Tag Archives: single ladies

Best Vacation Ever!

Posted on February 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

Man, I wish I could go on a vacation right now.  I really need it.  Don’t we all?  I’ve been on some great vacations in my life.  In honor of Fun Friday I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite vacation stories ever.

A couple of years ago my friends, Kristine and Molly, and I decided to do a road trip of New England.  The plan was for us to hit every New England state within a week.  Did we have a game plan?  No, not really.  We just wanted to drive around and see what there was to see.

So we packed up my little 1993 Saturn and set off from Molly’s house in the middle of the country in Pennsylvania.

On the road in Maine

Road trips are a lot of fun.  I happen to love driving and since we had no schedule we could go wherever we wanted and stop for as long as we felt like.  That first day we visited Woodstock, NY.  Woodstock is very touristy and over-priced, by the way.  Hippies all over the world are probably weeping in their VW busses because of it.  We had a good time though, took goofy pictures and visited some really interesting stores.  Then we headed on to Massachusetts.

Everything was fine our first day in Mass.  We visited Plymouth Plantation, which was really cool, and Plymouth Rock, which was … a rock.  I got a cool t-shirt.

The trouble began that evening.

Now that's what I call a nice location for a Colonial settlement!

You see, Kristine may be my best friend and we may have a lot of things in common, but we also know exactly how to drive each other crazy.  When I get super tired I have a tendency to talk too much.  I talk so much, in fact, that by the time I get to the end of the sentence I’ve forgotten what I said at the beginning.  Kristine, on the other hand, gets really snarky.  She becomes the master of the sharp comment.  Most of the time this works out just fine.  I start talking and not paying attention to what I’m saying and Kristine makes snide comments about everything I say that I barely hear.  We have entertained poor Molly this way on several occasions.

But Boston was different.

I had half an idea what hotel we should stay in, having looked on the internet.  Only that hotel was booked by the time we got there.  So they sent us to another one in the same chain.  Well, that hotel was in a completely skeezy part of town.  There was no way I was going to stay there.  But Kristine was exhausted and in a really bad mood.  We got into the biggest nasty girl fight in the car in the middle of four lanes of traffic without any idea how to turn around.  It’s funny in retrospect, but at the time Molly was inches away from witnessing a double homicide.

I knew the area a teensy bit though.  Much to Kristine’s distress, I got back on the highway and drove all the way out to Cape Ann where my aunt and uncle live.  I knew there were some nice hotels up there.  Very nice.  We pulled into the Bass Rocks Inn in Gloucester tired, hungry, and ready to scratch each other’s eyes out.  I went into the office to ask if they had any vacancies while Molly stayed in the car with Kristine, talking her out of murdering me in my sleep.  The good news was that they had a vacancy!  The bad news was the price tag.  But you know what?  At that point I didn’t care.  I took the room and went to give my friends the good news.

The view from our balcony at the Bass Rocks Inn

I love hotels, but I really love the Bass Rocks Inn in Gloucester.  Our room had a balcony that looked out over Bass Rocks and the raging sea.  It’s the perfect place to sit around and read a book and listen to the waves crash on the rocks.  Part of the hotel is an old Victorian mansion that has been converted into rooms and a small restaurant.  They make the best blueberry scones in the world.  Gloucester and the neighboring town of Rockport have a million things to do.  And I have family there.

Part of me wished we could stay there, but after resting for a full day we journeyed on to Bar Harbor, Maine.  We had another hotel incident there, only this one involved going to about three or four different places until we found a vacancy.  Fortunately, this time Kristine and I weren’t so pissed off at each other.  And Project Runway was on that night.

We went on to New Hampshire the next day, visited an old estate called Castle in the Clouds, and had dinner at a truly fantastic restaurant that had canoes on the wall.  I had a blueberry martini.  I got very fuzzy and nearly fell in my salmon.  And we stayed at a really cool little hotel in Center Harbor on Lake Winnipesauke where the rooms felt like dorm rooms and the staff was like your extended family.

