Dating Diary: Just Friends

As soon as class guy walked into his first class a few minutes late I was hooked. This guy was sexy, with a great body and beautiful hair and skin. Once I got to know him a little more I was all in. He was only 20, so about ten years younger than me (which made me feel like a bit of a cradle robber) but in every other way he seemed perfect. He was funny, highly intelligent, and a gentleman. He had a good job and home, great friends, and a sense of style. We started hanging out outside of class and it seemed like he liked the same music and food as me. Things were going somewhere.

But as things progressed, I started sleeping over at his house a lot and we still didn’t do the deed. I started wondering if there was something wrong. Finally, on one of my visits, we tried. And I have to say that either the guy had a problem getting up or he was on roids or something, because it didn’t go well. I wondered if maybe he just wasn’t attracted to me.

We stayed up late that night and the next day I was working a double shift at work and his friend was coming from out of town to visit him. Since we were both busy, we didn’t talk – which is fine. I don’t necessarily need to talk to a guy I’m seeing casually every day. (But at the same time, when he didn’t call me I felt like he wasn’t that into me; it would have been nice for him to let me know he had a great time.) By the following day I had decided that I didn’t want to sleep with him again, so I would just call him and say that I just wanted to be friends. 

But I was awkward about the sexual problems and I didn’t want to bring them up, so I came up with what I thought was a smooth way to wriggle out of it. I figured I’d use him not calling the next day as an excuse. In the end, it was a stupid decision – it just made me look crazy. He wasn’t even mad about being just friends, but he kept trying to explain why he was too busy to call. The thing was, I didn’t actually care, so I told him not to worry about it – we’d just hang out next time we saw each other in class. The class rolled around, and we left together as usual. As we were walking, he turned to me.

“I just wanted to explain why I didn’t call. I knew you were working all day, and I was going to that show with my friend. I knew we’d talk to each other again…”

“Look,” I finally said. “That wasn’t the real reason. I don’t really care if a guy calls me the next day. The reason I told you that is because I didn’t enjoy the sex the other night.”

“Oh,” he said.

“So, just friends?”

“Just friends, okay.”

He didn’t ask any more questions and we went our separate ways. A few days later, I started wondering if I’d made a mistake. The guy seemed perfect in every way except in the sack. I messaged him saying I wanted to give it one more shot. Maybe our problems that first night had been a one-off, and there was more to him than that. He said he wasn’t really interested, that he’d moved onto seeing other people. I told him so had I, and we left it at that.

The most awkward thing was seeing him in class afterwards. We totally stopped hanging out as friends and for a while he avoided me like the plague. It made class super weird and made me realize why they say it’s not a good idea to hook up with anyone you’ll have to see every day afterwards if it fucks up. The weirdest thing of all is that after the class ended he started texting me looking for a quick fuck. I kept turning him down, but he kept asking even as I went through other boyfriends and changed phone numbers. Finally I told him I was pregnant and he backed off.

I don’t know what the lesson is here – maybe it’s to be careful what you ask for. Just because someone seems great at first doesn't mean they're right for you.

Working The Long Game

I’ve always wanted to write books. At some point in the last few years I came across a scrap paper that I must have filled out when I was about 6 years old. Under the category asking what job I wanted to do, I put something like, “firefighter or author.” I honestly have no idea where I came up with the idea that I wanted to be a firefighter (is that just a universal little kid thing?), but I definitely knew all along that I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, my nose was always buried in a book. Some of them were literary books passed down from my university-educated parents, but a lot of them weren’t. They were Scholastic books, adventurous stories about kids like The Boxcar Children, The Hardy Boys, and later the Animorphs. Basically, it was all serialized fiction which eschewed the literary bent for adventure and simplicity. Later, in university, when I found myself trying to be super-literary, I had to remind myself that my formative years were spent reading a lot of pulp fantasy and mystery, and not the (capital-C) Classics.

My first attempt to write a book came when I was about 10. I wrote about 30 pages of a crime thriller about a little kid and his friend who were somehow tasked with investigating a mysterious accident. It didn’t get very far – at some point I think I realized that I didn’t really have any idea what the kids were going to find, and the story was quickly abandoned. That pattern followed through much of high school, as time and time again I would start a story only to leave it abandoned after a chapter or two. Usually there was some sense that I’d run out of ideas and didn’t know how to drive the story to a sweeping conclusion, but I also had a tendency to agonize over the sections that were already written and either compulsively edit them or just give up, feeling like they exemplified my failure as a writer. I felt incapable of finishing anything. In the end, I would get stuck and move onto a new idea that seemed more tantalizing.

