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You have to know when your identity is too tied up in something.  When, 15 years after you graduate, all your screen names still relate back to your college, you’ve gone too far.  If one experience from your childhood dominates your stories, you need to assess what, if anything, you’ve accomplished since.  If you don’t take a long hard look at yourself, realize you’re stuck, why, and how to get out of there, then you run the risk of not only getting lost in the past but missing out on the present.  You become a child star all grown up.  And not like Sarah Jessica Parker.  More like Marcia Brady.  Or Rerun from What’s Happening who wore those orange suspenders til the day he died.  Ever hoping for a reunion.  Making “friends” because of who you once were.  Never really enjoying whoever it is you’ve become.

I met The Professor online, and he seemed like my type.  Intimidatingly bright and somewhat more serious than I was (or am), he immediately appealed to the intellectual side of me.  My socks weren’t knocked off, but I was interested.  I think I was flattered that he liked me.  He was a few years older than me, but light years more accomplished.  After Yale law he had practiced for a while, and then started teaching law.  It was clear to me that he was poised to get tenure at a reputable law school (and did shortly after we dated).  I was glad I could hold my own with him in conversations.  I knew he was smarter than me, but I never felt like I was getting behind.  That made me feel good about myself.

The Prof came across as a social person who was not born an extrovert.  He was more an introvert posing as an extrovert.  Someone who was quite bookish by nature, but who saw the value in good communication skills.  Before we met he became interested in improv comedy.  He took classes, and became part of a performance group.  I think he was more proud of his improv skills than his lawyer skills.  This makes sense to me.  The lawyer skills came to him pretty naturally, but he was proud of the comedy side of him because he had really worked for it.  Anyway, he was so proud of his abilities, that he took me to an improv comedy performance on our first date.  He participated so much that by the middle of the night the emcee cut him off, and said she wouldn’t take any more suggestions from him.  I didn’t participate.  I’m not an improv kind of girl.  I think the performance is funny, but that’s about it.  My humor is off-the-cuff and truly spontaneous.  Improv theater is a place people go to purposefully be spontaneous.  That’s not as funny to me.  But I had a good time, and agreed to subsequent dates.

The Prof was on the short side - about 5′7″.  I know this because we were eye-to-eye and I know how tall I am.  Despite all his education and reasoning skills, he has no idea how tall he is.  He stated more than once that he was 5′9″.  It said so on his online profile.  He brought it up on every date.  On one date we went to the Cosi on the north side of Dupont Circle for a bite after a movie.  He had resisted going there, but that was the only place I wanted to go and so he agreed.  When we got there, the waiter immediately recognized “us” from the night before.  The Prof’s nervous reaction told me that he had taken another woman there the night before - but I was seeing other people too so I made a joke about our twins dating each other.  That put The Professor in an insecure moment, and probably set up the following conversation about height:

“I must have a very large head.”

“What makes you say that?  It looks about the right size to me.”

“Well, you’d think that I’d wear a man’s regular length jacket, because I’m 5′9″ and the regulars fit men 5′8″ to 6′.  But I don’t, I wear a short.”

“Okay, so that just means you have a smaller torso.”

“Yeah, but then you’d think I’d have long legs.  But I don’t.  I have a 27″ inseam.  So if the height isn’t in my torso or my legs, I must have a really big head.”

silence

What I wanted to say was “you do, but only metaphorically.”  I still liked him though.  I saw the flaws, but he was smart and fun.  I wanted another date.

The next date proved to be the last.  Early that evening I told him that if we went downtown I wanted to stop by Crush.  At the time, Crush was a club in Adams Morgan, and I was good friends with the manager, Chip.  The Prof asked me how I knew Chip and I said that we had mutual friends, and had even dated for a while.  The Prof asked if Chip was a big guy, and I said yes, and that maybe we’d see him at some point.  Instead of going downtown, we went to see Barbershop.  As we left the movie I said “you know, if you’re curious what Chip looks like, he strongly resembles Ice Cube.  I watched The Prof’s face as he realized I had dated a black man.  He said nothing, so neither did I.

