Flotsam

First of all, while I am trying to give this whole wonky herbal medicine thing a chance—the Chinese have been doing this for centuries! NAD assures me—I am having difficulty swallowing it. Literally. I cannot help but wonder why, if the Chinese have been doing this for centuries, they haven’t yet figured out a way to make the pills taste like, say, bacon, instead of festering rat corpse garnished with a soupcon of wheatgrass. Perhaps if they had spent a bit less time building that “great” wall, and a bit more time developing a pill capsule made from sesame chicken, I wouldn’t have to retch indelicately each time I take my medicine.

But on to happier things: it seems that someone reads this godforsaken blog and liked it enough to nominate me for an award.* For Best Writing, no less. Best Writing! Miss Rothschild is furious. As the last thing I won was honorable mention in a fire safety poster contest held by my elementary school (girl with pigtails, screaming, house on fire in background—some of my best work) I am, understandably, thrilled. If you like (she says coyly) you may vote for me here. Or not—but either way, you should go and look at the list of nominees, as you are bound to find some delightful new blogs to read.

Now, I realize I have been quite lax about answering the excellent questions you put to me some time ago. So I will answer another of them now.

Q: Thalia, from England, wants to know how I met the Nearly:

A: Well, once upon a time, I was drunk unoccupied and tooling about the internet, as I am wont to do. I was on a website reading an article about a nightclub when there, in the sidebar, was an advertisement for said website’s personals section.
Single people, in your area! It promised. Single people: Lovely to look at, Delightful to know! Or some such.
Now, I had been unimpressed with my previous online dating experience. That matching service had mostly matched me with military men pictured standing in front of rippling American flags (was this because the “matchers” sensed I needed a firm hand? I suppose we’ll never know). Anyway, it wasn’t the military I had a problem with so much as the fact that my matches’ hobbies were primarily “ropes courses” whilst mine were “reading things” and “eating fondue.”
The point being, it is only because I was very, very drunk unoccupied that I clicked on the link next to the nightclub article I was reading and browsed through the profiles.
And there he was—the Nearly, giving me a bewildered look and telling me that he was a graduate student, aged 20-something. I cannot remember exactly what his profile said, but it must have been good, because I wrote him an email that instant. It was Fate! Intuition! I thought to myself.
Unfortunately, Salon.com would not relay any message unless I created a profile of my own.
I quickly did so.
They then informed me I could send him an electronic “wink,” the mere thought of which I found mortifying. It had to be a proper email, and so I paid twenty dollars right then to become a full fledged member, and pressed send.

Whatever I wrote must not have been too unappealing because he wrote back the next day. And then I wrote back to him.
This went on for approximately 48 hours before the Nearly invited me to a reading he was giving.
Fate! Intuition! my mind buzzed at me as I got ready to leave my apartment.

The Nearly scarcely spoke to me all evening. We exchanged awkward pleasantries, sat next to each other as the other readers read their goddamn stories, then went out for drinks with his friends. He continued to more or less ignore me, so I chatted up a storm with the people on my other side. Oh, how I laughed, gaily! Oh, how I tossed my obviously-not-attractive-enough-for-some-people hair!
Afterwards, the Nearly drove me back to my car.
“So,” I said. So much for “Fate.” I thought, So much for “Intuition.”
“So,” quoth the Nearly.
“Well do you want my number?” I snapped at him.
“Yes,” he said.
I scribbled it down and got out of the car.

As I drove home, I shook my head in disgust. Well, I’ll never hear from him again. What a waste of time.

Two days later, the Nearly called. It turns out he’s rather shy. And–well, he was a bit overwhelmed by how much he liked me.

Of course, he maintains that he was “bold” during those initial phases of our courtship. Generally I fail to suppress a guffaw when he says this.
“I invited you to my reading, didn’t I?” he will say, defensively. “I called you, even after you spent the whole night talking to those other people sitting next to you.”
And I suppose he does have a point, there.

Curiously, I never did tell my family how we actually met, knowing my mother would rather kill me herself than have me do anything so uncouth as answer a personal ad. They still think the Nearly picked me up in a coffee shop. Boldly.

UPDATED: Okay, I just got another hit from that search I mentioned in my last post. Was this one of you? The searcher was from England–is there a large population of forest fornicators in England?
I’m scared–Hold me.

*See that fetching box in the sidebar? The one that took me over an hour to install due to my lack of technical know-how? It will take you to the awards website, where one can vote for bloggers in a passel of categories. Share the love, won’t you?