Stupid is as stupid does.

I did something stupid. While it's true this statement is also the best and most likely title for a book and movie of the week based on my life starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, clearly there will need to be sequels.

Before I explain any further, I'm not expecting anybody to be surprised by this latest turn of events, but what do I know? I was very surprised myself when a friend recently told me she was shocked by the shallowness of my last posting, in which I complained about being unable to find knee boots that don't make my legs look like a couple of giant sausage casings and a turducken squeezed into Italian leather.

Given that the shopping trip this posting described took place during a week I was in Vancouver for allergy testing, and given I learned during that week that I'm severely allergic to a lot of glue used in boots and shoes, it was apparently shallow of me to focus on how sad I am that I can't find fashionable boots because of sizing, rather than the fact that certain boots and their glue could kill me.


In my defense, my allergy to the glue in my shoes won't actually kill me. All it does is cause my feet to swell, bubble, toil, trouble, bleed and blister. I don't die though, so as long as that shit is covered up by my socks, nobody needs to see the mess even though it's kind of painful - much like the theory behind wearing Spanx.


What I found more shocking about my friend feeling shock was she had gone this long without ever having known I'm shallow. Soon she'll discover she's actually met me before, and I'm prone to banging men in uniform. Her mind will boggle.

However, back to me being a dumb-ass.

You see...there was this boy. That's pretty much all I should have to say by now to instill a feeling of dread in all ten of my readers, but it gets worse.

One day, this girl was feeling the need for a distraction. For those of you not following closely enough, that girl would be me. I came across an amusingly worded boy seeking girl dating profile and I sent a reply.

Last year, I had sworn off ever online dating again or at least not until I reach my goal weight, but neither infinity or single digit pant sizes have materialized as of yet, and so it came to this.

(It had also come to my poor Mom calling me on a Saturday night, and sounding so sad that I answered. She told me that my life makes her sad and she just wishes I could have more fun, or at least a guy who would take me to the movies once in a while. My Mom used to wish for my wedding day and grandchildren. Now all the woman can dare to dream about is the remote possibility there might be a guy willing to sit next to me in the dark for two hours, without even having to talk. And yet, I still disappoint.)

This is how I came to be dipping my toe back in the putrid waters of the online dating pool. Remarkably enough, things went...awesome.

The distraction (or D) was funny, kind, tall, smart, employed, younger enough than me to be hot without being creepy, and SO cute. We talked for hours and hours everyday. My work productivity dropped from a solid 30% output to less than zero. When we met in person we clicked like crazy.

Normally meeting in person is when the courtship ends for me, so I was beyond flustered when we continued being unable to leave each other alone.

We started making plans. Restaurants we wanted to go to, long drives we wanted to take, places he wanted to show me, movies he wanted to watch with me. My head spun. Was it really this easy?

My married firefighter called me up and I put him off. It felt like I'd be...cheating. Holy. Crap. Everything I was feeling felt like something I'd given up feeling again - that rush of meeting somebody new. The even bigger rush that came from thinking that the new person was getting the same rush I was. It was such a rush I told nobody. If I talked about it at all, it might go away.

The first time D came over to my place was mildly terrifying. I had invited him, we had discussed it, but I had no idea why he was there. When a guy comes over to my place and he's not directly related or gay, it's normally because he's planning to have sex with me. I didn't know what to do with a guy who seemed like he might be there for more than that.

(Naturally, with all of our talking and hanging out, D and I covered sex and the possibility we may have it with one another at some point. In fact, I had already decided that for once, the idea didn't make me fearful. Instead, it made me happy. He admitted he'd lost girlfriends because his sex drive far exceeded theirs. This ladies, is why I prefer younger men.)

I wasn't uncomfortable for long. We laughed a lot, talked a lot, drank some wine...a lot. And then all of a sudden I was uncomfortable again.

He had just finished telling me a funny story about his family, and I was laughing and pouring wine. By the time I turned back towards him, he had his hand down his pants.

At first I thought I had caught him scratching himself rather obviously and I should turn away again, give him a moment, and then carry on. When I turned toward him a second time, he was still at it. This wasn't an ill-timed scratch. He was full on jacking-off mid-conversation.

Remarkably, this has nothing to do with the stupid thing I did. This is really just an aside, or perhaps it's the first of several red flags I may have wanted to pay closer to attention to over the course of the evening.

Perhaps an even bigger red flag than this was the fact my first response was to ignore it. We were having a wholesome good time goddammit, and as long as I kept my eyes on his face and kept the conversation to open-ended questions that showed I was a worthy companion who was genuinely interested in his life then I could pretend that maybe he was itchy and...oh fuck my life. He wasn't stopping or even slowing down.

