ickis.com / Julene Horowitz

Lately a good deal of the females I know have been telling me they loved my e-dating series. This is usually followed by near-begging to bring them back. There’s just two problems:

1.) I haven’t been going on any dates, but mostly…

2.) Writing about this shit on the internet means eventually everyone reads it, and guys don’t like being called out online. (Examples: the artist, the babyface & the super hot older writer man.)

I don’t think anyone would say I’m a shitty girl to go on a date with. Except Captain Planet–but really, he set himself up to get crushed via debate over lunch. A lunch I bought myself, no less. (Bad first date etiquette, I don’t give a fuck what your liberal friends are trying to tell you.) (more…)

The Cosmic Law of the Internet dictates that whenever I post about something on my blog, a relevant internet incident must occur shortly thereafter. A few hours after my post about Facebook ruining friendships went up, someone I went to high school decided to try to get reckless via Facebook chat. Lately I haven’t been posting much stuff like this because really, it’s not that funny anymore. Except I know at some point a few years ago I posted about this dude on here, except last time he was doing this on Myspace. So really, this is just a prime opportunity to showcase the progression of trolling on the internet today. (That sounded convincing, right?) Enjoy!

M—: lets do it,,,,,, please\
Me: are you drunk?
M—: no, but i think u are a lesbien
(more…)

As a girl I think it’s safe to say most females somewhere in my age bracket are seeking out their ideal relationship romantically. Unfortunately for them, that relationship has been defined by Disney movies–and we all know how likely it is that real life is going to be anything like a fairy tale (at least most of the time).

There’s three important factors when we’re talking about the kinds of relationships women think they should be having. I think taking these into account when entering or observing a relationship could potentially really do something for our generation… like maybe, helping us having meaningful and open lines of communication. I realize that’s asking a lot, but let’s start out with the first element responsible for relationship letdowns and we’ll see if you’re on the same page I am after.

Element one: A successful father figure with appropriately endless love for his daughter(s) tries to micromanage their lives, while still wanting them to find a strong provider of their own.

Our Ideal:
Not every Disney movie has a father figure, but when they do… man, they are the best goddamn dads. They love their daughters wholeheartedly, without reservation even when their behavior is at its worst. Typically these fathers border on being too involved with their daughters lives, pushing this daughter-turned-woman to marry (think The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, Mulan, etc.) Early on in the plot they butt heads over what she should be doing with her life–after all, this intelligent, vibrant, attractive female wants to do more with herself than just marry a suitor of her father’s choosing.

Then she runs off to experience the world without being under her father’s thumb… and meets the man of her dreams. You know, the successful one that isn’t her father but resembles him in many ways. Once the family is reunited, daddy meets his daughter’s love interest and realizes that this suitor is capable of taking care of his little girl monetarily in ways her father probably couldn’t. Handed off like the prize that she is in her father’s eyes, queue wedding scene, cut to a chaste-but-loving kiss and daddy waving stoically as his daughter rides off into the sunset in the arms of her new beau. She has done him proud by following the life plan he had set out for her (one she “grew up” and realized he was right, of course.)

And the real…
Girls are rarely close with their fathers throughout the years when they need them most. Through that rocky pubescent period, even the best fathers are unsure of how to handle us growing and changing. We are physically becoming an embodiment of femininity, yet remain children in their eyes. More so now than ever, there’s the concern of a father being too involved with his daughter’s life while she matures. Not to say there weren’t cases of sexual abuse at the hands of fathers in the past, but courtesy of day-time TV and those speeches pounded into our head by school guidance counselors at a young age, girls are on edge–just waiting for some kind of inappropriate contact to occur.

While fathers have to fear for their daughters being attacked, molested, or raped by a man, society fears that they (the fathers) will be the ones to do wrong. I suppose it gives them every reason to hesitate when it comes to tucking their daughters in at night with the door closed, or hugging their teenaged ‘princess’ unless it’s from the side.

