Tag: 40-something

chronic pain, humor, personal writing

independence day

mycrookedrainbow

Last night was the 4th of July. It was also, for me personally, a comedy of errors, a sad little comedy of errors.

You see, fireworks hold a special place in my heart. Every year, I have a deep, inexplicably strong desire to see them.

It has been five years now that I’ve been, to a greater or lesser degree, disabled by extraordinary pain and functional limitations in one leg, a problem which itself is both cause and result of multiple massive surgeries. And it has been almost 28 years of sequelae from the very serious, exceptionally rare congenital muscular disorder that was discovered when I was 16, when my leg more or less exploded as soon as they slit the skin to relieve the pressure in the muscles, a defining characteristic of this crazy syndrome. All the ripple effects of this have spanned nearly three decades, and in the process, have made me, well, a bit of medical mystery, a case study of one.

But I digress. Back to my story: I love fireworks. I hate being sidelined. I have – because I’m a weird 40 something woman who still goes nuts for fireworks – endeavored to get myself to see some each year on the 4th of July for the last five years.

Last night was the closest I got in this endeavor.

So close and yet so far.

Let me explain.

The pain was at a 7-7.5 last night. I cannot walk more than a few dozen feet at a time these days. Good thing, I thought helpfully, that I happen to live on the bottom of the very hill where people come to watch the spectacular city display in the distance.

It’s all just up the hill from me!

Kool, kool. I got this.

Before I leave the apartment – because I both feel and look like poop on a platter, and because my ex boyfriend, a quasi-neighbor, could conceivably be there – I spruce up my hair with dry shampoo and put on red (red, goddammit) lipstick, cuz f*ck that sh!t, if I am gonna have a chance run-in with him and some new lady, I’m gonna look HAWT. So yeah, red lipstick.

Inner Voice: Ya ever heard of lipstick on a pig?

Shut the f*ck up, Inner Voice. We’re doing this. This is the year.

My plan, you see, was to drive as far up the hill as possible, till the road closures, and then park and use my crutches the rest of the way up.

Fail-safe plan!

It can’t be – what – more than .2, .3 miles from my car to the top of the hill? What could possibly go wrong?

So I commence plan.

I walk down the corridor that leads to the parking lot (note to self, it’s stupid to leave crutches in the car out of pride, this hall is long!) I make it to the door, neon green ice pack Velcro-wrapped around my leg, ready for my trek.

This is your Everest, jokes Inner Voice, before dodging just in time to avoid my proverbial ice pick.

I get to the car, drive up the hill as far as I can, park, and grab the crutches out of the back. Plan on track.

I start crutching uphill. I’m passed by an old man carrying portable chairs. I’m passed by some families with little kids and strollers. We are all presumably going to the same place. My hands already stinging from my climb, I imagine nodding to the baby stroller, saying, “Mind if I hitch a ride?”

I chuckle to myself. I then realize the chuckle was out loud. I cough, to stifle another laugh, but somewhat suddenly, and as such seem to scare the little girl in a peach dress passing me on my right. She stops and looks at me and at my crutches, and – you know – I get it. Metal crutches are loud and shiny and maybe a little scary. Even though I’m quite skilled with these things, if I do say so myself. (After well over eight years on crutches, I am certain I’d be an Olympic gold, maybe silver, medalist, if crutching were an Olympic event.)

But the girl scurries ahead and, looking back at me with big eyes, reaches for her mama’s hand.

This makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Head down, I continue my climb. My left leg searing, and a blister already forming on my heel (stupid cute sandals, in case of stupid ex sighting), I begin to question if this is worth it. I throw a quick look back downhill and realize it’d be even stupider to give up now.

As I near my destination, I hear fireworks in the distance. I curse my slow self, sidelined by needing to sit down three times on my way up. Thinking I was hearing the real show, I start to crutch a bit faster.

A guy in a Red Sox hat says to me, “Whoa, be careful there – you don’t want to go and break your other leg now, do ya?”

I think briefly about whether the nearby police presence would take my side or his if I beat him flat to the ground with these things.

