Tests and Testosterone

So I missed yoga tonight, which has me feeling kind of annoyed, precisely the kind of feeling that yoga is meant to take away, no? It all started this afternoon when I glanced down (it's finally warm enough to go barefoot) and thought, "I can't do yoga next to someone and force them to look at feet that look like this!" I mean, sure, with my glasses off my feet are just adorable little peachy blobs at the bottom of my legs, but for someone with real vision it was not going to be pretty. I was working from home today -- the weather during my "spring break" (M-W of this week) was kind of eh but today it got beautiful, so I did a lot of my reading and e-mail from my deck -- and so decided to get a pedicure from one of the places just down the street, carefully calculating backwards so I'd have enough time for my toes to dry before I headed to yoga, about a 20 minute walk away. Except when doing my oh-so-precise calculations, I hadn't taken Hank into account. Yes, today in lieu of a small Vietnamese woman doing my pedicure (which does always make me feel a bit colonial, even though I am not French and have never said "Indochine") it was a slightly larger Vietnamese man, complete with thin mustache, long nails on the thumb and pinky of each hand, and a jaunty newsboy cap (like those of pre-baldness Britney Spears) worn at a slight angle on his head. Hank (an altered version of the American version of his Vietnamese name) weirdly and kind of sleazily hit on me for basically the entirety of my time in the chair, which was much longer than usual. He complimented me on the beauty of my arm hair, and stroked it. He asked if my breasts were real, as they were also just beautiful. Really, beautiful! (Wink here.) Did I have a boyfriend in Spookytown? Did I have a boyfriend in New York? Did I live alone? He had trained in massage when living in New York and would gladly give me a full body massage for far less than massage parlor prices. He's free on Sunday! He could show me the best place to eat pho and would buy me wine and take me dancing. I thought he was just kidding, or gay, or both, until about halfway through (in general, East and Southeast Asian men display no interest in me whatsoever), but the blowing on my toenails to dry them before the topcoat (this is not usual practice) really sealed the deal. Let's just say I did not give him my usual generous tip.

I had said earlier that I had been thinking of posting a little anti-male screed, but then had decided not to, in part because I am indeed working very hard on focusing on the positive right now (my epiphany yesterday that no matter how long I live here in Spookytown it will never really feel like home to me, so that my future plans need to take that into account, is both helping and hindering here). And I'm not anti-male, really, not at all. But I've just had to deal with so much nonsense in the last month or so that it is making me wonder if it is excruciatingly difficult to walk around with a lot of testosterone coursing through your system and still behave with integrity. Surely it's possible, given all the incredibly great men I know who are friends of mine, partners or husbands of friends of mine, or both. And yet I have to deal with things like the questionable pedicure (which sounds like an Edward Gorey book, now that I think about it) or being hit on in my own kitchen by Mr. Dishwasher Repairman. Or having someone at a conference dinner spend hours being charmingly and directedly flirtatious and plying me with drink and only after not spending the night with me (sweet; not my type, plus I'm not good with the conference hookup) somewhat punitively mention his girlfriend several times on the walk to the conference venue the next morning -- this after days of conversation where whoops! she had somehow miraculously never come up. Or being out with male friends or acquaintances and have them not answer their girlfriends' calls while with me, and then have them tell me about how they are lying/lied/will be lying about the fact that they were out with me even though our interactions are completely platonic. In every possible way. Which makes me feel kind of sleazy, even though I have only the most innocent of intentions. (Full disclosure: for two days least week I exchanged far too many e-mails, each one quite brief, with a long-distance unavailable crush, kind of like IMing for old people, until I realized there was no point in torturing myself and so what if he does like me more than his current girlfriend? and if I like spending time with him more than almost any other man I know [the also-not-a-viable-prospect Zen Boy the only exception in recent months]? What difference does it make? He'll never be able to offer me anything real. But those days with four e-mails apiece probably are something that shouldn't be reported to the GF.) Oh, not to mention the married or in-relationship men who write to me on my internet dating site and invite me to help them cheat on their wives or girlfriends (just got one today in fact). And there's more, but by now you surely have the general idea.

I guess there are two major conclusions I'm drawing from this, both of which, in the end, are in fact kind of positive. The first is my continued resolution to not be in a relationship rather than be with someone I'm kind of ambivalent about because it seems better than being alone. Stovie and I were talking about all this the other day and he pointed out that a lot of people just aren't that happy with the people they're with, but stay with them for whatever constellation of reasons. But then while in this not-so-fulfilling relationship, maybe there's the hookup with the cute fellow conference-goer from another country when far from home. Or one person becomes the jealous, checking-in-all-the-time type because there isn't a secure foundation and so everything and everyone starts to seem suspicious and like a threat, and so lying takes place, because how else can the non-jealous person have a life? The second is the reinforcement of my continued resolution to end up with someone that I can live in a transparent (and thus integrity-filled) relationship with. I don't mean telling everything all the time. But multiple phone calls a day, or knowing where your partner is at all times, or what's going on his life, this should all be because of life integration and interlinking and all the good things, not a defensive control mechanism. I see it in the lives of people around me, although not as many as I'd like to see. So surely I can find it for myself -- now if I could only figure out where...