The Power of Two

One woman, sitting alone in a café sipping coffee and typing at her laptop; no one speaks to her.

Three women chatting at a corner table in a dimly lit bar; no one disturbs their intimidating conversation.

One woman, sitting, standing, chatting, laughing, with one other woman, and their table is like a magnet pulling the force of twenty horny men.

I call it, “the power of two”.

When I arrived in DC two months ago, I was prepared to endure two months of loneliness. Loneliness was an emotion that I had become comfortable with when I lived in DC in 2003. But within a few days I had met Tatiana. And my spectacular friend March was throwing a lavish birthday celebration that gave me the perfect chance to invite her out.

March rented out the Blue Room. She hired a DJ and a photographer and she invited the most colorful, diverse and hip collection of DC peeps I had ever seen together in one room. It was almost like a New York party, but for the arrival of a gaggle of gate crashing frat boys wearing backwards caps and sporting Tevas. According to them, they were way too cool for this scene.

They decided to move on to a ‘better bar’ called “Chiefite” and threw an invitation our way.

But they wouldn't have spoken to me had I been hugging a Diet Coke, hanging out on the dance floor by myself. I have been that girl too many times in new cities and new places. They asked me because I was with my new DC BFF. And two women channeling Madonna on the dance floor, is just the right number. Not too pathetic looking, not too intimidating. Just right.

After their fine display of wedding reception moves, how could we resist observing their original interpretations of the shopping cart, sprinkler and lawn mower at the next venue. Besides, 80% of the men in the current bar were gay. Out for adventure and a little flirtation, we decided to follow.

Walking down the street alone on my way to the party; few heads swiveled to watch the sway of my hip. Walking down the street with Tati’s arm locked in mine; boys whistled, men fell over themselves on the sidewalk, guys tried to catch our eyes, dudes walked up and started conversations.

Arriving at Cheifites, Tati and I danced some more. Men lined the dance floor to watch. Having a partner to play off of, made me groove a little deeper and sweat a lot more. The line of men just moved closer. We escaped before the lights came up, sweaty bodies meeting the chill of the DC spring night.

One woman, out for the night, meeting new people, dancing with strangers; replays her favorite moments of the night in her head as she walks home alone.

One woman, in the company of another fantastic woman, out for the night, meeting new people, dancing with each other; they lock arms and replay the evening between them as they walk each other home.

This is the kind of fun that doesn’t happen sitting at home isolating.

I call it, "the power of two."

Raindrops on Roses...

Not sure if it is because I only had one cup of coffee today, or because I broke a tooth, but I'm tired, irritable and nursing boredom with a side of bad-attitude. I'm wallowing in self pity. I'm lonely. I'm weighed down by a guilty conscious. Hungover from the myriad of negative behavior that sprang from last weeks boredom.

When you are bored, you tend to think too much. Life spent in the analysis of ones self, magnifies every flaw. Oh yes, and when you think too much, everything is about you.

Selfish, Bored, fatigued, sporting a broken tooth, a bad-attitude, self-pity, and loneliness. I am remarkably good company tonight.

So, rather than expose my friends to my own favorite brand of doom and gloom, I have made a concerted effort to isolate. At times like these, I turn to some of my favorite methods:

#1 SHOPPING: Spent Sunday and Monday burning up the Amex at Feilenes and Loehmanns. When shopping to quell pain and/or boredom, the focus is on quantity not quality. The more shopping bags, the more shoes, the more tiny Ziplocks holding spare buttons that you will find lying around on the counter tops the next morning, the better you feel.

But even when you have the money to burn, even when you can afford twenty Marc Jacobs tissue paper tee shirts, you know you are doing something destructive. Shopping still feels empty at the end of the day.

I was smarting from a family visit that dragged out my dirty laundry. I shopped to buy new things to make me look better on the outside. Since the insides were not feeling very pretty.

And the amount of time spent mentally shuffling through my closet, preening at my image in the mirror, plotting the shoes I would buy to go with that skirt, kept me firmly rooted in my own head. And also kept me unable to be present in the moment to those around me.

