Hillery Occasionally

I used to live in a much bigger apartment.  It had two bedrooms, five closets, a double parlor, a sun room, and a big balcony, all of which was falling apart.  Plaster flaked from the ceilings, the bathroom walls were molding, and the linoleum in the kitchen was older than me.  The floorboards creaked mysteriously at night.  It was the ideal floor plan in the House of Usher. 

It was also cheap and big enough to accommodate some serious entertaining.  I had a propane grill out on the balcony and served homemade barbecue in the summer.  One year I had thirty-five friends over for a Thanksgiving Turkey buffet.  I could seat ten for a formal dinner by disguising a flea market size folding table under a crisp linen tablecloth and genuine Fire King Jadeite dinnerware.  (Not that knock-off Martha Stewart crap, thank you very much.)  I always served four courses, ambitiously selected from The Barefoot Contessa, Jean Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four Star Chef, and The Silver Palate Cookbook.  I would clean up for a week afterwards.

What I loved about it was the sense of accomplishment in entertaining people in a manner largely lost on my generation.  It was about the quality of the meal and the beauty of the presentation.  All the proper glasses and flatware, arranged just so, goading my guests into approximating etiquette.  I worked like a fiend to conjure a perfect moment that no one else I knew was all that interested in.  But once they had a taste, it was on.  I seduced them into higher expectations of a meal and in return they bowed to me.  It was strangely enchanting for all concerned.

Last month my friend Andrea asked me, as if it were something we had spoken of just the other day, “Hillery, when are you going to make that garlic soup again?”  She had tasted it nine years ago at the first dinner party I’d ever invited her to…and not once since then.

What with one thing and another—shooting the show, quitting my job, being evicted from my spacious though dilapidated flat, moving, re-launching my freelancing business—I haven’t been much of a hostess lately.  And the new friends I’ve been working so hard to meet and make, they know nothing of this side of me. When Karen was trying to console me through my eviction, she encouraged me to sell all my stuff and take a share in Manhattan, “You know, darling, for a fresh start.”  I stopped crying and started laughing.  She had never seen my china cabinet or my pan rack or my bar.  She couldn’t know that these trappings were as much a part of me as an arm or a leg.

Karen’s been talking about leaving the city for a while now; so, while I was monumentally disappointed to hear it, I wasn’t that surprised when she announced her imminent departure last week.  The first thing I said was, “You’re coming to my house for dinner!”  I would invoke perfection all over again.  On Saturday night, my garlic soup would resonate within the soul of another.  Before she left the country, my friend would know the sum of all my parts. 

Yeah.  Somewhere in that next week, I lost the plot. I was keeping up with my running regime, procrastinating by posting on my new blog, and managing to do some work I can actually bill out.  By the time Friday rolled around, I had accomplished exactly nothing in the way of preparation for the big night.  I’d stalled in the middle of hooking up my surround sound speakers—splicing monster cable is harder than it sounds—and my living room was covered with tools and wire.  I hadn’t even planned the menu.

I was too tired to be anything but blasé about it all, so after my client meeting in the afternoon I decided to wing it.  I went to the Whole Foods in Union Square and made it up as I went along.  Garlic.  Check.  Cheeses.  Check.  Key limes.  Great.  I’ll make a key lime pie for dessert. Cornichons.  Check.  Short ribs are on sale.  Main course.  Check. 

I needed something slightly exotic for the second course, but something that wouldn’t have to be combined with anything else exotic.  Without the recipe selected in advance, I couldn’t know what that second ingredient might be and the whole thing would turn into a crapshoot.  I picked up some crabmeat.  I could work with that potential worst case scenario.  This is the way you learn to live when your neighborhood is something of an urban wasteland.  Grocery shopping becomes its own commute.

On Saturday morning my chore list runs in two columns.  There are the things I absolutely must get done before four-thirty, when I have to get in the shower, and the things that can be put off and, ultimately, dispensed with altogether in case of a running out of time type of emergency.  Basically, I can cook in front of my guests, but the house really should be clean before they arrive.

