Starting the new year with a bang
It's been an interesting 2013 so far. It started off with a lovely New Year's Eve celebration that started off classy and ended up not-so-classy (maybe a bit slutty?), and since then I've managed to read my first book of the year, finally hang something on the walls of my home (at last!), register for an improv comedy class, and be hit in my new car head-on by an 80-year-old woman who had a stroke at the wheel. (No one was injured, and the damage to my car is minor and easily fixed, but the whole thing was rather traumatizing.)
New Year's Eve this year was so different from last year's, and for a while there I was bummed about it. But I tried to look forward and focus on the fact that I'd been invited by a pair of married friends to a night of good food and company. The invite was to a four-course prix fixe meal at an interesting space run by interesting people -- a husband-wife team of talented artists who've shown at the Whitney Biennial and have stuff hanging in MOMA. To supplement their work as artists, the husband took up cooking and has worked in some respected restaurants in LA. The evening sounded like a great way to distract myself from the fact that I was ending the year in the total inverse of how I had started it. Something I was trying hard not to think about since it was damn depressing.
So, while I was closing out 2012 single, at least it was with other loved ones. In the morning, I met with one of my best friends for brunch and we went to get our nails done. I almost never get manicures or pedicures, but whenever I do, I always wonder why not. The way my fingers and toes look without a lot of dead skin hanging around is a revelation. We exchanged late Christmas gifts and spent the afternoon lazing around her cozy family room and catching up.
In the evening, I decided to go for it and actually wear some of the fun things in my wardrobe. I went with a dress I'd bought during the post-holiday sales: a form-fitting black sheath with a high neckline, long narrow sleeves, and panels of ruching over the chest (I call it my "Dieter" dress, because it makes me look like a German museum curator). I paired it with a pair of five-inch platform ankle boots that I've only worn once, a collarless leather jacket and a big fake-fur stole that I bought a while back and hadn't yet worked up the nerve to wear. It was nice to get dressed up, and to cut some tags off stuff that had been sitting forlornly in my closet.
Instead of moping around at home by myself New Year's Eve, it was far better to have dinner with a group of fun friends: the married pair who'd invited me, and fellow single folk like a girlfriend who's a writer in TV animation, a guy who's a psychiatrist and teaches at UCLA Medical School, and Mr. Drama, whose editing career is coming along nicely (one of the movies he worked on just got nominated for a Best Picture Oscar). Though the rich brunch I'd had earlier put my stomach out of sorts, I managed to at least taste everything, though I would've loved to have gorged. The food was beautifully cooked. I wound up having to go easy on the alcohol too, which is a shame because it was BYOB and there were bottles upon bottles of excellent wine and champagne. But that probably saved me from getting drunk, sad and barfy, and I'm very glad of that.
Right before midnight, everyone went around the table and shared a New Year's resolution. After each person made their pronouncement ("Get married!" said the TV writer; "Finish revising my novel manuscript!" said I; "Make a feature film!" said one of the marrieds, a film professor; "Be open to love," said Mr. Drama, still struggling to come to terms with his own 2012 breakup; "Stay married," said the film professor's husband), we would cheer and raise glasses of champagne. At midnight everyone kissed and hugged, and then we lingered for a while longer, congratulating the chef and his wife on a great evening.
I have to say, I was in awe that Leena, the friend who proclaimed she would get married, would put it out there so boldly and publicly, as she wasn't seeing anyone and didn't have any prospects on the horizon. That takes balls. I said as much to the doctor friend, Bo, and he shrugged. "I want to get married too," he said. "I just don't say it like that, but I do." I can't remember the last time I heard a guy say so baldly that he wanted to get married. After coming across too many guys in LA who are having trouble settling down, it was kind of refreshing. I'm torn -- I can't decide whether putting your desires out into the universe is better than keeping them protectively to yourself. Sometimes it feels like, if you put it out there, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak -- like jinxing yourself. But I think that's just me and my negative thinking.