The guilt of the wasted money. The pain of the lost connections. I turned to a second favorite to avoid feeling any of these emotions.

#2 DATING: I note a startling inverse relationship between a plethora of exciting and challenging things going on in my life and the number of times I check my Friendster profile. Considering the addictive-like quality of my Friendster stalking as of late, I think it is safe to say that I am bored.

Boredom sparks a mad scientist chase for human interaction. And since I was old enough to make-out in the back of a car, I've known that the easiest, quickest and most reliable form of human interaction is dating.

Ever since I located to Washington DC and updated my Friendster and Myspace, I have been getting twenty new messages a day. I had to disable my e-mail pop-ups so that the barrage of incoming messages would stop disturbing my evenings at home.

Boredom turns the fun and harmless act of internet dating into a callused mouse finger. Like a morphine addicted rat, I keep hitting the button for another fix. Anything done addictively or to excess, just does not feel as good the next morning. It is to the point where I dread opening my e-mail. The messages only serve to remind me that I am lonely for a little human interaction. A little one-on-one, human interaction.

Perhaps this is why I went out with Frenchy when he called me Monday night. Perhaps this is why I asked out that Alanon boy I've been crushing on since February. Perhaps that is why when I met a guy at the Gala last night, I came home, googled him and came up with a bogus reason to drop him an e-mail. We are talking serious stalker behavior here!

And after a while, the tolerance has been built up and it takes more and more to sustain the high. No matter how many flirtatious e-mails I've exchanged, I'm still antsy. It's not working. I can still feel. Thus I turned to the group.

#3 GROUP ISOLATION: I've got a host of new girl and guy friends in DC. On any given night, I can be out in a raucous group. The other night, I soaked up a hot spring evening with four old DC girlfriends in an outside cafe along 18th street. But as the sun slid behind the buildings the chill in the air made me long for the warmth of a real connection.

Fighting the control freak within, I observed as my women friends spent the first hour discussing politics, and the second, laughing over inside jokes into glasses of Happy Hour Syrah. By their third bottle of wine their eyes sparkled and they were gushing over one another, discussing how much they had missed each other in the month since they had last met up.

Politics, the drink, reliving the past, all ways of passing four hours without ever passing a level of superficial conversation. I was nowhere closer to finding out what was going on these womens hearts and nowhere closer to them. I walked away feeling lonely.

Saturday night I met up with friends at a house party. Determined to insert myself, within an hour I had taken over the grill, organized a game of charades and led the group in a witty exchange of political back and forth. My normally welcoming and warm personality morphed into Julie McCoy, cruise director.

Obsessed with controlling the groups interaction, I stopped relating to people on a deeper lever. The very thing I was craving, I let get away from me by giving in to the group dynamic.

Isolation. My best friend. My favorite thing to do when I move to a new places.

My first six months in NYC were spent shopping, dating and trying to make friends. I went to every sample sale. I went out with every man that asked. I went everywhere I was invited. I aquired an amazing wardrobe. I went out with some very hot men.

To further my social ambitions, I had parties at my house. I organized dinner parties, comedy nights, egg decorating brunches, cookie baking days, tree trimming afternoons, birthday parties, ladies retreats and girls-nights-out. I built a group of three into a group of twelve with a few phone calls. And once they arrived, I began my dance. Keeping everyone talking and laughing was meant to have the side effect of everyone loving me. But at the end of the night, as my friends streamed out into the New York night, I was alone again, surrounded by piles of their dirty dishes.

Coming down here to DC for a few months kicks up old behavior. I am back in a new place and a new city, I am drawn to want to collect people and generate adventure. I am prone to my many favorite forms of isolation.

There is the kind of isolation spent at home with take-out Chinese and Netflix, and the kind spent hiding out under the mask of superficial group interaction, working the shoe aisle at Barneys CoOp and searching the files of Friendster. I have only just recently discovered my penchant for the latter.

So here I am, sitting at the computer, wearing my new Prada dress, an in-box filled with messages from potential suitors, a host of unreturned phone calls in my voicemail begging me to come out for the night.

