I knew it!

Dependent variable: Will he call? (yes/no)
Independent variables:
He_Said: Did he say he would call? (yes/no)
Predate: Number of pre-date contacts (#)
Cost: Cost of date ($)
Bases: Level of intimacy during the date (bases)
Interest: His estimated interest level during the date (5 point Likert scale)


























.

Sepak takraw is pretty incredible too.

I wrote that big long post, but it was boring anyway. I just watched the Smooth E ad campaign from Thailand, which is so super great. In the first one, they filmed my conversation with Sean! Seriously, it’s like there were cameras in the room. In the second one, she turns all pretty and girlie. I haven’t gone to that kind of trouble yet, because I am still hoping to win gentlemen over with my huge vocabulary and my fine, fine prose. But now I understand the process! If I do find an mtf transexual to show me how to be a girl and track you down to the sepak takraw court, I fully expect you to walk by your soon-to-be ex-girlfriend to pick a pink rose for me. I can’t wait for part three, when we go everywhere with balloons. I would never faint at the end, though, unless maybe the girl clothes are constricting my breath. Part four went well too, but my guy friends don’t harbor secret crushes on me. Just my girl friends.

The ads reminded me that I saw the best music video of my life when I was in Thailand. There was a boy and he loved a girl. She was very pretty, but she was sad. She was sad because she watched her entire family, mother and father and adorable baby brothers die screaming in a house fire. We watched that with her, so we knew why she was sad. Because he loved her, he wanted to make her happy again. So he tried to do nice things for her, like bring her flowers or carry her books. But she just turned away, sadly and beautifully, every time. He was very much in love and kept trying. One day, while they were walking through the market, he bought them ice cream cones; she ate hers sadly. When he had only the cone left, he caught the eye of an adorable market urchin, and he held the cone to his head like a hat and the urchin giggled and he laughed too. He looked at the girl he loved, but she was turned away again.

Oh no! Had he reminded her of her adorable baby brothers, who burned to death as we watched? Had he no heart, sharing a lighthearted moment with the market urchin, while she was sad all the time? He reached to apologize to her and she turned back to him, smiling and holding her ice cream cone to her nose and crossing her eyes! She smiled at the urchin and the urchin laughed and the boy was so, so happy that she wasn’t sad anymore. Just as he smiled with joy and relief, she stepped off the curb and a truck SLAMMED INTO HER AND KILLED HER. They showed that five or six times, so we could be sure. I may never see anything so good again.

If there were six of them, we could be a complete Ultimate line.

Yesterday at lunch we got to talking about cousins who have been on reality shows. A cousin of someone I knew had been on The Bachelor. We watched her every week, hoping for the best. It is amazing how fast your standards change when you know a competitor on The Bachelor. Normally I would like her to show her intelligence and competence, conduct herself with her usual stylish grace. On The Bachelor, I just prayed that she wouldn’t make out with him in the hot tub. Another of our cousins easily outdid The Bachelor by appearing on Ricki Lake, Who’s the Daddy?. She was uncertain of the father of her son and thought a free paternity test on daytime TV would be a gentle way to settle matters with her husband and paramour. I thought I caught some disapproval about her dilemma from my lunch companions, but I was mostly just impressed. Not knowing the father of your child implies that you are getting some, which, as you know, is a longstanding goal of mine.

I got to thinking about what it would be like if I were on a reality show. In fact, what if I were the center of a season of The Bachelorette? The thought of a house full of men competing for my affection sounds mortifying, but it would never happen like that. If the producers selected men for the show based on my preferences, they would end up with a house full of really smart, good-natured men who like to do things. Since they wouldn’t be stupidly macho and competitive, they would naturally start finding ways to pass the time. On the second “date” I would show up, tossing my hair in slow motion, to find the guys on the roof. “Climb up! We’re throwing watermelons off! And old electronics! See if you can get the cameraperson to film it!” When it came time for the pool party, I might be able to get the guys to notice the cleave, but only if they weren’t catching frisbees as they jumped off the diving board. I know that I’m supposed to pick two guys to take in the hot air balloon over Napa, so that one can emote frustrated longing while I make eyes at the other, but really, I would rather go with the whole crew to Korean karaoke.

