The Elevator Couple

Birthday weekends are better if you start them off with posh cocktails on The Peninsula hotel’s sun-drenched rooftop. The lift expresses you to Manhattan’s concrete canopy, and within moments you’re surrounded by its forbidden fruit. You’ll find the sunglasses a touch on the large side; it’s getting hard to tell if the object of your wandering eye deserves your attention. The linen draped oh so trendily over a central Moroccan-style tent may flap away in the breeze, but it will be restored in no time – the illusion of easy breezy perfection back in tact.

You may have to battle with the condensation dripping off the dainty base of your champagne flute onto your summer-white dress (mine was black in prep for the promised rain), and you may have to drink up in a hurry  if you expect to be on time for that Broadway play. You may even have to squint (wrinkle-encouraging) if you’re still wearing prescription glasses (passe?), but it’ll all be worth it for the scene you may encounter on your express lift trip back down to earth.

We’re waiting for the elevator. It arrives with a ding. Doors part open, revealing an eager (but not too eager) crowd. The leggy blonde standing in front of me – also awaiting the lift – pretends it’s empty and promptly pushes her way to the back of it, turns around, and glares out. The crowd of people she has just barged into start to shuffle out, a little stunned at this less than pleasant introduction to the rooftop, and one girl – a particularly miffed brunette – shakes her head and mutters “braindead” as she passes by.

As we start our descent, it immediately becomes clear that the blonde – long, healthy hair tied up in a medium-high ponytail, thickly mascaraed eyes brimming with suspended tears, and a tasteful – though short – patterned dress with bell sleeves and gold trim – is very upset. She is glaring at a guy – taller than she, great body, running pants and a faded Princeton T, maybe holding a bottle of water – and saying, across the space, “This is the lowest you’ve ever sunk. I can’t believe it. This is the lowest.”

He’s a little embarrassed, but keeps it cool, “I’ll make it up to you, baby,” he offers flippantly with a sly grin, which enervates her even further, and she crosses the lift, so she is directly across from him, and we are no longer in the crossfire. “I’ll come,” he says.

She, angrily – “I don’t even want you to come anymore.”

“I’ll come,” he says again, shrugging his shoulders and reaching out to her at the same time.

She crosses her arms, “No. I don’t want you to come.”

We hit ground, the doors open, and she sashays out, turning her head over her shoulder with the dagger, piercing: “Don’t forget you’re forty-five.”

She walks quickly – rushing the alluring sway granted by her heels – towards the hotel’s revolving door. He catches up to her, reaches out, says, “Come on, babe, wait” and she, “No, I’m going,” is out the door, presumably into a cab. He raises his hands in a half-hearted gesture of what the fuck? but does not continue to follow.

Too busy observing to talk, we make our way to the room-bound elevator lobby (yes, a little ways from the rooftop lift – The Peninsula likes a little distinction between the haves and the want-to-haves). We’re heading to the 20th to pick up a forgotten umbrella, and Princeton-T guy steps in after us, hits 10, and says, in somewhat sheepish acknowledgment  “Hey, it’s me again.”

We smile politely. I ask if he went to Princeton (in lieu of asking exactly what level he had sunk to, which of course is the question dancing on the tip of my tongue). He says no. We reach the 10th floor, he gets out, nods goodbye and that’s that.

5-minute incident. A night’s worth of conversation fodder.

Did he sleep with a younger girl? Or did she just catch him flirting with one when he was supposed to be grooming for a big night out? The 45 comment was a big clue, the difference in how they were dressed, the absence of a ring. The fact that he had a room at the hotel – was she staying with him? Was he visiting her?

Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon. I get a text from my friend:

Elevator couple (yes together) just checked out in front of me

She wasn’t saying anything but she was giving off a major bitch vibe…normal mode for her?

Ok, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been so entertained by what – at the end of the day – was just another lovers’ spat, but the drama of it – the opening and closing of small spaces, the urgent need to flee from the rooftop, the raw emotion (only hers) and brazen public-ness (she didn’t care to be discreet) lent itself to dissection. Like seeing a very short snippet of a play, where the game is to figure out what precedes and follows the action.

