Buzzards, Vultures, Wolves and Other Hazards to Resurrecting the Dead
I'm never quite sure where to start with these blog entries or where they are going to go. Honestly, this blog has become more personal than I ever thought it would be. But since it's me, I really shouldn't be surprised. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to some sort of point of where this entry will go which is partly about sex, partly about online dating (yet again) and of course partly about dancing (because ever since I dug up that corpse, it's pretty much constantly on my mind...yes even more than sex, love and romance). Enough parenthetical remarks! And no I'm not going to make excuses for not being more regular with writing entries for this blog. If you know me personally then you know my schedule and perhaps it will naturally come up in this entry anyway.
So, here I am on the last day of a much needed break from my super heavy, intense, 50 hour a week plus job which I have a love/hate relationship with and which is becoming mostly a hate/hate relationship. Partly because of the extra issues in the particular case that are unique and on top of the normal stresses of working in the special education therapy area and which for legal and ethical reasons, I can't go into here. However it's this min-break that is allowing me to quickly write this entry. So rather than spend a page or several complaining about my job, I think I will talk about dating again since it's been awhile and this blog started out with the intention of being over 40 and dating.
About 2 weeks ago, I decided to go onto a dating site that I have used occasionally in the past but that I've been absent from for a good year. I decided to start fresh so I totally deleted my old profile and the account, then started a new account and created a new profile from scratch. I'm really busy so I only have time to check my messages about once a week. For some reason I notice this upsets some guys so I sometimes get a string of messages that increase in frustration from an over excited, lonely guy who has decided from 2 paragraphs and some bad, blurry cell phone pics that I could be his "The One." It's fine, he weeds himself out for me because since I am super independent, needy guys and I don't get along well. Don' t get upset with me and tell me to give these men some slack, I used to be a lot more forgiving in the beginning but learned the hard way that if a guy is this needy before I even meet him, I need to just delete the email without responding and move onto to the next one.
In addition to that kind of thing, I have received a message from a guy demanding why and how I know any Hebrew - the profile has a place where a person can list languages they know and their level of ability. For the record, I barely know Hebrew but do know a few words and can recognize even less when it's in print. I received another one from a married guy looking to have a secret affair. This is pretty common online unfortunately and he gets minus 10 points for that but plus 1 for being honest that he's married, since there are many married guys and guys in relationship on the Internet who pretend to be single. I'm not saying there aren't women doing the same. I don't tend to date women, so I can't comment. The other message I got was probably a spam bot/phishing message because by the time I read it, the profile had been deleted. Sometimes these are obvious but sometimes they can be eerily, coincidentally personal. This one mentioned me not getting enough sleep and opened "hey there, you. I just wanted you to know, I think you are awesome and would like to know more about you." I've had online and in person stalkers before so this tone really creeped me out before I realized, I had not posted on social networks about online dating again and I hadn't told anybody I know in real life I was either, let alone published my profile name or the site I am semi-actively on. So yeah, most likely a spammer/scammer.
Out of those messages, I have received about 2 that could be from guys I would like to meet and of those 2, 1 or both could be secretly in a relationship, or single but not ready to meet anybody in real life. I try not to care. I don't know these guys. They don't know me. I have been single for 6 years now. There things I like about being single. But yeah, I'm human. I want a partner. I want male companionship. And honestly I love sex and get lonely and horny and a vibrator alone just isn't the same.
To make matters more disheartening, when I opened the account, the site emailed me a geographical report on the top 5 states and worst states for me to find matches, based on my profile responses and while, Arizona was not in the bottom 5, I suspect maybe it is in the bottom 10. My top 5 states for matches are Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The economy is still bad so I won't be moving to the east coast easily or soon. But it would seem that if I want to get some romance or even just some friendly sex with a like minded person, it could take awhile, Universe forbid, since I live where I live.
