We're getting MARRIED!

Well--not really.
Story: I've been enjoying an online flirtation with The Mister for several months now. We belonged to one of the same groups at school, but since he was a few years older than me I actually never met him. Towards the end of senior year I tracked him down via MyFriendSpaceBook to ask him a question, and a conversation developed--first "do you know? do you know?" and gradually ranging into everything from politics, ethics, religion, past loves (his), careers (mine), even our visions on child rearing (which isn't as weird as it sounds, given that the context was already odd enough.) Turns out we share a lot of the same views, similar level of intellect, sense of humor, our hometowns are even fairly close. I have to admit, I was kind of thinking "ding ding ding" despite the fact that The Mister lives in NY. Whatever, I go there sometimes. We're both young and mobile. (And nubile, natch.) I was pleased to have this intriguing possibility on the back burner.

Recently, for some reason I as yet don't know, the flirt-quotient really started to heat up. "Manifestoes are hot," he wrote after I sent him one. "I like you, Elle Daley. I don't know what it is about your emails that I like so much." He sighed about his singlehood (which is odd for a young guy living in New York, and never such a sure-fire suggestion tactic regardless, but it showed he's relationship-minded, which I liked.) Then, after a particularly furious spate of email exchange (three from him, including a long and compliment-filled one) he wrote "Is my voicemail message annoying? Everyone says it is."

"Are you trying to get me to call you? I'm not sure we're ready for this!" I typed back. "Actually, I think you're trying to get me to call you and have you not answer!"

"I do want you to call me," he replied. "In fact, now I don't even know if I'm going to answer. What would I say?"

So it was back to MyFriendSpaceBook and I called him. The voicemail was annoying. He called back (midnight my time) and we proceeded to talk for three hours, which could be the first time I've logged that on a phone call since--I don't even know, it could be the first time I've talked on the phone that long when I wasn't trapped by a loquacious friend and my own too-gentle spirit. Reader, I really like him. He's funny, intelligent, thoughtful. Confident enough to be masculine but self-deprecating enough to be funny and kind (or interested) enough to ask about my side of things and to listen to what I'm saying. In some ways he reminds me of a male version of myself. And while phone may not be the perfect way to gauge attraction (remember, we've still never met) it's a way better gauge than email. I like his voice. Teasing me once about how young I am, he said "If I were standing next to you right now" (pause; Elle's entire body proceeds to blush) "I'd be patting you on the head." Whew! I was astonished at my own reaction.

So I came into work the next day with a pounding head (after hanging up, reluctantly, at 3 am) and, I confess, started doodling lists of baby names. NOT SERIOUSLY! It's just the kind of thing that runs through a person's head at a time like this. I mean, I wasn't totally sold on the whole thing. The Mister and I have enough in common that if we were to get together, this could be it. IT it. I really don't think I'm ready for that at 22. I have a few more good years of traveling, making out with strangers and Febreezeing the jeans I have on to get out of my system before any parent-meeting and life-sharing and baby-naming enters the equation. But still, I was blown away: this is the person, out of everyone I know, who it could make the most sense for me to one day be serious with, and we haven't even met yet.

This was two days ago. The next night, which was last night, he called me again (I was on the other line and let it go.) Suddenly I feel like this bride here, nailed to the floor by bouquets.

What do you think, readers? Is it creepy to spend so much energy pursuing a girl you've never met? Is The Mister some sort of anomalous committment-crazed freak? (He did say he hopes to get married by 30, but he's only 25.) Is that creepy that marriage even came up? The thing is, he seems like such a normal guy. Drinks, swears, makes inappropriate jokes (like me), had a few long-term girlfriends--basically as normal as you could hope for, at least, as far as I can judge via extended electronic communication.

But then I got another email from him today--admiring, intelligent, sharing enough about himself to keep the conversation going without being a creepy or needy overshare. And now I'm thinking that little girl up there kinda looks like a Ramona, or maybe a Rachel.

Help me, blogosphere! Should I run, withdraw or just throw myself into whatever The Mister has in mind? (Bear in mind that if I go with that, by the next time I post here it's just barely possible I'd be reporting to you as The Missus . . .)

