one sharp broad sex, boys & snark

Save it till the morning after

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a messy studio apartment in the Richmond making out with an almost middle aged white dude. I hadn’t engaged in this kind of thing in quite some time and trust me, this broad needed a fix. We met at a friend’s party at the tail end of it and the pick up was so fast I barely remember it (seriously, don’t ask me, I don’t remember).

In any case, the following morning, I braced myself for the typical sobering post hook-up awkwardness, that same conversation I’ve had so many times before: what are you doing today, that was fun, damn was I drunk, I usually don’t use Craigslist for this kind of thing, etc.

This particular morning after conversation would take the cake. Laying in bed next to me he says: “I wonder if anyone saw me leave with you. That wouldn’t be very good for my reputation, after the whole vegansexual thing.” “Vegansexual?”, I ask. “Yeah”, he says. I just wrote about vegansexuality for my column.” I laughed. He was being 100% serious. (For those of you who aren’t familiar, a “vegansexual” is a vegan who only has sex with other vegans. Me = not vegan. )

He was so serious that a while later, over cups of green tea, brewed for just the right amount of time (naturally, he was too good for coffee) he showed me the article. It has since been posted online, and I was able to get my most favorite passage:

Non-vegetarian bodies,” said one female subject, “(are) literally sustained through carcasses – the murdered flesh of others.” If you really are what you eat, then the body of a meat eater is, as one vegan commentator put it, “kind of a graveyard for animals.” You don’t need to be a certified sexpert to appreciate that some vegans would be turned off by the thought of exchanging bodily secretions (like sweat, spit, scents, and…well, you get the picture) with such walking culinary cemeteries.

I’ve always thought of myself as an adorable beacon of adorableness wrapped in a black hoodie and smelling faintly of dark chocolate, espresso, and sunflowers (or bourbon, but it depends on the time of day) but I guess “walking culinary cementary” works, too. The fact that he went so far as to show me the piece was off-putting. Why did he even invite me back here when the first thing I slurred at him was : “I’m totally NOT vegan, dude!”?

The kicker, however was really at the end:

Yet I persist in hoping because the heart wants what it wants, and I know, in my heart, that I want to be with someone with whom I can enjoy the ineffably unique bond that only exists in the coupled soul of two deeply bonded vegan lovers.

Except for you know, that unique bond that is shared between two hammered people at a party who talk to each other for 10 minutes and then decide to go home together. I mean, I get it. A drunk ho is a drunk ho whether or not she stuffs her face with goat cheese and fried chicken or Teese and Boca Burgers but if a dude can rise above eating steaks, can’t he rise above the call of easy sex? I guess he can say that while his brain is vegan, his dick was merely vegan-flexible.

(Editor’s note: I thought about linking back to the article in this piece a couple of times, but decided that it wasn’t cool to call him out like that since I rarely use names when referring to dudes on this blog. Those of you who know who I am talking about, will know and those of you who don’t, will just have to find it your own way.)

Maybe he’s the one.

5 years ago, I broke my foot. I was on an epic bender with a guy I had met on online. I couldn’t even look at a bottle of gin in a healthy way for a year. I remember going into the bathroom of a crappy Thai restaurant he had taken me to in the Tenderloin, looking at myself in the mirror and thinking “You can do this. Man up. Don’t puke. You’re gonna get through this night.”

I didn’t puke, but instead ended up breaking my foot and needing surgery the next day. During my 6 weeks of being bed-ridden, I communicated with many a fellow on Craigslist. One in particular, would call me late at night and try to get me to come over to his warehouse in the Bayview. He would tell me stories about how him and his friends would get into constant bar fights, which I guess were supposed to turn me on, but instead just made me like him less and less. The final straw came when in one of his bouts of convincing me to go over there, he told me that he could just “fuck me and then never talk to me again” because he was you know, that strong and powerful. A true charmer and romantic.

So anyway, around that time I was given the go-ahead to start walking again, so I stopped talking to him. A few years later, the bastard emerges on Yelp, starting fights about vegans and hippies and homeless people. There was one particularly heinous, racist thread he started about the Mission. He was still using the same photos, so I e-mailed him asking if he remembered me and then claimed not to. I let it go.

Yesterday, I got an email from him on OKCupid. He still doesn’t remember me, becuase this is what he said:

I’m perplexed, because there is nothing in my profile that says I want to fuck random guys with strap-ons. I’ve always thought of that as an activity you do on your wedding night, or when you are in a real relationship (I guess I am just a prude). While the offer was tempting, I had to turn him down. But this being our third run in on the Internets in 5 years, I’m starting to think: maybe he’s the one. Maybe I’m just resisting what is clearly my soul mate. What do you fools think?

