally after a number of exchanges, including more mild and informal chatting, he wanted to make me more comfortable and offered me the reins... I would be the dominant... the dominatrix. Before taking him up on the offer, I said the pace had to be mine and that he already knew my limits when it came to bodily fluids, but that I would see how it went.

Then I got a text that nearly made me cancel. It read: "Can I wait for you naked in my collar and leash mistress?" Er... No. You can't. The idea of props and costumes (or lack there of) doesn't bother me as such but role play to me always feels silly.

I want to make sure that is perfectly clear, although much of my blog may seem judgmental, which in part let's be honest, it is, I don't think any of the people in my dating catalog are bad people, just that their approach or what turns them on is not what turns me on and the situations and conversations that we've had to establish that we weren't suitable for each other are rather funny to me (and hopefully to my friends).

Without going into too much detail, I tried my best to be a good dominatrix by de-humanizing and controlling this gentleman, however, I think I failed abysmally. Something about the idea of inflicting non-pleasurable pain or treating another human being as a toilet-even if they like it just didn't work for me, and unfortunately, I am no closer to understanding why or how it works for him and in that respect we were both left unsatisfied when I left.

Heather gives "Sexy" back

You have a new email from this guy on our dating website!

Every time I see those words I cross my fingers and remember that my e-dating profile provides me with great material to amuse my friends with even if that amusement is paired with utter disappointment that the single male population in my immediate area is clearly single for very obvious reasons.

The past few times that I've opened those emails, they've been one line and that one line goes something like this "hey sexy, what's up?" From 5 photos on my profile, which are in no way revealing, these gentlemen of various ages and ethnic backgrounds find it not only appropriate, but flattering to open the lines of communication with "hey sexy."

Now it's not that I'm offended, flattery is always in short supply and most certainly the sentiment is a welcome one. And it's not that the gentlemen are always unattractive to me, some of them are what I consider cute or handsome. But is that how they would approach me in a bar? Is that how they would address me if we met at a basketball game? If we met at some other venue than the internet? Probably not.

Not to mention that sexy is purely subjective, I personally find wit and intelligence more sexy in someways than physical appearance. If I find a man's mind sexy, it's easier to find the whole package sexier and the opposite is also true where he can be physically appealing but have the personality of a wet mop and then the whole thing is ruined.

It's totally a personal preference, but I like being called sexy in context. Whispering it in my ear when we enter a room and I'm made up and I feel sexy, or when we're in bed and in the midst of or done doing something sexy. But not as an opener, and not when I'm reading it in my pjs with bed hair or about to go teach, it's out of context and if they're older than my dad, it's just plain uncomfortable.

Application for dating me

Taking a page out of Tucker Max's book is only useful if you're out of wiping material, so I'm leaving all of those pages firmly fastened in his book and on his website. However, the whole "checklist" idea of what is appealing in a partner is kind of useful for those of us who are a little more choosy and try to avoid riding town bicycles or barflies who've already had their wings pulled off. If you're racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic or any kind of supremacist I don't want to know you let alone date you or sleep with you. If you have some other belief that compels you to try and convert others, knock on someone else's door. If you have what's referred to as "Peter Pan Syndrome," take your fairy dust and your game console and fly back to Neverland as fast as you can. If you have a totally distorted and unhealthy (and usually unwarranted) overly inflated ego and/or self perception, I hate to burst your bubble but... *pop*. If you have an annoying nasal and or squeaky voice I can promise you that I've thought of what it would sound like in bed and nothing not even duct tape and ear plugs would tempt me to sleep with you even if you looked like Clive Owen. 4 year degree required and higher education level strongly encouraged. If you have never been outside of the contiguous United States (or your own for that matter) you'd do better finding a girl from your hometown or the one just down the road. If you have no sex drive, you can only call me when you've gotten your engine overhauled. Alternatively, if you've got fixations on backdoor action, bondage, sharing, excretion, exhibitionist tendencies or anything else like that, you'd probably do better with a 1 900 number and a big bottle of Jergens than you would with me. If your motto is "it's not the size that counts..." I'll refer you to the whole breast size issue and then ask you if you really want to stick to your original statement. If your member has more bends than a paperclip, you may want to see someone about that and I mean a qualified medical professional, not me. If you can't remember the number of sexual partners you've had or if your bedroom has a revolving door is a revolving one, have fun with that, I won't. If your idea of foreplay is buying me dinner, you can stay in your car and head to the drive thru (and if your idea of buying me dinner involves a drive thru, keep on truckin). Quite obviously, I wouldn't tolerate violence towards me but I wouldn't tolerate it towards anyone else either. If you don't like beer I would say great more for me, but if it's "lite" or watery like most Domestics, more for you (unless you're up for trying the better beer the rest of the world drinks- in which case you just gained points) If you believe that the food groups are meat, potatoes, beer, candy and soda/pop we're going to have problems. If you spend more time on your hair than I do or in general look prettier than I do, you may want to find a more suitable companion. If you're desperately seeking wife/baby maker, you'll see a cloud of dust behind me that resembles that of the Roadrunner in Looney Tunes. Last but not least, if you do/have done any of the following consider yourself automatically disqualified: Been arrested Participated in competitive eating (aside from chubby bunny competitions) Do drugs Killed or maimed a person or animal (hunting is exempt) Donated money to a televangelist Voted for George W Bush Chew tobacco Been an extreme activist of any kind Believe that you are the messiah or if you were previously married to or otherwise entangled with me or someone I know