NTKOG Year Two, #18: The kind of spontaneous romantic who, when presented with the culmination of astronomical odds, wagers her heart (and a potentially awkward two-hour train ride) on the chance that it might. be. fate.

I am: continuing the story I started here, if you missed the first installion.

I am not: buggin’ if you don’t want to go back and read it.

The Recap: Spent a while flirting aggressively with a cute Canadian in a grad student bar in New England College Town. Afterwards, realized, whoa, he was actually kind of into me? and I was kind of into him? and I didn’t know anything except his first name? Went to New York (ie: the biggest friggin’ city in America), and in that city of seven million people, of all the trains at Grand Central, and all the cars on the train — he chooses mine.

We lock eyes. I blush and offer him a seat. He accepts. Okay, back to…

The Scene: The Canadian takes the seat across from me and my eyes stay snapped on him, looking for words like digging through a snowbank. Justice and Kiss-Ducker carry on their own conversation, like mama lions following from a respectful distance, keeping a cautious eye on a cub attempting its first kill.

TKOG: So I forgot to ask you the other night: you’re at Badass University, right? What do you study?
The Canadian:  Architecture. I’m in the second year of a three-year masters program.

He slides down a few inches in his chair, his knee grazing mine. An architect. I’m always drawn to men who live in quiet, orderly apartments inside their own minds. But architects, they think with their hands, don’t they? That’s something altogether different. His knee grazes mine again, more deliberately.

He asks what I do, and I explain that I’m a writer, sort of, and went to school for Russian literature. His eyes light up.

The Canadian: I double-majored in studio art and comparative literatures! I love Russian literature!
TKOG: Who’s your favorite?
The Canadian:  Totally Gogol. That guy’s awesome. He’s so hilarious.

We chat about The Overcoat for a few moments, before The Canadian exclaims:  Yeah, that story’s so funny! It reminds me of that show Curb Your Enthusiasm! Do you watch it? No, I tell him, and he launches into a five-minute reenactment of a scene, laughing a bit too slowly at his own recreated punchlines. I pull my knee away from his and he switches gears.

The Canadian: What’d you do in New York?
TKOG: Oh, we had a great day! Went to the Met for a bit, saw some German Expressionism — that’s totally my art jam. Walked around Central Park, then went to a cool Belgian beer bar and got classic cocktails at Pegu Club. You?
The Canadian:  Man, it was epic. I came up on Friday and spent the night with a high school friend. We smoked a lot of pot. Then hung out with a college friend. We smoked a lot of pot. Then I hung out with another high school friend. We didn’t smoke any pot.

…epic indeed. But — but he goes to one of the best architecture graduate programs in the country! He’s just one of those weekday Type-A personalities who relaxes intensely on the weekends! Besides, there’s nothing hotter than a man with a concrete talent, who works toward it with great ambition.

He digs through his backpack for gum and I see a sketchpad. Hey, I tell him, my friend has a National Draw A Dinosaur Day coming up on January 30th [click that link, y'all!] — you’re an artsy dude. Can you draw me a dinosaur I can submit and pretend I drew? He gamely produced the following masterpiece:

Architect! Artsy! Sort of! I pursue this.

TKOG: So, I like architecture but I don’t know anything about it. What’s the best building in the world? Like, what’s your personal favorite?
The Canadian:  Uhhhhhhhhhhhh. I don’t — oh! Yeah. There’s a building I like in Toronto. It’s this big brick building. It’s pretty cool.
TKOG:  Cool. What kind of building? Like a bank or an old library or…
The Canadian:  It’s made of brick.

That thud you hear is not the beating of my feverish heart, just to clarify. It is the thud of a conversation dying forever and, with it, any interest I could possibly lather up in the human being sitting across from me.

TKOG: So, uh, how much longer ’til we get to New Haven?
The Canadian: About two hours.
TKOG: Oh. Okay.

Justice, Kiss-Ducker and I spent the rest of the trip in an animated discussion of the social networking model of internet search and writing captions for New Yorker cartoons, tolerating his awkward intrusions  with conspiratorial smirks at one another.

When we finally reached the station, dead-tired and happy to be rid of him, he bolted out of the train ahead of us, then slowed to a walk so we could catch up again. Hey, he asked, are you taking a taxi, or…? It was the kind of wintry New England night so cold that your scalp constricts to shrink-wrap your skull and roman candles go off behind your eyes.

So Justice, gracious goddess that she is, dropped him off at his apartment, then took us back to her place where, exhausted, I crawled into the guest room bed alone alone oh god so happily alone.

The Verdict: To this tale of urban dating woe, I see three morals:

1) You know all those times you have sultry eye contact with a stranger, walk out of each other’s lives, and spend days wondering, by god, WHAT IF?! It’s okay, dude. You probably didn’t miss the love of your life.

2) But SERIOUSLY?! I meet a grad student. At one of the best universities in the free world. We instantly like each other. Then happen to meet him again, days later, in a city of seven million people. And he’s read Gogol. And he’s STILL a kinda-dumb stoner? How is that possibly the end to this story?! I’m not even disappointed in the universe — I’m mad at it.

3) Disappointing though this was, we can all agree that dinosaurs make things better. Draw A Dinosaur Day is Sunday, with submissions accepted today through then! You should submit one! I know I am.

[Edit: A few hours after writing this post, got an email from Justice:

"So I'm sitting on a bus right now on my way to the grad student ski trip and guess who's sitting next to me? Yup, the Canadian. Destiny."

Hmmmm. Maybe he's HER soulmate...? Too bad she's already engaged!]

While I was too undisciplined to write last week, posted I think my personal favorite Secret Society of List Addicts list to date: quotes I thought were from the Bible ’til an embarrassing age. Keep in mind, I went to Catholic school.