Instead, I smile politely and attempt a laugh.

Of course, I immediately think of better retorts (oh don’t you worry your pretty little head, cuz you’re gonna be watching me take home the Olympic gold metal for —) but he’s already too far ahead.

I sigh, more audibly than intended.

Finally, sweating, breathing a bit heavily, I reach my destination. I make my way, clinking and clanking, in the dark, over the uneven ground to find a spot as close as possible to the street.

I choose a place and my crutches make a loud metallic noise as I let them drop beside me. Some people from the group in front of me turn around to look.

Please do not say a goddamn thing.

I lay down the old shirt I thought to bring as a blanket and deposit myself down in the grass. Throbbing heat radiates down my leg.

Welp, I tell my body – inaudibly of course, we did it. We are here. We are finally here – we’re gonna get our fireworks on!

I begin to relax, let my mind drift.

When I was a kid, we would go to Vermont every summer. Those were the happiest memories of my childhood. My parents were still together, we were still a family then. We would gather old plaid blankets, pack some snacks, and go to the nearby high school to watch the fireworks from the football field.

They were probably unspectacular as far as fireworks displays go – it was a small rural town in Vermont in the 1980s after all – but it was a true highlight of my summer.

We would lay down our happy family spread, and take in the – out there – black sky and the – back then – bright stars. My parents would break out their little plastic Chablis glasses, and we kids would eat pretzels and popcorn, and we would wait.

All the other families around us were doing the same. All of us, looking up, expectantly. I remember an almost tangible buzz of anticipation in the summer air.

Then they’d start. We would Oooo and Aaaaah right in sync with the crowd, which – considering the traffic getting out of the school parking lot at the end of the night – must have represented the entirety of that small Vermont town.

But there was a definitive feel-good quality to the whole ritual. We were there together. As a community. As a family. We were a part of something larger. There was, above us, evidence of magic.

Hilariously, there was also evidence of our human absurdities. There was this one guy who – every year – would park himself on the edges of crowd and yell – with a volume and scope that, I realize in hindsight, could only have come from a full six pack of beer:

BOOOOOOOOOOO-MERRRRRRRRR!

After going several years in a row and hearing this guy, we had come to feel it was part of the show. The whole crowd came to understand what Six Pack knew intrinsically: that when he would shout, BOOMER!, we were sure to get a really good, really big Boomer! And we did. Sometimes we would yell along with him.

I remember each year my brother and I would twitter in excitement – Mom! Dad! When’s the BOOMER coming?

And then, as if on cue, the rebel yell:

BOOOOOOOOO-MERRRRRRRR!

We squealed. We knew what was coming next. The crowd knew, too.

And the finale was always spectacular.

It was magic.

Abruptly, quite rudely, I’m brought back to the present – by mosquitos. Lots and lots of mosquitoes.

I had remembered the red lipstick. I had remembered the shirt-blanket. Did I remember bug spray? No, I did not remember the bug spray.

Ha! Inner Voice revels, Lipstick on an idiot pig! Here you are, alone, ex nowhere in sight, in your red lipstick, being bitten alive!

Well, at least I have my phone, I tell Inner Voice in my defense. I’m not really alone! What!! I’m not. I’m gonna text my friend. See, I’m not lame!

Jesus, though, these bugs are vicious!

As I text my friend, I am horrified to realize – it is another fifty five minutes before the fireworks begin.

This is somewhat of a miscalculation on my part.

The blister on my heel stinging, my hands burning, the bugs biting – I didn’t even want to think about my leg. What to do?

I take a deep breath and consider my options. I try to muster the courage to sit through all this for another hour – just to see the fireworks, alone, from a distance. No chance of a Boomer.

Nope. I can’t do it.

What is this pilgrimage for anyhow? A nostalgic trek to a forgotten era. A simpler life. One in which I was parked in the middle of that plaid blanket, planted right in the heart of my family.

F*ck this. I’m out. Let’s go, Lipstick. NOW.

Inner Voice has a point this time, I concede.