It's starting to feel like dating for an alternative, kinky, polyamorous over 40, non-slutty woman in Arizona is a little like an surreal version of "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly." Why do I say this? Well I started dancing to yes get out of the house and mostly to have a creative outlet again but also to meet single guys. Who did I meet dancing? Um, married guys, and engaged guys learning their wedding dances is pretty much who I met. Oh and male dance teachers, 2 who are not single and 2 who are young enough to be my sons. I may sort of be a reluctant cougar, but not that much of a cougar! And as for married men, well yes, I am polyamourous but I do not date men who are married or have girlfriends unless they are in varifiable open relationships and by verifiable, I mean the wife/girlfriend personally and in person tells me I have her blessing to date her man. But more importantly, I do business with the teachers and I'm pretty sure dating someone I do business with would qualify as "shitting where I eat." I am just not ever going there. Seriously.
And now a quick semi-tangent, polyamourous does not mean a swinger (I do not judge swingers, but I am not 1) or a slut. I have standards. And I am not looking to fuck loads of guys. I am having a hard time finding one guy to have a passionate, romantic, hot and heavy relationship with who is available and who will treat me with caring, dignity and respect as well as kindness. I identify as poly because I know I can be and have been in love with more than 1 man at a time. I have in the past been unhappy about being trapped in monogamy but remaining faithful when I am not built that way. I have a theory that monogamy, like heterosexuality is a continuum and I am somewhere in the the middle, slightly more towards the poly side. But yeah any of my married, Arizona friends. To be clear, I am not out to sleep with or blow your husbands. So you can all relax.
Yeah so I'm not meeting any guys through dancing and so far no luck yet with online dating. I am determined not to get me down even in the face of the weird, deep, maddening issues that dancing with a partner, well multiple dance partners, brings out in me. I will say it, a dance partnership is like a relationship on mega amounts of steroids. Issues and different ones with different partners come out big time for me. The temptation to project them and blame them on various partners, in my case 2 teachers in particular is huge. I have to work enormously hard to step back, check myself and look in the mirror. It takes a lot of effort. So if you know me on facebook and I get a bit snitty if a certain person doesn't dance with me at a party or consecutive parties, it is not their fault. It is me. This teacher and I have already had a talk and that was before my fb post. He has to keep his students happy. I watch what he and other male teachers go through, especially him and my teacher who are very popular. They get swarmed. It's truthfully like watching buzzards and other carrion picking and fighting over a carcass. I'm disgusted by it and never want to become that, ever. I once witnessed a similar phenomena on a much larger scale when I went to some events that the artist/actor/writer Viggo Mortensen was at the center of where he was mobbed by so many women who seemed old enough to know better. It was overwhelming beyond belief and really ugly.
When I find myself behaving like or feeling like a jealous, jilted lover towards this person, I hate myself. I can safely say, the greater the connection and chemistry with a partner, especially a certain type of chemistry and connection, the worse this feeling is. Frankly I just want it to go the hell away. Sometimes I just find myself trying to avoid and ignore this person when I see them because I am not prepared to deal with this or talk about it with them and then they are so busy and I would have to chase them down like a puppy or worse or vulture and I just can't/won't do it. It's embarrassing and it isn't coming from them. It's all me. But I also have an intense desire to dance with them. I want to dance with this person badly. He is my favorite person right now to dance with, so if he gets mobbed or goes right by me and doesn't ask me to dance but the person next to me or behind me and the party ends and he hasn't asked me or I haven't been able to ask him, I want to cry. Something really fucked up is wrong with me here. It's good to know my issues I guess. But I'm really beyond ready for my ego to clear this crap. Again it is not anything he is doing. It's all from me.
I don't have this issue with my own teacher. We have other issues that come up. Or I should say I do. The latest was that I felt he didn't "get or understand me." And I tried to then translate how my brain works and made the mistake of bringing up the above teacher who I have a let's call it "dance crush" on and who has a similar way of thinking to me. In the short term it felt bad and I shut down, but in the long term it opened up things and got both me and my teacher thinking on a deeper level about how to work on our next routine. Plus it helped me trust my own teacher more.
Dance in general brings out a lot for me and I've talked to a couple other students who say the same. For me I love it, but it's a constant reminder that I did not become a professional dancer/performer and that the desire to be a professional dancer is still very overwhelmingly large. It's extremely painful. I want to be dancing all the time. I want to perform. I want to compete. I wish I could work at the studio. Every time I dance, is a reminder that through injury and childhood sexual, physical, emotional and verbal abuse that a dream was killed, embalmed, burned and buried by me. It was my coping mechanism when I go injured. I am still afraid to admit this except in this blog and to a few friends. I haven't even shared this with my dance teachers. If I had the time and money, I would seriously start competing on an amateur or pro-am level.