We saw two plays my birthday weekend – August Osage County and Waiting for Godot – both ultimately about human relationships and the human condition. One could argue that we saw a third (if briefer) – The Elevator Couple. Just because it wasn’t scripted and produced, doesn’t make it any less a commentary on being human, if viewed through the lens in which all the world’s a play, and all the men and women merely players. Art is supposed to be, after all, a mirror on life. And in some ways, the quarrel was extremely scripted – by societal convention, by gender roles, by biological drivers. Who wouldn’t want to spend a summer’s eve analyzing it?

Break-up Texts

Back in the day, when I graduated from college, texting hadn’t yet caught on in the States. But it had in Italy, which was my first destination after commencement.  There, I was introduced to the rather romantic, Italian art of texting, though a text was more frequently referred to as an SMS – pronounced along the lines of essemmesse. The Italians send lovely little love texts – full of big kisses (bacioni), quotes from romantic poets long dead, and cheesy lines like this one:

A volte mi chiedo dove abitino gli angeli, in aria, in cielo, o in terra? Non lo so, so solo che un angelo tiene adesso il proprio cellulare in mano.

And in English: Sometimes I wonder whether angels live in the air, the sky, or on land. That I don’t know: I only know that an angel currently has her cell phone in her hand.

I got that one from a guy I’d hung out with twice. I hadn’t been planning on a third time seeing as the chemistry just wasn’t there, but then I got this text…

While in Italy, I read an article in the Florence Metro paper that disparaged Britney for divorcing her beau by text but also pointed out that texting seemed to be encouraging Italian males in their early teens to be more affectionate and sweet, as it enabled them to send ‘thinking of you’ messages throughout the day and goodnight kisses at bedtime – sans too much effort or the teasing of their friends.

UK texts weren’t nearly as noteworthy, but for the fact that English boys (not huge verbal communicators to begin with) seem to think the advent of texting is indisputable proof that man was never intended to actually speak on the phone.

My faves from India were from a random guy I met in Calcutta, who had just applied for a passport so he could travel to America. We happened to share a birthday, and that sealed it – we were to be friends for life:

1+1 = 2 My eyes looking for U. 2+3 = 5 Sense missing for U. 5+2 = 7 Days thinking of U. 7+5 = 12 Month dreaming about U. 99 + 1 = 100 Years I need a sweet friend like you.

If lovers are like MOON then friends are like STARS and have you noticed that the sky can look beautiful with out MOON but not without *STAR*

To be fair, all of the above is recycled material. I’ve thought about it before, written about some of it before, etc. But what dusted the cobwebs off the topic of texting was a gem that a friend recently received.

Set the scene: Boy and girl date. Boy doesn’t want to date girl anymore. Boy too much of a pussy to break up with girl, so he acts like a jerk – distant, unemotional, irresponsive – until she breaks up with him. Some time passes, and boy moves to girl’s neighborhood (not on purpose, it’s a cool neighborhood, lots of people are moving there). Boy has a neighborhood-related question, and seeing as girl’s lived there for ages, perhaps she can help him out.

Boy texts girl: Hey would you be able to do me a favor?

Girl texts back: Really Dave, this is pushing it. Are you hurt? injured? If you need a kidney it’s out of the question. In short: favor unlikely.

1 day later…

Girl texts boy again: By the way, what was it?

People used to write, keep and cherish letters. We have a record of our emails, but when you’re 75, do you really envision yourself sifting online through the many thousand to re-read the particularly touching ones? I suppose the simple answer would be to print out the good stuff now to save you the trouble later, but I don’t have a printer, so that plan’s out the window. The point is – for the most part, we don’t have a record of our texts. I scribbled down a few from Italy on bits of paper and quickly found that bits of paper have a habit of going missing…

But fear not, anthropologists of the future, there are now a slew of websites that encourage users to aggregate their electronic comms by theme – I’ve mentioned textsfromlastnight before, but postcardsfromyomomma is also getting heaps of attention in the media. So I’m thinking it’s high time we get a site up and running for funny “break-up and its aftermath” texts. We may, lest we get too down, want to include the funny “falling in love” ones as well, for example: you are crazy beautiful you make me drool

Other amusing, indicative of our times, user-generated-content sites:

maybeyoushouldntbuythat.com

thisiswhyyourefat.com

stuffwhitepeoplelike.com (oldie but goodie)

And, finally, on a completely unrelated note, I like this:

Baby Planning

I’m 26. I have a brother who’s 28. He has a 5.5 month old baby. They came to visit for Passover, and all of a sudden people – colleagues, friends, acquaintances, guys I used to date – think it’s appropriate to ask, “So, when are you planning to start a family?”

