The Frenchies Have Influenced the Schmooies

(This entry will start off first being reflective and then will move on to the immature silly stuff you all know and love me for.)

I hate almost anything French, except French fries. More on that in a minute. First let me take a moment for reflection.

A great friend reminded me of how desperate, frustrated and lonely I was just eight months ago.  Upon that friend’s wise recommendation, I started this blog to give my annoyance a place to be heard outside of my own head. At that time, the career I thought I wanted was pulled out from under me. I was living in an area of the country where it was nearly impossible to date any Jewish men. My mom’s friends were placing her in a paranoid state about my love life, which then translated into her placing me into a paranoid state about my lack of love life. It all felt a bit hopeless, utterly fruitless. Something ridiculous to be concerned about and yet I couldn’t stop feeling bugged by it. Some nights, I’d find myself praying before bed to find a boyfriend already, someone in my age group to love me unconditionally, deeply, affectionately, all the things a girl hears about in movies but never actually finds in real life. So now that there’s this actual dude in front of me called Shy Boy who’s trying to do all those things, I have to go and over scrutinize him. Of course, I forgot to leave out the specifics in that prayer—how he should look, what his job should be, that I should be as equally deeply in love with him as he is with me. I’m not sure what it is about human nature, or maybe it’s that the career I’m in naturally encourages one to over think, over plan, and have a tight need for control. Shy Boy’s got all that gooshy romantic stuff in him for sure, but still he’s just not what I pictured Schmooie to be. He’s nothing like I expected and yet he’s everything a girl should want. Would someone please explain this phenomenon to me?

My mama blames herself for the fact that I feel too good for most men, that I feel I must tread carefully, and for my stealth ability at protecting my own heart. She trained me never to let a man break my heart and to always take anything a man says with a grain of salt. Of course, my mama’s also the same one who kvetches (Yiddish word meaning “complains”), “What? You wanna be in your fifties and unmarried?” Yes, maybe I do. I just want a nice boyfriend who’s not going to hurt me. I didn’t say I wanted a husband…

Alright, got that out of my system. That was the mature part of this entry. Now onto the immature silliness I’m more accustomed to and comfortable with…

As I said before, French fries are about the only thing “French” I dig. Would someone then please explain to me what’s so great about a French kiss? Shy Boy is the utmost gentleman. Chivalrous and old fashioned to a fault. On the other hand, he’s also a passionate dude. He loves to kiss and be kissed. But he never does anything inappropriate. I’m the one with the child-like immaturity. Sometimes he’ll be in the middle of a great kiss and I’ll let my mouth go limp and tell him I’m a dead fish. I do it just to annoy him. But he found a way to annoy me back. He told me the next time I pulled a so called “dead fish kiss” he would French kiss me. Sure enough, he was true to his word. And I discovered: French kisses are disgusting! Blame it on the fact that my profession involves looking at tongues on a daily basis. Then again, French kissing also involves too much thinking. I get afraid someone’s tongue is going to get bitten off. At any rate, I’m pretty sure attempting a French kiss has been on Shy Boy’s radar for some time now and he was just looking for an excuse to spring it on me. So I went home and researched “French kissing.” See, in my profession, evidence based anything is important for being a good practioner. Someone on some website recommended pretending the other person’s tongue was soft-serve ice cream. Eww! That put me off soft serve ice cream for a week. (Ooo, and now I just realized that perhaps if you too google “French kiss” this blog post might just pop up. Hi out there!) The following week, after I regained my love of soft serve ice cream, I decided if Shy Boy went in for another French kiss, I’d just follow the advice of my research. The only problem was that advice worked too well. Just when I’ve gotten used to French kissing and hoped he’d had enough of this newfound way of kissing, he tells me how much he likes doing it. Apparently, he likes how my tongue feels on his tongue. Now almost every kiss has a tongue in it! Eww! It’ll be a good thing when he decides he’s sick of being French and wants to be American again. I must make a mental note to find a way to nip this in the bud or tongue as it were.