The Vine: August 1, 2001
Not-so-recently, a long and stormy relationship ended. The ending was not so bad, but the “let’s be friends” holdover was murder; my ex gave full play to all of the cold, manipulative, bitchy and self-indulgent aspects of her character which her charms — when she had been willing to share them — had formerly masked.
The worst of these was her insistence on “maintaining cordiality” — pretending to be warm, friendly and close when we happened to meet in public, and totally freezing me out of her life at all other times. To add insult to injury, she incorporated a public running commentary on our status into the other chatter on her weblog.
While I am fortunate that I don’t run into her anymore in real life — she moved away — and her online antics have subsided, the systematic public humiliation to which she subjected me still rankles. The knowledge that she will eventually get screwed over herself is not a satisfactory substitute for genuine revenge, no matter how good and proper she ultimately gets it from someone else. I welcome your words of wisdom regarding the dish best served cold.
Please sign me,
Not Quite Finished
Dear Not Quite,
Stop caring. That’s truly the best revenge, particularly in a situation like this. Your ex is trying to get a rise out of you. Don’t give it to her.
Avenging yourself in any active way will only serve to play you right into her hands. Decide that she’s not worth it and that you don’t care, and act like it until you believe it. Try to get back at her and you’ll just show up in her weblog again. Breathe through the pain.
Hi Sars,
Okay. So, first, you and your writing rock…intelligent, funny, and grammatically correct! I “accidentally” wandered into a DC recap last summer, and fell off my couch in a snickering heap. Then I discovered TN and have subsequently added at least two weeks total to my tenure in grad school. Thanks, I think. At a party, I met a MBTV recapper, and I think I scared her to death drunkenly singing your praises. Though she, by the way (of course), agreed with me.
And you give advice? Fabulous.
So here goes: I’m 28, and I’m single. I’m not Ally — I don’t see dancing babies, I don’t want to get married anytime soon, and I’m not (well, occasionally a leeetle bit) jealous of all my coupled-up friends. Sure, I’d like to have a long-term relationship someday, but, more immediately, my problem is sex. I would like to have sex again in this lifetime. I used to say “in this millennium,” but that ball dropped a while ago. I’m not asking you where to find a man. But I don’t have any clue what to do when I find one, wherever he may be. Through a combination of quirky twists of fate (meet guy, move cross-country from guy, not once, not twice, but three times!?) and assholes (sex, then dumping; sex, then dumping), I’ve never had regular sex with somebody, anybody. So, in addition to the fairly normal (I think) I-haven’t-had-sex-in-four-years-could-someone-loan-me-an-instruction manual?-complex, I have the I’m-29-with-the-sexual-experience-of-a-high-schooler complex. (A repressed high school, okay? Work with me.) I can talk a good game. I can basic foreplay with the best of ’em. Oral sex? Sex-sex? Hell, no.
I’m intelligent, attractive, even occasionally amusing. I like crappy TV, novels with no redeeming value, and decon lit crit; I smoke, I’m clumsy as hell, and I have a sense of humor about all of the wacky contradictions that make me me. Okay, maybe I’m a little too intense, from time to time; I overthink things, I’m a workaholic. I’m your average humanities graduate student. But it’s not outside the realm of possibility I could meet someone who might want to sleep with me. Do I unload all of this crap right away? Do I try to fake it? Do I try to “build a relationship” with sex on the back burner? (Can you even realistically do that these days? My friends who’ve met someone in grad school have been in bed by at least the third date.) Do I move to Australia, find a legal male prostitute, and practice a lot? Honesty, I’m sure, would be the best policy in a ideal world. But I’m in graduate school, not an ideal world; so, any suggestions?
Many thanks.
Oh, damn. I’m no bloody good at thinking up creative and quirky pseudonyms. Should you decide to use this letter, can you just stick one on the end? There’s a reason I’m not a writer, and you are. Thanks.
