Door #1 or Door #2?

1. Elsa the Hungarian Pharmacist:

I met her a couple of weekends ago at a 4 a.m. bar in which I was way too old to be at; I was like the chaperon, seriously. Just when I'm thinking it's time to get a slice of pizza and an orange soda* and take my old ass home, a blond walks in, and she "makes eyes at me."** A little while later, the two of us are doing a barroom, make-out deal, another thing I'm way too old for. We have since exchanged text messages and calls, but it took a while for us to connect. When we finally did talk, I found her to be a lot of fun, and she has a great laugh. We plan on meeting up tomorrow (Thursday).

Pluses:
1. Fun.
2. Cute accent.
3. Might be a potential hook-up for copious drugs. Only kidding! Seriously, positive factor number three has been saying Elsa the Hungarian Pharmacist for the last couple of weeks.

Minuses:
1. I know almost nothing about her.
2. The bar was dark and I was drunk, so she might not be as pretty as I thought she was.
3. Ladies I have met under similar circumstances have not been of much substance, except for Classy.

2. Asian Med-Student Neighbor:

She's a beautiful woman, there are no two ways about it, and everyone who meets her thinks so. We have these amazing conversations when we're one-on-one, yet it's somewhat strained when we're in a crowd. There was one night where it looked like something was going to go down between us, but she flaked. Then another night we're out with a bunch of people, the two of us are talking in a room of the bar away from our friends, and we're agreeing about how great our talks have been. Moments later, when I really should have been kissing her, I find myself talking with some Russian guy in a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt, discussing the merits of their seminal, 1990 LP Butchered at Birth.***

A few days ago she calls me, surprising as it may be after choosing a death metal discussion over her, to ask if I have any Bed Bath and Beyond coupons, which I, of course, didn't. But moments later I found myself going linen/bedding shopping with her. Good sign, right? By the end of the trip we had made plans to go Christmas shopping at Macy's together. Great sign, yes? However, knowing me, I will build up the Christmas party at her house this Saturday as the end-all-be-all moment to make a move. After chickening out, or watching her hook back up with the hand doctor or some other doctor, I'll go upstairs to my apartment, listen to Love Hurts by Nazareth, cry into my keyboard, and then be my own hand doctor.

Pluses:
1. Butterflies. I get honest-to-God butterflies.
2. She's intelligent and a good conversationalist.
3. Fun to be with. I could have sniffed candles in that shop with her until they kicked us out.

Minuses:
1. Seems to have a taste for the finer things in life, and I shop at Aldi and wear gym shorts when I run out of boxers. The thread counts of the bedding seemed a chief concern, and I really didn't know that was a big deal, nor did I know how to spell duvet until Monday.
2. Dating the neighbor could be awkward, and the inevitable post-relationship run-ins would be even weirder. Also, between her 3 roomies and my 4, we have SEVEN roommates. Would we ever be alone together? Also, if things get weird between she and I, would I mess up having four, cute med-students to hang out with?
3. Why do she and I only hit it off one-on-one? Something is screwy about that, right?

I'm surely going to take a crack at both and see where my heart leads me, which will sort a lot of these things out, but I'd welcome some preliminary input, seven readers. All I know is I better enjoy this two girl "problem" while it lasts, because given the feast or famine nature of my love-life, the next two months could have me feeling like The Loneliest Leper TV series starring Scott Bakula.

*You can't beat that combination at Chicago's Pizza.
**Who says that? Nobody else at that bar, that's who. Thus proving I was too old to be in there.
***I've actually never heard that record, or any of their other work for more than a growling minute, but I know all their album titles and what the covers look like. Fucked With a Knife is one of their ditties . . .

I Bring You . . .

. . . Some of the funniest, most random things I've heard in the past week or so:

The Biggest Undies Surplus I've Ever Heard of: Last night a female friend of mine, who has always seemed normal enough, told me two of the strangest things I've ever heard.

1. Don't ask me how this came up, but she disclosed to me that she owns 250 pairs of underwear, many of which still have the tags on them, and they take up like three drawers. Who in the hell hoards undies like that? I told her she should make a quilt out of them, like Gayle Zappa did with all of the bloomers that Frank got from his fans. That idea made her right eyebrow go up, which is when I know I've peaked her interest.
2. She still clings to a security "blankie" she has had since she was two-years-old. When her and I were trying to decide whether or not her boyfriend was a good catch, she did say that he would run into a burning building to save her "blankie." That made our minds up on two matters. He's alright, and she's totally fuck-nuts, in a good way.

