Hey everyone! I’m Jenn, and you can find me over at my little piece of the web, you’ll grow to love me (seriously, you will. Don’t ask questions.)

When Rebekah asked me to guest post, I asked her what she would like me to write about. She answered “BOYS”. I suppose as the token single girl AND as the token college girl, I’m expected to have lots of stories about boys.

I thought about telling you all about the time that I got dry-humped, but that story has been told (complete with illustrations.)

So since Rebekah is in Florida with her boy, I decided to write about the time that I went to Florida with a boy.

My last relationship was about two years ago, and about this time in 2008 we decided we had had enough of the Boston winter and were going to jetset down to Florida and bask in the sun (where I proceeded to do a little too much basking and not enough sunscreen-applying.)

Neither one of us had ever traveled anywhere with a significant other, and we were both a little nervous. We ended up having a great time though, and I learned a few lessons along the way.

1. Make sure your partner is a “good traveler”. You don’t want to be THAT COUPLE that holds up the security line or throws a tantrum when United says your bags are going to cost $100 to check. You want to be with the man that calmly and patiently sorts out the problem with the rental car (and you want to be far far away while he does it, TRUST ME.)
2. Wear sunscreen. It doesn’t work so well when you’re burnt by the end of the first brunch. (Believe me when I say that hotel room activities are not as enjoyable when IT HURTS TO MOVE.)
3. Splurge. You’re on vacation! Go to the delicious Brazilian steakhouse for dinner and consume more wine than you ever thought possible, even if it means you skip breakfast the next morning.
4. Prepare yourself for the bathroom. All of the bathroom sharing you do while spending the night at each other’s places is nothing compared to when you discover that your man is “dropping the kids off at the pool” while also talking to his mom on the phone.
5. Take lots of pictures — just don’t put them on Facebook. I know you want to show off your tan to all your friends and make them jealous of the warmth you were in, but I guarantee that you’re going to want to burn every single one of those pictures when you break up and they only serve as a reminder of that time you went on a romantic getaway with that dbag that broke your heart.

Anyone else have any advice or lessons-learned when traveling with a significant other?

I must look like the angry, pregnant wife standing over here in this babydoll dress that makes me look second-trimester fat and a pair of ratty Playboy flip-flops, intermittently scowling at him and rolling my eyes.

I’d just walked in five minutes ago and I was already ready to go home and go to bed again. When she saw me across the room, Erica the bartender waved and reached under the bar for a bottle of Bud Select, my usual here. I was too late to stop her before she popped the cap.

“Oops,” she said. “I thought you…”

“Nope. I came to get THAT,” I say, pointing down the bar to where Tim is seated with two girls I don’t recognize.

Erica frowned. “He said Mike was going to take him home.”

“Mike left.”

She looked around. “Oh.” She pushed the open beer across the bar to me. “Take it, on me.”

I don’t drink it but instead head in Tim’s direction. He looks up and sees me before I can speak, and one of the girls glares at me when she sees his eyes light up.

“Hey babe!” he says, a little too loudly. “Thanksh for coming!”

“Are you ready?” I ask. No preliminaries. It’s one o’clock in the morning, I’m wearing a dress I found on the floor and put on in the dark, and I want to go home.

“Lemme finish this beer.” He waves an almost-full bottle at me.

I sigh and pull up a barstool. Tim wraps his arms around me. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’re the best.” He turns to the girl I don’t know. “This girl is great,” he says to her, shaking me by the shoulders and smiling his dopey-drunk smile. “She’s such a great friend.” Then he looks back at me, turns my face toward his with a hand on my chin and looks right in my eyes. “I owe you. Big time.”

“Yes,” I say, pulling away.This is how he looks at me when he wants to kiss me. “Yes you do.”

So I wait it out. He finishes his beer and doesn’t want to leave until I have him by the arm and am tugging him past the pool tables and out the door. He has to get something from his truck. He forgot to say goodbye to someone. He wants to have a cigarette.

“Smoke in the car,” I say, getting in and slamming the door. “Please. Just get in.”

He blows the smoke out the window while I drive. “I’m really sorry,” he says drowsily as he flicks the half-spent cigarette out onto Lansdowne. “I came with Ben. He left to go do something with his girlfriend.” He practically spits out the last word. “He totally ditched me for her.”

“Um.”

“Then Mike said he’d take me home but he left early and I don’t know. You’re like my only real friend.”

I turn onto River Des Peres Road and roll down the window, letting the wind blow on my face to wake me up a bit.

“Twice in a week, though. You can’t keep doing this to me, you have to make sure someone less than twenty minutes away can drive you.”

“I’m sorry. I tried, but Mike–”

“Then leave with Mike next time.” I sigh and stare at the road. “E would not like it if he knew I was out with you in the middle of the night. I don’t want you to drive when you’re drunk but you can’t keep putting me in this position.”

“But we’re friends now. He’s secure, he doesn’t mind me.” He reaches across the console and rubs my arm. I try to shake him off.