Yet here I sit. Disinterested in sitting still. Lonely, but reluctant to human interaction. Avoiding listening to my feelings. Bored. Tired. A broken tooth.

Isolating.

Blue Easter

So there I sat on a lonely Easter holiday. Separated from my family. Separated from my Manhattan. The patterns of my previous relationships staring back at me.

It was my day to complete my fourth step. In AA's twleve steps, step four is taking a personal inventory. You make a list of all the people you resent, you write out why, you try to assign what part of your basic instincts that person triggered, and then you write your part. You try to focus on yourself and figure out what actions of your own set the wrecking ball in motion.

Sure, that guy yelled at me in the street. But, I did run over his dog when I was riding my bike on the sidewalk. It’s not okay for him to tell me I’m a nasty ho-bag who mustn’t have had a mama to teach me manners, but it’s not okay for me to be riding my bike on the sidewalk either.

You get the picture.

After this painful exercise in self reflection, you isolate resentments that relate to the men you’ve dated or slept with and you make a separate list of all the ways you harmed these men. It's called a sex inventory.

I call it 'dangerous'. An excuse to sit in self-pity and think you are the most horrible person in the world.

In black and white, I'm reminded of how I meet men, how I get into relationships with them, when and why I sleep with them, what I expect from them, and how I run away from them. It’s a sloppy collage of repeated patterns, insecurities, frivolous fears and utter self-centeredness.

At the end of this exercise, I’m left wondering: Have I have ever really loved a man?

Because to me, true love does not have expectations. And my patterns show me that I’ve rarely entered into a relationship with a man without a hundred pre-existing measuring sticks of how things should look, how I should feel, how they should feel and how they should express it.

An insurance company won’t pay for your pre-existing conditions. But I somehow think it is fair to ask a man to enter into a relationship with me based on pre-existing expectations.

I called my father.

We talked about the weather and then I asked him when he knew he was in love with my mother. If he was like me, it would be love at first sight. But what he said, surprised me.

“It must have been about two years after we started dating. ”

Two years? Two years?? I wouldn’t date a man for more than three months if he wasn’t ready to profess his love. Two years? Are you snorting mom's cancer meds?

“Well, keep in mind. We didn’t have sex on the third date back then.”

That made sense.

In my mind, sex almost always equals expectations. Sex, or even the highly sexualized act of flirting, signals that a friendship has passed into a new category and now has guidelines for behavior. Is it possible to date without sexpectations?

And in this modern dating scene, who can date without sending out sexual signals. Perhaps this was possible in High School, studying late at night with that boy that sat behind you in Spanish class for two years, when suddenly your friendship dissolveds into a clash of intertwined braces. Today, the mere act of ‘going on a date’, sitting at a table with another person, grabbing someone’s arm when you are walking down a cobblestone street, brushing up against one another in a bar, is all heavy with the anticipation of sex. It’s nearly impossible to get to know someone without the hint of sexual promise. I live in New York City, where competition dogs your every designer shoe step. If you don't throw it out there, you might lose them to the red head standing in line behind you.

“It took some time.”

In Manhattan, time is your most precious commodity. Who has time to stop and get to know someone? See past their immediate flaws. There are hundreds of eligible men in this town, ready to step in as soon as I pick one off for using the wrong shampoo. I don’t have to be patient when there is more than enough supply for my demand.

My father went on, “How could I have been in love with your mother any sooner. It took me two years just to get to know her. And how can you really be in love with someone that you hardly know?”

And how can you really get to know someone once you begin weighing them against a lifetime of built-up expectations? And where do these expectations come from?

"You love your brother, Jane. Now whether or not he constitutes a man, I don’t know."