I am forced to economize as time flies.  Key lime pie becomes key lime pots de crème to save me from having to make the graham cracker crust.  The floors will be swept, definitely, but not mopped.  All of this is fine.  I’m slipping, but no one will notice.  When I have to give up on the linen table cloth because I don’t have time to press it, that’s when the panic sets in.  I know for certain that I’m a hack when I can’t even set the table in advance…because there’s no more advance left. 

An hour after my guests arrive, all four of them, I give up on the soup course completely.  I have fallen so very far. I want to wallow in my shame, but I know I can’t.  I am still responsible for feeding these people and I have assured them some level of enjoyment.  I may be low rent all of a sudden, but I am still running the show!

The surprising thing is, it goes over.  It goes all the way over.  They don’t seem to miss the table linens or the garlic soup.  They’re getting to know one another and making conversation in a way that, even if they had been meeting randomly for the first time, has to signify as: Ding!  Friend of my friend.  Cool.  They’re talking gay marriage and apathetic youth and those darn Republicans and then someone says, “Whether or not you agree with her politics, you have to admire her upper body.  Oh my God, I would love to have arms like Condi’s!”  They’re smart, they’re funny, and they’re showing it off in my living room.

No matter how convinced I am that I’ve dropped the ball, I have to admit that it’s a success.  It’s not the seduction I’m used to conducting, but it’s working.  People are leaving with a new friend to phone, a new movie to watch, and new show to download to their iPods.  And the food?  Oh, I’ll be back.  I will return to form.  I mean to mesmerize again.  But it’s nice to know that even shooting from the hip, I can impress.  After her first bite of dessert, my friend Sandra turns to me and says, “My crush on you has grown.”

I live in a very small world.  Most of my friends, I’ve known them for eight or nine years.  I’ve met all their friends several times, so setting me up with someone they know is a moot point.  Also, not many of my friends are men.  My professional field is dominated by women and men who are not interested in women, for one reason or another, so I just don’t meet that many guys.

I see them though.  They’re all over the place.  But I don’t know how to talk to men I’ve never met.  I have no idea how to pull off that smiling from across the room thing.  Goldie Hawn does it perfectly in Foul Play.  By simply beaming at him, she turns Chevy Chase into a bungling, maniacal idiot, which is how I probably seem to any man who tries to talk to me.

My problem, in any conversation with a new person, is that I immediately engage in a paranoid fantasy of what he or she is going to want from me.  ‘Why are you talking to me,’ I think.  ‘You must want me to give you money or claim Jesus Christ as my personal savior.’  Perhaps both, I muse.  ‘Are you looking to sell me into sex slavery?’ is a question that often comes to mind.  And yet, I want to be a nice person.  I try to be polite and hear a stranger out.  But while we’re talking, I become simultaneously overwhelmed by the burden of entertaining the stranger and escaping the demand I anticipate being put to me.  Within a minute, I want to run away as fast as I can.

This does not bode well for casual dating, among other things.  The last time I made a new friend, I was purposefully overcompensating for the above mentioned tendencies.  Making a new friend was something that had to be written down on a list of things to do.  Even then, if Karen hadn’t spoken up, we never would have met.

Consequently, the only men I end up talking to, you know, like a relatively sane person, are the ones who date my friends.  I know they don’t want anything from me and right off the bat we have something in common because they dig one of my girls.  Usually we get along really well.  Sometimes, I don’t even have to grow on them.

I was out the other night with a couple of friends, meeting one of their beaus for the first time.  I wanted to make a good impression and I had been cooped up in my apartment for too long working on a deadline, so I was extra chatty.  I’m always nervous that I’m talking too much when I’m around new people, so I was extra nervous.  Then my friend says, “Tell him about that guy you went out with who left when you went to the bathroom!”

Two things are disturbing here.  One is that, yes, I used to go out with strangers I met online.  People I knew were doing it and having fun and I was told to try it too.  The second, and maybe this is only a problem for me, is that my dating history seems to be of benefit only to my friends, who love to rehash what has come to be a sizeable catalogue of what’s the worst that could happens.

But the self-deprecating story is the star turn in my repertoire, so I’m off and running.  Nothing to worry about; I know what I’m doing here. 