In real life, I would inevitably end up hanging out in the house as one of the guys until the show dispersed. I would keep in touch with them and attend all of their weddings, pleased by their delight in their lovely brides and wondering again why she wasn’t me. On TV, though, the Megan Season can have a happy ending. When it got down to the last five or six best kissers, they would come to me as a group. “Megan,” one would say, “we don’t want to compete against each other. Could you please choose early, put us out of our misery?” “But honey,” I would answer, “I can’t! I just don’t know! Choose the man who cooks such good food? Or the one who sings in the car with me? Or the one who spots me when we lift weights? Choose between the mathematician and the physicist? No woman could do that! If only I could choose you all!” Then, gradually at first, a look of hope and agreement would dawn in our eyes.

Although the nation would be scandalized, the producers would let us keep the house with the pool in exchange for filming the wedding. My grooms would look so handsome in their tuxes. The country would have a chance to catch up on our love story a couple years later, when we all appear on Ricki Lake, Who’s the Daddy?.

I could not be more serious.

I was born middle class in America, which means that I live a life of tremendous privilege and plenty. Since my basic needs are met and I expect they always will be, I’ve come to believe that my most important priority is fun. That sounds frivolous, but fun is the difference between a great life and passing time. It would be a waste of all I’ve been given if I didn’t make this the most excellent life I could have.

Fun is the explicit goal of all of my voluntary activities and the deciding factor for all my choices. It is the only irreducible reward. Money buys freedom from fear and access to fun. Sex is only as good as it is fun. Power has a charge to it, but without fun it is just grinding responsibility. Only fun winning is worth it; winning an unpleasant or uneven game isn’t much better than losing. Not only is fun the valuable part of any reward, but there is no risk that it won’t be gratifying.

The good thing about realizing that fun is what you really want out of a reward is that you can skip intermediate steps and go straight to the fun. Once you know what is fun for you, you should do that instead of anything that is only a proxy for fun (like material consumption or hedonism or looking cool). For me, fun usually involves moving around, being with witty, kind people, doing new things, learning stuff. Planning fun is often itself fun. Fun often includes goofiness and sometimes a delighted self-awareness in the moment. I should also mention that fun has a high discount rate. Always value the fun as it happens; never leave fun for potential fun.

My friends and I realized a while back that the only measure of an occasion is each person’s subjective fun. The person who has the most fun wins. That spazzy bad dancer rocking out in front of the band and scaring the ladies? If he is having fun, more fun than we are sitting around being dignified (which would never happen) then he fucking wins. Respect. Anyone having less fun than us isn’t worth considering; honestly, I don’t care who sees me and my posse moseying through the supermarket. That person isn’t playing Gunslinger and that means he loses. If a stranger sees us, squints and drops his hands to his holsters, well now, there’s someone with good, discriminating taste. If he looks baffled or disdainful, he has revealed himself as no fun and inherently irrelevant.

If you are not having fun, you are making your life less than it could be. None of the following are acceptable substitutes for fun: money, work, comfort, maintaining your composure, impressing other people. Change your priorities to put fun on top. You cannot lose by having more fun.

I was a little sad but I am over it.

Sacramento is not a grown-up city yet. It is still gangly and awkward and it worries a lot about how people see it. City planning comes up real often around here because the city is changing so conspicuously. The place is still small enough that everyone knows the influential planners, architects, policy-makers around town. Everyone has opinions about what they want Sacramento to look like.

Midtown could talk about nothing else when the new Safeway opened. It wasn’t the Safeway so much, but the chrome horse! Did you see the chrome horse? That was a silly question, because who could miss the giant, huge, shiny chrome horse? Took two weeks for us to talk about anything else. (Now, I am only an engineer. I don’t understand these fancy underlying meanings and multiple artistic interpretations. Perhaps if I had an advanced degree in art, I would know why the developer chose to erect a massive prancing stallion and a thrusting faux-water tower at the new Safeway.)

So people feel real involved in Sacramento’s development and public art. Most everyone immediately hated the Tsakapoulos’ proposed new skyscraper. Most people felt that we didn’t need a thirty story building topped by a full-scale replica of the Parthenon. Here's the artist's rendering for you.

I couldn’t believe the proposal, but right after I decided it wasn’t a joke, I kinda loved it. I would love to take people downtown and watch them realize that someone put a replica of the Parthenon on top of a local skyscraper. There was some small chance that it would have public access and we need more rooftop access around here. And why not have it look like the Parthenon? I was all for it.

The Tsakapoulos family announced today that they have changed plans in favor of a sleek new building with no Greek monuments on it. I suppose it was inevitable.

She knows what she likes.

