not the new me*

* With a huge nod to the awesome Wendy McClure, author of the memoir I'm Not The New Me, which I highly recommend. We got to meet and chat and gossip at BlogHer last weekend, which was lovely.

"What was it that you wanted
that you would not want again?" -- Ida

The other night, I was on a maybe date, when basically a couple hit on me. Individually and together. We wound up at a bar that once upon a time I flashed my boobs at, which feels like a lifetime ago, a night that kindof lives in my head in stupid, slutty infamy. Strangely, it wasn’t all that long ago, February 2006, and it’s not like I haven’t flashed my boobs this year, but I’m so not in that place right now. That night is one of those that my mind just lingers on sometimes, the surrealness. I don’t know if other people have this, where they remember things, but those things also feel like a dream, but that night was one of them. It was kindof the beginning of a year of sexual misadventures. I was going to say mistakes but I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I can’t really say that anyone I’ve slept with was a mistake. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking but even the people who hurt me a lot, intentionally or not (and in this case, that meant me literally walking down Second Avenue crying my eyes out), matter to me. It’s ironic, that, but it’s because when I fall, I fall hard. I’m not high maintenance in the financial sense; Nichelle used to tease me cause I’d go on dates to, like, Teriyaki Boy. But I don’t mind that, in fact, I kindof like it. I’m a cheap date but attention-wise, I go deep. I listen. I probe. I Google. Once you make me fall for your life story, I’m hooked, and I still don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that it really doesn’t take that much to reel me in. I’ve been trying to be so good for the last few months and focusing on myself and my friends, new and old, rather than the constant dating drama and ups and downs. For a long while I know I’ve been the girl who always has some crazy story, some breathless, “And then,” and it’s kindof nice to just have nothing to report. And now that some of those old flings are moving on into the mamarama life I covet, I am even more cautious. Which makes the other night’s shenanigans even more ludicrous.

Anyway, yes, I wound up at this bar that’s on the same block as Happy Corp. where I once drank martinis for dinner and kicked off a year of bad sexual habits, aka 2006. I’m over the whole buffbaldingJewishguywithtattooswhodoesntusecondoms, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to those memories. Novel fodder is what I keep telling myself. But that was then and this is 2007. The new me is all into weight lifting and onesies and long talks with my friends. Self help and retail therapy and trying to get organized, or at least, not spiral downward. I am fine with making mistakes, but I really abhor myself when I make the same exact ones over and over.

I’d like to think that 2007 is about the new me, a better me, a more considerate and openhearted and open to change me. I’m the same inside, mostly, but I’m not. The outside and the inside are getting overhauled, even though I sometimes have to drag myself kicking and screaming from the comforts of my own bad habits. Now it’s not enough that I don’t even consider drinking (Marion’s martinis were a good drink to end on though), I’m trying to cut back on even my diet Coke drinking. I feel like I’m refining and refining and hoping to get to a point where I can just chill. Not because I’ve reached some state of perfection, but because I can wake up and go to sleep and be proud of who I am. Lately, that’s all I really want. It sounds easy, but not so much. It’s not that I want to escape my past, or my present really, but I am so fearful of being pigeonholed, of pigeonholing myself. On being burdened with this little three letter word, sex, that it might as well be tattooed on me. Plenty of days I wish I were tied to something much more innocuous, much less fraught with the potential to make me feel inadequate. Because somehow I never quite feel like I’m getting it right.

I guess in my head, I feel about 90% old lady (bingo, trivia, coupons, huge bags, Jewish mother thing going on) and 10% wild child, whereas before those ratios were probably reversed. I can still be slutty and wild and all that but, well, I’m not. I stay up until three most nights…working. Or trying to work. And I wonder if this so-called “Lusty Lady” persona I’ve built is all a sham. Or if not a sham, a relic, a skeleton, someone I used to be and no longer am. Every time I turn around, I find someone I’ve slept with or someone I know from the sex world now immersed in the mommy and daddy world. Some travel in both, and I cling to them and their examples fervently.

So when, in this newly mature phase of my life, I am in the middle of what I’m not sure is a date, it’s more than a little unnerving to have a stranger come up to me and say, “Are you a journalist?” At first, I thought he was taking some drunken survey of the bar, or had me mixed up with someone else. I tend to forget that, like, when you put your photo online, people might recognize you. And it’s one thing when they’re Tara from I Quit for Lijit at BlogHer, another when they’re basically cockblocking you and interrupting your conversation. It wasn’t so much the interruption as that it went on a bit too long and I felt totally embarrassed. Then his girlfriend came by and I was ready to slink under the table. She actually said to me, “We’re going to be thinking about you tonight!” It wasn’t icky so much as totally strange. I felt like a visitor to some other land of wild sex that I don’t have a passport to anymore. And I knew I was the one who had changed. They were actually probably very cool, but it unnerved me. I don’t know what my companion for the evening thought, though I get the sense he was impressed, while I was just nonplussed. Maybe a little wistful for the old me, but I think she’s gone and I’m still searching for the new me, and wondering who’ll come up to her at a bar in ten years or five years or even one.