Where You Can Find Me These Days

The group blog I was alluding to in a previous entry is going full steam ahead, motherfuckers! I still can not part with my domain name, so they are living on a sub-domain for now, but DO check them out and DO add them to your RSS reader:

The Sharp Broads 

If you can not figure out RSS like 98% of the Internet, add them to your Twitter list — that twitter account is automatically updated with the new posts.

If you can’t get enough of me me me, I’ve jumped on the Tumblr bandwagon. They should also be posting here, but of course, my plug-in isn’t working, so I’ll get to fixing that soon. If you need me now (and really, who doesn’t?) , click on through to my Tumblr 

And of course, you can always get me on that glorious time-suck, Twitter.  Any questions?

Words To Live By

Once again, Tracie Egan/Slut Machine of Jezebel and One D At A Time knocks it out of the motherfuckin’ park with her latest entry. I’ll let you go read it for yourself because it’s poignant and wonderful but I will tell you something that really stuck with me:

“Anyway, I’m so over not writing because other people would prefer it that way. Not writing about what happens to me isn’t going to make people love me, in the same way that writing about it isn’t going to render me unlovable for the rest of my whore-y life. “

I totally hear where she’s coming from, since being single for the last year or so, I’ve often thought that my Internet presence would be intimidating to people and how no one would ever want to date me because I write about my life in a pretty honest way. And I have experience with this: I’ve totally gotten in trouble for my online journal before. In high school, when I was a little asshole I would complain about my friends (somehow thinking that they would be okay with this? Not sure why.) and I got in trouble. My internet boyfriend, who I met because he emailed me through my journal would get extremely upset when he would read me complaining about him without uh, talking to him first. I got a little better, until I got to college and my roommates had a “house meeting” with me and one of them said she would sue me for slander and it was so traumatic that the only thing I won’t talk about on my blog is housemates. Never again. I also won’t talk about paying work in a public forum, unless it’s in passing but you won’t find any kind of talk about my old employers on the Internet. It’s not worth it. Even now I won’t say it, mostly because it is boring.

However, boys: fair game. Last summer, I got into trouble with VPG over a post I wrote and the Ex got mad at me when I directed my rage towards him getting into a new relationship a week after our break up into a review of his place of work. He wrote me an extremely polite email about how customers were asking him what the drama was. I have since changed it, although I still mention that he works there, but not by name.

My most recent snafu with dragging someone into my treacherous world was of course, Married Dude. Initially, because I didn’t want him to hate me, I wasn’t going to write about it at all and just keep the whole thing off the Internets. But after the weird STD e-mail and after his wife started blowing up my blog stats AND she left a comment on one of my Flickr photos, there was no way I could keep that to myself. And even THAT post, in its confession type way, doesn’t even say that much. There are no real specific details there. The only people who know who it is are the people involved. That entry could literally be about anyone. I half expected him to write me and tell me to take it down, but I think we all knew (me, him, the wife) that denial was futile, we all knew what happened, why cover it up?

What I didn’t tell you guys was that she wrote to me a week after I posted that, asking me to elaborate on something I said, using his dummy email account. I’m almost certain that it was her and not him, because I’m pretty sure he is never even allowed to utter the name “Maria” ever again in this lifetime, much less compose an email to me. I wrote back a one sentence reply.

The e-stalking from her has stopped for the most part. I caught her the other day (I think that IP address is basically ingrained into my memory, like Hurly’s numbers from LOST) and it made me a little sad to think of her still looking on here. The whole thing is going to make a spectacular short story one day.

Anyway, the point, dear readers, is being scared to write the truth never got anyone anywhere. There is so much bullshit on the Internet already, why continue to perpetuate it?

New Developments

So, I’ve decided to try my hand at being an editor, rather than sole contributor of this blog, and am going to be transitioning to a group format in the next week. Right now, the biggest snafu is getting Wordpress MU up & running since that seems to be the best option to have multiple authors. However, it’s been nothing but a big, gigantic headache. When I am posting for help on the support forum, things have gotten pretty bad. So, I am looking into some alternatives namely Typepad & Movable Type. I’m not quite ready to pay just yet and I certainly don’t have money to pay for a 300 dollar MT4 lisence, so hopefully I can get something up and running soon. Oh yeah, and I want it to look good.

