On Being A Modern Siren

In the sixties, we were extorted to be Domestic Goddesses, cleaning the house in our well-fitted two to three inch heels, resting fully dressed three to four minutes on our freshly waxed floors, and having a chilled cocktail waiting for Him when he walked through the door, the scent of martini wafting gently over the smell of floor wax, pot roast, and a fresh Lysol douche.

In the seventies, we had two paths: Angry Feminist with Granola partner, or Total Woman. Like the Domestic Goddess, the Total Woman was expected to manage the household competently but unlike Betty Crocker, be a competent seductress who (probably) also gave head. I don't recall that head is mentioned in the Total Woman book, but since every page is basically a hymn to penis power (particularly the higher wage) it might as well be.

In the 80's, Roseanne Barr took the piss out of the Domestic Goddess, and we permed our bangs to amazing heights.

The 90's brought us the Promise Keepers, "good" Christian men who banded together and vowed to actually honor their marriage vows and to bring home the bacon to boot.

Anything after that is kind of a fog to me, having been expatriated for so long. But one thing is sure: at 48 I realize the value of having another income to buoy up the family, and if your husband not only changes the lightbulbs but can support you well enough so that all you have to do is have your nails done and play canasta--and you're happy with this--then more power to you. Happiness has a lot to do with the choices you make, and if you are lucky enough to be in the position where you're happy being at home, washing the clothes or watching other people do it, then enjoy. If you want to work, then enjoy your career. Having kids? Enjoy them too.

I also got to thinking about this: I always wanted to be a housewife, but no one hired me for the job. So, having a bit of free time on my hands this week, as well as the influence of a plethora of pain-killing drugs due to a root canal gone bad, I spent some time trolling on the Net, learning exactly how to be if not a Total Woman, at least someone who has a few more dates. Enter The Modern Siren.

The Modern Siren is a program I found which promises that by simply changing my vibe and focusing more on myself, I can have men drooling over me. For only $199 dollars I can enroll in a video course that can change my life. Some of the tools were sent to me: they are, to my jaundiced eye, actually viable techniques, but there's something in me that rebels against "imagine you are painting yourself with love while the man you want to attract watches you. Concentrate on this image the next time you're in his presence." I immediately picture myself in a staff meeting, dipping my fingers in an imaginary cup of love and anointing myself while He stares at me longingly--and I burst out laughing. I can't see this, me dripping love on myself while being lectured about Form Tutors and House points. Anyone who knows me well enough to know what sorts of things I DO think about in those staff meetings can be sure that I am not dipping my fingers into anything in my head, I'm probably working out the kinks in a new tomato sauce recipe or figuring out how to conduct three simultaneous new student interviews while also giving meaningful instruction to my class.

My friend Teri who, like me, is single and of a certain age, asked me what I do believe it. It's simple: I believe that you can trick and coerce people in to feeling an initial attraction, but that's not the way I want to win. I believe that most men are not going to leave a woman who throws the occasional random Steak and Blow Job day (or the equivalent for whatever kink he has). I think of head as a form of communion, of communication, and of sex as the best description I ever heard, from the British marriage service: with my body, I thee worship. I believe in treating your partner well and receiving the same treatment in return: I believe in being faithful, but if a married man strays my way, that's your problem, not mine. Most of my friends are married men and quite frankly I could snap my fingers and have almost any one of them, but guess what--that's not me, and that't not what I want. As dearly as I love my male friends, there's not one I feel that happiness with. Since they do confide in me, I can tell women (in general) one thing: quit whining, and appreciate what you've got. Just because I am not going to poach your man, don't think there are other women, particularly very young beautiful Chinese women, who have my scruples. Trust me, any guy, ANY GUY, in the world, can hook up within a week with a young beautiful girl here who will indeed give him steak and blow jobs every day of the week, until that ring is on her finger. You want proof? Go to the Hello Kitty restaurant. Trust me, every guy in there is going to get laid that night. And trust me when I say once the marriage happens, the lovin' goes out the window and she takes control of the purse strings and meals out cease as well.

