I hate my neighbors

Would it be wrong for me to pay the people two floors above me to stomp as loudly as possible for 20 minutes at 2am?

Question for the married folks

If you've been tracking the comments, you'll have seen that my friend Scott says that if I want to laugh my a** off, I'm better off getting a gay roommate than a boyfriend or husband.

Married people -- is this true??? I need to know!

Also -- is it desirable or undesirable for me to respond to your comments in the comments?

President's Club!

I just bought a membership to the President's Club, and IT ROCKS. Free wireless access, free booze, free cheese, free crackers, free Fritos.

I can't believe I didn't do this 3 years ago.

Just testing

Allegedly, I can e-mail an entry to a special address, and it will magically appear on the blog. I'm just sitting on my plane to NYC, watching all the nice people go by. Well, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on the "nice" part, which isn't like me.

I had the sad realization last week that I'm right at, if not past, that technology divide where you join your parents in the class of people who are baffled by technology. Actually, it's not so much that the how baffles me (so I can still do the modern equivalent of setting the VCR clock so that it doesn't flash 12:00 all the time) as much as the why baffles me. Why do I need my phone to play music, surf the web, watch TV, and work as a phone? I would be happy with a teeny, tiny, brick (as opposed to flip) phone that only worked as a phone and let me send and receive text messages (in which I often still type out full words -- technology divide meets grammar and spelling geek). Guess what. Nobody makes a phone like that anymore.

Ok, so I've seen many, many men put their briefcases in the overhead compartment. Annoying. You know what was kind of satisfying about boarding this plane? A guy asked the gate agent if first class was full, and of course, the answer was yes. The guy then asked if the gate agent was sure, which the gate agent was. When they boarded the flight, first class went first, and I happened to be second in line. Apparently, I don't appear to be first class material because that guy also got in line, and when the gate agent said something about first class only, he said, "SHE's in first class?" as if I had stolen his upgrade. I flew 95,000 Elite-qualifying miles last year, buddy. Shut it. Especially since I'm dressed more nicely than you are.

Ok, they're gearing up to go, so I'll stop. I love seeing people write in the comments! Melissa -- I think an oldest would be best for me, but I'd entertain the idea of a baby. :-)

For Lindy

If you read the comments to the Theory post below, you'll see that Lindy has asked me to post what I'm looking for in a guy. (She also said I need to git to her house for some meat on March 1, but I'll be in Austin, which you can confirm two posts down.)

The short, pithy answer is that I want someone who's smart, funny, can take care of himself, has whimsy in his heart, and is totally into me. I'm also shallow enough to say that I want someone who's not ugly; in fairness, beauty is completely in the eye of the beholder, and I've dated men that you wouldn't immediately think were handsome, but I totally did because they were smart and funny. So there.

My friend Melissa once described her husband as her best friend, the one person with whom she could safely drop all of her defenses in a way that she couldn't with her family or other friends. She was so matter of fact and sincere in the way that she said it, it brought tears to my eyes, which I hope she didn't notice because I have a tough chick reputation to maintain. It stayed with me because it was such a crisp and eloquent way of phrasing what we all want. It's the realistic, achievable part of trashy romances that keeps me going back for more cotton candy.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that your true love will protect your solitude without intruding on it (I'm obviously paraphrasing). This appeals to the rageaholic in me who hates people. I don't think it would be all that healthy for me to be with someone who is as happy as I am to sit home on a Friday night in her pjs, watching old episodes of Bones and House, blogging away, but I do want to be with someone who understands and respects that, despite how social and extroverted as I am, I need time away from the world to recharge my batteries.

I've noticed a lot with my friends' husbands and wives that there's some spectacular complementing happening. I had dinner in DC with my friends Shana and Brian, and Brian's wife Teresa. Brian's a bigger banana than I am, he's a total dude, and it's completely visible when they're together how Teresa makes him fit for human consumption and makes him an even better person than he already is. Brian gives Teresa the courage to be the total rock star that she is, both at her salaried job and at the business that she's started. And they're totally amused by each other. Shana's completely mathphobic and a bit of a spendthrift (me, too). Her husband has a Ph.D. in some hard-core science and is a SERIOUS saver. They've had a lot of health drama in the first 6 months of their marriage, and they're each other's rock. When people tell me my standards are too high, I think of all my married friends, and I tell those people to pound sand.

I'll tell you what, though -- if you're the kind of guy who puts your smaller bag in the overhead compartment instead of under the seat in front of you on the airplane, stay away. That's a dealbreaker. You're a selfish jerk, and I don't care how long your legs are.

I Have a Theory

So I was thinking back over my past boyfriends/relationships, and I realized that I have dated some very nice men. And then I started thinking about that thing where women say they like nice men, but then date jerks, over and over, and then nice men complain that they're not getting to date women, even the ones who say they want a nice man, because secretly, women all want jerks.

Here's what I've decided: women really do want nice men. If we date jerks, it's because we think they're going to be nice. Maybe we recognize that the guy is a jerk, but we've deluded ourselves into thinking we're going to love him into being nice. Maybe we've been deceived into thinking that a jerk is a nice guy. Either way, very few of the truly smart women I know (and I know a LOT of smart women) have dated a jerk on purpose.

I started thinking about what the disconnect is, and I think it all comes back to what we mean by nice. I think when women say we want a nice guy, we're talking about someone who makes us feel pretty and smart and just generally good. But we also don't like being crowded. Women tend to get the bad rap that we're way more into relationships than men and get all clingy and needy, and maybe that's true, but my theory (see how I tied it into the title of the post?) is that when we reject men for being "too nice," the real reason we're rejecting them is the sneaking suspicion that you're going to be all up in our grills ALL THE TIME. And smart women (or at least the smart women I know, and remember, I know a LOT of smart women) don't want anyone, including the men in our lives, to be all up in our grills all the time.

Chew on that. And please let me know if you think you know someone who will make me feel pretty and smart and just generally good without breathing all of my air.

An Actual Update

Match.com: I finally have electronic photos of myself. I, uh, still have to do the actual signing up for Match.

5K: Ummmm... I'll get back to you. :)

Britney: I think with enough psychiatric help, she can pull it together, but is she ever going to be as big as she was with Toxic? I just don't know.

Work: I love my job again -- the split between CELC and IRR is perfect for me. It's a really nice mix of old and new and puts me in a position where I get credited for the work that I do.

Where am I? (through the end of March)

February 26-27: NYC
February 29-March 2: Austin
March 3-4: Atlanta
March 10-11: Dallas
March 11-14: DC

All the times in between? In Houston, of course.

Yup, I'm trying this again

I've been fielding a lot of questions lately about where I'm going to be and when. It seems like an easy question, but it kind of isn't. So to make sure that when we talk, we get to talk about juicy stuff, like the amazing (in good and bad ways) things that happen at work, whether Britney is going to pull it together, and where I am in the signing-up-for-Match.com and selecting-and-training-for-a-5K processes, I've restarted a new and improved Blog. We'll see how it goes.