the yoga gansta

Now, dear readers, I’m guessing that it wasn’t difficult for you for you to see why I was smitten with mysterious, rugged Kurt.  This one may require a bit more of your imagination.  Just bear with me.  And if, even after hearing me out, you just don’t get it, well, think about someone you once liked that no one else understood (c’mon, I know there’s been at least one).  And throw me a bone.

Moving to this town brought many new things for me, and one of them was yoga.  I loved it right away and started going regularly.  There was one class in particular that I began to look forward to.  The instructor was a guy probably in his late 30s, not particularly attractive but not exactly unattractive.  He had grayish-brown hair, a receding hairline and blue eyes.  He was slimly built but muscular, and he had a nice smile.  He went by his last name, Mason.

At first it wasn’t him I noticed so much as the music.  He got us rockin’ like no other yoga class, with unconventional pop-hip-hop-reggae blends.  He crafted beautiful flows that seemed to fit the music.  I left his class feeling strong and elated and ready to enjoy a glorious Sunday.  I fell for his class long before I fell for him.

As time went on, I began to notice him more and more.  He frequently cracked jokes and told little stories, often making fun of himself.  He could make everyone laugh.  He talked like he was from a city.  He had a deep voice and a way with words.  Sometimes I would unexpectedly recall something he had said in my other yoga classes.

Despite my growing curiosity about him, I found it ridiculous to actually have a crush on him.  He was so clearly not my type.  A 40-ish yoga instructor with a receding hairline that talked like a gangster?  WHAT?!  All the same, I became highly devoted to his class and even found myself looking forward to it during the week.  Still, the most I could squeak out to him was a quick “thank you” at the end of each class before dashing off (that residual shyness).  But I didn’t stress about it.  His class was something to look forward to each week, and that was enough.  There didn’t seem to be any place for us in the real world.  Beside, he hadn’t shown any real interest in me.

Gradually, veeery gradually, that began to change.  Our interactions at the end of class became a little longer each time.  I might say, “Have a nice week” or “I loved the flows today”.  He might say, “Thanks for coming” or “It was nice to see you”.  Or at the beginning of class, when all the other ladies were kicking off their boots and laying out their mats, he might come up to me and ask, “How are you?”

One day at the end of class, we struck up a conversation.  He came up to my yoga mat and sat down, and we started chatting in earnest.  He asked about where I was from, and we talked about a small town there that we had both spent some time in.  Someone else from his class interrupted with a question for him, and I said goodbye.  The next week I was more excited for class than ever before.  But again, he was held up by someone else, and I left without talking to him.  He caught up with me as I headed up the stairs.  He asked me about my name, which is uncommon, and said that he thought it was pretty and that it reminded him of a Lotus (it has some similar sounds)… and that it seemed fitting.  Yes, I know, I know, this was a very yoga-instructor thing to say and I’m sure many of you are rolling your eyes.  Inwardly, I rolled mine just a little bit, too.  However, it is not often in our keep-it-cool culture to hear such a frank compliment.  I smiled and thanked him.  Then I wasn’t sure what else to say, and ended lamely with, “Well, have a great week!” and darted off, kicking myself as I did.  It so happened that day that I ran into him again out on the street, and he asked me to go cross-country skiing with him sometime.  He told me to look him up on Facebook, which did seem kind of weak.  His Facebook name was something new age-y, like Nightshadow Mason.  I looked him up anyway, slightly doubting my sanity, and we arranged to meet up.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from hanging out with him outside of class.  I wondered if he would spend the whole time trying to share Buddha’s teachings with me or talking about enlightenment.  In actuality, as we skied, we chatted easily about the town, our pasts, and yeah, a little yoga.  He frequently made me laugh.  He was taking care of two little dogs named Bella and Coco Chanel for a friend.  He mimicked for me the neighbor’s faces when they heard him calling their names.  At one point I mentioned that I still thought about moving back home, and he said, “Yeah, until you met a cute yoga instructor, and the rest was history”.  I just smiled.  It sounded a bit convincing.

