City Mouse In The Country

Jules called me last Friday.
“What are you doing next weekend?”
“I might have to work, but if I don’t, nothing. Why?”
“We’re going camping. You should come.”
Huh. Here’s the thing about me. I have NEVER gone camping. I don’t go anywhere that I can’t wear heels. But I’ve been thinking that I need to make some major changes in my life. So maybe it’s time to try something new.
“Sure. If l don’t have to work, I’ll come. But I don’t have camping stuff. I’m not really a nature girl.”
“Don’t worry about it. We got you. Do you have a sleeping bag?”
“I DO! From sleepovers in middle school.”
“Then you’re fine. Bring that. We’ve got everything else. It’ll be fun. Just come.”
So Friday morning, I packed myself up, grabbed my sleeping bag and went to work. Jules and her boyfriend picked me up after work and we set off to the wilderness.
First stop: Jules’ mom’s house to pick up some more stuff, including her older brother. He looked at my feet. “Are you wearing heels?”
Shit. I had never taken off my heels from work. I had shed the blazer and was running around in a t-shirt and jeans but I had forgotten to replace my heels with the sneakers I bought my freshman year of college and that still look new, that’s how infrequently I wear them. I went back to the car and changed my shoes. I felt short. I’m used to seeing the world about two inches higher. I felt like Camping Barbie, like my feet should be permanently molded into that high-heel shape so when you wear sneakers, you look stupid.
“Hey, look, it’s Camping Lindsay!” Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who had that thought.
We packed up the cars and set off. It took us less than two minutes to get going the wrong way. We’re all city people. We’re not so good with streets that aren’t numbered.
We find ourselves driving through pouring rain. This is not looking good. It’s getting so bad that visibility is starting to not be so great. The other car we’re caravanning with is thinking maybe we should pull over and let the storm pass. “It’s clear over there,” Sculls, Jules’ boyfriend, says, pointing to the left. “Too bad we’re driving over this way,” he says, pointing to the right of the car, where the clouds are black and streaming down to the ground. I don’t know much about nature, but I do know this: when you see clouds that touch the horizon, it’s pouring. I’m starting to wonder why I thought I needed to try something new.
We get to the camp ground in a light drizzle that stopped by the time we finished with registration. They hand us contracts to sign. The contracts basically sign away our lives. “We’ve got one more thing for you all to sign,” the 15-year-old charged with our safety told us.
“Five bucks says we have to sign it in blood,” I said.
Contracts and lives all signed away, we head up to our campsites. They’re on top of a hill. We have to haul all our stuff up and down. It’s just like the city. Our campsite’s a walkup.
We get ourselves set up and I get to see what camping is really about: drinking. We drank a case between four of us by the time the other people in our group got off work and got up here. By this time, it was dark. Setting up tents in the dark, not as easy as setting up tents while it’s light out, but we got the job done. To celebrate: more drinking.
We drink so much that we forget to be good campers. We just fall asleep. We wake up in the morning when it starts pouring on all of our tents. We wait for the rain to stop (a fierce but quick moving storm that’s over in 45 minutes) before we venture outside and realize just how citified we are.
The night before we put a tarp up just in case of bad weather. We strung it up carefully and put a poll in the middle so that even the tallest among us could walk under it. And it worked. The ground under the tarp was dry as a bone.
Unfortunately, nothing was actually under the tarp. Everything we left out at night, the food, the clothes, the napkins, even the damn matches, was on a picnic table right next to the tarp. And everything was soaked. We’re idiots.
We spent the rest of the morning trying to salvage things and throwing out the really damaged stuff. By that time, it was time to go rafting. I’ve never been rafting before. I was told I couldn’t wear heels. I had to wear swimmy shoes instead.
We were running so late and it was overcast and grey so it took us about an hour on the river before I realized I left the sunscreen in the car. We got back to the campsite drunk and tired and as red as lobsters. There was only one thing to do to combat that. We drank some more.
The next morning we packed up our camp site and dragged everything back down to the cars. We sat around after the cars were packed, shooting the shit and playing catch and Frisbee. Oh yeah, and drinking. We didn’t want to have to haul that beer back to the city.
It was finally time to go. We drove back down the mountain and headed towards electricity and running water and civilization in general. I loved camping. I had a great time and I would do it again in a second, even as I sit here, home from work for the day because I am so sunburned I can’t wear anything other than a thin cotton nightgown.
That being said, I can’t wait to slip my feet into a pair of two-and-a-half inch stilettos.