Roxie and I went down to Stockton to catch a show last night. We met friends of ours for dinner first. We were joined by a friend of theirs who came out because she particularly likes the Thai restaurant we went to. Seems she really likes this Thai restaurant because she can get a bowl of rice, like she always does. I sortof heard the joking about her rice, but I didn't realize it was literal until she ordered a bowl of rice and nothing else.

She was excited and happy for her plain bowl of rice. She knew it was strange, but she was entirely sure she didn't want anything else. She declined tastes of our dishes, or spoonfuls of sauce to put on her rice. She had tried new things before, she said, but they just don't work out. I liked her certainty, and I liked her even better when she started singing to herself under her breath: Rice, rice. Rice is nice, doesn't need spice, I like it twice.

Her rice song reminded me of one of my favorite poems:

Cheese is stretchy
Cheese is nice
Cheese is the last
Temptation of mice.

Love is testing me but still I'm losing it

I was lamenting to my friend Sean about my long drought. Before you go clicking away from another boring water entry, I mean a drought of a more personal nature… a bedroom nature. Sean and I agreed that it is ridiculous that I don’t have a boyfriend; I am presentable and pleasant enough. Since I’m a great girlfriend once I am in a relationship, Sean figured there must be something about my approach that I could work on.

“Meggie,” he said, “What do you wear when you are working on a guy?”

“You’re looking at it.” I said. “No,” he said, “Those are your clothes for doing chores and gardening. What do you wear when you are out where boys could see you?” When I gestured at my clothes again, he winced, which I totally didn’t get, ‘cause these are my new jeans. “Meggie,” he said, “When was the last time you dressed up?” “Oh! That was for the fall league party. I wore this tight red dress with four inch red heels and cocksucker red lipstick.” “And was there a boy you liked at the party?” “Yeah.” “What happened when he saw you in the dress?” “He jumped and spilled his drink. Someone must have bumped into him.” Sean patiently explained that no one bumped into him, and that if I want boys to notice me, I am going to have to wear girl clothes.

“Girl clothes!” I shouted. “That’s outrageous! They don’t have pockets, and you can’t sprint in them if you need to beat the light, and you can’t just throw them on from the previous day because they get wrinkled! Besides, the colors have to match and you have to wear jewelry, and that takes like twenty minutes!” I can patiently explain things too, so I pointed out all the ways that girl clothing is a repressive tool of the patriarchy to physically restrain women and keep them from full actualization by requiring them to spend their time on stupid shit like earrings. Sean didn’t argue, but he did force me to make an unpleasant choice between fighting blatant injustice and getting some horizontal actualization of my own.

Moving on, Sean asked me how I flirt with the guys I like. “Well, you know how I am usually friendly and smiley and I talk about dorky things? Just like that, only more.” “So if you saw a guy you liked…” “I would probably give him a hug like everyone else, and then tell him about the things I’ve been thinking about recently. Like right now I’m super into Geoffrey Chaucer’s blog, so I would be all ‘hah, hah, hah, and then, he makes fun of John Gower, hah hah’.” “And you still don’t score?” said Sean. “Remarkable.”

Sean told me that I have inadvertently crossed over into one-of-the-guys territory. He listed flirting techniques that might get me out of there. “Do you flip your hair? Giggle? Ask him to get you a drink? Smile demurely? Hit him on the arm?” Now THAT was interesting. “Hit him on the arm? Like a jab, or more of an uppercut? Should I kick him, too?” “Not like that”, said Sean, and he demonstrated with sortof an openhanded swat on the arm.

Gentle reader, I did taekwondo for thirteen years. During college I trained with the team twenty-five hours a week. It would be impossible to count the punches I’ve thrown or the hours I’ve spent with a heavy bag. I have broken boards and a brick with a punch. It has been many years since then, but I imagine I could still return to the gym and learn to box in a matter of months. Those skills aren’t entirely gone, but I am quite sure that I could never learn to swat men on the arm.

Sean persevered. “Meggie, is there anyone you flirt with?” “Oh yeah,” I said. “I flirt with lesbians all the time.” “What do you do?” “Oh, it changes. Sometimes I walk up boldly and look them up and down real slow, then nod, all satisfied. Sometimes I’ll smile shyly, and look down, and look back and blush. I’ll hold eye contact while I tuck my hair. Wearing a shirt that shows downtown Cleveland seems to make me clumsy, ‘cause I just keep dropping things…” “And do they like you?” “Oh man, dykes love me. They’re always hanging on me and asking for sugar. If I only liked the ladylovin’ I would be all set.” “Meggie, that’s it! You just have to do that with men.” “Do that with men… I could never… they would totally get the wrong id- HEY!”

