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UP WITH SHOUT OUTS!

Remember: As to the opinions expressed in all Shout-outs, Breakup Girl is not necessarily endorsing; she is simply thought-provoking and sharing.

From Dezzy to Queasy Rider and Blanche DuBois:

I have played the internet personals and I had an experience like Queasy's. Met a guy who told me that he was a writer, an actor, a doctor, a mathmetician, a real Renaissance man! I didn't feel a deep interest in him but he seemed to be dying to meet me -- "What the heck," I thought, "He want to meet me, maybe he's cute, it's just a meal," etc. I should mention that he never wanted to talk on the phone (now my rule before I meet anyone in person), saying it would spoil our in-person meeting by using up our conversation. As fate would have it on the day of our meeting for dinner there was a terrible snowstorm and I e-mailed him to call me at work and tell me if he could make it as it was a real hum-dinger. When he did I got the idea why he didn't want to chat -- his speech was gasping, garbled, slurred, barely understandable, obviously talking through a machine of some sort. I got off the horn acting like nothing happened and then freaked out. The routine I composed was that an emergency happened at home and I had to go sort it out and cancel the date. I understood his motives for not saying "Hey, I have a serious problem," but I can't say I wasn't resentful that he had lied to me about it. I thought even if I was the sort who could overlook his deficiency, his misleading stories were really uncool. A week later I e-mailed him that "my ex and I had gotten back together" ( my standard painless buh-bye). No, no, I would never even flirt with someone I've never seen now. And now I'm pleasantly surprised if we hit it off at all (this has happened twice out of about 12 dates, but just nice friends have come out of it).

So to summarise, no, Blanche, you don't need to worry that you are too picky. People usually disclose themselves pretty fast on the page to my experience and often I terminate writing if I get bored or suspect they're lying right off. At this point I can figure out fairly swiftly if I want to interact with them at all in person (Do they tell me much about themselves? Is it interesting? Do they ask me questions about me? Do they respond to things I bring up? Does their story sound - um - implausible at best?) and if I do the phone # comes out fast and the "let's get together" soon afterward as I don't want to spend a lot of time writing/chatting to find out they are uninteresting/freakish/a fibber/no-click in person. I hate having to be wary, but internet romance has toughened me up!

From Anonymous to L.:

I'd like to encourage you to leave you husband for the blue-collar lover. My reasoning:

1) Being artistic does not mean that you are more "passionate" or on some higher plane than the mere mortals who do something more "practical" with their lives. I'm not saying this as some investment banker type who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing -- I, too, am the liberal arts type, but I don't think that makes me more sensitive and/or loving than everyone else out there.

2) You had an "epiphany" two seconds after vowing to love this guy for the rest of your life? He is now a "stagnant known commodity?" How do you know that bachelor number two won't become the same thing once he is no longer "forbidden?" Are you sure that he's really your soul-mate (gag) or are you just looking for the flush of new love, over and over again?

3) Your husband deserves much better than a wife who appreciates him only for his bank account. I don't care if you grew up poor and have realized that it feels better to have money than to not have it. I have a feeling that this guy has better things to do in his life than bankroll a sarcastic, unloving wife. I also have a feeling that money was your primary motivation for marrying him in the first place.

In short -- grow up and let your husband be free to find someone who can appreciate and love him. Whew! I feel better now! ; )

And look who's back!

El Duderino writes: The "Karen thing" is over, as some of you have predicted. In one of the shout-outs, someone said something about a "geographical cure" -- that really struck me. Still, truth it may be, the cure isn't any cure, it's more like a suppressant, really. Nevertheless, I had promised to write back, so these are my thoughts.

There have been times in my life when I like to say "anything less than extra-ordinary is a waste of time". You want to imagine a woman with the body of Maria Gracia Cucinotta, maternal wisdom of Susan Sarandon, and sweetness of Elizabeth Shue. You want her to make guys sick to their stomach wondering why such a babe would hang out with a schmuck like you, let alone allow you to eat maguro sashimi off her firm belly. You want her to make them think that right-hand-drive '70 BMW 2800 CS Coupe parked outside the Buddha-Bar in Paris is hers, and not yours. And you get to ride in it. You want them to wish that they had learned how to make those sensual risotto because a woman like that is always hungry and will demand to be spoon-fed in bed. Even the attractive blonde behind the counter at the ice-cream shop Berthillon on Ile Saint-Louis knows you are deliciously doomed to be this woman's after-lunch dessert. She can tell that for a woman like that to hand you the key to her inner sanctum, you got to be lining your bed with 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets, and that you definitely understand Feng Shui.

