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Charlotte_Web

age:

	37

location:

	Academia, NYC/NJ

looking for :

	The Ashton to my Demi

more about me:

	Maladroit yet MILF-a-licious redhead with bookshelves that won't quit will drink you under the table AND help build your dinosaur diorama, all at the same time. I'm fiercely liberal and fiendishly funny, but under it all a creampuff. (That's creampuff, not tart. Just sayin' ...)

7.317

Other Hooksexup Blogs:

Counting the Cars On the New Jersey Turnpike
7/26/2008 10:45:06 AM

To quote the Harry Hamlin lookalike I had a major crush on for most of my college career, “Sometimes you just have to go in your room, lock the door, and listen to Simon and Garfunkel.” I’ve been listening to a lot of Simon and Garfunkel lately. Like every child of the seventies, especially those who grew up within a ten-mile radius of the 59th Street Bridge, I find them comforting. Their Greatest Hits may have been shoved back on the shelf for a few months or even years at a time, but those cheerful, Jew-fro’d faces are always there for me when I’m weary, feelin’ small, etc.

(HH Lookalike was the only guy on my College Kiss List who never got crossed off. Not sure who that says more about: him, or me. Guess we’ll never know.)

“The Boxer” is heartbreaking. “Cecilia” is hilarious – “I’m getting’ dicked over; why can’t I STOP DANCING!;” “America” is a metaphysical road poem. And “Bridge Over Troubled Water” tears me up without fail, just like the end of the beginning (that’s for you, Pat) of The Royal Tenenbaums, when the falcon soars out over an imaginary city to “Hey Jude” reimagined as Handel’s Messiah, because what you’ve been waiting for all this time is always already gone.

I don’t teach anymore. This was firmly established at a party in my now-former department (which wasn’t “for” me; it just coincided with my leaving), at which about ten people drank a case of Prosecco and were silly and sexy and brilliant in all the ways that make me hate to leave them. Luckily, I’m leaving on good terms, due in part to what makes BEB different from almost every other guy I’ve ever dated …

I listen to him.

Zeit and I have given a lot of airplay to what makes relationships work, and it seems like maybe this weird little medium has allowed us both to become more aware partners to the awesome people we found during our time here. This hit me for the first time during a wine-dark shouting match on 5th Street. I described a situation as I saw it; he told me how it seemed to him, and after some fairly fierce resistance, my brain swam up to the surface to see that he had a point, and was looking out for me. I know this sounds fairly straightforward, but for me it was like being hit across the head with a big thick board. See, I’m not really so good with the listening, especially when I’m drunk. BEB has a sort of gentle, generous gravitas to him that makes giving up feel utterly unlike giving in … this might have something to do with why I’m still writing about him, and why he’s headed out this way tonight even though I’m on antibiotics and feel kind of gross, and why my new favorite picture features his big grin and my little El’s head peeking over his shoulder.

I do, however, disagree with Zeit’s definition of relationship sex. It’s only in a relationship that I feel secure enough to out what I’m into, and there’s more than enough of THAT to keep our dance card full for a few more weeks, at least. Hell, he did something after the prosecco party that had never even OCCURED to me … I actually said “Oh, MY,” out loud, lusty old lady that I am.

What were we talking about? Simon and Garfunkel. Right.

Anyway, as you all know, this little brown and orange blog party is coming to an end any minute now. I’m not Professor MILF anymore, but if there are any lingering questions I can answer without alienating Important People, now’s the time …

Thanks, everyone.

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Now I Know Why I've Been So Moody Lately ...
7/17/2008 7:35:15 AM

It must be all those abortions I've been having.

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Goodbye To All That
7/12/2008 9:09:59 AM

... kind of.

Anyway, it's official. Professor Web has resigned her position at Urban University, and will now be working full-time at Suburban Bookstore.

This will make my life easier and more pleasant in myriad ways. For one, I can walk to work. My schedule will be more regular, meaning more time with my girlies, who are growing like dandelions. (For you city folk, that means "fast.") Salary is the same, but I won't be spending $60-$100 a week commuting. I like the people I work with, and will be involved in a lot of their community outreach stuff (prison literacy, carbon-neutral bookbuying)this fall.

But it's hard. I've been in academia for 13 years now, and teaching full-time for six. Being a professor was cool. In fact, it still IS cool: I'm just not one anymore. As I was telling BEB, I feel like I've surrendered my superpowers. Of course, my primary superpowers were the ability to grade 20 papers (thoroughly, I might add) in one night and then get up at 4 am, but still.

There's no question that what we refer to as "Quality of Life" will improve. The choice seemed clear at first; now I'm Having Angst.

But it's done.