The other thing is while I have acquaintances from all walks of life, all religions and all types of political and social and sexual persuasions, I am closest to deep, creative, artistic types so the people I would most likely become close friends with are the people I do business with at the studio and that's the staff and owners. So I go and have a necessary thick professional boundary with people in L.A. if we met in the art or poetry or film world, I would probably become if not best friends with, at least close friends who I'd socialize with a lot. But here, and again not from them, it seems I can't and I understand why. I don't even ask. I don't want it to be awkward. Plus they see me and I see them at the studio. They tell me of cool things to go do, but I have nobody to do them with and they don't ask me to do it with them and I don't feel I can ask them to come with me either as a group so I don't. It isn't their fault. It's just the nature of how the culture works right now and business is business and it's my issue. I can try to find some other artistic outlets where I can meet other creative people who I am not paying money to so it isn't a conflict of interest. It's just much harder than it was in L.A. or San Francisco, or Seattle or London. Plus in all of those places I was friends and did socialize regularly with art/writing/film teachers and mentors.
I need to come to an ending for this entry. Where did I begin? I didn't even mention sex too much. But I did if you caught it, come out (I already was out to most of the world, but not in Arizona) as a kinky polyamourous straight woman and not just a vanilla straight woman. Oh yeah, online dating. So yeah, to pull some pressure off my dance teachers and to find some available male companionship, friendship and possibly someday romance, I am trying online dating again. It's only been a couple weeks and I'm struggling against being jaded and frustrated by it. I am going to try to be patient. And most of all I'm still determined to not chase men for any reason, including dancing. OK comment at will. Talk to you next time which for this blog could be next week or a year from now. <3
So, here I am on the last day of a much needed break from my super heavy, intense, 50 hour a week plus job which I have a love/hate relationship with and which is becoming mostly a hate/hate relationship. Partly because of the extra issues in the particular case that are unique and on top of the normal stresses of working in the special education therapy area and which for legal and ethical reasons, I can't go into here. However it's this min-break that is allowing me to quickly write this entry. So rather than spend a page or several complaining about my job, I think I will talk about dating again since it's been awhile and this blog started out with the intention of being over 40 and dating.
About 2 weeks ago, I decided to go onto a dating site that I have used occasionally in the past but that I've been absent from for a good year. I decided to start fresh so I totally deleted my old profile and the account, then started a new account and created a new profile from scratch. I'm really busy so I only have time to check my messages about once a week. For some reason I notice this upsets some guys so I sometimes get a string of messages that increase in frustration from an over excited, lonely guy who has decided from 2 paragraphs and some bad, blurry cell phone pics that I could be his "The One." It's fine, he weeds himself out for me because since I am super independent, needy guys and I don't get along well. Don' t get upset with me and tell me to give these men some slack, I used to be a lot more forgiving in the beginning but learned the hard way that if a guy is this needy before I even meet him, I need to just delete the email without responding and move onto to the next one.
In addition to that kind of thing, I have received a message from a guy demanding why and how I know any Hebrew - the profile has a place where a person can list languages they know and their level of ability. For the record, I barely know Hebrew but do know a few words and can recognize even less when it's in print. I received another one from a married guy looking to have a secret affair. This is pretty common online unfortunately and he gets minus 10 points for that but plus 1 for being honest that he's married, since there are many married guys and guys in relationship on the Internet who pretend to be single. I'm not saying there aren't women doing the same. I don't tend to date women, so I can't comment. The other message I got was probably a spam bot/phishing message because by the time I read it, the profile had been deleted. Sometimes these are obvious but sometimes they can be eerily, coincidentally personal. This one mentioned me not getting enough sleep and opened "hey there, you. I just wanted you to know, I think you are awesome and would like to know more about you." I've had online and in person stalkers before so this tone really creeped me out before I realized, I had not posted on social networks about online dating again and I hadn't told anybody I know in real life I was either, let alone published my profile name or the site I am semi-actively on. So yeah, most likely a spammer/scammer.