I pick up my loud crutches and in one expert (dare I say, Olympian) move I jump up and get going down the hill.

Clink. Clank. Clink.

A guy in a hat with a cooler in hand looks at me going downhill as he’s going uphill.

Say One Word. I dare you!

I want to scream.

BOOOOOOOOOOOM-ERRRR!

Here, we have arrived at the finale of this failed endeavor.

At this point, I can’t help it, but I start to feel sorry for myself. This is the fifth year in a row (and who knows how many times over my lifetime) that I’ve missed the stupid fireworks because of my leg. It is just one hour per year that I need my leg to cooperate. One single hour.

But for five years, that hope has not been my reality.

I fight the tears.

You can’t cry while crutching!

It’s true. I know this from experience. If you do, the tears just sting the corners of your eyes and, with your hands in use, you can’t wipe them away, so they just trickle down your cheeks and into your ears – and, on bad days, drop onto your shirt, leaving dark, telltale wet spots.

Finally, finally, I see my car. I snort at the absurdity of it all – I don’t try to stifle it – everyone else is uphill already. I’m alone in my descent. Hot tears come in spite of my efforts to stop them, or maybe, because of my efforts.

But just as I reach my car, everything hurting – I feel the breeze blow. Just enough that the leaves of the bushes lining the sidewalk rustle. It’s a quiet sound.

On the breeze, I can smell the faint summer scent of linden flower. I stop to dab my eyes. I realize – I can see the moon from here. An unassuming sliver of ombre against a faded gray sky. It is in the opposite direction of where everyone else’s eyes are trained, expectantly waiting.

An old saying one of my sisters shared with me sometime in the last few years, when I’d complained that my life had become the wreckage of its former self:

Barn’s burnt down, but I can see the moon now.

When she first told me this, I didn’t really get it.

I think I get it now.

I laugh and cry at the same time, out loud now, cuz … the barn’s burnt down and, really, who has a fuck left to give.

I get in my car. I take a deep breath. Linden flower in the air, orange crescent moon in the sky, each putting on their own quiet show.

A distant voice climbs inside me, once more, from deep within my memory banks, with a volume and scope that can only come from years of experience:

BOOOOOOOOOO-MERRRR!

I turn the ignition on and head down the rest of the hill home. I won’t be able to see the moon from home, but I will know it’s there.

dating, humor, personal writing

professor cute butt

mycrookedrainbow

God help me if we end up in a real relationship because it shall be here-forth known to all of the interwebs that I had a GREAT date with a man whom my BFF and I are calling “Professor Cute Butt.” If you saw his picture on Bumble, you’d understand immediately. (Why am I hearing some crass teenage voice in my head saying, “yeah, don’t look at me like that, you woulda swiped right on his a$$ too.”)

Professor Cute Butt is a professor. Prof. CB does have a cute butt. He is not a professor of buttology or anything, but he could be. That’s what I’m saying, people.

So here’s how it goes down: I have a big interview for a job I am a finalist Friday – the job is OUT OF STATE. Professor Cute Butt is IN STATE, oh yesiree. We met Tuesday, and BOOM. Almost seven hours later, we forced ourselves to part, promising we’d have a second date the day after my interview. It felt like when you try to split a taffy candy with someone. You pull. They pull. The taffy just hangs there, laughing in your face, all “you can’t split taffy, you wanker!” If neighbors were watching us say goodbye, which they very well could have been (DAMN, URBAN LIVING!) they might have had one of two thoughts: 1) Aww, those two! So clearly fond of each other they can’t even say a successful goodbye! 2) GET A F*CKING ROOM.

But what would I do if I got said job AND it actually went somewhere with Professor Cute Butt? You know why I ask this question, don’t you. Yep. That is, just in case you were starting to wonder, how the Universe rolls: “I’ll send you a promising man in one state and a promising job in a different state, all in the same week,” she says, maniacally rubbing her Universe hands together and letting out her Universe cackle.

I see you, Universe, and I am not going to be laughing.