Kristine, Molly, and I at the Castle on a Cloud

There’s something amazing about a sweet hotel on a rambling road trip that makes true friends go from wanting to kill each other one minute to laughing hysterically over SpongeBob Squarepants the next.  Just like there’s a whole aspect to friendship that you can only experience when you spend five hours in a car together six days in a row, enduring headaches, mood swings, and breathtaking scenery.  We spend a lot of time in our lives guarding ourselves against revealing too much to the people around us, even the ones we call friends.  But on a road trip, when you are far from everything you know and trapped in close quarters with your buddies, you learn more about each other than you do every day.

Thankfully Kristine and Molly are still two of my closest friends.  We ended up cutting that road trip short by a day because we were just so damned tired by the end.  But we met our goal.  In six days we drove 2,000 miles and visited New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont.  Without killing each other.  I still don’t think I’ve recovered financially from that trip but it remains one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.  And like we said at every single place we stopped and stayed, I have got to go back there someday!

So that’s my best vacation story.  What’s yours?

[Incidentally, if you want to see all of the photos from that road trip and another New England trip I took with Kristine, they're on my Flickr stream here.]

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New Girl

Posted on February 10, 2012 | 6 Comments

Okay, it’s Friday, it’s been a rotten week, and I want to blog about something FUN!  So here it is, my other new favorite show (Smash being the first)….

New Girl!

Kristine has been telling me about this delightful little half-hour comedy for a long time.  Last weekend I finally checked it out … and proceeded to watch every episode that has been produced so far.  It’s really good, people.  It’s just the right blend of wacky fun and everyday reality that so many of us go through whether we want to or not.

The plot centers around Jess, played expertly by show creator Zoey Daschenel.

Jess is the kind of goofy free-spirit I have always wanted to be.  But unlike me, who always just came off as weird when I expressed myself, Jess is cute and quirky and fun.  And she has fantastic hair and eyes.  In the pilot episode Jess’s boyfriend of six years whom she lives with cheats on her.  So she dumps him and moves into a fantastic apartment with three guy roommates.  Hilarity ensues.

The best part about this show is, of course, the fact that ostensibly Jess has nothing even remotely in common with her three new roomies.  Nick is a bit of an emotional midget (but he’s learning) who is still hung up on the girlfriend who dumped him six months ago.  Schmidt is a high-powered business guy – who works at a company with all women – and is a total douche.  But in the nicest possible way.  And Winston is their unemployed friend who just returned to the US after playing professional basketball in Latvia for two years.  Add to the mix Jess’s best friend Cece, who is a model, and it makes for some of the silliest adventures.

I have learned so much from New Girl already.  For instance, I have learned that you can do the chicken dance in ultra-slow motion.  I have learned that guys like easy girls, but they love a challenge even more.  I’ve learned that you can’t defrost a giant Thanksgiving turkey in a clothes dryer.  I’ve learned that you should never try out sexy moves you learned from the internet on your new boyfriend.  And I’ve learned that Murphy’s Law will apply in every situation you can possibly think of.

What I love so much about this show is that, like British TV, it’s funny without pointing a finger at itself and saying “Hey look at me!  I’m funny!”  It also doesn’t have a laugh-track.  At least not that I’ve noticed.  It’s like a half-hour comedy filmed as an hour-long drama.  The writing is great, the acting is first-rate (Zoey Daschenel has amazing comedic timing … and great hair and eyes! And yes I said that twice now), and as diverse as they are, the characters are likable.

This was the perfect show to watch last weekend when I was feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.  It’s good for bad moods and, I suspect, goofy moods too.  I totally recommend checking it out wherever you can.

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Why Men Should Pay on a Date

Posted on December 21, 2011 | 5 Comments

I was having a conversation with my coworkers the other day about dating and I surprised myself by expressing my firm belief that men should always pick up the bill on a date.

Ooo, really?  Do I really think that?

Yes!  I do.

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty liberal, enlightened woman.  But when it comes to dates of the first or second or anything prior to “we’re officially going out” kind, I have this visceral belief that the man should pay.  It seems so old fashioned.  It flies in the face of my beliefs about equality and fairness.  And after a couple has had THE CONVERSATION and agreed that they’re Going Out I definitely think the bill should be split or that the woman should pay at least half of the time.  But before that?  When two people are testing the waters and seeing how things go?  That check is all yours, bro.