NTKOG Year 2, #15: The kind of unanchored, pleasure-motivated creature of Id who pays no mind to Should or Ought, but builds her castle on a foundation of Want.

I am: locked in a constant struggle with my discipline, both as a writer and a human being. For the past year or so, I’ve emerged as the victor, thanks to a ceaseless cycle of early mornings, late nights, and forcibly cutting off my internet access after hours.

I am not: convinced it’s been great for my mental health. Let’s put it this way: near the end of the three-month MFA application extravaganza, I had no trouble getting a seat to myself on the bus. ’cause I was twitching and shuddering like an ’89 Honda going a hundred on the freeway.

The Scene: My apartment. My god, my glorious monk’s-cell apartment, night after night, for a week of personally mandated laziness. During the second week of the new year, I made a deal with myself: You don’t have to write. You don’t have to do laundry. You don’t have to socialize with humans. Just do what comes naturally.

It reminds me, actually, of my project during the year after undergraduate: I declared a moratorium on alarm clocks, and spent a year living by my natural clock. I’ve never been happier or more well-rested in my life, going to sleep at 9:30pm and waking up at 5:30.

During this week of laziness, though, I assure you I wasn’t waking up in the wee hours. Oh most verily not.

For the sake of comparison, my general weekday schedule before MFA applications started:

6:30 Wake up
6:45 – 8:15am: Jog or clean; shower; eat
9:00 – 5:00: I don’t even want to talk about it
5:15 – 9:00: Writin’ in the library, with a quick break for dinner
9:30 – 10:30: Goofin’ around for a bit before sleep

Compare that to the mental health extravaganza that was life during MFA applications.

8:27am: Wake up
8:30am: Leave for work
9:15 – 5:00: Ugh
5:30 – 10:00: MFA applications and story editing, living on a diet of cookies and soft pretzels to justify my non-stop cafe tables
10:30 – 1:00am: Back hme, last-minute MFA stuff, research, panic attacks, until the dreamless death of sleep

So. Yeah. I was doing super great for a while. Now that the applications are all in and the weight of the world is off my shoulders, though, I figured one week of utterly debauched laziness would reset my system. And every day, I discovered another thing that I thought I’d forgotten how to love.

Whole novels, swallowed over the course of one decadent evening! Spending hours cooking complicated meals and meditating on the wonders of food! Walking the two and a half miles home from work because, hey, I have nowhere to go and no particular time to get there! My god, some evenings I can spend an hour or more doing nothing but cuddling with my stuffed elephant, vacant of thought, just feeling warm and happy to be alive!

I also, of my own volition, finally washed the dishes that were stacked up from MFA madness. I don’t want to talk about how old some of them were. Like, we’re not talking calendar — we’re talking carbon dating.

The effect of this mindset was best captured last Sunday, when I thought to myself: My god, have I not left the house since Friday night? then remembered with relief, No, it’s okay! I went to the convenience store TWICE today! Oh yeah. The rest of you girls can save the prettiest valentine in the box for Atticus Finch, ’cause apparently I’m in the market for a Boo Radley.

The Verdict: Well, my “week” reprieve started three weeks ago, yet here I am, lolling around in my pajamas, eating chicken curry and contemplating rereading Calvin Trillin’s “An Attempt To Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing”. As great as I feel, I’m afraid we’re going to have to label this one a decided fail.

How is it that just a few days indulgence, following a massive burst of virtuous do-gooding no less!, can push us so far backward in our personal journeys for excellence? I’m filled with discouragement, despair, self-recrimination, etc., etc. Well, I will be. As soon as I finish this chicken curry burrito and lounge around in my pajamas a bit longer. Sigh.

What demons are you facing right now? And if your demons happen to be passing a supermarket, can they pick me up some soy milk?

Over on Secret Society of List Addicts, check out some crazy lies my parents told me that I didn’t find out the truth about until embarrassingly late in life.

NTKOG Year 2, #12: The kind of girl who pits her (non-existent) desire to wake & bake against her law-abiding status and comes up with an, uh, interesting solution.

I am: a total fuddy duddy now. Y’alls, I don’t even jaywalk. And as for any desire to experiment with drugs, well, let’s just say those ended around the time Maroon 5 stopped pumping out number one jams.

I am not: all that psyched with how epically uncool I’ve become.

The Scene: A ritzy headshop (heh, I totally just said ‘head’) on Newbury Street where, after nervously shuffling at the counter for a few minutes, I selected a bag of K2, the legalized pot-alternative that’s been sweeping the nation for the past year or so. The scruffy dude behind the counter rolled his eyes as I asked him half a dozen questions, then asked me, “Dude, have you never smoked pot before?!” Uh, sir, I don’t even take cough syrup. But instead, I just attempted to bat my eyelashes until he agreed to roll me a fake-weed joint.

It’s not that I haven’t smoked pot, for the record. I did it maybe a dozen times in college — mostly courtesy of the culinary genius running the unofficial Stoned on Scones bakery out of the apartment next-door. I just don’t love it: it makes me lazy, anxious, and exquisitely famished. Which is to say, it doesn’t do anything at all. Still, in light of California’s recent failure to decriminalize marijuana use, I thought it would be fun to investigate the last legal recourses of stoners.

Drink deeply of the illicit image, kittens, 'cause in real life you're more likely to see me hold a cockroach than a roach-roach.

Surely any legal substance couldn’t actually get me high, right? RIGHT?! To answer that question, I present you with the musings of Stoned TKOG, who wrote the following completely unedited text after consuming a full joint of K2:

The Choreography of my Evening as a Legal Stoner

During walk from the store, marvel over its delicate sweetness – like a mixture of lemongrass and chamomile tea, you think. Perhaps it shall taste like childhood! It can’t possibly work, you know already, so your sober-as-friggin’-melancholy streak can go on another day.

