Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  I had no idea what to do with that last piece of information.

  Strangely, at this point in the game I was getting more nervous at the outset of dates instead of less. Once I’d started to think of dates as job interviews, I’d begun to relax considerably, but around first date #12, I noticed that I was getting a bit of dry-mouth and my palms were sweating. I attributed the latter to the fact that it was summer, but it was definitely a thing to worry about (and I was always on the lookout for those).

  My palms were sweating with White-Linen-Suit Guy, but thankfully, hand-holding would be far more freaky on a first date than fucking, so I was in the clear.

  I hadn’t been that excited to meet WLSG because I thought I wouldn’t have a lot to talk about with a stockbroker, but he’d made me laugh over messenger on OkCupid, so I thought I’d give him a chance.

  I’d been frustrated of late by the fact that, aside from Outdoorsy Guy, it had been more and more difficult to find someone I was conversationally compatible with. But it shouldn’t have surprised me that a person who’d spent the past eleven years writing comedy for a radio variety show might have trouble finding conversational common ground with someone who wrote computer code or managed a medical office or just generally existed in the real world with normal people who have to work for a living.

  I found myself saying things like “Oh. You have to be at work on time? Every day? What’s that like?” or “What do you mean you’ve never filed an expense report for otter costumes?”

  So I settled in at the taqueria for a couple hours of polite nodding, but there was almost none.

  White-Linen-Suit Guy was quite funny in person, and about twenty minutes into the date, he asked me if I’d ever tried ayahuasca.

  There are a couple things that might happen when you hear this question. One, the person might be about to ask you if you’d like to join him in an ayahuasca ceremony. This will involve a shaman and will take anywhere from four to eight hours to complete. And you will probably vomit. Or, two, a person is about to tell you about his latest ayahuasca journey, which also might take anywhere from four to eight hours.

  In my case, it was the latter.

  Since I’d never heard of ayahuasca, it was actually quite interesting. But it did drag on.

  If you’ve never heard of it, ayahuasca is a psychotropic, plant-based brew that has traditionally been used by indigenous Amazonian people as spiritual medicine and shamanic communication but has recently been called “the Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale” by The New Yorker.

  WLSG described the beginning of the ceremony with the shaman and his own skepticism and then illness after drinking the brew.

  “Most people throw up,” he said. “I threw up about eight times over the course of a couple hours.”

  “That sounds horrible,” I said.

  “It was,” he said. “But I’d do it again in a second.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He went on to describe an experience wherein he found himself on a previously unknown plane of existence, one on which he was able to clearly see his entire life and the people in it, including his daughter and his ex, with whom he’d been embroiled in a nasty divorce.

  “In the beginning,” he said, “I was watching all the best moments from our lives together like really good TV.”

  “Nice,” I said. “You got to binge-watch your life.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And then I suddenly felt about her like I used to feel. And I could see the pain she was in now, and my bad feelings toward her just…ended.”

  “Even when you came out of it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right now, I still feel the same way.”

  “So you can still see things exactly as you did on the drug?” I asked.

  “Totally.”

  I’ve never been great with drugs (you can imagine why), but if there were a drug that didn’t force me to hang out with some dude named Aspen who called himself a shaman, didn’t make me vomit for hours, and allowed me to forgive everyone who’s ever wronged me, I’d take it in a second. Because I don’t want to continue to hold a grudge against that woman who didn’t give me “the wave” after I allowed her to merge in front of me on I-5 in 1997; it’s just in my nature.

  White-Linen-Suit Guy and I walked on Alberta Street for a few blocks after we had drinks and I kept thinking about the idea of being magically brought back to a time when you loved someone you’d later come to hate. Was the experience unnatural or natural? Was the drug manipulating the space-time continuum to erase every moment that ever changed your feelings? Or was it somehow returning you to the kindest, most forgiving version of yourself?

  We sat on a park bench for a while talking about the huge market for a forgiveness drug. (I said we could call it Absolvet and use “Let It Go” from Frozen as the jingle.)

  I knew I’d probably never see him again because we were very different and, I think, only mildly interested in each other, each of us regarding the other as the human equivalent of a plain doughnut: a nice treat if it’s the only thing left in the box, but, y’know, fuck plain doughnuts otherwise.

  Even with that in mind, I still had an altogether pleasant and illuminating evening, one that the snark machine inside my brain never would’ve predicted. If this dating binge was doing anything, it was slowly chipping away at the part of me that assumed the worst about people. I now saw that this habit was partly a product of my anxiety, which kept me constantly bracing for the next crisis, and partly a cop-out, because it was easier than actually trying to figure out who people were.

  As exhausting as it was, dating was teaching me to be slightly less of an asshole. And I appreciated that.

  Then, when I got home from my date with WLSG, I opened my spreadsheet and entered his scores, and suddenly I was an asshole again.

  It was a roller coaster of a night.

  High Score (if the Category Had Existed): Storytelling

  Lesson Learned: Stockbrokers aren’t all buttoned-up types—some go on really vomit-y emotional vision quests, and there are some men who can wear the shit out of a fedora.