Later I went back to The Prof’s house.  We talked for a while.  About an hour had passed since the end of the movie.  Suddenly he says,

“Have you seen the research proving that black men’s penises are longer on average?  And it’s not just research.  When my high school football team used to play the mostly black team nearby and they changed together, the guys all told me it was true.”

“You realize that the outlying examples influence the average.  That in fact most everyone everywhere is about the same.  Plus, are we talking flacid or hard?  Flacid there’s a bigger difference.  It has to do with body temp vs. ambient air temp.  It’s hot in Africa.  Not so much in Russia.  It’s very Darwin.”

“Yeah, but let’s face it.  The black men are just bigger than we are.”

“Maybe, but I’ve seen tons of small, medium and large guys who are caucasian, black, asian, latin — whatever.  In every race I’ve seen a big range.”

I think this is when he started doing math in his head.  He never called me again.

I’m working on what is turning out to be a very long post.  It’s about something in my life that has been very difficult, and I want to do it justice.  It’s taking so long that I am not getting posts up as often as I should.  So here I find myself, like Dr. Johnson writing about procrastination minutes before a deadline, writing about writing instead of posting the writing itself.  I’ll get there, and hopefully it will be worth the wait.

In the meantime, life has been good.  I went to a “meet the family” party where my family came together with that of my brother’s fiancee.  Everything was fabulous, and there was much to find amusing.  No detail is necessary beyond saying that everyone showed up acting as themselves, and with family that always leads to groans and laughs.  I did have to watch my grandparents and Josh’s grandmother crumble in utter panic because we took one wrong turn, in daylight, with half a tank of gas, in a populated upscale area while running early for the party.  My reassurances that we could fix the problem, and easily at that (we were surrounded by gated communities with guards we could ask), did absolutely nothing to stop them from feeding into one another’s desperation to get back in the box.  By the time we got to the right place my head was swimming.

In other humor, I never fail to be amused by the things people Google.  More importantly, the things people Google that lead them straight to my blog.  Today someone Googled “capri pants transvestite”.  Because I have “capri pants” in Aunt Flow, and “transvestite” in Whore, I was a direct hit.  I Googled it myself and I came up eighth in the list.  Come to think of it, if anyone ever Googles ”capri pants transvestite” again I’m likely to be higher up on the list after writing this.  So, if you’re a trannie in search of capri pants, I welcome you to enjoy my blog.

I really don’t like my period.  Yes, it makes me feel like a woman as all the feminist works indicate it should, but not in a good way.  I bond with other women not so much in the “hear me roar” sense, but more in the “one of you must have an Advil” sense.  I started getting my period in December 1985, and I have been miserable one week out of four ever since.

One of my worst period memories came to me recently.  It was June 1986, so I was only seven months into the deal.  I was a very insecure 12 year old on her way to Camp Pinecliffe for the next eight weeks.  I was waiting with my mother ready to fly out of LaGuardia Airport, surrounded by other campers and their mothers.  I was wearing white capri pants.

My best friend at that time was Sarah.  We had gone to school together since 4th grade.  We bonded over mutual dorkiness and incessant reading, and at camp we shared archery and hiking.  Yeah, all the “cool” stuff.  I still see her in front of me at age 13, with limbs slightly too long for her torso and a haircut with wings.  So, we’re waiting to go, and that’s when she yells (I remember it being loud enough to hear across the terminal without a loud speaker, but that’s definitely a distortion of time and embarrassment) “Janet, you’re bleeding through your pants!”.

I was insecure anyway.  Camp didn’t take away any of my insecurities.  I’m no good at sports.  I don’t like group activities.  I always managed to get fashion wrong.  My first year there everyone wore collared shirts with the collars up, so when I bought uniforms for the second year I insisted they all be collared.  My second year there everyone only wore t-shirts and collars were “out”.  Oh, and I wore the uniform.  There was a mandatory uniform, but I was the only one in the polyester mess.  I tried so hard to fit in that I stuck out.  By 12 I was an uncomfortable D cup with bad acne who still wasn’t an actual teenager.  And now I’m bleeding through my white pants.  In public.  Worse than in public - in front of several dozen tween girls from New York with whom I have to spend the next eight weeks.  I don’t do small disasters.

