Haunted

"And then what?"

Michelle and I are squished into a booth in a tiny Lebanese deli and I'm updating her on recent events.

"I had a panic attack."

She puts her head in her hands. "Of course you did. How bad was it? Was it one where you needed one of the bags? What was going on?" 

"Mostly kissing. And it wasn't that bad. I didn't need a bag. I just needed to . . . I don't know. Slow things down. Think rationally for a second."

"Oh, honey. The last thing you needed to do was keep thinking." She pauses. "I love you, but you're just a mess."

"But a good mess right? You know, like how I strive to be sort of charmingly crazy rather than don't-stir-that-pot-of-crazy crazy? Can I be a funny, smart mess? A mess who's also a good writer and a fantastic baker and pretty generally has her life together? Maybe a mess that you wouldn't be, I don't know, completely disappointed you spent the night with when you woke up the next morning?"

"You want stuffed grape leaves?"

"I hate you."

***

Here, in no particular order are some things that scare me.

Confined spaces. Heights. Being touched by strangers. That whatever guy I'm with is secretly a serial killer and I'm about to done in in some horrible, gruesome, Dexter-esque way. Anything jumping out at me. The Redneck Pain Family from Cabin in the Woods. The monsters from Hush. Basically anything Joss Whedon has ever created with the intention of scaring the shit out of you. The Exorcist. The Blair Witch Project. Walking down empty streets alone in the middle of the night. Anyone chasing me in any context ever (which is amplified when they have a chainsaw). 

That seems like enough for now.

***

I have two really bad moments in the haunted house. 

Haunted houses are emphatically not my thing. I like a good scare, yeah, absolutely. But I have a terrible startle reflex, so jumpy things and I are not the best match. I don't watch movies where things pop out of nowhere and I generally avoid haunted houses this time of year. 

But it's a dear friend's bachlorette party and I'm trying to be a good sport, so I agree "Yes, a haunted house sounds like fun!" all the time thinking "Oh my God. The last time I was at a haunted house I was twelve years old, got separated from my family, and was so scared I peed my pants. This is going to be bad."

I drink almost nothing all day and go to the bathroom four times before we get in line. 

Things start to fall apart when we board the hayride to take us out to the haunted house and are informed "Our monsters will touch you. You may not touch them."

Oh shit. 

We make it through the hayride with me squeezing myself into the middle of the wagon and pulling my hat down over my eyes and generally avoiding everything going on around me, which is a cacophony of bangs and screams and random people in costumes jumping on the wagon and ohmygodthere'saredneckpainfamilymemberstrokingmyback. 

Despite the fact that I can't stop screaming, this is not one of the bad moments. 

Jess is good enough to walk next to me and hold my hand over the next forty minutes. She takes the brunt of the attention, but there are still people jumping out and touching me every three to three and a half minutes.

Eventually, we're trying to get into some dark building and someone walks up behind me and starts stroking the back of my neck. 

As we were walking in, I had given myself a pep talk. "None of this," I told myself "is real. You are in control of how you react to this. These are human beings and if they see you start crying or you ask them to stop touching you they'll have some compassion."

False. 

The guy stroking the back of my neck just won't quit, not even after I shout "Stop fucking touching me!" 

So I throw an elbow. 

This guy is also apparently, a member of the Redneck Pain Family, because this just makes him lean in closer and start whispering in my ear, something typically reserved for people who spend the night. I'm freaking and Jess yanks me forward. 

***

"So," Michelle asks, after the grape leaves have arrived. "Why the panic attack?"

I play with my food for a little while and don't answer.

"Oh, Kels. Was it the serial killer thing again? You need to talk to someone about that."

"I do not need to talk to someone about it! We grew up in Milwaukee while Jeffery Dahmer was still at large. Our brains hadn't finished forming yet, I think it's perfectly reasonable that it scares the shit out of me."

"I've told you this before. You're not" she pauses here for emphasis, as if I don't already know what she's about to say "a gay man. As such, that particular fixation is not reasonable."

"It's not just Dahmer! It's the whole thing, the whole serial killer thing." Her eyebrows go up. "Shut up. I was reasonably confident he was not a serial killer and that was not what was making me panicky." 

"So what was it?"

I give her the Cliff Notes version, the same thing I've told two other people, one of whom was my therapist. I tell her and despite the fact that she's been my closest friend for fifteen years, it's really, really hard. She, not one for physical affection, gives me the last grape leaf. "Oh, honey." 

***

I do all right for the remainder of the haunted house, holding it together through a room where the walls are soft, black, weighted, and literally pressing in on you and through strobe-lit corn mazes and on and on. It's the last maze, the one with the black walls, black hallways, and no lights where I dig in my heels and say "No. No. Nononononononono. I can't do this." I get tugged forward and the next thing I know I'm in a long, dark, hallway. 

The are two men in masks running straight at me. From opposite directions. With chainsaws. 