  First Date #18, Late July: DJ Jazzy Jazz Guy

  Remember those sweaty palms I’d noticed at the beginning of the month? Later on in July, I developed another new nervous tic. It hadn’t ever happened to me before, but after my date with DJ Jazzy Jazz Guy, it seemed destined to become my body’s go-to method for making an unforgettable first impression.

  It was a reasonably hot day in late July, and we were sitting outside in the crowded, tiki-bar-esque atmosphere of the back patio at a bar called the Bye and Bye. Sunny, and perhaps in the mid-eighties, but not really hot enough to sweat in the shade. For most people.

  At the beginning of the date, I’d felt the chest buzzing and shakiness in my arms and hands that were often precursors to a full-blown anxiety attack. But what would be the reason for it? I’d been dating for seven months now; my body and brain had had more than enough time to get used to it. The only explanation I could come up with was that all of this new activity over the course of those months had triggered my GAD to show up inappropriately. (That’s one of the many fun things about GAD—sometimes it barges in during experiences that have never caused you concern before and never will again. It’s like your nervous system is throwing a twenty-sided die with life events on it to decide when to get agitated.)

  I recognized the symptoms, but the mild electrical current on the surface of my skin and the chest tightness both felt like they were holding pretty steady, so I just breathed, drank my vodka and soda, and tried to keep everything at its current level—sometimes “no escalation” was the best I could hope for.

  The good news is that the anxiety attack never came.

  But sweat did. A lot of it.

  I was wearing a low-cut sundress with spaghetti straps, and when the sweating started, I could feel it running down the sides of my head almost immediately. It felt like I was in the shower.

  Once the rivers o
f sweat gushed down from the top of my head, they formed two tributaries, one below each ear, and flowed into a giant estuary that ran down the middle of my cleavage to a great salt lake beneath the center of my bra.

  DJ Jazzy Jazz Guy was a sweetheart, a bald and bearded former jazz DJ and current podcaster who wore rockabilly shirts and a wide grin. I was trying to enjoy talking to him about the glory days of radio, but I was too busy ruminating about my flop sweat. How bad was it? Was my hair color turning the rivers red? Did he think I was dying?

  I tried to figure out what sort of subtle gestures I could make with my hands to cover the surface runoff coming from what felt like every pore.

  “So how many years were you a DJ?” I asked.

  “About a decade,” he said.

  Normal me would’ve recognized that we had a commonality there, but flop-sweat me was preoccupied with figuring out how I might cover or dry or otherwise obfuscate this thing that I knew was utterly un-obfuscate-able.

  I could use my arm to cover my cleavage, but then he could still see my neck, and if I used my other arm to cover my neck, I would look like a hip-hop artist triumphantly crossing her arms after a successful dance battle.

  My hairline was totally soaked now, and I knew there were beads of sweat dangling off it. I felt sweat running all the way down my back and into my ass crack. At this point, I became concerned about drowning.

  Then, without warning, it just stopped. Like a faucet had been turned off.

  But it didn’t matter. The damage had been done.

  I honestly don’t remember anything of significance from that conversation because I was totally engrossed in Flop Sweat Gate ’15 for most of it.

  Finally, the evening cooled down and I dried off a little and managed to relax. I thought, Well, he either likes sweaters or he doesn’t.

  Turned out, he liked sweaters.

  Shockingly, after that inauspicious beginning, DJ Jazzy Jazz Guy and I spent a lovely month drinking summery cocktails and enthusiastically making out. Then I had to take a break to focus on my work, and we just fizzled out.

  But I’ll always be grateful to him for seeing past my tidal wave of humiliation.

  After that experience, I thought I could survive just about anything on a date.

  That theory would be tested later on, but in the meantime, I recorded stats for First Date #18.

  High Score (in a Category I Created for Him): Ability to Ignore Another Person’s Patently Obvious Uncontrollable Physical Event.

  Lessons Learned: If you sweat enough on a hot afternoon, once the sun goes down you can actually freeze from sitting in a wet dress, which is why you should always bring a jacket. Also, it turns out you can have a pretty gigantic anxiety event on a date and things can still work out as long as you’re with a sweetly forgiving person.

  At this point in the OFW date-a-thon, I was definitely disappointed with how things were going. Not only had I not found it—the spark or connection I was looking for—I hadn’t found anything even in that neighborhood. But we all know that dating is just a series of horrifying disappointments right up until it isn’t.

  I was frustrated, but I wasn’t ready to quit. Even though some people around me thought it was probably time to.

  One afternoon in early August I was sitting in my backyard with a group of friends chatting over drinks, and one of them asked what was going on with me.

  I imparted a few of my dating escapades from the weeks prior—using the ridiculous monikers I’d given all my OkCupid paramours, like Weirdly-Obsessed-with-Sake Guy or Pretty-Sure-He-Hates-Me Guy.

  She listened for a while, then said, “Okay, well, do you have any stories that don’t revolve around looking for a man? Like, stories about other stuff you’re doing with your life?”

  Her message was clear. She thought I was better than this.

  But I wasn’t. I’m not.