Bangin': Today I was telling my mom how my opinion of someone, unless he/she is on of my readers, of course, immediately drops when I hear that he/she tunes in every week for a shit-ass episode of Grey's Anatomy. She pointed out what I've always thought, and what most anyone else should be able to deduce, that one would not want to be treated in a hospital where the entire staff is "bangin'" each other. I'm not sure if any of you will think that's funny, but I just got a bang, pun intended, out of my mom saying "bangin'."

Rotten Ass: I was out with K.I.D., Niner, and some other folks, and K.I.D. relayed a story to us where a random guy said her ass is "ripe." This is along the same lines as the fellow-patron at Home Depot calling Bottle "thick." In both cases, although I wasn't there, I'm sure it was meant as a complement, but in neither case did the woman in question take it as such. To comfort K.I.D., Niner posed the question of would she rather the guy had said she had a "rotten ass?" I nearly fell out of my chair.

Eternal Life Through "Gancer's Awesome Mix Vol 1" and Other Masterpieces

Yesterday, I hitched a ride with some coworkers to a company-paid, birthday lunch for another coworker, and I noticed a few surprisingly respectable songs in a row on a disc that the driver was spinning. I say surprising, because she has never struck me as an Arctic Monkeys fan - I had her pegged as a casual fan of rock music, who would default to something like Coldplay. As it turns out, the disc was made by a guy who she went out with a few times. Sidebar, this gal seems to go on like three dates a week, and the first time I had a conversation beyond hello with her, I felt like I was on a date. She was grilling me with a guided barrage of questions. People with that bad of a sense of urgency to find someone scare the shit out of me.

Mix Tape Guy* guy was evidently scared too, because he dumped her after three dates. I find it strange, as did she, that before dumping her, he acted all chipper on the phone when he made plans to see her at a coffee shop to dump her. There was no need for the face-to-face dump after three dates, even with the mix tape propelling the relationship**, and by making her meet him out, he disrupted her whole day.

ANYWAY, given the fact that I could tell she thought the guy was a putz, I was surprised to see that the disc was still in rotation in her car. This gave me a reassuring feeling that there may be girls out there bumping my mix tapes, even though some of them*** may be saying something akin to, "Fuck Gancer and the camry he rode in on!" I put a lot of time into my mix tapes, and I truly do think about each and every track in terms of the likely-hood that she will like it, given everything I know about the person. I don't simply reburn a set playlist. I certainly don't burn an entire mix tape of the same song over and over, like my sister's psychotic, college roommate, song being In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel. Actually, that might be an easy way out of a relationshit, because any woman would be horrified by such a nutty move. ANYWAY, Because of my strong feelings about these CD's, I'm glad that the carefully chosen songs by bands I love are being spread to people she knows, and maybe even burned onto NEW mix tapes, and then maybe that person makes YET ANOTHER mix tape . . . Staggering, I know.

How about you, Seven Readers? Do you have any relationship-based mix tape stories?

*I'm going to call mix CD's mix tapes throughout this whole post. However innacurate it may be, mix tape is not a term I'm willing to let go.
**That was a joke by the way. I'm don't put quite THAT much stock in the power of the mix tape.
***By that I mean roughly all of them.

El Conquistador

I was talking with a female friend of mine who said that after her extremely emotional break up, which I don't think she's entirely over (but who ever is?), she never had a trampage period. If you don't know what that is, and don't worry if you don't, because I didn't either, this is an episode when a gal sleeps with numerous men, not at the same time necessarily, but essentially, to get over her ex she goes through men like she goes through scrunchies. Wait, scrunchies? Girl don't even use those anymore do they? I once had a girlfriend with whom I shared a car, and she'd leave her scrunchie wrapped around the gear-shift thing. It looked not-so-manly to drive around with a gear-shift adorned with a woman's hair accessory, but I just left it there to avoid getting in a fight somehow, even though I wasn't even sure if moving it anywhere, which means I would lose it, would, in fact, get me in a fight. Could that be a metaphor for our whole relationship, or just a really useless tangent leading us astray from the topic at hand?

