Paris Can Wait

I've never been to Paris. That's not a complaint -- just a fact. Even though I love visiting new places and count myself lucky to have traveled to other European countries, I have not yet visited France. I could have orchestrated a trip to France when I was married, but I couldn't bear the thought of seeing Paris for the first time with someone with whom I was not wildly in love. The three of us -- my daughter, my then-husband, and I -- ended up going to Ireland instead. Given my lifelong love of horses, Ireland was a fitting "consolation" prize. What Paris is to love, Ireland is to the horse.

I've been "saving" Paris for a great love ever since. I have many reasons to think I would adore Paris, among them my interest in art history, the three years in high school I tortured my class with my midwestern-accented semi-coherent attempts to say simple phrases in French, and good God, I *do* so love to eat. I read once that if you smile at a stranger in Paris, the local Parisians will assume you are either an escaped lunatic from a mental ward or you're an American. That reaction delights me. I pray it's true.  

When Frenchy and I started dating, I thought there was a good chance I'd finally get to see Paris with him, but it wasn't meant to be. Frenchy and I have broken up. Paris can wait.

I'm still committed to visiting Paris one day with the love of my life. I can picture us walking along the Seine trying to find the exact place where Madeline fell in and Genevieve the dog saved her, or arguing about which street mime was better -- the one who was "caught in a wind tunnel" or the one "trapped in a box." I can even hear her chiding me, "Mom, you're embarrassing me. Stop smiling at everyone!"

Work, Work, Work

Work, work, work. That's all I can see for myself now and over the course of the next 20 years. Between raising the kid and hustling for and at work, I don't expect to have any time to breathe, much less relax and enjoy myself. That's what it feels like to essentially start over in middle age in an economy that can't get its shit together to provide gainful, appropriate employment to 40% of its most recent college grads, much less someone who made the economically foolish decision to leave the paid work force for years to raise a child. The weight of work presses on me, like a bird rebuilding its nest after a tornado. Even at the end of a very productive day, I can find it difficult to relax without feeling the guilt of squandering my free time in front of the tv instead of using it to acquire another marketable job skill. I *should* be learning Mandarin, but I am watching The Mindy Project instead. No wonder I inhabit this uncomfortable purgatory of alternating periods of unemployment and temp gigs, while Oprah inhabits all of America. *She* would have opened her Mandarin book instead of reaching for the remote.

A while ago I gave up my favorite hobby, putting it on the back burner until my life stabilizes and I can afford the time and money to indulge in hobbies again. People who've known me since I was a child are surprised to hear I've gone cold turkey on this hobby that figured so prominently in my identity for so long. But I'm nothing, if not practical. And it's not practical to throw away my limited time on something that will do nothing to secure my stable future. I don't like feeling so out of balance, but until my livelihood is relaunched in a sustainable, less volatile way, I really can't afford to indulge in hobbies. When I do finally find my way in the work world, the first hobby I will reinstate is breathing -- wonderful, guilt-free breathing.

Valentine's Day: The Judgmental Mother-in-Law of Holidays

I have a confession. Even though I write a blog about the quest for true love, I am not a big fan of Valentine's Day, even when I'm in a relationship. I once received a rice cooker on Valentine's Day, and I don't really even like rice. This was the way my longtime sweetheart chose to remember me on the biggest day of the year devoted to romance. We're still together -- my rice cooker and I. Rice-Cooker-Giver, however, is long gone. While the fact that Rice-Cooker-Giver gave me a perfectly unmeaningful kitchen appliance to make a food I don't especially like on Valentine's Day is not a direct cause of our breakup, it is a fitting metaphor for our relationship that never really quite worked.

Valentine's Day is the judgmental mother-in-law of holidays that has the power to make me feel unworthy, unappreciated, or worse, ordinary. If you're single, Valentine's Day can feel like the phantom limb of a partner who is either no longer there or one who has not yet surfaced in your life. If you're in a relationship, it is bothersome to experience the cultural pressure to reiterate your love with a forced, showy display of material affection. I enjoy doing something fun, but low-key, for Valentine's Day, which is why I can only recall two truly memorable ones.

In college, my friends and I staged a mock wedding and beer party one Valentine's Day. Dressed in a tux and a white pouffy wedding dress, my boyfriend and I played the groom and bride, but we wore bags over our heads to "conceal our identities." The fact that *all* of our other friends played characters in the mock wedding, so anyone could easily guess that College Boyfriend and I were the lucky mock couple, never punctured our delusion that we had kept our identities a secret from the rest of the campus. After the mock wedding ceremony, which took place in the college chapel, College Boyfriend and I walked down the long aisle and into the waiting get-away car driven by our accomplice/friend. She whisked us away to a local motel, where we decided to stage another mock event at the bar before heading back to campus to the party. College Friend and College Boyfriend went in to the bar and sat down at a cozy table for two. A few minutes later with the bag off my head, but still in my wedding dress, I stormed into the bar screaming, "WHERE IS HE?!!!!," then grabbed College Boyfriend by the lapels and dragged him out of there. I like to think we provided the unsuspecting patrons with a dramatic soap opera moment to what would have been just another ordinary Valentine's Day spent at a bar drinking and dancing to Jimmy Buffett songs.