Walking back from bus, pass convenience store and debate purchasing alleged “munchies” for the purpose of scientific inquiry; consider the contents of your bank account; vigorously veto experiment. Deliberate whether to smoke the fake joint outside, or to smoke it in the warmth and – well, let’s be frank here – nudity of your own apartment. Opt for the latter because you can’t bear the thought of anyone thinking you’re a stoner. It’ll be your little secret.

Back home, use torn cover from Oprah Magazine to wipe the dust bunnies off the plate under your obligatory sad-single-girl bath candle. Get so caught up in architectural marvel of a well-rolled joint (see Exhibit A) that you light it and puff curiously before remembering to open bathroom windows. “Eh,” you reason, “it’s organic. It’ll probably smell like incense. No way you’ll even be able to smell it.”

Yikes! Not a well-rolled joint! The first inch and a half are packed too loose and burn down in three seconds, (“Am I smoking too fast?” you worry, “Should I check into rehab?”) creating a truly prodigious cloud of smoke. After a few puffs, though, it burns slower and you can take satisfying pulls – without the usual lung-searing feeling. Become so fascinated with smoking process that you want to smoke as far into the joint as possible, and try to use small bathroom implements to extend the joint’s length.

Look up and see yourself – dude, seriously, life choices – in the most grim of drug tableaux: naked on the shower rug of your grimy bathroom, holding a fake-weed joint to your lips using a toenail clipper as a roach clip

Flush the roach down the toilet, then throw open the bathroom door to realize two things: 1) you are stoned. as. balls.; 2) judging by the skunky smoke billowing under your door crack, everybody in the building knows it. Judging by the reek of pot pervading the hall, there was enough K2-infused air pumping through my building to contact-high all my neighbors and several rounds of their ancestors. Uh, so much for no one thinking I’m a stoner.

Back into my apartment, and there’s only one urgent task at hand: camouflage the stench of pot wafting from my apartment.

Man, why did I veto the munchies experimentation? Mistakes were made.

Oh, no, right, the smell in the bathroom. Immediately, without thinking, turned the shower on at full blast. …with my head still in it. Drew the curtains and closed the door. Five minutes later realized, oh, I shouldn’t leave a shower unattended! and dashed to the bathroom to turn it off. Felt proud of myself. Got distracted by sad-single-girl bath candle and realized it could cover the smell, so lit it, went to close the door.

“Oh daaaang,” I realized, “my carelessness is increasing with comic exponentiality. I’m totally the after-school special about fake-marijuana use. I’m one scene away from a tragic-but-morally-nourishing grisy ending.” Decided to fend off tragedy by babysitting the candle while it works its de-incriminating smell magic.

Which makes me now a much more nuanced yet still grim drug cliché: naked on the shower rug of my grimy bathroom, hunched over a laptop, hoping the smell of a TJ Maxx hazelnut/toffee candle will overpower the odor of fake-weed billowing from my apartment at 9:21 on a Wednesday night. I – I often wonder what choices have brought me here.

Whoa, my heart’s beating the usual speed, but harder, and every beat’s reverberating like the taut face of a drum.

Screw this. I’m going to order a pizza and read a book about centaurs.

I only have three more distinct memories of the night. First, after an hour of deliberation, finally dragging myself to the pizzeria across the street and realizing, whoa, I feel almost happy.

Next, finding this picture by @cakewrecks, and laughing out loud to myself for a full three minutes…

…before thinking to myself: “How embarrassing to misspell that on your van! That’s weird, though, she usually posts pictures of cakes.”

Finally, just before I passed out, I grabbed my phone and frantically texted myself: “I feel very calm but I don’t feel very useful. Don’t do this again, dude. This isn’t you.”

The Verdict: Okay, Stoned TKOG, you may have almost set your apartment on fire and mistaken a cake for a van, but you managed to pull out a little wisdom at the bottom of the ninth. Cannabis lovers (and cannaibs lovers too, for that matter), I’ve got good news for you: legalized K2 is a fairly legitimate product and, though it isn’t identical to marijuana, it offers a very similar high.

Which means I’ve got bad news for myself: turns out I just don’t like the feeling of being stoned. Guess I’ve got another sixty years of fuddy duddying in my future, huh?

Over on Life As A Human, I reveal the rogue sixth stage of break-up grief: putting down the imaginary dog.

NTKOG Year 2, #11: The kind of vivacious, breezily social cafe-hopper who, when beckoned to the next table over, figures, “What the hell?”

I am: notoriously picky about the people I spend my time with. All I ask is that they be smart, cool, socially aware, and capable of making me laugh so hard my stomach cramps.

I am not: asking too much, am I?

The Scene: Borders Cafe in Copley Square, at 8pm on a Saturday night. I’d been working on grad school applications since 10am and, dudes, let me say that while in the best of times I’m no pageant queen, duuuude, I was A Situation. For starters, I hadn’t showered since Thursday, and my hair was pulled into a fifth-generation ponytail. And as for make-up? Ha! Not since October!

At some point, realize I haven’t used the restroom all day, so catch eyes with the guy at the table across from me and point to my computer. “Hey, can you make sure no one steals my computer? If they try, maybe rough ‘em up a little?”

He nods and I leave. When I come back, I give him the thank-you wave, but instead of turning back to his own laptop, he takes a step over to my table.

Cafe Dude: Hey, are you good at punctuation?
TKOG: Uhhh, yeah, I’m really good at it.
CD: I could tell when I first saw you!  You’re an English major or something, right? The second I saw you, I was like, “This girl looks like she knows about punctuation!”