My mother sprung into action, but blood really isn’t her thing.  She became overwhelmed pretty quickly.  We ran for the bathroom.  Sarah’s mother, June, came with us.  June was a nurse and one of about half a dozen girls in her family.  I’m guessing she’d seen soiled pants before.  So, as my mother stood there panicking and useless, June washed my pants out in the sink.  A few minutes later I was wearing pants again.  Completely see-through, soggy, blood-tinged pants.  Off to camp I went.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it wasn’t the best summer of my life.  There was just a wee bit of foreshadowing of the hot mess to come.

Two weeks ago I managed to bleed through my pants.  Don’t ask me how - I was wearing a pad when it happened.  It was totally disgusting.  I told my office I had a “woman emergency” and I drove home to change.  On the drive back to the office I thought of June.  She died about a year and a half ago after a long battle with cancer.  The memory of that day at the airport turned from bittersweet to mostly bitter, and I wound up in tears.  The period hormones helped I’m sure, but mostly I was missing the sort of woman who would come running when someone else’s daughter needed her.  Sarah and I have grown apart, but that memory is still with me.

I’ve written a lot about sexual morality because it’s an issue that is important to me.  I’ve also written about it because I think it is so misunderstood.  There are such contradictory messages.  Like the woman in my book club who told me that there is a big gap between what Catholic Priests say and what “real” Catholics do, the societal ideal and the reality of our lives don’t always go together.  There are also realities, universal realities, that have existed since the dawn of human society yet go unrecognized.  It’s hard to remember to analyze the ordinary.

Prostitution is widely recognized as the “oldest profession”.  Hey, when a man has fresh meat and all I have is a cooch, and it’s the middle of winter when nothing’s growing on the trees, it’s a pretty obvious trade.  Thus is born the first woman to fend for herself and her children by shaking her booty.  Clear heels probably weren’t a part of it back then.

Notice that men don’t really become prostitutes.  Though at some point, and in some culture, women must have had something worth getting.  Weren’t we the gatherers?  And if men are both eager for sex and in need of making a living it seems a logical source of income.  Two birds with one stone and all that.  There are some men in the business, but most of them are gay or dressed as women (transvestite or transexual I’m not really sure, but dressed as women either way).  So the question looms.  Why?

Senior year of college I took a class called Social Deviance.  The point was to examine mainstream society’s reaction to deviance.  When prostitution came up, the professor pointed out the gender distinction described above and posed the same question - the same “why”.  Kira, a feminist cheerleader of the sort only Barnard College could produce, blurted out from the front row “because men give it up for free.”  And they do.  Men don’t typically need to be wooed.  You don’t buy a man a watch so he’ll have sex with you.  Pretty much you just ask for sex.  There’s a pretty good return rate on that technique.

When a man has sex he gains power.  It’s the world according to American Pie.  Men always add 2 to their “number”.  It’s kind of like wearing pelts to show how many animals you’ve killed and rearranging them so they look more plentiful.  Men are conquerers, and gain strength in numbers.

Women give up something when they have sex.  Duh, that’s why it’s called “giving it up”.  When was the last time you heard that expression applied to a man?  Well, short of Kira’s Sociology class bombshell.  The American Pie rule for women is that women always subtract 2 from their number.  There’s value attributed to “innocence”.  I’m putting innocence in quotes because low numbers for vaginal intercourse is only perceived innocence.  If you’ve never had vaginal intercourse but you’ve given blow jobs to 100 guys you may be a virgin, but innocence left the building about 90 hummers ago.  Anyway, presumably female prostitutes are working up some pretty high numbers.  Subtracting 2 from the total wouldn’t make a big enough percentage drop to bring them back into societally acceptable ranges.  They’re losing status, and fast.  They have to be compensated.  Meat now comes cheap under plastic at Giant.  What they need is cash.

