Strippers and Friends

Boy is home watching “Blood Diamond” tonight, and I have to confess that I love this movie. And I love Leonardo Dicaprio in it. This is, I think, the first movie he’s been in where he actually seemed like a man and not just a boy playing a man. That fake South African, oh, I mean Rhodesian, accent, and that take charge, mercenary way about him. I mean, he got me. I’m only human.


I went to lunch with some real men today. A couple of the engineers I work with went with me to follow up on a project, and when we were done, I asked where they wanted to go for lunch.

The big guy named one of the local strip joints, and I knew he was joking.

So, I said, “Sure, but I’m not going to French kiss any more strippers for you.”

“Well, then I guess we’ll just have to go to Hooters,” which is where I knew we’d end up anyway.

So we did.


Work has been insanely busy. I’m simply overwhelmed. It’s the end of the fiscal year, so everyone’s taking time off and we have all these deadlines coming up. Crazy.

I went to yoga tonight to decompress. It’s my seventh Bikram class altogether and my second in four days. It’s a little weird that it takes sweating and stretching for an hour and a half to make me calm again. But I’m not going to argue with results. I’m definitely at peace right now.

When you’re doing yoga, you’re directed to empty your mind of all the b.s. that’s holding you down and just exist. I have a really hard time doing that. My mind starts to wander, and I start remembering things I’ve forgotten, like the wet laundry in the washer or where I left my keys that time when I was seventeen and had to get my locks rekeyed. Or people I’ve put behind me.

There was a girl I went to high school with. We were best friends for years and years. We finally parted ways because I could never give her what she needed from the relationship. It was too emotional. She cared too much about me. Normally that would be a good thing, but in this case it wasn’t.

Her husband hated me, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. But, shortly before I withdrew from the relationship for the last time, I caught her lying to him about where she was when she was with me.

So I asked her, “Why did you do that? Why are you lying to your husband? And why doesn’t he want you hanging out with me?”

She told me that after I visited her one time, she’d been so upset about the fact that I didn’t return her affections – she’d made a pass at me and I’d brushed it off – that she’d ended up in therapy.

And it all clicked into place finally. Why she was always wanting more and more from me. Why nothing I gave – time, phone calls, emails – was ever enough. She was in love.

I didn’t feel that way about her, had never felt that inclination toward a woman at all. I just didn’t, and I couldn’t. So I left the friendship. I simply stopped returning her calls. I took a step back.

It was the right thing to do - for everyone.

But I still miss her sometimes.