Celibacy is the New Black

Although most people would describe my summer as an extended dry spell, I have decided to liken it to an exercise in discipline and self-restraint.

I have sworn off guys in the past, announcing loudly that I was becoming asexual and celibate, an amoeba if you will. And much to everyone's amusement, that never lasted very long because within a week or so I would meet some semi-attractive and/or semi-interesting prospect, and my proclamations would quickly be forgotten.

But I have discovered the secret to making celibacy work and it's a bitter pill. After finding out that one too many guys I know are total and utter scumbags, including a handful that I had previously actually trusted, I have absolutely no desire to associate with the opposite sex whatsoever.

Which really isn't too surprising when you consider what happened with the last guy I dated, Shmucks. In addition to being a total moron (he underlined words in his books that he didn't understand, which is how I discovered he still had no idea what the words "coitus" and "irrevocable" meant), he was also a complete dirtbag. One night when he had passed out from too much tequila, his phone kept ringing incessantly so I picked it up to find out that another girl was calling him at 2AM because he had previously texted her (while he was with me): "I want to lick you all over your body."

Telling him to never speak to me again wasn't a total loss, except I probably did a disservice to mankind in that I'm pretty sure him and his friends are a step down on the evolutionary ladder and could've provided scientists with endless hours of research. They are a group of privileged white Jewish guys who are under the impression that they are "gangstas," even going so far as to wear red bandannas (just like the Bloods), which was amusing to me at the time, and just embarrassing to look back on now.

So between him, the Murray Hill adventures, Goldsomething, and just general guy idiocy, I have been feeling pretty disgusted with men, which has probably been the reason I've been extra hostile as of late.

I am infamous in my circle for being rude to guys that hit on my friends and me in bars. I don't like when guys are aggressive in any way and can't take a hint to back off. This has led to a few mild confrontations in the past, usually being called a "bitch," which I've become accustomed to. But lately, I've decided I'm not longer tolerating that and I'm fighting back.

A few weeks ago I was out with my girlfriend S and these annoying guys at the bar offered us shots. I turned them down, but they wouldn't back down, and one of them started to yell out insults and jibes. At this point, I was just fed up, so I turned away but as soon as they had forgotten my presence and were sipping on their drinks, I leaned over and slapped the offender as hard as I could in his crotch.

Side Note: For those of you who are not as violent and/or experienced in the area of ball-attacking as I apparently am, there was a rhyme and reason to my actions. After years of unsuccessful attempts to kick boys in the nuts (yes, I was a feisty teenager, and wow do guys have quick reflexes when they see a girl lifting her knee!) I had all but given up.

However, one fateful day in college I was hanging out at a fraternity with some guy friends when they started playing the "Ball Slap Game," which consisted of them attempting to lightly tap each other on the nuts. Apart from this being absurdly baffling behavior (Seriously. Girls never sit around playing the "Slap Each Other In the Breasts Game." No wonder we're considered the more mature gender), I was amazed by how often they succeeded in their endeavors.

You see, when you go for the slap instead of the kick, you get a great deal more extension with your arm than you do with your knee, so you can place yourself at a further distance from your opponent, giving him much less time to react and defend himself. The key is to wait for someone to let his guard down and then swiftly reach over and smack his genitalia with the palm of your hand.

Just a little lesson for the kids out there!

Anyways, back to my story. After I slapped him in his man area, he yelped out, "That girl just hit me in my balls!" while his friends looked on stunned. He iced his nuts with his cold beer for the remainder of the night while they gaped at me in amazement and I'm sure called me some names to each other, but they didn't dare say anything else to me directly for the remainder of our stay.

For some reason, maybe because I am thoroughly exhausted with men, I found my behavior to be completely acceptable, even warranted, and felt like I had been doing a favor to all females by teaching these idiots a lesson.

However, the rest of the world seems to view it differently. Much to my surprise, when I repeated my tale of bravery, my friends just laughed and asked me with confusion what the hell had come over me and why my gut reaction was to go around slapping guys in the nuts.

The criticism, of course, didn't deter me from my newfound ball-slap reflexes. This past weekend, out with S again (why does trouble seem to follow us?), we met up with our friend C and some of his friends we had never met before. I overheard one of them ask C who sang the song that was playing at the moment and when I leaned over to tell him, he responded with, "I didn't fucking ask you, did I? I was talking to C."

