James Joyce is Not a Good Boyfriend

From Lily in Venice-

I met you at a party on a ranch in the mountains of Los Angeles county. You were living with some childhood friends who had moved out here to “create music, man”. You were a conventionally good-looking one- looking a lot like the pop idols of the 70’s with long, flowy blond hair and high cheek bones. Actually, you look more like a chick. I wasn’t attracted to you. You kept following me around the party and talked about how much you hated everything. I got drunk and you seemed interested, so we made out until we both fell asleep. I slipped out in the morning and I was surprised to get a call from you two days later. We began seeing each other and you had nice hands. It started to dawn on me how crazy you were when you never changed out of the one three piece wool suit you owned and you talked of being the reincarnation of James Joyce. But you were such a good cuddler. You talked about how this town was going to kill you or that your intellect would slowly make you go insane. I threatened to walk and every time you pleaded with me not to go, until one day you told me you “didn’t want a girlfriend.” You couldn’t get over the equitable basket-case you dated a year ago (who claimed to have lost your baby) and I wasn’t going to “fix you”, as you so plainly stated. You said you were afraid of having meaningful sex with someone blah blah blah BLAH BLAH! You and I pretend to be friends now but I don’t particularly like you as a person and I want to yell that to your face. So I just picked up the phone to do that and instead we talked for an hour about nothing and I felt empty. P.S. Now I actually don't talk to you. Someone told me you stuck your thumb in the ground one day for a few hours. Why? P.S.S. I was forced to talk to you the other day at our mutual friends' concert. You complained to everyone that I wouldn't talk to you. Cut your hair!

Who Knew Subway Sandwiches Can Make You Lose Weight AND Get a Date

From LM in Koreatown:

This is an open letter to the guy I dated last year for the month of June-

You stopped me at a Subway in Koreatown. You said my smile made you need to talk to me. You gave me your card and SURPRISE! you were an actor and SURPRISE! you had no car. You were beautiful. 100% conventionally good looking. You weren’t my type but I didn’t mind the idea of having you as arm candy. I never thought of myself as vain, but I guess it looks like I am! It was on our first date that I discovered how stupid you were. I was holding out hope you were just nervous and you weren't always this way (nope, you're just stupid). Our second date was my birthday but I didn’t tell you it was my birthday. I didn’t want anyone to know. We had a good time in Downtown, but I was more concerned about listening to the new Arcade Fire album that was playing on the loud speakers than talking to you. We had sex that evening and my only thought during it was, “you have to be kidding me”. You were obnoxiously loud and fast I was slightly embarrassed for you. You were very sweet to me but I no longer trusted any man. Finally one day, right in the middle of sex, you accused me of faking it. Maybe I was, but that was no excuse to banish me to my own couch. That was it. The last thing you said to me as you walked out the door was, “What’s the difference between a PC and a Mac and can you get on the internet with a Mac?” I wasn’t that sad to see you go. I think you’re dating a teenager now which is good. Someone more on the same intellectual wavelength as you.

It Was the One Armed Man

From Ms. K in Silver Lake:

After discovering that my fiance was gay and suddenly needing to move out, I turned to Craigslist to deliver to me a roommate and confidant. I narrowed my search down to finding a fellow single gal. I fantasized about us having late night talks and mixing our social circles. I thought of how I'd meet my new boyfriend through her and we'd laugh at my wedding reception how it all began on a website known for yard sales and missed connections. I envisioned strangers stopping to tell us how our witty banter belonged on HBO, or at worst Fox.

Reality quickly bitch slapped the fantasy right out of me. Turns out not many people are rushing to live with a single 25 year old stranger. My new roommate Kira was nothing that I had hoped. Upon first looking at her she looked like a personified version of a wet sweater crammed into a dresser drawer for months. Her laugh annoyed me to the point of suicidal idealizations. She claimed to love cats. crosswords and gardening, but in reality enjoyed bringing home strangers of both sexes. Strangers that would use my bath towel, wear scrunchies with sweatpants and combat boots, or pass out in my bathroom in their own vomit blocking my path to the toilet.

Among the slew of strangers that paraded in and out of my door, there's one particular night of stomach turning awkwardness that remains tattooed on my brain. Actually, it's probably the back of my brain, since I had repressed this memory until last night when my father asked me if I had ever seen "The Fugitive".

One fateful evening, I had made the mistake to assume that, "Do you mind if I have two of my guy friends over?" meant "Do you mind if I have two of my guy friends over?". Unfortunately it actually meant, "If I have a guy I'm interested in over, will you please take his friend?" Hey, you live you learn.

Kira prepped me with the visit by letting me know that Tim only had one arm. I'm not really sure what the socially acceptable response to that is. I thought "Okay" would suffice. I thought maybe she was giving me a heads up, maybe others had encountered this poor man and gawked or screamed. I again mistakenly took something as face value and moved on.

The evening began in a fairly low key fashion with beer and burgers. It progressed into a game of Taboo, which quickly became awkward when I needed to make my one armed partner act out the word "Amputee". As I said pass, Kira was quick to lean over me and give the poor guy the clue, "You are this..." That was the tipping point to me saying that I was getting tired and needed to get some sleep. Kira quickly cornered me, questioned me, and guilted me. She wanted to know what my problem was, didn't I like Tim, was I being discriminatory about his one arm. I assured her that I wasn't quite sure what my specific problem was, that I wasn't discriminating and that I just wasn't feeling dating right now. She countered this point with a suggestion that I go into my room to show Tim my scrapbooks and let him sleep in my bed. Up until this point in my life I hadn't considered my scrapbooks to be an aphrodisiac, and again made the mistake of thinking that a one word answer, in this case "No", would suffice.