Weird. I don’t remember putting on my “I brake for Oxford commas” t-shirt this morning. Although I was wearing my “I said anarchy not MANarchy” pin…

Walk over to his table, where he pulls out a chair and pats it; I resist and look at his screen to see the punctuation query — then he closes the computer altogether and proceeds to tell me a lengthy, intricate story about his med school experience, the residencies he’s applying for, and the philosophical convictions shaping his particular phrasing of the last sentence of the first paragraph.

To this, two immediate reactions: 1) whoa, this guy’s friendly; 2) but he’s a doctor. If I leave the table right now, my mom will KILL me.

So I open his computer back up and set to work helping him redraft the thank-you letter he was writing, attempting to rein his rather fractured grammar and add some concrete language to his uncomfortably flowery prose style. Between every sentence that I edited, he would spin me tales about the unpleasant environment at his current medical school, the backstory to the academic strike blemishing his record, the qualities he valued at the hospitals where he’d interviewed.

After half an hour, I’d reworked the first of three paragraphs and he blinked up at me in surprise: “Whoa, you’re actually a good writer.”

Um, yeah, obviously. Why else would he have — oh. Oh. Is this that thing that the kids sometimes do? That flirting thing? It all started to make sense: the subtle way he’d coaxed my name out of me, the casual allusions to facebook, asking how long I’d been in the city, why I was spending Saturday night hunched over a laptop.

But whatever, dudes, we had a botched thank-you letter to finish editing.

I moved my things over to his table, and we worked on the letter for another hour, mixed in with conversation on just about every first date topic you can imagine. He told me about his moral opposition to the institution of pet ownership; I teased him pretty ferociously about it; he admitted he’d only joined Facebook the previous day, but would I friend him?; after he whipped out his laptop I, after some deliberation, agreed.

Eventually I looked up and realized that three hours had passed and the cafe was closing around us. So we packed up our things and he walked me back to the T station, told me he hoped I had a nice night.

Only when I was walking down the stairs to the station did it dawn on me: wait a minute, did I just accidentally go on a date?!

Except it was better than a date, because where most real dates leave one with nothing, this one at least resulted in a pretty exquisitely rewritten thank-you letter. Plus, I didn’t have to shower first.

The Verdict: Though I have less than zero interest in this guy, I’m always pleasantly mystified when interactions like this crop up organically in nature. While I sincerely doubt that I’ll meet the Great Love of My Life randomly in a cafe or bar (unless said bar is across the street from MIT, obvi), this was a good reminder that there are pleasant people out there, and it wouldn’t kill me to waste a little time with them.

Although if there’s any speculation as to whether this guy and I had a love connection, allow me to end it right now: At one point, he gestured to his keyboard and told me, “Hey, you know there’s a more efficient keyboard system, but they started using this layout because people like typing slower?”

“Oh!” I jumped in, excited, “you mean Dvorak?! That’s actually an old wives tale!” I started to explain some of the backstory behind that urban legend, but he just furrowed his brow and started shaking his head in bored confusion.

Sorry, Cafe Dude, but discussing things like Dvorak v. QWERTY is practically bedroom talk for a girl like me, and if you’re not on-board with that, this isn’t going to work out. Come to think of it, there might be a “talk nerdy to me” t-shirt in my near future…

Over at Life As A Human, some musings from my first 100 miles of running.

NTKOG Year 2, #8: The kind of masochistic utter slave to hair removal who, not content with using specialty products to rip off fifteen layers of epidermis (and attached hair), gets a little, uh, weird with it.

I am: a sucker for test-driving pretty much every item I see at CVS with that alluring little “As Seen On TV!” sticker. Vidalia Chop Wizard? Couldn’t live without mine. Ove Gloves? Practically have erotic dreams about ‘em.

I am not: surprised, therefore, that I finally gave into the allure of SmoothAway: a revolutionary hair-removal system, consisted of a pad “covered with superfine crystals that buff away unwanted hair, leaving your skin so soft and incredibly smooth”.

The Scene: Sprawled out on my bed, of a Thursday evening, giggling with girly mad scientist glee while opening the SmoothAway box and gazing at — sandpaper. I mean, it’s sandpaper, right? That’s what we’re talking about here.

The contents of the box were unimpressive. A flexible pink plastic mitt with a few ovals of extremely micro-grit sandpaper meant to attach to its face. But it’s no secret that I’m into painful body hair removal — heck if there were a spa in the city that specially trained, like, Argentinian swallows to peck out errant chin and nipple hairs, I’d be there — so pasted the microcrystal paper to the mitt and started a-rubbin’.

$14.99 -- plus $6.99 in Shipping and Handling. Or, uh, eight bucks at CVS.

The thing I like best about As Seen On TV products is, gosh, the thing I like best about most endeavors: that first moment — the lean-in, as it were — when what you’re about to experience exists simultaneously in the realms of fiction and reality. The exhilaration of infinite potential. A phrase that sounds a little too elegant to describe the actual tableau: my too-large bearpaw awkwardly crammed into the flimsy pink mitt, lowering tentatively over my sun-bleached arm hair (the last memento of summer!), rubbing five times clockwise then counter, and then –

Holy frig! It totally, totally worked!

Is it possible? An As Seen On TV product that works as well as advertised?! …well, sort of. Fifteen minutes of fierce rubbing left my arms weirdly (but not unattractively) hairless, and exfoliated within an inch of their lives.

Alas, though, the hair-removal panacea was not to be. Sated with the initial glee of the experiment, moved the mitt to attack the few days’ of accumulated stubble on my legs, and — nothing. Glued a new pad on the board, in case my excessive vim had already dulled the microcrystals and — ouch! More painful nothing. In a fit of grim curiosity, more than anything else, decided to test the packages claims that SmoothAway could quickly and painlessly remove armpit stubble.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever spent upward of ten minutes vigorously rubbing your armpits with an abrasive pad, but if that’s what the marketing specialist qualifies as “quick” and “painless,” then I have a feeling she spends most of her professional life writing copy for ballgag disinfectant. On the bright side, though, the treatment did detract from the appearance of stubble on my pits. ’cause who’s going to notice a little underarm stubble when the whole region is inflamed seventeen shades of fire engine?