When he disappeared, I explain, I wasn’t that disappointed except for being stuck with the check.  I was pulling out my wallet when he emerged from the men’s room.  The beau says, “Well, at least he didn’t bust and run.”  I say, “That would have been better.  The runner might have been rash, but the guy who doesn’t wait for you to return from the ladies is thoughtless.”  Also, I tell him, there were tip offs.  Basketball shoes, pleated pants, no reservations for dinner; I should have seen it coming.

They are laughing, but, I feel, perhaps not for the reasons I had in mind.  So I go again. 

I go to meet another guy from online.  I don’t know my way around the neighborhood, so he directs me from the train to his door on the cell phone.  I stand outside and he invites me to come in while he finds his shoes or what have you.  Because I’m me, my mind is already cycling rape scenarios—visions of hand cuffs, duct tape, a bed of nails.  I say, “You know I can’t, right?”  He doesn’t.  He looks so confused.

We go have a glass of wine and I’m thinking he’s probably not a rapist.  We’re talking books.  We’re talking music.  We’re having fun.  He says we should go for a walk.  I say sure.  If there’s any place I can handle myself, it’s a city street.  As he leads me into Fort Greene Park, I think he might be a serial killer.  I stop and ask, “Is it safe?”  Just to cover myself I ask three more times, but he doesn’t laugh.

I do my best imitation of a relaxed human being and, against every survival instinct I possess, follow him into the small, well lit park.  After a while he walks me to a bench and we sit down.  In retrospect, I imagine he was enjoying the misty summer evening.  He was quiet because he was in a reverie.  I was quiet because I couldn’t figure out if he had lured me out there to molest me or murder me.

So I say, “If you don’t kiss me soon, I’m afraid you’re going to kill me.”

He’s not looking confused anymore.  My freak flag is flying high. 

At this point, the beau has heard enough.  He has some advice for me.  He says, “You’re too hard on these guys.  You don’t like his shoes or his pants?  So what!  You can change that.”

Immediately, I have about a hundred reactions to this statement, running the gamut from ‘You’re totally right,’ to ‘I want to dress my son, not my lover.’  All I can manage to say is, “I’m trying.”  I have to keep saying it too because every time I do he says louder, “No you’re not!”  And he’s from Liverpool, so it sounds like I’m being shamed to shit by one of The Beatles, which, for me, is a very heady trip.

Then he says, “I mean it.  Kiss me or kill me?  I’m looking for a fucking gun!”  And I tell him that I know I’m an odd girl, I just think there has to be someone out there who’s looking for my kind of crazy.

Then he says, and this is my favorite part, “NOBODY is looking for that kind of crazy.”

This man is, in the vernacular of his countrymen, taking the piss out of me.  Quite obviously, this is exactly what I need.  I need as much of it as I can get.  I can’t explain why, but it makes me feel so much better.  It’s almost reassuring.  This kind of exchange, it’s the closest I’m going to get to being at ease around an unfamiliar person.  It was great!

And he was right that I need to ease up on these guys.  The way I see it though, I am trying.  By not dating them, I am sparing the many men I don’t know the nightmare that is a blind date with me.  Instead, I’m getting better at making friends and I’m actually showing up to parties.  I’m working on widening my social circle in the hopes of being my cool self in the company of men.  Because if you were to meet me under non-hyped circumstances, odds are I’d be charming.  If you were seated next to me at a dinner party, you might find my verbal acuity, broad base of trivial knowledge, and dated social graces endearing.  If we were to get to know each other in this manner, the prospect of a date might just be bearable…maybe even inviting.  So I concede that I need to be out there, but if I’m ever going to find anyone I can’t be looking.

Certainly this approach is unorthodox, perhaps even counterintuitive.  But come back with me, for a moment, to Chevy Chase.  He gets a second chance with Goldie of course.  All it takes is a mysterious microfilm, a dwarf, a giant albino, Dudley Moore’s den of sex, a door to door bible salesman, a triple car commandeering sequence, a plan to assassinate the pope, and a Barry Manilow score to bring them together.  Oh, and he has to save her life, twice.  Don’t my chances look so much better next to that?

Ages ago, I used to visit my family.  It’s a thousand mile trip, so what most twenty-somethings rationalize as the free use of a laundry machine wasn’t going to cut it for me.  I went, ostensibly, to shop at Target.  It was a ritual my dad and I had been practicing together for years…and he was still willing to pay.

