dusty with starlight

I’ve always been a serial monogamist and my shortest long term relationships clocked in at three years. So perhaps that’s why when I finally broke it off with my ex I went insane on dating. Part of it was definitely just that between anxiety and loneliness I wanted to fill up my time.

This happened when I was living alone for the first time, no roommates, just me and my little cat Leeloo. I didn’t want to come home to an empty house so instead I set up dates.

Most of these were disastrous. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and I had a lot more first dates than second because they’d seen enough, including the one where people aggressively complimented me.

But after a few months I had four people I was seeing simultaneously. I was up front with all of them that things were not exclusive, and they all agreed, so no infidelity took place here, just a lot of hijinks.

Here’s who was on the dating roster:

• An apprentice woodworker that we’ll call Jill. I honestly thought at 26 years old that her being 21 wasn’t a problem age gap and I quickly learned that there was a vast gulf of both maturity and life experience between us. Jill described herself as “heteroflexible” and had just dumped her first boyfriend to flirt it up with me.

• A married woman looking for a friends with benefits. We’ll call her Alice. I insisted on meeting her husband first to be sure I wasn’t part of a cheating mess and he gave me his blessing when I stayed over at her house. Years later when he and Alice had divorced I would go on to sell him and his new fiancée an engagement ring and we both realized at the end how we knew each other and it was wildly awkward. Alice was nice, but a hardcore vegan who insisted I brush my teeth if I so much as ate string cheese before I could kiss her. She was also unhappy in her marriage and was feeling out if I’d want to get serious.

• A bartender dubbed Snakebites, so called because of her signature piercings. She cooked me a steak so raw it was still mooing and some of the best asparagus I’d ever had. In our singular sexy encounter she bit my nipple and I never got over it. Really don't bite someone if you don't know their preference and work up in pressure. We weren’t terribly compatible but neither of us were willing to admit it yet. Truthfully I considered still dating her solely because I desperately wanted her bathroom. It had all black tile, black toilet, black sink, a rain shower in the corner and a jacuzzi tub. I may not have loved her but god I loved that bathroom.

And finally,

• My beloved, who I would go on to marry, who was dealing with a lot of personal stuff at the time. Obviously that meant I liked them the best of all the people I was seeing because we were both disasters at the time.

So that’s the cast of this little misadventure. Now, our story begins with Jill.

Jill was someone who heightened my anxiety. Each of the three times she came to my home she brought and left more stuff. A self help book, a ramen kit, the entire Teen Titans collection of DVDs. It was like she was trying to move in. She also liked to deride my taste in things, frequently calling me a pleb when I mentioned a band or show I liked.

She was working on a gorgeous little decorative table in her woodworking program. The main wood for the top had a beautiful dapple of knots like jaguar spots, and when she showed me a picture I exclaimed how pretty it was.

“Do you want it?”

“Oh- I mean it’s lovely, I wouldn’t mind having it, but you should sell it and make some money!”

But she was adamant. She’d give me the little side table. At about this time, Alice was starting to get awfully lovey for a FWB. I knew she wasn’t happy with her husband but I also knew we were not a good fit. Fun fact: Alice and her husband were step siblings with a pretty hefty age gap. They got together when he stumbled upon a kink photo shoot she’d done with vegetables. None of their family was happy about the relationship but they weren’t related by blood so it was fine.

So I was fending off more overt romantic advances from Alice, and feeling increasingly like I needed to break things off with Jill. Snakebites wasn’t ever initiating communication and I decided to pull a lot of plugs at once.

I ghosted Snakebites, told Alice that I thought we should cool it, and in a move worthy of a rom-com I asked my beloved if I could pretend we were exclusive to put off Jill. They agreed and I texted Jill to let her know that I was no longer single.

I was not prepared for Jill’s response. She. Was. Devastated. She flew off the handle. She’d just been waiting for the right time to tell me how she felt about me! How dare I do this to her!

What about the table?!

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

【Rippi/リッピ】

fuzzy bugs series

w140×h130xd90mm

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.