[Raeesa]

I'm not sure if theyre lives are clinical and distant, but perhaps it is the style in which they write which makes u think that??

The last one was cute, although i wonder if she would have been as easily persuaded into voting for his side lol

Can we have some more bunirab?

[Bruinrab]

A Wedding Invitation for a Mom Long Gone
By JULIE BUXBAUM
Published: May 11, 2008

SEVEN months ago, I was married in an ivory lace dress to a man in a gray suit on an island neither of us had ever been to. There was wind and sun and ocean, and 50 of our favorite people squinted up at us as we read our own vows. My mother was not there, as I knew she wouldn’t be, because she has been dead for so long that the scales have recently tipped: I have seen more days without her than with.

I would have sent out a cosmic invitation — no, not one of the letterpress ones we bought from Costco (Yes, Costco. Who knew they had letterpress?) — an earnest yearning, maybe even a prayer, but I’ve never been the type for that sort of thing. To be honest, I’ve never been the type for a wedding, either, which is probably why I was thrilled to buy our invitations from Costco, online and on sale. No hassle, no fuss, bulk discount.

So I married without my mother, which was unremarkable, as I’ve grown accustomed to her not being here for the big moments. What was remarkable was just how hard it turned out to be: the lead-up to my wedding managed to trump all prior celebratory occasions in its bittersweetness: graduating from college and law school, passing the bar, selling my novel. None seemed quite so land-mined with emotional triggers.

For someone who has remained almost immune to the lures of the wedding-industrial complex, I was blindsided by the fact that weddings — American ones at least — aren’t about brides and grooms at all.

They are about mothers and daughters.

I am not so good at things that are about mothers and daughters.

From my motherless perspective, the rituals — the big dress shop, the bridal shower, the planning — seemed designed to highlight her absence.

It seemed as if I was explaining myself at every turn, mostly to well-meaning shop clerks: “So what does your mom think?” they would ask when I mentioned my fiancé was Indian. “So what does your mom think?” when I said we would keep the wedding small and intimate. “So what does your mom think?” when I explained I was hoping to find a dress off the rack.

I had stumbled into an alternative wedding universe where everyone assumed you had a mother by your side, and not just any mother, but a hands-on mother whose opinion trumped all.

“She’s fine with it,” I would say, a lie and not a lie. Certainly, she would have been fine with the fact that my fiancé was Indian. But the small wedding, the dress off the rack? I am not so sure.

After my boyfriend proposed, we started bickering about how to marry. He preferred no wedding: just us, our families, a dotted line. We loved each other; why not just make it official with some words and signatures and maybe a nice dinner afterward?

My feelings were more complicated. I found myself approaching these discussions from a sense of deprivation. Though I wasn’t interested in the details I had seen friends lose sleep over — floral arrangements, party favors — I felt cheated. I didn’t want the typical wedding, couldn’t visualize myself in a white dress, walking down a long aisle.

Nor could I imagine spending so much money on a single day. It felt frivolous and silly, an opinion shared by the echo chamber of men in my life: my fiancé, my father, my brother.

My father half-joked that we should have a Vegas quickie; clean, painless, with the bonus of a little Elvis.

But I didn’t see marrying as a novelty or a prank. Giving up the idea of a wedding, or worse, being made to feel silly for wanting one (despite my ambivalence), felt like another thing forfeited. If my mother had been around, there wouldn’t have been any debate. “No wedding?” she would have said. “Over my dead body.”

The suggestion of a dinner party of just our immediate families was met with a rush of tears. Mine, of course.

“Too few people,” I said. “Her absence will stick out.”

“O.K.,” my fiancé said.

“More people,” I said. “We need more people. But. ... ”

“But what?”

“Not too many.”

There was his family to consider also. We couldn’t do it near them because our dollars were virtually worthless in London. Not to mention they were used to mega-scale Indian affairs: a ceremony at a Sikh gurdwara, a thousand strangers in a catering hall. I come from a tribe of New York Jews with its own traditions: 250 people, a raw bar during cocktail hour; later, chicken or beef or salmon.

Once we had decided on a destination wedding — only the people who cared about seeing us marry would be there, his parents on board (after a little convincing), and my father excited — we thought we were home free. The hotel gave us a checklist and little choice. We went with Option C pretty much across the board. Food, flowers, music, all decided in five minutes.