Actually, you probably know me well enough already, dear Reader, to know I actually will be laughing. Because I am quite often finding things very funny. I mean, LOOK AROUND. IT IS ABSURD.

Speaking of laughter, part of the reason I liked Prof. CB so much was because he made me SNORT with laughter. And I made him almost SNARF his beer. I felt more accomplished than I have in a long time. I mean, it wasn’t a successful snarf… yet… but very promising, indeed.

On the other hand: Have I just jinxed both job and man?

I will report back. Maybe I’ll bring the Universe some taffy from the gift shop.

P.S. I do have a nickname, and preferably an emoji too (e.g., glasses + peach), for all the guys. It’s what I do. It’s not something I am super proud of. But guess what, the world is rough and if a man’s gonna make it he’s gotta be tough, and I knew I wouldn’t be there to help you along, so I gave you this name and I said — Oh WAIT, that’s Johnny Cash. Never mind. In any case, you’ll know it’s serious if I drop the nickname. It’s just a handy way to give your poor heart a little buffer and way to laugh and dust itself off if and when it bites the dust hard, again. My heart has bit the dust so many times it’s missing teeth. Nicknames are just little mouthguards for the heart.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Mouthguards for the heart. You heard it here first.

humor, personal writing

the sun will come out

mycrookedrainbow

Do you ever sit down and take a little look-see around your life and think, WHERE THE HELL DID MY MOJO GO?

Yes, that happened to me recently.

For starters, I was, at the time of my existential deliberations, in a kiddie pool at the town rec center pool walking.

Let me set the stage for you. Now I am not very tall, but quite tall enough, thank you very much, to feel painfully visible to the teenage boy lifeguarding, the super-fit serious-swimmers, and the one actual kid (who was, unlike me, in the big girls pool).

So here I am, pool walking for some post-surgical rehab. I already have, as I mentioned in a previous post, the grace of a rhinoceros. Put that rhinoceros in the kiddie pool and require her to put on a swim cap as if she’s about to compete with Michael Phelps, and what you get is a painfully self-conscious rhinoceros.

As I am bouncing away, I notice the lifeguard is looking but trying not to look at me. Oh I see, yes, perhaps it is because I am bouncing not rhythmically up and down, in a regular cadence, but bouncing this way and that, in a helter skelter sort of fashion, zigzagging across the pool without discernible pattern, and catching myself on the side wall every few seconds when I lose my balance. Right. I get it. I look like a crazy person!

It was from this spot that I began to think, WHAT HAVE I COME TO?

Back when I was 7 or 8, I used to have MOJO, you see. I was so confident of my latent charm that I regularly “entertained” my parents’ party guests – even without their specifically requesting I do so! How Very Thoughtful Was I?

In any case, at these parties, I’d cue up the old record player with my favorite album of all time (back then): the soundtrack to Annie: the Movie. The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow was ready to roll. I had my little brother trained to start playing it when I gave him the signal. I ran down to “center stage,” a coffee table in front of the guests, and I got up on top of it, OF COURSE. From this mark, I put the microphone to my mouth and gave my brother the nod and boom! IT’S ON. I took care to really BELT OUT the words so that they could hear me and not just Annie singing. It’s only fair, you know. These people didn’t come here to listen to a record!!

I sang my little heart out. I even had a “routine” if you can call it that. I flung one arm out here at this part of the song, and then the other got flung out at that part of the song. I knew my stuff. I had watched Hee-Haw. I had seen live shows. This is how I knew, performers have to Take a Bow when they are done. So I did, and yep, there was in my memory some pattering of hands together before the parents’ party guests resumed their conversations.

What happened to this little Annie girl? She was a rising star sure that The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow. Sure, too, that the clapping of those guests of her parents meant that they really did enjoy her singing and dancing.

It was only later – I shudder to think how long it in fact took – that I realized I can neither carry a tune, nor move my body in space in any kind of way that could be called dancing. Entertaining, maybe. But not dancing, and definitely not pleasing.

So I put my little orphan Annie self in the trunk of childhood by about age 9 or 10. No more singing. No more dancing. Not even (especially not) Karaoke. What happened? Oh, just the sudden birth of SHAME.

