I have certainly expressed some level of dissatisfaction with the way of my relationships in the past. In fact, the last several posts have been about my relationship horror stories – and trust me, nothing excites me like going on yet another horrific date for entertainment’s sake. I have been known to justify arguably horrible experiences with, “Well, at least this’ll make a good post.”

There are times, however, when I just don’t get it, and no amount of entertainment can keep me from throwing up my hands and succumbing to the urge to strangle the next male thing that walks by (and don’t even get me started on women, they’re just as bad). Like any good twenty-something, I poured this frustration out to one of my favorite bartenders just after a certain musician who had been making the most obvious eyes EVER at me all night walked out without so much as introducing himself.

I began the conversation as civilly as could be expected.

“Guys are idiots.” Continue reading →

Today I read an article about “confessional culture” – in short, detailing the current trend of obsession with tell-all projects like “Post Secret” and “Cassette from My Ex”. It is what fuels reality TV and tabloids. And, I assume, it’s why all of you lovelies read my blog.

It’s either that or the elation you experience knowing that you haven’t had to experience the things I write about.

Speaking of which, let me tell you the story of my first.

Growing up, I didn’t have much of an early obsession with boys. They made me nervous, to be honest, and I liked books better. Once, in the summer after seventh grade, my cousin told me that his friend wanted to be my boyfriend. Mind you, this was all after I snuck out of my grandparents house, crashed a sleepover they were having, and he shined a laser pointer at my boobs, but the anxiety that followed the potential boyfriend-girlfriend announcement was unbearable for me. I couldn’t figure out if he was serious or not, and I couldn’t bear the thought of saying “yes” only to be laughed at for thinking the boy was for real. So I said, “My parents won’t let me,” which was pretty true at the time.

By the time I was eighteen, I still hadn’t responded in favor to any guy that asked me out, still for fear of some grand, public rejection. And, in some cases, for fear of the gross-factor of the boys who asked. That was until a friend of mine – Kristen – took it upon herself to solve the dating dilemma I didn’t even know I had. She decided to play match-maker for me, and having picked her target, she started not-so-subtly inviting us both over her house and leaving us alone for hours at a time claiming she had to “run to the store” or “pick up eggs.”

Long story short, he ended up kissing me while leaving her house one night, and asked me out on a date the very next week. It wasn’t my first kiss, else that could have been far more embarrassing of an event, but I was still pretty inexperienced. Continue reading →

Happy Monday, readers!

This weekend I drank far too many bottles of wine and spent far too much time dissecting and evaluating my relationships – both past and current – with good friends. Nothing wrong with that, as far as I can tell, and fortunately for you, this little story emerged.

Once, I was engaged.

I’m in my mid-twenties and there’s nothing scandalous, wrong, or even particularly interesting about the fact that I was once engaged, but I guess that fact that I am not currently married is still interesting enough to make people look at me in surprise and/or pity when I share the past-engagement status.

Even less interesting is the story of how I became engaged. The only thing I can say is that there was a guy I was living with, drinks, and a very shiny ring. The fun story comes from the morning after. Continue reading →

I have discovered that there is some sort of odd thrill in blogging about the things that I shouldn’t. It turns out that I love sharing my *private* life with the troves on the internet. Go figure.

In short, I’m a blogging whore.

Luckily for you, and sadly for me, I’m ok with this. In fact, I intend to celebrate it with this little tidbit from the history of my love life.

This past May, my little sister got married. I was intensely happy for her. I myself had just gotten out of an almost-marriage the previous fall and had spent months living in an electricity-less country where no one spoke English. Needless to say, I had been in the mood to have fun and do things that I shouldn’t for quite some time — this just happened to overlap with my sisters wedding, more specifically, with her groom’s wedding party. Continue reading →

I was happy to see that so many of you were more charmed with my date with AJ than I was with AJ. Lucky for you – and not so much for me – the story didn’t end with the end of the ten-hour-date.