I’ve tried Drupal (didn’t like it) and Nucleus (it’s okay, but it doesn’t give me a warm/fuzzy feeling).

The focus of the blog will stay the same, instead I am going to be joined by some pretty fantastic contributors, some who are my close friends and others who I roped in via Craigslist. The one thing we all have in common is that we will soon be wooing you with our skills.

I Ain’t Got Time For This!

Remnants of a pathetic dating life, the latest sad tale: I got a message on Myspace (yeah, I know) from a fellow expressing interest. I checked out his profile and he seemed like a new version of my ex-boyfriend, which is why I will now call him Joe 2.0. Except it’s more like buggy Joe 1.2 BETA. He was similar to my ex but as I began to talk to him, I saw he was missing a few key components, namely charm of any kind and ability to hold a conversation without asking obvious questions (one of my biggest dating peeves, do not ask me what I like to do for fun, you insipid dumb ass!)

So, we started talking on IM and things were okay. It wasn’t that terrible. He was a writer and I liked that.  He didn’t really seem to Get It (or you know, get me) but some people aren’t good on the Internet/over IM. I’m not one to waste too much time with constant Internet communication (add me to your buddy list after we have sex, plz), so I suggested meeting.   On the day that we were supposed to meet, I get an IM from him at 5AM (he sends this while I am asleep/idle) saying it’s too soon and he can’t do it. Okay, fine. That’s fair.

A few days later, he suggests we meet again. I say okay, but he can pick the time & the place. He totally flakes, doesn’t contact me and I sent him an email asking exactly what happened and he responds saying that he messaged me but I didn’t respond and how he called me and I didn’t call him back. Which is all utter bullshit as I’m on Instant Messenger on my Sidekick almost all of the time. Of course, genius doesn’t think to send me a message on Myspace or you know, leave a voicemail or a text. And then he says that I was giving him “mixed messages.

Of course, I did not learn and kept talking to him. Working from home can get boring sometimes. What can I say?

And where are we today? He totally flaked on me again, on tentative plans to hang out during the day. I sent him a message on Myspace yesterday asking where to meet and I can see that he read the message but hasn’t responded. I’m sure he’ll respond tonight about how he tried to send me a message through some magical tubes and somehow I didn’t get them.

Anyway, that’ll teach me to respond to inquiries sent over Myspace. My next romantic relationship will be born on a more respectable social networking site, like Twitter (add me, please!)

Blind Leading the Blind

I haven’t written here in a while. There are a few reasons: I hit a saturation point with media and had to step away from a while. And another reason, my business has been busy and I’ve been spending a lot of my internet time actually working, when not worrying about working. How do you go from total social time wasting slacker to power-driven one woman web shop? You find something you actually give a shit about. Working on websites makes sense because this is how I see the world, most of the time.

And finally, the last point - how to write a blog on relationships and sex when you have almost zero interest in either? As the brilliant Liz in LA states, I’m not into dating because I’m not built for dissapointment. And that’s all I see dating as right now: complete and utter dissapointment. I realize that this attitude sets me up for failure, if you’re not open to it, then it won’t happen. If you immediately expect everyone to let you down, then they probably will. But, how to get out of that cycle?

What am I looking for anyway? I am not a Scary Sadshaw desperately looking for a husband to take me away to some suburb and my hot slut days are most defenitely behind me, at least not in the way that most people treat it, the way most people think that sex is either casual and heartless or has to be completely associated with “being in love”. This is the reason most people can’t do “friends with benefits”, any indication you have any kind of feelings for the person completely fucks it up. And why — why can’t you love someone, have sex with them but not be constricted to the traditional version of a relationship?

And that’s the next thing — I worked very hard after my breakup to build my own life. I started dating my ex when I had only lived here for a year, was barely 22, and my entire social life revolved around my then best friend and her friends, who were all wonderful people, but still: not my people, they were hers. Dating was my only way to meet people outside the circle. And so, Joe became my anchor and my history. When it was over, I needed to build something new and I did. Sure, I spent the first half of 2007 in a drunken stupor, but I have come out of that with some solid friends and some good experiences.

The point is, I’m not the 21 year old girl who is willing to let anyone into my head, my pants or my heart again so easily. It’s no longer about me fitting in with them, but them fitting in with me. I’m much more protective of my life now, because I have so much more to be protective of.

But still: I find myself missing being around you know, dudes. I miss the way they carry over 1,000 keys on their belt loops on their jeans. I miss asexual smelling soap. I miss covertly getting them into shit that is mostly straight girl and gay guy territory like Sex and The City or Project Runway. I miss hoodies under Dickies jackets and getting cigarettes lit for me. I miss concave boy hips and unmanicured nails and having a larger t-shirt collection from which to choose from.