First, we split up so I can look at cheap shoes and he can find the eleventh pair of clever, casual pants he doesn’t need.  Everything we deposit in the cart must bear up under the scrutiny of the other.  I caution him against pleats.  He wonders aloud how many pairs of shoes will fit in my studio apartment back in New York, much less my suitcase.  Together we move through games and toys, bed and bath, home office, and over to electronics and media. 

On this occasion, my father proceeds to push the cart down the DVD aisle and toss in every movie he may or may not have already seen that interests him in the split-second of consideration he affords each title. 

This behavior sets my brain on fire.  I have already explained to him, fuck it, lectured him on the sanctity of the permanent collection.  There are movies you rent and there are the films you own.  A perfect stranger should be able to walk into your living room, assess your DVD/video collection and infer a recognizable portrait of your moral character, aesthetic sensibility and level of cultural ignorance.  Why then would he jeopardize his reputation in this reckless manner?  Did the man have a death wish?  Was he going undercover—necessarily reworking the disposition of his den as a means of disguise?

I am disabused of my shock induced speechlessness as soon as he snaps up Angel Eyes.  God bless him, the poor man only sees J Lo.  I see a trapdoor to Hell.  "No!" I gurgle, in the slo-mo monotone that accompanies every damned effort to save a human life.  In my normal voice, I remind him that his philosophy is skewed.  Calmly, I explain that his judgment is flawed.  I say, “This is a very bad movie.” 

He asks me why and I tell him that the writing was on the wall—the tagline on all the subway ads was systematically edited by the brilliant youth of New York City to read: You won’t believe her eyes ASS.  Isn’t that enough to illustrate the flimflam nature of this beast?  And from the mouths of babes!

He says, “So, you haven’t seen it.”  And then he looses the stone cold stare he’s been working on me since I was six years old.  It says: You think you’re smart, but can you talk your way out of this one?  Can you break the master of bullshit?  It is at this very moment that I discover the mantra that will save my soul and murder my social life: I must speak with authority on that which I despise.

I must speak with authority on that which I despise.  I must watch crappy movies in order to filet them properly and with all expediency.  No one can be allowed to escape my inimitable wrath.

The problem is I’m too much of a snob to suffer through all of it.  I take it too seriously.  So far, the oeuvre of Charlize The Wrong has nearly killed me.  I saw The Astronaut’s Wife for Johnny Depp.  I’m a first generation 21 Jump Street devotee and I used to go to every movie this man put out, but after that spent piece of used jet trash (thank you, Tom Waits, sir) I couldn’t do it anymore.  She’s gorgeous, but she can’t act her way out of a paper sack.  After The Legend of Bagger Vance, I’m sorry, but you’re not going to sell me on Monster. 

I don’t blame Johnny.  He takes risks and for a talented actor the peaks of that s-curve can be glorious.  They have been in his career.  On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that lately Morgan Freeman is a total movie ho.  At least equally as talented, for sure, but who does this man say no to?  He’s done twenty flicks in the last five years.  At what point did The Big Bounce seem like a good idea?  Guilty by Association?  I get Under Suspicion—I’d pick my nose onscreen if I could do it next to Hackman—but High Crimes?

Still, when The Legend of Zorro came out, I saved it to my Netflix list for eventual home viewing.  I knew it was going to be bad, and it was, but I couldn’t help myself.  I love the real legend of Zorro.  After all, he fights for those who cannot fight for themselves.  If I don’t fight for Zorro by lambasting this tragic interpolation, who will? 

I am tortured by my overwhelming need to articulate my many opinions and my intense fear of sounding ignorant.  They are equal opposing forces that never quit.  If we ever met, you might find this combination of personality traits somewhat annoying or abrasive.  Friend, you can walk away.  Let me repeat, I am tortured.

So, I continue to watch crap I probably won’t like.  At my house it’s called Probably Not a Very Good Movie Night.  (Because I live alone and I call it that.)  Mostly anything big and commercial goes into this category, along with anything recommended to me by my friend David.  Well, almost anything.  I still haven’t signed on for White Oleander. 