"Have you seen Leena's vision board?" he asked. Bo pulled out his phone and brought up a photo. It was of an actual posterboard with pictures pasted onto it. "See, she wants to get married, have a baby, get in shape..."
"Leena told you all this?" I said, even more impressed by her willingness to bare all.
"Naw, you can tell just by looking at the board -- she didn't have to tell me."
"Still, I'm impressed she showed it to you." I resolved then to make my own this year. Something about the board telegraphed a pure sense of hope and I found it touching, optimistic and brave, not sad or desperate. I'd probably keep the board to myself though -- and I definitely wouldn't be letting any friends take photos of it on their phones. (Leena was understandably mortified when she caught us looking at the photo of her vision board and started swatting Bo.)
The marrieds decided to head home, and the singles decided to meet up with some of Mr. Drama's friends in K-town. We dropped off the married couple, and I looked at my car, which was parked outside their house. "I could just jump out with them and head home and climb into my pjs," I thought. But my other resolution for the new year is to say "Yes and...", so I repeated it to myself and stayed with the late-night partiers. We convened with Mr. Drama's friends at The Prince bar, an old-fashioned dive that's been used to film scenes of Mad Men, and then, our ranks doubled, decided to go for noraebang (Korean-style karaoke, in which you rent out your own private room). At this point it was well past 1 am, and I thought longingly of my bed. Say yes.
It took us nearly another hour to find a noraebang place that had a room available -- every joint was packed. We got access just in the nick of time. Something I didn't know was that due to ordinances, everything in LA appears to shut down at 2 am -- but if you're in the know, it doesn't have to be that way. We were admitted into a place a few minutes before "closing" time, then the staff shut the front doors behind us, locked everything up, brought down the metal grates and turned off the lights outside. While we waited for a room to be prepared, a cute guy approached Leena and asked her out, and she happily gave him her number. (There might be something to this resolution business after all!) Then we were ushered to our room and handed drink menus and song directories as if the night had just begun.
Which it had. At first I was kicking myself for coming along. I was tired and a little sad and ready to go home and mope. I looked over at Mr. Drama and he seemed less than enthused about it all as well. "What are we doing here?" he wondered aloud. I shrugged and passed him a paper cup of soju. His friends produced a bunch of glow sticks, and we proceeded to busy ourselves with making bracelets, necklaces and headpieces. After a while -- I don't know if it's because we all looked sort of ridiculous in our glowing jewelry or what -- people started to loosen up and get into things -- and onto things. People in neighboring rooms peeked into our windows and laughed at us as we started awkwardly dancing on furniture. Three hours later, I found myself singing "Sweet Caroline" with Mr. Drama at the top of our lungs while everyone hopped around and shouted "So good! So good! So good!" during the chorus. We'd gone from elegant sophisticates at a dinner thrown by world-class artists to wearing glow sticks in the wee hours at a clandestine club like a bunch of ravers.
Around 5 am, we staggered out and into a service elevator, still singing. I was the only one still sober, thanks to my uncooperative stomach, so Mr. Drama handed me his keys and I became the designated driver. Drama called a Korean car service to shuttle his friends home, and then we dropped off Leena and another friend. We then went to the married couple's house to pick up my car.
"What a crazy night! I can't believe how that turned out," said Mr. Drama. "I wasn't sure about being there at first, but man! That was awesome!"
"So fun!" I agreed.
"You're so great!" Mr. Drama told me, apropos of nothing. I wondered just how drunk he was and laughed at him. We pulled up in front of our friends' house.
"Are you okay to drive?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. "Here, park the car." I figured he needed to sleep it off, and eased the car into a curbside spot in front of mine. I handed him a bottle of water and made him drink.
"What was your New Year's resolution again?" I asked, taking a swig from my own bottle of water.
"To be open to love," he said. I rolled my eyes in the dark, but decided that was rude. I tried to be positive.
"Aw, that's sweet," I said.
I put the cap back on my water bottle and was about to reach for the door handle when he grabbed my face and started kissing me. It was totally unexpected, but pleasant enough that I grinned, shrugged and kissed him back. We ended up making out in the car like a pair of teenagers, degenerating further from the sophisticated adult evening that had been our beginning. It was pretty damn fun.
