Sally Neumann: A Kisstory

Adhering as strictly as possible to this no boyfriend rule of mine, I've started to go through one of my least favorite aspects of single-hood (second only to increased chocolate appetite and new affinity for romantic comedies): kissing withdrawal. There's nothing I would love more right now than to feel the smooth, gentle, raspberry marshmallow brush of someone's lips. I want velvet cushions to whisper warm dew drops on the tingling nerves on my neck. I want to feel rough, pine needle bristles dig their nails into my cheeks. I want my eyelashes to lock fingers with his, and I want my skin to spark upon touch. I want to feel where hard meets soft and rough meets smooth. I want electricity and lightning.

Sally's very first kiss:
The first time I ever kissed a boy, I was six or seven or nine. I think. I know I was playing in the sandbox with a boy whose fingernails were always dirty and whose jean jacket and horn-rimmed glasses couldn't even distract from his rat tail that hung down past his shoulderblades. One afternoon, his mother beckoned for him to leave, and I couldn't resist giving him a spontaneous parting gift: I smashed my fleeting hummingbird lips against his and our pudgy faces bounced backward as soon as they had met. Of course, the teacher saw me and I was suspended. I would get suspended from Kindergarten.
My last recollection of that day was a view of my toes drawing figure eights on our black and white tiled bathroom floor as my mother shared with me the dangers of kissing. It gets you pregnant, you know.

Sally attempts open-mouthed kissing-- hilarity ensues
When I lived in Frankfurt, I lived in an apartment in a compound within a compound. I had a room within a room and a window that stretched far across my wall. One of the stranger rumors that leaked itself around the preteen community was that a guy named Preston liked to watch me undress in the evenings. I was twelve, so the creep factor was pretty high (though he was twelve too), but honestly, I really had nothing exciting under my sports-themed t-shirts. In fact, I'm pretty sure that was the age where my mom (yes, in front of company) would call my pre-boobs "cheerios." Anyway, I somehow got it in my head that I needed to figure out if this was true. It was. And it was easy to discern for one reason: Preston wore glow-in-the-dark glasses. That's right. I really know how to pick 'em. It was creepy, but I really wasn't all that threatened. It was more hilarious than a big deal, especially because he saw me see him and almost peed himself (his pee, presumably, also glowed in the dark). Anyway the point of this story is that Preston somehow ended up being my first real-live honest to God kiss. After getting over his skeeziness, I became good friends with Preston. On a particularly love-inspiring Tuesday, we finished a rollerblading race and sat a picnic table with our pinkies barely touching. He pushed his ever-present ridiculous glasses up his nose, now glistening with sweat, and uttered what is possibly the least necessary question in the world: "Can I kiss you?" Choosing to nod instead of deride him (give him a break, he's twelve), I felt him lean in. He hadn't quite mastered the whole "lips closed first, tongue later" scenario, and his open mouth came at me like an especially vacuuous black hole. Except wetter. When his tongue batted against mine, it fell each time like a plastic bag of soup dropped off of the third story of a building. And it tasted like a Big Mac. I pushed away as soon as I could and before I could catch myself, said "ew!" Luckily, he didn't seem offended. In fact, he apologized. "Sorry, I ate onions like ten minutes ago."

Sally's first best kiss
I hate to call this my absolute best kiss. I've had a lot of amazing kisses since this one, but since it was my first, it stands out as the most prominent. When I was fourteen, my best friends and I went to Disneyland Paris for one of their birthdays. It was pretty much the best thing ever. And to top it all off, when I returned home, I experienced the budding teenager's dream: a parent-less house. As long as you promise not to partake in retro-active grounding, mom, read on :) My sister was out with her boyfriend at the time, so I decided to invite my potential boyfriend over. He accepted, thrilled, and promised to bring over his favorite movie at the time: Underworld. I put on something that I knew would make him smile, which meant a gray, over-sized Blink 182 t-shirt. I ran to meet him at the train station and we danced home, tripping over our intentionally ruined Converse as we went. I sat on the couch, too far to one side so that if he sat down right next to me, I would know he liked me. He did. We started to watch the movie and then our hands grabbed each other's so quickly that I felt my breath fall out of me when I turned to him. We moved toward one another at the same time and as his blue-tinted glasses clicked against mine, I felt perfect euphoria. His hands settled gently around my back like freckled snowflakes. Mine grabbed his shoulders so clumsily that I pushed him off of the couch. A minor inconvenience. I sat beside him and blinked my right eye, then the next as I said, "camera 1, camera 2." Because Wayne's World is God. He giggled, and before I could make another mood-breaking joke (as is my custom), we fell into each other again. After an endless amount of flawless kissing, I finally walked him back to the train station, where we shared a parting peck that still ressonantes in my memory as the perfect end to a perfect evening.

