The Least Hygienic Hook-Up Ever (and how it made me momentarily internet-famous)

I still haven't done my own TMIT Thursday, but hey, a guest post from one of the raddest chicks out there? A very close second best. Right?

Hey guys! It’s TKOG, over from Not That Kind of Girl, psyched to steal a little of Rebel Mel’s spotlight on this most TMI of Thursdays!

My current project, Not That Kind of Girl, focuses on spending this year doing 250 completely uncharacteristic things – many of them relating to being newly single out of a blissful four-year relationship. And dudes – dudes! – when it comes to dating, there’s good reason I’m looking to become a totally new kind of girl. What follows is a tale of dating failure so rank it’ll curl your nose hairs.

During the time this story took place (when I was 18, during my first year of university), I had the bad luck of breaking in a rash of virgins. A rash. My wording is not coincidental.

In my freshman dorm, my bff Justice and I took an interest in tormenting slash socializing a particular quiet specimen who lived next door. He was kind of immature for his age, and weird-smart. He never seemed to have anything interesting to say. Until. UNTIL! I google-stalked him one day and realized that the seemingly shy little wallflower next door was in fact an internet rockstar. I can’t give too much away, but let’s just say he has a Wiki entry, a friggin’ famous-ass blog, and he was the number-one google result for his (common) first name. Swoooooon.

So one night, after a few drinks, I asked him to take a walk with me after a party, we ended up laying in the grass talking about intellectual property rights, and – when I couldn’t handle my Blog Star Complex any longer – I leaned in and gave him his first kiss.

Kisses turned into make-outs – awkward and unskilled, but not entirely unpleasant make-outs – and we went up to his room, where I bee-lined for the bed, but he lingered by the sink. He said he had to brush his teeth, and took a new toothbrush out of its wrapper. I, I’m sure, pouted and kicked the mattress.

“You know,” he mused, mouth foaming with Crest. “This is the first time I’ve brushed my teeth at University.”

You guys. You guys. It was JANUARY.

Did I make out with him anyway? Oh, you know I made out with him anyway.

Things went well for a week or two. Although we only had one other hook-up of note. We made out for a while one afternoon (man, I miss college) and I realized that he didn’t just have a little natural funk. His particular funk had an almost physical heft to it, like an oil that clouded through the nasal passages. Potent, guys, potent. At one point, I stuck my tongue in his ear, then recoiled in horror. When I subtly rubbed my tongue on his pillowcase afterwards, there was an enormous chunk of orange-yellow wax left on the fabric.

Shortly afterwards, I made my escape. Then in the room a few minutes later, my back started itching. So I took off my shirt and asked my roommate if she could see anything. She told me I seemed to have a rash or hives, but then started giggling so hard that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I found a mirror and saw to my horror that my back was emblazoned with screaming-red hives IN THE SHAPE OF A HANDPRINT on my back.

But TKOG, you’re saying, at least you got to break up with the (literal) slimeball and improve your break-up karma! And I’m touched, dear reader, by your simple, misplaced faith in 18-year-old TKOG. Although we stopped hooking up, I didn’t end things until weeks later.

Oscar Night 2005, to be exact. Martin Scorsese had just lost Best Director for “The Aviator,” and I was taking it hard. My mother called me and, I’ll admit, I may have been crying.

“Oh sweetie,” she told me, “you’ve already read it? Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out.”

When I gave her the venerable ol’ wtf, she reluctantly told me to check Hive Boy’s blog. Where he had just posted basically a live-blog of our first hook-up. It wasn’t flattering. He basically gave the internet – using my real name, with a link to my real-life blog! – a blow-by-blow of the hook-up and his reactions. Apparently his first hook-up wasn’t a great experience, because he dispatched the whole mess with the type of ennui and disdainfully clinical curiosity usually reserved for describing surgical procedures in third-world nations. And, insult to injury, throughout the whole ordeal, he painted me in broad strokes as a floozy.

Me! A floozy! I mean, okay, obviously I was a bit sexually indisriminate, but come on, I’ve read “War and Peace,” I used to do calculus for fun, I have friggin’ thoughts about heteronormativity! I’m not exactly a “The Price is Right” model over here.