But I digress: what do I believe? That marriage is the beginning of developing something bigger and better. That it's worth waiting for someone who melts your bones and makes you smile. That just because the one person who did this for me disappeared abruptly from my life, that doesn't mean it's over for me. I know I can love because I have loved: if I do end the rest of my days alone, I'm fine with that, because I know I won't have cheated my way into someone's heart, and can therefore sleep peacefully at night, knowing I haven't hurt anyone. If that isn't attractive to the right sort of man, then I don't know what is. But I'm sure not going to spend 199 bucks to find out.

Man Hunt

I've been thinking about this Man Thing that's going on in my life. One of the reasons I have stayed single is the horrific marriage I had which kind of left me scarred and stupid--other reasons include the fact that I lived a very isolated existence as an expat raising a child on her own, coupled with the fact that I'm in a female-dominated profession. Plus, there aren't a whole lot of single guys my age out there, and getting freakishly fat a few years ago didn't help. Also--I have great taste in friends, and lousy taste in men I date. Lots of factors contribute to my general singleness, including the biggets one: I have never met a single (unattached)  man I thought should be with me the rest of my life.

I have met married men that became good friends, I have met female friends, married or not, whom I will know my entire life (if I'm lucky) but I have yet to meet someone single of whom I could say, "My life would be so much better if I stick with you. I'll be happier if I have you to come home to, I'll have someone who has my back. Be mine." For me it's not about the house and the ring and the car--it's more about the basic premise of  "I enjoy the HELL out of your company and I trust you do to right by both of us. Come on, let's get going." According to my psych professor, if you don't have a "successful" relationship in your teens you are never going to have one as an adult. Well, I didn't have a "successful" relationship in my teens and if that fact alone dooms me to being single forever, so be it.

But I did think about how nice it would be to have someone I can count on to play Scrabble with, or to mess around in the kitchen with. So I thought about drafting an ad. I'm not sure where I would run it, but it would go something like this:

Woman of words seeks man of numbers.
Wanted: someone who thinks I'm cute and funny and who wants to make me laugh. Me: I can cook like a dream and will actually wash your clothes, separating the whites from the darks, and using Downy,  but you have to put them away. I support myself and my child, you support yourself and your dependents. What's left over we can blow on books, food, music, travel, and maybe a brick oven. Looks not important, but do be healthy enough to tie up your own laces. Love of organic gardening and microbrewing a plus. Must love my dogs. I promise to not be catty about your exes, and will tolerate if not love your pets, friends, children, quirks and colleagues. Klingon a plus but not a necessity. Mean people need not apply.


What do you think? Does it cover everything? I think the microbrewing eliminates the closet fairies, as does the suggestion I will bleach your whites, which means handling them first. Looks? Is that too harsh? Honestly, I am sick of handsome and the problems that go along with being goodlooking. How about a nice, normal face? Good grooming but not manscaping? How about clean? What's more attractive than that? I had a HUGE crush on someone once who was probably one of the least attractive men on the planet in terms of facial features and to some extent body shape but OH what a mind! So kind, so funny, so thoughtful, so effing smart! And such a good husband--his wife lit up when he entered the room (hell, we all did) and everyone felt better for having come into contact with this gorgeous, gorgeous man who looked like a frog but treated every woman like a princess.

I'm not asking for someone to support me--I do that just fine, thank you. I don't want someone to shoulder the responsibility of putting my daughter through school: that's a private family matter and we're coping with it just fine. You know what I want? Just like the title of the movie says, I Just Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. Swing dancing a plus.

Feelin' Groovy

The lowdown is this: it finally hit me on that gut-level where real change occurs that the guy who has been causing me all this heartache is a real shit head and as soon as I realized that, my body radiated relief and joy and I felt a million times better. Of course, the box of See's candy I was wolfing down at the time might have helped too. I have given up having chocolate excesses and cookie binges except for once a month or so (and have much better cholesterol as a result) but this was a special day. Each piece was a revelation and with each bite my courage rose and the hands on my moxie meter climbed back up to "mojo-licious" and has stayed there despite the resultant sugar crash half an hour later.

