Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Now that I have a boyfriend who reads this blog, I have to begin by saying this did not happen to me but to my girlfriend who has no name or location.

But she and I are the same size and age and have similar sensibilities.

We almost always make exactly the same mistakes, which is why we’re such good friends.

She called to ask me where the line is between exploring your options and cheating. How far out can you step before you say goodbye?

She hates her job, so she has been gritting her teeth and getting through it for well over a year. She’s undervalued and underpaid. So she’s been stealing time from her other duties and using it to look for a job while she’s at her job.

As far as I’m concerned, this is too normal to be worth talking about as a transgression. It is just too minor.

Recently, however, she’s started to get some job interviews. She comes up with an excuse and sneaks out. She told me she even leaves her interview clothes in the car so her co-workers don’t wonder why she’s all dressed up.

After the interview, she removes her lipstick and other makeup so she can blend into the blandness of her office without attracting attention.

When she dithers about cheating on her employer this way, I can tell she’s not genuinely troubled by it.

You don’t need to quit a job and be unemployed in order to find another one. Since you can get fired for even telling your boss you’re looking for another job, there is no choice. That’s just how it has to be.

Her approach to dating is very similar.

She’s always got a guy or three coming after her—one or two who think they are going out with her and at least one who she’s dumped but who hasn’t given up hope.

She doesn’t lead them on exactly, but she does manage all this male attention adroitly so she never has to be alone or pay for a meal in a nice restaurant. She tells them little lies so that Man A will continue to consider himself in the pole position (of course) despite the fact that she’s doing the same with Man B and often Man C, too.

It is always just about to collapse, on the verge of going out of control.

In the nightmare scenario, all these suitors arrive on her doorstep the same night with flowers, running into her other suitors. As I picture this, a battle ensues and the man left standing at the end gets her.

She’s not exactly cheating, I say, because she’s so adept at being vague. She lets the guys think what they want to think. She knows that clarity and transparency are not her friends, and that deception is allowed right up until the point she makes a commitment to one of the men.

She never seems to get to that point, however. If she told a guy she was also interviewing and auditioning other men he might not want to go through the evaluation, right?

I tell her you go girl, that’s just how it has to be.

I’m one of the original girl technogeeks.

I bopped around the Internet back when it was just a small neighborhood, or more accurately a boy’s dormitory.

So put an electronic toy in my hand, and I’m as swift on the uptake as my kids, and that’s saying a lot.

When I save to my cell phone a number that I expect to call again, I want to associate a picture and a ringtone with it, just for fun.

The photos are straightforward. If I meet a man online then I have a picture of him. Then again, this happens less than you might think. I don’t put his picture in my phone until after the first date, and most guys don’t get a second.

However, once we’ve met once or twice, and I go silent on him—I’m just thinking, Mmm, do I want him to take me out again or not?—his phone number and picture and ringtone get stuck in my phone.

Maybe I’ll go out with them again, maybe not. I can scroll down the pictures on my phone like an electronic menu of men and see what the choices are. I send a text message. He calls, and let the games begin.

The most fun by far is assigning ringtones. Each ringtone costs $1, so I have to at least value the man more than that.

When my kids call from home, I hear Paul Simon sing “Home! Home is where I wanna beeeeeeee!”

My ex and I still talk fairly frequently about kid business, which is the way I want to frame our ongoing relationship. We are partners in this child-raising business but not in any other sense.

I’ve assigned him Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business.” This is a huge upgrade for him over the tunes that came out of my phone earlier in our divorce process, the best being Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” which I now think of as my ex’s theme song.

Prior to that the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil” was the tune that introduced the harangue I was sure to get from him if I took the call.

When she called, my divorce lawyer was also announced by a Warren Zevon oldie: “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” which I now understand as a divorce song.

My ex does the same with his phone and reported to me that he’d brought a recent date to a screeching halt when I called and Joe Cocker began to sing “Unchain My Heart.”

He says the woman looked at him icily and told him that needed to be changed.