As I was announcing my departure to bed, my wonderful roommate chimed in that I had some great scrapbooks. My rebuttal was that the books where under my bed and couldn't be removed without moving the entire bedframe. I thought this would clearly end the discussion, but again, I was sadly mistaken. My roommate pushed the issue and the next thing I knew, TIm was holding my bed frame up. He then asked me, "Can you pull the scrapbooks out? I would but I only have one arm." The newness of this particular situation struck me dumb. I pulled out my Tupperware box of scrapbooks and watched as Tim opened to a page of me getting engaged. There I stood smiling at Dodger Stadium park with my fiance, having no idea that he was soliciting sex to strange men online. I looked at the bizarre picture in this increasingly bizarre situation and didn't know if I should assign it laughter or tears. Tim tried to coax me onto the bed, tried to rub my back with his good arm, as I had this sad little thought of "this is my life".

Drama ensued as I asked him to leave, which he said he would do but that he would then drive home drunk. Most people wouldn't want to be responsible for causing an amputee to go on a drunk driving rampage, but as this point in the evening I was okay with it.

Only later did this story become humorous. I recounted it to my aunt with confidence saying that, even though this guy was camping out in my room that I felt confident in my ability to fight him off. My aunt quickly replied with, "You've obviously never seen The Fugitive." I had infact seen the movie years before and suddenly could relate to a situation that would make you jump down a cascading waterfall over jagged rocks.

Norwegians Don't Do it Better.

From FC in Hollywood:

When I was 20 years old, I worked for a cruddy ol' management company. Part of my job was to bring new actors into the company for possible representation. Once a month, I was invited to acting teacher Bobbi Chance's showcase in Sherman Oaks. I met this 40-year-old-pretending-to-be-25 actor named Taylor. We hung out for awhile and he decided to hook me up with his Norwegian friend, Sebastian. I kind of dug him. Sebastian reminded me a lot of Ryan Adams- except for the terrible accent and serial killer hair-do. On our first date we ended up staying in my Hollywood apartment because it actually rained in L.A. We watched KILL BILL and right at the point The Bride goes postal in the restaurant he decides to kiss me. During the best moment in the movie! It was the absolute most horrible, disgusting, sloppiest kiss in the world. I'm too nice of a girl to say anything and we turned back to watching the bloodshed on screen without saying a word. We dated for a couple of weeks and I grew to hate him. I just felt sorry for the dude, until he told me he was HOMELESS. He had been living out of his car for the past 6 months.
That fucking explained why he asked to sleep over my house every night! He was drunk when he told me this and tried explaining that he was indeed not using me. I didn't believe him. Oh, and then he started telling me that he would very much like to date my sister. And he told me that he once slept with his cousin's wife. He was the most arrogant, inconsiderate, rude, hateful prick I had ever met. I started to suspect that maybe he was Satan. The last straw was when I got home from work and he was already in my house. That fucker was sitting in his underwear on my brand new couch watching "Judge Judy". He left that night to do God only knows what and I called him and told him never to come back. That was the beginning of him calling me every day for an entire month. I got so sick of it I finally picked up the phone and told him I'd started to date someone else. He went from upset to, "Oh, that's it? I thought I did something wrong."

Lonliness Made Me Do It!

I've been living in this moral void for almost five years. I'm not too shabby lookin'. 5'6", thin, blue eyes, sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette with bangs. I'm quirky. I wear old ladies glasses though I don't need them and I have a huge crush on David Byrne. I like wearing mens tuxedo shirts and I have a silkscreen of David Bowie that I cherish more than my car. Some men find this endearing. Others find it creepy.

I came out here to work in the film industry. Most of my friends work in the film industry. This could be the reason why we're all single and miserable. We work like dogs and we wonder why our social lives resemble that of our parents. We come from small towns having only ever dated one person, then find ourselves hooking up the with entire mailroom at WMA, or worse, the entire bullpen at E! We blur the lines of our "personal assistant" positions. We drink too much then puruse Birds on Franklin looking for the local that best resembles Scarlett Johansson or Justin Timberlake. You scan your cell phone and drunk text that dude named Thor or that chick named Candy that you met at the party two years ago on Lincoln in Venice and ask if they want to come over at 2AM.

And why do you do these things?

Cause you're fucking lonely and you haven't gotten laid in a long time.
At least by anyone who wasn't drunk and spending the rest of the night hugging your toiliet.

Do you have any stories like this and not ashamed to share them? Then send them in! They'll be anonymous and save you $100 an hour explaining it to your shrink.

Sex and the Angeleno

Dating in L.A. sucks. Period.

There is no better way to say it.

Though L.A. has a high index rate of single people, it's a demographic littered with the beautiful, the insecure, the dreamers, the feeders, the jaded, the sometimes bi-polar, and the occasional future mall shooter.

This blog was birthed one evening while I sat in my underwear on a Friday night at 8:30PM nursing a bottle of Cuervo and watching THE NOTEBOOK. I realized that evening that L.A. made sex and love no longer a pleasure, but a chore of the utmost ugly kind.

And as I climbed deeper and deeper into Jose, I decided to call all my friends and share with them my thoughts on dating in L.A. I was surprised to discover that they indeed felt the same way and that I was not alone. They then pleaded with me to put the bottle down and leave my apartment to be with people, but instead, I opted to start this blog and share my stories and my friend's stories in hopes it will give comfort to other disillusioned Angelenos lamely wading in the big city pool of sex and love.