This is my third Christmas being single. I’m feeling that it should be my last. I was telling this to an old friend of mine the other day. He is my first publisher and writing mentor, and a Dubliner to boot, and he has known me since I was sixteen, so he generally has some direct and pithy advice for me when I put my conundrums before him. My conundrum was this: I really want to meet someone, but how can I write a book about looking for love once I meet someone? His advice: If Mr. Right comes along, simply keep him in the attic until you have done the pre-press interviews.
There is only one problem with this approach. I don’t have an attic. I live in the bottom half of a house. I do have a pretty nice basement though, so I deftly modified his advice to include a basement. My basement is dry and full of a motley assortment of items, which Mr. Right could definitely fashion into a sort of makeshift home. There’s furniture. There are blankets. Many camping items. Plus a jar of my spare change, should he need to venture out for snacks. There is also my washer and drier, so he could even do my laundry while he waited. This idea is really taking shape.
Actually though, there is more than one problem with this proposed scenario. If he really is Mr. Right, presumably I will be very attracted to him. One would hope? So how easy would it be to lie in my single woman bed in my single woman bedroom with Mr. Right maybe less than comfortably situated on all my old blankets in the basement just ten feet away? This problem is consuming me right now. Way more than the problem of finding Mr. Right, which is maybe ass-backwards.
Another problem I could foresee, and I don’t mean to be pessimistic here, is the bathroom. This is a girl house. Our bathroom is tiny. We both need to take showers at around 7am. What if Mr. Right also needed to shower at that time? You could reasonably expect him to wait on his shower, as we are a teen student and a working mom, and he is living a life of leisure in our basement. I’m just saying. Could be a problem. Plus there’s the toilet-seat-up thing, but I might have to contend with that after he emerged from the basement, so I’m just not putting it on the list of things to be concerned about right now.
I suppose there are some vaguely possible problems involving Mr. Right’s own life, his job, and all his responsibilities. We have WiFi though, and there’s even a light in the basement, so I don’t foresee any of those things being too much of a barrier.
Anyway, regarding the singles meetup dance thing from the title, I know I said in a previous blog post that I am allergic to anything with singles in the name, but I’m having to rethink that philosophy. You cannot really be single in this world and desirous of meeting someone and yet not do anything that involves singles. I mean, how chicken is that? So I signed up for the singles meetup dance on the 29th. I did! First, of course, I found a single friend who was willing to come with me. And she’s driving us. And she knows how tentative I am, so I can’t hide in my bathroom when she comes to pick me up. She is a fairly forthright woman, I like that about her, and she will seek me out. We are going to the singles meetup dance. I’m dressing up, that’s decided.
If there are no men there (it’s Marin...) or they all have 70s mustaches, we have decided to become lesbians for the evening. Not with each other though, that could make the drive home a bit weird.
If the singles meetup dance goes well, as in I don’t spend most of the event outside the venue pretending to be a smoker, I may try some other singles events. Or I may just stay home writing love notes and slipping them shyly under the door of my basement.
No comments:
Post a Comment