I have no illusions about what transpired. Two lonely people -- friends -- were finding solace in each other. At one point he stopped kissing me and started asking rhetorical questions.
"How the hell did we get here?" he asked. "We have such awesome friends...we're good people, right? How did we end up this way?" We talked a little about the desire for a relationship, and when I told him I was letting it go, he told me that I was too young to give up on finding a partner and paid me some very sweet compliments. It's really lovely when someone says they think you're beautiful.
"We'll be okay," he told me, although he sounded like he was reassuring himself more than me. "We'll take care of each other, right?"
"Of course!" I patted his cheek and hugged him.
He sounded a little forlorn as he continued, "Sometimes I worry about whether I'll get there" -- meaning a settled relationship.
"You will," I scoffed. "You just need to get your shit together all up in here." I waved at his head. He looked a little sad then, and I realized that probably wasn't the nicest thing to say. But eh, it's the truth, and for a Peter Pan like Drama (he's very much like Actor Guy in certain respects), it couldn't hurt to hear it once in a while.
We agreed that neither of us wanted to have sex -- we just wanted to enjoy what was happening right there in the car and go no further. The sun came up, and we decided that it probably wasn't good to continue making out in daylight in front of our friends' house. We kissed each other affectionately ("What a fun way to start the new year!") and then went home. By the time I collapsed into bed, it was 8 am. He checked in on me later that day, calling me in the evening, and we laughed about how things had devolved over the course of the evening. "Making out like a couple of 16-year-olds!" he exclaimed.
"If we'd hung out any longer, we would've been eating paste in a sandbox," I told him.
Anyway, I haven't seen or talked to him since then, but am pleased with how things went. What could've been a sad New Year's Eve turned into a great one, and I got a little action to boot. It was lovely to be held and kissed and complimented by someone who cares about me (even though it was a friend with no real romantic potential). Man, I was so hung up on him at one point, long ago, once upon a time. But now, I'm free of any hold he once had on me -- and yet can still enjoy his company and feel loved. It was a very happy way to start off the new year indeed.
After the mayhem: In a K-town service elevator at 5 am New Year's Day
New Year's Eve this year was so different from last year's, and for a while there I was bummed about it. But I tried to look forward and focus on the fact that I'd been invited by a pair of married friends to a night of good food and company. The invite was to a four-course prix fixe meal at an interesting space run by interesting people -- a husband-wife team of talented artists who've shown at the Whitney Biennial and have stuff hanging in MOMA. To supplement their work as artists, the husband took up cooking and has worked in some respected restaurants in LA. The evening sounded like a great way to distract myself from the fact that I was ending the year in the total inverse of how I had started it. Something I was trying hard not to think about since it was damn depressing.
So, while I was closing out 2012 single, at least it was with other loved ones. In the morning, I met with one of my best friends for brunch and we went to get our nails done. I almost never get manicures or pedicures, but whenever I do, I always wonder why not. The way my fingers and toes look without a lot of dead skin hanging around is a revelation. We exchanged late Christmas gifts and spent the afternoon lazing around her cozy family room and catching up.
In the evening, I decided to go for it and actually wear some of the fun things in my wardrobe. I went with a dress I'd bought during the post-holiday sales: a form-fitting black sheath with a high neckline, long narrow sleeves, and panels of ruching over the chest (I call it my "Dieter" dress, because it makes me look like a German museum curator). I paired it with a pair of five-inch platform ankle boots that I've only worn once, a collarless leather jacket and a big fake-fur stole that I bought a while back and hadn't yet worked up the nerve to wear. It was nice to get dressed up, and to cut some tags off stuff that had been sitting forlornly in my closet.
