Dont Mince Words

Dating in Los Angeles is hard.  It’s hard all over.  But I know it is difficult when a man I went out with and wrote about in 2004 is pursuing me again, unknowingly, in Santa Barbara.  The difference is, while there has chronologically been eight years since our last date, his profile age is only one year older.  Oh, the joys of having a Hollywood age.

It took me about one minute after I read his email to register who he was…. “more fun than greased weasels” and a “culture vulture” with a lesbian friend who tells him what he needs and should be looking for.  Oh yeah.  Him.  He was the guy with a membership to Magic Castle.  After being in LA longer, I learned men with memberships to Magic Castle are like women with three cats – buyer beware.  But the funnier thing was he was my first blog troll.  Long before I enabled comments, he emailed me from a hotmail account and told me I was a bitch for not letting my date know he had something stuck in his teeth.  He emailed several times after that with negative trash talk, but since I didn’t respond, I guess he found another culture vulture to circle with.

Me?  I’m really eight years older, I still floss, and I have at least one reason a week why I’m thankful I don’t actively date anymore.

I was recently told that I was living my own romantic comedy.  Dot com-crash-to-Wall Street girl leaves New York for Los Angeles for personal growth.  Discovers the emotionally unevolved, focuses on health, gets laid off more, and then moves to a small town where she has a job and a sensible romantic life.

This is finally my fucking movie.  Finally.

Living in New York was truly one of the greatest experiences of my life.  I connected with a lot of smart and wonderful people.  But I also saw the evils.  I lived in fear for nearly nine months after I turned a dirty cop in to internal affairs.  After 9/11, I figured if I was going to get whacked by the mob, it would be a better death than burning in a building.  Needless to say, it all worked out and I happily left corporate slavery and chose LA as my backup plan when San Francisco was still in flames from the dot com bomb.

As I continue to look forward, it’s easy to reflect with the benefit of hindsight.  And I am one of those people who wouldn’t change anything in my life because even the bad stuff shapes the future path.  All those awful Los Angeles dates served some purpose (I know what I don’t want).  My odd projects, contracts and jobs all taught me that no workplace is perfect (I know what I don’t want).  Working is a fool’s errand.  You just have to try to pick your fools wisely.

The same holds true with dating.  When I was in the beginning interview stages in Santa Barbara, I went to the online personals to get a sense of the mid-40s dating scene in Santa Barbara.  Call it socio-romantic ethnography.  My random how-much-does-it-suck inquiry revealed dating there wasn’t much different than anywhere else:  crazy ex’s, drama, kids, liars, and the chemically altered.  And from that honest baseline, I developed a friendship with SB Man through a very, very long interview process.

But that’s not all.

My girlfriends in Los Angeles squealed when I told them that I saw SB Man four times in one week after I moved.  “It takes about six weeks to rack up that kind of time with one man in LA.  No one wants to make that kind of time commitment for fear of looking….available,” one admitted.

In New York, you knew your life was good when the trifecta of job-apartment-love was in balance.  Here, I know that my patience and perseverance prevailed.  I just don’t know how the movie is going to end.

As of today, I’ve lived in Los Angeles seven years.  It’s not really something to celebrate more than mark the time in awe.  It has flown and yet it has stood still.  I spent the afternoon with a New Yorker that relocated three years ago.  She’s still adjusting, but mocks the place just like I do.  It’s can’t-put-your-finger-on-it weird here.  After a bottle of wine, we concluded we liked the weather.

Dating is still hard.  Finding work is harder.  I’ve got the seven-year itch.