I love my baby brother. Does that count? One day, I just knew. He was visiting me and were playing racquet ball and he had a grand mal seizure on the court. I called 9-1-1 and lay on the ground next to his strong 22 year old frame to hold it still. Lying on the ground with him, calming him as he came around to consciousness, I clung to the image of an eight year old boy with gangly arms, a bloated belly, red galoshes and Dad’s old army helmet. I remembered making him laugh in the car by making funny faces over the back seat. There are few pains that a back scratch and ill-tuned lullaby wouldn’t temporarily relieve. But while he struggled with his helplessness, his eyes betrayed fear and I saw a pain that I could not make better.

I couldn’t leave his side for the next 36 hours. I had the nurse bring a cot into his hospital room and bought him six different kinds of Ben’n’Jerry’s ice cream that I watched slowly melt on his bed side stand while he slept. I would have traded places with him and taken any and more pain just to save him the humility of his body’s weakness. After that day, he could scream obscenities at me, eat off my plate, talk with his mouthful, chew three pieces of Bubblicious at a time and blow bubbles in my face, show up three hours late to dinner and loan my favorite pair of shoes to his girlfriend without ever threatening my affections. That’s love.

Dad told me to put down my pen. He told me to go outside.

“You’re right, you’re right.”

“I have to fix lunch for your mother. Jesus, that woman never gets enough grilled cheese.”

“Thanks Dad. I appreciate this. Happy Easter. I Love you.”

“You too."

Sober Dating

I had a date this weekend. Met a guy for coffee. He was funny and charming and handsome and smart. And best of all, he seemed totally into me. Coffee turned into brunch, brunch turned into more coffee. We sat in an outside cafe in Georgetown for about five hours, talking. Then, he asks me why I don't drink.

We are comfortable at this point so I say, "I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober for thirteen years. So where did you grow up again?"

He thinks for a minute. Takes a sip of coffee. Looks at me and says, "I've been thinking about doing something about my drinking."

Mother fucker. I think, but don't say.

So I tell him my story. He encourages me to go on. I switch from flirty possibility mode to twelve step call mode. I tell him what it was like for me, what happened and what I'm like now. I tell him about meetings in the area. He asks questions. A lot of questions. He tells me he wants to stop but he doesn't know how.

I walk him to the closest clubhouse and we pick up a meeting schedule and a big book. He gives me a quick hug goodbye and tells me he wants to try out meetings. He calls me this morning to tell me he went to his first meeting and it was great. He knows he belongs. And he is so grateful.

Great.

This marks the fourth date in the past year that went something like this. Just call me the Mary Poppins of recovery. At my firm, you get a bonus for every new employee you recruit.

Can I get my toaster oven now?

Balkan Wars

My first memory of Sarajevo was the drive between the airport and the hotel. The airport is surrounded by bombed buildings, separate entrances that divide the city between Serb and Bosniak, piles of rubble and a smattering of bullet holes in places you find your eye being led.

The center of a billboard with a half naked woman straddling a chair and advertising panty hose

My stay in Sarajevo was short. A driver picked me up and we drove five hours to Bijeljina, a small Serb town along the border. Sometime in September, I was chosen to monitor an election in Tuzla.

My first memory of Tuzla was Sherazada.

“My full name is Sherazada, but you can just call me Sher.”

She thrust her bony and thin hand across the table to meet mine half way. She looked 30 years old. But in the last few months, I had learned to take the age of a someone living in this region and subtract at least five years for the war. She was likely 25.

She quickly pulled her hand away and stuck it back into the warmth of the down vest that rode up around her ears as she hunched her shoulders and tucked her head into the lining. She fidgeted to stay warm and quell the creeping cold of the cool Tuzla, Bosnia September.

She popped her red nose up to tell me amongst clouds of frozen breath “I’ll be your translator.”

“You speak great English Sher. It’s almost American.”

Her body stopped bobbing for warmth; she looked me in the eye and raised one eyebrow. “I am American.”

I blushed.

“How culturally incorrect of me. I’m so sorry. I just assumed.”

“I was born here. But my father married an American woman during the war and now I have US citizenship. I live in Nebraska. You speak English well too. Where are you from?”

“I see, I’m so sorry.”

“Forget it.” She absolved my embarrassment by returning to her shivering.