  I’d spent most of my life un-entangled in an entangled world, and I could tell by the way she talked to me that she had no idea what that was like.

  I actually liked being alone. I’d been alone twenty-three of my twenty-five adult years, so it was something I knew how to do. I was good at it—probably way better than she was. (I know being alone isn’t a competition, but if it were, I would totally win.)

  Unless you’ve been on your own for as long as I have, you don’t know what it’s like to watch movies and read books and listen to music constantly barraging you with the message that romantic love should be every human’s ultimate life goal and if you don’t have it, there is something broken about you and maybe you should consider not leaving the house because you’re just making everyone sad. Unless…are you seeing anyone right now? Have you met someone? Have you tried to meet someone? You should really try to find someone. Or just stop looking because that’s when they’ll show up. It’ll happen. Or it won’t. You should make it happen. Look, but also don’t look is what we’re saying. Like, try to make it happen and then back off, but don’t totally back off so the universe knows you still want it but not so much that it’s pathetic. Because wanting it is really sad but having it is really important so try, but don’t try. And maybe lose a little weight. Or a lot.

  In a world that values monogamous romantic relationships so much more than it does autonomy, it’s impossible not to internalize the message that there’s something deeply wrong with you if you’ve been single for an inordinate amount of time (like the majority of your adult life).

  All of this is to say, I understood that my friend wanted me to be a better person, not someone who was so desperate to be in a relationship that she’d spend the majority of her summer weekends attempting to fulfill that goal.

  I wished I were better than that too. In fact, I wished the whole world were better than that.

  But it wasn’t, and I definitely wasn’t.

  Should I have spent some energy parsing how much I actually wanted to be with someone and how much I just wanted to stop feeling like a freak? Probably. But I frankly didn’t have time. I had more dating to do.

  That being said, the dating I was doing wasn’t working.

  Was I going about this all wrong? Should I attempt to game the system in some way?2 Or should I just stop altogether for a while to recombobulate and strategize? I mean, really, what was the rush? Aside from the fact that in our culture, women became invisible right around their forty-eighth birthdays, so I had two years until I disappeared.

  I’d heard friends tell horror stories about being on dating sites for three and four years with no success. There was no possible way I could continue doing this for four years. I’d have to get one of those teeth-whitening cheek retractors to freeze my mouth into a smile.

  I decided to stick with it, but I needed a new strategy. I took a little break from dating and put my energy into work. And doing drugs. And doing drugs at work.

  1 If you’ve never been ghosted, it’s when there’s no real end to a coupling; one or both people simply disappear from text communication. Sometimes there’s an “illness” or “business trip” involved. I’ve been ghosted a few times, and I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been the ghost as well (strep throat, Detroit).

  2 There’s a very helpful TED Talk by a woman named Amy Webb who gamed the hell out of the online dating system. She generated a seventy-two-point compatibility matrix, then created ten fake male profiles to study her most successful competitors; she eventually developed the perfect profile to attract the perfect man. She’s married now. I don’t have that kind of dedication. Except to potatoes. I really like potatoes.

  Getting Legally High

  In Which I Learn That

  Some People Just

  Shouldn’t Smoke Pot

  The first time I tried pot, I wound up in the hospital.

  The hospital.

  Because of weed.

  I was a junior in high school living in Monterey, California, on the Presidio army base. We lived in a big hundred-year-old box of a house that looked like every othe
r house on our street.

  My friend Laura Cohen and I were in the attic room that had been my brother’s before he went away to college. We had to go out the back door and climb some creaky-ass stairs to get in—it was a dark, windowless room with mud-brown carpeting and a huge built-in desk with a long counter that we sat cross-legged on, because that’s how you sit when you “do weed.”

  We shared half a joint.

  After about twenty minutes, I started feeling tingly and mildly dissociated. I was restless and my parents weren’t home, so Laura and I went to the main part of the house so I could try to calm down. Sitting was torture, so I walked from room to room, rubbing and then shaking my arms as if the tingling sensation in my chest and limbs could be jiggled or wrung out. Thoughts looped in my brain uncontrollably.

  What if this is permanent? I thought. What if the pot flipped a switch I won’t ever be able to turn off?

  Laura and I ended up calling my friend Mary for help. She and her mother arrived about twenty minutes later and took me to the hospital, where a very annoyed doctor put me in a cavernous, darkened exam room under a blanket so I could calm down.

  “Why do people do this?” I asked him.

  Even in my altered state, I felt like it was important to make it clear to the doctor that this was a new experience for me, that I was a good girl and not a pot addict.

  “I have no idea,” he said, shaking his head, jaw clenched.

  He hated me so much. But to be fair, my “weed overdose” was probably keeping him from a guy with a half-inch pipe in his head or a really cool vestigial-tail removal.

  Later, Mary’s mother called my mother, concerned that I had a drug problem. Mary had told her mom that I’d only smoked pot, but, like any self-respecting person who’d come of age in the sixties, Mary’s mother doubted that anyone was such a fucking lightweight that she had to go to the emergency room after smoking a joint. She figured I must’ve smoked crack or something.

  Nope. Just pot.