If Sars Liked Chicks That Way, That Would Be The Ballgame
Dear The Ballgame,
I hope you don’t mind the pseudonym. I mean, read your last paragraph — if one of us were a boy, we’d be all set here.
It’s my belief that sexual experience per se doesn’t matter that much. I sympathize with your fears, but you can put most of them to rest, because a lot of ingredients go into good sex, but the ability to perform like a machine is the least important. Can’t whip your legs up over your head? A little tentative in the giving-head department? Girl, join the club. You don’t have to come on like a Bond-girl-ninja with the positions and the suction to be good in bed.
The best sex comes from mutual enjoyment and respect, and from good communication. Not that I haven’t had some great junk-food sex in my day, but the really good sex — the sustaining and nourishing sex, the memorable “last scene of Like Water For Chocolate with the sparks spraying everywhere” sex — I had with partners that I knew and trusted as friends, that I loved, because we loved each other and we had a lot of fun with it and we gave the sex our best effort every time out.
Plus, every person is different — what turns them on, what they like to do. Like, you could give great head from here to Bahrain, but if you wind up in a long-term thing with a guy who’s not that into getting head, you’ll have to adjust your groove anyway. Not all sex is the same. Every time you do it, it’s a little different, and ideally, you’re having sex with a whole person, not just with his genitalia, and he’s having sex with all of you. It’s not your sexual experience overall that’s going to make the difference; it’s your sexual experience with that guy, the fact that you pay attention and listen and ask him to do the same, that you’re putting yourself out there (bad choice of words, but you know what I mean), that’s going to make the difference.
A guy’s going to walk into your life, and you’ll have a few laughs and get drunk and bemoan the sad state of New Criticism, and you’ll stumble around the way to get a pack of smokes and he’ll kiss you on the sidewalk, and you’ll start to worry about what he’ll think if you sleep with him, but then you’ll stop worrying, because if the guy is The Guy, he doesn’t want to have sex with you for the sake of the sex. He wants to have Sex With You. And you’ll want to have Sex With Him. And because of that, it’s going to be great sex and you’ll do just fine.
And any guy who thinks otherwise probably isn’t that great in bed himself.
Hey Sars,
I religiously read Tomato Nation and I think it’s brilliant, I really like your style of writing. I have a not-so-big problem but it is really annoying me what to do about it, and I wondered if you could give me some advice?
Well, I’m at university, but I’m living at home during the summer holidays and I have to share a room with my little sister. She’s just got a boyfriend, who she really likes, and I’m pleased for her, but he is driving me crazy. I felt a bit hostile towards him to begin with because although he’s only fifteen he used to be a car thief, and a bully, and all sorts of bad things, and my sister used to be scared of him. But I tried to be nice and whatever, but it is getting to annoy me. You see, he is always round our house, and in my (our) bedroom, and he is so rude and obnoxious and annoying. He insults me! He sits on my bed to watch TV! He insults my taste in music, in books, in everything! Today he found a pair of my knickers that someone had left on my bed and he ran round the room brandishing them! My sister won’t stop him. I don’t want to upset her by saying “I ABHOR your boyfriend” because, apart from this, we’re really close, and I love her to pieces, but she’s got that love-blindness thing going on.
What do I do without upsetting her and without going mad? I am scared of saying anything much to this boy because I am scared of him, which would seem pretty pathetic unless you met him and knew his reputation. Help!
Yours,
Thoroughly Irritated
Dear Irritated,
It’s your room, after all. You have the right to set some ground rules, and to ask your sister to please make sure her boy abides by them.
Sit her down and tell her, “Look, I’m happy that you’re in love and everything, but your honey really needs to stop touching my stuff, putting his feet on my bed, and giving me shit, or I don’t want him in our room anymore. Could you talk to him about that, or maybe limit the time he spends in here? I don’t mean to hassle you, but he’s not respecting my space and he needs to start.”
Mention that you’d hate to involve your parents, but you won’t hesitate to do so if you and she can’t come to an agreement about her boyfriend learning some manners.
[8/1/01]
Tags: boys (and girls) sex the fam