“Oh, I already started. As soon as I saw how cute my brother’s baby is, I rushed out and got myself knocked up.”

Or not.

Since when do single people plan families?

But the few times I moaned to my friends  about the sudden onslaught of family planning queries and the general absurdity of it all, I was surprised to find out that there actually are some single people out there planning when to have kids.

One friend’s decided that if the guy is not in the picture by the time she’s 34, she’s going to adopt. Another’s cut-off is 37, but she doesn’t want to adopt, she wants to have her own baby – the finding of Mr. Right be damned. Yet another’s mom has suggested she get her eggs frozen, which I know is not baby planning for oneself, but even so, the baby planning conversation is still being had!

Why is it that my fabulous single friends are already planning babies? Possibly because between [1] finding the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with and [2] having a baby, the latter is more within the realm of their control. If you decide to have a baby, you can have a baby (as long as biologically things are in tact). Meeting someone, on the other hand, is not exactly in your control – no matter how A-type you are.

Now my friends aren’t assuming they won’t meet someone. They have not given up. But a few broken hearts and disappointing denouements later, they figure planning for the worst case scenario is just, well, good forethought. A good way of not missing out on Step 2 in the unlikely event that Step 1 doesn’t pan out as expected.

With greater emphasis on the individual, college, career, self-actualization and exploring the world without responsibilities in tow, marriage (and babies) are taking a backseat. In general, the trend is to settle down later, so those stragglers who settle down even later than the norm (whether intentionally or otherwise) have to think about how their delay will affect their childbearing options. Previously, if you “settled down later than the norm,” you were doing so in your mid to late twenties, still leaving open plenty of solid baby-making years.

But it’s not just about timely biology. It’s also about being a young parent. Being energetic enough to keep up with your kids and young enough to be in touch with their doubts and joys, likes and dislikes. In many ways, I saw my au pair year in Florence as my opportunity to be a young mom.

If you really want a good head spinner, think of all the stars that have to align to not only be a young parent, but also a young grandparent and a mobile great grandparent. There is something extremely special about my grandmother being able to go for a walk with my nephew, her great grandson. Lots of early marriages and young moms working together to make that happen!

So baby planning is not just about one’s babies. It’s about life experiences, notches on the bedpost (of a different sort). Will you experience pregnancy and giving birth? Will you be a fun, young parent? Will you live to see your kids have kids, to see your kids’ kids have kids? This is heady stuff. To many, it is what makes the whole ordeal of human experience worthwhile: the miracle of love, life and the continuity of humanity.

All that said, I’m sticking by my story that it’s inappropriate to ask a single gal when she’s planning to start a family. Don’t ask, don’t tell (unless of course you really want to).

Partnering Up, Partnering Off

Used to be, people would partner up – for the weekend, for six months, for a coupla years even. But you kinda sorta knew it wouldn’t be lasting forever. I mean, who in the US gets married straight out of college these days? Ok, fine, there are exceptions, usually relegated to geo regions like Texas (sorry Gemma) and the slightly more religiously inclined among us, but now, 4+ years after graduation, the landscape’s starting to change.

At dinner the other night, a friend lamented the fact that everyone around her seems to be ‘partnering up.’ That wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, I countered. Everyone’s always been partnering up; now, however, they are taking it one step farther and partnering off. As in out of the game completely – at least until the first round of divorces kicks off when we hit our early thirties. Or should I say until the cheating that leads to the divorces gets a-going?

My younger brother’s still in college and recently referred to a female friend’s boyfriend as a ‘temporary obstacle,’ a ‘bump in the road.’ It’s a wonderfully optimistic perspective – one that he can still afford to have. It gets a little stickier later on – think Scarlett Johansson in  He’s Just Not That Into You. She gets involved with very hot but married Bradley Cooper because friend Drew Barrymore convinces her (over a manicure) that he might be the one. And if he is, of course he’ll leave his wife for voluptuous Scarlett (is that butt padding, or what?) He doesn’t end up leaving his wife, at least not voluntarily. He wants to have his cake and eat his girlfriend too.

