Love has no pride

Last night, my friend Alida was in town visiting from New York, so I took her to the Fecal Face 7.5 anniversary party at Minna. We met Paul there, and we all got to talking about relationships. We've all had gnarly break ups in the somewhat recent past, and we all remarked how we're actually pretty dang good at being alone. Being single is nice, we said. You have tons of freedom to work on projects or be lazy or be spontaneous or just be. It's up to you. But it's also really easy. Too easy. Basically, it comes down to you don't have to worry about letting anyone down or having anyone let you down. Sometimes this seems like a really good thing and sometimes it seems really chickenshit.

Mark Morford wrote a great article for the Comical about being single now that he's "past the age when getting moronically drunk every weekend and hooking up is the ultimate goal and you've had enough sex to fill a thousand porn movies and everyone around you is no longer on some sort of giddy, wide-eyed first-adult-relationship must-get-married must-have-babies track of impossibly optimistic utopian desire." You know, when relationships are more complex, full of ISSUES like kids and home owning and fidelity and bad foot odor. Forget the fact that dating can make you feel like you're 15 all over again, making out in cars, fumbling with bra straps, asking your friends, "Do you thinks she liiiiikes me?"

At Minna, while the young and as-yet-uncomplicated swirled around us like a giant tidybowl of hipster flotsam, we bemoaned the fact that most people like what they like, even if they don't like liking what they like. You get me? Often, we think maybe if we were just attracted to a different kind of person it would all work out, that it is the pattern that is the problem.

And so I'd had a few beers and I started to get worked up and I wanted to demand that we all make a pact of some kind. But I couldn't figure out what that would be -- a pact to make a list of all the things we are attracted to and which ones we'd like to change and why? Then I got distracted, and the conversation swerved like a teenager on wet leaves. Damn leaves.