Option C. When in doubt, I always chose Option C. After all, the same plan had worked quite well with my SATs.

But the torture had only begun. We stumbled over the wording for the invitations. I am the daughter of Frederick Buxbaum and ‘the late Elizabeth Buxbaum,’ but those words seemed depressing.

Excluding my mother felt like a misstatement: I am the daughter of both my father and my mother, regardless of the existential circumstances; including her, with or without the qualifier “late,” felt morbid.

After more of my tears, we decided to forgo specificity. My father and my fiancé’s parents welcomed the guests “to the marriage of their children.” Sure, we sounded inbred, but at least we had hurdled yet another emotional booby trap. I feared that my fiancé, who has put up with much mother-loss related neurosis from me over the years, was growing tired.

But we weren’t done, not by a long shot. There was the dress, the bridal shower and the question of how to honor my mother at the wedding.

When my future mother-in-law visited, we began the dreaded dress shopping. If she had let me, I would have gone for a black cocktail shift. My future mother-in-law, who is as close to a mother figure as I can now hope to have, and who couldn’t be more lovely, was not on the same page.

“But you are the bride,” she said, as if I were slightly deranged. How could I not want a pretty white dress that made my hips look about the size of an army tank?

I had shed enough tears. It was time to be a good sport. We compromised on ivory. I was surprised to find myself fingering, asking for lace, then strapless. In a word, traditional.

My practical side taking over, I went back for fittings alone, my mother-in-law back in London, and befriended the dress designer. The process was, dare I say it, pleasant and relaxing. Sure, I didn’t get my moment of finding the dress with my mom sitting on a chair crying at how beautiful I looked. I wasn’t particularly bothered though.

It was material, not a moment.

A dress is a dress is a dress.

At my last fitting, I stood on a platform and stared at myself in the mirror, trying to be brave as the store attendants cooed.

“You look gorgeous,” they said.

“I look like me, but in a wedding dress.”

“Well, yeah. But a gorgeous you.”

It wasn’t their fault that they lacked authority; they were being paid to say I looked good. And then I realized why this process had gone all wrong. I had been pretending I could do this by myself, had played the role of motherless daughter martyr, too proud to ask for someone to help me.

I’m 30, I had thought, I don’t need someone to coo over me in my wedding dress. But as embarrassing as it is to admit, I did.

So I scheduled another fitting and forced my brother, the person I felt least guilty about inconveniencing on a Sunday afternoon, to come inspect. He cooed. No tears, maybe, but I got a “Beautiful!” or two, and since he knows me, a few mentions of “Your hips look slim” as well.

Just then, it was about the moment, not the material.

I had turned a corner. I let my father’s girlfriend plan the bridal shower, a kind and maternal offer on her part, and one I would have ordinarily refused. Again, I realized I needed help, and like the wedding, would have felt cheated if I had had to skip that part, despite my qualms about the ritual; all that faux excitement over kitchen gadgets and the childish game-playing was, like ballrooms and crinoline, not my style.

At the shower, I pretended it wasn’t hard to be there, at what should have been a mother-daughter thing, and then it wasn’t, really. My father’s girlfriend made a toast, and I did, too, and I had to swallow tears only when I noticed some of my mother’s friends, whom I hadn’t seen in close to 16 years. They kindly said the words that were hardest to hear: “She would have been so proud of you.”

AND now, seven months later, I realize she would have been. Turns out, I pulled off a pretty fantastic wedding. O.K., the hotel pulled off a pretty fantastic wedding, but I was the one who picked Option C.

And though I didn’t send my mother an invitation, letterpress or otherwise, I know she was there on that island my husband and I had never been to, because I didn’t feel deprived of her, not even for a single moment.

I don’t know why. Making sure my friends were with me while I dressed certainly helped; the moments where I might have pined were instead filled with my favorite people popping Champagne.

And in the end, I even found a way to integrate my mother into the dress process by salvaging the ivory lace flowers from her decades-old wedding gown and stitching them onto my veil. My own silent tribute.

[Bruinrab]

For that one single day, I somehow managed to let go of everything I believed about life and death and earth and sky. I forgot about the limitations of mortality, about absence, about painful finality.