“He would mind this. Stop rubbing me like that.”

“You’re just such a great girl, babe,” he says. My lecture has obviously had no effect. “Remember when we…” And he’s off.By the time I pull up to his house, drunken nostalgia has gotten the best of him. “Come in.” He tugs at my hand.

“No.”

“Then gimme a hug.” He leans awkwardly across the console and wraps his arms around me. I sort of pat him on the shoulder. “You really are the best,” he whispers. “I owe you for this.”

He repeats this several times before I can convince him to get out of the car. Yes, he owes me. Again.

I drive to E’s house instead of my own, because I know it’s the only way I’ll feel alright about tonight.

When I was 22, I broke off my engagement 3 months before I was to have gotten married. He was a wonderful guy, but it just wasn’t right. Took me awhile to figure that out, but it’s better than getting divorced, I say.

So I re-entered the dating world in the summer of 2003, fresh out of a long-term relationship with a very conservative man who didn’t like me to have male friends or short skirts. I was free, free! I wanted male friends and boyfriends and short skirts were the way to get them!

After my first post-engagement boyfriend threatened to commit suicide when I broke up with him, I sought refuge in the arms of The Next Guy, a very handsome Indian doctor with a sophisticated lifestyle and a Very Important Job as a surgeon. We went to trendy restaurants and bars, and I spent way too much money buying trendy clothes in a desperate attempt to blend in. What this fellow saw in me and my Gap-based wardrobe was beyond me. We didn’t have any major sparks, but Next Guy was fun to hang out with and a lot more low-maintenance than Suicidal Rebound Ex. Plus, he taught me how to shop.

Suicidal Rebound Ex was still on my case, though, and I made the mistake of saying something about it to Next Guy. A few days later, he told me he didn’t think we should date anymore.

“It’s just kind of hard to deal with the baggage thing,” he sighed.

“What ‘baggage thing?’” I asked.

“The ex-fiance, the crazy suicidal guy, I don’t know…”

“You’re almost thirty years old,” I pointed out. “Everyone has exes by now. You’ll have to go back to high school girls if that’s too much baggage for you.”

“Still. Yours just seems really complicated. I like things to be simple, and there’s just a lot to deal with here. I just want to have fun.”

I didn’t pursue the conversation further. Next Guy and I still ended up being good friends for awhile and it was just as well that we didn’t date, since it turned out that he did have a thing for high school girls… or at least girls dressed up as high school girls in the “Barely Legal” variety of p-o-r-n.

But what he said stuck. Was my stuff really baggage? Until then I’d just thought of those things as life. Experiences. Things that happen to people, things we deal with, things we leave behind. Maybe he had a point, I considered. Maybe I wasn’t good at letting go. Maybe I’d been scarred for life. Maybe, I thought, my life at 22 had already encompassed enough emotional highs and lows that I had become unappealing to others.

At 27, I named this blog “She’s Got Baggage” because last summer, I thought I’d gathered enough that I could try and make a joke out of it. Ex-boyfriends were baggage. Certain health issues were baggage. Navy, Fireman, Copper and Captain* were baggage. Tim was a freaking steamer trunk. I had to make fun of the fact that I honestly felt like I was doomed.

And now?

Things are actually pretty great. Light. As though everything I thought was awful about my past experiences has actually pushed me in the right direction. Maybe it’s because I’ve learned a few things and let go of a few others.

Even if it has irrevocably changed you for better or worse, is it still baggage if you’ve learned something and moved on?

Sometimes I stare at my blog header and wonder what I was thinking. Because really… DO I?

——————

* See June – September 2008

I became friends with Tim this summer. It was a long path from our nasty breakup (two years ago this week, wow) to an actual friendship, with a few layovers in FWB-Land in between. When our best friends’ marriage began breaking up, Tim and I found ourselves thrown into identical situations with our friends and while they were falling apart, he and I had something to share that ended up with us in a much better relationship.

And then of course, E.

Tim and E met for the first time last winter and they got along okay. Like ex-boyfriends do, Tim always thought that the guys I dated weren’t good enough. He was fine with E at first, but in the early days of an improving friendship, I made the critical mistake of calling him once after E and I fought last spring, and it was all downhill from there. E was suddenly the devil to him and nothing he did was right.

E and I broke up and Tim was pleased that I was rid of such a terrible, terrible guy. Then when we got back together and Tim was skeptical, to say the least. For the first few months of the E and Me Do-Over, he was constantly saying “Are you REALLY serious about this?” and “I can’t believe you took him back” and other stuff in a similar vein. He couldn’t believe that we were doing things with each other’s families again (because that is serious shit, I say), so when he called me a few weeks ago and I told him I was with E at his mom’s house in Michigan, I was a bit surprised when he asked:

“What nights is E off work?”

I told him. “Why?”

“We have a pool league that plays on Thursdays.”

He wants E to play pool with him? Huh? “But he works on Thursdays.”