I'm certain any one of you 10 faithful readers could have come up with a better response than what I managed, but let's not Monday morning quarterback. I've never understood football and I've never chosen the best option, so it's not worth your effort. Instead of ordering him out of my house or at least off my couch, I kissed him.

Still, this is not the stupid thing I did.

He kissed me back, I made fun of his incredibly subtle seduction skills, we kept kissing and we fooled around. Note, we did not have sex. Per se. Not really.

(Oral sex shouldn't really count because nobody gets pregnant. Feel free to argue whether oral sex is sex amongst yourselves but in the mean time, that STILL had nothing to do with the stupid thing I did.)

We cuddled, we laughed more, talked more, made more plans. I was going to lend him some books, he was going to bring over a spare router so I can finally use my laptop in my living room again. I was going to teach him how to enjoy white wine, he was going to teach me to like good scotch.

When he left, we made plans to hang out the next night if he could get out of a dinner party early enough. If he couldn't, as soon as we could after that.

And that was the last I heard of him.

It's been nearly a week, and it's like he never existed. I'm still a little stunned. After how quickly and easily he fit into every minute of my day, I actually believed it would continue.

I thought that WE would continue, and THAT is the stupid thing I did.

After all of this time and everything I've been through, all it took was a guy using the "we" pronoun in future tense, and my heart went all aflutter. Not only did I believe all of that crap - I fell for it.

When naivete can no longer be considered an option, the only explanation left is stupidity.

(The ending to this story isn't entirely unhappy. After scanning the obituaries and concluding D really did stand for Douche and not Dead, I became fearful of another possibility. Was I that big of a disappointment in the sack...?? Not that oral sex is sex, but this wasn't time for semantics.)

(After three days had passed without any word from D, I showed up on the married firefighter's doorstep. It seemed my schedule had suddenly been cleared. Five hours later I prepared to leave and collected my clothing from the front hallway, the back patio, the living room, the kitchen table, and then retraced my steps through the bedroom, two bathrooms and the garage looking for my car keys and one earring. As one does. Before I could head home though, I had to ask him...was I...any good? I won't bore with you how he told me, but the answer took another hour and was a resounding yes. Firefighters...truly our nation's heroes.)

No shoes for you.

When you have thighs that end three feet below in toes as I do, boots are a problem. I see other girls running around with their skinny little calves, and their skinny little jeans zippered into their skinny little fashion boots and I stare them down with envy.

Those skinny little girls have no idea how some of us suffer, particularly those who make do with what can be most optimistically described as "sporty" calves.

I come from a long line of people voted least likely to ever blow over in a windstorm. Legs should be sturdy, but mine border more on resolute with prejudice. This condition makes finding boots that can zip up over my calves to be nearly impossible.

And yet I keep trying. I've long ago given up trying to be a better person, but I'll be damned if I give up on my quest for boots that will zip up around my calves. It's important to have priorities.

My latest expedition took place in Vancouver, where I spent a week submitting to allergy testing.

(For more than a year I've suffered from allergies so severe, it wasn't nearly enough to say I had allergies. The term "Muppetism" was coined to better describe what happens to my face and feet for no discernible rhyme or reason. This is how I ended up spending a week with 138 chemicals swabbed onto plastic trays, and the 138 little plastic trays taped to my back with three inches of medical tape. )

(It was good time, and I'm happy to report I know what I'm allergic to! I'm unhappy to report the chemical that affects me so severely appears to be in approximately 87% of products sold on planet earth, including all waxes for hair removal. I'm happy to report my sex life is pathetic enough that I was spared discovering this little factoid following a Brazilian because...well...damn.)

I couldn't exercise all week, I couldn't shower and I couldn't stop myself from rubbing my back up against various walls and sharp corners in an attempt to provide relief from the blisters and the itch while appearing nonchalant. Really, the only practical thing left for me to do was to shop.

Trying on clothes was largely out of the picture, because it's hard to wiggle in and out of a sweater without disturbing the large area of my back appearing to have grown an electrical panel. Really, I had no choice but to shop for shoes.

My sister had pointed out a store downtown carrying nothing but shoes, boots and purses - and nothing over $19.99. If there were a Make a Wish Foundation for Grown-ups with Muppetism, this store would feature prominently.

I was the only customer in the store in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. The owner of the store was a very well-dressed Iranian man, who glancing down at my feet assured me that most of the shoes in the store came in large sizes. Fantastic.

What I wanted to try was a pair of black over the knee boots with silver buckles and heels that sashayed the very fine line between sexy and slutty, and could easily make the leap to trashy whore with little effort. They were perfect.

When I went to zipper the perfect boots closed, they were also about 12 inches too small to do so. The owner gave a slight eye roll which said he wasn't the least surprised, and perhaps now I would be willing to look at the more clog oriented section of the store.