The Single Girl Treatment

Another one of my friends calls up, squealing about the latest date she went on and how she’s so in love. “He’s so nice and he’s good-looking and he has a great job and we just had the best time.” Blah Blah Blah.
Lately, I’ve become the single girl in my group. I don’t know that happened, but here I am, the single girl.
You know what happens to the single girl? She gets the single girl treatment. That means that all your friends surround you like you just got told you have leprosy and they’re determined not to let a few postulating lesions put them off. You have the promises of a night, “Just the girls—no boys,” like you couldn’t handle seeing your friends with somebody when you, yourself are alone. Like you’re going to slit your wrists right at the dinner table with the butter knife when you realize you’re alone. It hadn’t dawned on me before, but that’s when I knew I was the single girl.
“Oh, you have to meet Pat,” E said to me one night as we were walking out of a bar.
“I’d love to.” (Pat being the new boyfriend. They had been together for about a month. Already, I wasn’t too sure about him. He used an ironing board for a kitchen and a coffee table.)
“And don’t worry, we’ll all go out one night, you, me C, G. Just the girls, no boys.”
Thank god. Because everybody knows boys have cooties.
When people who were single aren’t single any more, they spend the first few months of their lives acting like single is a contagious disease they finally managed to get rid of. You don’t see as much of your friends now that they’re dating somebody else. You don’t get as many phone calls. Part of it is that they’re happy in love, sure, but the bigger part of it is they don’t seem to want to acknowledge their own single lives. “Oh, she’s got single. I had that once. It took me forever to get over it. I love her, she’s my girl, but I just have to much going on in my life right now. I can’t catch single again.”
Then, there’s that forced single-girl-meets-new-boyfriend dinner that is about as awkward as they come. They’re happy in love and gushing and it’s just human nature to instantly start looking for all of his flaws. Nobody can be that perfect. They just can’t. So, while they look adoringly at each other over the rims of their wine glasses, you’re looking at him with your eyebrows raised, trying to figure out the bullshit that lurks beneath.
And then come the setups. Every girl’s boyfriend’s got a single friend/brother/cousin/former cell mate and wouldn’t it be great if the two of you hit it off? Your girls are happy in love and now you have to be, too. So you wind up going to endless bars and dinners and parties attached to some mooch that wants to spend the night talking about the ex-girlfriend who really broke his heart. As the night goes on, and he gets progressively drunker, you hear details about his sex life you wouldn’t want to know about your own sex life until, finally, he gets drunk enough to call her, walking off to some quiet corner and leaving you to wonder how that winner managed to slip through your fingers.
And that whole night, you could have been meeting Mr. Right if your friends weren’t so determined that you should be happy.

The Slump

I am in a slump of epic proportions. I have not been out on a proper date since the closeted homosexual took me to dinner and the stranger next to me at the restaurant kindly suggested I try again.
I know a large part of it is because I work weird hours and, with very few exceptions, the men who are free around one in the afternoon are not the guys you want to be dating. I could have my pick of any of the just-this-side of homeless vegetable stand workers that I pass on my way home, but somehow I feel the conversation would be lacking.
There isn’t anybody in the past two months I’ve met that I would go out to dinner with when I could be taking a nap or reading a book. I genuinely enjoy being single and the guy has to be great in order for me to move into “girlfriend” mode. Or at least appear great. They usually turn out to be crazy, but in the beginning they put on a good show. The guys I’ve been meeting lately, they’re not even bothering with the smoke and the stage lights. They’ve all had some major character flaw that they wear on their sleeves like a badge of honor. I want to take them aside and teach them. “No, honey, it’s not a good thing that you’re an out-of-work writer with a coke habit. Don’t broadcast that like it’s one of your better traits.” Then I find myself thinking, “If that’s what they’re showing you, then, Jesus, what’s lying under the surface?” I don’t want to be on a date where I’m praying for shallow waters so I know I’m going to make it home at the end of the night.
How do you keep the faith that there’s somebody out there for you when you’re meeting people that are making you question the existence of God?
I know I’m not the only one out there asking this question. I know because every time I joke that I’m going to die alone and the 80 cats I’ve horded (because that’s what single old women seem to do—become cat ladies) will start eating my flesh before the police notice the stench, most of my single friends laugh. But not the right laugh. It’s not that “Oh, you are so ridiculous” laugh. It’s more like a nervous, “holy-shit-I’ve-had-that-same-thought-we’re-all-screwed” chuckle.
New York is one of the hardest cities in the world to date in if you’re a single woman. People have written columns and articles and chick lit books (one incredibly bitchy queen I met in a book store called them “cliterature” and I loved him for it) ad naseum about this very subject. But the problem with the slump is eventually it just brings out your insecurities and fears. You find yourself asking the important questions: Why is everybody else finding somebody and I’m not? Am I just not looking in the right places? Do I have some startling personality defect? Do I smell funny? It starts to feel like you really are the last single girl in the city and they should stuff you and put you on display in the Museum of Natural History with the Wooly Mammoth and all the other antiquities.
“What’s that, mommy?”
“That was the last single girl in New York.”
“What happened to her?”
“The cats got her.”