I'm halfway between hyper-ventilating and crying when Jacob pulls out his AAA card.
I'm in the Twin Cities for the weekend and I've lost my keys.
This is not an unusual set of circumstances. I lose my keys whenever I'm not in my own home, where they get put in the exact same spot every time I walk in the door to prevent this kind of madness.
This time, though, my keys are lost. I've torn apart the entire house, shaken out my clothes, called everywhere I've been in the past 24 hours, and they are nowhere.
If you ever want to see me have a complete, total, absurd meltdown catch me when I've lost something important. I almost instantly spiral into a self-hating anxiety pit. I berate myself for being so absent-minded, so thoughtless, so OhmyfuckingGodterribleatadulthood. So I'm in the process of all of that and it's compounded by the fact that I'm staying with my friends who have their lives together and I'm supposed to go out on a very early bike ride but my bike is locked in the car, and it's Memorial Day weekend, and I don't have a spare key, and I don't have the money to get my car rekeyed, and OHMYGOD.
Jacob pulls out his AAA card and tells me how it works. He drives me to my car, gets me a beer, pulls out my bike after the lock has been popped, loads it into his car, talks me through how getting a replacement key works, and takes me home. When we get back to his house, I'm not sure which feeling is more pronounced--relief or shame.
Who am I kidding? It's shame. And it's not because I've lost my keys.
***
I've been having a series of conversations with a different Jacob lately. No, that's not quite right. Over the past year or so we've been having what feels like a meta-conversation on relationships, feminism, and introversion with an occasional excursus into sci-fi and baseball and writing. It's nice to have someone to whom you can write 500 words about how the new Trek movie is rubbish and they not only read it but respond.
He's been trying for months now to up my geek cred and get me to watch DS9. I've been resistant claiming, you know, work, exercise, WHO. I just haven't had the attention span for a new television show. And let's be honest, no one will ever top Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard for me.
It's this last confession that sparks one of our more interesting conversations. I admit to adoring Picard (Patrick Stewart giving lines from Hamlet! ON A SPACESHIP. *swoon*) and make a joke about how I love the character Jayne Cobb from Firefly almost equally.
First, if you haven't already seen Firefly, shame on you. (Cowboys in space!) Second, Jake did a pretty good job of summing up the weirdness of my thing for this character: "I love how a Shakespeare quoting morally upright leader and a hilarious, jarhead mercenary with big muscles have the same effect on you."
***
I don't find the cognitive dissonance between these two types near as amusing as Jake does, mainly because I've lived it it for my entire life. It's a little weird, yes, but I don't feel much need to explain my attraction to either. (Warning, painting with a broad brush ahead.) The broad-shouldered, beardy, deep-voiced, lumberjacky types have always been easier for me to read. They're the kind of men I grew up around. They're the type of guy who can fix my car, chop the wood in the backyard, get things out of high places for me. I'll admit it. I've bought into the cultural signifiers of a man's virility (#feminismfail) to a certain extent.
It's the Picard thing that most people don't get. And when I say "Picard thing" I don't mean "Patrick Stewart thing." That's a whole different set of completely inappropriate feelings (No. I most certainly did not grow up with an emotionally distant father and now seek the approval of older men. Shut up.) I mean that I have a thing for brainy (cerebral), reserved, distant men. Sure, I think brainy is self-explanatory (it is the new sexy, afterall) but it's the reservation, the aloofness, that ah, really, turns my crank shall we say.
I'm not comfortable unless things in my life are challenging at best and really fucking difficult at worst. In graduate school I worked full time and pulled straight As. In undergraduate, I took a course overload every single semester. In my adult, personal relationships, I'm the exact same way. I need to be challenged, to have someone who will push back or at least prove something of a tough nut to crack or I feel like I'm cheating somehow. And dating someone who's brilliant, distant, who plays his cards close to his chest is frustrating, infuriating, and completely, maddeningly seductive. Because when you do finally break through, you feel like Wonder Woman and a safecracker and Scarlett Johansson all at once. It's a rush and it's only intensified when you realize that the feelings you've elicited are so rarely bestowed, so precious and intense (and if you're really fucking lucky) passionate and then you realize that you're equals. Good Lord, a girl might be tempted to scream Yahtzee.
***
The reason I'm feeling so ashamed as Jacob drives me home isn't because I've lost my keys. I mean, sure, I'm frustrated and pissed, but what's really upsetting is that I let him--for all intents and purposes--take care of the situation. And more than simply letting him take care of the situation, I enjoyed letting him take care of it. I enjoyed being able to hand over a problem to someone else, of saying, essentially I can't deal with this. Take care of it. Take care of me. And not only did I hand that power over to someone else and enjoy it, but I handed it over to a guy and enjoyed it.
But the most horrifying thing, the hardest thing for me to admit, even quietly and to myself, was how badly I want this. I want someone to take care of me. I want someone to balance my checkbook. I want someone to fix things around the house, make sure the car is running correctly, chop the wood in the backyard, corner me in the kitchen and take care of me. I want it so badly that I can barely find the words to describe it, and I hate myself for wanting it. For all of my talk about feminism and equal partnership and wocca wocca wocca, I want to be taken care of.
And that's the thing about the Jayne Cobbs and the Captain Jean-Luc Picards of the world. Despite being complete opposites on the spectrum of education and emotional detachment and, well, musculature, they've both always (secretly) struck me as the kind of guy who could take care of you.
That may be why it's been such a long time since I've kissed one of 'em on the mouth.