“Jane. I’m from Seattle. Nice to meet you.”

I gave her my outstretched hand. And she took it.

There was nothing that physically distinguished Sher from the other local volunteers. She shared large eyes, teeth that needed fixing and a cool stare that hid horror stories. But Sher held her shoulders back more like the men in the group. She walked tall and always jutted out her jaw before she began a sentence. Sher looked people in the eye.

When she spoke, she enunciated all her sentences with careful pauses. Bosnian words flew out of her mouth like a woman scorning her child. I couldn’t understand a word that she spoke, but I felt lucky I wasn’t on the receiving end of what was coming out of her mouth.

When she spoke English she was confident but gentle, like the girl sitting next to me in History class. She understood every cultural pun, witty jab or complicated rambling sentence that I sent her direction.

Standing in the cold Tuzla morning air, I had no idea the adventure this woman's friendship was about to bring me or how she would change my life.

Dayton Agreement

"Do you have AIDS?"

“What?” I spit out an incredulous laugh and half a mouth full of Turkish coffee. I wasn't sure if I had heard him correctly through his thick Bosnian accent.

“Do – you -have, AIDS?”

These were hardly the first words I expected him to speak.

Kasmir carefully rolled his cigarette in the ash tray to bring the cherry tip to a pencil point. He looked up at me from behind a swirl of smoke.

He couldn’t look me in the eye for long. It would have been inappropriate, according to Sher. But according to Sher's rules, it was also inappropriate for him to be sitting alone in a room with me.

Sher had spent the previous evening lecturing me on the customs of rural Muslim farmers in Bosnia. She filled me with small town tales of gossip and girls who’s reputations had been forever tainted by being caught driving in a car alone with a man or speaking to him alone in a large gathering.

Despite his twenty-eight years and his boldness at that moment, Kasmir was still a child. His soft cheeks blushed easily and his chocolate brown eyes seemed only to be stealing glances before they were hidden by the tips of his long dark lashes.

Since most Bosnians look ten years older than their actual age, I attributed Kasmir's youthful glow to the age he was when he stopped growing emotionally.

Sher told me that at sixteen years of age, his home was the front line of the war being waged in the Bosnian country side. Early in the war, his father and many other young husbands left to fight elsewhere. This left Saptna to be defended by teenage boys and aging grandfathers. His mother harbored the neighbor boys who had already lost their families and homes, providing them food and shelter. When the fighting would reach a stretch of cease-fire, Kasmir would count the men returning for his mothers cooking and warm blankets. He would note with innocent disappointment that one of his new friends had not made it back.

“He’s dead.” His mother would tell him.

“Set the table lazy boy.”

Kasmir grew up in a culture of war. His mother wouldn’t allow him to leave the house, for fear he would never return. So his education about foreigners had been painted by coca-cola ads in foreign magazines and MTV videos.

Somewhere amongst this education was the idea that all American girls were running around studio 54 shooting heroin, having casual sex and contracting HIV.

"No Kasmir. I don't have AIDS."

Sher poked her head in from the kitchen. "Do you need me to translate?"

"No thanks Sher. I think I've got this one."

Sher was following me across Bosnia, translating my four hour seminars on 'finding employment in a developing economy'. She was assigned to me when I monitored my first election. But we got along so easily that I requested her again for the seminar series.

She had taken it upon herself to sponsor my arrival into the Saptna social scene.

After an eighteen hour night quarantined to OSCE headquarters because of a terrorist threat, she took me home with her. I met her boyfriend Almir and her cousin Kasmir in a bleary eyed daze. I fell asleep in the back of the car, despite the risky twists and turns of Kasmir's driving.

When I woke up, I was lying on a polyester couch. Sher and her boyfriend were making coffee in the next room and Kasmir was sitting across from me. Watching me sleep.

He got up and returned with a demi cup of Turkish coffee and three sugar cubes.

I picked up the coffee cup with one hand and tried to wipe the sleep out of my eye with the other. As I raised the glass for a giant swig of caffeine, he gently reached across the table that divided us and stopped my hand.