Shortly after we had our first date date.  Again, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Partner yoga?  A Bhakti chanting session?  It was a pleasant surprise when he invited me to dinner and a movie.  I met him at his house.  He confided that he had let the restaurant owner know that he was bringing a cute girl there and that he should have candles and flowers at the ready.  The owner had apologized that he had the night off, but wished him luck.  The conversation flowed as it had the first time, and I found myself opening up to him and also laughing quite a lot.  We parted with a hug.

Later that week, I drove a half an hour to another town to go to his class there, but it turns out the yoga studio had changed location.  The directions I’d found online were useless.  Frantically, I ran into several businesses, including the local hick bar where I got a lot of stares, to try to find the new yoga studio, but no one was able to help me out in this generally conservative western town.  At last, I passed an acupuncturist office, and though “jackpot”.  Sure enough they were able to direct me.  I snuck in 20 minutes late, blushing furiously, but was reassured by the big grin on his face.  After class he thanked me warmly for coming and invited me to sushi.  After dinner, we kissed in the parking lot.  He shook his head and muttered, “Damn girl”.  I smiled and walked away. 

Things continued to be good.  He texted me frequently, just to wish me a good morning or to say I had looked hot during class.  When we got together, he never failed to tell me I looked nice.  He schemed future plans, like taking me to back country hot springs or going to Hawaii.  I didn't want get ahead of things, and listened to his plots without contributing.  He treated me like a lady, and I was surprised to find that I really liked it.  Our yoga-and-sushi became a sort-of tradition.

I will leave this story for now to tell another.  However, in case Mason managed to win you over as he did me, I remind you that this is a blog of mismatches.  So don't get too excited.

the one that got away

I met him the very first day I moved here, at the very first place I went to.  (Okay, except for maybe Walmart).  We were at a brewery opening in the late afternoon.  The sun streamed down, a band played, and outdoorsy people stood around sipping beer.  My good friend Amy was there waiting for me, ready to introduce us.  Amy had helped me find a job and a place to live, and was already working on snagging me a boyfriend.  Kurt was her first pick.

We met, and he seemed nice.  He was a burly guy with a beard (always a plus for a mountain mama such as myself) and a ski patrol (EMTs of the ski hills for those of you non-ski-townies).  And let’s be honest, anyone whose job involves saving people wins automatic hotness points.  Nonetheless, there were no fireworks that first time.   I was still reeling a bit from my summer’s escapades and to find myself in a new place.  I didn’t feel ready to turn my attention to anyone else.

A few weeks went by, and I slowly settled in.  Summer romance gradually dimmed in my mind.  I went out one night with some friends and ran into him again.  After making some eye contact, we started chatting.  He was quietly interested and bought me a beer.  As soon as Amy found out, she started plotting our next move.

The same brewery where we had met was showing a ski movie that Friday night, and she made plans for us all to meet up.  He and I talked some that night, but he spent more of the evening talking with friends.  I couldn’t quite read him.  But at one point when I got in line for a bathroom, he did something that became his signature move:  he met my eyes from across the room, held my gaze, and gave me a small, but very sincere, smile.  It stopped my heart for a moment, and not for the last time.

About a week later, Thanksgiving was upon us.  Amy invited me along to have an intimate dinner with another coworker – and a mutual friend of Kurt’s.  He was invited as well.  I painstakingly made my first sweet potato pie, whose crust I browned just a tad too much.  I arrived to a table beautifully set with candlelight, and Ella Fitzgerald playing, but no Kurt.  I helped the girls with the last preparations.  At last he arrived. 

We were seated next to each other, and spent the meal talking and engaging in subtle flirtation.  He complimented my pie and listened with amusement to my fumbling excuses of why it was a tad overdone.  When I went to help with the dishes, he locked eyes with mine and again gave me that signature, startling smile.  Long after dinner, when we had all talked and ate ourselves out, he and I went out to start our cars.  Out there in the chilly evening, he asked for my phone number.  I was glowing.

It was a few days before I heard from him, but I forgave him this when Amy told me that he had been agonizing with her over what to do for our first date.  She, knowing me so well, suggested beer and pizza as the perfect no-pressure first date.  Finally he called to ask me out.