So why do I believe this?  Where does this subconscious sense of the rightness of certain things come from?

My theory is that it boils down to hundreds if not thousands of years worth of men needing to prove that they can provide for a woman’s needs.  From time immemorial, since before our monkey ancestors dropped down out of the trees, the male of the species has had to compete with other males to prove that their genes are more worthy of being passes on through the female of their choice than the next monkey’s.  The female sense of what is attractive has developed on an instinctual level based on which male can keep us and our children alive the longest.  If a male could fight off the other males, make lots of babies with us, and make sure that we would all be well-fed and safe then he was in like Flint.

As mankind got a little more sophisticated the form that these things took may have changed, but for all intents and purposes the message was the same.  In the Middle Ages noble men were often not allowed to marry until their fathers had died, handing over their lands and titles to the eldest son.  Mothers wanted their daughters to marry the richest and most titled lords.  Why?  Because they could fight off the other males, make lots of babies, and make sure that the women were well-fed and safe.  Those men who couldn’t offer the promise of a home and an income were out of luck in the marriage department.

Time passed, society progressed.  The Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the demographics of the mechanized world changed.  People moved out of the country and towards the cities.  Men didn’t have to have a title or estates to catch the eye of the ladies.  But they still had to have means.  A job at least.  There’s a reason most heroes in Regency and Victorian romance novels are dukes or lords or have money, by the end of the novel if not at the beginning.  These are our idealized versions of masculinity.  They are handsome, faithful, and wealthy.  They can fight off the other males, make lots of babies, and keep the heroine well-fed and safe.

I’m not just talking about money here, in case you were about to accuse me of that.  Yeah, you know you were.  Money is merely a symptom of something much more important.  Ambition.  Motivation.  Purpose.  Money is a side-effect of someone with passion who cares about making their life and the lives of the people they love better.  I’m not talking about millions of dollars here, I’m talking about the desire to stand on your own two feet without asking for help from your parents or the government or anyone at all.

So.  Here we are again on our date.  Nothing turns me on more than a man who is motivated to demonstrate to me that he is thoughtful, independent, and confident.  What better way to convey that message than by taking me out and showing me a good time?  It doesn’t have to be dinner at Le Bec-Fin.  I would be equally if not more impressed if he took me to Sonic for onion rings.  Why?  Because I like Sonic onion rings.  The point is that he is taking the initiative, proving that he is capable of organizing and executing a plan.  He is proving that he will not end up sprawled on my couch in a wife-beater with a beer demanding that I make him a sandwich while he watches the game.  He is proving that I am not his mother, that I will not end up taking care of him.

Paying on a date is not about a guy impressing me with the size of his wallet, it’s about him showing me that he can fight off the other males, make lots of babies, and keep me well-fed and safe.  It’s about him demonstrating that he is mature enough to take a position of authority and to be sensitive to the needs of those around him.  Me, yes, but let me tell you, you can tell A LOT about a man by how he treats the wait staff and even the other patrons at a restaurant.

We live in a new, modern society that, for the first time in all of human history, doesn’t place outward, public rites of passage on young men to enable them to search for a mate.  There are no rules of inheritance or etiquette that slow down the mating process to ensure that the right decisions are being made and that couples will be able to handle the inevitable stresses of relationships.  Maybe that’s why so many relationships fail so spectacularly these days.  This one last vestige of the complex social order of days gone by, men paying on a date, sometimes feels like the only rational demonstration of practicality before emotions take over and make everyone lose their heads.

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Inappropriate Crush

Posted on December 13, 2011 | 15 Comments

I am the master of the Inappropriate Crush.  What makes a crush inappropriate, you ask?  Crushing on someone who is completely unavailable, of course.  And being consumed with embarrassment at the thought of revealing to anyone that you have a crush on that person.  So yes, I am the master of the Inappropriate Crush.

Actually, the vast majority of my love life has consisted of inappropriate crushes.  I don’t have a lot of luck with men at all.  This might be one of the reasons why.  I was never interested in bad-boys, I didn’t really care about the cute popular boys.  No, my crushes as far back as I can remember have been much more … creative than that.

Quick! Someone warn this child she's doomed to a life of Inappropriate Crushes!