So what’s the difference?  Why is it more important in every society I can think of for women to be more chaste than men?  It’s the babies.  Everyone knows who the mother is, but aint no telling who the daddy could be.  DNA testing has only become available within my lifetime.  For most of human history - human history minus 20 years - female chastity was the only way to ensure that the kid inheriting the old wrinkled lord of the manor’s estate was the son of the lord of the manor, and not the son of the cobbler with the cute ass in the next village over.

Available, safe, effective and affordable birth control was the first step towards a fix.  That’s only been around for about 30 years.  DNA testing is another big step towards fixing the disparity.  I wonder how many generations it will take to reverse the stigma, and the illegality, of the first job at which women out earned their male counterparts.

For most of my time as a single woman in DC I was a serious party girl.  Every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, at a minimum, I was at the clubs.  I went to dance and meet guys, but mostly I went to drink with my friends.  I loved my Jack and Diet Coke.  I loved Heaven & Hell 80’s dance party.  The Front Page was the inevitable start and finish to most of my nights.  Rarely did I go anywhere that either the bartender the door guy or both didn’t immediately know my face.

By spring 2001 I was at a low point in my life.  I was unsuccessfully looking for a permanent job.  I had failed the bar exam in July 2000.  I looked like a blimp with floatation devices attached at my armpits.  The one good thing I was still doing was teaching Hebrew and Jewish Studies to 3rd graders every Sunday morning.  Don’t ask me how anyone thought that was a good idea.  If the parents had ANY concept what I did on the other six days of the week they would have chased me out of the building I’m sure.  But I loved those kids, and I loved teaching them, even when it was hard.  When getting abused by eight year olds is the high point of the week, you really do need a few drinks.

So one Saturday night I’m at Heaven & Hell with my girlfriends.  We’re all several drinks into the evening, so we’ve gotten very friendly with surrounding groups of random men.  One group of five guys has two single men among them.  They ask us to determine which of those two is the better looking one.  Between the two, I could see that there was an obvious choice, and then there was my choice.  The obvious choice was blond haired, blue eyed with a strong jaw and a good build.  Immediately Leslie points to the Ken doll and names him the winner.  So that would leave my choice - the rough around the edges guy with imperfect looks and a recently broken ego.  If ever there was a time to strike, this is it.

I start dancing with him, and use the guise of dancing to literally re-inflate his ego.  Necking ensues.  Against the wall grabbing under the clothes necking.  Suddenly it’s 2:30AM.  Last call.  The lights are about to come on, so this is my opening.  I ask him back to my place.  I had to teach Hebrew School at 9AM, but I figured I’d be done with him way before then.  He explains that while he wants to come over there is a technical complication.  His car is at his friend’s house in Gaithersburg, a good half hour drive from my apartment and almost an hour from where I teach, and he needs to get a ride to the car in the morning.  Immediately I’m thinking two things - even the liquor battered brain can do this analysis - 1) No way am I leaving my place at 7AM to drive this guy to his car and 2) Morning?  Is he kidding?  Unless his idea of morning is 3:30AM we’re not the least bit in synch.

So I said “no”.  He was shocked, and really so was I.  I expected him to change his tune and find a way to work it out, but he didn’t, so I was done.  I hung out with my friends a little longer, got oversized slices of sub-par pizza, and then hopped in a cab back to my place arriving around 3AM.  About five minutes later the phone rings.  Somewhere in all that groping cell phone numbers were exchanged.  It’s him asking if he can come over, right now.  He’s in the car with his four friends, and they can drop him off.  He’ll figure out how to get home later.

So, let me think.  What on earth could make this guy change his mind?  If he wanted me, he would have found a way to have me in the moment.  He would have brainstormed his way through and found something.  He would not have let me get away.  But…I did get away.  Oh right, peer pressure.  When he got in the car, his friends asked what happened.  Presumably he told them, and it became apparent that he was a man who had turned down free no-strings-attached sex because of transportation issues.  Calling me and trying to get his groove back on was the only way to, well, get his groove back on.

I’m a lot of things.  Those things include horny.  They do not include gullible.  Or prey.  He’d missed his chance.  I said “no thank you” and “goodbye” and felt sorry for the comments I knew his friends would make.  I cannot save those who miss their moment.