I wasn't ready for the clogs. Instead, I meandered around the store in hopes I would find the impossible - sexy high boots to fit my peasant calves. If such boots ever existed, the patent was last seen stuffed into Jimmy Hoffa's pocket, but I had nothing better to do at the time.

Spotting a wider looking pair of riding boots, I reached my hand towards them. From the back of the store, the owner yelled out.

"Those are not for you!"

Alright...perhaps they weren't as wide as I may have thought. I turned and picked up some boots in a rich brown suede, that would look really cute with my pink...

"Not those!"

Fine. The brown suede may be a little too narrow after all, so I picked up a very dressy black pair with what appeared to be a generous amount of elastic at the very top.

"Those not for you either!"

I really, really wanted sexy boots for $19.99 so I argued that the top of the boots were stretchy.

"Not enough."

Now I understood why real truth in advertising can't be allowed to happen. My mission failed, but I still left with a pair of leopard print high heels, purchased largely out of self defense, and my head held high.

I had no choice but to hold my head high really - slouching could have loosened all the medical tape.

Screw you Howard.

I've been feuding with God since the mid-nineties, and over the Christmas holidays, God significantly raised the stakes.

We didn't always have such an acrimonious relationship. My parents, bless their naive hearts, had me baptized Catholic. Since I was a baby at the time and the ability to hold my bladder let alone rationalize were years out of my grasp, it was probably best my parents covered the major life decisions for me.

It's also just as likely my parents got tired of my head spinning around and my crib constantly catching fire, so they did what they felt they had to.

I was actually a bit of a religious zealot during my earliest years. My top career aspirations at the time were to become either a bird, a nun, a saint, or an Olympic athlete. Obviously, growing up to be a bird was actually the likeliest outcome based on those options.

I really liked how nuns wore black everyday, which seemed pretty bad-ass. They didn't even have to have their hair yanked into pony tails and barrettes every damn day because they got to wear those head flappy things.

My grandmother, who is still devoutly Catholic, bought me a Children's Book of Bible Stories. This is how I first developed a taste for the horror genre. The book was stuffed full of stories about rivers running with blood, first born sons being slaughtered from house to house, plagues of creepy insects, massive floods and women turning into pillars of salt as they ran from God's wrath.

She also bought me a book about the saints. Even then I noticed that these stories didn't exactly even out well for the girls. All the boy saints got their special place in heaven by doing fun things like talking to animals and leading lost people home. The girl saints had their eyes ripped out and were set on fire.

No matter, because I would be the first to change this. I would do fun things too, and get serious recognition from God, just as soon as I figured out what kinds of fun things to do to get that kind of attention.

God and I were actually pretty tight. Despite the stories I read, I couldn't help but see Him as a pretty good guy. After all, his name was Howard, and it's kind of hard to fear anything named Howard.

For those heathens amongst my ten readers, the Lord's Prayer, which every good Catholic invokes at the first sign of trouble, starts off like this: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name..."

Seriously, it took me years to discover the prayer we recited every Sunday School class wasn't actually saying: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name."

Frankly, this discovery made me sad. I liked the idea that there was a God in the sky, and his name was Howard. It just didn't seem as personal the other way.

In those days, Sunday School classes were all about preparing us for our first Communion. First Communion is a huge deal.

Again, for the heathens, Communion is a Christian rite reenacting the last supper. This would be the supper Jesus last hung out with his peeps before dying horribly and having his death memorialized into fashionable jewellery for pop stars centuries later.

He told the guys during this supper that the bread they were eating was his body, the wine they were drinking was his blood, and basically he'd be with them always. Kind of gross really.

Realistically speaking, I find it hard to believe that there wasn't at least one guy at the dinner that night who thought Jesus was being just a little melodramatic, if not completely batshit.

During Communion, consecrated bread and wine are distributed to participants during Roman Catholic mass. Essentially, we were being prepared to eat and drink a piece of Jesus.

This did not go over well initially in my Sunday School class. We rightly wanted to know how the Communion wafer became Jesus, and would we really be drinking blood? We were assured we would actually be drinking grape juice, but this just inspired more questions. How did grape juice become blood? Is it magic?

The grape juice does not actually become blood and the Communion wafer is not actually a piece of Jesus. That would be impossible because Jesus died a very long time ago. It's not magic either, and we shouldn't be asking about evil things like magic spells. The priest has the power to bless the wafer and the grape juice so we would only be consuming Jesus symbolically.

What a relief.

We rehearsed for First Communion. There was a special way we had to line up, a special way we had to sip from the cup and a special way to put the wafer in our mouths but only after saying amen. It had to be "amen," because a "thanks" to the priest was inappropriate.

It's a good thing we had a few run-throughs with regular old wafers instead of the special wafers blessed by the priest. Once the wafers were in our mouths, our next steps were critical. We were in under no circumstances supposed to chew on Jesus.