I have the day off. I might spend it visiting some elderly friends who don't get out much, and then go on to the Beauty Parlor for a new set of false eyelashes, and a foot massage, THAT's how good I feel.

He's a jerk, I can't do anything about that, just keep on moving. How nice to finally release the tension and worry--is he The One? What did I do wrong? How do I play it if he calls--should I pretend nothing happened?--and just get back to being myself, killer pedicure and all. Now that I don't have to be discreet, I might cough up one or two stories about this person, and then you'll see what all the fuss was about. I guarantee these skanky stories will blow your socks off and it's a shame I have to use fake names for fear of being sued (or worse.) Give me a day or two and I'll start posting the good, the bad, and the coyote ugly. I can hardly wait! 

How Any Guy Gets Laid in China

It's called Maggie's.
Walk in, buy a beer, leave with "company."
Or, simply breathe. Stand on a street corner. Pretend you don't speak any Chinese (if you do.) Within ten minutes, a girl desperate to "improve her English" will come to help you. Never mind that there's a young foreign mother struggling with a baby not two feet away from you-- a woman who might need a hand getting herself and baby into a cab, for example--YOU are the magnet here. You are the one with "Mr. Green Card" stamped across your forehead in invisible ink. You have money, you have no friends here to take you aside and say, "Dude, she is SO a whore!" and better yet, culture shock is giving you a serious case of Lack of Judgment.
 With luck, you'll be engaged by New Year's, and with even more luck, you won't realize until well into the marriage that she can't really speak English, she doesn't like you, and that the likelihood that she's still seeing her true love while you're slaving away teaching English at Wall Street is strong.
Well, remember this, Bucko: I told you so.

Names

 I am by profession a teacher, and I can vouch that there are certain names I hear which immediately send a shiver down my spine, as I associate that name with a particular and particularly vile student. Chinese students often choose "names" which are merely words translated into Chinglish from their original tongue, thus I have students with names like Happyway and Swallow (not an imperative form of the verb, by the way.) Naming a pet can be a nightmare as I can't think of a typical "English" name without recalling at least one student with the same moniker.Since I have about 150 students right now, that's a large pool of names I cannot draw from, even if I DID want to name the new (temporary) puppy Ballet or Pony or Jickson.

Other names seem to indicate trouble or heartbreak. Both Sissy and I have gone through hell in our lives with men named Richard, for example. They're either teachers from hell, or boyfriends who won't commit, or drunken troublemakers who borrow money and never come back. "What is it about men named Dick who break our hearts?" I asked Sissy. She replied, "Don't trust your heart to someone named after genitalia. Remember what a bitch Aunt Fanny was?"

So there's my advice: if you're stupid enough to like and trust someone named after body parts, make sure you're signed up at a really good gym so that when the inevitable happens and you're left heart sick and reeling with pain, you can at least go to the gym and work yourself into a semblance of sanity. That's where I have been all week, throwing punches and cursing the day I ever gave the smallest slip of my heart--let alone my phone number--to a big stupid Dick. I am sure there are really great guys out there named Richard, I just don't know any. And you know what? Men named Bob are EVEN WORSE. If he's still called Bobby--run. There's always a reason he never made it to Rob.

Back in Black

So, I was sitting in Lily's Nails when my cell phone buzzed with a new text and it was indeed but yet another disaster in the romance department. I immediately upped my order from a quick polish change to a full treatment pedicure (with massage),  manicure,  and a new set of false eyelashes (guaranteed to last a month--no mascara needed!) As three different women worked on me simultaneously--one on my feet, one on my hands and one behind me glueing my eyes shut -- I had several different thoughts flash through my head. First, it would take a single nip of the cuticle scissors to blind me (if I jerked or moved, tweezers would plunge straight into my eyeballs.) Second, I had just paid a lot of unknown women to touch me, and third, this was probably the closest to group sex that I would ever get--or, for that matter, any sex at all.

