Of meat and men

My kind of man.

I’ll refrain from making the obvious meat/sausage-fest jokes in this post. After all, I’m 32, not 23 (most of the time).

There are few weeks in which I don’t have to explain, at least once, what my eating preferences are. I grew up on a vegetarian diet of fresh fruit, vegetables, beans, legumes and a plethora of grains. Since those years, I have more or less maintained my vegetarianism, though I am more likely to call myself a “pescetarian” or (jokingly) a “flexi-tarian” (as my mostly-vegetarian-with-occasional-fish diet is supplemented by an bi-annual burger).

The bottom line: moderation is the name of my game. I rarely get drunk, and even more rarely enjoy it when I do. I play this odd game with myself, called “What would it be like if I moved to _____?” (name of random country) And I know that if I had to relocate, tomorrow, to a Muslim country where alcohol was prohibited, I wouldn’t be concerned. I don’t smoke, though I did in my college years, and infrequently experience the so-called benefits of getting high. Given an open schedule, I enjoy exactly 9 hours of sleep, so all-nighters and 4-hour nights are merely tolerated while I survive graduate school. In fact, the only thing extreme about my life is my addiction to Facebook.

I know that it’s unlikely that I’ll end up in a relationship with a vegetarian, unless I become a lesbian (seriously; in a large-scale study of vegetarians, only 32% were men while 68% were women). I have dated vegetarians: a Canadian Seventh-day Adventist; a Taiwanese atheist (Paul) who became vegetarian for animal rights; an African-American Seventh-day Adventist athlete; an Indian man who grew up Hindu. An atheist guy friend of mine is vegan. I have also dated wannabe vegetarians, like Edgar, whose travels and tendency for empathy nearly led him to vegetarianism if it weren’t for his love of all things beef. Or Bob, a Taiwanese-American man who took on vegetarianism after he became interested in me, then dropped it after I broke up with him.

Then there was this one guy I dated last summer. Or rather, went on two dates with. He was considerate, creative, and photographed for and wrote a blog about STEAK. Not just steak, but also burgers, barbecuing, bacon, and anything that involved buckets of butter (brioche, anyone?)…

For N.

Sometimes I let things go too long without blogging about it, and then, before you know it, it’s the end.

Flickr.com (CRASH:candy)

I had to say goodbye before I even said hello, to a man I consider a superlative human being, so full of light and goodness that everyone around him sees it. His empathy runs so deep and so quick that simply telling him how bad a day I’d had prompts a genuine response. His was the kind of friendship that never asks and only gives.

There was the time he read my tarot and served me his finest whisky, then said he’d like to see more of me. There were the weeks of pages-long emails, the shared experiences and shared vocabulary transmitting themselves across thousands of miles. There was the bouquet of flowers, thoughtfully selected by him, that arrived on my doorstep, a surprise. And there were the times I fell on the rope that held my life, balanced, against the synthetic rock wall, while his voice, below, calmly announced, “I’ve got you.”

He is a revolutionary, an artist, and a hearthstone fireplace to which I decided (perhaps belatedly, perhaps tragically) not to turn to. No matter how I wanted to convince myself otherwise.

And because we’ve already said our words off-blog, I’ll only state this: When time has done its rightful thing, and if it is possible (or plausible), I look forward to a different graft. A strengthened friendship with you.

2011: Heartbreak. 2012: ?

Suck it, 2011.

Last year was full of natural disasters in the World of Zoë Blue. I started January 1, 2011 with a broken heart, thanks to Luka. Then I met Rafael (heartbreak), and Anand (more heartbreak). It’s now 2012, and my heart is still feeling the effects of the marathon of happiness and devastation. The emotional stakes were higher and the falls harder in 2011 than in 2010. And now, even as I see a thoughtful hand extended my direction, I am evermore cautious. Will this man hurt me? And, perhaps more poignantly now, will I hurt him?

Despite what an entire industry based on dating will tell you, seduction is easy if you flash a smile and try a little. In my opinion, it’s not the getting that’s the difficult part, but the keeping. In part, men are reticent and fearful in the path of my direct, unflinching attention. On the other hand (and here I admit fully to my flaws) I decide quickly, leaving just as soon as I enter, my actions just as cold as they were hot.

2012: Of resolutions, the apocalypse, and audiences in their underwear.

Yesterday morning felt like New Year’s Day. Six a.m. sunshine was streaming in, brushing across my walls and over my bed. Inexplicably, I became euphoric, and after my first cup of coffee, I decided to take a walk with my second cup.

