I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places (25 page)

My ex cannot play the sound track to my next meet-cute.

This will probably not surprise you, but I don't like the song he wrote about our breakup. He's certainly entitled to his own spin on our parting, but that doesn't mean I have to dig it. Honestly, I could live with the fact that it oversimplifies things—there are only so many bars—but I hate that it reduces us to cliché.

We deserved better metaphors.

Did he forget his ex is a writer?

Though I confess, the chorus—a chorus about being free of me—got stuck in my head. It's very catchy, which is almost rude.

I had heard it before only because he released a video for it online, so at least I listened to it first in private. But while that mental preparation removed some of the lyrics' sting, it was a surreal and unpleasant experience to be surrounded by people dancing to the beat of breaking my heart.

But by far, the hardest part was hearing our happy love ballad back in rotation. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. And I don't blame him. It's a good song, and it's his product to sell.

But man, he sold it.

How did those words make him feel? Did they take him back like they did me? Or had he detached so much that the lyrics no longer held emotional truth, now they're just words that rhymed?

Maybe they always were.

Perhaps he's gotten used to the distance by now. There's an element of artifice to any performance. He rehearses these songs, plays them again and again, sells them to new people, woos new women with them.

Some other woman will listen to it and think, “I could be that girl.” And she'll hear the breakup one and think, “I could heal that.”

And if she asks him if it's about anyone specific, he'll answer, “Not really.”

And maybe, by then, it will be true.

But it will never be true for me. Few things are as evocative of memory as music. Songs are emotions preserved in sap. Those are my emotions, so those are my songs.

When I went home from the concert that night, I knew then that I wouldn't go to any more of his shows. Because no matter how “over it” I am in real life, it's impossible to listen to him sing the words to real feelings we felt and not have my chest in knots. Watching him
perform
them only makes me feel more freakishly vulnerable by comparison.

He's the one up onstage, with the microphone, and the brass backup, and the applause at the end.

And I'm a face in the crowd, imagining I know what he means.

 

To Error Is Human

Lisa

There's a lesson in every news story.

Luckily, you have me to find it for you.

Today's news story is the driverless car, about which you might have heard.

It's an Audi SUV outfitted with special electronics by a company named Delphi Automotive, and those electronics enable the car to drive itself. In fact, the car left San Francisco last weekend and is now driving itself thirty-five hundred miles to New York City.

I'm not making this up. I saw it online, so you know it's real.

The car is due to arrive in New York this weekend.

It better be on time.

And it probably will be.

Why?

Because there's no people around to make it late.

In fact, that's the theory of the driverless car. That it can drive itself anywhere, speed up or slow down, switch lanes, enter and exit highways, merge, and in short, get itself where it wants to even safer than a “human-piloted” car.

Why?

Because to err is human, and if you want to eliminate the err, you have to eliminate the human.

In other words, there's no pilot to mess up the piloting.

No knucklehead's at the wheel to text, eat, talk on the phone, or swill vodka while driving, nobody to be distracted or sleepy, no man or woman to make the mistakes that humans inevitably make.

And don't get me started on teenagers, who, though adorable, are programmed to make more driving mistakes than the general population.

It's not their fault, it's their hormones.

In that they have them.

There are few fuels more powerful than high-octane testosterone.

And at certain times of the month, estrogen can light an entire city.

I barely remember my estrogen.

And I'm not trying to replace her.

Because I don't miss her.

Nor does anyone around me.

When you think about it, the idea of a driverless car is very simple, and in fact, I wonder why it took so long to accomplish.

After all, planes have autopilot, so why shouldn't cars?

I know what you're thinking, that there's a lot more things to bump into on the road than in the sky, but you're forgetting that there's one big thing you could bump into in the sky, which is that large round ball located beneath the plane.

If you hit it, you'll do more than bend your fender.

The downside risk is greater. As in, it's
down
.

You get the idea, even if Harrison Ford doesn't.

So how does the driverless car get where it wants to go?

The Delphi website says that the car has “four short-range radars, three vision-based cameras, six lidars, a localization system, intelligent software algorithms and a full suite of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.”

Cheater.

If I had all that stuff, I could drive myself around, too.

Oh. Wait.

Plus I don't know what a lidar is, and I don't care. I don't need any lidars to drive my car. All I need is a fresh cup of coffee, my phone, something to eat, and a dead mouse in a water bottle.

You may recall the time I was driving, drank a dead mouse, and almost crashed into a divider, a cyclone fence, and a Wawa store.

Because I'm a human being.

And therefore unworthy of being a pilot.

I'm loving this principle of eliminating humans to reduce error, and I'm wondering if we could apply it in other situations.

For example, I'm pretty sure that both of my marriages would have been an astounding success, if I hadn't been in either one of them.

Also, I think the country would be running better if we eliminated the human beings in government.

Oh wait. There aren't any.

What if we just took the human beings off the planet and let Earth run itself?

Let's see, the air would smell better, the water would run cleaner, the ground would remain unpunctured, and the animals would be safe.

Just the way we found it.

Before we started driving.

Nah.

 

Conditional

Lisa

Every woman has a hair history.

Or is it a hairstory?

Let me tell you mine, then I'll get to my point.

We began, as always, with The Flying Scottolines, and growing up, we all used the same bathroom, which contained exactly one bottle of shampoo.

Head & Shoulders.

By the way, none of us had dandruff.

Those white spots on our clothes were lint.

I can't explain why Mother Mary always bought us Head & Shoulders, except that I suspect she thought it was fancier than our old shampoo, which was called Suave.

By the way, we weren't suave, either.

We aspired to being suave, with dandruff.