Yes, I did test SmoothAway on my bikini line. No, we’re not even going to talk about it.

After spending something like an hour experimenting with my new toy, came to the conclusion that it works by more or less disintegrating hair into a  fine powder with said microcrystals. Also, because of the broad-swath application method, while SmoothAway was decently effective at clearing areas of thin, fine hair, it doesn’t have the same brutally effective nuclear-winter-for-all-body-hair results as more exacting methods, like shaving or waxing.

That said, if your arms make it look like you’re turning into a werewolf, or if you want to, like, thin out peach fuzz on your stomach (is that a thing people do? feminine grooming puzzles me — I honestly have no idea), and dip a baby toe into s&m at the same time, there are worse solutions.

Also, for what its worth, if you ever get the idea: “Hey, if super-fine grit sandpaper works on my super-fine hair, maybe regular hardware store sandpaper will work on thicker hair!”? Don’t — don’t follow that inclination. Unless you want to experience the rare thrill of developing a bruisy rash on the back of your calf.

No comment on how I know that.

The Verdict: Every time an As Seen On TV product doesn’t work as I’d always dreamed, a little sliver of my hope for humanity withers away. At least I still have my Ove Gloves.

What “As Seen On TV” products always send you guiltily reaching for your debit card?

You guys, I was absolutely floored by the sympathetic responses — and the heart-rending stories — you poured out in response to yesterday’s post and over at Life As A Human. You truly are the best.

And speaking of things I love, head over to Secret Society of List Addicts to read my list of Things The Northeast Does Wicked Well. (Other things I love: smooth segues. Cough.)

NTKOG Year 2, #7: The kind of bold, interpersonal opportunist who, where others see a full cafe, just sees the chance to make a new best friend.

I am: deeply into personal space — especially when I’m working. After all, it takes a certain amount of discretionary tablespace to spread out two books, a laptop, an iPhone, and a few beverages, while still leaving enough free space to spazzily computer-dance to Queen’s Greatest Hits.

I am not: one to deny any other cafe-goer that same right. (C’mon, who doesn’t dance while they word process?)

The Scene: The Back Bay Borders down the street from the Boston Public Library. Sneaked into the cafe in late afternoon with big dreams of snagging a coveted wall socket for yet another marathon grad school application session. But apparently half the city had the same idea, ’cause there was only one plug left — right next to a table occupied by a statuesque mid-twenties gentleman, tapping away at his own laptop.

The three chairs splayed around the table rather optimistically oversold the real estate. Clearly the table is intended for one and a half — at best — and any reasonable person would back out of the cafe and seek a battery top-up at the terminally lame but always-empty Finagle A Bagel across the street. But since when have I been in the business of doing what any reasonable person would do?

Picked up a drink and strode over to the table, where I put my bag on one of the accompanying chairs before even catching his eye. “Mind if I join you? I need to charge my laptop,” I explained, already reaching for the charger. He grimaced but gave a defeated shrug and scooted his laptop a few inches closer to his torso.

The table was so small that, with both of our computers set up, we were leaned in nose to nose like the poster for Sixteen Candles. And maybe it was the tight quarters, but over the course of the next half-hour, we quickly formed that casual stranger intimacy. He accidentally nudged my leg under the table with his Whole Foods bag, stuffed with a bouquet of carnations; I offered him a napkin when he sneezed twice in quick succession; after a while, he jumped up to find a book, leaving his computer, laptop and wallet in plain sight without so much as a word of warning.

After he’d jumped up, the breeze from his retreat sent one of his papers fluttering onto the floor. A woman who’d recently sat down at the table next to ours leaned over to pick it up. “Excuse me!” she coughed through my earbud Queen haze. “Excuse me, is this your boyfriend’s?”

“Oh, I don’t know, but — wait, whaaaaaaat?!”

Huh. Nothing says relationship like a Whole Foods bag, I suppose. And his two books of Proust on the table screamed “grad student” almost as much as my dog-eared copy of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. Even our beat-up Moleskines were perfectly coordinated: my square-ruled notebook, jammed with strangely angular drawings and errant ticket stubs, every inch as eccentric as his unlined drawing notebook with its tight spidery handwriting scrawled perpendicular to itself.

Dude. Dude. Setting aside the fact that we’d never met, we totally could have been dating! Finally he returned, bearing the new David Sedaris book I’ve had on my to-read list for weeks now — the final seal of our imaginary-relationship status.

For the next hour or so, as we worked in parallel, I couldn’t help but sneak peeks at him over the top of my laptop. Was he a margin-scrawler? What kind of paper was he working on so intently? And who kept texting him?!

The last question, at least, resolved itself when a slightly younger guy in a truly devastating blazer wandered up to the table and grinned hello — then gave my imaginary boyfriend a movie-moment kiss hello. Sigh. Brutal break-up, dude.

The Verdict: Never share too-small cafe tables. You’ll only get your heart broken that way.

Plus, seriously, if the table’s small enough that you force the original table-holder to rearrange their belongings, then I can’t help but feel it’s overstepping a huge boundary. That, and once you sit within a two feet of someone, dude, it’s hard not to get involved, apparently. That’s — that’s, uh, normal, right?

Are you a table-sharer? Ever get too involved with the goings-on of other cafe dwellers?

NTKOG Year 2, #1: The kind of hardened pick-up artist who slays men in her wake by mastering the art of The Neg — jabbing the object of your desire with semi-insults until they … magically want to sleep with you?

I am: already kind of working The Neg in daily life. Or at least already the part where you’re not super nice to dudes.