So I put on a sweater and began to wander through my leafy, sun-filled neighborhood, cup in hand, stopping to knock on friends’ doors (no one was awake), take photos, pick flowers, and touch the silky bark of eucalyptus trees looming above. The euphoria permeated me entirely, culminating in unabashed blissfulness as I had lunch with my roommate, then spent the afternoon with Serena, ending my day in a long walk with another friend through a fog-filled field of trees. No matter what anyone tells me, my calendar knows: December 30, 2011 was actually January 1, 2012. And considering that 2012 may mark the end of the world, I couldn’t have asked for a better first day.

But, ok, your calendars indicate that are still a few more hours left of this year. And by Mayan estimations, this year will be the last year of our lives before an apocalyptic erasure of life. But look on the bright side! There are still 366 days left to live (a leap year!), so it’s still prudent to have a plan. A “resolution,” if you will.

While I was cooking up my own resolutions, I asked a few blogger friends to co-write this post, sharing theirs. Two friends – LA-based Rahul, of Your Beard is Good, and son-of-a-preacher-man TurnJacson, of The Fantastical Ramblings of a Chronic Over-Thinker - contributed (I really ought to mail them homemade cookies – unless, of course, they go on a diet in 2012, in which case, sugar-free cookies?).

2011: A year in posts

Cut the hair short and update that Mac by a few years, and this could nearly look like me.

2011 marked my second year as a blogger, but it was also one of my least active and most conflicted. I was not nearly as prolific as I had been in 2010. I would blog in bursts, between breakups and grad school deadlines. While I accomplished more this year in grad school (a landmark paper for my Ph.D., for instance), I lagged in blogging. When I did blog, though, it was often heavy and rarely light.

The breakups:

OUCH. Ouch (again?). ARGGGH! *sigh*

The year of the Indian man:

Count them: three. Vikram. Madhav. Anand. That’s a lot of garam masala.

The getting over the breakup:

Where I praised the get-over-him kiss. A few weeks after breaking up with Rafael, easily the biggest heartbreak of the year, I wrote about hope, then took a solo road trip. To Yellowstone, via Utah, Wyoming and Nevada. This was so immensely cleansing, it took me months to finally understand what happened on that road trip.

Meta-posts (blogging about blogging):

This year’s Valentine’s Day was an active one that involved a friendly love triangle. But when one of the men found my blog and confronted me, I had a choice: to move forward with the blog or to halt. I knew this wouldn’t be the first time I would discuss my blog with a boyfriend, so I made a pivotal decision to continue blogging:

I let go. I am proud of this blog. I am proud of who I’ve become through a year of writing this blog. I will not retreat. This is my mouthpiece, my foghorn, my “beating heart on my ever-present sleeve.” I will proceed to write, and as I do, I will protect – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – those whose hearts are also divulged in the lines of this binary code.

In August, September and November, while going through a new and healthy relationship with an Indian architect in Los Angeles, I didn’t blog once. I also dropped off of Twitter. After those two months had passed, I wrote again, only to say that I was:

no longer interested in the page hits, or number of comments I receive on blog posts, or number of friends I meet on Twitter, or even which of my exes are still reading. Because I’ll write this blog the way I wrote it in the beginning: for me, a couple of my friends, and whoever else stumbles over and decides to read. No advertisements, no Tweets announcing its arrival several times a day, and no guarantee I’ll even blog that frequently as graduate school demands more of me.

The post I can’t neatly categorize:

The time I dated and fell in love with a paraplegic. I still can’t see stairwells or handicapped parking spots the same way

Finally … the funnies:

A blog post on kissing that I still re-read with great mirth. The winner of worst kisses, if we can call it a “winner,” was the “Face Bath” kiss.

That time I went to a nude beach with a blogger who, after applying spray sunscreen to me, complimented me on my “nice ass.”

This sacrilegious photo always makes me laugh out loud. And this one makes me feel patriotic (though I can’t imagine why).

Another blogger’s (friend’s) recap of 2011:

TurnJacon: “Reflecting on 2011“

Yellowstone, unpacked.

It’s always so difficult to talk about your travels. How do you summarize moments like this?

Antelope Island, Salt Lake City

But this summer’s solo road trip was one of the most important things I did this year. As I spent days driving through the red rock beauty of Utah, or the bright blue spaces of Wyoming, singing to myself, car dancing, or stopping for photos, I found the adventure I had sought.

Yes, this is Yellowstone.

Beginnings.

Once, in the beginning, the August Los Angeles sunlight pressing against the windows, Anand announced with delight, “Your eyes look like sunflowers. They’re green and blue, with streaks of yellow in them.” I was crowned his sunflower-eyed queen, and countless cups of sugary chai were brewed in my honor.