I come from a long line of aspirational shampoo buyers.

In any event, we used our creamy aqua Head & Shoulders shampoo and felt pretty good about ourselves, until one day, when I was in high school. I was with my first boyfriend at a party, which was held outside. It was August, which is definitely a bad-hair month in Philly.

Which is a bad-hair city.

You know it's true.

It's the City of Brotherly Locks.

For women.

Anyway, back to the party. My curly, frizzy, wavy hair had already exploded, and my boyfriend made the mistake of trying to touch my hair.

This was back in the old days, when men actually touched my hair.

Overrated.

Anyway, his hand got caught in my hair and he couldn't get it out, as if I had the Venus flytrap of hair.

I caught a man!

Then I tore off his wings.

Just kidding.

In fact, I was completely embarrassed, and after my boyfriend finally freed his fingers from my carnivorous hair, he said, “You should really use a conditioner.”

I didn't even know what conditioner was. And that's how naïve I was, back then. I was a conditioner virgin.

So I went home and told Mother Mary that we needed conditioner, and after much grumbling, on her next trip to the grocery store, she returned home with something that purported to be shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle, called Pert Plus.

Like I said, aspirational.

I may not be suave, but I'm nothing if not Pert Plus.

So I used the stuff, but the truth is, it didn't seem to make any difference. My hair was still tangly, curly, wavy, and frizzy, and on occasion, my own hand got stuck in it.

Medusa, needing mousse.

So I consulted my girlfriends and all of them agreed that the two-in-one products didn't work and that I needed conditioner that came in its own bottle, so I went to ask my mother.

“No,” Mother Mary said flatly. “We don't need two bottles in the shower.”

“But it will change my life,” I argued, meaning it.

“No it won't. It won't even change your hair.”

Mother Mary ruled the house, so fast-forward to the present day, when I get my own house, with a shower all to myself.

It's filled with approximately twelve different bottles of conditioner.

No two-in-ones for this girl.

Each one separate from shampoo.

Head and shoulders above everything else.

Very suave.

And every time I wash my hair, I use conditioner in the shower, then I spray on a detangler and comb through with Moroccan oil.

The result?

My hair looks greasy all the time.

There is so much damn product in my hair that even the smallest dollop of shampoo explodes on contact with my head, which is the telltale sign of product overload.

Also I produce so much lather that I'm wearing a meringue pie.

Evidently, each time I shampoo, I'm shampooing the conditioner.

And I don't know how to stop the madness.

So I asked my girlfriends, who told me there's a special shampoo you can buy and a special conditioner you can use, which together will somehow strip out all of the other shampoos and conditioners.

But I'm not buying.

Do I need more product to eliminate my product?

I'm beginning to suspect that Mother Mary was right, yet again.

She loved me, unconditionally.

 

Dog Must Love

Francesca

For the twenty-four hours that I had an active Tinder account, my bio consisted of one line:

“I don't introduce my dog to just anyone.”

“Must love dogs” is a given. But any man dating me ought to recognize this:

My dog has to love you.

You know how dogs can sense ghosts and smell fear? They have even more experience smelling assholes.

My first boyfriend tried valiantly to be a dog person, but he was asthmatic and allergic to all things furry. That he dated me, the only girl in our high school who had four dogs, a cat, and a horse, was an exercise in masochism.

In gratitude, I pretended not to notice when his nose was runny when we kissed.

Young love.

Despite his allergies, all the dogs adored him, especially our one golden retriever, Angie. She would shuffle over to him and face-plant in his lap.

She got to third base before I did.

He was a patient, gentle, sniffly boy, and an ideal first boyfriend. We dated for years.

My college boyfriend was one of those guys who only knew how to interact with animals by rough-housing with them. When he visited my home in the summer, he completely won over our youngest golden retriever, Penny, by matching her manic energy for jumping into the pool after the ball.

He scored fewer points with my horse, Willie. Within minutes of mounting up for his first-ever riding lesson, my ex considered himself a cowboy. He had enough fear to hold the reins in a death grip, but enough false bravado to deliver a wallop of a kick when I had advised “a squeeze.”

Willie started walking backwards, tail switching, ears pinned back. The horse shot me a look with a rolling eye that said: “Let him try that one more time, and see where he lands.”

Our first and last lesson ended shortly after that.

And our relationship ended a few months later.

Willie was right. He kept me on too short a rein.

I dated one guy in the city who probably should've been a fling, but he was so enthusiastic about my dog Pip, and Pip so crazy about him, I fell in love. Pip was only a couple years old then, and this guy would always play with him first thing when he came over. Pip adored him, which made me adore him. The fact that my dog liked him seemed to vouch for his trustworthiness.

Until one morning when I got up to see him playing with Pip buck naked, dangling Pip's favorite chew toy dangerously close to other dangly bits.

He was a little too trusting.

Then there was that guy I was so excited about. I thought he was sophisticated, intelligent, successful, a real catch. Until he met Pip.

“Can I pick him up?” he asked.

I found it an endearing request.

I have never in my life seen someone pick up an animal so awkwardly. His approach was totally illogical. He just sort of hugged Pip's neck under one front leg and pulled up, making the dog's ruff smoosh around his face, his arm sticking out like a Popsicle stick, his back feet scrambling in the air.

I swooped in to take my precious baby from this oaf.

I could feel my ovaries recoil.

Next!

Sometimes I do give second chances. Like my musician-boyfriend—when we first started dating, he made a show of cringing and clutching his ear whenever Pip barked, as if the sound threatened his instrument. I found it so histrionic, I complained to all my girlfriends about it, and I was on the verge of breaking things off with him two weeks in.