Heya! Guess what I did today? I went out again! Early in the morning I "ascorted" by brother to the cyber cafe near my house as he wants to play some games. After about an hour, I went back home to take my bath and to change to get ready to go to......*drum rols* Sg. Wang and Times Square again! for the third time in a row! Yes. Madness right? I don't know. Mae says It's addictive. Oh well.. Went to Times Square first then ate Kenny Rogers! Yum!Yum! Walked around for a lil while then tried on some tribal shirts which are very nice! Its was very comfy! I just love it so much! Woohoo! Did some bargaining! Can u believe it? Bargaining in Times Square?! ahaks.. woohoo! I managed to pull the price down! Then later went to Tag again! Yes. All I did in there was stood there and admire my dream watch. *sigh* After that, I ran across to Sg. Wang to eat again! Ate at Kim Gary's. Orders this dish which has rice, beef, curry with tomato sauce. It was pretty spicy..

Ah, first love...
Looking back on it, I get this curious feeling ... that strange mixture of remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmingly in love, and yet there's a certain distaste for the whole thing. It leaves a strange aftertaste, like eating a kiwi. Sweet on top and a bitter acidity in the back of your throat that lasts for hours afterwards.

I was 24. I was divorced. I was in a long-term "temporary" relationship with another man who was 11 years my senior. I was (and, of course, still am) Black.

He was 25 and in a long-term relationship with a Big Tit girl everyone expected him to marry. He was White.

We met at work. He was the manager of another department with which I was supposed to work closely. I remember the moment I met him ... your typical good-looking all-American White boy. Good natured. As I was introduced to him, I glanced at the picture on his desk of him with his girlfriend, and felt a pang.

Strange, I thought. Like you ever had a chance.

But oddly enough, we clicked. We spent a lot of time on the phone giggling and telling jokes when we were supposed to be working out some problem between my department and his.

And then the jokes began to have double meanings.

One day he invited me out with his department for drinks. The place where we worked is a well-known entertainment company -- hard partying was the rule, even among the VPs. So that night we all drank way too much. I got so drunk I passed out in the bar, and he very nicely went out of his way to take me home.

To Harlem.

And to me, I figured he must have liked me, because generally White people are scared to be in Harlem at 2:00am.

Very long story short: I fell for him. Big time. And I thought he felt the same way, but now I'm not so sure.

The first time I met his mother she stared at me for a good five minutes. His father seemed alright on the surface. I didn't meet his grandparents for a good year and a half; they weren't all that happy about us.

Six months after we got together, we moved into an apartment in New Jersey. His grandfather threatened to cut him out of the will. His father wasn't happy. After the dust settled, I ended up actually getting along with his mother.

My parents were much more diplomatic; all my father asked me was if I loved this man enough to put up with the crap that I might have to endure because he was white. I said I did. Pop said OK.

But basically, he was never going to marry me. My black friends all said so. I didn't believe them.

The first year was great. The second year, we fought. The third year, we stopped having real conversations with each other. I loved him and didn't want to rock the boat so I didn't push it. But I began to feel that we were falling apart. I also felt, however, that through all the crap and comments that we'd endured, he must have loved me because he was still with me.

The fourth year, I found out he was cheating on me with some blonde chick from Nebraska.

The discovery was an accident. I was cleaning up the living room; he was in bed, asleep. I picked up his knapsack that he carried back and forth to work with him and it weighed a ton. I looked into it just to see what made it so heavy ... it was a bunch of music CDs.

But there was also a neat little bundle of letters addressed to him at work.

Curiosity got the better of me and I opened one up. It was all about how much she missed him, how she wondered what it would be like to buy groceries for two, how they would listen to jazz together ....

I felt as though someone punched their way into my stomach, grabbed hold of my intestines and ripped them out. I ran screaming into the bedroom and tried to get him to leave ... but his dad had borrowed his truck that night so we were stuck together. I crawled into the bed and cried myself into a delirium before finally falling asleep.

That was Monday. Thursday, he moved back home to his mother's. I lost 20 pounds and a bra cup size in two weeks. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I'd go to work and burst into tears in the middle of a conversation.

I finally got my own place, back in NY. I started my life over completely, from scratch. New friends. New life. New job, eventually. I drank a lot. It took me two years to date anybody again.

In the meantime, he married his Nebraska chick. They moved to California first, then to New Jersey. Now they happily live in Long Island.

Me? Well, I still haven't gotten the hang of relationships ... the guy I'm with now is Albanian. A whole other, equally difficult can of worms.

You'd think I would've learned.

I'm pregnant ... we're not married. Probably never will be. But it's OK. I'm not so sold on the love/marriage thing anymore.

I just look forward to my baby.

 

From the Notebook of the Best Administrative Assistant
This is from an old notebook; it's the concluding two sections of the first chapter of a (failed) book I wrote while at work at NYU's film department. The full title is From the Notebook of the Best Administrative Aide in the World, NYU Film Department, Registration Office. Not that catchy, but here goes. Oh, at some point I did a find-and-replace for "film students" with the word "goats," a move that greatly improved the text. I think chicken means "non-film major" or something.

[21]
The goats of which I speak: they must be taught by someone. And they are a semi-professional lot, that of the trained goats, the ones who have gone out to the farms and met other goats and even chickens and told stories. None of them can necessarily write, even correctly, but I respect them and what they do. And the way they speak to the little goats! Such blessings they give them! It is the foreign-speaking trained goats of which I speak most fondly, for as I write this, one is flirting with a goat-chicken (or is it chicken goat? no matter) and she is laughing, fondly, hoping for a development deal that goats sometimes get, especially girl goats wearing hardly a stitch of clothing. Such respect trained goats give, the kind that goats need in order to survive.

[22]
Anyone who has seen a goat being born will understand what I am about to say better than those who haven't. But the general thrust is this: All goats, when they are born, land on only three feet. Not all four. The newborns, wet, soaking in the waters of their mother, struggle, and, gradually, like all good prose, they will land on four feet, struggling with the first shaky steps. To the goats I assist as the Best Administrative Aide in the World, I am that fourth leg. I am propping it up beneath them, giving them orderly advice. They insult me, yes, but this is because they do not understand the wisdom they are receiving from me. And when they go back to Westchester or Connecticut or Southern California, eating their festive winter meals, they think back to my desk, where their fourth legs waits for them, even in their absence.