Instead, I let myself believe my mother was there with me — in that piece of her dress, or in the wind, or in the crowd of 50 squinting up at us — but I believed she was there, with her own wedding gift of sorts: one more day for my “with her” column, which was one day fewer that I have lived without.

Julie Buxbaum lives in Los Angeles. Her first novel, “The Opposite of Love,” was recently published by Dial Press.

[Raeesa]

awww.. how beautiful and sad

[Bruinrab]

Instant Message, Instant Girlfriend
By ROGER HOBBS
Published: May 25, 2008

FOR several years I had a problem unusual among Internet geeks: I had too much success with women. I used the Internet as a means of communication with women I had already met offline in order to overcome my social awkwardness and forge romantic relationships.

Sounds healthy? It wasn’t.

It started in my sophomore year in high school. I went to one of those big Eastern public schools that pumps out students in a way that would make 19th-century industrialists throw their top hats into the air and shout “Huzzah!” Even we students thought of ourselves as a faceless mob of subproletarians waiting for the next episode of “American Idol” to take away the pain of our meaningless existence.

I was at the bottom of the barrel: a plump, silent, painfully awkward dweeb who clung to his Latin textbook as if it held the secrets to existence. The only good thing that happened to me that year was meeting Chelsea.

We talked for maybe 5 minutes about video games between classes, and of that time I spent 4 minutes and 59 seconds dripping in nervous sweat and trying to swallow my stutter. Whenever I tried to say something charming, my sentence drooped off with an invisible ellipsis. My words of wit fell flat, and my skillful cultural allusions deteriorated into a stream of loosely associated quotations from “Star Trek.”

I was the quintessential nerd with the quintessential nerd problem: I was uncharismatic and I knew it. By the time the bell rang for the beginning of class, I had seen her favorable grin mutate horribly into a thousand-yard stare. I knew that look well. I had seen it before in the eyes of every person confused by my appearance or put off by my manner.

I had to scuttle the conversation and find a way to salvage my bruised ego, so I asked for her screen name on instant messenger. After an agonizing moment in which I prayed to every god in the Dungeons & Dragons pantheon, she gave it to me on the back of a candy wrapper. As she walked away, I had the 16-year-old equivalent of a major heart attack.

Back home, I gazed forlornly at the crumpled candy wrapper, wondering if I should contact her. Descending the stairs into my basement computer lair, I decided that it was worth a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? I could make myself look like an idiot and never have a chance with her again.

This possibility being trivially different from the situation I was already in, I signed on and said “hello” with one of those ever-youthful emoticons. I gulped hard and buckled down for another tempestuous voyage into total failure.

Then something magical happened.

I don’t know what it was exactly. Somewhere in the dark reaches of the Internet I went through a transformation sequence worthy of a Japanese children’s cartoon. I suddenly shifted from an overweight, overdressed frog to a charming, handsome, technology-savvy prince.

Online I could shuffle off the nervous coil that had previously bound me to failure. As soon as my fingers touched the keys, I was not just another face in an endless crowd. With words on a screen, I would never stutter. I could take as long as I wanted to think of the perfect answer to every question, and the perfect response to every flirtation.

As we talked this way, I could feel her warm to me, her words changing to favor me like a sly smile. Before we had finished our second night of online conversation, she was my girlfriend. My heart trembled when I saw her message with those smiley-face words: “Would you like to go out with me?”

I was hooked. It was as if the Internet had allowed me to turn flirtation and seduction into a video game. But I didn’t know if my Internet charms were just a fluke or if they were real. I wanted, no, needed to know that the cool person I became when my fingers caressed the keys was actually me.

Therefore, with a scientific resolve possessed only by physicists and 80th-level paladins, I set out to repeat my success. I didn’t want another girlfriend per se, but rather I wanted the affirmation that would come with being able to get another girlfriend.

A few days later I met Rachel during lunch, and after a short conversation got her instant-messenger screen name. After two days, she, too, wanted to date me. I was beginning to see a pattern. The more women I seduced, the more often I could escape my loser identity and become the super-cool cyber Casanova I thought I deserved to be.

I did it again and again. In five minutes I could persuade a girl to give me her screen name and a week after that I could persuade her to go out with me. By the end of the year, I had six girlfriends simultaneously, all maintained through a complicated system of instant messenger, e-mail messages and heavily orchestrated dates.