Maybe it was my arrhythmic bobbing in the kiddie pool that brought this memory to the fore. What happened to that little kid that didn’t CARE what she looked or sounded like? She just put her WHOLE HEART into it, whatever it sounded or looked like.

I wonder – if my Annie self had somehow not been decimated by the savage trauma of just being a person, would I still have my life mojo? Would my life have turned out differently?

Or is this like asking, if a tree falls in the forest….

But why is it that some people are able to hold onto their little Annie selves, keep them safe from the brutal storms of life, and bring them out, relatively unscathed, when it is safe to be vulnerable?

I will ponder this question later. For now, I will focus my attention on being a bit less of a rhinoceros in the kiddie pool – or, better yet, recognize that if I must be a rhinoceros, maybe I can become less self-conscious of my rhinocery.

In fact, maybe one day in the not too distant future, I will grab the mike, get up on the proverbial coffee table, and downright celebrate my rhinocery!! With a little tune I know called…. (IN UNISON, PEOPLE!): The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.

dating, humor, personal writing

the green dot blues

mycrookedrainbow

OK. I get it. I’m online dating, you’re online dating, he’s definitely online dating, everybody is online dating. On every possible app. Yep. Got the memo.

But here’s the thing. Dating in this era, especially for an insecurely attached introvert such as myself, is – let’s see, there’s a word for it – oh yes: HELL. It is unmitigated torture. Like a slow drip from a faucet while you’re trying to sleep and wanting to think thoughts of anything other than the slow drip of the damned faucet.

Or like those monks who believe self-flagellation is an integral part of their spiritual practice, flogging the fragile skin of their naked backs with those heavy, prickly ropes, over and over and over and over in a ritual shaming of the flesh, that will leave its mark only UNTIL the END of TIME .

Or like getting all settled into your seat on the plane on an overseas 12 hour flight, only to find the guy next to you wants to spend the entire time alternately snoring into your ear and creeping into your shoulder space, or chewing on some dry pretzels, little bits of which spew this way and that, as he explains to you his ten year plan, while exuding what must be some kind of protest against capitalism via his utter disregard for the hygiene products it peddles.

Or like ordering this amazing dress you’ve been eyeing for a while on Amazon (on sale! great reviews! pics so cute!) only to have it arrive at your door looking nothing like the dress you imagined flitting prettily about in, not even looking – in pure point of fact – like a dress at all, but rather more like the shriveled aftermath of a party of polyester and cardboard left out in the rain, for a few years, then put in the dryer with a hamster. (Not to put too fine a point on it.)

Or like going to the mechanic with your car that’s been making this noise for a while, and then suddenly, now that you’re telling him about it, it’s not making a noise at all, it actually goes ghostly quiet, even though you KNOW something real happened and you’re NOT imagining it – but the mechanic just looks at you, like, Whatever, lady! NEXT!

Or that awful dream you wake up sweating from where you’re at a party where you just can’t quite figure out what the hell people are talking about – is it another language they are speaking? Why can’t I understand what is going on? Wait, I was supposed to bring a gift? Is that why they are looking at me that way? Cue looking down: OH MY GOD I FORGOT MY PANTS.

You get the drift? Yes, I think you do. This, my friends, is online dating in 2019. As a 40 something straight lady. In a city. With lots of dudes. And lots and lots and lots of beautiful young women.

So here’s what I find to be the most excruciating facet of this whole maddening enterprise, for me anyway: that f*cking green dot. ONLINE NOW! Or the green dot equivalent. On Bumble, it’s the mysteriously rapid-changing locations of the person you just had some you-thought-fabulous-dates-and-hot-chemistry with. But there he is 3.6 miles away, now 4.7 miles away, now 8.2 – which means he is SWIPING NOW!, wherever he is, he is MESSAGING SOMEONE NOW…. or so you have heard (or, let’s be real, so you have *read,* after some obsession-fueled googling with a glass of wine to calm your nerves).