There are moments in your life where the rational side of your brain checks out. Where the calm, reasonable, thoughtful person you've always thought you were goes out for lunch without you. Say, when someone you love calls you and says "I never want to see you again." Or when you're kissing some devastatingly cute guy and you flash back to the last time you were kissing some good-looking guy and how that ended. 

Or when there are two people representing one of your worst, most archetypal fears chasing you down a dark hallway lit only with strobe lights. 

Jess can feel actually feel my fight-or-flight-response kick in. When we finally got out of this damn place she said "I knew you were going to bolt, that you weren't thinking clearly, and that you were going to get lost. Alone. That would have ended badly." She screams at me "Pull it together, Prosen!" 

I close my eyes. We run.

***

Michelle and I pay our bill and step outside the restaurant. In the open air of the street she finally asks.

"Panic attacks . . ."

"Attack. I only had one. And it was short."

"Panic attack aside, how was it?"

I just smile.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your poker face sucks. I knew the second you stepped out of your car." 

I hug her. "I knew you knew. That's why I told you the rest of it." I pause "I'm just afraid . . ."

"Nope." She shushes me. "Don't even go there." Then she hugs me back. "Way to . . . you know . . . face your fears. We'll get you to watch The Exorcist yet."

"Actually," I brighten up a little. "I'm going to a haunted house at the end of the month."

"I'm so, so sorry for whoever is going with you."

I jingle my keys as I'm getting into my car. "I don't know. I've got a good feeling about this one."

Snob

“I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body.”

This comment is met by laughter so loud the other people in the bar turn to look at our table. I reflect that it would have been more successful were we not in my favorite bar—a slightly higher end scotch and beer place—a place that blows my budget to hell if I’m not careful.

I take another sip of my drink and roll my eyes. I was entirely serious—we’ve been talking about books and music with the intensity that comes with unwinding at the end of a long week. I’ve just finished shredding a book a few of us have recently read featuring vampires and werewolves and witches. It’s a hot mess of a book, and not even a fun hot mess. It’s in response to this that I get called a snob and retort in kind. Honestly, I’m just happy to be out among friends talking about music and books and art. It’s been a long time, and I’m nearing the shiny-eyed intensity that comes when I’m the exact right amount of stimulated.

The waitress takes advantage of the lull in laughter and talk to come around ask if we want another drink. One of my quicker friends beats me to my order.

“Yes, Kel here will have your least snobbish scotch.”

I give him a hand gesture indicating he’ll get his comeuppance and the table breaks up again.

***

“That’s one of my favorite songs!”

I’m walking down the street with a guy who will break my heart more than once in the coming months. But we don’t know that yet. For now, we’re walking down the street in that lovely, early stage of going top-over-teakettle for someone. When you keep discovering things you have in common and ohyeahmetoo-ing and grinning like a fool and thinking ohmygodthisistheone.

I mean, everyone does that, right?

Our current conversation has touched on everything from a shared interest in trying foie gras (I know a place in the city we should try!) to what we’re reading (Me: Les Mis. Him: Moby Dick.) to our shared love for Bon Iver (to this day hearing that song in the fall makes me really nostalgic for this exact moment in our lives.)

We’re dawdling as we approach my house, slowing our steps and lingering over conversation. Eventually we run out of sidewalk and get to the front door. He puts his hand on my elbow and I turn away from the door, where my hands have been shaking so badly I can’t get the key in the lock. He smiles at me and I honest-to-god almost fall down. Skinny guys with nice smiles always completely undo me and this guy is no exception.

Squeezing my arm he says “I’ve never met a girl with such good taste.” And while he doesn’t kiss me, the extra bit of air he’s just given my already over-inflated ego almost makes up for it.

***

I hate Anna Karenina.

There. I said it. I fucking hate that book. I hate it the way I hate my boobs. I hate it the way I hate listening to voicemail. I hate it so intensely that just seeing it on my bookshelf makes me nearly apoplectic with rage.

Overreaction to a book? Yeah, probably.

I tried three times to read Anna Karenina. Three damn times, and each time took me weeks. The first two times I managed to make it two thirds of the way through the book. You know, the spot where (spoilers!) the titular character throws herself under a train? Also known as the part where the book should just oh my god end already? The third time I slogged through the remaining two hundred pages because, damn it, this was a classic and it was a book I was supposed to enjoy and I wasn’t going to quit.

When I finally finished I was just disgusted with the amount of time I had wasted on the book.

Then I sat down and read the Millennium Trilogy in a weekend.

I lied when I said I finished it because it was a classic.

I finished Anna Karenina for foie gras boy. He loved it.

Shoulda taken that as a sign.