There’s a lot of things to miss. I just need to find someone who is worth letting in.

Puppies & Kittens

The amount of ugliness on the Internet this week really got to me, starting with the insane level of ignorance surrounding the coverage of the Spitzer case (thank god for Amber Rhea for being a source of sanity) and ending with an incident involving a friend of mine. My friend got her picture posted on a blog and ended up getting shitty troll comments in return on shit like the state of her bathroom and on the fact that she dare take a picture with her iPhone. I’m as snarky as the next bitch, but have we reached a point in which we can’t communicate without saying anything mean? Even I have a limit with this - which is why I don’t read comments on Consumerist and why I limit my consumption of Gawker and Ohnotheydidnt, because even I can not stand to participate in this culture of non stop bitchiness 24 hours a day.

In any case, this entry is about nice things, partly inspired by the above and by the discovery of Mindy Kaling’s (better known as Kelly from The Office) adorable blog. So, here is a list of things I enjoy, without irony and without subtext.

1. Listening to This American Life

I broke my ankle last summer and it pretty much changed my life in a variety of ways. For one, I finally got on the Ira Glass bandwagon. I devoured most of the archives in one month, which are all wonderfully available on their site. . Right now I subscribe to the podcast and what I like to do is not listen to it for a month and then go on a TAL binge and listen to them all over the course of an evening. It’s so satisfying. The only contributor I skip through is Sarah Vowell, because I can not stand the sound of her voice. I’ve tried. I can’t do it. My favorite contributor is Scott Carrier.

2. Look up hideously expensive bags on neimanmarcus.com like this one, which, at 940.00 is not THAT expensive (for a designer bag, I guess), but is truly, delightfully fugs:

Check out that tiger!!!

3. American Apparel hoodies. No article of clothing gives me as much joy as a hoodie from American Apparel. They are wonderful because they are comfortable but because it is AA and everything is in the hoochie cut, a girl can wear them and not look like all shapeless. Here, I will demonstrate:

4. Quorn patties!

I’m an omnivore but I absolutely hate cooking meat. It’s expensive and tedious and takes forever and I’d rather pay someone else to do it. So when I eat at home, I basically live off of vegetarian convenience food. I will murder a bitch for a Quorn patty, which is some kind of weird fungus that makes really awesome fake chicken patties (read more here), much better than that crap Morningstar Farms I lived on when I was in college. I like to eat them with a pound of avocado on top and some Alexia fries on the side or maybe some sweet potatoes. Or, if I’m feeling creative, with some stir fried mushrooms. And if I am lucky enough to be graced with its presence, some Wildwood Garlic Aioli.

5. Coffee

(Photo snagged from Flickr user Inapond )

A few weeks ago, I got a cup of coffee after dinner at Ad Hoc, where they serve you your very own French Press. I poured the coffee and immediately pulled out my phone to photograph the crema that had appeared on the top. A guy at our table seemed totally perplexed as to why I was attempting to capture the coffee and not say, any of the four course meal we had just had. He asked me why I was taking a picture, and I said: “because this is the most beautiful thing in the world.”

What are things you think are the most beautiful thing in the world?

Honest to Blog, Dudes

Jezebel, I love you but you’ve got to edit this entry on how unprotected anal sex is "safer" than unprotected vaginal sex. Simply not true. Don’t believe the lies! A few of the commenters noticed this, but who knows how many people wont click through and will mis-spread this information? I’m posting this here so you don’t have to read through the comments which are unbelievably tedious. I realize I’m guilty of it too, but why is everyone de-generating into weird slangy-Diablo Cody cutesy talk? How many euphemisms for anal sex can a person take?

Anyway, the Spitzer story is boring to me. I’m not surprised at all that a powerful and wealthy man would see a prostitute for some no strings attached sex rather than have a free mistress (the latter is far more likely to spill). 

I’m much more interested in the fate of the women who were working for the Emperor’s Club - what will happen to "Kristen"? Is her whole life going to be torn apart now, too?

Also, if you’re into primary sources, as I am, check out the write up on Radar which includes a link older version of the Emperor’s Club website and of course, the actual court papers at my old favorite, The Smoking Gun.  

I <3 Amy Poehler

I’m sick and feeling like a fraud tonight, but this video of Amy Poehler as Project Runway’s Christian is making me happy. It’s not really that funny, but I love it anyway.FIERCE!