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Affection

Somewhat Damaged

Now you all can see that I was actually productive these past few years. Comments/criticisms welcomed/appreciated. (You need Quicktime in order to watch the videos.)

So I put up a personals ad on Craigslist last Wednesday. I was feeling depressed and lonely due to my break-up with Jennifer, and after talking with her on Tuesday and gauging her interest in getting back together (or at least having a friends with benefits relationship) and determining she didn't want any part of it, I decided to take matters into my own hands and throw a line into the water. It was actually a pretty well-written ad, especially in comparison to the mindless inanities proffered by most jackasses. I did it in the style of a tabloid magazine article, writing in the third person, referring to myself as a renowned filmmaker and including the pic of myself where I'm walking off the plane and waving to a cadre of my off-camera fans.
And the response was tremendous. I'm not used to having a choice when it comes to girls but there are 3 who I've maintained e-mail conversations with. One of them is a 32-year-old Puerto Riqueno and an ex-lawyer; the other is 25 and teaches at a school for the deaf and blind. The last one is the cream of the crop, the first girl to actually excite me in 4 years. Her name's Rachel, she's 23, and she's an artist. She provided me with a link to a website containing samples of her paintings and she's really talented. She majored in media arts at the University of Arizona and had a desire to be a screenwriter until she became disillusioned following a stint with a local production company last year. She is a terrific writer, though, as her Myspace blogs could attest. (They were entertaining, at least.)
Even though I've got my mind set on Rachel, I've continued my correspondence with the other girls because I never have faith that things are going to work out quite like I expect them to and I want to have as many options available to me as possible. This seemed to be a great idea earlier in the week when Rachel went 5 days without responding to my last e-mail. I'm one of those neurotic types where if I know that someone's been on-line and they haven't responded to my e-mails, I wonder if they're angry with me or trying to avoid me. And so I could see that she'd been visiting Myspace all week but she wasn't writing back to me. In the past, that would've really gotten me down, but since I had the other two girls to write to, I didn't lose any sleep over it. I did write a quick note to her on Wednesday, wondering if her boss was working her half to death, and she managed to respond to that. She had been busy since last I wrote. She mentioned, however, that she was going to be meeting a friend of hers at Kon Tiki, a popular bar in Tucson, sometime this week and was wondering if I'd be interested in joining them. Of course I said yes and we made tentative plans for Friday.
Friday came and went and I didn't hear from her. I wrote to Heather, the 25-year-old teacher, to see if she'd be interested in meeting for drinks on Saturday. Since Jen's been gone, it's been a while since I last got laid and I was looking to end that streak this weekend.

My Saturday didn't go according to script. I got up early and took my car in to get an oil change and my serpentine belt replaced -- I found out earlier this week that mine is the car we'll be driving to Coachella after all. My entire morning ended up being spent there as they took 2 and a half hours before working on my car. I let my aggravation be known and they took $15 off the cost, which brought the total to ~$95. While I was there, I received a call from Gabi, this producer I've worked with in the past. She was helping out on a University of Arizona student project and a couple people had flaked out on helping them and she was wondering if I'd be available to assist on today's shoot. I didn't have any concrete plans and it had been a while since I was on a set, so I said okay. It was actually a lot of fun, and the first time since 2002 that I worked on a movie I wasn't the director of. I absorbed everything, observing the way people were talking to one another, assessing whether I'd make a different call on how to shoot a particular scene, etc. They were definitely students and this project is going to be pretty shit, but it was good to be in that environment again. And as unsociable as I may be, and was at the beginning, I warmed up as time went on and struck up conversations with a few people. It may not seem like the grandest accomplishment but I used to have panic attacks in public, so anytime I demonstrate progress from that sort of anxiety, it's quite the triumph. What was especially emboldening was that two of the conversations I struck up were with these beautiful girls working on the movie. I was hoping to make even better inroads with them at the wrap party I heard rumored about, but I ended up having to leave before I got official word on where that was happening.
So I got home and there was a message awaiting me from Rachel. "Would you like to meet at Kon Tiki at 10:30 tonight?" She gave me her phone number and told me to call or text her. I called and left her a message. She texted me right back, saying that we were on. I got fucking excited. I cleaned up whatever messiness there was in my house, anticipating her coming by later on, and took a shower. There was still an hour to kill till we were supposed to meet so I checked the other messages in my inbox and saw that Heather had written. She was interested in meeting tonight but I put her on the back-burner. Perhaps tomorrow if things with Rachel didn't work out tonight?
I'm perpetually early and I know it makes me seem too eager probably so I did my best to get there late. I left my house at 10:20 and arrived at Kon Tiki at...10:28. Goddamn it. I texted Rachel that I was there and she wrote back that she was on her way. I sat in my car listening to my New Young Pony Club CD, trying to calm my nerves and observing the Pacific Islander girl smoking by the Tiki head and the douchebags with cowboy hats standing beside her. I looked in my rear view mirror at every car passing behind me, wondering if that was Rachel. Rick and Rachel -- I think my parents once toyed with the notion of naming my sister Rachel so that our names would be similar. (They decided on Maricela.) At 10:38, I received another text from her. "I'm sorry. I can't do this. You're probably going to think I'm a horrible person."
As I started to type my response, I got a call from my friend Milly. She and her friend Michelle were going to a gay bar to watch a drag show that Michelle's friend was appearing in. I told her what had just happened, that my plans for the evening had suddenly opened up, and got directions from her so I could meet them in 20 minutes. I got off the phone with Milly and called Rachel, getting her voice mail again. I left her a pleasant message, telling her I didn't think she was horrible and that I wasn't upset or angry. I was disappointed, sure, but I could understand if she was nervous or shy. Perhaps some other night? The big difference in my reaction, from what I would have done in the past, was that I didn't think it meant there was a deficiency in me. She's an artist and made reference to being crazy in her very first e-mail to me -- she is probably fucking NUTS. And that's fine, crazy girls need lovin', besides the fact they're probably the only ones who'd want to have anything to do with me. But that wouldn't bother me because a girl who's mentally unstable is the only kind I can see myself having any sort of attraction to -- stability is alien to me.
From reading her blogs, I know she broke up with a boyfriend in December. Perhaps she had her heart broken and is still trigger-shy in getting into another relationship because of her fears of being hurt yet again? She's stunning in her pics on Myspace, and after I made mention of how beautiful she is, she remarked back that those pics are from her gym rat days, that she isn't "nearly thin now." She wrote that she's not always fine with her appearance as it presently stands but that she's gotten to be okay with it for the most part. So perhaps she's insecure that I'll be appalled by how she looks now and she didn't want to face that potential rejection tonight after all? Or perhaps she's really big into the zodiac and checked out the compatibility of Scorpios (her) and Pisces (me) and ascertained that they are not romantically compatible. Whatever the case is, it is very likely her issue, not something to do with me. And the fact that I can entertain that thought speaks volumes of how far I've come.