Of all the dates of my life, this has to be in the top 3, despite it taking place in a ski bum pizza joint.  We talked our hearts out – about our families, our siblings, our best friends, our favorite things to do, our lives’ paths.  On my way back from the restroom, he caught me again, with that heart-stopping smile.  The air crackled. In the parking lot we hugged goodbye, which is normally my idea of the appropriate farewell to a first date.  But after a brief hesitation, he asked if he could kiss me.   It was a sweet, gentle kiss that sent my insides rocking. 

After that, there were a few more dates.  I still couldn’t let myself relax and trust this good thing that was happening.  Whether I couldn’t trust it from my own anxieties about love or from an inexplicable sense that something was wavering, I can’t be sure.  There was a constant knot in my stomach because I knew I liked him more and more, and I knew I was vulnerable.

On our last date (I did warn you this was a non-love stories blog), he cooked me a delicious dinner in his apartment, and we talked for a while, and then headed to the house of a friend to use his hot tub.  We cuddled in the hot water as snowflakes floated down.  He told me his was so glad we had met.  I was unsure what to say and gave some casual reply.  When we headed back to his apartment, we kissed for a long while in his doorway, my stomach in a knot as I wondered if he would ask me to stay.  When it became clear that wasn’t his intention, I said goodnight.

After that, things started to go awry.  His texts were cool, and we never could seem to work out when to get together.  I tried not to let it bother me, despite the sinking feeling in my stomach.  One night Amy and I were out for after-work drinks, and she asked me how things were going.  I confided my fear that he had lost interest.  She was genuinely puzzled, and decided to do some surreptitious investigating.  She texted him to ask how things were going with me.  He replied that he just didn’t think that either of us was looking for something serious right then.  Again, my stomach sank.  Basically, he wasn’t looking for something serious.  He wasn’t into it.

I went home for Christmas and tried my hardest to forget about him.  When I returned, Amy had the story for me.  Apparently in the past he had had an unstable girlfriend that none of his friends had liked.  Despite this, they were very serious.  He had brought her out to meet his family, and even his family told him to cut ties with her.  He had finally broken up with her and tried to move on.  However, it turns out that she managed to get back into his life.  He didn’t want me, a nice girl, to be in the middle of it.

Amy tried her best to convince me that it had nothing to do with me, that he had said I was a great girl.  However, it’s impossible not to take these things personally.  I kept thinking that if he had just liked me a little more, she would not have been a factor.  I felt cheated out of something great, and it wasn’t easy to take.

But time went on, and there were other boys and other adventures, and he faded in my mind as all things past eventually will.  To this day I feel a little pang to think of him, but as Amy keeps telling me, this one was just not meant to me.  That’s hard to accept, but I guess everyone has at least one that got away.

before miss matched... the romantic and the hermit

Just thought I’d give a little background info for the psycho-analyzers out there (feel free to skip it if you’re not one of them).  As a girl, I was a hopeless, starry-eyed mushy romantic.  In fact, it’s even a little embarrassing to recall my fondness of puffy dresses and princesses, and how every imaginary game involved some elaborate romantic vignette.

This extreme fantasy-romanticism carried over into high school, where as a shy, awkward, passionate, hormone-charged teenage it got me in landed in two obsessive, painful, year-long crushes, one after the other – you know the kind.  Of course I couldn’t squeak out nary a word to either of these exquisite specimens of humankind, and the couple of times I forced myself to talk to them still make my insides whither with shame to recall.  As a result of these failures, my strategy became:  light some candles, put on Sarah McLachlan, let the tears roll down my face, and send strong vibes of love floating out into the universe to land directly into their consciousness, when they would suddenly realize that they were inexplicitly madly in love with the quiet girl with braces in English class.  (Needless to say, this strategy did not prove fruitful.) What can I say?  I never had brothers.  What I knew about boys and girls I learned from Disney movies.  I will say that it was a bit gratifying this summer, when about ten years later I ran into the latter of the two crushes, and it turns out he wasn’t quite the godly being I had remembered… in fact he was experiencing some premature balding.  I, on the other hand, had improved with age.  So take that.