So they put up this safe distance for all these years when we need to be hearing from men about what is (and more importantly, what isn’t) acceptable behavior from a boyfriend or lover. In retrospect, I wish more of those “good” fathers I knew growing up sat down and told their little girls when to leave a guy. While I’d like to say most of us learned our lesson the hard way, I don’t think most women have fully grasped the concept. Why else would our friends in their 30′s and beyond struggle with the same issues revolving around codependency and abusive relationships that they did in high school?

And is that really due to a lack direct discussion about the topic with someone we (generally) idolize, like our fathers? I’m not sure, but I suspect it has something to do with it.

Think about every girl you know. We may have been close to our fathers as children, or developed one of those parent-turned-friend type of relationship as we’ve become comfortable with being full grown women… but really? We hate our dads, we love our dads, we deny any Oedipal-type desire to find a man like our father to take care of us for as long as we both shall live.

We’re looking for daddy in all the wrong places, ladies.

I think I’m over trying to scope out boys in coffee shops. I start out wondering what they read (if at all) but quickly move on to shallower topics… like their ability to grow chest hair. My eyes wander from baby faced 20-something’s to guys clearly unaware of how far their silver fox status will take them if they quit being so self-conscious about it. I crack jokes about varying creepy preferences of mine, but lately I’m paying more attention to what kinds of guys it is that I’m looking at.

Turns out, I have less of a set “type” than I thought. I don’t bother checking out dudes with shaved heads, throat tattoos or lobes big enough for me to put four fingers through. (My inner comparison of that last bit to fisting doesn’t escape me.) Looking around, there’s fewer would’s in here than I would have been able to spot a few years ago. Has my taste changed that much or are people getting uglier? I want to believe I am becoming more refined in my choice in men, but the second option is equally as likely.

I watch women a lot too, though I’m pickier and harsher in my judgments of them as they walk by. There’s fat-faced high school girls abound in here, and the low-budget edgy dye jobs are a red flag that I don’t need to go there. (I learned this lesson the hard way about five years ago. Remind me and I’ll tell you guys about it later.)

A girl just walked in the front door–she bears slight resemblance to a coke-y Lohan. I’m feeling it until the guy two steps behind her makes jealous eye contact, so I go back to pretending to read something really interesting on my laptop’s screen. My sexual preference has always been fairly fluid, but I suspect I’m years past wanting to actively sleep with women… thinking about, however, it is a different story.

That’s precisely one ‘would’ in four hours of people watching, by the way. I know it’s not that I’m not interested in looking, but everything I’ve been looking at hasn’t been all that interesting. Well, maybe interesting to the kinds of girls I mentioned in my last paragraph but not to me.

Trust me, I’ve been evaluating my options. The rockabillies are too chubby, the punk rock boys too thin. The older dudes are in no way comparable to foxes, the younger dudes could use a bath and a box of Nicorette. All those formerly delicious bros are packing beer guts and hipster boys have no visible package in their skinny jeans.

Picky, picky, picky. It’s not like this was intentional, but I suspect my sex drive is on sabbatical for a while. I’m not bothered by the idea at all, but it’d be nice to see someone worth making eyes at on occasion.

Then again, between work, websites and my anal-retentive work out schedule I don’t have much time to ‘entertain’. Unless by ‘entertain’ we mean spending hours writing by myself in coffee shops where I stare at (ugly) boys.

For the record, I will probably never stop having enough time for that.

I never cease to be amazed by the turnaround time men have when it comes to me. Let me preface this by saying that in the last three years or so I have worked really hard to be less of a jerk when it comes to dealing with guys. Not that I always succeed, but at least I try. (We’re talking about guys I actually date, not the ones I rip on for some genuinely funny things that happen. Or when they’re a total jerk first, because frankly it’d be foolish for me not to capitalize on that for entries to post here.)

Case in point: around the time I was 20 or 21 I had a sweet fluffy faux hawk that brought all the bros to my yard. There’s one in particular I feel like mentioning though, because overall he was a pretty nice dude. I just… flaked on him. I think it had more to do with the fact that the group friends I had at the time told me there was no way some tall, blond Brosef was into me for anything other than shock value. Personally I thought he liked me for my sick tattz and my ability to hold a conversation—regardless, I just quit calling him back after a few weeks of us hanging out on a pretty regular basis.