While I wasn’t crazy enough to go on a second date, I was cordial enough think that he deserved a phone call from me telling him that while he certainly put a lot of effort into our first date, I didn’t think we should see each other again.

My plan was to wait a couple of days – you know, for the sake of the two-day rule and to not look like a psycho, though I’m not exactly sure why I was concerned about the psycho part – he had already trumped me on that one. But, by the time I woke up the next morning (thank god it was a Saturday – I needed some serious sleep to recoup from such a long date – and not for any kind of a good reason) he had already left me a voice mail two text messages.

Apparently no one ever told him about the two-day rule. Continue reading →

As a fair warning, this may be the longest blog post I have ever written, but I promise you, the story is well worth it. And this one is dedicated to Janna –  a sweet friend of mine who is currently hanging out in the hospital with nothing better to do than read my blog posts.

Whenever I re-commit myself to blog writing, I feel as if I constantly teeter along the edge of the over share. On one hand, constantly sharing too much about myself, my experiences, and the people involved in them would probably make my blog that much more popular (and while I don’t obsess, I do enjoy increased readership). On the other hand, I have no idea who reads my blog, who knows me, or who would be potentially hurt by my for-entertainment’s-sake stories.

I once read a post by a friend of mine condemning the culture of over sharing. She maintained that is was class-less, unnecessary, and a tasteless by-product of a generation obsessed with attention. I couldn’t help but feel that it has all the potential to be the exact opposite – I tend to admire those who are out loud, open, and not afraid of who they are (or who they are becoming). I have always been a tad jealous of the unhindered.

It is in that spirit that I am opening yet another aspect of my life to blogging – one that had previously been off-limits, mostly for my own sake: DATING.

Yep, aside from a smattering of words on the untimely end of my engagement and one particularly forward Dominican man, I have not allowed my readers to scour my relationships. That will end today. I have a lot of stories, and I love telling stories. What could go wrong?

(I say this with all the hope in the world that no one will hate me at the end of said stories!)

For those of you who know me, and anything about my dating life, you know there’s only one place to start — AJ. Sit tight – this could be a little long … Continue reading →

Having neighbors in the suburbs is entirely different from having neighbors in the city.  I suppose that the time I spent growing up in the suburbs did not afford me the time or concern to draw conclusions about my neighbors – and, to be frank, most of my neighbors were related to me in one way or another for the large portion of my childhood.

On the other hand, most of my adulthood has been spent living in the city. In the city, your neighbors are most often eccentric characters who exist within their own little bubble. Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t. The proximity is close, but while you may know everything about their day-to-day functioning, you know surprisingly little about them as individuals. For instance, I have not lived in too many places in the great city of Philadelphia where I could not hear when my neighbors came and went, what type of music they listened to (or even sing along if it was loud enough and the insulation was on one of its seemingly perpetual periods of uselessness), when they had sex, how good it was, and smell what they were cooking. Continue reading →

I can hardly believe that it’s the beginning of September already – but, this makes just as good of a time as any to start blogging regularly again. I like to begin things at the beginning of other things – for example, new blog at the beginning of the month (and sort of the beginning of a new season, unless you want to be technical about it), I only start new diets and exercise routines (or any routines at all) on Mondays (the beginning of a new week), and when new eras of my life begin, I usually find myself starting a bunch of other new things. I suppose it feels appropriate.

Regardless – hopefully you’re excited to know that I am officially blogging again after my somewhat brief retirement.

Over the past year (school year?) — to be more specific, since I returned from the Dominican Republic (as a side note, I find it curious that my time there has become sort of a benchmark in my life – I now find myself categorizing things as “pre-DR” and “post-DR” – it’s strange that we do that with things in our lives) So, again – since having returned from the DR, I went through a flurry of drastic changes – my life was so different upon return, and I had been so far removed from anything that was ‘mine’ for so long, that I think I reverted to a sort of survival mode – my thought process was something along the lines of, “I’m back. “x” is a problem. There, fixed.” Continue reading →

I have been lucky enough to be inundated with people in my life who really love their own birthdays.

