Well, that’s what Viagra is for!

Day 7 of Singlehood.  Weather: grey again, but too hot!  Sweat is imminent!  Mood: potentially sick/tired.

Sometimes when I get my period, it surprises me because I’ve totally forgotten that I’m not a man.  How silly, you say, but true nonetheless; I’m pretty sure that most people I know see me as a crossdressing dude with a rack.  This is because I am surrounded by, nay, drowning in men.  Both of my roommates are men.  All of my college friends are men.  I spend nearly all my free time on the weekends at a gym which is a toatal sausage fest.  It seems like the perfect environment for the single and desperate, right?  As the sole womaln in all these otherwise male social groups, shouldn’t I naturally be inundated with dating opportunities?  I should, but I’m NOT, because I’ve been unfortunately branded as “One of the Guys.”  Oh, Woe to the woman who is so awesome, so badass, so much fun to be around that she is welcomed into the gentlemen’s club!  I’ve been treated to the sight of my friends in their underwear scratching their man bits, and asked for baked goods to soothe unholy hangovers.  You can bet I wouldn’t be exposed to any of this delightfulness if I were a potential mate.  Dammit, I’ve been turned into a pseurdodude against my will!

Of my handful of female friends, most are out of the country right now and only one is relatively close (in the same state, an hour’s drive away).  I went to visit this rare and mythical beast, the female friend of Miss Anthropy, last night and had a lovely time with Princess, but WOW.  It was like a cosmic explosion of genesis proportions of estrogen.  The mile a minute gossip ticker initially hit me like a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the brain, but I rallied my tongue and was soon keeping pace with Princess.  And it felt unbelievably good to be catty.  And petty.  And bitchy without fear of male smarminess.  Occasionally, I’ll try to recruit one of my male buddies for a “girl talk”; some of them submit with excellent graces and do an admirable job of painting my nails and chatting away.  however, after last night, I’ve realized that nothing can compare to real girl talk with a real, honest to god, actual material girl.  Three cheers for Miss Anthropy, I’ve recovered a tad of my missing femininity!  Tonight, in maintaining this spirit, I’m going to paint my toenails pink.  As in trailer trash pink.  And I might shave my legs, too.  Hooray for gender behavioral stereotypes!

On a sidednote, my darling friend, Princess, is adorably naive.  She has maintained a certain innocence and distance when it comes to men, which I can respect, even if I am doing EVERYTHING in my power to hack away at that distance when it comes to myself.  Anyway, we were discussing that most lamentable affliction, the small penis, and this little gem of a quote presented itself:

Princess: Well, there’s things for that.
Miss Anthropy: Yes, well, I – what?
Princess: There are ways to make it bigger.
Miss Anthropy: Princess, those pills advertised on the internet don’t actually work.
Princess: Oh, they don’t?  Well that’s what Viagra is for!
Miss Anthropy: …er, no it’s not.

I love you, Princess.

A Lover is…

Day 6 of Singlehood.  Weather: dark, balmy night.  Mood: mysterious.

What is the difference between a lover and a boyfriend?  I’ll admit to having watched enough Sex and the City to know that there is a difference, and it’s somehow significant.  If I’m recalling correctly, and that’s a big if, then here’s how it breaks down:

A Lover is someone somewhat too mature to be called a boy, hence not a “boy”friend.

A Lover is more sophisticated in tastes than a boyfriend.

A Lover is a more luxurious connosieur of the flesh.

A Lover is someone you are circumstantially attached to for something that resembles an extended fling far more than a committed relationship.

That  being said, which one is better, a Lover or a boyfriend?  A boyfriend seems to be a more serious commitment, which demands more effort but yields more security.  Well, a GOOD boyfriend will give you a sense of security, but all too often, I don’t get a very good return on my investment.  The idea of a Lover is appealing because there seems to be a more normalized ratio of effort in, results out.  Having just had a messy end to a relationship, I don’t think I have much patience (not that I had much to begin with) left.  Ultimately, I know I want to find a nice billionaire and settle down in a castle in the hills with my 1.3 children and a cat and a dog and a chinchilla, but for right now, a Lover sounds like a nice diversion.  However, I still consider myself single, since a Lover is just a grown-up friend with benefits, so my blogging adventures will continue!  And in all seriousness, if I’m offered a relationship with someone else I like, then I’ll probably take it (and lose the Lover; I’m a one man only kind of girl).  So until then, I’ll remain dedicated to you, dear readers.  Still single.  Still desperate.

