Seeking Charles Christmas 3: Approaching an Ayo Moment

I follow Charles Christmas now on both Facebook and Instagram and have concluded that he is one cool cucumber. This nerd from middle school has grown into a fun, active man who works out a million times a day and goes to outdoor concerts. He seems to have a real thirst for life that I admire, and I want him to be my friend. I guess more accurately, my friend again. For some reason, I feel like I should ask him about this, but I am forever scarred from when I asked this guy Ayo from college, who I thought was cool for the same reasons, to be my pen pal and he said no. I felt so stupid. Of course he would say no! I could just imagine him making fun of me with his friends. There is a price to putting yourself out there ladies, even platonically. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. 

"Stop feeling like you gotta be everybody's friend!" Lisha yelled in my ear when I told her how I want to reach out to Charles Christmas about being buddies. She just doesn't want to see me embarrass myself but honestly, if I'm not embarrassing myself, what am I doing? 

I brainstormed how I could reach out to him without looking thirsty and I concluded sending him a message similar to this one:

You have been chosen to be a friend of Holly Clay! Follow the link below to Google questionnaire to further consider your qualification for this position.

Once he got to the questionnaire, he'd have to answer the following questions:

1. Do you like burritos?
2. Do you like talking on the phone/ texting?
3. What are your views on the color blue?
4. Is Teyanna Taylor a girl?
5. Where do you stand on canned meats?

I can feel the embarrassment 'abrewin, can't you? As usual, I will keep you posted. 

Pix and the Coconut Oiled Elder Jay-jay

Pix is in love y'all! He has found this magic woman who is selfless, listens, and checks all the boxes I could never check off because I question everything and, according to him, like to "go back and forth," with men. He is on cloud nine and called me to talk about it. I was happy to hear that someone is having relationship success. It's beyond dusty out here. 

I like Pix because he always has a story for me and last night didn't disappoint. He started this story off with a question. 

"Do you think that older women dislike women in their 20's because they can get wetter than them?" he honestly inquired. 

"Uhhhhh..." The question even caught me off guard. I said something about perimenopause and hormone levels. 

"I ask because I have been with young women and older women and sometimes, younger women get so wet that they are wet even outside their lips."

Yes, before you ask, I am aware that this convo is going off the rails, but this is par for the course when you have platonic homeboys that have friend zoned you. 

"I don't think that older women dislike younger women because of this. It is what it is," I offered. "Plus, there is like lube and vitamins for women that need real wetness help."

He then proceeded to tell me a horror story about a past relationship with an older woman who was a resident of the dry side. He snuck and used coconut oil on her and got great results. They were so great, in fact, that they became a coconut couple and the oil was very present in their love life. I shuttered, looking at the container of coconut oil on my nightstand I use on my hair. If I'm ever in a situation where a man has to sneak and oil me up, it's time to hang it up, flat screen. I told you all I am already worried about my aging hands. I guess I have to add my girl becoming a dust pan to the list. 

"Ah, intimacy and its many humiliations," I said, shaking my head. 

He laughed. "It was humiliating until it wasn't. We had a good time!"

I accept that I have to age. I even accept that I will one day die. Just please, let me be close to the end when my coconut oil days show up. Men have embarrassed me a lot in my life, but having one feel he has to covertly baby oil me is where I have to dry the line. 

Hands

There is a lot to worry about in the world today.  Politics. Climate change. Food scarcity. And as a woke person, I try to stay abreast and worried about everything. However, I find that lately, I am most worried most about my hands. I fear that they are prematurely aging. 

When I was a kid, I used to watch infomercials like they were actual TV shows, especially ones where old White women talkrd about mail order beauty treatments. And I remember one lady talking about how important it is to make sure that your hands remain youthful. According to her, you could look like The Crypt Keeper, but if your hands were wrinkle-free, people would assume you were 22. I recall looking at my own plump, juicy 2nd grade hands that still had some baby pudge too them, wondering how ones hands get old. Easily apparently. 

I already have man hands, so I'm not excited about having old man hands, but this is all my fault. In college, my roommate and I used to clean our shower with this really strong cleaner. It was the only thing that would get our dirty foot prints from walking in flip flops around New Orleans out of the shower floor. One day, I recall looking at my hands after a cleaning with a raised eyebrow. My hands looked about two years older. Now I'm 41, scared I'm going to wakeup with granny hands. 

If that is my future, it is what it is. I'm scared to use any hand products out of fear they will make things worse. This could be a great opportunity to consider some chic glove options. 

Midlife Men

I do believe that the men that I am chatting with on the dating app are having midlife crises. One of them messages me about how he doesn't know where his life is going. Another is experiencing grief from losing his job, has to move out of his house, and is lost as to what he is going to do when he gets back to Atlanta. This other guy is refusing to get back surgery even though it would surely return him to his former quality of life, and another is going back and forth ad nauseam about coloring his beard. They seem pretty frazzled, and I am trying to be understanding because I hear that is what men like, but their complaining is lowkey making my anxiety rise. I don't really know what to tell them. My life is also a hot mess! 

Listening to these men discuss their problems makes me wonder if I am really ready to be in a partnership. I mean, I am 41. If not now, when? However, upon reflection, I think that I am ready for the hugging and snuggling, not the part where I need to provide emotional support and be a light in someone's life. Truth be told, I am happier with the lights off. I feel the calmest in the dark. I also feel calm when I am not juggling 110 balls in the air. Changing that number to 111 to account for someone else's issues could drive me to the edge! 