That's what you want. It's not because other dudes would envy you. Not really. But such high standards, though, you thought. So, what is it then? You know all those years since Golden Girl, you've been birdie putting those nubile young women with the single-mindedness of an agile predator. Yet you often stand on the balcony worrying that if you settle for someone less, you might someday regret it and resent her for it. And if you set such high standards, maybe you won't fall in love again because such a woman does not exist. Hence you don't have to worry that the woman you love will leave you. Leave you to die of heartbreak. And under the protection of your stoic loneliness, you are safe from all those pain. The kind of pain that will break a man into two.

Maybe because you have been emotionally abandoned by your absentee father and till this day can't have a decent conversation with him even though he's close to dying. And maybe through all those years of disappointment, you decide that if you do have a family and raise a child, he/she will not ever be without the physical and emotional presence of a loving father. By god, you WILL NOT let that happen. The logic goes, therefore, the woman that will conceive and raise that child with you, will have to be perfect, or as close to perfection as God would allow.

Each night you carved your heart out and in the morning it's full again. You will remember that you let your heart iced over like reinforced concrete not even Naomi Wolf or Counting Crows can crack. You will remember that they give names to the wind that blows across the Sahara, names that your Chinese tongue can't pronounce. You will remember that some woman in the past had told you after making love to you that you have lived for a long time, maybe more than one lifetime and that your intensity is both tragic and powerful, sitting somewhere along the stem of evolution. And you will remember that you vaguely and wistfully tried to understand what she said.

But one day, someone comes along. She's normal, and god forbids, ordinary in all senses of the word. You say, : "Fine, I have some time to kill." So you date, you make love, and you flip omelets filled with mushroom, bell pepper, onion and sun-dried tomato. You know that is a convenient choice. A girlfriend in transit. You know that she knows. Yet she chooses to stay in it.

Then another day, she comes home from work. She looks tired and stressed from battles waged in the office. And she looks uncharacteristically vulnerable. So you sit her down. Pour some hot water into a flat pail, mixed in some tropical oil, and wash those tired feet of hers. As you are massaging her feet, you feel her fingers run through your short black hair and you look up from the water right at her. There are tears in her eyes. In those eyes, you see happy children running in circles amidst tall grass. They fall down on the grass, dizzy and gasping, laughing for no particular reason, the sunlight reflecting the morning glow off their hair. Then they jump on the swing, taking the swing high up to the sky, and when the wind fills their faces, they laugh again. In those eyes, you see the promise of tomorrow.

At that moment, you wonder how could this woman love you so much. "Is she nuts? What's wrong with the woman anyway, going soft on me like that?" And then suddenly you realized exactly what you are doing. Sleeves rolled up to your biceps, siting on a low stool, attending to a woman's feet. You start to panic, and you stop breathing. This picture is ALL wrong, your mind tells you. Yet, surprisingly, it feels familiar. It feels comfortable, like a feeling of an old friend who had come to visit.

You dry her feet and get up muttering something unintelligible. You walk over to the balcony stopping briefly to turn on the radio. You light up your unfiltered Camel standing on the balcony and say to yourself : "what in the name of Zeus is happening?" All of a sudden Miles Davis comes on the radio to play some tune about twilight, about those ghosts in the past, about rumble of distant chariots, about brave men fighting in hand-to-hand combat, about magenta wind sweeping through the Iowa plains, about young Italian widow sipping grappa-spiked caffe corretto, about little girl dreaming of horses, making that old horn weep. You feel her coming up behind you and wrap her arms around you asking : "are you okay?"

All of a sudden, she's no longer ordinary. She's the one who loves you, damn it, even though you're a low-life putz. Then you realize that by loving you, she touches you in a place you never wanted to acknowledge. You want to love her back, out of kindness, or something along that line. You do. And yet, there is something intrinsically unfair to her about it, as if you are doing it because the TelePrompTer said so. You realize that this time you too have to be brave and truthful. All of a sudden, Pollini's 1972 recording of Chopin's Etudes opp. 10 and 25 seem little more vulgar than usual. It is exactly that Chopin's muscularity that is eating at you. So you take a deep breath and say : "honey, we have to talk."

There's no easy way to break somebody's heart, is there? You wonder how many more checks like this your soul can cash when she looks at you silent, with tears of sadness and forgiveness in her eyes. The fact that she understands all of it makes it even more difficult. You feel like you are still paying for that Faustian contract signed but long forgotten.

The sun is rising again. It's yet another day. You will remember to breathe. You hope that things will be better. She will find someone worthy of her, surely.

And may God have mercy on your soul.

Breakup Girl responds: Oh, Dude. Can't speak for the Big G, but BG will.

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