By the Book

I was admiring a young gentleman on the bus this morning. He had that great is-he-or-isn't-he-straight style: flared jeans, fitted coat, matching scarf and skullie, le tout ensemble sported with Tims, which I love when black guys do but, well, I've never seen anyone else try it, but if they did it would be horrible. Anyway, he looked good. And as a bonus, he was reading: a brightly colored hardcover, looked like a Jonathan Franzen or something like that. (I actually almost never read contemporary writers because I'm too cheap, but I know what they look like.) Perhaps the choice of literature would give me a clue as to his availability. I shifted in my seat and peered unobtrusively. The Abs Diet.

 

Damn.

Yep, I'm a big terrorist

Note to would-be Santas with packages yet to send (get to it, slackers!) when the nice lady at USPS asks you if you've got anything fragile in there, do not say "Yup. A bottle of liquor." "What?" "SODA." Didn't work. I had to haul the darn thing to FedEx and pay $13 more, all because of my pernicious plot to combust the world with hot cocoa and cinnamon schnapps. Funnily, at FedEx he didn't even ask: it was like (mumbling to self) "hazardous materials . . ." (makes check mark) "There, you're all set." What a trustworthy face. (It helped that I found the earmuffs.) I would probably make a very good terrorist.

Goin' to get m'eyebrows threaded!

I'm so excited. Now I can be beautiful like her instead of what I usually am, which is beautiful like her:
Actually, that was just an example, but now that I look, geez, those are some serious eyebrows, Alicia. Ha! 1996!

HAT HAIR

Even the giant butterfly clip doesn't help.

The cold is digging in like a fanatic adolescent after a blackhead, and the past few mornings I have been forced to make a painful choice. Wear the cunning earmuffs--in which I'm insouciant, radiant, truly have the world at my feet--or a warmer and less likely to sproing off my head when my hands are full, but seriously debilitating in the follicular region, knitted cap? The decision was made for me when I lost my earmuffs (and really, I don't know why, but I look smashing in those earmuffs) in the tussle of Washington unpacking. So yesterday it was a tight red number--too long for a skullie and too short for a stocking, resembling nothing so much as a knit condom on my head--and today one of those brilliant Andes hats with the earflaps and the braids that hang down. SERIOUSLY WARM. But now my bangs are plastered to my head like those of an eight-year-old child whose mom has a serious Detangler fetish. And let's not even talk about how juvenile yours truly looks in the hats--if I were smaller I'd get taken by the hand crossing streets, as it is, I look like a horribly overgrown child with a boring dress-up box. Oh, and the other thing about bangs in the winter? When you sneeze, they fly straight up, like you were just surprised by a cartoon character going "Ah-OO-ga!" It's [English accent] damn silly.

Blast from the heart's past

I was out at a bar tonight (yup, I'm a mad crazy partier, but also my roommate's boyfriend's band was tearin' it up) and saw this guy whose face pounded me back into the past. He looked like an older, fatter version of King T, this boy I had a crush on for, if I'm honest, many years of college. King T was on the short side, earnest and solemn and a little nerdy, but I, and as I sometimes found out and sometimes just believed, many of my friends fell for him on the DL because he was also insightful and funny and good. In some ways he was manlier at 19 than some people I know will ever be. We called him by a macho nickname because it was so incogruous, but he came to wear it until the hubris really did accrue to him, and he was a cult favorite by any standards after a few months' acquaintance. This year I found out that King T is becoming a priest. Not without a pang, let me tell you. I know he'll be a good one, and it's not like I was really planning to march back there and marry him anyway. but still . . . The decision fits, I guess; if anyone I know is making a decision as a college senior that'll shape the rest of their lives, he'd be the one to do it, and to have it be the right one. I don't see that kind of permanence anywhere else around me. I know I'm not ready for it myself, but that's what worries me; it's like a nation of people who can't digest milk, when it's that that makes your skeleton strong.

