Category: Dating and Relationships

California Dreamin’

Ah, California. A state I’ve been to many times, although not in recent years. I’m definitely more a northern California type and prefer San Francisco to Los Angeles—although San Diego is quite lovely.

My ex-husband proposed to me in San Francisco actually. He meant to do it while we were on a horseback ride at Half Moon Bay, but when he tried to bring his horse parallel to mine, it trotted away, taking him and his grand proposal with it. It was kind of funny to see, as he had precious little experience with horses, if any, where I had been a mere 20 years out from not only Camp 4H on Long Island, where I took classes in equitation, but also starting a horseback riding club at my high school. Riding a horse is not unlike riding a bike, in my experience. You never really forget how. Therefore, it gave me a chuckle to see him bouncing in the saddle as his horse trotted up the beach.

Our guide was not amused, however, and it took some doing to turn my ex around and back toward the group. Instead, my ex proposed to me just outside the Legion of Honor, where there was a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

That’s kind of how things were with my ex-husband. He’d always just forge ahead, figuring he’d learn as he went, and it often ended up in some kind minor and eventually amusing catastrophe. I was into downhill skiing, and as he was open to trying new things, when we were dating we took a ski trip up to Mont Sutton in Quebec. I firmly believe in the saying “friends don’t teach friends how to ski” and figured that went twice over for romantic partners, so we took lessons, my ex to learn and me to refresh my skills. Well, the first time we took a lift together, when he got off he didn’t stand up. Instead, there he went, skiing in a squat right toward the back, ungroomed side of the mountain.

“Dan! DAN, FALL!” I yelled, choking back tears of laughter. “FALL DOWN!”

I haven’t seen anything that funny on a ski slope since. However, in his defense, getting off the lift is often a challenge for beginners. I learned that when you’re not sure what to do and you can’t control where you’re going, it’s usually a good idea to just lean over and fall into the snow. It’s better than crashing into another skier or a tree—or skiing off the back side of a mountain. (My beginner moment was NOT falling, and instead skiing right into a tow-rope operator who caught me just before I skied into a stream at Sunday River in Maine.)

My ex and I went to Jamaica for our honeymoon, and when we rented a canoe he paddled us out too far and then capsized the canoe. I was able to dive down quickly enough to grab my wallet, so I didn’t lose my ID, but I did lose some sunglasses I was rather fond of. When we got back home he gave me a gift certificate to get new sunglasses, and that’s how I came to acquire the pair of Ralph Laurens that I still wear to this day, 22 years later. It was quite a memory. Some naked guys sailed past us from the nudist resort next to where we were staying. There’s nothing like reconsidering your brand new marriage while clinging in fury to the side of a canoe, and just when you think help has arrived, you look up to see a pair of hairy arses sitting on the edge of a sailboat while the owners of said arses laugh at you as they sail by. Eventually the safety patrol at the resort came out to get us. Quite embarrassing.

My wasband had a great sense of adventure, though, so I have to give him props for just getting out there and doing new things even if they didn’t always go as planned, like marriage to me.

Anyway, here’s the California state Christmas tree, complete with a few ornaments showing the Golden Gate Bridge, my favorite bridge in the world. Click to enlarge. This one is dedicated to my friend Susan, who has made not one but two trips to see Poets of the Fall not only fun, but super coordinated and easy for me to plan and navigate, first to Prog Power in Atlanta in 2019, and more recently to Warsaw, Poland, just last September. Susan, I promise, one day I WILL take a picture with Jaska!

California's state Christmas tree, 2023.
California’s state Christmas tree, 2023. Click to embiggen.

Oh, Shut Up, Elmo.

You know what I want for Christmas? A Shut-Me-Up Elmo. Instead of tickling him, when he runs his mouth, you tell him to shut up and he apologizes for being an ignorant asshat and then never again speaks about things he knows nothing about.

Seriously. Eleven kids with three different women, and Elon Musk wants to talk about morality? So tired of these sexist jackdonkeys who think women’s highest achievement is to reproduce. Ya know, for the majority of women, it’s not rocket science. Lie on your back and let a dude ride raw and finish.

As for the rest, it is patently offensive and cruel to deem people who don’t have kids as “genetic dead ends.” Has that fool never heard of infertility? Not everyone who does want kids can have them or afford expensive fertility treatments.

He has also passed comments about how he thinks people who don’t have kids shouldn’t be allowed to vote because he thinks they have no stake in the future. I never wanted kids, but believe me, I have a stake in the future. I shudder to think of a world where egomaniacs like him get to dictate another human being’s life purpose, so one of the ways I seek to leave the world a better place than I found it is to counter ignorant commentary by his ilk.

Regardless, Elmo can run his yap about his OWN experience when he not only actively takes part in parenting on the level a woman does—there is a joke among kid-free feminists where women say “I’d make a great father”—AND he has raised kids into adults who actually want anything to do with him, because trust me, when your own daughter won’t speak to you, you’ve done something heinous as a parent.

Furthermore…

1. Eleven kids is a helluva lot of environmental destruction for one man’s ego. Ya wanna talk about morality? How about ethics?

2. Yes, other people’s kids will take care of me when I am old and ailing. They’re called nurses and home care aides. Having kids as some kind of insurance for adult daycare is both selfish and delusional. One visit to a nursing home should cure him of that notion. See also, “daughter who won’t speak to you,” above.

3. If you need to have kids to teach you how to love, be selfless, and have fulfillment, you’re entitled, privileged, selfish, and tedious to begin with. Having kids won’t change that. You’ll just raise them to be entitled, privileged, selfish, and tedious, too. Or, again, they won’t talk to you when they’re adults.

4. As for all these misogynists going on about Taylor Swift’s cover on Time, whining about her being an example of how feminism has “ruined women,” and nattering on about how she’s an “aging, promiscuous cat lady,” don’t threaten women with a good time, boys. If women would rather share their lives with creatures who crap in a box (or in my case, on newspapers or my sweatshirts) than you, you need to do some introspection on what kind of person you are and what it is you think you offer a woman because we don’t need either the money or the extra housework, and we can buy batteries.

A typical rebuttal from a misogynist is that “you need us to have children.” Well, no. We don’t really need men to have or raise children, either. I know several women who went to sperm banks in their late 30s and did IVF. These women have great careers and can provide for a child, and also have a great family and social network—the proverbial village in which to raise a child, including brothers and male friends who can offer a male’s perspective or be a father figure but whom they know will not indoctrinate their children in the ways of toxic masculinity. But again, if a woman is fertile and has all the social support that’s necessary for healthy parenting, all she needs to do is lie on her back (although I wouldn’t recommend that route, as it’s better to know a male’s genetic carriage like you would with a sperm bank). If that ticks off these fragile males, oh well. Be the kind of equal life partner and co-parent women would want to have a family with and you won’t have any problems living your dream of being a family man.

Another misogynistic rebuttal is “You need us to protect you.” From what? Oh, right, other men, both on an individual level with intimate partner violence, sexual assault, predation, and other crimes, and on a macro level with the wars that by and large are waged by men who fail to see a way to peace.

Yeah, no. Sell all of that somewhere else. Healthy, strong men who are comfortable in their skins live and let live.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce my Song of the Year, “Labour,” by Paris Paloma. It’s an ode to the unfair distribution of work in a heterosexual couple’s household and the realization that no man is ever a woman’s savior. Turn on captions to follow the lyrics.