Every once in a while, I’m pleasantly surprised.  Usually, I find the special features of decidedly bad films far more entertaining than the actual feature.  The best so far is The Forgotten, which started out as fairly intriguing modern noir and then shifted abruptly and inexplicably into a ridiculous sci-fi alien brain sucking thing.  They have interviews with the cast and I just loved listening to Julianne Moore speak passionately about the incredible script and how much she believed in the project.  Lady, did you read it?  Either the interview was the performance of her career or they rewrote the ending on her.  That I could watch ten times!

All of this is to say, in case you haven’t already guessed, I am a great big obsessive pop-culture geek.  I have Netflix OCD and must re-rank my queue several times each day.  I stay home on weekends and watch DVDs.  I own all of Buffy and am working on top five episode lists for each season.  (Marti Noxon, you are my hero!)  You know, for fun. 

I also own The Decalogue and Howard Hawks has been my favorite director since I was eleven years old.  The Third Man is my number one film.  Barbara Stanwyck is my best actress.  Paul Newman is my best actor.  I know I’m looking for a Frank Capra man who is able to negotiate this Hitchcokian world we live in, but I’m still facing up to the fact that I’m going to have to leave my apartment a little more often if I want to find him.

Meanwhile, I have the master of bullshit to contend with.  Shortly after I got home from that trip I received a package.  I knew what was in it.  I’m not his daughter for free.  The note attached to the J Lo ticket to eternal damnation read: You always forget to pack one thing when you visit.  What would you do without me?

Can we talk about the sex tapes for a minute?  Because I’m at a loss on this.  I’m starting out at a disadvantage, I know, because I haven’t seen much pornography and I’ve never actually watched one of these homemade celebrity deals.  Yes, I know how to find the link; I just have zero interest.  My objection, if that’s even what this is, is academic.  I do not understand the virtue of the fucktape.

To get you a little closer to where I’m coming from, I’ll admit that I get the mirror over the bed thing.  The idea that while someone is on top of you, performing whatever scene of whichever act, you might want to take a momentary timeout to observe what he or she looks like from several other angles—that this might increase your enjoyment of the act itself—this I understand.

It’s not for me, mind you.  For one thing, I’m a paranoid individual—predicting potential catastrophe dominates my continuous interior monologue.  Shards of glass could come crashing down at any moment!  And there are other things.  But I understand this.

So with all the sex tapes emerging lately, I’m constantly reminded of how much I don’t understand that.  I’ve spent far too much time considering why anyone would make one and nothing I’ve come up with makes any sense.

First off—and I don’t care how hot you are, famous celebrity—watching yourself in naked action has to be weird.  Who’s doing the lighting?  Who is going to airbrush you?  If you’re ogling yourself for technique, how many years of analysis does that translate to?

Second, do you really think this little home movie is going to stay private?  For even five minutes?  I mean, that excuse might have flown for those nudy shots from before you were somebody, but now it’s not even taking off.  Sure, you’re vacuous, but aren’t you just a little bit savvy by now, celebrity person?  Aren’t you somewhat acquainted with this sort of chicanery?  Isn’t your entourage supposed to be on top of these things?

In fact, big stud modern day matinee idol, you are manufacturing your own blackmail scenario.  Not that I mind.  I’m just baffled.  Isn’t it clear that once you’re done with the ingénue, she’s going to take you down?  Is it possible that I’m the only one who sees this coming?

Oh, you don’t care, Mr. rock/rap/racecar star?  You’re documenting your conquests?  You’re showing us where your real talents lie?  Guess what?  You just fractionalized the number of women who will agree to sleep with you in the future.  Are we afraid you’ll tape us too?  Not so much.  We’re too busy feeling sorry for you.

Sadly, this is where my mind has been idling.  Hopefully now, having articulated my frustration, I can move on to more stimulating subject matter.  Keep your fingers crossed.

I am happier right now than I have been in months and it’s ridiculous.  It’s like when you’re super sick and slipping into a coma seems like a good idea because the pain and weakness are so bad that all you can do is cry.  When you recover from something like that or, I imagine, get out of prison, the relief from misery is so intense you feel like it’s the best day of your life.  It’s Wednesday for everybody else, but for you the world is beginning anew.