I also accidentalDRUNKENly basically told my roomates tonight that I have a little student-crush on one of my grad professors, who was supposed to meet us out (frisson! a new experience for me, drinkin' with the profs) and didn't. Just as freakin' well. But anyway, ooooops. Hey, we're both adults, damn it. I know many kids whose parents met that way, which is actually a little frightening. I love to keep a closed mouth about my matters of the heart (except that I, um, started this blog, but you suckas don't know me after all) but whenever a drop of booze crosses my lips, it's Unasked-for Truth City. The reason I like to keep my stories close is that somehow, your stories never seem to sound as good to your friends as they do to you, naimean? Maybe I just have extremely phlegmatic friends, but I could be all like " . . . and then the puma spit out my left nipple, turned to Madeline Albright and said 'Hey, don't I know you from sophomore lit class?'" and they'd be like this: " . . . . . . . Ha! And what else did you do in England?" It's more satisfying to tell myself my own Big Fish stories. But that said, dag have I got some good ones for you from my escapades in DC. But not for now. Cookies are only for sometimes, and now Elle Daley is for BAID, son.

Reasons I need a camera phone

The VIc Brew and View listed its movies on three marquee lines instead of two, so it reads like one long phrase: "40 Year Old Virgin Wedding Crashers." When I have nightmares about my future . . .

Broke my heart, and I love it

After raving "Rent," I want to promise you I don't only fall for love stories about gay people, but here's the thing, Brokeback Mountain is so much more than that. Everyone from the New York Times to the Salvation Army Santa's been saying it, so I'll be the million and oneth. There aren't many ways left to convey love against all odds, which is what all the great love stories are. Brokeback does it. It makes you want to be in love, even if that means being wrenched and shattered. It makes wrenched and shattered look transcendent. Broke my heart, made me want to suffer, made me write drunken poems in Clarke's on Belmont at 1 a.m. I can't give you a single reason not to see it; it's 100% perfect. Whether before or after you see it, read the story; the best lit to film transition I can imagine.

Livin' large at Madam's Organ

I'm in DC for work and went out to Adams Morgan (to a great bar called Madam's Organ--ah ha ha) with some fellow conventioneers.

Jiminy crickets, I love this bar!

We were an adorable group of mostly chicks, and when we started grooving to the fantastic jazz band everybody got up--including, unfortunately, this creepy old guy with absolutely no sense of proportion, by which I mean no sense of the fact that he was like fifty, and in a suit minus jacket, and clearly had "NO SENSE OF PROPORTION: HAS NO IDEA HOW PROPORTIONLESS HE LOOKS" stamped all over him. It was entertaining for awhile as he did his stiff old overtan white man dance; okay, he's enjoying the music, lovely. But when he started getting all up on our circle, and particularly all up on yours truly--but in classic creepy old man fashion, not up on enough to the point that I could have just wreaked bodily or psychic harm and driven him away, but was reduced to never, ever, ever meeting his gaze, which is impossible to do just by coincidence--I got pissed, and started making eyes at anything in the vicinity (actually, a cute HAPA boy in a suit, not a bad eyes target) to lure some, any, physical division between me and Papa Creepy. The darling band, though, situated as they were about ten inches from the dancing action, picked up on the idea of a physical division. They started playing "The Wall," and the vocalist got down among us with her mike so we could all belt together "LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!" He still didn't get it.

Life At Times Is Pleasurable

Like this: I feel gross all day, get snowed on for an hour for a work thing (don't ask) while everyone sails by to their Metra train, slalom my way to the bus in all my soaked-ass glory, benefit from the kindness of strangers, ride for an hour while breathing down the snowy neck of half Hyde Park and now I'm in slippers and a giant sweater, drinking mulled wine and Christmas shopping online. And life is good indeed.

Least fun way to spend New Year's EVER

Celebration of the Soul, a crunchy-style blowout. $80 for no booze, "inspring" speakers, and drums banging in your ear. Seriously, could anything be worse?

Well, other than eating crackers and dip on your parents' couch.

Worst political branding ever

Republican Judy Baar Topinka is running for governor. Her opponents, claiming she's a clone of the current guv, have seen fit to dub her Topinkojevich. Whassa? By the time you get that one past the tip of your tongue, you've forgotten who you're talking about. Might I instead suggest J-Rod?

Can I get some sympathy right now?

I'm really smarter than this bonnet makes me look.