In fact, that statement doesn’t really do it justice. They more than love their own birthdays. They give the day they entered the world the same status as a national holiday, often extend it into other, unsuspecting days (read: “It’s my birthday week!”), and take personal offense if their birthday isn’t acknowledged at every even-slightly opportune moment throughout the entire month.

Impressive, isn’t it? Continue reading →

I’ve had some pretty specific requests for more hilarity lately – as if that’s even possible – and, since I’m pretty into making my readers happy, I decided to post another entry today that will hopefully meet the needs of some of the more demanding blog browsers in my life.

And, I know some of you are thinking “But you totally “to be continued” yesterday’s post! I need to know what happens!!!” No worries. I’ll update you on that post soon enough, but for now, enjoy a little bit of St. Patrick’s Day hell.

Let me begin by telling you that I kind of grew up in the hood. Now, Vineland isn’t the worst place to live in the world, but it’s far from a suburbian wonderland. I didn’t realize how bad it actually was until my parents moved my sister and I to the real suburbs (holla, Franklinville!) where there were arguably more cows than people and not a minority person in sight. That said, while I was living and going to public school in Vineland, I became pretty accustomed to being a minority myself. There weren’t all that many white kids in my classes, and, as far as I was concerned, it was normal for it to be that way.

So. Imagine me as a child. Little. Brown hair (skillfully cut into a super hot 1980’s chick-mullet by my mother). Brown eyes (way to big for any of my other features, but freakin’ adorable). White. Kind of socially awkward – in the sense that I tended to over-think everything that had to do with interacting with another person, and, as a result, ended up acting totally impulsively without actually meaning to or managing to be endearing about it.

Example: Standing in line in the hallway with my second grade class, my overly awkward self is fidgeting (because I can never just be still), and worrying about making it to the library in time to get the next Nancy Drew book. My teacher, Mrs. Paladino, who at that time I was convinced may have been the closest thing to the devil I had ever encountered, scolds me for not standing still and waiting like everyone else. I stare up at her, fighting tears, and out of the corner of my eye catch all of the kids in front of me turning around to stare. This brings on a mild panic, and as a thousand thoughts rush through my little, mullet-ed head, I blurt “You have a tag in your hair. Is it a wig?!”

Now, in my defense, she was in fact wearing a wig, and her tag was in fact sticking out.  But you can see how it was equally as easy to love and hate the younger-me. And now that you have a slight head start in understanding this, I’ll go on with my St. Patty’s Day story.

The highlights of every grade-schooler’s year are those unofficial holidays – the ones that still allowed you to go to school and see your friends, but also meant a party, arts and crafts, and treats. One of those holidays, of course, is St. Patrick’s Day. Grade school St. Patrick’s day parties consisted of making leprechauns, coloring rainbows, and eating shamrock-shaped cookies, Irish potatoes, and chocolate in the shape of over-sized gold coins.

In the spirit of the holiday, every teacher always asked us students to dress in green for the party, and every year I would rush home, excited, and start digging through my closet for green clothes to wear to the great St. Patrick’s Day party. Every year, my excitement would be painfully squelched by by my over-zealous Irish Protestant grandmother.

“Kari Anne! You are Irish PROTESTANT. We don’t wear green for St. Patrick’s Day – that’s an Irish Catholic thing.”

The green tights I had found and held clutched to my chest fell to the floor. She spat the word “green” as if it were dirty.

“You’ll wear the proper colors. You can show everyone how proud you are to be a Protestant Irish!”

Oh, thrills. I knew what was coming. The most hideous color combination ever.

“Purple and Orange! And I made you this pin to wear with it!”

I know I don’t match, and I’m sure that the pin is actually bigger than my head.

Every year I would drag myself to school on St. Patrick’s Day. The only white girl. Already socially awkward. And by far the only student dressed in purple and orange in a sea of green happiness.

Thank God for green beer …