Contramazing

Evidence that I am the coolest person alive: Because all of my weekend plans at that point involved going out with strangers at vegan restaurants on the lower east side, I decided to take my friend Dan up on his invitation to go to a gender role free contra dance party at the LGBT Center in Chelsea. Um, yeah. If you understood the last part of that sentence you’re already way ahead of where I was when I agreed that this would be the best way ever to spend my Friday night.

For the uninitiated, contra is a close cousin to square dancing ,that originated in New England. Two rows of people stand facing each other and there’s a caller at the front of the room shouting out calls to do si do and swing your partner round and round. It is also amazing.

I was skeptical at first, as I am with any kind of organized group activity, but by the end of the night I can honestly say it was the most fun I’d had in months. Of course I was terrible at it, but everyone was really friendly and there is something about touching sweaty strangers in a completely platonic and consensual non-creepy context that made me feel like I was in middle school and forget I was in New York in the best possible way. There’s also something really heartwarming about watching two middle aged men in skirts doing the waltz 1000 times more gracefully than you’ll ever be able to. They have it on the second Saturday of every month and I'm pretty sure I'm going to go back.

Never Eat Soup When You're Drunk and Other Hazards of Online Dating

Okay, so the first one is more accurately a hazard of me being a moron, getting overly excited when I came home from a date at 1am to find that my roommate had left a pot of some vegetable noodle thing on the stove, and not letting it cool off at all before slurping it down. Whatever. My tongue still hurts and I’m blaming the internet.

So it’s finally happened. After several months of fighting off my roommate’s urgings that I follow her into the dark scary world of virtual ass hunting, I finally admitted I don’t actually have any pride left and signed up for an online dating site. Somewhere I think the little me that was convinced that by 23 I would be writing for VOGUE and struggling to choose between marriage proposals from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonathan Brandeis just shot herself in the face.

I decided to do this for two reasons:
1) I have no clue how to meet women and while it would be nice to think that every few months I will get the opportunity to run into an old acquaintance from high school, get drunk, and make out with them in a bathroom stall, I just don’t think this is a strategy I can rely on.
2) I figured it would give me something to write about.

Even at the time I knew this second reason was pretty much bullshit. One of the advantages of saying you’re a writer is the ability to claim that any range of potentially embarrassing decisions were made in the name of research. I’m not desperate, I’m an anthropologist! It doesn’t matter. So far the only revelation that has come of this is that I was probably right to hold out in the first place. I went on two dates last week and they were both fine. The girls I went out with were friendly, read books, and I wasn’t attracted to either of them. As neither of them openly questioned my intelligence or tried to make me pay for everything, however, both dates were infinitely better than ones I’ve been on with guys I met in real life.

At the end of each night though I couldn’t help thinking that the whole thing just feels like too much of a project. I have enough trouble making time to hang out with my real friends on a regular basis. Do I really want to reserve two nights a week to getting trashed with strangers? (And yes, I understand that these things don’t necessarily have to involve alcohol, but you try getting through a blind date sober.) While it’s nice to have a safety net and a guaranteed way to meet people, it just seems so forced. The whole fun of dating and meeting someone new is the excitement that comes from that initial electricity and confusion. Even if the person completely sucks, which they will, and everything falls to shit, which it will, you still had those first few moments of possibility when it seemed like it could work. With this all you get is the knowledge that you're both awkwardly assessing each other and that after three beers and two hours will probably find the other person lacking.

I’m giving this experiment until the end of the month when my subscription runs out. This is partially because I don’t like treating my love life like a position I’m holding auditions for and partially because if I keep it up much longer I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to add “overweight alcoholic” to my description of myself in which case I’ll probably be off the market anyway.

Hair!

Because I apparently live in a world where romantic comedy clichés about sad single women actually apply, after getting dumped by the person I don’t think I was even technically dating, I decided to go to a salon on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago and lob off all of my hair. I have never had short hair before. Up until a few days before it was well below my shoulders. There were giant tumbleweeds of it rolling through my apartment and tangled wet nests clogging up my shower drain. Now the longest parts come down around my ears and to the nape of my neck. When it starts to grow out and if I don’t take care of it, it will look like a mullet.

I’m not sure why I did this. I had just spent three hours at a student salon on Thursday getting the most time consuming two inch trim of my life. Actually, this is a lie. Half the time I go there it ends up taking an eternity because the person cutting my hair either feels too lazy to work on two people in one night, decides to give me a spontaneous makeover that leaves me looking like someone just beat me up/barfed glitter all over my face, or is so insecure they feel the need to call their instructor over ever five minutes to make sure they didn’t somehow fuck up snipping off my spit ends. I keep going back though because it’s so ridiculously cheap and for some reason I seem to think $20 is a reasonable rate for my entire Thursday night. My hair looked fine ie, the same way it has for the past four or so years, and I wasn’t too concerned about it until I got home and my roommate decided this would be the perfect opportunity to do a photo shoot for an online dating site. Apparently those extra frayed inches they cut off pushed me over the edge from clearly straight to “kinda dikey.”

After she’d finished taking a couple dozen pictures in which my attempts to appear sultry/friendly mostly resulted in me looking high/confused I began to realize I sort of liked the way I looked without a gigantic mass of ratty curls hanging partway down my back. The theory being that maybe if I stop trying to look like a delicate flower I will stop getting trampled on so often. Two minutes later I was making an appointment at this place that only does short haircuts for women and two days after that I was sitting in a tiny studio salon on the lower east side telling a weirdly awkward hairdresser who reminded me of the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs to do whatever he wanted. He did a good job. I’m still getting used to it. It’s also possible this little “gaykeover” won’t be as transformative as I’d hoped it would be. Whatever. Maybe I just need to buy some beaters and a hoodie.