I had to create a list of 500 certain companies in the Chicago area. I trawled the Internet, worked off a partial list we had, and got it done. Now we're supposed to start calling the cos to find out their HR directors. It's becoming frighteningly clear to me that I fucked up the list. At some point I must have hit the wrong thing in Excel; companies don't go with addresses don't go with zips don't go with phone numbers . . . I'd tell you that I'm a smart woman, but you'd be justified in laughing ad pissendum. Any minute now my boss is going to be calling me pointing out that McDonalds is not based on Wacker Drive. It was below my intelligence and I couldn't hack it! I'm working frantically right now trying to fix; probably going to be doing that all night and then I have to figure out how to casually get everyone to start using a doc that's going to look completely different. So they don't notice that I, you know, can't create an Excel sheet.

I need a hug.

Girl Dies After Boy's Peanut Kiss

See, boys and girls? This is what happens when you give in to your lustful desires!

Actually, am I weird for thinking there's something starkly romantic about this?

Total shocker: designers not cultural symbols

The New York Times found that Donald Trump is better-known than Ralph Lauren or even household names Dolce and Gabbana (Is This the Most Trusted Man in Fashion?, Thursday.) Quoth the Times: "That only one designer, Mr. Lauren, made it into the top category on the strength of his own steam [not celebrity endorsements or whatever] is interesting, though. It says to Mr. Passikoff, and perhaps everyone else, that designers are not the cultural symbols we suppose them to be." The cultural symbols who supposed them to be, you twee numbnuts? Yeah, keep your eye out for the Karl Lagerfeld Christmas Special on ABC.

No more chocolate wafting on the breeze?!?

This is the saddest thing ever. (Blommer's chocolate aroma to vanish--Crain's Chicago Business) How are we supposed to get through the winter now? I'm going to go install fondue pots in all my scarves. And sulk.

Hipster doppelgangers swarm my life

I saw Rent this weekend and it was a weird and wonderful experience. Wonderful because it's a fantastic movie--I loved the show and was worried about what they'd do to it, but the film both honors the stage show and stands on its own. Weird because Roger reminded me a lot of Daniel, this bookstore guy I was trying to hit on about a month ago, although while Daniel was cute, Roger, eighties 'do and all, is a stone cold, pants-dampening hottie. Weirder still because narrator Mark reminded me to a disturbing degree of my friend Plato, to the point where I couldn't distinguish between them by the end of the film. Same general aesthetic, same asexual-yet-whipped demeanor. (The movie plays up Mark's pining for Maureen a lot more than the stage show, with a few lost-your-girl-to-a-girl jokes, which surprised me.) Mark came across as more asexual in the stage version; in the movie it's more like, as Lady M. would say, unmann'd. But seriously, the Mark-Plato congruence was such that I had to fight hard not to fall for Plato all over again throughout. Plato is a grad student, Elle, not an self-deprecating, filmmaking hottie suffering through the AIDS crisis and in need of rescue. Though the latter may be true, let some other girl do it; you go work on finding your own Roger-style rock-god-cum-little-boy-cum-savior-figure. Anyway, whew. See Rent!

(P.S. to those who've seen it: did the fake snow in the "Here Goes" scene also make you want to kill yourself?)

There is no justice.

A call from my mom interrupted a post-red eye nap today. I WAS DREAMING OF MAKING OUT WITH ROGER FROM RENT, YOU HARPY!!!!

You know how sometimes you think your jeans are still pretty clean, and then you wear them that one last time, and it's like, God, that was a mistake?

Yeah.

I'm still at work, although most have cleared out, because there's no point in going home before my flight leaves. It'd actually feel kind of cool and rebellious if my workaholic boss weren't still here too, and didn't have the office right next to me. Sigh.

The Chicago Transit Authority is multiplying the potential for oddities during the commute with its holiday El train. Still sounds to me like a trixie spoiled by her sugar daddy. "Check out that bling. Someone's ridin' the Santa train!"

Rob Thomas said he was more worried about beating 50 Cent at the AMAs than losing to him. Does this strike anyone besides me as (a) racist, (b) attention-starved, (c) if sincere, particularly stupid?