Wanted: Significant Something

I've developed a curiosity with the human experience, relationships/dating, and the "self advertising" that has quickly become a major part of all of the above. I've read hundreds of personal ads in the interest of art (and my own curiosity) and even wrote a few of my own. Occasionally, a creative one will catch my eye and I wanted to share them...here's one of hopefully many more to come. It's titled "Wanted: Significant Something"

Description/Position Summary:
My company’s public relation’s department currently has a part-time opening for a ‘Probationary Friend’. You must understand this is an entry level position and as such, you may be terminated at any time for any reason.

However, the right candidate will rise quickly and could possibly be interviewed for the lucrative full time position of Significant Other at a moments notice. Keep in mind, we are looking for only the best and brightest talented individual to fill this position. The Significant Other is a cornerstone of our company and can be a very rewarding position. This person will where many hats and be able to change them tactfully and gracefully to suit the given situation. The Significant Other is responsible for contributing (at least in part) to emotional stability and support, physical tenderness and excitement, as well as mental stability and entertainment. The exceptional Significant Other may also pursue the “Life Partner” Track, which will lead to a much broader spectrum of benefits and responsibilities. Our ideal candidate will possess the following characteristics:

-Be self-motivated
-Be a great team player
-Have great creativity
-Caring: not only for themselves, but the company as a whole
-Detail-oriented
-The ability to work long hours and overtime
-The ability to finish work in a timely manner
-Open to direction and adaptable to change
-Must have excellent written and oral communication skills
-A great ability to multi-task
-Excellent time management skills
-The ability to work in a fast-paced, occasionally stressful environment
-The ability to prioritize based on limited information
-Must be able to work independently
-Excellent problem solving skills
-The ability to work very closely with a partner
-The ability to meet performance quotas
-A winning ‘can-do’ attitude

Desired Skills:
-The ability to lie comfortably in front of a movie
-The ability to ask and answer questions over dinner or drinks
-The ability to chase sunsets at a moments notice
-The ability to understand that no one is perfect
-The desire to make the company greater than the sum of its parts
-The desire to take and use vacation time effectively and often
-The desire to find a compromise between two differing view points
-The desire to smile early and often
-The desire and love of love

Qualifications/Requirements:
Candidate must have a high school education or better. Candidate must also have 2-5 years experience of related experience. No beginners please!

Salary/Benefits:
Salary is commensurate with experience. Great benefits package for full time employment!

This company is EOE.

Against the Grain

I've had very little to write here other than....

• "dating" is strange and nearly a non-existent practice of our generation
• online personals seem like a human sears catalogue
• if girls spent as much time and energy on their education/careers/something worth while as they do on their waist lines, makeup, and hair in the pursuit of male attention...so much more would be accomplished
• and that I, inexplicably, just can't seem to relate...

"Today I was a terrorist"

The clock ticked idly on the wall as I stood in the lobby watching a team of firemen in their rubber-duck HasMat suits carry the last of my fellow victims across the grass to the yellow tent erected on the other end that I’d come to learn was a “Decontamination” station. I’d been “dead” for three hours give or take and by this point I was the last “victim” in the auditorium around which all the commotion had been staged. It was my entire fault.

My mother, a contractor and member of the controller team evaluating responders during the exercise, had asked me if I would like to volunteer to be a “victim” in an exercise they were holding at the fort and if I wouldn’t mind being “decontaminated”. The very word provoked a number of questions but I arrived Wednesday morning armed with a backpack full of snacks and my bathing suit under my clothes. I was ready.

Mom didn’t mention anything about being a terrorist.

The evidence was highly suggestive, a letter detailing a possible motive for the attack, tucked into the furthermost pocket of my backpack. The fire alarms of the building were set off and the victims waited to be rescued. There were five of us staged in the auditorium—not including two heavy looking dummies that also required rescuing—and fourteen in total. It was an hour before firemen entered the building and three more had passed before firemen packaged my limp body on a yellow sled and dragged me from the building with my backpack as evidence.

An initial decontamination shower had been unleashed in front of the building and the team of firemen carrying me paused beneath it until I was thoroughly soaked. I shivered despite the sun and I tried not to smile as the firemen overhead remarked that for a dead body, I sure seemed cold. I squeezed my eyes shut as I was transferred from the sled to a portable conveyor belt inside the HasMat decontamination tent. When I opened them, the four pretty female GI’s leaning over me were discussing procedure. “This is where we’d remove your clothes and begin decontamination”, one of them said to me. I piped up and told them I’d come prepared and they processed me without hesitation, fed my arms and head through a plastic body bag, and folded my arms over my chest. My bag was searched and the evidence eventually made it’s way into the hands of the authorities.

They told me I could go home.

Well it seems I've been deceived

It has been a real treat to be home. It's been amazing to see old friends, visit with new ones, and rediscover my old haunts around town. I've taken to running to the public beach two towns over and sitting in the sand for a while watching the waves and people chase their toddlers up and down the beach playing chicken with the waves. It's wonderful to be home but I'm finding something haunting about it that I have yet to shake.

When a relationship ends, sympathetic spectators are quick to pat you on the back and tell you how glad they are that you've learned something from the experience. While I frequently arm myself with such convictions, I've been thinking of late how tired I am of feeling like the very beach upon which I rest my sneakers.