Shitty, right? Right. I mean, I hate when that shit happens to me. That’s why generally I try to tell dudes if I’m not feeling it. At least then they won’t wonder why after seeing each other on a semi-regular basis I’ve suddenly dropped off the face of the planet.

Anyway, about two months after I initially blew this guy off and had started seeing someone else I ran into him out at a bar. I was in the middle of my shift; my then-boyfriend was standing about five feet away watching as the aforementioned Brosef started asking where I’d been and if everything was okay. I panicked, so I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I ducked out the back door and booked it out of there for the night. Super responsible way of handling an awkward situation, I know.

Fast-forward four years… I guess without the fauxhawk I’m not nearly as recognizable, but I haven’t ever been the type of girl to forget a face. Brosef approached me at a favored cafe & mentioned I looked familiar but couldn’t put a finger on where we’d met before. Being the awkward little bird that I am, I opted for the best reply (the honest one) and reminded him that I’d blown him off years before.

Why he thought that meant to sit down with me to catch up is beyond me–I’m still not feeling it. He still strikes me as a nice dude, and the little iPhone photo slideshow I got to look over of his adventures in foreign countries was inspiring in a weird way.

I think he got that I’m not interested in a round two from my quick goodbye… or maybe it was the way my waiter mean-mugged him from the time he sat down until I headed out the door. But the guy picked up my tab (nothing serious, just $1.37 for that cup of coffee) and said he’d like to hang out and talk again. I’m glad I got to apologize for blowing him off without feeling like I had to do anything else… I’m not big on that whole “make it up to me” mentality.

I’ve decided I’m going to try something new around here… introducing Time Travel Tuesday, a new way for me to regale you with the sometimes tragic (but usually just timeless) tales from the Big Book of Julene.

This song takes me back to being 19 and dating some young hoodlum motherfucker that I’ve mentioned sparingly on this blog. I know that even now, years after our break up, he holds this special place in his heart for me and I guess to an extent I do for him too. It’s nothing like the love we (thought we?) had during the zenith of our relationship, obviously.

I think everyone’s enjoyed that whole “being young and thinking just because you’ve been together a year means that maybe you’ll make it” thing at least once. While it’s a beautiful sensation, I don’t think I can really experience it now the way I did back then–not that I’d want to, because I remember the kinds of arguments that accompanied our puppy love. Our breakups were ugly and world shattering; we really had a knack for fucking each other up when we weren’t trying to convince each other to try something freaky I’d never want my mother to know about. Before we dated, I was seeing one of his best friend and he was dating a girl I knew. The night he dumped her I happened to be in the neighborhood, and while I went over to his house to tear him a new one that wasn’t really how the situation played itself out.

Sometimes I wonder if he qualifies as a feeder–I must’ve weighed 165 by the time we finally broke up for good. Really it was the best thing that could’ve happened: in less than two weeks a fight followed by a hospital visit, bail bondsman and drug charges all came into play. What can I say, I used to need something explosive in my life to distract me from the goal at hand: figuring out what the fuck I was going to do with my life.

…But this song doesn’t remind me of all the shitty times I’ve brought up. It makes me think about riding around in his maroon Chevy Cavalier with the windows down smoking Marlboro reds and smiling at each other. He had the prettiest blue eyes I’d ever seen, and something in them didn’t match the swagger his low-income upbringing had afforded him. He was a lot more intelligent than he liked to let on. He made me listen to Fabolous and I knew he secretly loved the Fall Out Boy CD I forced him to suffer through on occasion. The beauty of our puppy love was that we didn’t identify it as such. It was everything: we were everything, if only because of what we were to each other.

With spring here & summer just around the corner, there’s few things as enjoyable as remembering what it was like to be in love without hesitation. There will never be another love like that one, and I’m okay with that. Round two just never yields the same results, you know?