The pedicure was great--it included a salt scrub and moisturing treatment which had my plump calves slathered with lotion, wrapped in baggies and thrust into electronic booties. The massage was to die for--I am learning to relax into the massage and not run screaming away from probing knuckles (on my feet, that is.) Eyelashes--nice, not too flashy. Manicure--lovely, but ruined within 24 hours as my nails are like cellophane and I tend to use them as tools. As I contemplated the ruin of my manicure hours later, my phone buzzed with another text: That Man wanted to see me, and I compared my fragile little nails to my soul: is it there to be used and ruined, or honored and allowed to grow strong?

I said the hell with it, and rather than replying, hit "delete" then "block sender."

Yay me.

What Does It Say...

What does it say about my readers that the bulk of you are driven to this site by typing "Get Laid in China" into the Google Search Engine?

Should I put in more recipes, or concentrate on the folly of dating here? I could post the most disturbing email I have ever received, which was entitled "How (Not) to Stage an Orgy" but I was kind of saving it for an Abnormal Psych class I'm taking this fall. Besides, once I start down that slippery slope of writing about other people's dark obsessions I am far less likely to write about mine, which revolve mostly around books, cooking, and singing.

A note: for a long time, Jennifer Lancaster's website, http://www.jennsylvania.com/, was blocked in China, as was Ayun Halliday's site http://www.dirtysugarcookies.com/

I finally got a VPN so I could read both. Jennifer's site was promptly unblocked--I guess the government decided that a nation of females devoted to a surly ex-sorority goddess were hardly like to stage a revolution--so now any old yahoo can read her online (and laugh--I know I do.) However, Ayun, either your site has been cleverly confounded so that your last recipe for Monkfish McNuggets is the only post we can see here (VPN or not) OR you have stopped writing your blog. Dear Lady, you are busy, but I can't tell you how many times I have scored from your pumpkin pie recipe, which I christened "Naughty Pumpkin Pie" after the movie Waitress, and I sure wish you'd start food writing again. But the spirit moves where it will, so if that's the deal, and you are not food blogging, I'll accept whatever you are writing about. Just wish I could get your books--and Jennifer's--in China. Sigh.

As for you who read the Internet to find out how to get laid in China--when I figure it out, trust me, I'll tell you.

A Funny Postscript, and a Recipe for Weenie Gravy

Got a call this afternoon from a friend who had heard  via the grapevine that That Man decided I was "too fucking smart" for him. She challenged him on this and reports the conversation went like this:

"What do you mean, Xanne is too fucking smart for you? You just mean she's intelligent, right? Or do you mean you'd like her better if she WEREN'T smarter than you?"

That Man: "Uh, I don't know. Sheesh. What's the big deal?

Friend:  "Your comment is offensive to smart women, that's what. Are you saying she'd be ok to date if she had no brains?"

Long pause. Then: "Honestly, I don't know why I said that. Maybe it's because her tits aren't very big for her size."

Ouch. 

In honor of that comment, I present Weenie Gravy. You'd think it would be one tiny weenie in a whole lot of hot water, but it's not. The water is thickened somewhat.

Now, if I had to make this a deluxe version, I'd buy high-quality frankfurters, which is NOT an oxymoron, and I'd brown the hell out of them in some sweet hot butter, and use that as the basis for my roux. But this is a dish for a stupid asshole who hurt my feelings (not to mention being my old friend's fourth stepfather's favorite dish) so I give you the horrible recipe as I learned it.

