Popagandhi

I have a habit of losing people in the midst of saying something, since I say the sort of things that just.. well, make me wish I never said them the moment I do. Especially if I’m dating them. Things that make me ashamed that I’m such an utter dork. Things that make my friend Amira wonder: “And women still want to go out with you..?” She has a point, I think.

I blame it completely on my lonely childhood. When your best friends were your pocket dictionary/computer, and your infrared headphones with receiving base station, and instead of hanging out with the cool kids you hung out with an assortment of mono screen PDAs (Psions and Palms) with less than 2MB of memory, you can’t help but turn out a certain way.

I am completely incompatible with women in so many ways, it worries me. We don’t share sentiments regarding shopping, which can be disastrous since gay women want to do everything together, including shopping, going to the toilet, decorating the house. I’m the sort of person who walks into a store, grabs everything I want to wear for a year, and be happy I only expended five minutes on the hazard of shopping. Want a book? Why bother with a bookstore, Amazon it, get everything off eBay! Some men are also known to have higher degrees of coiffure and retail therapy awareness and sophistication than I do - again, women do everything together, straight or gay, couple or not, including hair cuts. This leaves me out from 95% of the opportunities of female interaction.

The point of this post is, I am increasingly aware of how un-dateable I should be, by any account, and it’s shocking. I wouldn’t date myself. Case study: On a recent occasion, I was comparing dessert at one restaurant to a more famous version at another. My companion was unconvinced, and it led me to explain, with a straight face: “If you were to plot a graph of the trajectory of pleasure, Marmalade’s is more.. exponential. The taste explodes in your mouth and you get that orgasmic sensation. Olio’s is more subtle, more constant.. flatter. Though the average works out to be about the same.” She continued eating, while I continued deliberating upon the sticky date toffee pudding, their graphical relations, and possible inferences thereof. So I’m frankly rather surprised, and pleased, that she’s still going out with me. (This is the point at which I start to blush and beam, in the best way I can do so electronically, and where you avert your eyes from the sight.)

I sometimes wonder if girls are disappointed when they realize I’m really quite a man - I would rather stay in and watch soccer on a weekend, than cuddle in bed. The beer only completes the picture. And the falling asleep right after we..? Well, nothing. I don’t do that. Yet. Three different women accused me of being a man, in a span of two days last week. Sometimes I really wonder if what I told Caleb - that “i like to think of myself as a gay man trapped in a woman???s body, and who likes cross dressing men” - isn’t as much of a joke as I meant it to be. Postmodernism has made nothing impossible.

The real reason behind this post: thank you for taking me as I am, warts, baggage, and all. Am I lucky or what?