Immediately C apologized to me and the offender's girlfriend reprimanded him with, "You can't talk to her like that, she doesn't know you!" After I got over my initial shock, since I'm not used to people speaking to me like that for no reason whatsoever, I decided I shouldn't react since he was friends with one of my friends.

However, I pulled C aside and informed him that out of respect to him, I had refrained from hitting his friend for being rude to me. At which point C laughed and said, "You have my absolute permission to slap him. He's being a complete asshole."

So with C's blessing, I bided my time, waited until the jackass was in the right position turned towards me with his genitals unguarded, and I leaned over and smacked him with all my might on his balls. What I didn't anticipate was his reaction, which was to instantaneously lean over and smack C in his balls. Both of them doubled over in pain, clutching their respective scrotums. Then the bouncer came over and told them if they wanted to fight, they would have to leave. I received no such reprimand.

I stand by my actions and want this to be a warning to any guy that just thinks about saying something inappropriate in the future. That's right, buddy. You're going to end up with some sore balls for the rest of the night. And that's just the best case scenario. Better think twice.

So needless to say, my bristly exterior has not been making the boys come a-runnin as of late (what's that they say about catching more bees with honey? pah, clearly ridiculous).

But I gotta say, hopefully without jinxing it, by now I'd have expected to be ready to jump the first virile male that crosses my path, and instead I remain completely indifferent to sexual encounters with the opposite sex (and relations with the same sex, I had a fun trip to Lesbian-A-Go-Go a few weekends ago and wasn't particularly interested in testing those waters out either).

For the time being, I don't see any reason to alter my behavior, but that may likely change once I meet a hot guy with or without glaring red flags, or when I am arrested for assaulting some dude's gonads, whichever comes first. And really at this point, I think it's a toss up.

Murray Hill Madness

New York, just like any other city, has areas that have certain stereotypes attached to them. Everyone knows that the hippies hang out in the Village and that the investment banker yuppies go out to the Meatpacking district and spend an exorbitant amount of money for bottle service and the freedom to fist pump their worries away (and oh boy, do they!).

But perhaps, my favorite land of stereotypes is that of Murray Hill, the East side of Manhattan in the thirties. On the weekdays, it's pretty mellow, and people who work in midtown wander over there for happy hours and dive bar food and beer. But then on the weekends it transforms into a veritable haven for the bridge and tunnel crowd. Hoards of people from New Jersey and Long Island literally pour into the bars and commence their energetic muscled poundings to Bon Jovi, Journey, and Billy Joel.

I swear, I have been in a bar that was by all accounts mellow at 9PM and suddenly at 11PM, Livin' On a Prayer comes on the jukebox and suddenly everyone's fists are in the air, emphatically singing along to every word about Tommy and Gina.

For this reason, I have tried my best to avoid Murray Hill on the weekends as much as is humanly possible.

Then, a few weekends ago, my friend R convinced me to go to a party at her friend's apartment in Murray Hill. Ok, in truth, there wasn't much convincing to do once she told me there would be free booze. I'm a sucker for free beer (and hey, you can stop your judging right there - I am not a freshman girl getting lured into the fraternity parties with the promise of free beer - the cost of alcohol really adds up in the city so a girl's gotta take all the free beer she can get!)

The party turned out to be not so much of a party as a gathering of about ten people, but there was a lot of free beer, so I had no problems sticking around and meeting R's friends from college.

So at some point, we were all sitting around the coffee table and talking when one of the guys pulled out an empty beer bottle and announced, "Everyone ready? Let's play Spin the Bottle!"

R and I glanced at each other, laughing, but he wasn't kidding. Once he put the bottle on the table and made his first spin, I started looking around incredulously a) to see if everyone else there was going along with it and b) to see if I had suddenly entered a time warp into the seventh grade.

But apparently, this Classy Murray Hill crowd (Classy with a capital C, obviously), was used to this, because they were all into it. So I'm going to attribute it to the free beer I'd been drinking and my latent seventh grade desires to fit in that I actually went along with it and played the game.

Later, R and I would wonder if it was worse that someone had actually proposed that we played Spin the Bottle, or that her and I had silently opted to play the game after all.

Funnier still, the game turned out to be very PG-rated. When the bottle landed on me, I literally gave the guy a very quick closed-mouth peck. I think I've gone further with our pet dog than I did with him. However, not all the guys turned out to be such gentleman. When it was my turn to spin and it landed on a stranger, he went all out and literally attacked me with his tongue, to which I made a strangled yelp and leaped back to the couch, much to the amusement of all the witnesses.