I was the girl who had the crushes on teachers in high school.  Yes, I had a massive crush on Rev. Smith.  And it doesn’t get more inappropriate than that.  Rev. Smith was from South Africa.  He had a beautiful accent and a viciously dry sense of humor.  He wasn’t necessarily well-liked by the other kids, mostly because they didn’t get his oddball, quirky humor.  He was old enough to be my father.  In fact, two of his kids (twins) were in my class.  Yes, I had a crush on the father of two of my classmates, a strange man with an accent.  He was married, but that kind of fell apart spectacularly when we were still in school and it’s not my place to talk about it.  But yes, I loved him.  And it was so, so wrong.

I didn’t grow out of the inappropriate crush phase as I got older either.  The trend has pretty much continued in one way or another until the present.  I was the girl who had crushes on professors at school, including ones who were Catholic priests.  And while yes, a lot of this could probably be attributed to daddy issues of some sort, it hasn’t just been about older men.

In my mid-20s I had the worst kind of Inappropriate Crush, the kind that is best classified as Unrequited Love.  Dan was younger than me by a few years.  He was in my brother’s class in school I think, but they weren’t especially close friends.  I thought the sun rose and set around Dan.  And so, unfortunately, I started to act like it did.  Yes, I followed him around like a little puppy, which was so not what I should have been doing at that age.  I baked him cookies and made him a cake.  I sewed a button or two back on his dress shirts.  I walked around more or less as his yes-man side-kick for months.  Then he transferred to a different college.  He told me that he knew I would write to him no matter what, even if he didn’t write back.

That was when it hit me.  Dan was a douche who had been using me the whole time.

Well, that kind of put a damper on my crushes for a long, long time.  It’s an awful thing to wake up and realize a guy you put your heart on your sleeve for has been playing you.  I think it’s called being a girl in your 20s.

Fortunately I recovered, somewhat sadder and wiser.  Sort of.

If you’ve been reading my Unlikely Hero of the Week posts on Thursdays then you know I’ve developed a unique taste in men.  I did him a long time ago, but Michael Emerson is still my favorite Unlikely Hero ever!  I love him so much.  And when in doubt I can always have a crush on Richard Armitage.  He’s dreamy.  But up there with them these days is another fantastically Inappropriate Crush, Chris Colfer.  Because nothing says inappropriate like having the warm fuzzies for a very gay man.  I just like him so much!  And didn’t Kinsey say something about none of us ever being completely one way or the other?

Speaking of which, I have a bit of an Inappropriate Crush on Emma Watson.  I’d switch teams to date her.  Or maybe I just want to be her.  I’m not entirely clear on that one.

And if you’ve noticed, I’ve been evading a bit here.  Because the question still remains….  Do I currently have any inappropriate crushes?

*bows head in shame*

Yes, yes I do.  But before I confess, I need to back up by about a year and a half and talk about my cricket team.

When I first got involved with cricket in the Philadelphia area, before I knew the guys as well as I do now, yes.  Yes I did have a few crushes amongst them.  I’ve had a crush on three of the guys in that picture above.  But I quickly learned not to crush on my cricket guys at all because South Asian men don’t wear wedding rings when they’re playing cricket.  And just about all of them are married.  My most embarrassing cricket crush moment was finding out that he was married with six kids.  I am so glad I never said anything!

But back to the present.  Yes, I have not one but TWO Inappropriate Crushes in real life these days.  These are my work crushes.  Everyone needs work crushes as far as I’m concerned. …  Um, as long as you recognize that they’re crushes, that is.  Both my Day Job work crush and my Part-Time Job work crush are a little on the nerdy side, not traditionally attractive, both hard workers, both with quirky senses of humor. … Both have very serious girlfriends.  *SIGH*

In fact, looking back on things, high school, college, cricket, work crushes, I have a thing for unavailable guys.  The ultimate Inappropriate Crush!  I would say that I’m attracted to the wrong type, but the thing is, I think I’m attracted to exactly the RIGHT type.  It’s just that my type tends to get into serious, loving, committed relationships BEFORE they meet me. By the time they get to be my age those kinds of guys are usually married and busy being good fathers and husbands.