Truth is, none of the above matters. Today, the key to both partnering up and partnering off is the strength of your online dating profile. Which means the real money isn’t in winning the rather random husband lottery, but in writing an algorithm that takes the qualities someone’s looking for in a mate and spits out an internet profile perfectly suited to catch that special someone’s eye.

It’s the era of the edge. Just as a resume’s no longer sufficient (you need a blog to give you an edge), you can’t just be fabulous, you need an online profile (be it on match, jdate or shaadi.com) to prove it.

Twinsies

Perhaps it’s because I’m part gemini or a sucker for seconds, but I’ve always had a thing for twins. I grew up on Sweet Valley High and couldn’t stop staring when at age seven, two girls in my new class – Dominique and Jessica – were impossible to tell apart! Don’t even get me started on Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. While in college, I spent a summer babysitting for two sets of twins, and recently, an article in Portfolio magazine about the salaries the hottest toddler twins of the moment are making didn’t fail to catch my eye.

As a child, I didn’t fantasize about future husbands or meringue wedding dresses, but I did decide I was going to have twin girls. They’d be dressed to the baby nines and named after my grandmothers, Sonia and Sylvia. It’s good to have some long-term goals.

I’d all but forgotten about my little plan until I recently went on a date with a twin, actually the second twin I’ve been out with in four months. Both twins’ brothers got married this summer (I suppose they were looking to even the score), and as I was recounting the coincidence to my mom (who had set me up with twin #1), she replied, “Well, maybe you’re just destined to marry a twin, Tov. There’re twins in our family and if you marry one, you’ll be able to have your twin girls.” Too right. Only twins from here on out.

In thinking about it though, being a twin’s got to be rough. Competition between siblings is cutthroat enough as it is – it’s got to be cutthroat squared if you’re the same age, in the same classes and the same sex. Both twins I went on dates with felt their brothers had ‘won’ on the marriage front (simply by being first to marry). Both felt their twins were smarter than they (twin #1 ranked 4th in his high school graduating class and his brother was valedictorian; twin #2 ranked 8th and his brother 7th). Career-wise, they compare promotions, titles, increases, etc. My own brother’s contribution was to point out that I seem to be getting the duds!

Anyhow, I think I may have changed my mind about that whole twin daughters thing. I’d probably insist they dress exactly alike, earning their animosity for life. And then there’d be the issue of telling them apart. I’d be crap at that.

Other People’s Love Letters

It’s a silly coffee table book, a little small in size, so its likely to go unnoticed by your weekend guest especially if you keep it hidden under other silly coffee table books (as Jon did). I randomly uncovered and started thumbing through Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See about five minutes before leaving my weekend home. Slightly out of place in a bachelor pad, its premise was charming. Bill Shapiro (editor and introduction writer) reached out to an ever-growing network to solicit love (or un-love) letters from across the land. Scribbles on napkins, emails, dusty type-written letters hidden in attics, poems, notes on brown paper bags came flooding in. People keep their love letters. And wanted to share them with Billy, so he could share them with the reading public. Would you share your love letters with the world?

I recently received a lovely little ‘love’ poem that I wouldn’t have dreamed of posting on a blog but for the timely discovery of Jon’s coffee table book. In what is so often an all too serious world its lightness made me smile; perhaps it will have the same effect on you.

—–

My Burger King buddy – a love poem about a girl

Just the thought of her makes me hard
Standing beside her so nervous, my words come out like a retard

Her beauty and smarts far exceed anything I possess
All this and she is stunning in her cute little dress

And when I am in the mood
this girl will eat fast food!

In her presence, the sun shines brighter, the air a little purer
My god I’m getting horny – I just wanna do her

I look at her and want more and more
I feel like a little boy in a candy store

Her body like chocolate – so sweet
I want to lick her from her head down to her perfect feet

She is an angel – she is my angel – at least for now
Or for as long as the heavens will allow

From her dreamy eyes to her soft luscious lips
to her strong sexy hips
My friends you must admit
she is all that and a bag of chips

—–

It still makes me laugh. I reckon it would have made the 150 shortlist had the stars aligned time-wise. Everything else I got falls into the too-salacious-to-share category. Sorry.