So I drove across town and met up with Milly at the Yard Dog, which is an unusual name for a gay bar. Some black transvestite prostitute looked me up and down as I was going inside. The drag show going on was pretty pathetic, although I suppose that isn't saying much as most drag shows are. Attendance was abysmal and the drag queens were na-a-a-sty. I ordered myself a Long Island and downed it fairly quickly. We talked about going to another bar, the Oliver Twist. Milly's been fucking one of the bartenders who works there and he tends to hook us up with free drinks when we go in. The night was 180 degrees from where I was expecting it to be just 20 minutes earlier so I was anxious for the change of scenery.
We left the Yard Dog and drove to the Oliver Twist, where Milly had a sudden existential crisis. Apparently things aren't exactly cheery in Fucking Oliver Twist Bartender Town and she worried that he would feel like she was "stalking him." I told her she was being silly and we all went inside. She continued being silly, refusing to go into the main bar area even though she would have to if she wanted to use the restroom (which she said she had to, badly). I volunteered to go ahead and make sure the coast was clear. The offending bartender was nowhere to be found and I reported to her as such. She still refused to go any further in. I ordered myself a 7 and 7 and quickly surveyed the crowd to see if there were any potential one night stands. There weren't. I went back to where Milly and Michelle were hiding and told her to stop acting like a 12-year-old. She got mad that I wasn't sympathetic to her nervousness and threw it back at me, saying that I was the pot calling the kettle black. I reminded her that I'm not the 30-year-old, she is, and that despite whatever anxieties I've experienced with lovers in the past, it isn't important how you've responded to obstacles before but how you learn and grow from those experiences that demonstrates your character. I've never had a relationship where I was reluctant to even be in the presence of a person I had been fucking and professed to not have any feelings for, which further repudiated the criticisms she attempted to levy against me.
I suggested that we go to a different bar since she was being such a fucking child but she no longer felt like being out in public so she and Michelle decided to call it a night. It was fucking 12 o'clock and my plans for an exciting Saturday evening had been completely shot to hell. Sure, I could've tried to hit a bar on my own, but I know how well I fare in those environments, and I was already feeling pretty damn pessimistic about the female gender, so I didn't think I'd be terribly effective in convincing someone to let me stick my penis inside of her tonight. So here it is, 1:23 am and I'm writing this e-mail. As the subject heading says, fuckin' bitches, yo.

Been dating 2 girls for the past couple weeks. One is named Heather -- she's 25 and works as an instructor's aid at a school for the deaf and blind. The other is Mabel, a 32-year-old from Puerto Rico who used to be a lawyer and is getting her master's at the U of A. Both responded to an ad I placed on Craigslist and really compelled my interest with the chemistry we had via correspondence. Mabel stayed over on Friday night -- we watched There Will Be Blood and got 2 hours of sleep. Last night, Heather and I played Scene It and I spent the night. While Heather and I were out to breakfast this morning, Mabel sent me a text asking if I'd like to come over for dinner; I'll be leaving for her house in 20 minutes or so. It's an embarrassment of riches I'm finding myself in right now, although it is certainly hitting my pocketbook kind of hard (doling out $50+ in dinners/drinks in consecutive nights, when I've got Coachella coming up this weekend). I know that this cannot be maintained because I can already sense feelings in both girls developing for me and I don't want to be an asshole, which I'm afraid may already be too late. I've made no promises to either of them but I feel like the stronger connection is with Mabel. If you had told me back in 2000 that I'd one day be in this position, I would've thought you were certifiably mental. Talk about progress, eh?