I am not: mega adroit at communicating that I want to smooch a dude even when I totally, totally do. Let alone when trying to appear aloof, craft witty dialogue and remain seventeen moves ahead in the chess match of seduction — all without spilling my drink.

The Scene: First, a quick lesson in The Neg, for those of you who aren’t as obsessed with bro culture as I. (You’re welcome, mom.) The Neg is basically the pivotal tenet of the Mystery Method — right behind stupid hats — and suggests that women, especially beautiful women, have been hit on so many times that they automatically filter out compliments, so in order to woo her, you need to pooh-pooh her. The Neg can range from homicide inducing (“You wouldn’t think a girl with your figure would look so nice in a dress like that.”) to the subtle (“Huh, you’re not a lot of fun, are you?”). And, when properly applied, is supposed to coax any woman into desperately trying to prove just how wrong you are. With sexytimes.

The stuff men come up with, eh? Still, I’ve witnessed The Neg used with mortifying effectiveness on all kinds of smart, cool women, so why not give a few dudes a taste of their own medicine?

Neg the first: Late-twenties guy sitting on the stoop of my local convenience store, comforting a young girl whose giraffe rubber Silly Bandz bracelet has just snapped. He’s attempting to finesse the tiny bracelet into a delicate knot.

Usually I’d pass on hitting on stoop-dwellers — for some reason, almost none of them have read Camus, if you can believe it — but seeing a guy comfort a random child does something for a girl. As he futzed with the bracelet, I hovered and we made friendly eye contact. Everything was so positive. So of course it was time to throw The Neg.

“Hey, if you hold the broken ends to a lighter, you can probably fuse them back together.” He blinked up at me, non-plussed. “Don’t stress. You’re too cute to have to be clever.”

According to the Mystery Method, I should have been friggin’ in there like swimwear. Angsty glances! Flirtatious verbal sparring! Sexytimes? Instead, he rolled his eyes and I awkwardly shuffled away. But when I peeked back at him, he was indeed trying the lighter suggestion. So, uh, victory?

Neg the second: Since my first attempt felt less like flirtation and more like just plain rudeness, let the venerable ol’ Mystery script my first encounter. Stopped in alone to a neighborhood bar after work and grabbed a stool near a dude who was sitting alone, trying to read the head of his Sam Adams like tea leaves.

After I’d established goodwill with a little neutral chatting (weather! Sox!), I dropped the bomb with a neg line stolen directly from a Pick-Up Artist website.

“Dude, you want some gum?” I offered sweetly.
“Uh, no thanks. I’m drinking a beer,” he grunted.
“No, no really. You should probably take some gum.”

I’m sorry, in what parallel universe does this lead to make-outs? Dude turned away from me and suddenly became very invested in the Sox game. Which is probably just as well, since I don’t carry gum anyway.

(Accidental) Neg the third: On the way home, I toyed with the idea of staving off psychological debilitation long enough to try out a few more negs and, in that vein, jaunted to the convenience store to pick up a pack of non-phantom gum. The brah at the front of the line spent ten minutes mulling between Pall Malls and Parliaments, and in that time, I established standard mute-courtesy rapport with the attractive mid-twenties girl behind me.

After I rang up my pack of Orbit, I ripped off the cellophane to take a piece, then, since it was open, held out the pack to her. “Gum?”

She declined, politely, but I held her gaze for a moment too long afterwards and her face clouded with anxiety: “Do I need gum?”

Pause. Pause. I smirked, not unkindly. “Well, a little gum never hurts.”

Gave her the piece, walked out onto the street where — oh, I kid you not, my blessed kittens — two minutes later she shot out after me, physically stopped me, and proceeded to chat with me for nigh ten minutes about the neighborhood, laundry days, and how hard it is to make friends when you’re new in town. After the conversation had reached its natural end, she smiled at me — still chomping the gum — and said she hoped she’d see me around again.

The Verdict:  Holy frig, guys. Holy frig. I may have gotten shot down by two guys, but I PICKED UP A STRAIGHT WOMAN. Rejection be damned! Never before in my life have I felt more like a bro.

That said, maybe I was doing it wrong, or maybe I’m not the type, but I’m going to go ahead and veto The Neg for any future seduction attempts. While it’s devilishly effective on women, I’m not convinced the approach translates well across gender lines. After all, at least according to bar-hopping stereotypes, women are either wooed or ignored, and thus captivated by uncourted rejection; men, on the other hand, get rejected all the dang time, so it’s barely a blip on their radar.

Whether it’s gender differences or just the stupidity of the method, hey, The Neg, this is me rejecting you. (Though hopefully that’ll make you want to hook up with me. Call me?)

Over on List Addicts, stuff I know you’re supposed to do but, look guys, I’m just never going to. And at the charming Red Boots, I contribute to the Dear Sixteen Year Old Me letter-writing project with some advice I only wish I could have given myself back in the day.

NTKOG #241: The kind of obnoxiously chipper Suzy Homemaker who, of a quiet summer evening, knocks unbidden on a neighbor’s door with a tray of baked goods and an open heart.

I am: a pretty socially anxious dude. It takes me years of regular hangs and heart-to-hearts to upgrade someone from “acquaintance” to “friend” — to say nothing of that first leap from “stranger” to “acquaintance”.

I am not: even great about keeping social plans that I wanted to make. As The Ex will attest, 95% of my pre-going-out ritual consists of praying to Dionysus that I will get canceled on.

The Scene: The hallway of my apartment building, ungodly early one morning last week, bleary-eyed because the incessant baying of a neighbor’s hellhound had kept me up half the night. I’m a headache-prone dude, and when I first signed my lease, I only asked the landlord two questions: “Are there no-pet and no-instrument policies? Are they enforced?!” So you can imagine the virulent pre-7am torrent I was about to loose when the beast’s owner happened to open her door at the same time I headed out for my jog.