Very gradually, over many years, my awkwardness diminished along with my romantic fantasies.  I decided to focus on myself, instead of the opposite sex.  I lived in some new places, spent a chunk of time abroad, and checked off a good number of the “things to do before I die”.  As I became more absorbed in my own life, more confident and more the person I wanted to be, romance (or the lack of it) became nothing but a slight nagging annoyance, until finally I resolved that screw it, I was going to become a hermit woman in a tiny cabin in the woods in a tiny mountain town for the rest of my life.  I would chop my own firewood and learn to hunt game and scavenge mushrooms and secretly write torrid epic novels beside my crackling fireplace.  (Yes perhaps a tad dramatic for a girl in her late 20s).  With this new fantasy in mind, I went to work for a summer in a National Park… with a bunch of single men, it turns out.  And something shifted.

That summer I didn’t find love exactly, but I did find some hints of it, along with this new power in myself to be fun and comfortable, and even desirable, in the company of men.  I was the girl that would hop in the back of the truck to go fishing with the boys and stay up into the late hours joking around and drinking PBRs with them.  I would tear up the dance floor to the bluegrass bands in the arms of many fellas.  I was their sidekick and their darling.  I was surprised to find myself being that girl, and I loved being her.

Something changed.  I didn’t rekindle the romantic fantasies, but I did realize that my hermit-in-the-woods fantasy was probably equally unrealistic.  I didn’t become convinced that I would surely find someone to share my life with, but neither did it seem certain that I wouldn’t.  At the very least, I realized that I was dateable, and that there is something fun and affirming in the attention – or at the very least entertaining – even if it doesn’t always work out in the end.

And with all this fresh in my brain, I moved to a ski town.  And that’s where this story begins.

miss matching

Let’s set something straight right off the bat – this is not a blog about love.  This is a blog about the lack of love – the absence of butterflies, chemicals, connection, little popping hearts, etc.  These are the stories of when two hopeful people meet, and then let each other down… sooner or later.  Which, I am certain, happens a lot more often than love itself.  At least it does to me.  But I can't say that it hasn't been entertaining.

More specifically, this is a blog about love’s mishaps in a ski town.  Now, you may have heard that ski towns are notorious for their abundance of one thing – men.  Okay, yeah, and snow, too.  But mostly men.  Ski towns are the “Never-Never-Lands” of overgrown boys.  They are the places that allow men a degree of notoriety, accomplishment and pure manliness simply for making some perfect turns on a powder day.  Here, the number of digits on your salary (salary?), the size and price tag of your vehicle, the jumble of letters on your degrees, all pale in significance to the number of vertical feet you dropped last season.  And, much like Peter Pan, these ever-boys tend to live life with the charmingly fun, day-by-day, thrill-seeking, reckless abandon.  They move here for the snow, and look for a job as an after-thought.  But, like lost boys everywhere, they are in need of a girl to perfect the dream.  They are ever on the scout for their own personal “Wendy” to tag along for the ride.  And preferably one that can make powder turns just as sick as theirs.

As for myself, I moved here for a job, and the snow was an afterthought.  In fact, I hadn’t skied downhill in 10 years, since freshmen year of high school when I quit because none of my friends were skiers.  However, as a lover of mountains, I wasn’t put off by the locale.  And as a lover of boys in general, I wasn’t deterred by the “Boy’s Town” reputation.  Let me tell you, ladies, that if you’re looking for some dating adventures and a few good laughs, it’s not a bad place to be.  With a shockingly small amount of effort, I’ve landed myself in more dates in one year than I’d probably had in my life prior to moving here.  However, a warning – the saying for gals around here goes, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd”.  Which has been precisely the case.  Although for me maybe it goes a bit more like, “The bad ones you’ll bag, but the good ones have baggage”.  Sound familiar?

Time and again in this town, I’ve been “mismatched”.  I got my heart bruised a couple of times and bruised a few myself.  But in all this bumbling about, I’ve had some laughs and acquired a few stories.  I have a feeling I’m not alone in this. So I thought I’d share these non-love stories, if only so that a few people out there might shake their heads and say to themselves, “I know just what you mean”.

The point of this blog is not to humiliate anyone, and for that reason names have been changed, and I will keep this as anonymous as possible.  I may gently poke a little fun at the boys, but at myself as well.  I do realize however that these stories are extremely one-sided.  As for you, dear readers, judge me and my misadventures as you will, but be gentle.  I’ve got some tender spots.  And I promise you, if I do find the perfect match, I’ll shut right up.  That ain’t what this blog is about.