8:21 p.m. - 2012-06-17
cool girl
I asked Marley tonight if it's OK with her if I get a girlfriend. She said, "It's ok as long as she doesn't have a boyfriend."
I was quite surprised that she didn't question the idea of me getting a GIRLFRIEND. (Probably she assumes that all parents get girlfriends, like her father...)
(Also curious where she gets the idea that monogamy is important, since her father doesn't exactly model it and I model nun-ery.)
I didn't say anything, though, but "Oh, good."
And then I said, "What do you think if I get a girlfriend who has lots of animals and a big backyard?"
Of course, I've only met Andi face-to-face for four hours and exchanged a couple of weeks of really long e-mails, but I am not the shop-around type -- not in relationships, or major purchases, or career moves, or any major decisions that I can think of. I usually do enough research to have some idea of what I'm looking for, and then I look until I find what my gut says "yes" to, and then I stop looking. I am a big believer in gut instinct, or call it your heart, or fate or luck. I really don't believe you should always shop for a better deal -- you can spend your whole life shopping for a better deal; you'll never find it and die emptyhanded. This is a long way of saying that if Andi is still as great as she seems after one or two more dates, I'm taking my profile off the dating site.
(After all, it only takes a couple of clicks to put it back up again...)
I can picture her fitting seamlessly into my life without any major adjustments of my lifestyle, parenting, plans, sense of humor or identity -- those last two have always seemed to need tweaking to fit with whoever I'm with, and the first three, well, I am embarassed to admit "yes." EG. I greatly admire Heather for homeschooling her kids, and since it is her biggest focus in life it would probably be hard for me to value her (if I was her partner) and not agree that sending my kids to public school is not the best possible decision (which at the moment I believe, strongly, it is). This is probably one reason why even though I like Heather, and she's really intelligent and educated and financially secure and really pretty and a fellow mom, I've been unable to picture her as anything but a friend. I had the same sort of feeling about Teri and our trip to a healthfood store -- she is clearly a disciple of a health-food-based religion, and I am NOT, NOT, NOT. (It's all food, dammit. I think health-food stores are as big of a ripoff as lottery tickets.) And I know that I would have to change my appearance to get a second glance from probably the majority of lesbians because (thank you Andi for actually saying it) "YOU LOOK STRAIGHT!"
"So what am I supposed to do, cut off my hair? I like my hair. I need my hair to hide behind!"
"No," Andi says, "don't cut off your hair."
The way she says it makes me feel like maybe she likes it too, or maybe that she tends to like the way a person looks if she likes the person, which is what she says, and which is pretty much how I feel so I have a tendency to believe her.
She does still remind me of Kate. Noncompetitive, self-contained, complete. Type A, driven people (like me and matt) are very incomplete -- that's why we're driven. We try to get whatever it is we need to be complete, only we never are complete when we get it, and we just keep going after more. I don't know why American culture admires that. I don't admire it in myself and, post-Matt, I don't think I admire it in other people anymore.
I do think I can "do better" than Matt (as people have told me) and though I don't know what they mean, what I mean is that I could be with someone who doesn't interrupt dinner and serious conversations constantly to take cell phone calls, who cares more about what I think of him/her than what people at work think of him/her, who is with me because he/she loves who I am and not because I'm a good arm ornament; and who isn't shopping on the sly for something better.
Of course, I am shallow enough to also want the person to be self-supporting and reasonably likely to stay that way, physically attractive (to ME), and not have any utterly bizarre fetishes. Andi is a check in all of those boxes. Plus we have a very similar sense of humor. I definitely like that, since mine is a little weird but critical to my sanity.
I am probably going to bomb biology because I am writing/thinking about/to her instead of studying photofuckingsynthesis.
Oh, and yes, she likes me. More than anyone she's come across in a long time. She has made that very clear. So I'm not beginning a psycho one-way obsession. Not yet.
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