So, dear readers, there is hope for me yet. Perhaps one of you is the dorky gentleman for me. When we meet, there is a good chance that I will revert to my awkward ways. If I am bringing up esoteric shit and asking about your dissertation, please understand that I am flirting with you. If, on the other hand, I am looking at you through lowered lashes and gasping at your wicked lines, please understand that I am imagining you as an especially butch lesbian. Either way, your prospects are good. Go ahead and put the moves on, ‘cause this drought has got to end.

Rest in peace, Grandma Jeanette.

It is a measure of my deep love for Chris that I hauled my recently broken, recently sick self out to help him move for four hours in the rain tonight. It was especially hard to have to box and move his crap, since I just spent four days in Connecticut with my dad and aunt working ten-hour days to clear out my grandmother’s final apartment. Still, if there is anyone who can call on my time and effort, it is Chris. Chris has done some heavy lifting for me this last year.

I call on Chris first when things go wrong, and I’ve had some losses in the past months. When I heard my grandmother died, I had no hesitation about calling him out of his meeting to come over and take care of me. She wasn’t a nice person; honestly, we dreaded seeing her. It was no coincidence that her daughter put an ocean between them to the east and her son moved west until an ocean stopped him. She hadn’t been in her right mind for four or five years now, which took some of the guilt out of avoiding her.

Chris came over right away so we could talk about my grandma’s death. I can’t say that I felt grief. She could be horrible to be around and I hadn’t wanted to know her. Her death certainly didn’t open a wound in my heart. But that night I felt terribly sad for her life. The heartbreaking part of my grandmother’s nastiness is that she never meant to drive anyone away. She liked being around people and she loved her family very much. She never connected her poisonous comments and relentless nagging with her desperate loneliness; it was a mystery and great sadness to her that we didn’t visit or write. As we cleared out her apartment this week, I found hundreds of envelopes and stacks of stationary and cards. She would have loved to have a correspondence with me.

My decision to not be like my grandmother is one of the most powerful choices I have ever made. But the night of her death, I wanted to sort through her characteristics, to see if there was anything I could claim and keep. I found a couple – her strong will and determination has served me well. In an odd gift, she bequeathed to all of her grandchildren an unusually high pain tolerance. Chris sat with me as I cried for her loneliness and looked more closely at her than I had for years.

I wasn’t purely sad, so we were also joking. At one point I wondered aloud what would happen to all her spite. Now that it wasn’t contained in her body, was the world big enough to hold it? Chris corrected me instantly. No, he said. That’s not how it works. When someone dies, all the love they contain is released back to the world. The spite dies with them. “Look at you,” he said. “You haven’t showed this much compassion for your grandma since I’ve known you.”

I thought about that idea for several days and I am sure it is true. It isn’t the love each person generates; that is given away during their lifetimes. But the love people felt for them gets carried in their selves their entire lives. When their selves are gone, that love is freed for the living to feel again.

Valuable lessons all around.

I went to Ukiah with the rest of engineering girl gang, a nice biologist and an older engineer. Don't remember how it came up, but I started telling the story about my sister and my dad and her teddy bear. My sister's favorite bear was George, and one night while we were all at dinner, my dad mentioned that a quarter a day would go a long way toward making sure that nothing bad happened to George while my sister was at school. Accidents happen, he said, but for a quarter a day he would personally check on George when he came home from lunch. My sister held out at first, but after finding George hanging by his neck from the ceiling, or in the oven, or the freezer, she conceded that George was indeed accident prone and started paying the protection money.

Her allowance didn't always last the entire week, but she could always earn some extra quarters by ironing dad's shirts. He paid her a quarter a shirt, which goes to show that he had a system the entire time and wasn't just extorting money from a ten-year-old girl for the fun of it. We were all laughing as Tracy asked how my dad could be so mean, and I answered that, well, he just wanted to teach her a life lesson in paying protection money on time, and how important a quarter could be.

"Why?" said the older engineer. "Is he a Jew?"

All the laughing stopped and I thought the sunlight seemed a little whiter and bleaker for a flash and none of us had anything to say until I answered "Yes. He is Jewish. As am I." The older engineer faltered, and explained that she didn't mean anything by it, its just that you know how important money is to Jews. Well, we were walking somewhere anyway and I didn't care to walk near her anymore, or really have anything to say to her after that. I still don't.