“Yeah, that’s why I was checking. We need a girl to kind of round out our numbers and I wanted to ask you but I didn’t want to have to take you away from him if it was going to be on one of his nights off.”

Whaaaat?

After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I protested about my absolute lack of pool prowess and he explained the way the APA scores so teams need people of all skill levels – even mine. He filled me in on some of the details and told me to ask E if it was okay. “I hope he doesn’t mind because it would be really cool if you could play, but let me know and it’s cool if you can’t.”

E was fine with it. Of course he doesn’t love the idea of me hanging out with my ex-boyfriend for hours every week, but he knows that he has to trust me and so he sent me off with a kiss and some sort of just-try-and-hit-the-ball-straight advice on the first night.

“How was it?” he asked me later.

“Meh,” I replied. “I lost, of course. But I had fun, I guess.”

“Any cute boys there?” he teased.

“There was one who talked to me a lot,” I said, teasing back. “But he looks like a 12 year-old with a beard. He looks like that High School Musical guy.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“I’m not a pedophile and beards aren’t my thing, so no.”

The next week when I went back, I checked in with Tim to see when I was going to play. “You don’t have to worry about <dude> anymore, by the way,” he added after telling me to chalk up at 8:30.

“Huh?”

“He was talking about you like crazy after last week,” he said, not making eye contact. “Asked if you were single and stuff. And I said no.” He made a scribble on the score sheet.

“Good, thanks.”

“You seem really happy with E and guys like <dude> are just bad news. If he doesn’t respect that, tell me and I’ll make him back off.”

“That’s really sweet of you… especially ’cause you don’t even like E.”

“It’s pretty obvious that you’re really happy with him and he’s treating you right this time.” He still won’t look up at me.

“I am. And he is.”

Tim finally lifted his head. “Try to get at least one ball in tonight, okay?” he grunted.

I think that was Tim-ish for ‘I approve.’ And I did win one of my four games that night… only because the other girl scratched on the 8-ball, but hey. The night was full of miracles.

It’s been a one-month hiatus and I think that’s long enough. I mentioned in a post before that I really hate writing in the blog when I’m depressed, because it just becomes a series of depressing posts and who wants to read that? I’ve had no motivation to do anything – work, eat, clean – even taking a shower required supreme effort on some days. You (and the people around me) will be happy to know that I did manage that last one.

But life has been plodding along. I’ve been spending a lot of time with E and friends, and that’s been the only thing that’s really kept me feeling like I might still be alive. I love my blog and blosse but for some reason I’ve needed the face to face company lately, like I need to reassure myself that there’s a real world around me and not just the one in which I imagine that I am popular and pretty and a brilliant writer.

But enough of that. I’m sure you are on the edge of your spinny desk chair, drooling as you anticipate the recap of my month.

Jeep

The big news is that the recession got me in the middle of my depression, and I had to get rid of the Jeep. Gas prices, insurance prices, payments – KILLING me. My medication costs have gone up significantly and I just can’t afford it anymore. Seriously, meds these days? If you’re not depressed already, the cost of anti-depressants will MAKE you depressed. But I got a cute little Pontiac Vibe the other day and I have to confess, it’s so fun and zippy! I feel like a traitor saying that, but dammit, Jeep – you let me down! 15 mpg in the city? Hybridize yourself! Take some initiative! You make my bank account weep!

Boys

In slightly smaller but still not awesome news, I met a friend’s new boyfriend the other day and I have to say, I was a tiny bit underwhelmed after her glowing raves about this fellow. Guys, aren’t you supposed to make an effort to woo the friends with charm on the first meeting? Aren’t you supposed to keep your mouth shut about divisive topics like religion and politics and not try to evangelize your Republican views like Pat Robertson on crack? Now I have no problem with Republicans. Or Democrats or Libertarians or Greens or whatever else. Be what you want and so will I. But really? Save yourself the strain of stepping up on the soapbox because it just makes me want to shoot you while you’re up there making yourself an easy target.

I honestly don’t think that my failure to be swept off my feet by this fellow has anything to do with my friendship with my girlfriend’s ex. I’ve thought about this at length because there is obviously a huge potential for prejudice here. I just fail to see the attraction. I like boys to be charming and handsome and sweet because she deserves all of those things… she’s in her twenties, beautiful and brilliant and could probably have any guy she wanted. Why this one?

Perhaps I’ll grow to like him. You know, if he doesn’t talk around me.

Fun!

My anal-retentive apostrophe habits have made me famous-ish!

Boo.

I got invited to sub on E’s volleyball team on Monday when one of the other girls had to get a cyst removed from her hand. So in the spirit of team solidarity, I managed to break my left thumb during my first game. I was the lucky one though – my friend Jill took a tumble and tore ligaments in her right ankle and is basically immobile for six weeks. Ow ow ow!!!

The irony here is that Jill and I were the only ones playing sober. So here’s the plan: I’ll drink a whole pitcher of beer before the next game, and then my thumb won’t hurt and I will be able to play and not get injured.

That’ll work, right?