I've had some wonderful kisses. I've had some horrible, lip-vaccuuming, face-drooling, teeth-cracking kisses. But the ones that melt my knees and force my lips to smile make it all worth it. And I can't wait to do it again. You know... in time.

If you look like this, feel free to hit on me.

Who am I Kidding? I'm not an Old Black Woman

Apparently using pet names all the time is weird. Apparently I'm flirtatious. I should probably stop that if I want to achieve my goal. Which brings us to...

Things I can Actively Change to Remain Single:
1) Stop using pet names. HOW ON EARTH CAN I DO THAT?! In fact, I probably shouldn't do that. That's just silly. I basically am pet names.
2) Stop touching boys flirtatiously. This obviously excludes the janitor, since he's seen me naked twice and is therefore my intimate lover.
3) Eat more chocolate. And pizza. And bagels. Isn't that word cuter if you spell it like "bagle?" Tee hee :)
4) Go to frat parties. YUP! So this isn't counter-intuitive because I'm not attracted to the following: (excuse me as I reveal my extreme tendency to generalize and stereotype)
a) Guys who wear collared shirts under...collared shirts
b) Guys who wear collared shirts on a daily basis in general.
c) Guys with names like "Brody" and "Hoit"
d) Guys who smell expensive
e) Drunk guys who hit on me and use lines like "I had to come over here because your shiny shiny silver spandex glinted in my eye and I was so distracted" (actually that was pretty hilarious, but still, I'm in man-repelling mode and have to be selective)
5) Keep dressing nicely-- feeling pretty usually equates to my feeling confident and generally happy throughout the day
6) Stop drooling over the really attractive guy in my linguistics class who looks like a combination of Jake Gyllenhaal and GOD.

I guess all I can do is try and achieve these goals and hope for the best!

Do Girls Count?

No. They totally don't.

Where would I be without silly putty and bubble wrap?

I'm fond of so many things. I love the smell of hand sanitzer when you just put it on, I love french-dipped sandwiches, and I love my rainbow bed sheets. I'm not fond of waking up in the morning. Usually what urges me to get out of bed in the morning (other than my rather pleasant alarm song) is the knowledge that I can go check my e-mail and see what magical messages had popped up while I slept. I love constant communication and attention. And I guess I'm not totally alone there, and the e-mail checking thing isn't gone, but my other morning ritual is.
In addition to seeing what the world had to say to me every morning, I like to text the person to whom I'm currently attached some variant of "Good morning, sunshine." Also not (that) weird. But what's weird is that right now, I have no one to say good morning to. Now, I'm not lonely: I have plenty of friends, a few of whom wouldn't even think it strange if I were to text them good morning (as most people are used to my gushing, over-zealous platonic love expressions). I do, however, miss having someone to take care of. I find myself restless and bored, even after just a couple of days of not having anyone to coddle or cuddle. I hope this gets easier, because right now I'm in a strange selfishness paradox. I need to think of only myself in order to achieve this goal, but besides achieving this goal, everything I want is, at this point, unhealthy. I can't be selfish and want to hold on to people who love me just because they love me. In time, when I'm ready, perhaps I'll be able to love someone fully, and not ever wonder if it's just because I crave attention and affection.
But for now, (because I need to talk about something esle and stop being a huge Eeyore) need to find alternate sources of entertainment and outlets for my insane energy. So far, I've made my four year plan and then done it again, had three cups of tea, eaten just to eat, and popped bubble wrap until every single one of the little imprisoned air pockets had burst. I guess I should probably be productive and learn French or something, but at this point, I need a better distraction. Do they make some sort of gum to wean people off of a perpetual desire for companionship?