What the frig do you have in there? I wanted to ask. A great dane? A friggin’ coyote? But just as I caught the woman’s eye, she yanked on a leash, and out scampered a toy pomeranian half the size of my palm.

I don’t know what the national record is for an irate, sleep-deprived twenty-something melting to the floor and covering an entire dog with air kisses, but I’m willing to bet I beat it by a margin. Once I remembered there was a human in the hall, straightened up and introduced myself to said neighbor for the first time in my eleven months here.

To her credit, despite my blatant attempt at dog-poaching, she responded warmly and immediately told me that she and her husband love to meet people, and wouldn’t I drop by sometime to meet them properly? They’re home most nights!

Ha. Sweet gesture, but, c’mon, who in their right mind would ever take anyone up on that? As a compulsive maker of insincere plans (you’re the best dental hygienist ever! we should go see an opera together!), I flashed a big, fake smile and told her that maybe I would.

The thing is, I don’t even really spend time with people I like in Boston. I moved here in part to recuperate from flapping my social butterfly wings ragged. So when I set up shop in this city on the hill, I had one simple goal: don’t make any friends. Just don’t do it. And 95% of the time I’m totally thrilled with the decision to spend virtually all of my free time alone in my head, writing the literary zombie-pornos that pass as the building blocks of my fiction career and making conversation with my Roomba. And then there’s the five percent of the time I long for the old days of triple-booking brunch plans and non-stop hang-outs.

I’m not saying I lack for significant social contact. But I am saying that two nights ago I gave a birthday card to my favorite convenience store cashier. So there’s that.

Flash forward to yesterday evening. Heard the neighbors arrive home from dinner, bickering adorably, and thought to myself, “God, how awful would it be to force myself to actually go over there?!” And when I have a thought like that, dude, I just have to do it.

Loaded a Tupperware tray with half a batch of chocolate-orange dinosaur muffins (god bless insomnia baking) and nipped over to the door before the reasonable part of my brain could talk me out of it. Though it occurred to me just how weird the situation was when I knocked twice and then listened to them confer in alarm for a full twenty seconds before the door cracked open.

“Uh — hey. I met your, uh, wife the other day and I just made, like, too many muffins the other day, so I thought I’d drop some off? If you like muffins? Neighborly gesture?”

The dude was way less weirded out than I would be in the same situation. He waved me inside, called his wife to the door, and she bade me to sit down on their lumpy, pale blue couch.

We chatted briefly about the building and our mutual fear of the super, and just when I started to think, hey, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad — dreaded silence that we half-heartedly tried to chip away on all sides.

Weather? Humid! Sports? Sox! MBTA? MBTAre you friggin’ kidding me?!

The stilted ten-minute conversation sounded like a round of clues in the “Stuff Banal People Know About Boston” category of $25,000 Pyramid. Mercifully, we were all saved when the dog ran up to the couch and issued a tiny, perfect sneeze. We all gurgled adoringly over the palm pom, who ran around the coffee table in a display of manic friggin’ cuteness — after which, thankfully, enough time had passed that I could leave the museum of social anxiety once and for all.

As I waved goodbye, the wife called out: “You should come by again sometime!” Definitely, I smiled. Definitely.

The Verdict: Eeeeeek. Humans are underwhelming. I’m just going to glue some googly eyes on my Roomba and call it a day.

Do you guys ever hang out with neighbors? Can it actually be done? Should it?

NTKOG #240: The kind of unabashed glamour puss who spends half the morning primping before she deigns to run to the convenience store across the street.

I am: the lowest-maintenance person you’ll ever meet. As in, 95% of the time I am growing out my armpit hair. On purpose.

I am not: opposed to other people going to extraordinary lengths to look gorgeous – in fact, I’m glad they do it, as it gives me something to look at on the bus. I’ve just never felt the urge to go there myself.

The Scene: A perfectly ordinary lazy Sunday, with a hint of pizzazz. After my morning run (week six, baby!), took stock of myself in the mirror: drenched with sweat, PMS acne clusters dotting my cheek and forehead, dark circles under my eyes, erratic tanlines, squishy bits, body hair – to your average glamorous girl about town, I looked like a down-market Picasso. So, I set to work changing that. All of it.

At 10:30am, I hopped into the shower, armed with an arsenal of clay-based microscrubs, scented soaps, fresh razor, and nerves of steel. On a normal day, I spend a quarter of an hour getting ready: shower essentials, comb through the hair, dry off enough to throw on clothes without them sticking, then out the door, ready to electrify the world.

By a quarter hour into my GlamorBot primping? Tsh, I’d barely even shaved one leg.

I was halfway through my Empowering Ladies playlist by the time I’d finished all the hair removal (damn you, toe knuckles!). Afterwards, scrubbing, soothing, moisturizing – I was exfoliated within an inch of my dang life. (Seriously, have you ever exfoliated the inside of your belly button? If you haven’t then, uh, don’t.)

And that was just the pre-show! Afterwards, played some Peggy Lee and flipped through all of the candy colored silks and chiffons and laces in the “don’t even think about it” section of my closet, before settling on a black lace cocktail dress that wasn’t totally inappropriate for daytime.

Then the eye shadow, how it glimmered; the earrings, how glitzy. If I did this every day, you’d have to fucking commit me.

After a solid hour and a half of work, took a deep breath and looked at myself – made-up, coiffed and perfect sartorially attended for the first time in my life since, I kid you not, senior prom.

Quick twirl in front of the mirror, then met my eager eye and I looked – good. I looked, y’know, perfectly nice. Pulled together and even a teensy bit stylish. But I felt kind of underwhelmed.

