Summar Slump

Today is my first official day of summar.  No, that's not a spelling error; only pronouncing it "summar" gives summer the proper amount of simultaneous excitement and dread that a single teacher like me experiences at the start of this season each year.

One of the reasons you become a teacher, apart from wanting to help kids and stuff, is the guaranteed vacation time: three days at Thanksgiving, two weeks at Christmas, a week for spring break, and a little more than two months off every summer.  What they don't tell you is that you won't be able to survive in the teaching profession without all that time away all the demands of the job.  And they definitely won't tell you about the summer slump.

In my first several years of summer vacation as a teacher, I didn't have this sense of dread.  I went into summer like a kid, excited about spending time at the pool, sleeping in, and hanging out with my friends.  I spent those first few summers as a seasonal alcoholic with friends who were still in undergrad, grad school or who were just loafing about until they figured out life.  That kind of stuff is still socially acceptable when you're 24. Not so much when you're 31.

The further you get away from college, the fewer friends you have who are able to hang out with you in the middle of the day.  It can become a lonely, lonely time filled with conversations with your cat, not-showering and sleeping like a factory worker on the night shift.  You can really lose your sense of time, place and self.  Sure, there are other teachers you could hang out with, but the truth is that as much as you need a break from students, you also kind of need a break from coworkers by the time June rolls around.  There's also the high probability that most of those coworkers have children, which greatly affects either the activities available or their available time.

And the older you get, the more you realize that you really should be spending some of that down time taking care of adult responsibilities like getting your oil changed in your car because it probably resembles hot fudge by this point.  I'm not sure if this habit comes from my Midwestern mother who has probably the craziest work ethic on the planet, but summer has become a time of goals for me.  Goals I rarely accomplish, but goals nonetheless.  Here are this summer's goals to meet some adult responsibilities and stay busy enough to avoid the summer slump:

Lose the weight I gained over the course of the school year
This school year I made the decision to sponsor the student council at our high school.  It was an effort to find a new challenge, and, boy, did I find one.  The magnitude of what I'd taken on hit me sometime in September, which is when I started stress eating and avoiding the gym because of sheer exhaustion by the time I left work.  By the end of the year, it was a rewarding experience; however, I carry around a pound to help me remember each of my StuCo officers.  As much as I want to remember those kids, I don't need to carry around the extra baggage.

Use all of the Groupons and gift certificates I've accumulated 
Here's more of a glimpse into my neuroses--I have five Google calendars, people.  Five. One for student council--coded green.  One for work appointments--coded blue.  One to schedule in grading time because it's impossible to get all the grading of an English teacher completed during school hours--coded red.  One for training (clearly I didn't stick to that one very well this year)--coded orange.  And, finally, one for my own social calendar--coded purple.  While I am able to be social during the school year, it takes a lot of planning to make it happen and it's difficult to squeeze in unexpected events sometimes.  And my eyes are bigger than the free space in my calendar.  This year I've purchased Groupons for Dolce Vita (eek!  It expires tomorrow!), The Melting Pot, and a pottery class for two.  I've also been gifted a generous gift certificate for cooking classes at The Silver Whisk and a gift card for an Aveda salon.  Time to mark those things on my calendar!

Write more
When I started this blog, I set some goals for myself, none of which I've met.  It's time to finally write the saga of Hotel San Jose, for cryinoutloud.

Read more
Through the accountability of my book club and a long-distance friend, I've managed to read a few books over the course of the school year.  But now it's time to devour them.  Some of my favorite summers have consisted of me and a series of books keeping each other company until the wee hours of the morning.  It's time to curl up with David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, and many others to have a giant literary orgy again.

Ensure that I no longer have summers off
I'm sure there are people reading this who hate me a little for complaining about summer.  All I can tell you is that I hope to no longer have summer vacation by the end of this summer break.  My plan is to spend at least part of each day working to find a new job (today I bookmarked a bunch of jobs for which I'll be applying in the coming week--check!).  As much as I've loved the creative aspects of teaching, enjoyed the relationships I've formed, honed my craft, and developed a love/hate relationship with summers, it's time for me to try something new.  At least until I long for summers again.

The Internet Dating Chronicles: Eh. Just OkCupid

Before I dive into more dating stories, I want to pause and talk about OkCupid.