Instead of moping around at home by myself New Year's Eve, it was far better to have dinner with a group of fun friends: the married pair who'd invited me, and fellow single folk like a girlfriend who's a writer in TV animation, a guy who's a psychiatrist and teaches at UCLA Medical School, and Mr. Drama, whose editing career is coming along nicely (one of the movies he worked on just got nominated for a Best Picture Oscar). Though the rich brunch I'd had earlier put my stomach out of sorts, I managed to at least taste everything, though I would've loved to have gorged. The food was beautifully cooked. I wound up having to go easy on the alcohol too, which is a shame because it was BYOB and there were bottles upon bottles of excellent wine and champagne. But that probably saved me from getting drunk, sad and barfy, and I'm very glad of that.
Right before midnight, everyone went around the table and shared a New Year's resolution. After each person made their pronouncement ("Get married!" said the TV writer; "Finish revising my novel manuscript!" said I; "Make a feature film!" said one of the marrieds, a film professor; "Be open to love," said Mr. Drama, still struggling to come to terms with his own 2012 breakup; "Stay married," said the film professor's husband), we would cheer and raise glasses of champagne. At midnight everyone kissed and hugged, and then we lingered for a while longer, congratulating the chef and his wife on a great evening.
I have to say, I was in awe that Leena, the friend who proclaimed she would get married, would put it out there so boldly and publicly, as she wasn't seeing anyone and didn't have any prospects on the horizon. That takes balls. I said as much to the doctor friend, Bo, and he shrugged. "I want to get married too," he said. "I just don't say it like that, but I do." I can't remember the last time I heard a guy say so baldly that he wanted to get married. After coming across too many guys in LA who are having trouble settling down, it was kind of refreshing. I'm torn -- I can't decide whether putting your desires out into the universe is better than keeping them protectively to yourself. Sometimes it feels like, if you put it out there, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak -- like jinxing yourself. But I think that's just me and my negative thinking.
"Have you seen Leena's vision board?" he asked. Bo pulled out his phone and brought up a photo. It was of an actual posterboard with pictures pasted onto it. "See, she wants to get married, have a baby, get in shape..."
"Leena told you all this?" I said, even more impressed by her willingness to bare all.
"Naw, you can tell just by looking at the board -- she didn't have to tell me."
"Still, I'm impressed she showed it to you." I resolved then to make my own this year. Something about the board telegraphed a pure sense of hope and I found it touching, optimistic and brave, not sad or desperate. I'd probably keep the board to myself though -- and I definitely wouldn't be letting any friends take photos of it on their phones. (Leena was understandably mortified when she caught us looking at the photo of her vision board and started swatting Bo.)
The marrieds decided to head home, and the singles decided to meet up with some of Mr. Drama's friends in K-town. We dropped off the married couple, and I looked at my car, which was parked outside their house. "I could just jump out with them and head home and climb into my pjs," I thought. But my other resolution for the new year is to say "Yes and...", so I repeated it to myself and stayed with the late-night partiers. We convened with Mr. Drama's friends at The Prince bar, an old-fashioned dive that's been used to film scenes of Mad Men, and then, our ranks doubled, decided to go for noraebang (Korean-style karaoke, in which you rent out your own private room). At this point it was well past 1 am, and I thought longingly of my bed. Say yes.
It took us nearly another hour to find a noraebang place that had a room available -- every joint was packed. We got access just in the nick of time. Something I didn't know was that due to ordinances, everything in LA appears to shut down at 2 am -- but if you're in the know, it doesn't have to be that way. We were admitted into a place a few minutes before "closing" time, then the staff shut the front doors behind us, locked everything up, brought down the metal grates and turned off the lights outside. While we waited for a room to be prepared, a cute guy approached Leena and asked her out, and she happily gave him her number. (There might be something to this resolution business after all!) Then we were ushered to our room and handed drink menus and song directories as if the night had just begun.