Two things about that comment shocked me. First, we are stateworkers! Are we not trained to be painfully, exasperatingly sensitive and correct? (Although considering that the girl gang spends its working hours in a nearly non-stop exchange of sexist comments and overt sexual harassment, perhaps the training has not taken hold as well as our bosses might hope.) How did "Jews love money" slip through? If it got back to our big boss, which it won't by me, all hell will break loose for her.

Second, I was surprised by how much the comment hurt. How much is not very much in the big scheme of things, but enough to have some sting a couple days later. I almost never identify with my Jewish heritage, and I have been a privileged part of mainstream culture my entire life. I may have to re-think some of my earlier reasoning (like "the etymology of 'call a spade a spade' is about shovels and not racism, so save your ire for real crap, otherwise impressive Councilwoman Hammond" in favor of "our history is so heavily loaded that it hurts either way, so how about we use words that have no opportunity for misinterpretation."). Thinking hurts my pretty little head, and what a pain in the ass to have to do it twice. But it is worth the effort if it saves me from accidentally making someone else feel like that.

Maybe today I'll get to the Post Office. Sorry, hon.

I’ve been supposed to send Anand’s cell phone charger back to him since Thanksgiving. Instead, I send him the occasional update.

A few weeks ago:
Well, I am pleased to say that there has been some real progress on Operation Home on the Range. About a month ago, your charger was boxed neatly, and the box was taped. The sealed box went down to Los Angeles for a week, and then returned safely to Sacramento. Just this very morning, the box was addressed (black scented marker), and clear tape affixed over the address.

I think these are definite breakthroughs, and am optimistic that an agent could carry the addressed box to a post office ANY DAY NOW to mail it to Dallas.

If you get a new job and move first, please inform headquarters.

Megan


Bulletin, 31 January 2006, 13:00pm PST.
Phone charger held on terrorism charges
After weeks of misinformation, the Department of Homeland Security admitted they have been holding Anand’s cell phone charger for suspected terrorist activities. The charger is a known accomplice of Anand’s cell phone, which was the device used in communications critical of the President’s energy policy, Texas barbecue, and driving alone to work in SUV’s. The phone charger has not been allowed to contact his family, and has been held in isolation in a cell he describes as “little more than a box”.

Homeland Security denies violating Amendments IV, V and VI of the Bill of Rights, pointing out that the phone charger is not an American citizen. “This phone charger was built in China, and never naturalized. The Constitution affords him no protections against search and seizure, no guarantee of a speedy trial of his peers, no right to know the charges against him.” Homeland Security says the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war also don’t apply to the phone charger: “Geneva Conventions? They aren’t for appliances that know appliances that were used to discuss heresies against our American way of life.”

Homeland Security refused to agree to a release date for Anand’s phone charger. “Considering the threat terrorism poses to Americans every day, it is not too much to ask Democrats to go without their preferred means of communication until this danger passes. Besides, if he can’t be talking on his phone, he can’t be calling George W. Bush a freakin’ moron. He’ll get his phone charger back when he gets it back.”

Correlation is not causation.

I was a pretty naïve sophomore when I moved into a sixty-person, vegetarian, clothing-optional co-op. I never entirely fit in, but it was an easy, tolerant place for me to grow up. My closest friends are still from Loth. When I first got there, though, there was a lot to the culture I didn’t understand.

There were half a dozen men in the house who always had one pant leg rolled up, and I just couldn’t figure out why. I must have worked on that for weeks. I watched them, and I thought about it, and I just kept at it. Why did they always have one pant leg rolled up?

Finally one day I put it together. I finally noticed that the five or six guys with one pant leg up were not the manliest men in this house full of sweet hippies. That was it!! They were bi! It made perfect sense … one pant leg up, one pant leg down … a little something for everyone.

And I was good with that. I never mentioned it to anyone, ‘cause I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t known that one rolled pant leg meant you were bi. Really, I mostly forgot about it. Solving the secret code meant that it wasn’t interesting anymore, and I’ve never cared who anyone sleeps with.

Years later, at a different school, I rode my bike up to my early morning class, locked it real quick, and reached down to unroll my pant leg. Oh holy shit. I must have stood there in shock for thirty seconds. I had been so sure, and so serenely wrong, for years.

I guess I'll say two things in my defense. First, it was internally consistent and it fit the evidence. Second, it is no stupider than using an earring to announce a preference for boys.