All the Bridges Blown Away Keep Floating Up

'Nothing like a little spring-time boy drama, my coworker friend remarked when I told her about my weekend.

My weekend, which did not at all go according to script. That prominently featured me listening to the equivocations, excuses, silences and other forms of romantic torture from the various man-children in my life. Various. Because there are several and they're all a headache.

I don't know about you, but I can only sustain an unrequited crush for a month before I lose interest in torturing myself and move on to a new debacle. Hear that men of DC and the internet? If you want to entertain yourself by causing me to crush on you, you have a one month window of time before I grow bored and seek out a new mystery. So therefore it's kind of confusing when one that I had just managed to forget about re-emerges. Since I'm bothering to share this information with you, it means I am obviously still unsure what I will do about this whole thing. Okay, I know what I should do. But I probably won't do it.

I would also like to say that "I'm staying in because my dog is sick" is a really lame-sounding way of getting out of hanging out with a girl. It sounds a lot like "I'm staying in and washing my hair," which we all know is so sad and clichéd by now that it's almost funny. Hear that men of DC and the internet? It's time to put your collective heads together and come up with a better cop-out.


It's not that I object so much to drama, I just prefer it in small doses, and preferably, coming from only one direction. This, was a bit much. And really, the only person who can justifiably act like a 22 year old about all this is the 22 year old who has suddenly entered the equation. Uh, yeah. My new nickname is Mrs. Robinson. Literally, my friends called me Mrs. Robinson all day on Sunday.

When I was 16 I taught photography at a summer arts camp. Because the camp catered to teenagers, most of my charges were just a couple years younger than me. For some reason, this little posse of 14 year old boys decided to follow me around all summer. It was like having an entourage. Nothing romantic or sexual ever happened with any of them, although there'd be the slightest teenager-ish flirtation every now and then. Having the 22 year old around has reminded me of that era. He often seems to be in the same place as me, right by my side. He occupies his slightly gangly body in a manner that suggest that he hasn't quite gotten used to living inside of it. He trips over his feet a lot and I often tease him about it. He dresses like he's in a garage band. Until this weekend, I basically assumed he saw me as an older-sister type. Wrong. So that aspect of the weekend took me back to 16. But with better lingerie and actually getting to makeout.