Out of those messages, I have received about 2 that could be from guys I would like to meet and of those 2, 1 or both could be secretly in a relationship, or single but not ready to meet anybody in real life. I try not to care. I don't know these guys. They don't know me. I have been single for 6 years now. There things I like about being single. But yeah, I'm human. I want a partner. I want male companionship. And honestly I love sex and get lonely and horny and a vibrator alone just isn't the same.
To make matters more disheartening, when I opened the account, the site emailed me a geographical report on the top 5 states and worst states for me to find matches, based on my profile responses and while, Arizona was not in the bottom 5, I suspect maybe it is in the bottom 10. My top 5 states for matches are Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The economy is still bad so I won't be moving to the east coast easily or soon. But it would seem that if I want to get some romance or even just some friendly sex with a like minded person, it could take awhile, Universe forbid, since I live where I live.
It's starting to feel like dating for an alternative, kinky, polyamorous over 40, non-slutty woman in Arizona is a little like an surreal version of "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly." Why do I say this? Well I started dancing to yes get out of the house and mostly to have a creative outlet again but also to meet single guys. Who did I meet dancing? Um, married guys, and engaged guys learning their wedding dances is pretty much who I met. Oh and male dance teachers, 2 who are not single and 2 who are young enough to be my sons. I may sort of be a reluctant cougar, but not that much of a cougar! And as for married men, well yes, I am polyamourous but I do not date men who are married or have girlfriends unless they are in varifiable open relationships and by verifiable, I mean the wife/girlfriend personally and in person tells me I have her blessing to date her man. But more importantly, I do business with the teachers and I'm pretty sure dating someone I do business with would qualify as "shitting where I eat." I am just not ever going there. Seriously.
And now a quick semi-tangent, polyamourous does not mean a swinger (I do not judge swingers, but I am not 1) or a slut. I have standards. And I am not looking to fuck loads of guys. I am having a hard time finding one guy to have a passionate, romantic, hot and heavy relationship with who is available and who will treat me with caring, dignity and respect as well as kindness. I identify as poly because I know I can be and have been in love with more than 1 man at a time. I have in the past been unhappy about being trapped in monogamy but remaining faithful when I am not built that way. I have a theory that monogamy, like heterosexuality is a continuum and I am somewhere in the the middle, slightly more towards the poly side. But yeah any of my married, Arizona friends. To be clear, I am not out to sleep with or blow your husbands. So you can all relax.
Yeah so I'm not meeting any guys through dancing and so far no luck yet with online dating. I am determined not to get me down even in the face of the weird, deep, maddening issues that dancing with a partner, well multiple dance partners, brings out in me. I will say it, a dance partnership is like a relationship on mega amounts of steroids. Issues and different ones with different partners come out big time for me. The temptation to project them and blame them on various partners, in my case 2 teachers in particular is huge. I have to work enormously hard to step back, check myself and look in the mirror. It takes a lot of effort. So if you know me on facebook and I get a bit snitty if a certain person doesn't dance with me at a party or consecutive parties, it is not their fault. It is me. This teacher and I have already had a talk and that was before my fb post. He has to keep his students happy. I watch what he and other male teachers go through, especially him and my teacher who are very popular. They get swarmed. It's truthfully like watching buzzards and other carrion picking and fighting over a carcass. I'm disgusted by it and never want to become that, ever. I once witnessed a similar phenomena on a much larger scale when I went to some events that the artist/actor/writer Viggo Mortensen was at the center of where he was mobbed by so many women who seemed old enough to know better. It was overwhelming beyond belief and really ugly.
When I find myself behaving like or feeling like a jealous, jilted lover towards this person, I hate myself. I can safely say, the greater the connection and chemistry with a partner, especially a certain type of chemistry and connection, the worse this feeling is. Frankly I just want it to go the hell away. Sometimes I just find myself trying to avoid and ignore this person when I see them because I am not prepared to deal with this or talk about it with them and then they are so busy and I would have to chase them down like a puppy or worse or vulture and I just can't/won't do it. It's embarrassing and it isn't coming from them. It's all me. But I also have an intense desire to dance with them. I want to dance with this person badly. He is my favorite person right now to dance with, so if he gets mobbed or goes right by me and doesn't ask me to dance but the person next to me or behind me and the party ends and he hasn't asked me or I haven't been able to ask him, I want to cry. Something really fucked up is wrong with me here. It's good to know my issues I guess. But I'm really beyond ready for my ego to clear this crap. Again it is not anything he is doing. It's all from me.