Follow-through is really important in being successful in any aspect of life. One of the first things one of my teachers preached in writing school was to work on finishing things, because history is littered with writers swimming in half-finished manuscripts who never went anywhere. I’ve gotten a bit better at completing projects since university, but not much – I’m still very much a work in progress, and stories without deadlines tend to hang in eternal limbo. It‘s with this history firmly in my mind that in the past few months I’ve been forced to set this project – at least the nitty-gritty work of writing and editing – a little bit to the side. This time, it wasn’t simply out of a loss of interest or feeling stuck. I felt like I was absolutely capable of continuing to work on the book and between Sarah’s original manuscript and my detailed notes, I have a very strong notion on how to complete the book. But I also knew that if we were going to sell this story to editors and publishers, they needed to know that we were capable writers. They needed to know that putting a book in our hands was the responsible thing to do. So I put the manuscript aside and set out to, in so many words, make a name for myself. While I knew that I had to keep my expectations in check and not expect to get big-time gigs immediately, I also knew my portfolio lacked the punch to get noticed in a slush pile and that any decent credentials would be better than what I had. If getting a book published is the end goal, getting a shorter article published in a mid-level magazine is a means to that end. It’s been a moderate success so far. While nothing I’ve written has made me an overnight success, my name is significantly more Googleable than it used to be and I’ve had a few articles that have seen widespread circulation or received some outside praise.

The other day, for the first time in my life, I pitched two major magazines with a story I’ve been independently researching. In response, I received two generally complimentary rejection emails. The first email was from an editor I have worked with before who suggested that the story was interesting, but not newsworthy enough for his publication. The other editor thanked me for the pitch but stated that the story was “not quite right at this time.” In my reading up on how to get published in the magazine industry, I have come under the impression that “not quite right at this time” often means that the story pitched was too big for the writer’s credentials – that it may have been a workable story but not one that an editor was willing to trust in the hands of an unknown. I have no idea if that was the true underpinning of my response note – perhaps there was another reason, or several, why it didn’t fit into their criteria for publication – but it seems like an entirely reasonable read on the situation. The article I was (and still am) hoping to write is a long-form piece, but it’s a long-form piece that might top out at a couple thousand words. Sleeping With The Material World is a long-form piece that will be running 100,000 words – and as such, an editor is going to need that much more faith in the writer handling the project.

Writing is hard. The more research I do, the more articles I come up with that are just disgruntled writers writing about writing, or preachy articles about how to get stuff rejected. More and more, it seems there are more people writing stuff than reading it, which is kind of a sad reality of our modern world. Between writing, working at my full-time job, and having Netflix readily available, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how many books I read these days – and that’s as a writer! I certainly make the effort to always be working on a novel, but there are certainly weeks where I barely read anything offline. But that's not the point. Really, being a productive writer is about pitching and getting work done. Reading is intellectually stimulating and important on various levels, but ultimately unproductive.

Of course, while I’m over here trying to get some smaller work published, the Sleeping With The Material World manuscript sits idly by, not getting nearly as much work or love as it should. Between Sarah’s pregnancy and my writing work elsewhere, along with both of us having full-time jobs to pay the bills, it’s become a little like an older brother who feels neglected because the new baby has everyone’s attention. And honestly, we haven’t had as much time to work on the manuscript in the last few months as we would like. But it’s not abandonment, at least not in the way I used to abandon my stories. It’s about working the long game.

-Simon

Exercising With Other Moms-To-Be

When I got pregnant, I was doing a martial arts class a couple of times a week and working out on top of that. My class was in Jeet Kune Do, a type of martial arts which involves a lot of takedowns, kicks, punches, and sometimes sticks and knives. I would often come home with bruises on my legs and arms. So when I got pregnant, my OB told me I couldn’t do Jeet Kune Do anymore, because the contact was risky for the baby. Around the time I stopped, I generally became extremely tired and seemingly lost all motivation to work out. I was working a lot of hours at work and I was just blah. I began to fall into a rut where I wasn’t participating in any physical activity at all.

The fact that my partner could still go to class and I couldn’t grated on me. I started to get depressed, and jealousy and hormones took over. I realized that I needed to be doing something – just lying at home feeling pathetic wasn’t my thing. One of my pregnant girlfriends told me she was doing Aquafit and I was welcome to join her for a class. I wasn’t convinced at first, but I figured I’d try one class and see what it was all about.

The first half hour of my first class was just a discussion about pregnancy and after-birth topics, and I learned a lot about what to think about when a baby is coming into your life. After the talk we all headed downstairs to the pool and spent an hour doing some exercises. Afterwards, I felt relieved and like I’d accomplished something. Because the whole class was geared towards pregnancy and after birth, I learned a lot. Being around other pregnant women who could understand what I was going through was such a nice change from my everyday life, and pretty soon I was a regular at the class.

