Plenty of Fish

Gentleman callers come and gentleman callers go. Mostly, they go—and I don't kiss and tell.

Well-meaning friends assume I long to be in a relationship and they try to set me up with men they think I'd get along with. Sometimes the candidates are good friends of my friends, sometimes they're veritable strangers that my friends strike up cunning conversations with while answering a casting call or waiting in line at their polling place. This is when you realize how little the people close to you actually know you.

Indeed, it's true that I am not currently in any legally binding commitment to another person. A woman of a certain age, I live alone and I don't do any online dating. Honestly, bouts of celibacy don't concern me. (Should they?) I wear mismatched flannel pajamas and my carpets are stained with cat barf. Oh, did I mention I have cats? I eat most meals on the couch in front of network TV. Sometimes I open a $30 bottle of wine for dinner even though there's usually no one to share it with. I watch Britcoms on Saturday night.

My secret shame is not that my friends think I'm a sad-sack lonely heart, but rather that I'm really happy with the way things are. I like to think I'm only performing a cliché and that in a parallel world my real life is being lived by a trapeze artist. I say, let her do the work.

Trust Me, It's Not Pretty

Does any man really think it's a good idea to remove his socks last in the boudoir? If you ask me, there's nothing less sexy than a man wearing only socks. That's cute on select toddlers. Boys, do us a favor and remove them before you take off your pants. Or else don't bother taking the pants off.

Just Like Mom Used to Make

Lately I've been buying frozen shrimp and broccoli for lunches at the office. I heat them up with a little pre-cooked brown rice and, voilà, it's what I call a homemade TV dinner.

Happy Valentine's Day

Once someone sent me this awful love letter that was meant to be erotic but it was just raunchy. He dowsed it with a sickening cologne that he mistakenly believed would arouse a woman, so the paper stunk as badly as the prose.

I still have it years later—in a closet in a sealed plastic bag to contain the stench. I can't just throw it in the garbage because I don't even want trash pickers knowing I was the object of this person's desire. And I don't have anywhere to burn it safely. I would like to shred it but then my shredder will smell like the letter and forever remind me of how much I absolutely hated that cologne, and how no number of subtle hints and frank suggestions could get him to stop using it.

Timeless Fashion

When I was very young I worked at a hearing aid factory. My boss Frank was 36 years old, which at the time meant that all the music he'd loved as a teenager was from the 50s and 60s. We listened to the "oldies" station all day long, which is why I'm intimately acquainted with the lyrics of songs that had already gone off the radio before I was born.

Anyway, I was remembering in particular a lady from the company's personnel department. Her name was Brownie McCandliss and she was always impeccably dressed and coiffed, with an outdated hairstyle that needed a lot of hairspray. She had a very trim figure, but her clothes were outdated, too: everything she owned was in immaculate condition but looked at least 20 years behind the current styles, and not in a good way. At that time, women Brownie's age were dressing for the proverbial success and girls like me were wearing baggy CP Shades sweatshirts and slouch socks. Edgy vintage wear was in vogue, but Brownie's wardrobe wasn't what you'd call edgy.

Brownie seemed kind of swingin', like she enjoyed a good fondue party. But she was proper and she never put her feet up on her desk. Instead, she had this lunchtime ritual where she'd unwrap the sandwich she brought every day and she'd slide open the bottom drawer of her desk and use it like a little step while she ate. Then she would close the drawer again when she went back to work.

She was very proud of herself for being able to remember by heart how to spell Frank's complicated Polish last name.

Much later I worked for a high-profile organization that people were impressed I was affiliated with, though what that outfit does isn't nearly as useful as manufacturing devices to help people hear. And none of the high-ranking staff in the human resources division there left the kind of impression on me that Brownie McCandliss did. I will remember them only for their ordinariness.

Beautification

The thing about the Jazzercise instructors—they look like "real" people. They aren't super skinny or buff or even very color-coordinated. You don't feel pressure to hide your imperfections or your age or the holes in your T-shirt. The thing about the Jazzercise instructors... Well, they stay looking like real people. Years into their teaching their lumps and bumps are still where they always were. And they Jazzercise many times per week. Not a good indicator of the transformative potential of this particular workout franchise.

Recently I graduated up to the Latin/hip hop fusion workout called Zumba, which is not as in keeping with my image as the outdated Jazzercise, so it's a let-down from a performance standpoint. But if incentive comes in the form of aspiring to resemble our instructors, then, instead of becoming a buxom, red-faced white lady, I might take a stab at ultra-buff, sleek-muscled black man.