Okay, that tangent is over, so stay with me here. The concept of a trampage begs a couple questions:

First the feminist, double-standard question:
Why is it trampy for a woman to get filled out like an application for a few months to get over someone, and a man is just a red-blooded stud getting the poison out? A fair question, and one I don't have the answer to. I could delve into this, but the topic is a little too serious for me, and frankly, I'm not qualified or smart enough to come up with solutions to such a systemic, societal trend. Blogger doesn't pay me to be smart.*

Second, a question that is even less fair to a segment of the population than the last quesion:
Why can't I meet more trampaging women? Okay, the segment I just mentioned is just me, but I'm right when I say it's not fair! I guess I may have come across a few, but never have I been told explicitly I was being used to get over someone. This happened to a friend of mine though, on New Year's Eve a few years back. He and I lived together at the time, and we were having a party at a bar across the street from our house. By the way, it was my favorite New Years ever, and probably among my friend's favorites, as you'll gather in a minute, because there were like one-hundred people there, and so many of them were great people who we invited. Anyway, because this bar was so close to our place, we had pre and post-partying there, and many folks left their coats in my buddy's room, a fact that will be significant in a second. So, My Buddy* is hitting it off with a gal, they duck out, go back to our place before the post-party starts, and he gives her a good rogering in his bedroom, on top of roughly 30, winter coats. At some point she actually told him that she was coming off a bad breakup, and to get over it, she'd be down for getting freaky, even it were on top of a combination of wool, leather, polyester, and maybe even GORE-TEX.**

Lastly, the question on the other side of the Trampaging Coin:
What term do we assign to the male equivalent?
I've given this some thought. Actually, I just blurted it out when the question was posed to me, but I think it's a term with some staying power. Because a man sometimes needs a series of sexual conquests to move on, and because the term implies a latin-lover-type mentality, the term for a man in this period of his life that I'm leaving for posterity, here at the gancer, is Conquistador.

Okay, now it's your turn:
Tell us a Little Miss Trampage or El Conquistador story

*They don't pay me to be funny either. The pricks.

**Every time I typed My Buddy, I couldn't help think of the doll My Buddy advertised on television when I was growing up. It didn't seem tangent worthy, so I've footnoted it, and you can learn more about it here.

***My friend, I'm done saying my buddy, later told me that during "the act" she said, "I love parties!"

****In the above text, you will not find a fourth asterisk, which incidentally, took me forever to figure out how to spell (see earlier where I said I'm not that bright), but special thanks goes to fellow blogger Mysterygirl, who, despite never fully trampaging herself, proved to be a valuable person to network with on this topic.

"Thanks, Chad. I'll Take It From Here."

For whatever reason, everyone I talked to was not pumped about Halloween weekend this year. No one knew what costume they were going to wear, what party/bar they were going to, or even what kind of candy they were going to give the kids (cyanide or razor blade based). Unlike these ill-prepared and underwhelmed dead-beats, not only did I have plans for Friday and Saturday, but I had a separate costume for each night. As it turns out, the weekend proved to be everything I hoped it would be and more, and I'd like to share with you some of the details.

Friday
The Costume: On this night I was Brett Michaels from Poison. I had on a black wife beater, dark jeans, black eye liner, a tacky, rock star belt, a blond, rather convincing, wig, a do-rag, and I even researched his tattoos, and had my talented roommate draw them on me.
Venue: My Heterosexual Life Partner (HLP), who was dressed as Jim Morrison from the bloated era, and I went to Subterranean to see a bunch of bands dressing and playing like other bands, but really good bands like The Misfits, Neutral Milk Hotel, Guided By Voices, Flaming Lips, Blondie, and Badfinger.

It's kind of fun to get your rock on when you are dressed as rock stars, but what an unlikely pair of rockers to be hanging out, right? I don't see Brett and Jim having much in common, but on this night they got along famously.

We then went to The Liar's Club where we danced with a big group of girls who looked to be way too hot to be coming from a book club, all of which were married, which we didn't bother looking into until it was last call. Jim was tired, so was Brett, but Brett still wanted to meet up with some friends doing late-night karaoke at The Hidden Cove, a shit-hole so far up north it might as well be in Wisconsin. Brett was blind drunk, but still managed to perform a rousing rendition of Photograph by one of his competeters, Def Leppard, even with the teleprompter out! That is the stuff karaoke legends are made of. Look what you've done to this rock n' roll crown, Brett. Look what you've done . . .

