Too Good with the Drunken Phone Call

Just got back from spending a great day alone -- something I haven't done a lot of in a long time.  I don't know what it is, but it's like I forgot how to be a solitary being in public for the last year.  In a lot of ways, it was like I was trying to balance the scale after constantly being a solitary being in public for 2.5 years.  There are NO redheads in Romania, and definitely none in my town, to the point that I was a near-aberration (read: freak) that people would practically gawk at when I walked down the street.

That combined with the fact that Romanian men find it occasionally acceptable to verbally/sexually assault women on the street.  A few weeks into pre-service training, I was walking to the training site one morning only to have a random older man on the street grab my upper inner thigh, twisting my flesh in his fingers, muttering appreciatively.  Whether or not it was justified, for the next two years anytime a man came towards me with any sort of speed and/or creepiness, my heart jumped in my chest and I went into fight or flight (definitely leaning towards the second).  Never happened again, but I did get a lot of groups of men/boys following me around making sexual/derogatory comments.    

All of it led to spending a lot of time in my apartment in Romania, and a lot of time with my headphones on (ya know, if you can't hear it - did it happen?) to avoid the verbal end of it.  When I got back to Baltimore, most places weren't within walking distance and any real kind of public transportation was either nonexistent or inefficient.  That plus the combination of TNB, seeing my refugee family every Saturday and parking being impossible to find in my neighborhood led to a lack of purely public solitary activities.

I'm really trying to consciously work on the solitary stuff instead of doing what I always do instead... ya know, what most of the blog has dealt with.  Drinking, hipsters and the seemingly unavoidable drama that seems to come with that combination.  I don't think I was fully aware of it last time.  To quote Bukowski:

you see
I am too good
with the drunken letter
and the drunken phone call
screaming for love
when I probably don't
have it.

Truthfully, I can't say that I have the same drive, for a new relationship or even a rebound, that I had the last time around.  This time around I'm a little more aware that I literally don't have it, and most likely won't for a while.  In some ways, I don't even really know what I want anymore.  And like I said in my previous post, if continual presence and affection seems to lead to a fog from which you don't awake until it's over, this might be the good time to figure out exactly who/what I'm going for.  Which isn't to say that direct qualifications are necessary, sometimes it's just nice to have certain things open for discussion.  Kinda like how people think of threesomes (yes, that was the first example I came up with), you may never have one, but sometimes it's just nice to know it's on the table.  And sometimes talking about it is enough, makes you feel like you're more adventurous than you might be when push actually came to shove.

This USAID thing may or may not end up happening, but if it did - be nice to know that whoever I ended up seeing saw living overseas as a positive and not something totally out of character.  Because even if it doesn't, that kind of mindset definitely translates.  More immediately, I've started planning a six-week to two-month backpacking trip around Turkey this summer (update: who knew Turkey was like a million degrees in summer?  not this guy.  so make that riding the Transsiberian railroad.  holla).  Planning on doing it solitary, something that seems a little out of comfort zone even for me, but if for some reason I end up staying stateside for the long-term, I'd see making trips like that a yearly thing.  Summers off are definitely the biggest perk of teaching.  But dating someone who thinks Cancun is the extent of exotic travel... not really on the table.    

But until I can figure it all out, I'll be the one on a museum-crawl instead of a bar-crawl this time.  And, alone.