Shortly after reading the blog entry, I grabbed his (no doubt gangrenous) arm, dragged him outside, and shouted healthy, productive things (“I hope you get chlamydia of the face AND DIE!”), finally ending the semi-relationship. Although it didn’t end there; not really. Because the bastard had linked to my blog, which had my email address attached, I received an influx of literally hundreds of blog comments and hate-mails, all positively reaming me for apparently forcing my grotesque make-outs on the poor sainted little computer nerd. People dug through my blog archives, google-stalked me, found out information about me through channels I can’t even imagine, and sent me the absolutely filthiest hate-mail you could imagine. For months. In fact, up until the point my university email address was deleted, four years later, I still received the occasional hate-mail; my personal blog gets about 30 hits a month from that old entry, despite the fact that he removed my name and blog address after the chlamydia rant.

So. Basically I win at dating forever.

Oh, and a coda to the story: I found out, while googling him to write this, that he’s apparently gay now. Which makes me feel slightly better about the whole “hated hooking up with me so much – despite the fact that he continued to do it – that he had to live-blog the friggin’ experience” thing. Not much better, but a little.

If you want to check out more TMIT's, head over to Lilu's blog!

Examining the source of my food phobias: Fish and Ketchup.

I am a very picky eater. There are very few meals that don't contain something that will be left on the side of my plate when finished. I think that's why I like cooking so much - I substitute everything that I don't like, and voila! A full plate of nom noms, no picking around!

It's funny though, because I know why I don't like most things. Or at least why I am so greatly grossed out by them. What started out as a comment to TKOG, has quickly become an entire post, so I have decided to share with everyone all of my reasoning for hating certain foods.

In this post, I am going to examine Fish and Ketchup. Ewwwww.

When I was younger my father made this rule - I couldn't leave the dinner table until I was done with my meal. My plate had to be clean. He thought I was just being a brat about not wanting to eat (think: the kid in A Christmas Story) which was probably true half of the time.

But, this rule continued until I was about ten years old, when I was clearly at the age of being capable of deciding what I like and what I didn't like. But my father was convinced that I liked fish. When I said I didn't like it, he said "well you never had a problem with fishsticks!" which was true, because they were mainly breading!

I remember this one occasion where my mother made fish filets for dinner. I said that I didn't like fish, so my mother told me to just take more of the other stuff we were eating that night, when my father intervened, saying "No, she's just being a brat. She likes fish. She's eating it." I said "No, I really don't like fish." and low and behold, I had a plate full of fish in front of me and was not allowed to leave the table until it was gone.

I remember first chipping away at the breading, hoping that my mother would notice my attempt at eating the fish, which she did, but that wasn't good enough for my father. Now that I didn't have the breading to mask the flavor of fish, I decided I would load it up with Ketchup and salt.

The original amount of ketchup and salt didn't help, so I poured more on, which made my plate look like a bloody cow heart. I could STILL taste the fish.

My dad, who had been done eating for an hour, came back into the kitchen and told me to stop playing with my food and to eat it. I cried. I told him it tasted so bad, and I tried to make it taste better by adding salt and ketchup, and it just didn't work. He looked at me and told me to eat my food and left the room.

Now, this is back in the mid-nineties, and it was also a Friday night. It was about 6:30 when my father cleared his plate, so at this point it was 7:30. I had a half hour to eat my food, or I would miss TGIF.

I flaked away the layers, nearly puckering at the saltiness of each bite. I figured that if I could keep taking the smallest bites possible, where I couldn't taste the fish anymore, maybe I would make it in time to catch Family Matters. After a few bites, I realized that the ice cold fish flavor was overtaking both the salt and the ketchup, and I couldn't eat another bite. I still had more than half my filet left, and I was running out of ideas.

I got up, and as soon as I did that, my dad came rushing into the kitchen, hoping to catch me doing something I shouldn't have been, hence the reason I did not just throw out the food and claim to have eaten it.

"What are you doing?" My father demanded.

"I need a napkin. I got ketchup on myself." I replied, mentally patting myself on the back for my quick thinking.