***

I am horrified to remember some of the conversations that I had with this guy. Or by some of the dates we went on. I once spent eighty dollars (Eighty dollars! Also known as a student loan payment, two tanks of gas, or my grocery budget for two weeks) on a picnic for the two of us. A picnic we ate overlooking the Mississippi River (Me: heels, dress. Him: button-down, jacket.) prior to a orchestra concert and definitely prior to him inflicting Bartok on me for several hours while he expounded on music and I fought off yawns.

I’m also deeply embarrassed by a lie I told him. I had picked up the phone (he was traveling) and when he heard my heavy breathing he asked what I was up to and why I sounded so out of breath.

“Uhhhhh.” I stalled. I’ve never been terribly good at dissembling. “Lugging groceries up the stairs,” I said, kicking open the apartment door and dropping a desktop computer on a kitchen table. “I’m making a wild mushroom and Stilton galette this weekend. Then I’ll hang out reading Les Mis.” I pause. "Yes. I know you love it. Yes. I know it's a beautiful book. Yes. That's why I'm reading it."

People looked up from their various cables and pulled headphones off. I made a sushing gesture and hooked up my monitor. There’s just no way I would tell him I was LAN-ing for the weekend. That I would spend the entire weekend drinking coffee, catching a few hours sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, and playing my way through Diablo I&II. When he told me to have a good weekend, we’d go out for wine on Sunday I said “Yup, uh-huh. Sounds good” and quickly hung up the phone, barely trusting the men and women in the room to keep it together. As soon as they saw my phone is off the shouting started.

“Why did we order pizza?!”
“Clark, watch out, I think Lois is starting to see through you!”
“You’re embarrassed to be seen with us!”
“-20 to passive awesomeness, Kels!”

When they’d finished we put our headphones on. As we logged on, it took a few seconds to realize that characters are showing up with names like Marius and Javert.

“Very funny, guys.”

The entire room broke up again.

***

“You know what? Bartok JUST SOUNDS LIKE NOISE, I like Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready, sometimes I’d skip the opera with you so I could go game, and by the way, Les Mis is the single most tedious book I’ve ever encountered. It's nearly as tedious as 70% of our conversations.”

The best-worst conversation of my life ends with me shouting that into a phone and promptly hanging up. I’ve just been told by foie gras that he loves someone else. That he never loved me. That my taste is ohsomuchmore pedestrian than he thought. Also that I'm crazy and unstable. And that he never loved me, did he mention that?

I take Les Mis to the used bookstore and exchange it for Game of Thrones.

***

“What I mean when I say I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body” I say, as we walk to the car, (We had that second round, and a third, and are now on our way out for cheap pizza before we go spend the night playing Cards Against Humanity.) “is that I still like some nice things, scotch and good food, mainly. But I still like cheap pizza and I’ll happily drink a Miller Lite. What I mean is that I don’t care what other people like to read even if it’s stupid vampire fiction. I don’t think that you should read or eat or drink things just to make other people happy.”

The guy who ordered the least snobbish scotch for me reaches for my arm and squeezes it. “Kels, we know.” His eyes sparkle as he leans in and despite the fact that he’s gay, my knees still go a little weak. He says:

“And it’s fine that you never finished Les Mis. The musical is better anyway.”

And despite the fact that he was never going to kiss me, the boost he's given to my self-worth is just as good.

Date a Nerd

Date a nerd.

You owe it to yourself to date a girl who celebrates Ada Lovelace Day. Who has definite opinions on women and STEM, who cares deeply about coded desire in Victorian Literature, who can expound on Civil War Battles, who knows how to use affect/effect correctly.

The girl at trivia who’s wearing a Doctor Who t-shirt and tall boots? Buy her a beer. Ask her about Davies /Tennant vs. Moffat/Smith. Listen to her when she talks about faith and reason in The X-Files. The girl crying in front of the Lincoln Memorial? Pass her a tissue and say “The Second Inaugural has always been my favorite. You?”

Date a nerd.

Take her out for good scotch. She can handle it. When she says she wants Marie and Pierre Curie’s relationship counter with Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Find out what excites her, whether it’s sea turtles or immunology. Take her to see if you can spot the Aurora Borealis. Argue with her about Great American Authors. Argue with her about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Argue with her about jazz.

Argue with her about anything.

Date a nerd because she’s spent years nurturing loves for a hundred odd things. She’ll never love you ironically. Date a nerd because because if you can break through her shyness and social awkwardness she’ll reward you with a thousand odd scraps of culture, things she’s discovered and kept close for years. Date a nerd because the sex will never be boring. Because a girl who has a brain and a vocabulary will always be able to tell you what she wants, and it will usually surprise you.

Date a nerd because girls who won’t push back are boring, and thoughtful verbal sparring is an automatic +10 to intelligence. Date a nerd because smart really is sexy. Because you’ll never be her everything and she’ll never expect you to save her, but she’ll love you when you play ranged to her melee. Date a nerd because she’s a self-rescuing princess and dragon-slayer and dungeonmaster all rolled into one.