The Question

Day 5 of Singlehood.  Weather: big blue sky.  Mood: shaken, not stirred/pensive.

Question: what do you bring for dessert when your 30 year old lover invites you over for dinner with him and his 6 year old daughter?

*Update*
Answer: You go to Borders and buy the cookbook written by The French Laundry’s head pastry chef, study it religiously, and try to produce something that looks half as good as it does in the book.  Which clearly isn’t going to happen, since all of these photos qualify as foodporn.  I bet they airbrushed.

And yes, I realize that I am completely dodging the very large elephant in this post, but you know what?  I’m okay with that for right now.

And my entire body was pain

Day 4 of singlehood.  Weather: gray today, yay! Mood: bored in class, craving sweets.

I learned a new concept yesterday that I think is important for all single people to know, and that is the idea of the Revenge Body.  The Revenge Body is motivated by negative feelings following a break up; this bitterness leads one to exercise and diet furiously in order to attain a higher level of fitness and hottitude, aka the Revenge Body.  You can tell your friends and family that your Revenge Body is actually a Dating Body, that is, a body sculpted with the purpose of attracting a new mate, but you can’t lie to yourself: you know you only got fit so you could make your ex see how stupid they were to let you go.  I think that the more bitter you are, the better your Revenge Body looks.

So I have begun working on my very own Revenge Body.  As I do, in fact, have more than a few feelings of…er…let’s be polite and call it “discontent”, I’m expecting my Revenge Body to be spectacular indeed.  And I can be honest and say that yes, I am getting in shape solely to make my most recent ex hit himself in the forehead and wonder what he was smoking when he dumped me.  Sorry, I realize I’m starting to sound kind of like “that crazy ex-girlfriend who smashed in my car headlights and broke into my apartment at night to sleep next to me and killed my cat and sent it to me in a box”, but don’t worry, he doesn’t have a cat!  Just kidding, but I think I’m allowed to be a little bit angsty for the first week of singledom.  Once my internal dialogue starts sounding like a Death Cab for Cutie album, then I’ll know that I’m in trouble.

Anyway, I’m leaping into this full force with intentions to go to the gym every day, with my routine taking about an hour or a little more, and yesterday was my second day.  At least, that WAS the plan until I woke up this morning AND MY ENTIRE BODY WAS PAIN!  Every molecule was a little bundle of OUCH, held together by forces of HOLY HELL and shaped around bones of MAKE THIS STOP!  But class waits for no (wo)man, so I ate a cupcake for breakfast and staggered off across the darkling plain, also known as campus.

Despite this morning’s enormous suckness, I did wake up feeling oddly refreshed and optimistic, since yesterday I did all of these things:
1. Baked cupcakes
2. Shaved my legs
3. Cleaned my room
4. Went out for lunch with a friend
5. Helped roommate clean the living room
6. FINALLY washed the dishes
7. Worked out for an hour
8. Read several poems (Dickinson and Hopkins)
9. Read a book (The Island of Dr. Moreau)
10. Wrote two essays
11. Watched an entire season of the show “Home Movies”

So I think I deserve that cupcake I ate this morning.  AS WELL AS A FUCKING MEDAL.  And a date.  Guess which one out of the three of those I’d like the most?

Prep school

Day 3 of Singlehood.  Weather: still sunny and probably going to stay that way.  Mood: slightly crampy (potential food poisoning)/horny.

Today I’d like to talk to you about a very important thing: preparation.  Yessir, wars are won and lost based on some very basic preperations, and what greater war is there than that of love?  So, I’d like to share with you some lessons I have learned from my own tragic experiences.  If my suffering can spare you, then that’s good enough for me.  In fact, I’m kind of like the Jesus Christ of dating; I’ll suffer the agony of failed romances so that you may be saved.  You’re welcome.  So without further ado, here is Miss Anthropy’s List of Vital and Semi-Important Preparations:

#1: Shave.
This falls under the obvious category of hygiene.  Obviously, it’s important to stay groomed while single, in order to attract the Princes Charming (or Princesses Charming), but Shaving needs to be mentioned in its own right.  Shaving your legs is important, as you never know when they will be suddenly wrapped around someone in passionate embrace.  Whether it’s due to drunken shenanigans or winning the Love Lottery, sometimes random hookups do happen (and by that, I mean that they happen ALL THE TIME), so you should always be ready for spontaneous lovin’.  HOWEVER, don’t think just because your legs are shaved that you’re ready for action!  Don’t let the hair on your naughty bits wave gently in the wind; you must obliterate hair here with ruthless abandon!  It’s a pain in the you-know-what (sometimes literally) to be shaving your lady parts, but don’t get lazy and leave it undone, because there’s nothing worse than cockblocking yourself.  “Oh, but I really thought that nothing would happen tonight” is not an excuse; a true bachelorette is ready anytime, anywhere for potential Princes Charming.

