The first post of the New Year, and I am still sick

I just finished the ritual I perform every four hours: 2 pumps of saline spray into each nostril, toss back 2.5 Tablespoon of Robitussin, slather my neck and chest with Vick’s Vapor Rub, a 4oz. cup of Airborne, and shove simultaneously 1000mg of Vitamin C and 450 mg of Echinacea into my throat. I look like a 6 yr old, my scent a combination of mint and cherry flavored cough syrup, snot dribbling down my nose, and whimpers of how much I want my mommy right now.

Yes, I am still sick. My sinus infection cleared up only to be replaced with a horrible chest cold from the plane ride back from Sun Valley. In its place a hacking “unproductive” (aka no phlegm, and God how much I fucking love phlegm and wish for it right now) cough, heavy chest, and thoughts racing through my mind that I am about to have an asthma attack.

Whenever I get sick and paranoid like this, I need to be around people—someone to take care of me, their presence to remind me if I do go into an asthmatic fit someone will be there to call the police or drive my sorry ass to a hospital. But with my 24th birthday on Wed marking my entry into the “mid-20’s”, I’ve come to realize that my relationships with my friends have changed and no longer can I call them up at 2am to come over and sit by my side. To invite them out for a beer yes, but to take care of me, not so much.

Other priorities have come into their life: jobs, relationships that provide sex, a desire not to be nocturnal…things that have replaced the spontaneity of our college/mutually single-boyfriend replacement relationship. And it’s acceptable that the friendships have evolved. And it’s acceptable if you don’t notice this evolution because you are one of those lucky people who are perpetually in relationships and have the luxury to barter expedited intimacy via sex for chicken soup and companionship when you are sick.

Sex and relationships do weird things to people. It’s given me bottles of champagne a top of hotel bars, fresh matzo ball soup driven to me in a winter storm, phone calls at 2am asking me why I was online, things the men in question wouldn’t have done for their own best friends…but for a woman with the prospect of fucking her, we develop a much stronger resolve of ‘Do unto others’ and ‘expect a lot more shit’.

So perhaps it’s the combination of being sick and not having anyone to take care of me at 2am (gay Greek husband is on LI again) and the prospect of a new year on the horizon with promise, but I’ve crawled back to online dating, committed to find a decent guy.

And yes don’t remind me there is always something wrong with them, and there are no decent guys on online dating and the decent ones are shorter than me in my manolos such as the last one, who had a smaller waist line than me and he was my height. Without my heels! Yea, let’s say I contemplated barfing up the drinks at the end of the night each time I hung out with him. But no boy is worth bulimia I rationalized…so instead, I self-sabotaged the prospect of a relationship, and had Brit guy #2 allude that I was a whack job by the end of it all…Hey, but at least I am bulimia free at the moment.


So with that guy off the radar, friends in NYC still happily engaged in productive relationships, and Lu not coming to visit until next week, I am back trolling the depths of mediocrity called match.com and craigslist. The beauty of internet dating, I recently learned, is this feature called the ‘keyword’ search. Have a foot fetish? Enter that term in and see all the ads that mention that term. I have a British fetish, love the accent and men who are my polar opposite: repressed, refined, sarcastic sense of humor, and date like polar opposites of their NYC male counterparts. Or maybe it’s a reminder of the London fag…but that observation is reserved for my soon to be therapist. So I’ve keyworded match.com and CL for Brit, British, England, Englishman, etc. And I stumbled upon this one guy, who has posted ads in both places. Same dorky smiling face, similar rambling of why he wants a girlfriend…and I was thinking to myself, isn’t that slightly desperate? What must be his fatal flaw if he is posting on 2 dating sites?

And in other news, my great Aunt is doing much much better and it looks like she will prob see her 105th birthday…

Sun Valley and New Year’s rocked…will tell you more about driving around in the Porsche and the slightly pornographic pics taken but need to wait for the pics to come back from my friends so you can see what I am talking about.