Which it had. At first I was kicking myself for coming along. I was tired and a little sad and ready to go home and mope. I looked over at Mr. Drama and he seemed less than enthused about it all as well. "What are we doing here?" he wondered aloud. I shrugged and passed him a paper cup of soju. His friends produced a bunch of glow sticks, and we proceeded to busy ourselves with making bracelets, necklaces and headpieces. After a while -- I don't know if it's because we all looked sort of ridiculous in our glowing jewelry or what -- people started to loosen up and get into things -- and onto things. People in neighboring rooms peeked into our windows and laughed at us as we started awkwardly dancing on furniture. Three hours later, I found myself singing "Sweet Caroline" with Mr. Drama at the top of our lungs while everyone hopped around and shouted "So good! So good! So good!" during the chorus. We'd gone from elegant sophisticates at a dinner thrown by world-class artists to wearing glow sticks in the wee hours at a clandestine club like a bunch of ravers.
Around 5 am, we staggered out and into a service elevator, still singing. I was the only one still sober, thanks to my uncooperative stomach, so Mr. Drama handed me his keys and I became the designated driver. Drama called a Korean car service to shuttle his friends home, and then we dropped off Leena and another friend. We then went to the married couple's house to pick up my car.
"What a crazy night! I can't believe how that turned out," said Mr. Drama. "I wasn't sure about being there at first, but man! That was awesome!"
"So fun!" I agreed.
"You're so great!" Mr. Drama told me, apropos of nothing. I wondered just how drunk he was and laughed at him. We pulled up in front of our friends' house.
"Are you okay to drive?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. "Here, park the car." I figured he needed to sleep it off, and eased the car into a curbside spot in front of mine. I handed him a bottle of water and made him drink.
"What was your New Year's resolution again?" I asked, taking a swig from my own bottle of water.
"To be open to love," he said. I rolled my eyes in the dark, but decided that was rude. I tried to be positive.
"Aw, that's sweet," I said.
I put the cap back on my water bottle and was about to reach for the door handle when he grabbed my face and started kissing me. It was totally unexpected, but pleasant enough that I grinned, shrugged and kissed him back. We ended up making out in the car like a pair of teenagers, degenerating further from the sophisticated adult evening that had been our beginning. It was pretty damn fun.
I have no illusions about what transpired. Two lonely people -- friends -- were finding solace in each other. At one point he stopped kissing me and started asking rhetorical questions.
"How the hell did we get here?" he asked. "We have such awesome friends...we're good people, right? How did we end up this way?" We talked a little about the desire for a relationship, and when I told him I was letting it go, he told me that I was too young to give up on finding a partner and paid me some very sweet compliments. It's really lovely when someone says they think you're beautiful.
"We'll be okay," he told me, although he sounded like he was reassuring himself more than me. "We'll take care of each other, right?"
"Of course!" I patted his cheek and hugged him.
He sounded a little forlorn as he continued, "Sometimes I worry about whether I'll get there" -- meaning a settled relationship.
"You will," I scoffed. "You just need to get your shit together all up in here." I waved at his head. He looked a little sad then, and I realized that probably wasn't the nicest thing to say. But eh, it's the truth, and for a Peter Pan like Drama (he's very much like Actor Guy in certain respects), it couldn't hurt to hear it once in a while.
We agreed that neither of us wanted to have sex -- we just wanted to enjoy what was happening right there in the car and go no further. The sun came up, and we decided that it probably wasn't good to continue making out in daylight in front of our friends' house. We kissed each other affectionately ("What a fun way to start the new year!") and then went home. By the time I collapsed into bed, it was 8 am. He checked in on me later that day, calling me in the evening, and we laughed about how things had devolved over the course of the evening. "Making out like a couple of 16-year-olds!" he exclaimed.
"If we'd hung out any longer, we would've been eating paste in a sandbox," I told him.
Anyway, I haven't seen or talked to him since then, but am pleased with how things went. What could've been a sad New Year's Eve turned into a great one, and I got a little action to boot. It was lovely to be held and kissed and complimented by someone who cares about me (even though it was a friend with no real romantic potential). Man, I was so hung up on him at one point, long ago, once upon a time. But now, I'm free of any hold he once had on me -- and yet can still enjoy his company and feel loved. It was a very happy way to start off the new year indeed.
After the mayhem: In a K-town service elevator at 5 am New Year's Day