#2: Clean your room.
Anyone who personally knows me will think that I’m joking, as I am the messiest person in the world.  That’s not an idle boast, I actually have a certificate from the Guiness Book of World Records for being the owner/creater of the messiest bedroom.  So if I, of all people, am telling you to keep your space clean, then you know it’s a serious deal.  At some point, you may want to bring a young man or young lady into your bed.  It is not sexy in the least to fornitcate in a room that smells of rotting food, scattered garbage is not the same as scattered rose petals, and you’ll have less energy to rut if you waste it on jumping over piles of clothing/debris.  So for the sake of your happy ending, make sure your room is clean so you have a place to bring your date back to.

#3: Learn how to cook.
Even if you already know how to cook, you should memorize at least one dinner dish and one dessert that you can make from scratch without having to look up the recipe.  It’s best if the ingredients are basic enough to be found even in a single man’s kitchen (something made from beer and ketchup is perfect, if  you can think of a way to make it taste good), or with ingredients that are small enough to be carried around in a purse (for a while, I never left my apartment without a small bottle of vanilla extract).  The basic principle of this is that even if you’re slightly overweight or a little awkward or whatever…no one says no to a girl with food.  It’s at least good enough to get a foot in the door, and at that point you can take over with your other great qualitits (that was a pun about boobs), or whatever.  Also, you get brownie points if you clean up his kitchen afterwards, especially if you clean EVERYTHING, not just the dishes you used.  Although be careful, because he could get used to you doing it, and then you’d be stuck playing Cinderella forever.  I, for one, will leap over tall buildings and sell the souls of entire orphanages in order to escape dishwashing duty, so I’ll only clean a kitchen if I’m very, very interested.

Alright my lovely disciples, take my wisdom and run with it.  Although, I’m not sure how much you should trust the advice of someone who has such terrible luck with men, so you may have just wasted your time in reading this.  How depressing.  Instead of reading dumb blogs, you should really be cleaning your room.

Chuckyian flirtations

Day 2 of Singledom is nigh.  Weather: disgustingly sunny.  Mood: bloated and disturbed.

After all of my triumph yesterday, one would think that I would wake up today full of positive energy and motivation to continue my one-day Sexy streak.  But of course, such was not the case.  As usual, I responded to my one step forward with two steps back: I did not put on makeup this morning, and I also ate an entire box of easy mac for lunch.  Fail and fail.

So of course, this flailing on my part put me in the PERFECT mood for self-discovery today, and I was certainly struck by an epiphany of such enormity that it will forever change my life.  Years of therapy and countless hours of modification will go towards fixing what I have disvoered to be true today, but it will be worth it.  If this problem is not solved, it could mean the end of the Miss Anthropy family line.  Brace yourselves, here it is:

There is something Chuckyian in nature about every single one of my non-neutral facial expressions.

Don’t go looking up the term “Chuckyian” on dictionary.com, because you won’t find it there, on account of my just having made up the word.  I’m sure you know who Chucky is, right?  Creepy animate doll that goes around murdering people while grinning?  Yep, that’s the one.  And as far as I can tell, we could be related.

I was sitting in bed, innocently watching my trashy tv shows, when I happened to look across the room at a mirror while I was mid-chortle.  That’s when I saw it.  The crazed, rolling eyes, the cheeks spread eerily wide, the drool glistening from jagged incisors (not really that last one, but I did have masticated mac and cheese in my mouth, so it was even more disgusting).  Truly and completely horrifying, is what it was.  And suddenly my bachelorettehood seemed to make more sense.  I tried an angry face to see if that was any better.  Some women are said to be the most beautiful when fury is flashing in their eyes, but I cannot be said to be one of these women.  In fact, after seeing my own angry visage, I posit that there is no such thing as an attractive angry woman, because the ensuing blotchiness and wrinkles couldn’t possibly flatter ANY face.