Saturday
Costume: Ghostbuster costumes that HLP and I ordered online. The jumpsuits were a little more yellow than they should have been, and the proton pack and gun were inflatable.
Venue: A party in a remote suburb TWO HOURS west of Chicago.

We were committed to go to this thing, because we feel bad for our friend who moved so far away, but as the day approached, the evite only had like 10 confirmed guests. This was frustrating, because the Saturday before Halloween is the best bar night in the city. Period. Every girl is dressed like a slut, and it's so easy to talk to people, because it's just a matter of saying, "Hey there, Slutty Girlscout. I'll take two boxes of thin mints, if you know what I mean." I actually don't know what that means, and neither did she, but who gives a shit. You get the point.

We made the two hour drive, it took about that long to blow up our proton packs, and I think I got a hernia from the strain of the process. The hernia didn't improve when I slipped on the one-size-fits all, Ghostbusters jumpsuit, that didn't have a 6'2" guy in mind when they made the thing, because it pushed my ball-bag up into my naval. Anyway, the party was small, but the thing about The Host (the same guy from this post) is that any time he's drinking he's partying like it's his last, and he has a maniacle, and yes that's the word for it, laugh that bumps everyone around him up to a party-level of defcom 5. He had a smoke machine and a mix of music that reportedly took him "weeks" to complete with maniacle, once again, the right word, interludes of recordings of his own voice.

However, The Host's wife didn't share her spouse's ability to look past the piss-poor turn-out, and she decided that we needed go to a bar to salvage the evening. Now, my expectations were pretty low for a bar in a city so far from Chicago that it really can't even be considered a suburb, but I will say that this bar was bumping! Not only that, but you could get a round of vodka redbulls for like twelve bucks. To a broke, booze-hound Chicagoan, that's like looting.

There were two gay dudes with us dressed as Roman soldiers, so we had a pair of centurions and a pair of Ghostbusters getting busy on the dance floor, which must have looked hilarious in a bar where only one third of the people were dressed up. I kept having a girl, dressed as Marilyn Monroe whom I hadn't said a word to, come up to me, grind on me for a brief while, and leave. I said to one of the Centurions, much to his amusement, that she was a contingency plan in case all else failed.

So, all else failed, and I found myself having a drunken discussion with Marilyn at the end of the night. She said that I was going home with her, and who am I to argue with her? I think I may have agreed to get rid of some ghosts in her apartment, but I'm not sure, as I was pretty drunk at the time (see the aforementioned vodka-redbull prices). So, we're back at her place, we do our thing, in most every room of her place, and I awake the next day to the sound of sea gulls. I wandered into the living room to investigate this sound, naked, because I was in no hurry to wear my only clothing item available to me, the ball-squishing jumpsuit. On my way to her back door, behind which was the source of the seagull noises, I saw a note that read as follows: "Gancer, went to pick up my son. Be right back."

Dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and discombobulated, I walked to go look at the water and sea gulls and process the recent events. As I was scratching my head and naked ass, I was thinking to myself:

Did she mention a son last night?
What body of water is this?
I suppose it could be the Mississippi as far west as we are.
Hell, it could be the Pacific Ocean. Hahahha. That wasn't bad . . .

Just then the door opened, and I thought, "Oh, shit! I can't have this poor kid come home to see a naked man looking out the back door!" So, I covered my junk, and ran to the bedroom to get my jumpsuit. She and Chad, her son, who looked to be around 1, were nice enough to drive me home, and here is the whole reason I was excited about writing this blog. I know, it's been a long one, and I've come a long way for this one detail, but I think it's worth it. When we pulled up to my buddy's house, as I'm saying my goodbyes to a woman who looked far better as Marilyn Monroe and through eyes operating by means of a brain addled by way too many cheap energy drink-based cocktails, I reached to the back seat of the car to fetch my gear, which is when I saw young Chad chewing on my inflatable, proton pack. There is something that is simoultaneously funny and pathetic about that moment, and it will probably be an image that will always stay with me. I said, "Thanks, Chad. I'll take it from here."