The Magical Mystery Flirting Tour

I got a call from D today who lives in Toronto. He is constantly trying to get me to move there but I won’t. I have never been to Toronto so I can’t say I prefer it to Vancouver but this is home for me and I like it ok so far. I met D in jewellery school. Like most of our former classmates we didn’t ever make a “living” from jewellery design but still really enjoyed the experience. I believe he still has a mini studio set up and will be getting a proper workshop soon. He was especially excited to find out that I have a blog and will be commenting in the near future. Look out everybody! I can’t wait to see what happens with that.

So while we were chatting on the phone D was reading my blog. This is the kind of conversations we have. It is not uncommon for a whole other activity to be going on, on either end, while we are chatting. D suddenly said to me, “You do too know how to flirt!” I can’t remember which post I mentioned that fact in but he had obviously found it. I little bout of, “Do not!” “Do too!’ ensued and no real consensus was reached on the subject.

I will say it now and I have said it for years; I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO FLIRT!! I watch women do it via conversation and body language and marvel at their skills. I am truly envious. I will say this, it has been a theme in my life that I seem to attract men that not only am I completely not interested in but also who are completely not compatible with me. However, if I actually like a guy he will NEVER KNOW about it from me. The reason? I would be so embarrassed if he knew I liked him but didn’t like me back. That kind of situation is really humiliating to me. Yes, I know that it is no big deal in the grand scheme of life but that is just the way I am. It also seems to happen that in the presence of a male that I am attracted to I turn into a moron lacking any wit, social grace or endearing personality traits. Basically I am painfully shy. So according to D and the discrepancies in my love life I do flirt but totally unconsciously and to people I am not attracted to. Yeah – this is so me.

These are the kind of men who are attracted to me:

-Older guys. We are talking 60ish guys. They very seriously pursue me. I am not kidding.

-Older guys who like country music and lead that kind of lifestyle. Pick-up truck, hound dog, deer heads in their gunrooms and a little parcel of land they can call their own kind of guys. These men are perfectly nice but anybody who knows me knows this is not a good match. Not one little bit.

-Guys who are married or already in a committed relationship. I will not touch these men PERIOD. That is NOT ON.

-Men who are looking for a mother figure. Enough said about that.

I can assure you I do not flirt with them first! At least not CONSCIOUSLY….

The other thing I do often enough that has caused a fair amount of discomfort on my part and the part of others is that I totally misread signals and have thought somebody has been attracted to me while they were TOTALLY NOT! After mustering up some eggs to do my part and initiate some sort of mutual meeting or activity I get shot down in the dirt like a lame horse. I know that men take the lion’s share of the risk of rejection and, shit, I can say it is brutal. It is a wonder anybody gets together, ever.

Overall it seems best that I let some bizarre fluke of nature take its course and let some perfect guy fall through the roof onto my lap while I am watching TV.

So while D and I were chatting he was looking through the 50 Things About Me post. I told him not to bother as there was nothing there he didn’t know about me. I was wrong. It seems in the 10 years of our friendship I never mentioned I went to Jamaica when I was 22 years old. We talked about that for a bit and it popped into my mind that once again there was a perfect example of my mutated flirting abilities.

When I went to Jamaica it was to visit a friend of mine I had met a few years earlier on a ferryboat in the Mediterranean. He and his friend had been travelling as well and we totally hit it off on the long boat ride from the islands to mainland Greece. They were flying out the same evening but we had a great day in Athens and they invited me up to Bath, England where they were both in university becoming architects. I visited them up there a few weeks later and they took me on a pub crawl that completely destroyed my ability to function for several days afterward while not even causing them to burp.

Anyway this one particular guy out of the pair, who reminded me a great deal of Hugh Grant, and I had written each other on and off for a couple years in a very platonic but friendly way. He had gone to work in Jamaica as an architect and invited me over for a visit. After the time that I found my fiancé in bed with my friend I thought this was prime time to take Hugh Grant up on his kind offer so off I went to Jamaica. The trip entailed me and Hugh Grant and 3 of his buddies piling into a pick-up truck and driving all over the island and slumming it with the locals. This was in hindsight, overall, an incredibly dangerous endeavour where we were constantly on the alert for spontaneous muggings or other random hate crimes. It was not uncommon to have local citizens yelling, “WHITEY!!!” at us as we drove by. What could we say? Yes, we are indeed white and your point is? Anyway, for two whole weeks 4 guys and I shared hostel rooms, beds and bathrooms without any hanky panky going on whatsoever. All the guys had gorgeous Jamaican girlfriends back in Kingston while I had a broken heart and wasn’t in any mood to be messing with any more ASSHOLES for a while. I was, without exception, treated like one of the guys and behaved as such the whole trip. Or so I thought until one day Hugh Grant came up to me out of the FUCKING BLUE and said to me, “You know I have a girlfriend right? You know that nothing can happen between us, right? I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas blah blah blah.” I should have smacked him in the head and laughed in his face but at the time I was really embarrassed that I may have given him the impression that I was trolling for Mr. G Lovin’. Um, NO! I had stayed at his girlfriend’s house earlier in the week and met all the group’s significant others. Did he think I was that kind of skank? So I just said I was not in any way looking for a relationship of any kind after the hell I had just been through, thank you very much. It was embarrassing for the both of us and the other guys seemed to sense something had suddenly changed so they did their typical British thing and called us a couple of cunts which immediately dispersed the bad vibe and the trip went on as usual.

When I tell this strange tale most of my friends say that what happened was a stoopid guy thing that guys do when they are the ones feeling attraction when they shouldn’t be and out of guilt project it on you so you have to put the kibosh on any hook up possibility. Maybe. Or it could have been some of my magical reverse flirting skills at work. We will never know for sure.