OkCupid embodies the phrase: you get what you pay for.  (It's a free site.)  

I've had an OkCupid account for about 4 years now, though I've activated and deactivated it so often that it's probably only been available to the mens a total of one year.  I find the site appalling but feel compelled to look at it often when my account is active for reasons that I do not understand.  

I'm a fan of lists.  Here are the benefits and detriments of OkCupid:


Benefits:

• It’s free!  When you inevitably do not find the love of your life through the site, you don't feel bitter and dead on the inside because of how undesirable the opposite sex seems to find you.
• More creative freedom.  The questions asked when creating your profile are much more open and allow for a greater word count in the response section than eHarmony.  This means it’s possible to get more of a sense of someone’s personality from looking at his profile.  Check out the bulleted list (my favorite kind of list!) I made on my profile.  Plus, you know that if he really didn’t fill in anything at all, he really doesn’t give a shit.

Bulleted list within a bulleted list.  I'm so meta.

• You can look at anyone’s profile.  With eHarmony, I can only look at the people the program has matched me with at the rate at which they decide to deliver them to me, but OkCupid lets you look at anyone in the world regardless of age, match status, gender, or location.
• You go straight to the messaging.  There’s no multiple choice question section.  Once you start communicating with someone, it’s often within a week that you meet up at some bar around town.
• Fun quizzes and questions!  The part of me that is still a 15-year-old girl loves that there are all sorts of personality quizzes on the site.  When am I going to die?  When I'm 78.  What is my dating persona? The sonnet (whatever that means).  What type of man turns me on?  The mystery man.  Quality stuff for procrastination.  Once I answered a series of sex-related questions in a row and forgot to answer privately; my activity was posted on OkCupid and I was extremely popular for about an hour...oops.

But does the way this person answers about kids correlate to how much privacy they'll give a partner?  Tricky.

Detriments:

• It's time consuming.  There’s a lot of sorting that has to happen if you’re taking a proactive approach. Since it’s free, it seems that everyone and his brother has signed up for the service.  Some of these guys are super active and others create a page and then rarely come back to it.  It’s also just a larger pool of users and you can access them at any time. 
• It makes you feel unworthy. OkCupid classifies its users into leagues according to how many people have rated your looks or personality highly.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t search and find people in a higher league than your own, but it does take more work.  And it’s kind of depressing to look at the matches on your list and realize they’re a reflection of how the opposite gender views you.  From what I can tell, I’m about a 4 on a scale of 1-10 in the world of OkCupid.  
• Less monitoring.  OkCupid isn’t always great at monitoring uploaded pictures the way eHamony is.  I’ve seen a few penises in my time on the site…
• Kockamamy matching and labeling.  The algorithms used for creating match percentages is flawed, in my opinion.  OkCupid uses multiple choice questions created by users to who is a good match.  Users are presented with a question like “How willing are you to try something new in bed?” or “Would you ever get an abortion?” that they answer.  Then, you decide which answer selections would be acceptable from a possible match and select how important that question is to you.  Are these really good indicators for a love connection?  The tricky part is that anything you rate as being really important or mandatory, often shows up in a tab called “personality” on your profile.  Something I answered led to me having a “more kinky” label on my personality tab, which led to a bunch of weird dudes sending me messages.

Here's my personality, according to OkCupid.

• Serial daters and dudes just looking for hookups.  OkCupid is not necessarily the place where people looking for serious relationships should flock.  Yes, it does give you the option of stating if you are looking for new friends, activity partners, casual sex, short term dating or long term dating, but people lie.  I went out with a guy who was supposedly looking for new friends who only wanted to get in my pants, and I went out with a guy who was supposedly looking for long term dating who only wanted to get in my patns.  There are also, clearly, guys spamming the inboxes of the women in their match list.  Why in the world would I reply to someone who cut and paste the same message into several messages and then maybe added one little P.S. that related to me as a human being?  Gross.  

Through OkCupid, I've met some of the worst, most disrespectful or awkward men and also some of the most interesting.  I don't think this is where I'll meet my ultimate match, but it's absolutely a good place to find a date.    For anyone looking to get back in the saddle of dating after a divorce, break-up or long ass dry spell, I highly recommend the site.  It allows you to wade in slowly by browsing profiles and ignoring messages or to jump into the freezing water all at once by meeting the first person who contacts you.  