The other memorable Valentine's Day occurred when I was five months pregnant. My then-sister-in-law was in town for a professional conference. The only night my then-husband and I could get together with her was for dinner on February 14th. Since my then-sister-in-law was also pregnant -- almost seven months along -- I can only imagine what people thought of the three of us: two big preggos and a seemingly cavalier lothario squiring them on each arm for an odd Valentine's Day dinner. We were a modern-day commemorative plate the Franklin Mint conveniently forgot to make. 

The Joy of Sexonomics

If you enjoy getting puzzled or leering looks from strangers in public places -- and frankly, who doesn't? -- just tote around the book Dollars and Sex as you go about your daily errands. I guess people think I'm reading a vocational guide to prostitution, judging by the pointed "That's... interesting" I got from a creepy older guy staring first at my book, then at my chest, while we were waiting for our coffee at Starbucks.

The full title of Dr. Marina Adshade's fascinating book, based on her blog, is Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love. An economist and a divorcee trying to make rational sense of dating and mating behavior, the author teaches economics at the University of British Columbia. While *I* find economics sexy, I will concede that most people do not. To get her bored students to pay attention in class, she started illustrating the principles of economic theory with examples related to love and dating. Imagine how interesting the typical 18- or 19-year-old might find the concept of opportunity cost when it's explained using the standard example of a factory making widgets. Dullsville. But opportunity cost, when it's explained in the context of dating, is much more compelling, because most of them have weighed those very costs every time they ask someone out or turn someone down. Her approach was so successful, she now teaches an undergraduate course called "Economics of Sex and Love," a class as wildly popular as Ira Glass at a Seattle dinner party.

With an economist's bias that "almost every option, every decision, and every outcome in matters of sex and love is better understood by thinking within an economic framework," the author explores the topics of dating, cohabitation, marriage, divorce, monogamy, and birth control. Some of her findings seem intuitively logical (e.g. why do older unattractive guys like Donald Trump always have beautiful young wives? Well, duh...it's the age-old trade of youthful beauty for the big old wallet). But there are many insights that are counterintuitive, and those are the most interesting. In economic hard times, one might think divorces would increase due to the stress of keeping or losing a job. But in actuality, the divorce rate goes down when the economy is weak because people don't like to walk away from economic losses (e.g. selling a house when its market value has gone down), and will instead choose to ride it out until the economy improves.

While I did not have the luxury of learning economic theory taught through the titillating lense of sex, my interest in understanding the subject was jolted by my intense desire to prove a point to a jackass in my class one semester. One day early on in the course, Jackass made a comment, which I rebutted. My friend -- a man -- noticed that Jackass just bristled whenever I (or indeed any woman) spoke up in class, which he took as evidence of Jackass's reputed misogyny. Well, that's all it took. If you think I'm stupid, that's one thing. Depending on how I feel about myself that day, I might not disagree with you. But if you think I'm stupid just because I'm female, that's *quite* another. Jackass had no idea he was in a match race with a stubborn old mule like me.

From then on, my goal was to litigate any points Jackass made in class, which meant I had to know the material better than I knew my own name. In one memorable exchange, the professor talked about how government can pass laws to affect outcomes and the performance of the economy. Jackass -- who was the original Dwight Shrute 20 years before that character showed up on tv in The Office -- was so put out by this idea, he rambled on and on about how unfair and arbitrary it was to big business to have the rules change. His argument was that in order to "play the game," the rules governing sports were sacrosanct, and so should be the laws regulating business. I disagreed with him, arguing that rules change all the time, "helpfully" pointing out that even basketball had just adopted the three-point rule. Since Jackass also fancied himself a sports nut, it was particularly sweet to use an example from basketball -- *his* sport -- against him.

And so it went all semester, the battle of the sexes fought point by point on the court of microeconomic theory. Most days I walked away feeling like the Billie Jean King of Econ 102, while I suspect he walked away feeling not like Bobby Riggs, but more like H.L. Mencken -- his low opinion of women confirmed by the obstreperousness of my relentless mouth. All these years later, I wonder what he would think of me now. It pleases me to think he would *not* approve of this blog. Women shouldn't have opinions, you know.