We were meant to suck on Jesus, and not move our mouths. Any sign of masticating would be a disappointment to our families and to God.

Boys were paired up with girls to walk down the aisle for the big show. I was delighted to be paired with my good friend Marcel, who I had a crush on. We were the two tallest kids in the class so for aesthetic purposes it was meant to be.

We were both nervous about what we'd be wearing for First Communion. As it turns out, Marcel was gay. Given how my life eventually turned out, it shouldn't be surprising that I was already a fag-hag at age seven.

The outfits were actually pretty important. Boys wear suits and ties and girls wear pretty white dresses and veils. Had I known that would be the first and very last time I'd be seen in a pretty white dress with matching veil, I probably would have milked it just a little more.

Fast forward a couple of decades and my relationship with the Catholic church has changed just as radically as my career aspirations. I no longer wish to be a nun. At this point, I think Jesus himself would probably put in a second appearance just to ask me WTF should I ever try.

I do like wearing all black though, because it's still pretty bad-ass. Wisely, I no longer aspire to sainthood. The best I can offer is aspiring to not be such an asshole, and even then I make no promises.

I will never be an Olympic athlete, but I wouldn't mind dating one. Particularly Sidney Crosby. I could do very unsaintly things to that boy.

Growing up to be a bird still comes up occasionally.

My loss of faith in the religion I was raised in breaks my Dad's heart. He doesn't disagree with my reasons for turning my back on the church and wiggling my ass in its general direction, but he thinks I should be able to overlook what are essentially the sins of God's management team on earth, and find value in the most basic teachings.

My Dad is a very good man, and I despise God's management team all the more for being such a disappointment to a guy like my Dad, who is forced to look past a whole lot of sins just to remember the basic teachings.

I'm not nearly so faithful or forgiving. I can not look past the poor treatment of women in the Catholic faith, the rape of children and the years of covering for and protecting those who rape children, the discrimination against gays and lesbians, the mind numbingly backward and dangerous views on birth control that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives because of AIDS and impoverished women denied the right or ability to stop giving birth to dozens of impoverished children, the arrogance behind the belief that women don't have a right to their own bodies, the twisting and tarring of consensual sex between adults as evil or unhealthy, the Pope's stupid pointy hat...

There's not very much about Catholicism I'm still fond of, but I'm very fond of my Dad. Because I am, I will shut my wafer-hole, keep my opinions to myself and go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve with my family.

One night a year, I call for a truce with God. Yes, it's true I broke exactly three commandments on the drive to the church, but if I'm truly not supposed to covet anything belonging to somebody else then I have no idea how I'm supposed to occupy my time.

(Message to God: If I had the things I covet, then I wouldn't have to covet now would I? Feel free to take that as a hint.)

(Also, taking your name in vain when I banged my knee getting out of the car should hardly be considered that big of a sin. It really hurt.)

(Fine. I did steal the last lemon bar for the ride to the church when I knew my sister wanted to eat it, but I was feeling peckish.)

A half hour into the mass, the priest having sermonized appropriately and the choir having taken all of the joy out of Christmas favorite, Joy to the World, it was time for Communion.

Despite the years in between, all that rehearsing and wearing that pretty white veil are deeply embedded in my memory. Although only once a year, Communion is still an automatic response.

How to form the line, the appropriate response when the priest intones, "Body of Christ," how to cup my hands to receive the wafer, and mostly how to suck and not chew Jesus...

Which is how I ended up choking on the fucking Holy Communion. I'm walking away from the priest, attempting to look pious, when a piece of the Body of Christ lodges in my throat.

I'll say it. I know you're thinking it. You're thinking with all the years of bad behaviour in between holy innocence and now, that I might have learned to suck just a little better. You would be wrong.

There I am, eyes watering, arms ready to flap in panic, airway blocked, and all I can think is...this is pretty damned funny. Out of all the ways to go, this is really hilarious.

I learned in the First Aid/CPR course I completed (all the while having impure thoughts about a fellow classmate) that if you yourself are choking, it's very difficult to perform the Heimlich solo.

The best thing to do is to throw yourself flat out, face forward to the ground in hopes having the air knocked out of you dislodges the food.

This amuses me even more. After having just placed the Holy Wafer in my mouth I suddenly throw myself flat out on the ground? Guaranteed there were people devout enough at that mass who would think I'd just been possessed by Satan, and instead of the Heimlich I'd get some holy water on my forehead.

If I could almost laugh I could almost breathe, and if I could do that I could cough until the piece of Jesus that was trying to murder me sorted itself out. I hacked and I coughed all the way to my seat and through the rest of the mass, disturbing nearly the entire congregation, and likely preventing the word of God as filtered through the priest from reaching them properly.

As far as retaliation goes, it was the very least I could do.