Why I'm Single, Reason #1: The Sweat

I'm a sweaty gal.  I've come to terms with it.  I don't deny it.

I'm the one you see at the gym wiping down a sweat slick on the weight bench.  I'm the girl who can't wear her hair down if it's above 70 degrees outside because it won't take long before it looks like she just stepped out of the shower.

I inherited these sweat glands from my dad.  I have very clear memories of helping my dad outside in the yard or garage and noting that the back of his shirt was a complete shade darker than the front of his shirt.  Not just in patches, either--the whole back of the shirt.  And he's a bald man with a very large dome of a head, too.  The sweat would bead as it came out of the pores on his scalp and dribble down, collecting at the end of his nose.  As I would stand near him, ready on deck with the next tool he'd need for his project, I would wait in anticipation for the moment when the drip on the end of his nose would drop.

Of course, I describe this only with affection, because I know exactly how he feels.  Maybe I feel even worse that he feels.  Because as grossed out as people might be by a sweaty man, they must pity a sweaty woman.  Women aren't supposed to sweat in great drops that pool at the waistband of their jeans.  Women are supposed to only slightly glisten, to glow, to appear dewy--not to look like a wet rat.

I cite my sweatiness as just one of the many reasons I still find myself single today.  Not only does my body react to even the slightest heat with oceans of salt water, it also takes cues from my emotions as to when to release the tide.

I sweat when I'm nervous.  A lot of people do.  But it's probably not the same full body sweat I experience.  Once, at a conference for English teachers, I was selected by my round table in a creative writing session to share my quick-write with the entire group.  Of about 300 people.  Now, everyone knows that one of the reasons you go to a conference as a single person is to try to meet other single people.  You wear your cutest outfits.  You try to sit next to attractive people and wow them with your amazing insights on whatever bullshit professional topic is being discussed.  And this should have been my shining moment.  Not only would I be on display for all of the men in the room who would surely decide they needed to talk to me after my reading, I was also singled out for my creativity and writing abilities.  All men are amazed by that, right?  Uh huh.

Well, I've spoken in front of groups of 30 people for years.  I'm a teacher.  That's a daily part of my job.  But at that point, I'd never spoken in front of 300 people.  And definitely never with a microphone.  I am pulled up to the front of the hotel ballroom, and the microphone is shoved in my hand.  Immediately, my body starts to quiver.  Then I feel the blood rush to my cheeks.  The panic sets in.  The red, hotness in my face is a sign that the sweat is about to come.  I start to read the words that are in front of me, probably with the microphone too close to my mouth, but all that's going on inside my head is: stop sweating, stop sweating, stop sweating!  But it just keeps on coming.  By that point, my voice was shaking as much as the hand holding the microphone.

Needless to say, zero men approached me to talk about writing when I sheepishly made my way back to my chair.  I like to believe that they would have if the sweat didn't come.

The worst part about the sweat is that it's also my reaction to attraction.  I'm sure there's some scientific reason that has to do with pheromones, but I just don't agree with science (one thing I have in common with Creationists!) when the thing releasing the chemicals that are supposed to attract a mate also completely disgusts him.  As soon as I lock eyes with a new attractive man and get within a normal range of personal space, it all starts--the redness, the heat, the sweat.  Not just a faint bead on my upper lip.  Full on face sweat.

If I'm lucky, I've interacted with a man enough from a safe distance before this happens and it's not the first impression I make.  But that's usually not the case.

As with most shitty situations in life, I've tried to make the best of it.  I've learned to just not even bother leaving my hair down between April and October in Texas.  I've learned that if I have to be outside when it's warm, it's best to wear a dress or skirt and let the breezes flow.  I've learned to pay attention to types of fabric when shopping for clothes so I don't end up like my dad in the yard.

But my favorite lesson is that my body tells me who I'm attracted to before my head realizes it.  It's become my own little detection system.  It's come in handy in places like the workplace where you don't necessarily want to be flirting with coworkers or when you meet a married man so you know not to joke around with him too much because it might get weird.

And it actually helped me realize I was interested in the last guy I dated when we were left alone at a picnic table and I suddenly felt sweat dripping down my neck.  As I tried to subtly wipe it off with a head-scratch-to-wipe move, I thought, oh, I guess I like this guy.

Luckily, it was a breezy night and the sweat dried quickly.