La Mulatta Tragique

White Rain

It’s raining frickin weddings. Everyone I know is fucking married or might as well be. Even my staytrue friend from college, who hated the institution as much as it gave me hives, caved and tied the knot. To her credit, she is in an open marriage to a Irishman who is really just providing her with an EU citizenship, and they got married spontaneously at town hall, but still.

I’m on vacation. In between jobs, I guess you could say. I just quit my god forsaken job at a translation company which treated its employees like cattle and the linguists who worked for us even worse. I discovered I am not a business woman, and aggressively pursued a job in non-profit. One landed in my lap, and I will now be an administrative assistant to a large non-profit that handles study abroad scholarships around the world.

I’m so frustrated writing doesn’t bring me the joy it once did.

Anyway. I mention my job because I finally feel myself inching towards where I want to be professionally. But I hear a voice going off in my head, well I suppose it is more of a scenario -- me, successful, alone, and 43 with no husband in sight. I don't believe in stalling my climb to success at all for a man but I don't want to end up without one.

Working girl.

Meanwhile, girls my age are walking down the aisle left and right and that scares me. How can they hope to be successful career women? Don't their futures matter to them beyond the men they have in their lives? Or am I just booking myself a one-way ticket to spinster-dom by thinking of them thus? I'm so confused...

Guys have it so easy.

There was a time (or a period of time) when I dreamt of my wedding day. When I'd go to the Borders in my college's town and grab all the wedding mags just for fun to see what the latest dress styles were. I have a whole folder on my computer devoted to possible wedding rings -- but the one I want has been picked out for some time now. I have envisioned my wedding to at least four different men...that I can count off the top of my head. And every time one disappears from my life I vow not to be so silly with the next one, only to find myself trying out a new surname on a second date.

All in all I'm largely less alter-bound than ever before, but I am just as confounded by the obsession of my entire gender with one freaking day of our lives. I honestly don't believe that people put as much thought into who they are marrying as they do into the arrangements themselves. Seriously, if you thought about whether to say yes or no to a man's proposal for a year (about the same amount of time it takes to plan the average wedding) you might change your mind before the big day.

Anyway, the pickings are slim in Manhattan. Sex and the City is honestly less funny to the single New York woman and more chicken soup for the battered dater's soul. God it's been too long since I've been laid. And waaaaaaaay to long since I've been laid by someone I respected.

The destitute spirit of my sex life.