Boil a couple of hot dogs in about a cup of hot water. When the dogs are cooked, pour off the dogs and the water, and heat the now-empty sauce pan over the flame until it's dry. Add two tablespoons of fat--bacon grease, butter, oleo, what have you, and allow it to melt. Fancy cooks might use a combination of bacon fat and butter, it depends on how much you love the heart health of the person you're inflicting this on--er, cooking this for. When it melts, add two tablespoons of flour, stirring it well into the mix, and allow it to bubble all over. This bubbling cooks the roux (pronounced "roo" to rhyme with, well, "poo") and gives it a cooked taste. Again, if you were all fancy-like, you could cook the hell out of it to a dark brown and make it sort of Cajun, but you're cooking it for some weenie, like the jerk who thinks my tatas are too small to waste any time on, so just cook it a bit. (Yeah, because big tits will bail you out of jail, or cook you dinner, or be there for you.) Then add that cup or so of weenie water, mix, and let it boil 'til thick and---- I almost wrote "yummy." This thing could boil 'til hell freezes over and it would never be yummy. I suppose if I made it with good quality franks, butter/bacon fat, a thick and dense stock made from high-quality meats and a hit of cream, not to mention assorted fine seasonings, it might be palatable.

But as it is now--a thinnish greyish sauce with hunks of pink weenie--it is suitable for jerks to eat. Eat this, Jerk, and know that my precious self is filet mignon while you are pig lips and sphincters held together in a gelatinous mass. (If only you weren't such a damn fine kisser.)

Will take a picture, later, when I stop kicking the furniture...

That Sudden Feeling

So, maybe it happens like this: there's this guy you've known for a long time and you've worked together a bit off and on for a while, but you can remember meeting him and thinking at the time, "Meh, not for me." Then one day there's something that happens: you find yourself blushing,  and swimming in the pools of his eyes. You have a "coffee" after work that turns into a dinner. You have a real official date: he gives you a respectful good night kiss (no tongue) that curls your toes. You drift off to sleep thinking, WOW! Why didn't I see this before?

A few days pass: you know he's kind of into that macho thing and hell, since he's your age and never been married you don't expect this to go too fast, right? Right. At least that's what you tell yourself when the phone rings--which you jump up to answer and almost throw out the window in a fit of anger when the person ringing Isn't Him. You bump into him at work: he sort of waves at you and ducks away quickly. You think, oh, shit, not this again. You think of that kiss: my god, he held your face and brushed his thumb gently across your mouth, then kissed your eyelids, before planting one on you, one of the best kisses you've ever had--and you think, what the HELL? A mutual friend takes you out to lunch, ostensibly to discuss the lining of her new coat. It's a ruse. She tells you that she'd had cocktails with him the night before and he confessed after his third Dirty Mother that as much as he likes you, you are--and I quote --"too fucking smart for him."

What do you do? Do you run towards him shrieking, "I am SO NOT too smart for you," which you then prove by making really, really bad choices, largely in the monkey lovin' department, just to show you're a fool and therefore worthy of his attention? Or do you suck it up and put this down to experience and move on, a little sadder, a little wiser, and still thinking of that kiss, wondering if, in the fullness of time, it is your last, ever.

Cancelled Dates

Let's say you're me, and a friend sends you a text saying, Hey, let's meet up Saturday evening and hang out. You're going to be working not far from your friend's place and you finish around six. Your friend knows the place where you work--hell, he went to school there--and he agrees. You text that you're not quite sure when you finish that day but you'll find out Saturday afternoon and let him know.

You get to work, find out you're done around 5:30, and send another text saying Hey, done at 5:30, meet you at the south gate at 5:45. Then--less than an hour before you are supposed to meet, your friend texts you. He can't make it. Busy. Has to watch his kids.  Do you a) send back a message saying Gosh, so glad you're spending time with your family, how I miss having a wee one around or b) send back a message saying "YOU FUCKING INCONSIDERATE BASTARD, YOU COULDN'T HAVE TOLD ME THIS EARLIER? I TURNED DOWN AN INVITATION TO COCKTAILS WITH A SINGLE STRAIGHT GUY FOR YOU!"

Guess which one I sent? Yes, I'm stupid that way. I may have sobbed a bit in the cab on the way home, but at least when I got there, I didn't hit either the cupcakes or the liquor cabinet, so score one to me.