But it is OKCupid that is the origin story of my Green Dot Blues. Somehow this is made all the more devastating by the fact that OKC has, no offense, evolved into what feels a graveyard of gray faces, mine included (so I can say it, y’all!). In other words, OKC is like Facebook. Once upon a time it was KOOL. Now it’s where daters go to die. But even there, he’s ONLINE NOW, checking out all the other, better gray faces than yours.

Well, carry on, shall we?

Nah, I’m being harsh. There are nice guys out there. For sure. Really nice. It’s just hard not to feel like we are all the picked-over garments after a massive end-of-summer sale at TJ Maxx. This sweater is good, but bummer, it only comes in xxxl or xxss. This blazer has a stain that’s been there since the 70s. Wait, are these pants wearing a wedding ring? There’ve got to be other clothes stored somewhere in the back? No? So… this is it? Then you look down and realize there’s a hole where there’s not supposed to be a hole in your own damned t-shirt.

Yeah. Here we all are, god help us, we have *that* in common. And that, I guess, is a start.

Also, an update: recall Mr. Cutiepants from the horrific mistaken hand-holding incident post? I remembered just now that that was not the first time my subconscious pulled that stunt with this guy. On our second date, after he kissed me for the first time, and it was raining and we were looking for a little shelter where we could make out on the sidewalk in the rain LIKE TEENAGERS, PEOPLE… And I might have just grabbed his hand and held it, grinning madly. In my mind, I was skipping with him hand in hand down the sidewalk, onlookers turning their wet heads to watch these two new lovebirds go by, love story blooming as they watched. In reality, my reverie evaporated soon as I found myself holding hands with this guy I’d just met, who, for all I know is a PLAYAH. I had said, “Oh My Gosh! I’m holding your hand – is that weird? I think that’s weird! I mean, it’s weird for a second date! Sorry if this is weird! IS it weird?” He said, as gamely as he could, “Only if you make it weird!”

So, that about sums up online dating for me thus far: Only If You Make It Weird (i.e., Yes, You’ve Now Made It Weird, You Weirdo) and, perhaps not unrelatedly, the post-date Green Dot Blues.

I do have one final thing to say on the matter, on this lovely Friday evening, where I am – you may note – NOT out on the town. And that is:

F-U WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.

F-U JOHN CUSACK and YOUR GIANT BOOMBOX.

F-U JUDD NELSON and THE STUD EARRING YOU GIVE MOLLY RINGWALD AT THE END OF MOVIE.

That is all.

dating, humor, personal writing

like a big yellow umbrella

mycrookedrainbow

It’s a big yellow box of condoms. It’s enormous, really. Like someone whose eyes are bigger than her – well, you know – but the problem is as soon as it arrives in its nondescript Amazon cardboard box with its entirely unnecessary internal plastic air filled bubbles (I mean, really, we gotta protect the rubbers?) I realize the gravity of my error. The tragedy in this hubris.

Point is, I have made a HUGE mistake. I have, in essence, just f*cked my sex life, if you will. I have done the sex life equivalent of breaking a damn mirror.

I am 43, nearly 44. In what earthly paradise was I imagining myself to live when I purchased a box of 36 condoms? I mean let’s be real, I have only recently gotten back online after another humiliating heartbreak. I am older, flubbier, wrinklier, and Jesus knows more banged up than my last rodeo. So to think I’d need – and, pronto! via Prime shipping, no less! – a box of Three.Dozen.Condoms (ribbed for *her* pleasure, mind you), implying I would have sex 36 times before these things expire? If nothing else, I certainly am an ambitious online dater!

All the same I realize must return these bad boys, stat.

Gross, don’t look at me like that. I mean untouched, still plastic wrapped. Bubble protected. And as soon as possible, before any curse takes hold.

I mean, everybody knows that if you leave the house without an umbrella you are virtually ensuring heavy rains. If, on the other hand, you finally remember the damn thing, “just in case”, then we all know, especially if you find you have to carry said umbrella with you wherever you go all day like the telltale sign of your stupidity that it is – that, my friends, will be a gorgeous f*cking day.