Life is in these moments. Just as life is not about death, but about the time before, so love is not about the end, but everything before, the inchoate beginning that runs smoothly like a stream over rocks. Instead of thinking about breakups, I want to focus on beginnings. Not just the beginning of my relationship with Anand, but of so many other relationships that sweetly remain, like the undiluted sugar at the bottom of a tea cup.

Off the blog

I began and ended a relationship off the blog.

Until two weeks ago, I have been cheerfully dating a man whose blog-name, “Anand,” meant “happiness” in Sanskrit. I wanted to tell you more, because there were oodles of stories and conversation one-liners and moments of sunshine that filled the edges of our relationship. In the two weeks since, despite a heavy reluctance to talk about the departure of a man so dear, I have found myself leaning on one phrase: “It was a good relationship.” And it was. Yet in a relationship that could be best characterized with the word “honest,” I never told Anand about this blog, nor did I write about him. And I’m at peace with keeping it at that: off the blog.

Language is a limiting thing, a fact this blog has shown me again and again. In a previous post about another un-blogged relationship, I wondered:

“Am I protecting the sweet moments between two people who find each other in this mad world? Why would I want to diffuse that magic by releasing it into the hands of commenters who have not experienced the same magic, who do not know me or him or the context within which the first flickerings of love appear?”

There is something here I cannot verbalize, but it is akin to the moment when, after a journey that may have been so transformative that you returned a different person, someone naively asks, “What was it like?“

What was it like? If you ask me to elucidate my thoughts on why Anand and I worked, I don’t want to find the words. There is a language of experience, whether it be travel or love, that surpasses linguistic limits. And while it does not make for good blogging, it does make for good living.

It’s good to be back, on the blog.

Part-time blogger, full-time lover.

So it’s been a while. I say this a lot, I know. I could come up with excuses, and if you suspected that, with me, “no news is good news,” you’d be correct. I am happily dating, and for the first time in far too long, I’m in a relationship that has lasted for over two months.

My blogging lagged after a recent vacation to Yellowstone, and correspondingly, after I began dating my current boyfriend. In addition, my doctoral writing has increased, and so, between the post-vacation calm, the new-relationship joys, and the grad school nights, I distracted myself out of blogging regularly.

And then I began to wonder: “what purpose does this blog have?” When I first wrote it, I was in the middle of a dating spree, thanks to my Match.com account. Initially, I set up this blog as a way to update my girlfriends on my dating life, but then the shiny allure of social media came along. I began to look into blogging-for-profit (many of the brilliant dating bloggers I know do). I began to widen my reach, through Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon. I even created a solitary YouTube video. All to the detriment of my graduate school studies.

So I’ll just admit it: I may not blog as frequently as I have before. I’m no longer interested in the page hits, or number of comments I receive on blog posts, or number of friends I meet on Twitter, or even which of my exes are still reading. Because I’ll write this blog the way I wrote it in the beginning: for me, a couple of my friends, and whoever else stumbles over and decides to read. No advertisements, no Tweets announcing its arrival several times a day, and no guarantee I’ll even blog that frequently as graduate school demands more of me.

But, yes.

Yes, I’ll tell you about Anand. That’s not his real name, but “Anand” means “happiness” in Sanskrit … so it fits.

Happy 130th post, readers. :)

On the road!

Flickr.com (PatrickSmithPhotography)

Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up, shower, eat breakfast, brew myself a thermos full of green tea, and then get in my car. Eight hours later, I’ll make my first stop: in Utah. I’m going to Yellowstone, baby.

A couple of months ago, after my breakup with Rafael, I knew I’d need some space to collect my thoughts and re-focus on my graduate studies. I wanted to go somewhere that didn’t have a cell phone signal or an Internet router. I wanted to write, and listen to birds and watch the sun rise from my tent. I wanted to drive for hours on end and stop when I wanted to, take photos when I wanted to, eat junk food when I wanted to. I wanted to challenge my camping skills. And, because I love people and surround myself with them all the time, I wanted to be alone. I had traveled alone before, when I was 19 years old, on a three-week backpacking trip in Europe. Then I had dealt with the chaos of bus stations, subway trains, hostels, money belts and pidgin French. But I had always been around others, either sharing a hostel room with several other thrifty North American students, or a night in a train station with drunk Hungarian men, but I had not been on my own in the forest, in the mountains. I wanted to be.

So I considered my options, and narrowed it down to New Mexico or Wyoming; White Sands or Yellowstone. Then I checked the weather conditions for August, and it was no longer a difficult decision.

Traveling is in my family (my grandfather picked up his Norwegian family and moved to Africa; my father hitchhiked around the U.S. when he was 21 years old, in addition to living in Uganda, Jordan and South Africa), so you could say wanderlust is hereditary. But, in the case of my grandfather and father, it is also … male. And this message is repeated when you see movies about travel and adventure. For instance, these two: