how he became señor valentine

I met Ian this August in the doctor's mess (for those non-Brits, “the mess” is the appropriately dubbed equivalent of the on-call room which basically means a trashed area of the hospital where junior doctors can sleep at random hours, eat their food, and generally talk bollocks about the shit day they’ve been having. It resembles a fraternity the morning after a party - crumbs and excretion stains on the sofas, rumpled up sheets, a flipped over lamp (that has literally been on its side for two and half months), food wrappers thrown amok, curtains that don't actually open, a paper bag of stale donuts that someone will eventually eat, a free (!) vending machine that delivers watered down coffees and hot chocolate, and a big-screen television that displays a continuous feed of news articles about Brexit or Trump or accusations of some new American film producer/ British parliament member having been lascivious in the workplace). Anyway, I was in this mess place with some colleagues having lunch when I spotted Ian sitting there alone looking generally unenthusiastic and otherwise doing fuck all. He was just staring blankly into space with his arms folded. So I said HI. He did not seem much impressed by my exotic accent nor perky attitude. So I pulled up a chair and badgered him with questions in effort to make him cave to my charm in any capacity I could.

Nothing. This guy was impenetrable.

He tells me now that he had been having a particularly bad day between work and some rando girl he met on the internet having dumped him out of the blue after their second date. It doesn't really matter anyway, in that moment I failed every attempt to entertain him  and eventually surrendered, leaving him on that sofa statically depraved, just the way I’d found him, much like this:

Ian is the personification of my favorite emoticon innit: 😑

I decided this boy was probably a miserable loser and then really didn't think of him again. I didn't even think of him again when we apparently had a twenty minute convo at a bar party organized by the mess committee a few weeks later, one that I cannot recall. This was surprising to me as according to Ian it was a funny and interesting discourse about North Korea which happens  to be one of my very favorite topics! Whatever. I was barely even drunk. I call it payback for him having sloughed me off earlier that month. 

THEN. Then in late October I was referred to review a patient on the general medical ward where he (unbeknownst to me) worked. I walked into the ward and started talking with a colleague about the patient, when Ian suddenly emerged from an isolation room fully gowned in head to toe infection control yellow plastic. Like, a proper polycarbon trashbag dress with long sleeves and blue gloves. The way he looked at me in that moment was unforgettable- some wild mix of tender meets predatory. It was confusing but arousing and completely disarmed me. British people are in my experience terrible at making eye contact, let alone letting their gaze linger. But this particular lad was strategic, and after capturing my attention, asked his colleague to kindly fetch him a cannula, conveniently leaving the two of us alone separated only by empty and awkward space. He asked what my plans were for the weekend and then called me to task by requesting I write the date on his cannulation sticker. My pen wasn’t working and I definitely didn’t know the date. So he grabbed at the air for any other random cheap topic that could protract our conversation. He was flirtatious. Brave but wholesome. And then our time was up.

That evening I got a message from Ian via Facebook saying "it was lovely to see you on the ward today". Whenever I tell British people this story they invariably ask "WOT? Is he even  ACTUALLY British?" Apparently this is far too forward an advance for a bearer of the union jack over his heart- had he been true blue he'd have orchestrated his next move when he was drunk in the pub, saying something stupid or mildly perverted , hoping i too was drunk enough not to notice, or at least drunk enough to ignore it, and then we’d snog, and then maybe shag, and then after that perhaps he’d have asked me out for a cocktail weeks later. But this boy was different. He waited no time to ask me to join him at Shakespeare’s Globe theater for an evening of the arts.  

…but that never happened.

We got to talking about an imminent castle fireworks display in his hometown and decided instead to go with the risk and romance of having a first date as a weekend away together at Kenilworth Castle to see the Guy Fawkes Day celebration. It was unconventional and risky which I liked because either way I’d have a story to tell over brunch with my budding group of girlfriends. I got used to fishing for stories having dated half of London via various dating apps for the first six months of my time in the UK. At some point it began to appear as if I were hunting natural dating disasters. 

The build up was exciting and intense, we talked regularly on the phone and engaged often in random acts of romance .. I brought him a chocolate croissant to the ward one morning, he left a coffee in my department the morning after. I brought him home-made dinner to the ward on one of his long days, he brought me flowers and a card the following afternoon. We also got together for a cheeky 15 minute coffee date at work, just days after we had  bumped into each other in the pub when I was dressed as a yellowjacket for Halloween and he drunkenly whispered to me that I was the most beautiful bee he’d ever seen. Intoxicated, stupid, and slightly perverted indeed. But he ran out before the snog.

Our high stakes weekend finally arrived.  We took Friday off and left early in the morning, embarking on our 3 hour roadtrip out of London. In the first half an hour I almost lost my shit when a hairy brown spider dangled down from the windowsill over my left ear. Then I almost lost my shit again when we had not even made it as far as Chelsea before Ian shamelessly started singing along to some teenage pop garbage tune on the radio.

We stopped first at Stratford Upon Avon to see the home where Shakespeare allegedly grew up. It was all remarkably cheesy and hardly historical (placated by the bag of lemon sherbets I bought myself). But then Ian kissed my face for the first time in a tiny alcove of Shakespeare's garden. And I felt all those butterflies. And later in the day when we arrived at our AirBnb, there were two bottles of champagne in the room- one that I had organized to surprise Ian, and a second that Ian had organized to surprise me. He won because he also ordered flowers and chocolate. I mean...

And then there was Kenilworth. It was one of the dreamiest days of my life. Drama in the sky. A full moon rise. A castle in decay. And a good English boy. 

  

And of course, the intensity of a three day first date getaway would not have been complete without having met Ian's family. So on day three of date one I received formal and incredibly warm introductions to mom, gran, aunt, cousin, godson, niece, and in -laws. And when they asked us how long we’d been together, we smiled and said “well, we met in August”.

  

one foot in front of the other

Do you ever oscillate between manic productivity and then days where you barely manage to do more than change the batteries in your vibrator? 

Neither do I. Because I am never lazy. At all. Like, ever. Nor do I own a vibrator that is battery operated. Double A's are so 1989 and not even environmentally friendly.   

Basically I have been quiet not because I'm lazy but because I changed jobs a few months ago and have been trembling at a frequency too rapid to effectively type as I focus all energies toward trying not to fuck up my life or someone else's. 

I thought I was doing ok in this respect until yesterday I tripped over the bathtub and probably broke my toe. I knew immediately the damage was going to be bad so I rapidly washed my important bits, grabbed a pack of peas from the freezer and plopped down on the bed with my right leg raised, not initially realizing that the pea pack was open to one corner and consequently dumped half the bag's contents all over my duvet, which then split between smashing into the white sheets and rolling down into the cracks of the bedframe as I jumped up to try and contain them. Mission aborted, the morning therein dedicated to hunting for rogue vegetable matter rather than nursing my limb.  I hobbled to work. At the end of the day I unwrapped my (very cute designer) shoes to reveal this beaut: 

Reminds me of the last time I walked straight into the wall whilst sober, which is  basically unforgivable for someone who identifies with being an adult, not that I claim access to this exclusive cohort. Double annoying that my gel pedicure from two days had also chipped off in one full piece from my pinky toe, unrelated to the injury but adding insult in any case. 

Tis the season where after a period unwavering myopic focus trying to survive (in a way that interrupts sleep), that herpetic gift that keeps on giving reappeared in my  right nostril, impeding my ability to breathe from one of my only three air holes, painfully crusting up my nares, and outfitting me with a massive and painful retroauricular lymph node just for the sake of reminding me that I have one. A retroauricular lymph node and herpes. Forever! But this is old news.  Just try typing "herpes" into the search bar of this blog and at least 7 hits will come up that all pertain to me. 

But otherwise, living in London is great! Tonight I am going to see the Ferryman in the West End. Theater and live music and art are regular parts of my life here and I'm grateful for that. I am also grateful to be able to afford ramen and kebabs, toilet paper, the massive electricity bill, that monumentally priced public transportation, and have a roof over my head. I am still in that same crap apartment which now has an industrial sized trash bin in the kitchen, which from its nascency has had a broken spring in the lid and therefore has to be kept closed by a lime green broken salt and pepper shaker. It's impressive how your muscle memory develops in response to these sorts of things. For instance, I know that to  simply toss away my used tea bag I have to reach out, remove the salt and pepper weight from the bin lid, physically lift the lid, THEN pick out my teabag from the mug THAT I HAVE LEFT ON THE COUNTER while I hold the lid open with my other hand.  It sounds easy but if you're standing over the bin with the mug in your right hand and the teabag in your left hand, you need an extra hand to take the salt/pepper shaker off. You have to plan ahead to throw your shit away in my house! It is good that I love to formulate lists and plan things. I have gotten used to this routine to the degree that when I'm in the presence of a normally functioning bin I get all disoriented the way you do when you usually drive a manual transmission vehicle and then switch to automatic. Your feet start tapping the ground like an overeager dancer with metal plates on their soles and sometimes you hit the gas like you would a stiff clutch and things go from copacetic to scary real quick. 

I have noticed some things about British people. Or maybe it's just Londoners I don't know. But I can't sort out why so many people in these parts go for runs with a backpack on. Can somebody please explain this to me? I have never seen a phenomenon quite like it. They are definitely not running contextually for something like the bus. I know because they have all their sporty gear on.  What exactly is in that backpack they all have? Its not thin like a camelback that supplies hands-free water. Its humped like a ninja turtle, full of unknown goods! I wonder, what could be in there, as well as where they are running from, or to?  I have also noticed that while I am admittedly charmed by the british accent, as a wretched stereotype, they are famous for being snobby when it comes to matters of proper etiquette, grammar, and lexicon. But then you pour some lager into their face holes and they start shouting obscenities, jumping out of the queue, and unabashedly peeing in public places. The city has even installed  outdoor, open public urinals in places like Soho. Basically just a wall where people can pee against so at least the act appears intentional and well conceived. Oh! and then when they speak they all almost invariably say things like "samwich" instead of sandwich, and "free" instead of three and "everyfing" instead of everything. I just don't know what to do about this heuristic break. I came here to become more like the Queen and instead am just finding it more and more acceptable to eat a Burger King on the underground after a night out on the lash. 

Thats enough for now, Im late for a 5pm gin and tonic in Picadilly and likely a tiny cucumber samwich. Had I planned ahead and not been temporarily equipped with a degenerate toe I'd stay a little longer and run there with my backpack. Maybe then I will start calling myself a Londoner. 


BYE