I’m having that day today…over a sofa.

I moved three and a half months ago and I didn’t feel like paying someone to cart my heavy, disgusting, "yes, I do have cats," old sofa over to my new place.  I couldn’t afford a new one after laying out a three month deposit and first month’s rent, so I’ve been doing without.

I work at home and I’ve been editing books on a folding chair.  I watched season one of Veronica Mars all in one weekend, sitting on the floor.  For a while, I seriously considered lawn furniture.

There was a cheap sofa on backorder, a second trip to Ikea during which I was seduced by the new, twice the price model and gave them all my money, and a two week waiting period to accommodate the delivery window.  Then no sofa.  It was like the time the orthodontist told me the braces were coming off next month and then nix nix.  I was a mess.

I picked myself up, dusted off, and held my forked little tongue while I called the monolith to figure out the trouble.  Amazingly, they admitted it was all their fault.  And, as promised, it was delivered on a Sunday.

I know it seems small, that in fact it is small.  I feel a tinge of guilt over my immense satisfaction.  But the misery is over!  I’m going to get in the shower, blow out my hair, and paint my face for the very first sitting. 

Shit! What am I going to wear?

I grew up in Minnesota where there are only two seasons: winter and road construction.  Winter is nine months long.  There is no sunshine, only a cloudy haze from which precipitation may pour at any moment.  The land is flat for 300 miles in every direction, so once the wind gets going there’s nothing to slow it down.  Oh, and the jet stream is coming down from Canada.  On any given day, the wind chill factor can drag the temperature down by more than twenty degrees.  It’s not hard to believe that this is where the glaciers stopped.  What I don’t understand is how they melted.

New York is a balmy oasis by comparison—a complete seasonal cycle with just a soupcon of global warming.  Still, every time December rolls around, I get the winter terrors.  New Yorkers walk everywhere or we take the subway.  The wind going up and down Manhattan avenues is enough to blow you around the corner and I have yet to meet the heated platform.  We are on the front lines of the weather war.

People who don’t leave Minnesota as soon as they turn eighteen (or graduate high school, whichever comes first) and live to tell about it, they find ways not to come in direct contact with the cold.  They have heated garages and all of the downtown office buildings are connected by second story glassed-in walkways called skyways.  Extra taxes are levied to heat the homes of the poor and the aged and homeless people are conscientiously sheltered—it’s a matter of life and death.  The last time most of these people were on the front lines they were little kids waiting on the corner for the school bus.  Indeed, those are the memories that haunt me to this day.

It would happen something like this.  You go to sleep at night shivering under what can never be enough blankets.  You wake up even colder, which means in the middle of the night the water in the pipes froze solid or the boiler conked out.  You’ll be able to get a minute long cold shower before packing off to the bus stop.  When you leave the house you are wearing moon boots, two pairs of socks, long underwear under jeans, a long-sleeved undershirt, a sweater, a scarf for under the coat, the parka, the hat and gloves, and the scarf for over your coat that mom or dad will wrap around your head leaving only a gap for your eyes and your runny nose.   

You start down the sidewalk and you think it’s a good thing you know where you’re going because it feels like you’re in a maze; the snowdrifts on either side of you are five feet high and you can’t see over them.  When you get to the corner, you and all the other kids stand with your backs to the wind and pray that the bus comes before your bodily fluids freeze, sealing shut your air passages and suffocating you…to death. 

Then that mean, restless little boy from down the block pops out from behind one of the snow drifts and throws a snowball at you.  He is in fact a snowball artiste.  He has hit you in the ear where the folds of your outer scarf must separate to allow for your eye opening.  The snowball was packed tightly enough to penetrate this chink in your armor, but not so tightly that it shatters on impact.  No, it is the heat seeking snowball, splitting into shards that slide down your neck and into the folds of the inner scarf.  When the bus does arrive and you climb into its stuffy, steamy warm cavity, the shards will melt and you will be wrapped in wet wool.