I sat down with the napkin as my dad scowled at me. I shoveled a huge bite of the icy, salty, ketchupy fish into my mouth and chewed until my father walked away. I quickly grabbed my napkin and spit the chewed mess into my napkin, folding it in an attempt to make it appear that it had just been used to wipe ketchup off myself.

That's when I heard the sweet sounds of a piano playing. I quietly sang along while gazing into the fishy mess.

"It's a rare condition, this day and age, to read any good news, in the newspaper page."

I quickly chopped up my food and scattered it around my plate, hoping to hide all of the fish in the ketchup. My dad entered again.

"Do you hear that? Family Matters is going to start, and you're going to miss it!" He taunted.

"I'm almost finished eating," I began, testing the waters to see if my father would comply.

"No you're not. You haven't even eaten half of it. You just pushed it around your plate! Now eat! You're not leaving the table until your plate is clean!"

"As days go byyyyy, it's the bigger love of the family."

Damn! Now what?

I tried nibbling on the bits again, and after what felt like days, I actually heard Family Matters ending, and I still hadn't made any progress.

Now, I am hearing the intro to Boy Meets World.

My love, Ryder Strong, was to be appearing on TV any minute now, and I was stuck looking at vile, half eaten, now hours old fish. What did I ever do to deserve such a thing? I contemplated just eating the fish and scurrying into the living room to catch my dream man. But that would mean I had to put my pride aside and deal with my father, all night, saying "That wasn't that bad, was it? See, you like fish!" and subsequently forcing me to eat fish for the rest of my life, reminding me of that moment where I caved and ate the fish because I wanted to drool over Ryder Strong.

I couldn't do it. Even though, at the time, I would have eaten fish for Ryder, this was now something bigger and more complex. This was a protest.

I decided to listen to Boy Meets World, in an attempt to piece together the shennanigans that the boys had gotten into this week. I mean, if I were blind, this is how I would be watching TV anyway, right?

I learned that night that listening to Boy Meets World wasn't nearly as entertaining as actually viewing it. With about ten minutes left of the episode, I decided to start brainstorming other plans that would get me into the living room, hopefully to catch Step By Step.

I decided I would yell to the 'rents that I had to go to the bathroom. I filled my mouth with as much fish and ketchup and salt as humanly possible, and I ran in. As soon as I got in, I spit the mess into the toilet. Worst case scenario? The parents would think I was vomiting, and that would do nothing but help my protest.

I still had a good chunk of fish left on my plate when I left the bathroom. I sat back down, only in a different chair. I could see about half of the TV in this position, and that was good enough for me.

It could have been the episode of Step By Step where Dana is set up with Brad Pit (who was an extra in Legends of the Fall) who she assumes is the Brad Pitt, but I could be wrong. I was too furious with what was sitting in front of me to concentrate on the left half of the television. My father came into the kitchen, and saw that I had switched seats, trying to figure out my motivation to do so. I hoped that he wouldn't be able to put his finger on it, but he did. I was to move to another seat. Not my initial one, either. One across from my old seat, where I absolutely could not see the television.

This seat was closer to the trash can, which meant if I was fast and sly enough, I could dump the food in the trashcan and pretend that I had eaten it. I would have to be absolutely silent, though, which was something I was not sure that I could do. I did, however, notice that the warm rays from the television set were reflecting off of the metal backing of the stove, and I could see a blurry version of what was on the TV, only backwards. I had to really use my imagination to follow that episode of Step By Step, but it was better than eating the fish, and also safer than trying to run to the trashcan to throw out my grotesque dinner.

By the time Hangin' with Mr. Cooper came on, I was more tired and cold than anything. This week I would not be Thanking Goodness that it was Friday, I would be sitting in a cold, icy kitchen staring into my least favorite meal, 3 hours past it's prime. After the end of Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, my father had passed out as a result of fifteen to twenty budweisers, and I was told by my mother that I could go into my room and watch TV in there. She threw away my half eaten fish, and then told me that she didn't like fish either.

I snuggled up with my polar bear beanie baby and watched 20/20 on my 7 inch black and white screen as I sulked, because I had missed the one thing I was looking forward to all week, and I had a belly full of fish flavored ketchup.

I can't even think about Fish or Ketchup without throwing up in my mouth a little bit.