Still, I reckoned, maybe when I ventured out into the world, I’d begin to feel that glossy halo I always imagine around Girl With Great Shoes And Store Credit Accounts. Ran to CVS, took myself out to a decent lunch, and spent a while perusing the sale bin at a book store and, dude, nothing. No one treated me differently, I didn’t feel any more or less confident about myself. It was just a normal Sunday with the only exception being that I was wearing a dress I was afraid to get grass stains on.

Eventually I gave up on the whole glamour game and walked to the Common, where I threw myself down on the ground (grass stains be damned!) for an afternoon of writing. At one point, before I packed up to head into Starbucks, the light was such that I caught a reflection of myself in my MacBook screen.

Glasses on, make-up melting down one cheek, grass in my hair, shoes kicked off – an hour and a half of primping totally undone, but it was the first time that day that I looked at myself and felt great about what I saw.

The Verdict: I know there must be a reason that some women go through this torture every single day, but damned if I can figure out what it is. I think this probably has something to do with the fact that my body isn’t the source of my superpowers. In fact, I look at myself in the mirror, on average, three times a day, and the time I’m happiest about what I see is almost always the same: after my morning jog, hair up in a disgusting frizzy pony tail, shapeless tank top liberally bibbed with sweat and all of my skin flaming seventeen shades of fire engine. It’s not People Magazine cover material, sure, but for some reason, it speaks to me.

In fact, I think I’m breaking all the rules when I say this but, dude, I just straight up like the way I look. I have since I was a teenager. I’m not gorgeous or even particularly good-looking, and the laziest photographer would find a dozen things to PhotoShop in every quadrant, but I just don’t understand the insecurity the world seems bent telling me I should feel. I like my thighs, I like my belly, I like my stress-acne and the stupid toe knuckle hair and the fact that you could see me randomly on the street and just know I’m the kind of girl who’s going to breast-feed her own kids. I truly cannot understand on even the most basic level why anyone else would feel differently.

I like my whole package, and time and make-up are expensive, so fuck it. Not that kind of girl with a bullet.

That said, you other ladies are more than welcome to keep spending hours getting yourself gorgeous before work, ‘cause the rest of us need something pretty to look at on the bus.

Ironically, the day I schedule this post for is also the first day I completely pooched my c25k run. This week, the program upped running from 9 total minutes to 16 — almost doubling my meager and hard-fought running time. I’d put up with it all week, but this time I took a slightly different route, got lost in my own neighborhood, and had a big snot-fueled meltdown in Brookline at 7am. Still. Tomorrow is another (painful) day.

NTKOG #231: The kind of unabashed physical fitness enthusiast who — ignoring the sniggers and smirks of other passers-by — attempts to push herself into the stupid zone.

I am: literally the worst jogger who’s ever drawn breath. Er, drawn deep, wheezy gasps, that is.

I am not: excited about this fact or even, really, super okay with it.

The Scene: A quiet Williamsburg neighborhood early on the morning of my birthday. Justice — vicariously excited about my couch-to-5k regimen — demanded I bring my workout gear to join her for a run. I tried to explain how truly out of shape I am, but after a few attempts to persuade her, I finally gave up and decided she’d have to see it for herself.

Some things, once seen, can never be un-seen.

When we got outside to pound the pavement at seven in the morning, two things immediately struck me:

1) Goddamn is New York a miserable, sticky gehenna. (Hey, have you heard my new band, Urban Heat?)

2) While I was inordinately proud of my newfound couch-to-5k ability to run for three minutes in a row, those colossal superpowers might not seem quite as impressive to Justice, who, when she’s in the zone, can run a quick five or six miles while keeping up a knowledgable discussion on tort reform.

Still, it’s just once in my life — surely I can accelerate my training enough to jog a measy half an hour, right? For the first five or six minutes, I jogged steadily at my usual blazing-fast rate, chatting only slightly breathlessly with Justice. I was doing it! I was doing the hell out of it! No friggin’ problem!

After a few more blocks: problem. Big problem.

By the time we’d gotten within a few blocks of the park that was meant to serve as our halfway point, it became apparent that something terrible was happening to my body. Around the mile mark, you see, some madcap prankster had decided to coat the inside of my lungs with a highly flammable substance.

“You can do it!” Justice soothed, jogging next to me in an elaborate slow-motion pantomime. “Just a few more blocks and we can walk for a minute!”

Which just goes to show the kindness of blind optimism. A few blocks? I was straight-up vomiting oxygen. After a few blocks, I wouldn’t be able to walk again.

Let us not labor the rest of the outing except to say that it was grim. I was basically a complete failure of a human being, a limping survey of every possible problem with the concept of locomotion.

At one point, I begged Justice to stop and bolted into a nearby closed cafe, where I begged the lovely barista to pour me a glass of water. Which I subsequently debated pouring over my head.

Still, we jogged not far nor (on my part) fast, but I didn’t die in a gutter. If I didn’t limp home with dignity, I at least came home a wiser girl. One who, for instance, now knows better than to jog in 98% humidity with a dude who can actually run.

The Verdict: So, turns out not even the best of intentions can allow you to hulk out at will. Bummer.

That said, this extremely ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate my poky old-lady jogging program helped me really appreciate how much said program’s done for me so far. It can come as no surprise that I am basically a weak and lazy human being, but — against all odds, I’m chipping away at the seemingly insurmountable goal of learning to run with the power of … discipline.

Discipline. Ask me six months ago, and I’d have told you that discipline is something you’re born either with or without; that discipline is the providence of strong people. Now it occurs to me that saying discipline is for strong people is like saying money is for rich people. Entirely missing the point.

Lord help me, if it takes another fifty years, I’m going to move this whole messy mountain, stone by stone. Just — just don’t make me jog while I’m doing it, okay?