I don't have this issue with my own teacher. We have other issues that come up. Or I should say I do. The latest was that I felt he didn't "get or understand me." And I tried to then translate how my brain works and made the mistake of bringing up the above teacher who I have a let's call it "dance crush" on and who has a similar way of thinking to me. In the short term it felt bad and I shut down, but in the long term it opened up things and got both me and my teacher thinking on a deeper level about how to work on our next routine. Plus it helped me trust my own teacher more.
Dance in general brings out a lot for me and I've talked to a couple other students who say the same. For me I love it, but it's a constant reminder that I did not become a professional dancer/performer and that the desire to be a professional dancer is still very overwhelmingly large. It's extremely painful. I want to be dancing all the time. I want to perform. I want to compete. I wish I could work at the studio. Every time I dance, is a reminder that through injury and childhood sexual, physical, emotional and verbal abuse that a dream was killed, embalmed, burned and buried by me. It was my coping mechanism when I go injured. I am still afraid to admit this except in this blog and to a few friends. I haven't even shared this with my dance teachers. If I had the time and money, I would seriously start competing on an amateur or pro-am level.
The other thing is while I have acquaintances from all walks of life, all religions and all types of political and social and sexual persuasions, I am closest to deep, creative, artistic types so the people I would most likely become close friends with are the people I do business with at the studio and that's the staff and owners. So I go and have a necessary thick professional boundary with people in L.A. if we met in the art or poetry or film world, I would probably become if not best friends with, at least close friends who I'd socialize with a lot. But here, and again not from them, it seems I can't and I understand why. I don't even ask. I don't want it to be awkward. Plus they see me and I see them at the studio. They tell me of cool things to go do, but I have nobody to do them with and they don't ask me to do it with them and I don't feel I can ask them to come with me either as a group so I don't. It isn't their fault. It's just the nature of how the culture works right now and business is business and it's my issue. I can try to find some other artistic outlets where I can meet other creative people who I am not paying money to so it isn't a conflict of interest. It's just much harder than it was in L.A. or San Francisco, or Seattle or London. Plus in all of those places I was friends and did socialize regularly with art/writing/film teachers and mentors.
I need to come to an ending for this entry. Where did I begin? I didn't even mention sex too much. But I did if you caught it, come out (I already was out to most of the world, but not in Arizona) as a kinky polyamourous straight woman and not just a vanilla straight woman. Oh yeah, online dating. So yeah, to pull some pressure off my dance teachers and to find some available male companionship, friendship and possibly someday romance, I am trying online dating again. It's only been a couple weeks and I'm struggling against being jaded and frustrated by it. I am going to try to be patient. And most of all I'm still determined to not chase men for any reason, including dancing. OK comment at will. Talk to you next time which for this blog could be next week or a year from now. <3
Can I say that I think you are being too hard on yourself when you say that you hate yourself for feeling hurt when "dance crush teacher" is not dancing with you? I know that it FEELS REALLY GOOD to dance with this man. So, it's natural, no matter what is going on in your personal/social/sex life to want to be able to dance with him as much as possible. Yes, I know that there are deeper things going on, but sometimes you just have to look at the simple fact that you want to do something that is fun and feels good, and it hurts when you can't. That's normal and human. And I have felt the same way, and so has other people. So, give yourself some credit for recognizing this fairly common issue, and don't beat yourself up so much about it. For me, if I don't get to dance with our other teacher at regular intervals, I start to feel like I'm going through physical withdrawals. Dance feels good. It's addicting. It's a much healthier addiction than lots of things. So relax and enjoy it. One of the wisest things our teacher told me was to just enjoy the sweet times, and don't keep rehashing the other times. However, when that's hard to do, I'll be an understanding ear to vent to.
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