Two weeks later I randomly ran into the guy at a bar in Murray Hill and he didn't remember me. I actually had to say to him, "Remember, you tried to make out with me during a game of Spin the Bottle? You had your tongue in my mouth!" I'm still not sure that clarified things for him since the Spin the Bottle is apparently a regular occurrence.

The whole night in general was reminiscent of my prepubescent years, sitting around drinking beer in someone's living room at a time when hanging out with the immature, armpit farting boys and playing Spin the Bottle with them still seemed like a good idea. I had previously held the lofty delusion that I had matured a lot since those days since I am now all of twenty and six, but it turns out, nope, not so much.

The whole excursion has not done much to improve my opinion of Murray Hill, and if anything, I'm more judgemental than I was before of the inhabitants and visitors of this area of the city.

And inevitably, of myself.

The Heart of the Matter

Today, I was pondering forgiveness. If you love someone, or what is much likelier the case if the act of forgiving is involved, loved someone, is it necessary to forgive them for the sins they have committed against you? Or is it ok, healthy per se, to move on with life harboring the resentment and anger?

I haven't had the greatest breakups in history. Ok, ok, I've had some of the worst breakups ever.

This is no exaggeration. On New Year's Eve in 2003, I got into a fight with my then boyfriend in San Francisco, where I had flown out to spend the holiday with him, and he was so angry at me he kicked me out of the city. As in, no joke, I was puking into his toilet and he threw open the door, tossed my suitcase in, and said, "Pack your shit. I called you a cab and it'll be here in 20 minutes." With no return flight booked I had to sleep in the JetBlue terminal until 6AM when the next flight departed to JFK.

At the time, my friend who I had managed to get on the phone in the middle of New Year's festivities told me to buck up because in another year we'd be able to laugh about it and at parties I would have the uncontested best breakup story. She was right. I am a hit at parties.

(Side Note: The last time I had indirect contact with this ex was this past Superbowl. My friend R and I had decided since we didn't really care about the Steelers or the Cardinals, we would root for "Team Booze and Buffalo Wings." Therefore, as a joke, I was wearing my Hooters tank top when much to my dismay, I ran into the ex's little sister in line at the bathroom. I hadn't even known she'd moved to New York. She proceeded to tell me her brother had just gotten engaged and asked me politely if I enjoy working at the Hooters in the city. Absolutely mortifying. I haven't worn the shirt since.)

The point of this digression is that I have had a good many situations in which forgiveness seems implausible. As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty terrible at staying friends with my exes, because after the explosive breakups, it's difficult to revert to small talk.

But today, I was wondering if I am wasting precious energy on bad feelings. After all, if someone was worth loving in the first place, shouldn't they be worth forgiving now for whatever ugliness passed between us?

For the past month or so, I have found myself actively mad at my most recent serious ex-boyfriend, Goldsomething. We had managed to stay friends for a while, mostly because we parted mutually when he moved away about a year ago. The reasons behind the anger are complicated and entirely uninteresting to anyone except my diary, but in short he lied to me about something insignificant, which made me realize that our friendship was based on a very unstable foundation and wasn't healthy for me to partake in any longer.

Despite my efforts not to dwell on it since, I found myself having bursts of anger at random moments, and refused to allow myself to miss him or ponder if I had made the right decision in cutting him out of my life.

I don't really have the energy to be angry with him anymore, though. I think at his core he is a good person, which is validated by the fact that I loved him not too long ago. And thus it logically follows that I should be able to forgive him and move on, with or without him in my life (for the foreseeable future, it will be without).

On the other hand, I'm not sure some people deserve forgiveness. For example, I can laugh about getting kicked out of the West Coast six years later, but I'm not sure I will ever fully forgive the guy for doing so. If I ran into him on the street today, I would have a hard time not inflicting physical pain. Once again, I am not sure this is the healthiest attitude to have, but that would be my honest gut reaction.

All in all, forgiveness sounds like a lovely idea in theory, but practicing it seems to be the difficulty. I would love to be zen like the Dalai Lama and some of my other friends who are undeniably better people than I am, and much more open to forgiving those who have wronged them. But I'm not sure I'm completely capable of that.