my weekend

First of all, if you want to know what I did on Sunday night, click here. I don't chew my cud twice.

Second of all, I had an eventful weekend, largely pleasant, occasionally harrowing. I was getting over a terrible cold that I got when I allowed a sick friend to cook me some tofu, and so mostly I lay around and mucillaged little religious scraps to the lid of a box, and sucked on the end of a pencil and looked pensive, and pretended that I did not promise the editor of a small publishing house specializing in erotic science fiction that I would write them a tiny novella in which Anais Nin, Bruce Campbell, and Sir Francis Drake would figure prominently. I also strummed indolently on this weird dulcimer that got left at my house the last time I had a big party.

On Saturday, after a lot of strumming and coughing and pencil-sucking, I went to a party hosted by some of Cromwell's literary friends, and Cromwell took a shower at my house first, which I thought was funny, but also nice, because I aim to be useful. At the party I hung around awkwardly and talked to a lot of scrawny interesting Harvard graduates & a couple of vapid girls and a very nice girl I knew pretty well from going to Bulgarian dance clubs with her and dancing with the same insane dervish as she did, who came very close to ripping my cardigan several times as he threw me against the floor and clawed me back up to my feet. I think she started dating him or something but now she wants to get into dating women. I don't know how one goes about dating women. I told her I would ask around amongst the lesbians I know but I only really knew about Iola and her stripper friends, with all their purple lipstick, and then some women I went to high school with.

Anyway, eventually it was 3 AM & I was unready to go to bed, but Cromwell had left with some sweet girl with kind of a mullet or shag or something and a cute T-shirt, and my other friend, Tess, was leaving too. I would have left with her, except that she wasn't walking anywhere in the direction of my apartment, and it was late, and I lived too close to get a cab, but too far to feel comfortable walking it alone in a paisley-patterned party dress and fishnet stockings and a pair of black shoes with holes in the soles. Of course what ended up happening was that I found someone who lived near my apartment to walk home with & for some reason he decided it was necessary that he kiss me, and I disagreed, and we had a lively debate about it for two hours in front of a third-rate Italian ice restaurant. Much logic was used that was very questionable, and many terrible hypotheticals were brought forth, and also we played hopscotch. He was very nice and spoke with a kind of inoffensive lisp like Crispin Glover in Back to the Future. He knew a lot about Ikea and the different names of all of the furniture lines there, and he persisted in calling me "foxy." I asked him to explain what specifically about me was foxy, and he said I had "very regular features."

This, dear reader, is where this guy wins. Regular features don't sound very poetic, but they're at the core of classic beauty, and if I have them Stephen has no right to say I'm not objectively beautiful. It's like saying a triangle with a 90-degree angle in it isn't objectively a right triangle. Right? Right? I rewarded Andy with a delighted smile and a masculine handshake, and the next day I looked at myself in the mirror and grinned a nice symmetrical smile. It was a ridiculously sunny day, so I put on a red linen sundress and little red sandals and a pair of enormous sunglasses and brought my research (Delta of Venus and a new essay on Sir Francis D. by some eminent historian) to the park, and read of privateers and privates under a little pink-blossomed tree, and felt pretty happy and pretty productive and pretty pretty.

Of course you know what happened. After I had packed up my things, and freshened my lipstick, and put on a little pearled cardigan against the cooling breeze, and was walking airily past some wrought-iron gate and some stone cougar, a hand caught my wrist and I was spun around and my name was pronounced and it was Stephen, carrying a thick book and wearing a newsboy hat and absurdly wheeling a bicycle.

"I'm so happy to have run into you!" he said.

Behind my closed mouth, I licked my teeth clean of lipstick. "Yes, I'm sure you are," I said.

He said it was wonderful to see me and why wouldn't I return his phone calls? I laughed gaily and made some gesture with my hand in the air. He looked very, very, very handsome, which I resented enormously.

He said that it was really necessary that I come and have a cup of coffee with him. I said I would take a walk around the edge of the park, if he wanted, and that I didn't really drink coffee, so we did, and he insisted upon holding my hand, and I resisted, but it seemed very natural to walk around with him and I allowed him to fasten blossoms of all shapes and colors in my hair and in the buttons of my cardigan and to pass his hand possessively across my shoulderblades and to recite little cryptic verses. I allowed this because I was thinking about my regular features and how irreproachably, incontestably regular they were. I decided he must have finally realized I was beautiful, because he was staring at me kind of worshipfully and grinning with pleasure when I screwed up the regular corner of my regular little red mouth or when I fluttered my regular eyelids or wrinkled my regular nose. Therefore I permitted him to buy me a large milky tea in a cafe, and eventually I looked the other way when he was vaguely playing with my hands, which lay mostly flat on the table near his. It was very nice & sent little secret thrills up to my shoulders.

"So this guy I met last night says I have regular features," I announced.

"Well, you certainly do," said Stephen affectionately, reaching across the table to sort of pluck at my nose.

"You know, regular like in a Jane Austen novel, like pleasing and harmonious."

"Yes, I know what that means, I've read a couple of books," he said, and chuckled, and squeezed my hands.

"So you admit," I said triumphantly, "that I am not objectively unbeautiful."

"Oh, geez. Are you still thinking about that?" he said.

I said I was.

"Listen, I really thought that maybe now you could handle the fact that I adore you totally even though you're not beautiful," he said. "You need to stop thinking of love in terms of beauty, it's just unhealthy."

I spat into his coffee cup and walked out, leaving lots of little petals in my wake.

There is no accounting for taste.

Posted by anonymousblonde at avril 15, 2003 02:51 AM