Some of these girlfriends were as nerdy as I was, while others were cheerleaders and prep-scholars, but the particulars mattered less than the rush of simply being able to charm a girl into liking me, over and over, and then maintaining it.

Often I would be chatting online with five girls at once, each conversation a distinct flirtation (one about puns, another about philosophy); it was like spinning plates. Many of these girls I rarely met in person, but we had deep and steady online relationships.

I also went out on actual dates with a select few: movies and museums, dinner and dancing, and everything else I thought teenage couples should do. Each date was carefully planned so no other girl would catch me.

Nothing was too challenging. I first seduced my best friend’s girlfriend and, when they broke up, I seduced his new girlfriend. I had a girlfriend in New York and one in Philadelphia. I had a girl I met on a train and a girl I met in a nightclub. I had a Republican and a Democrat, an artist and an engineer, a Christian and an atheist.

Each thought I was theirs, yet I was so caught up in the thrill of it all that I felt not a pang of guilt. My love life was a technology that I had practiced and mastered; all I had to do was press the same buttons in the right order every time, and the secrets of human love would come pouring out.

The Internet was more than just a direct wire to the world. It had become a vehicle for my desire to be loved.

I kept up the charade for three years as my sense of challenge waned and my cynicism grew. It was a Sunday night in senior year and I had just returned from watching a movie with one of my girlfriends when my phone buzzed with a new text message. It was from Amber, the girl who had been with me longest: “I love you.”

I love you.

Those three words shocked me into repentance. I didn’t love her back; in fact, love hadn’t even been part of the equation for me. With the help of my computer I could seduce girls I couldn’t even speak to in person, but no amount of smiley faces, words, or LOLs could make me love someone I didn’t. My charm was real, but my affection was feigned.

I realized I had to undo what I had done before I lost track of what really mattered to me and to the people I had duped.

I dealt with it the hard way. I sat down at my computer and started ending relationships, typing again and again those dreaded four words: “We need to talk.” I felt relief as the lie came clear.

Over the next few months my life became a series of break-ups, one after another, as I emptied my contact-list harem of 19 phony relationships. Sometimes I broke up with them, sometimes they broke up with me. The result was the same: freedom. But if the Internet had accelerated my entry into these relationships, it made getting out of them agonizingly time-consuming.

When two nerds break up in person, the threat of eye contact typically ends the conversation in minutes. It’s painful, but at least it’s quick. When two nerds break up over the phone, it can take about an hour. With e-mail or instant messages, the fight can last longer than a special edition “Lord of the Rings” movie. Eternities dropped off the clock as I waited through the pregnant silences between every line. I endured this over and over.

DON’T mistake my story for a technophobe’s cautionary tale, however. I was blinded by the common belief that somehow a relationship forged on the Internet isn’t real. When I saw that fated text message — “I love you” — I realized the truth. The Internet is not a separate place a person can go to from the real world. The Internet is the real world. Only faster.

When I flew out to college that autumn, I felt as if I was stepping into sunshine after four years in the dark. I could start fresh alongside hundreds of others who were ripe to shed their high school selves. If I could step away from the lies I had put on the computer screen, I could find a way both to be charming and true to the person I really am.

Months later I met Lara at a midnight showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” She sat with me long after the movie was over, enduring exhaustion and a sticky seat just to be with me.

“Here,” she said, shifting forward in that subtle way girls do when they’re interested but don’t want to make it obvious. In her hand was a piece of paper. “Here’s my screen name.”

I smiled at her. “Thanks,” I said. “You’ll be the only person on my contact list.”

Roger Hobbs, a runner-up in the Modern Love college essay contest, recently completed his freshman year at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

[Variable]

Originally Posted by Bruinrab

Some of these girlfriends were as nerdy as I was, while others were cheerleaders and prep-scholars, but the particulars mattered less than the rush of simply being able to charm a girl into liking me, over and over, and then maintaining it.

Yeh right. They were all nerds.

[Bruinrab]

My Dropout Boyfriend Kept Dropping In

By LEE CONELL
Published: June 1, 2008

IN April of my freshman year, my boyfriend, Terry, decided he wanted to be homeless. Among the decisions I expected a college-age boyfriend to make (changing cellphone plans, or maybe going vegan), homelessness was not one of them.