Of course, as my body grew, my two-piece bathing suit kept shrinking. Fortunately, I’m small enough that I didn’t grow out of it entirely, It just started to look a little weird – I didn’t have to go out and buy a pregnancy bathing suit (maternity clothes are expensive!).

Whether it’s Aquafit or something slightly different, I’d recommend some kind of communal exercise like this to all moms-to-be. There are lots of reasons for that, but here are just a few:

1. It’s nice to be around other women experiencing the same thing as you 
2. You can make friends 
3. It’s good for you physically 
4. It’s good for you mentally
5. Learning how other moms-to-be are planning ahead can help you make your own choices when it comes to the baby 
6. It’s a refreshing break from work and home life 
7. It’s a time to spend bonding with the baby, even though it’s still growing inside of you 

Being pregnant slows you down a lot – you’re literally carrying around a huge weight inside of you, after all. But while that may be an easy excuse to do nothing, that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to just lie around the house. Staying physically active is important for a pregnant body.

Dating Diary: A Foot Fetish?

I’d been casually acquainted with this fellow model at my agency for a few years. The first time we had met was at a Mac Body Painting show where we got to see each other naked. I liked what I saw and I guess he did too, but nothing came of it because he hooked up with one of the makeup artists after the show and I left. Years went by and we ran into each other at a few castings. We would talk here and there but I always thought he was a bit of a mimbo (male bimbo), so I wasn’t really interested. Besides, the only model I ended up dating in all my years in the industry turned out to be gay, which kind of turned me off the idea of dating the male talent in general.

But eventually this mimbo and I ended up doing a casting for an alcohol commercial where we played boyfriend and girlfriend. At the time I was newly single and had just moved back to Toronto, and after the casting we started talking about religion and astrology and for the first time in all my years of rubbing shoulders with this guy I thought that maybe there was more to him than just looks. I gave him my number and he walked me to the streetcar stop. We stood there talking for about an hour as streetcar after streetcar passed me by. It was like I couldn’t tear myself away. Finally I told him I had to go because I was going to be late for work. He gave me a hug and kissed me on the cheek. I was a little shocked.

“Thank you?” I said. Then I hopped on the streetcar.

I was busy for a few days, but we eventually made plans for the following Sunday. Every time I had seen him up to this point was at a casting, so I was familiar with his clean-cut photo-ready look, but on Sunday I was a bit shocked to find out what he looked like in real life – unshaven, with clothing that was a little bit dishevelled and long, dirty fingernails. (I can’t stand dirty fingernails.) He came to my area in Etobicoke and we went to an Italian bakery for lunch, then walked down to the water. He showed me some Tai Chi and I showed him the Kabuki movements I was learning in an acting class. Despite his appearance, I was having a really good time and we ended up going for some Thai food where he made me laugh super awkwardly by singing to me in the restaurant. Mostly it was goofy and fun and romantic, and I didn’t want the fun to stop. After dinner it was getting dark so I asked if he wanted to come over and watch a movie or something. Inside, we talked for a little while and then he asked if he could see my feet.

“No, why?” I said. “Do you have a foot fetish?”

“What if I do?”

I was a little surprised, but at this point I needed to know more.

“What do you do, like, suck on toes and stuff?”

“Yeah, among other things. Let me see them.”

I told him I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t into that. As we continued to talk, a few other things about him came out. He was thirty years old and still lived with his Mom, a pothead, and pretty into the Bible. He still went to church every Sunday and he wanted me to believe too. I don't know how I feel about religion, but I'm certainly not that committed.

I had a lesbian love scene I was working on for my acting class where I had to kiss the other girl at the end. I asked this guy to help me rehearse the scene, but I warned him from the top that I didn’t want to act the kiss out. I just wanted to practice my lines. We ran it through a few times without the kiss, but on the fourth go-round he came over and kissed me. He had great lips, even though they smelled like roast beef and cigarettes, and after we kissed I found I couldn’t focus on the scene anymore. I hadn’t been touched by a man in about four months and I knew I wanted more. We sat there awkwardly for a few minutes, and then I stood up and said I had to run an errand. As I walked towards the door, our eyes locked and suddenly we were kissing again, more intensely than before. Soon our bodies were all twisted together, my legs wrapped around his torso, but then I realized I didn’t want to go any further. We stopped, and I appreciated that he didn’t push the issue.

After he left, I thought about things and decided he wasn’t for me. I was probably just a bit desperate because I hadn’t hooked up with anyone in a long time. In the end, the foot fetish thing was too weird, and I didn’t want a relationship with a grubby pothead who still lived with his Mom. But we’re still Facebook friends and I wish him the best in finding a girl who is also into foot fetishes.