I'd Better Stock up on Porn

There are a lot of things that make me weird. My socks don't match, I eat apples from top to bottom, and I'm the only person on the planet who thinks Jar-Jar Binks is adorable. And I know those are just quirks, but some weird things about me aren't charmingly idiosyncratic. For one, I never finish anything. Okay, so I finish off boxes of cereal and essays and cups of tea, but most things I don't finish. There are at least nine paint-by-numbers crammed in a crawl space somewhere that have like four empty spaces each because I was too lazy and bored to mix color 4 with color 95 to make "light puce." I have eighteen candles that I keep at a really low level of wax and constantly buy new ones because I don't want to let the old ones burn out. I have a box full of eighty paper cranes that I planned on hanging up, but instead just kept making them until I moved on to a new craft. I study things until I almost understand them, and then rely on innate intelligence to do well on tests (hint: this doesn't work for computer science or art history exams). Most of all, I don't follow through on what I really want. Most shit I do just isn't for myself. So, in linguistics today, I got my billionth harebrained idea: I decided that I would be single for a year.
At this point, you're probably wondering (as am I a little): why the hell would anybody want to do that? Isn't life about the pursuit of happiness, which is synonymous with love for some people? What the hell am I going to do with my day? Actually, I have absolutely no idea. But that's kind of the point. Basically, I'll lay this down for you: I've been in some sort of relationship since 8th grade, with no more than a two week hiatus between relationships, crushes, hook-ups or flings. My relationships have been like the pile of coats at a party: they all overlap messily, and there's always another one on the way. After every break-up, I've always announced to my friends, "All right guys, this is it: I'm totally going to try to be single." And I've always failed, because for some reason, I always become immediately infatuated with the next guy I meet who knows who Neil Gaiman is, or listens to Blink-182 (without shame). So this time, I'm going to finish something. I'm going to actually be single.
Yesterday, a friend of mine revealed to me that he thinks I might be addicted to love. My first thought (after I hummed "Addicted to Love" for a few bars) was that I had never considered love as an addiction. And aside from being addicted to chocolate, flash games, and looking at a hilarious picture of Dugtrio as three black men fondling each other, I've never considered myself as being addicted to anything. But, seeing as this made sense to me (See also: I had just read Choke and had addiciton on the brain), I decided that like with any addiction, I should try my self-control, self-confidence, and self-respect by using will power to quit. Granted, this addiction isn't anything like herion, but for me, it actually kind of is. Now that I think about it, every time I break up with someone, it feels like a detox. Sometimes I even get physically ill from it, but let's face it, that's not pretty, so I won't delve further into my fantastic stomach pyrotechnics. So while it may seem like this harebrained idea is just that, to me, it's about proving that I can do something just for myself. And actually do it. I have to learn to be happy on my own. To me, being alone is the same as not having a boyfriend, and that shouldn't be the case. I need to learn how to be happy alone before I'm happy with someone else, and when I choose to date someone else, I need to learn how to treat him like a gift, and not like a pile of paper cranes that I can get quickly bored of.
So, to do that, I figure I need to retrace my relationship steps-- figure out where I went wrong. But all I can picture is this weird powerpoint with a boring template flashing pictures of my old boyfriends and me while "Free Fallin'"plays softly in the background. And besides, it's not as if anything went wrong specifically in my old relationships, it's just that sometimes people don't work out. And even though I truly believe that, it doesn't make break-ups any less difficult. Essentially, I guess, so concludes day one of Sally being single. Oh but I've decided that this not dating thing will end next year on Valentine's Day, because that's just so appropriate.
Also, for all those reading this (Hi Gramma), if you're a conservative member of my family and swearing and sexual references offend you (or you're my mom and you think it's weird that I'm all grown up), I truly apologize, but this blog is as much my catharsis as it is for your entertainment. To my close friends, I hope you all make wise bets on how long this is going to last (you guys suck :p), to all others, follow me if you want, and encourage me if you can, because this isn't easy: I love boys and relationships and everything about this. I just, inexplicably (or, actually, very explicably as seen above), need to do this. Support is all I can ask for. So it begins!