Still, I took the situation calmly. I had known Terry since high school and had watched him pass through various phases: Goth, punk, anarchist, Marxist and Zen. When he explained that he was giving up his room to live on the farms and in the woods surrounding our Hudson Valley college town, I did not make a scene. I told myself this, too, would pass and politely asked him why he did not want to live in a house.

“I want to try to exist as free from material stuff as possible,” he said.

I squinted at him. “But I like your apartment. It’s in a great location.”

Terry looked straight into my eyes. “This is just something I have to do for myself.”

I didn’t say anything. It’s hard to argue with that personal power stuff.

Over dinner that evening, I told a girl who lived in my dorm about Terry’s plan. “I’m really worried about it,” I said.

A matter-of-fact business major from Brooklyn, she blurted, “He’s crazy!” She plunged her fork into a pile of rice, and then offered a thinly veiled criticism of me: “I would never put up with that.”

“He’s not so crazy,” I told her. “He’s going to be saving a lot of money. And I can understand wanting to feel close to nature.”

“No,” she said. “He’s definitely crazy.”

My roommate was equally nonplused. Where would he keep his stuff or brush his teeth? Could a city kid like him really transition into the life of an ascetic?

I had no answers. How would I explain his decision to others? Shouldn’t I have seen this coming? Several months earlier, Terry had given me the book “Into the Wild” for Valentine’s Day (because nothing says “I love you” like the story of a young man starving to death in the Alaskan wilderness). That should have been a clue.

Luckily, Terry wouldn’t have to worry about starvation in his own foray: he had a girlfriend with a college meal plan. I pictured myself sneaking cookies out of the dining hall and heading into the woods. People would think I was harboring an escaped convict.

An Oprah-esque voice in my head said: It doesn’t matter what people think as long as he feels fulfilled. But another voice in my head, the one that avoided self-help books and talk shows, was less convinced. That voice told me times had changed, and we weren’t in high school anymore.

Back then, before we started dating, Terry’s acts of rebellion had impressed and attracted me. Just standing next to him, a boy who wore eyeliner and a safety pin through his eyebrow, was an easy and efficient way for me to act out. But I hadn’t been Terry’s friend only for rebellion’s sake. At heart, I understood and agreed with many of his ideas. I just expressed my agreement quietly.

His Zen phase, for example, occurred at the same time as mine, in sophomore year of high school. But while I meditated alone in my bedroom, Terry would meditate publicly: in our high school hallway, on the subway and even, as a photograph I have demonstrates, under a fountain at the Cloisters in New York City (his lined eyelids shut serenely, legs crossed in lotus, bemused museum visitors stopping to stare).

In another photograph from the same day, I also sit under that fountain, but my eyes are wide open and I’m smiling sheepishly, aware of how I stick out, a teenager crouched on the ground, surrounded by medieval art.

We were attending separate colleges when Terry and I started dating in our freshman year, but after several months Terry, unhappy with school, dropped out.

This I defended to friends who gaped at the news by telling them that he was acting against the system, against the overplanned life of studying, choosing our majors, plotting out our meek life goals. What Terry was doing, I told them, was courageous, and I supported his decision even as I spent my nights in the library working wholly within the system to plot out my very own meek life goals.

When he rented a room in my college town and took a job as a taxi dispatcher, I was glad to have him nearby. Still, with the outdoors experiment beginning, I wasn’t sure how his roof-free life would mesh with my own. I had thought the enormous buildup to college — APs, SATs, and other nefarious acronyms — was supposed to pave the way to middle-class normalcy, which didn’t involve having to deal with decisions like Terry’s.

Sure, you might get involved in the occasional good-natured protest, but over all once you attended college, you were on the straight-and-narrow path. Or at least, if the economy didn’t sink, you were on the non-homeless path.

If Terry began to spend his free time lost in the woods finding himself, meditating next to a squirrel, in a state of perpetual nirvana, where would that leave me? Laboring away under fluorescent lighting? Of course, that was what I had chosen, just as I had chosen to smile for the camera under the fountain at the Cloisters while Terry sought the meaning of life in the same spot.