Family, friends, lovers, strangers, and trespassers alike have left traces of themselves in the form of sandcastles, doodles, and the occasional trail of footprints passing through. There are memories I like to sit with once in a while and soak in their warmth through remembrance. It's never much but it's enough to keep me going so long as I don't dwell in them for too long. Being back here--being home--keeps me close to the company of ghosts I keep and these memories with which I like to sit once in a while have been in my mind from the first morning stretch to when I close my eyes at night. They're at their worst when I'm out for a run.

It seems strange to be haunted by happy memories but this nagging fear in the pit of my stomach suggests crimes of more than missing, wishing, and remembering.

It is also completely unhelpful that City and Colour's "Confessions" has been stuck in my head for days on end. I will shake this.

learn something new every day

If there's one thing I always say when talking about my family it's this: we're complicated. I can never keep up with the various multi-decade long family feuds, who's speaking to whom, who swore they'd kill the other on sight, etc. We're Irish, German, French, Austrian, etc. and quite dramatic apparently. We're a family in which different groups gather for the various obligatory holidays and that's about it.

This afternoon, a few members of my family got together to eat dinner with a semi-long-lost uncle from Claifornia I haven't visited with since I was twelve. This afternoon has been really nice, an actual family occasion (granted there are only 5 of us here) where uncles and aunts came over to exchange hugs, stories, and copious amounts of food and where I unexpectedly learned a bit more about myself.

Today, I learned I'm related to Leslie LaGroves, a graduate of MIT, West Point, and the project manager "master mind" of the Manhattan project "responsible for killing all those Japanese people" as my aunt phrased it. LaGroves was also responsible for the CIA's operational policy of sharing information on a need to know basis, a topic of much discussion at the dinner table--more so than our family's hand in the dropping of the atomic bomb. Casual tidbit of dinner conversation I'm sure. Why hasn't anyone mentioned this before?

I also learned...as my other uncle pointed out, that I have double jointed thumbs. Sweet.

you might roll your eyes at this

For all my optimistic rambling, I've become much more quiet than I used to be and there are days I "live inside my head" as my friend scott likes to say. Scotty lives almost entirely inside his head. He swears it's safer there where you're freer from judgement and guilt. I can't really agree on my part but perhaps that's the difference between us. It's not as gloomy as one might think. That very phrase "living inside your head" has the tendency to incur sidelong glances and raised eyebrows everyone save the most understanding of friends. It's more pensive than anything and all I can think about is that line from "My Favorite Chords" by the Weakerthans that repeats over and over in my head:

"You are a radio. You are an open door. I am a faulty string of blue Christmas lights. You swim through frequencies. You let that stranger in, as I'm blinking off and on and off again."

More than anything I keep remembering the summers that have come before and I crave with an intensity I can't describe to relive every waking moment of the past four years of my life (the good, the bad, and the ugly) if only just to have for one second the chance to feel that kind of love again.

The most important relationship you'll ever have

I played catch up with my best girl friend from home over salads at Panera's yesterday. We dished over school, grades, guys, and that pesky ex-boyfriend my friend couldn't seem to get away from. She'd met lots of guys at school but she always seemed to compare them to him--no one got her the way he did and although he wasn't always so great (we all do seem to have our moments) settling for him seemed like a much better idea than being alone.

I couldn't help but ask why. Why was "settling" so much better than being "single" and what could being in a relationship offer you that you can't find in the comfort of yourself or a close group of friends--besides the obvious and how important is sex to you that you'll stick around in a relationship that does more mental and emotional damage than good?

My friend didn't have an answer and balked at my suggestion that this time could be time taken for herself, to develop the most important relationship anyone will ever have in their entire lives...more important than the ones with your parents, more important than the ones with your extended family and friends, and far more important than those connections with your myspace/facebook friends list. I suggested that she could take this time to develop a stronger relationship with herself by spending time doing what interests her rather than worry about finding, pleasing, and maintaining the interest of someone else.

How much time, really, do we devote to the persuit of others? How much energy do we spend wondering if they like us, if we're attractive to them, good enough, intelligent enough, or just enough? As women, how much time do we then spend trying to live up to those expectations by becoming less of ourselves--a smaller size and a more conplacent voice--in the disillusioned mindset that if we change ourselves and our bodies, others will change how they treat us.

We are not empty voids or parts of something needing to be made whole. We don't need to be in a relationship as confirmation that we're good people worthy of someone else's time, energy, and affection. I feel that everyone is deserving of that and I personally don't have that incessant need to go looking for someone else to make my life--my self--any better than it already is.

Now as for me, I feel like women could spend every minute of every day in efforts solely for others or just thinking about it and that's not to say that living a little for others is a horrible idea but I think it's important to remember to live a little each day just for yourself. Even if that little bit means unpacking all your crap from school, jumping on your bed, and taking a nap in the sun outside your window. :)

All that being said--and I feel almost compelled to write this after that near declaration of single status--I don't think there's anything amiss in being with someone who compliments your life and perhaps adds a little more color to it.

My best friend is an amazing, talented, and driven woman who I hope one day encounters someone who appreciates her hard-working and down to earth spirit. I think she deserves that.