So. Big yellow box of 36 woefully hopeful Trojans stare me down – No, sorry boys, gotta return ya. So back onto Amazon we go – yeah, I know, I suck – and initiate the returns process. Only here’s the thing – Amazon has determined it’s not worth their time to have me return the things, they tell me to keep the box and they’ll refund me anyway.

Can you hear the scary Psycho music in the background right now?

Yup. Does this mean what I think it means? I cannot reverse the curse even if I tried?

I text my best friend. I’m going to try to see this as a good thing, I say. Like the gods – or Amazon – or, same diff, if I can be frank here – have decided I get to have all kinds of sex, for free, ON THE HOUSE. Like okay. I like this interpretation. I’ve had a hard year. An almost comically bad year. Maybe this is the Universe telling me, you go girl! You earned this! This is on us! This will be the most fabulous year of sex you’ve ever had -ribbed for your pleasure- and you don’t even have to pay for it!

Wait, that sounds wrong. The Universe just knows it’s high time I have a good time. Right?

Yeah. You know what? I’m going to go with this interpretation. Free sex. Lots of it. Coming my way, you know. Soon. Not just to a theater near me. But right here, baby. These Trojans are going to RIDE!

I am not going to go looking this box of gift horses in the mouth. 

Unless that’s just what this post is doing….?

GODDAMMIT!

dating, humor, personal writing

the hand holding incident

mycrookedrainbow

So the other day I am on a date. Well, can you call it that? It was accompanying someone I find incredibly attractive on some errands. Fourth time meeting. Why did I agree to go on a fourth date like this? Where’s the rolling eyes emoji when you need it?

This is just how things go for me. You will see this, all in due time.

So anyway, aforementioned cutiepants and I are on this, you know, errand-running date. He is squeezing me in, you see. Which, I must admit, makes me feel a little bit unsure of my date’s interest in me.

He and I arrive at the mall where he is to pick up an order he’d placed online. Fair enough. We go in, but they need to find the order in the back. So we are instructed to wait for a couple minutes. It being a furniture store, we sit on a nice little two seater couch. (OK, not bad, we can sit next to each other!)

We take a seat. He seems a little distracted and had been looking for something in his coat. But out of the corner of my eye I see his right hand reach in my direction. My left hand – god help you, left hand – grabs his right. Like a ninja reflex.

But then – where’s that embarrassed face emoji? – I realize, he was not reaching for your hand, you fool of all fools! He was looking for something in his coat.

“Oh,” I say. “Wait, were you reaching for my hand?”

He pauses – and his hesitation is all I need to know, NO YOU DUMBASS HE WAS NOT REACHING FOR YOUR DAMNED HAND!

I pull it away and stare immediately at the very, very interesting things on the walls over there, in the direction facing anywhere but toward him.

This is just a little window into my love life. My so-called love life.

This might be why I am single. Here I am, this 40-something single lady, with a cat, mind you (a cat I walk on a leash, but that is for another day) trying to navigate the online dating world in a sea of millennials. Cutiepants is what I’ll call a late-stage millennial. Their norms are all kinds of different from Gen X-er’s like me.

Thus my confusion.

My mistaken hand-holding incident led me to spiral internally, as I do, and catastrophizing, as I also do, with thoughts like “Oh boy, this is a reflex from my LTR days. This is what someone in a RELATIONSHIP would do. We are just going out. We only just met. He is a late-stage millennial – he wears a SCARF for christsake! Is he going to call me a “Stage 5 Clinger” to his friends when he talks about this later? Holy crap, I’m DOOMED! I will choke on a baby carrot and die a single lady in my studio apartment with five cats who walk over my dead body for days (with that swishy-tailed I’m-Pissed vibe that cats do). OK, we are done here.”

Naturally, in my mind, we were done here. So I curled into myself and muttered nonsensical chatter mirroring the tone of his chatter until he dropped me back home, still mortified at my fatal mistake.

Instinctively assuming someone is reaching to hold your hand on date four, an errand date no less, is the equivalent of saying “I need you to love me, NOW”