All right, I’ll stop, but when I see snow come down this is my sense memory reaction.  I am cold and as long as I’m outside nothing will get better.  That’s why this weekend I stockpiled enough provisions to avoid leaving my house for at least a week.  My office is next door to my bedroom and I’ve never been more pleased about it.  I know the meaning of the word blizzard.

What I got instead was truly a winter wonderland.  Today was so sunny and beautiful, I had to get out and see it all for myself.  I went for a trudge in Prospect Park and everything was pristine and majestic and white.  And I didn’t even need my gloves! 

The few people who were out were cross country skiers, diehard runners, or fellow spectators equally caught up in nature’s benevolent act.  Maybe it was because there were no tourists in the vicinity, but we all smiled at each other and said hello as we passed.

I read this morning that this wasn’t technically a blizzard because wind gusts were well below 60 miles per hour.  And according to weather.com it will be 48 degrees on Thursday, so the snow won’t last long enough to get all trampled and ugly.  I ask you, how lucky can a girl get?

Here today, gone tomorrow; it’s the perfect snowstorm.

Why blog now? is the question running through my mind even as I type this.  I have nineteen notebooks full of intellectual property stacked neatly in my office.  Not once have I put them out on the coffee table when friends visit or in any other way encouraged people to read my tangential, digressive thoughts.

What’s changed? I’ve gotten myself into a spot of trouble.  Several of you already know this.  I have become a reality TV subject.  Next week a new show will debut on VH1 and at some point during the season there will be a 22 minute episode all about my desolate love life.

I know, you’re thinking I am the least likely person to be on a reality TV show.  I haven’t had television reception in my home in more than three years.  Reality programming is part of the reason why. Please believe me when I tell you it was all an accident.  I went along with it.  I take responsibility for it.  I simply never would have predicted that anyone would look at me and think, “Now that’s good television.”  I am as surprised as anyone.

Are you ready for the best part?  Okay, there are three best parts.  One: The show is now called “Can’t Get a Date.”  Two: Within the first eight minutes of the episode, I am giving tips on performing oral sex.  Three:  I am made to play sports and as a result I get into an actual, real live, rolling in the dirt, punching, scratching, biting girl fight.

We will deconstruct later, I promise.  For now, I just want to go on record, somewhere, about how extraordinary the whole process was (not that this is the only topic up for discussion here).  We shot for nearly four months.  They had enough footage to make twelve episodes about a dozen different Hillery type characters. I changed a lot of things in my life as a result of this experience.  I still don’t date much (okay, at all).

Just before Christmas, the producers had me into the studio for a follow up interview, during which I watched the episode for the first time.  It is so strange to see yourself on camera.  I do not move or sound anything like I thought I did.  I was shocked, shocked to find that indeed I had bitten a stranger.  All in all, I came off okay, even charming in a feisty way.

My deal is, I’m always asking myself, “If you just met you, would you like you?”  Am I decent and intelligent and funny enough to impress myself?  I ruminate.  I am a ruminator.  I ruminate like crazy!  Generally the answer is yes.  Certainly, I make an ass of myself often enough.  Usually the circumstances make my actions at least somewhat understandable.  The girl, the one I bit, ran me down and hurled a water balloon at my head after her whole team had been beaning me with them for 45 minutes.  Okay, so she missed.  I was mad as Hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore! 

Then something occurred to me that I probably should have considered before the whole thing started: people who don’t know me are going to watch the show and think that’s me.  They’re going to have opinions about a tip of the iceberg, collage display of me and I don’t even get to decide what pieces make the cut.  I’m going to be the poster girl for blow jobs and sissy fights.

Coming to terms with this took a while.  Along with being a ruminator, I am also a control freak and I’m borderline OCD.  I took it all very seriously.  I made a list.  The list was your standard two column pro/con deal.  It was, I thought, an objective self assessment of my personality.  As if such a thing were possible.  Where do I come up with this shit?  Really?

Now I look at it and I have to laugh.  It’s like a cartoon of my neuroses.  Actually, it’s kind of adorable.

I am posting it here, yes, to entertain you, but largely to console myself.  I don’t mind looking foolish.  It’s just that I want to have a say in what foolishness of mine you see and the context it is given.  Because I may be an ass, but I’m not an asshole.  That’s all I really want people to know about me…for now.

Hillery