It was growing dark. I had an essay to start, a test coming up. Then there would be laundry to do, followed by several halfhearted attempts at matching socks and cleaning my side of the room. I took a deep breath and looked out my window. As I watched the light change, I thought of Terry underneath that sky.

Then I realized that I was jealous.

What sort of lessons would I learn if I fell asleep each night under the stars? What would happen if I left school and followed Terry’s footsteps? I knew I wouldn’t do it, being overly fond of my books, my room’s four walls and the Internet. Still, I couldn’t stop one image from transposing itself onto my textbooks: me, lying by a brook at night, listening to its babbling, knowing I was going down my own wide-open path.

But once the experiment was under way, I realized that even when you are fully committed to treading that unbeaten path, it’s not so easy to lose yourself in the woods, particularly if you’re from Queens and scared of the dark. On one of his first nights outdoors, around midnight, Terry called me at my dorm. In a small voice he asked, “Can I come over?”

He had been trying to sleep in an apple orchard. As darkness enveloped him, the apple trees began to look less like trees and more like zombies with skeleton hands. Terry was frightened by the scuttling sounds in the bushes, and just as frightened when the sounds stopped.

“It’s really dark,” he said in a hollow, frightened voice. “I’m worried the farmer might find me and shoot me.”

So I told him to come by. And I made the same offer again and again over the following weeks, when around midnight my phone would ring, and Terry would ask me for shelter. He would say it was too cold for him to sleep outdoors, or that he thought he heard rabid dogs, or that the night seemed particularly dark.

Although he did manage to spend a bunch of full nights out there somewhere, he only became edgier as the experiment continued. Whenever I saw him early in the day, if he wasn’t cranky from sleep deprivation, he would be twitchy with anxiety, watching the sky for the looming dark, for a sign that the time of terror approached. Conversation centered on where his sleeping spot for the night would be, and how cold Weather.Com said it would become.

I couldn’t help but entertain the ways I would have done things differently if I were in his shoes, taking advantage of the peace in a way he seemed unable to do: sitting serenely in the wilderness, studying the movements of the stars, composing poetry about humanity’s unbalanced relationship with the natural world and communing with the Disney-eyed wildlife around me. I would certainly not be scared of the dark and a few barking dogs.

Deep down, though, I knew I would be just as scared, or even more scared. And so I felt a little triumphant every time Terry’s experiment went south, which happened often enough.

ONE night, bedded down by a river, he fell asleep with pepper spray in his grasp. Later he brushed his face with the back of his hand and immediately his eyes began to burn. Pepper spray had gotten onto his skin. Eyes smarting and sleep impossible, he walked out of the wooded area and into town, where he spent a few hours sleeping at a coin laundry before being awakened by the police. They threatened to arrest him, but let him go because they were impressed he had a legitimate day job.

That dispatcher job would prove handy during Terry’s time outdoors, as it provided him with a bathroom for tooth brushing and face washing, two activities that became difficult in the wilderness. Dorms were useful for showering. The grungier Terry looked, the easier it was for him to pass as a college student, so it wasn’t difficult for him to sneak into campus bathrooms.

[Bruinrab]

Still, amid the run-in with the police, sleep deprivation and treks to showers, the ideology behind his experiment began to melt away. This became clear to me after I told him that the hunger and homelessness group on campus was doing a “sleep out.” Students would spend one night sleeping outside a campus building to raise awareness about homelessness.

“Oh!” Terry exclaimed happily. “Maybe I’ll do it with them. It’d be less scary if I could sleep near other people.”

Not long after, he began spending most nights on the foldout couch outside my dorm room. In June he rented a room, at which point the experiment was declared over.

“Terry’s living indoors now!” I bragged to friends.

Terry and I are still seeing each other, and he continues to live under a roof.

But my happiness at the experiment’s failure had a darker side. In truth I had enjoyed watching his forays into the wilderness fail night after night because each retreat made me feel better, even superior, about my own safe choices: roof, college, stability. And Terry’s final surrender only drove home the point.

This was hardly something to celebrate, and the dreamer in me knew it.

Lee Conell, a runner-up in the Modern Love college essay contest, recently completed her junior year at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

[bravotwozero]

How quirky...

[Fortune]

About two weeks ago I was locked out of my place I was staying while on a trip. I slept in the car.