Michael Emerson - Married

 So what’s a girl to do?  Well, I can always write about the guys I want to be with.  I fall in love with my characters on a regular basis.  That’s something.  Aside from that … maybe I missed my calling as a rich man’s mistress?  Nah!  The kind of guy I love would never have something on the side.  I guess I’m just doomed until my romance novel/romantic comedy plot comes along to surprise me.

How ‘bout you?  Who are your crushes, appropriate or inappropriate, real or imaginary?

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History on Film – Regency House Party

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 6 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, behold!  One of the most awesome things to ever grace a TV screen!  PBS reality TV.  It’s not an oxymoron, it’s a stroke of genius.  There are several of these PBS reality TV series, but since I’m on a Jane Austen kick these days I give you…

In this series five single men and five single women (and their chaperones) from the modern world went to live on an estate in the country as if they were living in the year 1811.  They were taught all about the culture, rules, and history of the time period.  Their challenge was to live as if they were back in time … and to make the most advantageous match.

This might well be the most fabulous thing that has ever been put on TV.  This show captures so many things at the same time.

First, it is a well thought out look into what life in the Regency was like.  I’m not sure how it played out for the participants in the show as it was being filmed, but judging from the final product the participants were introduced to themes, ideas, history, and culture of the time period a little bit at a time.  It would take me all day and then some to go into the details of everything that was covered, but here are some of the highlights for me.

Regency clothing.  The show goes into great detail explaining all of the various pieces of clothing that men and women had to put on every day in 1811.  It was all about layers.  Your average person in the Regency didn’t have nearly as many choices in their wardrobes as we do now, so they had to take special care of what they did have.  Part of that was underwear.  The show has a few great segments about both men’s and women’s undergarments.  But that’s only the beginning.  About nine layers after you started you were dressed.  I think there’s one segment where one of the gentlemen talks about how tight those gorgeous men’s coats really are and how the stiffness sort of forces you to have good posture.  Well, one way or another, they all look really good in those coats!

Another segment that struck me was one in which the ladies discover just how restrictive life as a Regency gentlewoman was.  They could only go downstairs if their chaperone went with them.  The activities they were allowed to partake in were limited and usually very docile.  And they almost never had any direct contact with the men.

The men, on the other hand, had a vigorous and active lifestyle with a lot of freedoms.  They could go almost anywhere they wanted to go, behave as badly as they wanted to, drink at all hours, take snuff, stay up late, and walk around with considerably less clothing than the women.

Not that that was particularly period or acceptable.

Actually, that’s my favorite part of this series.  It’s a hoot to watch these modern people trying to adapt to a lifestyle that is far more restrictive than our own.  Guess what?  They don’t always make it.  The rules are broken, sometimes in grand style.  Both men and women appear at various points in states of shocking undress or venture where they are not supposed to go, associating with people they are not supposed to associate with.

One of these naughty dalliances really made me think, actually.  The show contains a May-December romance – a younger man with an older woman.  The point is made at one point that with the young ladies kept away from the young men so strictly, it was no wonder inappropriate relationships sprung up between younger men and older women.  To me it sounds like a case of society’s rule shooting itself in its own foot.  Really interesting stuff.

Masked Ball by candlelight? Yes please!

And yes, ultimately it’s all about the romances.  Even though these are real, modern day people, they do have a mission to make the most advantageous matches.  The participants took this seriously … as characters.  There are enough romantic intrigues in this unreal reality to write a slew of romance novels.

If I had been a participant and/or living in this fantasy where the people were real, I would absolutely, positively gone after Captain Jeremy Glover.

Captain Glover with Miss Braund

He is so completely my type!  Well, my type on screen.  I wonder if I might have wanted to smack him in person.  He’s an impish little trouble-maker at times … and a hopeless, kind-hearted romantic at others.  And yes, I did create a hero in a Regency-set story based on him.

I could say so much more, but you should really see for yourself.  I went on YouTube to see if maybe they have a trailer for the show, but voila!  They have the entire series on YouTube!  Here is Part One, which does a very good job of teasing the entire show within the first two minutes, so think of that as a trailer.

Yes, I would live here for 9 weeks pretending I was in 1811.

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