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Cooking Times May Vary Depending On Your Equipment
7/9/2008 10:47:15 AM

FOR MAHLERMAN

… who made the sweetest comment in the world, TWICE, and got no strokes in response. Thank you, thank, you, thank you. The first time I was sheepish; now I’m downright self-flagellatingly appalled by my own negligence. I wish you many, many, many more chocolate-chip cookies and pretty girls nibbling on your fingers, sans tears.

Big changes afoot, people. Big, BIG changes. So big that when I think about them I either want to leap around and squeal with glee, or hide under the carpet. (I have no carpets; I just like the word. CARPET.) I’ve been holding off writing thinking I could make an epic announcement, but no dice. So instead there’s just me being cryptic (odd) and contrite (as usual). Nothing to do with Hooksexup, but everything to do with, well, everything else.

Very UN-epic announcement? BEB and I crossed the six month line last Sunday, with little fanfare. OK, that’s not quite true … it was morningtime and he was wearing jeans and no shirt and I was getting ready for work and I asked him if he realized that we’d met exactly half-a-year ago, and he shrieked. Then he quoted the Spongebob movie, which he has been doing regularly since I let him watch it a week or so ago.

I love Spongebob. He pisses off the religious right and makes all kinds of arcane cultural references and cracks my kids up without being saccharine-y. They’ve grown out of him a little, but luckily my 32 year old boyfriend is there to pick up the slack.

He’s such a normal part of my life now, and yet I’m still always excited to see him, and talk to him, and cook for him and, uh, do stuff with him. We went into the city for the 4th, to watch the fireworks from a rooftop in Brooklyn. Which would have been idyllic had I not gotten carsick in the cab, and had it not rained, and had the music of choice not been late U2,* and had the partiers on another rooftop not been shooting bottlerockets at us the entire time; it was like a little re-enactment of the Revolution, although our party was thrown by a British person, which I guess is why we lost. After some ridiculously overpriced but awfully tasty Dumont burgers, we went to bed because I had to drag my ass into the bookstore at ten the next morning.

Anyway, I’m glad that BEB is stable because between cutting all my hair off** and this other As Yet Unmentionable Thing, I’m predicting a major identity crisis any minute now. Maybe I’ll live-blog it; after all this irritating stability, I think I owe you guys some sturm und drang.

*I saw the Wide Awake in America tour in 1985, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s been downhill ever since. The Joshua Tree wasn’t so bad. But Zooropa? GACK. (Wow, look at me! I sound like Zeit!)

**Oh yeah ... I cut all my hair off! It's like just below my ears now. I look elfin, or I would, were the rest of me not decidedly UN-elfin. (UN-ELFIN? Jesus Christ, what time is it?)

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Summer School
6/30/2008 9:05:37 AM

It’s summer. Much more summer than I’m ready for, in fact: sleepless-hot, bad-hair steamy. But my vegetable plot looks great (they weren’t kidding about the whole “Garden State” thing), the kids love their new cheap camp, and BEB and I had crazy sweaty sex up against the fridge on Saturday night, so it’s all good.

What with the bookstore job, I haven’t been in the city much, which kind of bums me out; unlike many people, I love New York summers. It might be said that I love them because I’ve always had a place to get away from them, be it my parents’ house in the burbs or some friends’ farm in Maine, or even this crazy place, where I spent one long-awaited lost weekend last year. The one summer I really spent in the city, working 9-5 with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, was mitigated by another friend’s subletting – for SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS A MONTH – a five-story UWS brownstone, complete with gourmet kitchen, garden (and turtles!), roof deck, and a string of high-ceilinged, airy bedrooms, in one of which I discovered Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus, early on a hot hungover morning. It was one of those ludicrously wonderful yet also fatally flawed residential arrangements so characteristic of the city, for the house also came equipped with a tremendous Rottweiler that was completely beyond our control, and used to knock my friend down the five flights of stairs on a regular basis, when it wasn’t trying to eat the rest of the neighborhood dogs. From a Rottweiler’s perspective, this was all in good fun, but it made for some stressful moments in an otherwise idyllic arrangement. I remember one party in particular to which neither of the gentlemen I was interested actually came, but I had a great time anyway. There was music and sangria and I was 23 and had yet to fuck up in any irremediable way. Anything could happen, although in retrospect not much did, even though some long-overdue sex on the fourth of July – HOLY FUCK fifteen years ago! -- initiated the relationship that eventually drove me to Maine.

It all goes so fucking fast now … BEB and I are planning a long Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, and something tells me that’s going to be here before we know it. So, my friends, tell me your best, worst, or simply strangest summer memories. They can be from years ago or just last week; I’m not picky. Hell, I’m just glad you’re still here. (Helllooooo?)

Oh, and P.S.: If Oli and I haven't banged this through your brains by now, you must all immediately go read Michael Chabon's first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, one of the best summer stories of all time, written before Chabon got all McSweeneys and shit. And yes, it will be on the test. GO.

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