He shook his head, picked up a sugar cube, and placed it between his teeth. Demonstrating the proper way to drink, he slurped the coffee through the sugar cube, just a little, put the cup back down, moved the sugar cube to his cheek and lit a fake Winston cigarette.

I followed.

Nation Building

Somewhere in Sapna, off a dirt road near the Serb border, watching him buy gas that comes in a recycled sprite bottle. I look at him and I know.

I am falling for Kasmir. Even though he speaks not a word of English.

It is the careful way he opens the door for me. It is the willingness he has to wake at 6:00 AM to make me coffee before I go to work. It is the way he bucks Bosnian tradition by insisting upon washing all my dishes.

Last weekend, Kasmir drove five hours from a contract job he had in Sarajevo, just to touch my face, hold my hand, kiss me good night, turn around and drive back.

Kasmir sees me. He can't hear my fancy talk. My witty comebacks. My puns. I can't manipulate him with my words. He can't understand my complaints and mood swings. He just sees my actions.

And I see his.

I see the way he cares for his little brother. I see the way he respects the women in his house. I see the hard work and focus he brings to even the most minuscule of tasks. I realize how much more all his risks mean, considering where we are.

I saw his courage when he arrived in the all Serb City outside his village just to hear me lead an employment seminar.

He sat in the group as we went around introducing ourselves by name.

“My name is Milos, I’m 32 and I live here in Zvornik. I am here to try and learn how to get a job.”

“Thank you Milos. Thank you for coming.”

I saw him squirm as the circle closed in towards him. I didn’t understand. Sher told me later, "A name in Bosnia reveals your religion."

His eyes pleaded with me. But I didn’t know.

“I am Kasmir.”

That was all he could say. He hung his head. The circle moved on.

But now everyone knew he was a Muslim. A Muslim from the one Muslim village that broke the military line during the war. The Muslim village that the army couldn’t take. They held on. They fought back with rusty shotguns and pitchforks.

Kasmir was sixteen, too young too fight. But old enough to run food to the men on the front lines. Old enough to bury the dead. Old enough to recognize some of the faces in the group.

Sher translated the entire seminar. It was the first time he could understand my every word. Kasmir listened to my words flow out of Sher for five hours.

Now, I watch as he pays the man for the gas with a loaf of his mother’s bread, wrapped in a yellow paper napkin. The man places his left hand on Kasmir's shoulder. They exchange words and look back at me in the car. Then they shake hands and Kasmir heads back towards the car smiling.

He get’s in the car, turns to look at me and widens his already contagious grin.

"You!" He annouces to the roof of the car.

We look at each other and start laughing. He touches my hair. I start playing with the radio. Nothing but Bosnian folk music.

He takes my hand off the radio and turns off the music.

He turns his whole body to face me in the car and he takes my hands.

“Oh Lord. We are getting serious.”

He is giddy, he is happy. Like he wants to tell me something exciting, but he can't. He takes my hands in his. He looks down at them and rubs his thumbs over my fingers while he speaks.

“I must tell you… today… amazing… I hear you…” he pauses, “Volim Te.”

“Huh?”

“Volim Te.”

“Whoa cowboy. Did you just say that you love me?”

It’s barely audible through the thick accent, but he says it again. In English this time.

“I love you.”

“You barely know me.”

“I love you."

"Dear God. That's insane.”

“Jane. I love you.”

“I've known you for two months.”

He takes my hand and places it on his heart. I can feel how fast it is beating.

“I know.”

I just stare at him. I don’t know what to say. I know very little. I know that I am leaving this country in one month. I know that this would never work outside of this country. I know that once I am surrounded by people who speak my language I will be caught up in the sarcasm and wordplay and the games and I won't notice the little things anymore. I know that when my feet feel the ground of New York City I will not miss Cevapcici and Turkish coffee. I know that I will forget about Kasmir before the end of the year. I know I will date many more men in my lifetime. I know that none of them will ever try this hard, or be this happy to understand me. I know that none of them will wake up at 6:00 AM to make me coffee.