Felon

Freshman year of high school I was sitting in Algebra class flanked by four girls who were at the time the most popular fourteen year olds around. I hate math. Much is known about this. And stuck in Coach I-forget-his-name’s class, I was completely bored.

I wasn't friends with these girls. In fact, I was down right terrified of them. The hierarchical system that was high school was particularly challenging for a social late bloomer such as myself. I spent too much of my time swimming around in my own head wishing I could be anywhere in the world other than St. Charles, Missouri. Some place a little more glamorous, more metropolitan, and less inundated with suburbanites obsessed with Dave Matthews.

Maybe that was the problem; I never got his appeal.

Regardless I was sitting there and these girls, who all happened to be freshman cheerleaders and who all happened to be dating senior football players, were discussing the rapturous natures of their relationships. At that point I made an entirely undramatic, and entirely unequivocal decision. I would immediately begin dating a senior football player.

There was no romance in my decision, or rationale for that matter, since for a person who could barely keep her loud mouth shut, I was utterly terrified of the opposite sex.

It was pure pragmatism.

I was bored and needed something to discuss while the man in front of the class with protruding nose hair, mid-section and ass crack, made homoerotic advances towards his JV players.

So I would commence dating. It was as simple as that.

Within a few weeks I was dating a guy who subsequently told me that he wanted to name his first son Felon because he had so many and I continued to date him through freshman year and even when he went off to college where a rousing relationship with a beer bong forced us to call it quits. The girls in my math class stopped dating there senior boyfriends one week later. I was still bored.

Hindsight being what it is, I don’t think I can really consider what we did dating. I hid from him in the halls, too freaked out to talk to his friends and on the weekends, and I mean every freaking weekend, we went to dinner at Applebee’s and a movie. Oh suburbia.

But this is not the point of my story.

Felon Boy was my introduction to the dating world and like so many of the decisions I have made towards my relationships since then, my decision to date was made - I hate to say this - arbitrarily.

“Okay. Today I am going to date.”

A little over six months, I woke up with another enlightened decision, most likely made while having nightmares about David Hassellhoff, (who is a douche by the way, not that we didn’t know that, but I feel as though I must personally attest to this and to his inability to drive, as he tries to mow down pedestrians in Burbank, but I digress) and I decided that I was done with dating. At least for a little while.

My last weekend in Florida, I woke up with that same feeling of awareness. I had made a decision unbeknownst to myself, and this phase, this fast, it just felt over.

Maybe it was because I finished my second book, an unexpected gift of my beach-side sabbatical. Maybe it was because I achieved what I hoped to accomplish in it all - an exploration of self-contentment, as illusive as it may be. Who knows why it felt over but somehow it just did.

Now just because it felt over to me, doesn’t mean the universe is going to agree with me, so until further notice, I think it will just be life as usual. And now that I am not busy writing, maybe I will have time to write.

We’ll see. I am not sure what phase is next but I am pretty excited for whatever is on the horizon. Let’s just hope it is not a guy named Misdemeanor.