One could argue that the whole point of having a partner is having someone to walk through life with you; to pick you up when you are down and help you to work through things. I mean, that really sounds beautiful. I am not sure how beautiful my version of this would be. I can't stand dealing with life, especially not someone else's life. Maybe what I am looking for is not a traditional partnership. We all know what a friend with benefits is. Do you think I can find a man interested in that minus the sex and emotional drain? Perhaps a friend with no benefits? I am fully aware that I type this as I inch closer and closer to my personal deadline to find love. I would call it quits now, but what would be the benefit in that? 

The Solution

So, it has been about two years since I made the decision to try to date before I get too old to even care, and I have just this to say: I have no more energy. Out of all the men I have met on the dating app, I have only gone to the conversation stage with about five of them, and I really don't know what else to say. I do not have it in me to ask another man what he does for a living and what his hobbies are. I feel like I know the answer before they answer. He works in a warehouse someplace and he likes to watch movies and play video games. At what point is it okay to just be like, "Look, you seem clean and mildly attractive. Do you want to just get together and see if we can stand each other enough to make something out of this?" I mean, that's the question, right? That is what we all want to know. So why not just cut to the chase and save some time? If I have learned anything from this process, it's that men can be misleading over the phone. Let's just meet up somewhere, witness the real deal, and decide after coffee and cake if we just want to start dating from there. I am estimating that 3-5 pointless conversations could be eliminated in this process. And I say pointless because even though I love talking on the phone, I am finding that these guys have almost nothing, NOTHING to say. Maybe they will be more chatty in person. I don't know. I am just spitballing here. I am trying not to complain, but find solutions, and it seems that if I want to be in a relationship, the best thing to do would be to just jump into one and figure out the deal later. Just an idea. 

Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test (Another Risky Business Story)

"Has anyone ever told you that you smell?" Risky Business asked me during our last conversation. 

"Uh..." I didn't know how to answer the question because it felt like it was leading to something else, and it was. Honestly, you never know where the call is going to go when you are talking to Risky Business. 

Apparently, one of her new boyfriends thinks that she stinks. She knows this because he has told her so several times. So, naturally, she began to pay more attention to her hygiene routine when it came to showering and washing her clothes. She even only wore a fragrance he said he liked when she went to see him. This did not work. The last time they met up, he declared that she still smelled. Can you imagine?

"It is not me," she assured me.  "I shower and do all the things before I go to see him. I think that he thinks that I smell because he just doesn't like me."

I didn't know what to say. I was too busy having an anxiety attack on the other end of the line. No woman wants to be told by anyone, especially an intimate partner, that they are not fresh. NO WOMAN! Smelling good is something that most women take pride in. When I was a teen working at a fast food restaurant, there was a homeless drug addict who used to lock herself in the bathroom and take baths in the sink. It was even important to her, in the state she was in, to be clean. I also had a flashback to when boys in elementary school used to tell girls that they smelled like fish. Somewhere, somehow, they discovered that girls were serious about smelling good and found a way to dish out the ultimate insult. It was up there with telling a girl she needed a perm when it came to being mean. 

After the call, I  just sat on my bed in shock. Is there no low to the things that men will say to us to bring us down? I remember a while back on the Love and Hip Hop Reunion where Ray J declared that a female cast member had a "stank p**&y". I was horrified! P even told me once that he told a female co-worker that her feet smelled, then had the nerve to be shocked when she stopped talking to him. 

Savannah once shared with me that one of her best male friends stunk, and his now wife fixed all that when they got together. She reminded him to take showers and helped him with his hygiene. I know more than one woman who has had to do this in a relationship. Apparently, this is not the route that a man will take in the same situation. He will just bark at a woman that she smells and leave her feeling gross and unfeminine. 

I guess I have stumbled upon yet another unpleasant part of male/female relations/ sexual health. It would seem that the road to intimacy can not only be paved with so-so intentions but also humiliation. Risky Business is no longer seeing this guy. She stopped talking to him, obviously. I mean, what other choice did she have? I am hopeful that she finds love, but also hopeful that she leaves the next guy too, if she gets a whiff that he is an insensitive jerk. Telling a woman she smells. Unbelievable. 

A Whole Person

Recently, I have been making an effort to stay in touch with my 91-year-old grand cousin. He was my grandmother's favorite cousin, Larry. He has been married for about 70 years to his wife, and they are retired, living out west. I have enjoyed our conversations because he has told me so much about our family history. Tonight, he told me that when my grandma was younger, my great-grandfather used to yell at her. 

"I think he was just afraid he was going to lose her," he informed me. 

When we got off the phone, I burst into tears. I know that no one is perfect, but my grandma came pretty close. She was kind and she was sweet and she was always thinking about everyone but herself. I couldn't stand the thought of someone being mean to her, no matter what the reason. I then began to think about the tantrums I used to throw as a kid and how ungrateful and bratty I could be. I pondered on something that we don't realize until we are older: the adults in our lives had whole lives before we got here. My grandma, who got on me for not wearing dresses and insisted that I press my hair, loved me and took care of me and also had a dad who could sometimes be mean to her. She liked to dance and play the guitar when she was younger. She sang with her friends in a jazz band. She was more than just the old lady that got on me for sitting with my legs open in skirts. She was a whole person. How did her life influence the kind of life that she tried to point me in the direction of having?

If nothing else, big questions like this are signs of getting older. When my niece and nephew become teens, and I am grounding them and putting them on punishment for being obnoxious, I wonder if they will be wise enough to know that I am not just their cruel aunty. I was a whole person before they got here that liked chopped and screwed love songs and books. Perhaps they will take this into account when they are mature enough to create a full picture of me.