So, there you have it.  I look like a murderous children’s toy out of a horror movie.  It’s no wonder that my sad attempts at flirty “come hither” glances always fall flat; Chuckyian flirtations are the stuff of men’s nightmares.  This is why I can’t keep a man.  Well, one of the many reasons, anyway.  I’ll have to fix that.  But for now, I will content myself with going to the gym to do penance for eating all that disgusting food today, and then I will bake brownies to make myself feel more comforted and less ugly.  Because, you know, it all kind of evens out, right?

I like long walks on the beach…

Alright, Day 1 of the singledom chronicle.  Weather watch: grey and drizzly.  Mood: cautiously optimistic/horny.  The plan for today: survive.

Okay, fine, things aren’t quite that bleak in my head, but I am seriously feeling some discomfort here.  I am definitely a girl who doesn’t know how to be single.  Who am I supposed to cook for??  What is the point in trying to be skinny and putting on makeup and shaving my legs and etc.?  And who will supply the sex?  Clearly I will fall into a sad state of unkempt disarray if this goes on, so I must get out there and find my soul mate as quickly as possible.

Of course, there are some problems with this vague intention.  The first is that I can’t talk to strangers.  Seriously.  I am cripplingly shy and totally awkward, and not in an endearing “oh, that’s so cute” kind of way.  The second is that I am not assertive; I will definitely wait for Prince Charming to fall into my lap.  This in itself is fine, it’s the way most girls operate, but here’s the catch: you must be ATTRACTIVE for this technique (or lack thereof) to work properly!  Now, I realize I’m not deformed and I have all my body parts attached, so I’m at least in the 50th percentile of available women, but that’s not going to net me Prince Charming.  I clearly can’t rely on my sparkling wit (I don’t have such a thing) or my family money (again, nonexistent) to cover up for my physical deficincies, so what’s an average lady to do?

This is what this average lady plans to do: lose 10 pounds, grow my hair out to Disney Princess length, and focus more on being charming and engaging (HAH!  Good luck me…)  Then, when I have successfully ensnared Prince Charming, I can go back to being the lazy schlub I am now.  As my plans go, this one is…flawed, but at least it’s kind of a direction for me to follow.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go make myself a wheatgrass power shake or something equally unpalatable for breakfast before I run a marathon.

Every troll has her day

Still Day 1.  Weather: still grey.  Mood: ON THE UPSWING!!

Dear readers, there has been a recent development!  But first, some background.

I have a lot of clothes.  Really, a LOT of clothes.  In fact, if I was confronted by a home invader, the easiest thing for me to do would be to trigger an avalanche of my clothes, which would bury and smother him where he stood.  (I, obviously, would escape the carnage and save the day).  My problem is that I am not quite sure how to put all these clothes together to make an Outfit.  Oh, I try, but it always comes out a tragedy…I’m often greeted by friends with the phrase, “Oh, I see it was ‘Dress Yourself Day’ today.”  Pfft, philistines, maybe I’m just too stylistically avant garde for my social circle.  Or not.

In order to combat my lack of coordination skills, I’ve taken to looking at other people when I’m walking around my college campus.  My school has a rash of young, hip, skinny ladies (ugh, the competition is FIERCE here), most of whom dress extremely well.  In between classes, I’ll sit in the cafe and watch the fashion forward females walk by and try to take note of what works and what doesn’t.  I’ll usually stop before someone notices my awkward behavior.  Usually.

So, this morning, I agonized over what to wear, and feeling a little bit bold, stepped out in grey ankle boots, olive mini skirt, brown jacket, and the piece de resistance…black tights.  Also dangly gold earrings.  I did question my choices; my friends will often see some weird article of clothing and say “oh, that’s soooooo Miss Anthropy” or “Miss Anthropy would totally wear that” or “Miss Anthropy, you’re the only person in the world who could pull that off”  (I think that last one is sincerely supposed to be a compliment).  Anyway, out I struck into the misty grey dawn (noon), to meet with one of my dashing (and married, boo) GSI’s (graduate student instructer/teacher’s assistant).  And do you know what he said?

“I like your earrings.  Actually you look very nice, your whole ensemble looks really good.”

TA DAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!  SUCCESS!  Results in only 24 hours!  You know what they say, every troll has her day, or something like that.