Dating Tips for the Unemployed

by Iris Smyles

  Incidentally, I have an iPhone—the best call-screening technology money can buy. I write down the calls I owe to friends on my To Do list under things like laundry and taxes. Laundry and taxes eventually get crossed off, while the ink used to write “Call May” or “Call Henry” fades like a tattoo on the arm of an aging hipster.

  I try to call at hours when I think it unlikely my friends will be available. After leaving a message, I am free of my friendship duties, until they get back to me. Hopefully, they won’t get back to me too quickly—some of them do, and this causes me a lot of pain. When they do call back, I wait patiently. Then, once the phone’s stopped ringing, I get out my To Do list and write their name under “clean toilet” or “pay Con Ed.”

  What I hate is when they get back to me right after I call them, within minutes or seconds, so that I’m forced to answer. I can’t be there one moment and absent the next; I don’t want to insult them. They are my friends after all. So I pick up, unhappily.

  At this point, I do my best to get off the phone quickly by making false promises to get together soon. If I’m unlucky, my friend will suggest a specific day later that week, and I’ll begin to panic, feeling again that my schedule is being overwhelmed. I’ll say I’m not sure I can do this or next week but definitely soon. “Next month is better. I’m just so busy right now,” I’ll say, highlighter poised over my TV Guide. “We’ll figure it out.” Then, having bought myself another month before another call is due, I feel relieved. Next month I repeat the pattern, and the next and the next, for as long as possible.

  Mostly I find once you’ve declared your desire to get together, there is little to no need to actually get together. Isn’t it with friendship, after all, that it’s the thought that counts? About once a year or so, sometimes less, sometimes more, my friends and I will get together, but only once it becomes impossible to put it off any longer. Every friendship is tied by an invisible elastic band, I’ve found. You can stretch your friendship a pretty long distance, but stretch it too far, go too long without checking in, and your friendship will snap. And it’s important to have friends after all. So now and then, I arrange to meet mine.

  Unfortunately, when I haven’t seen friends in a long time, they want to “catch up.” They want to get together just the two of us over dinner and say things like, “So how are you?” A question that has always stumped me.

  The short answer is “fine.” It’s short because it stops conversation dead. Then you have to think of something else to say. The long answer is “miserable.” It’s long because they’ll want to know why and then you have to tell them. The medium answer is “Good. What’s new with you?”

  These evenings of catching up are the social equivalent of being audited. There you are, forced to account for all the time since you last “checked in.” Though, having put it off for so long, the eventual get-together is at least festive, like the main branch of the Post Office on April 15th—Tax Day—when there are long winding lines and local vendors giving out free orange juice and tiny hamburgers. “Let’s share an appetizer!” you say.

  What I would like to do is go to a loud party where talking is impossible, or else see a movie—though in truth these are also things I’d enjoy more alone. But my friends, whom I haven’t seen in a while, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want to go somewhere loud. They don’t want to go to a movie. They want to go somewhere quiet where the two of us can talk, and so, there we are, quietly fishing through our purses for the social receipts of last year.

  “I was with someone. Then we broke up.” This is what you say to the “How are you really?” follow-up to “How are you?” “How are you really?” they say, as if asking after the condition of your soul, which, like money, should never be spoken about.

  You can always avoid soulful discussions and try, as I do, to keep things light, speaking only of the concrete and mundane. “I got a new job.” “For my New Year’s resolution, I’ve taken to drinking eight glasses of water a day. My skin looks great, but I constantly have to piss. I have time for little else. Which is why we haven’t seen each other in so long. Between the new job and the pissing, I’m swamped. What’s new with you?”

  The whole enterprise is exhausting. It’s only natural I should want to avoid it. What with work and love and staying optimally hydrated, who has time for the additional obligations friends bring with them? And yet, one needs friends. No man is an island, I’m told.

  If exhausted after these get-togethers, I also feel great, the way one feels great after having accomplished something one has been putting off for a very long time. I’m free, I think, mailing my tax return, that is until next year’s tax season approaches and, like every year before, I begin the ritual of filing for an automatic delay.

  The great thing about close friends is that you can go for a very long time without having to hear from or see that person. For a good while, they will still consider you a dear friend. Every friendship has a different degree of elasticity, however, and in the last couple of years, I have stretched most of mine too far.

  Recently, I’ve seen one of them snap. I feel quite bad about it. For months now, it’s been on my To Do list to win this person back, but I’ve not yet gotten around to it. My friend Katie, with whom I went to college, with whom I made “the grand tour,” called and emailed a number of times without reply before she finally stopped. Even the IRS will not let you defer forever. This makes me sad. If only there were some way—besides calling or writing or seeing her face-to-face—to communicate to her that I think of her often, to tell her that, indeed, her friendship means the world to me.

  A year and a half ago she was married. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the wedding due to work obligations. I was unemployed at the time, but she didn’t know that and so it seemed a good enough excuse. Still, I clicked onto her wedding website—they all have them now—and found her registry. She was registered at Crate and Barrel and also with this new honeymoon fund. Friends and family could put money toward airfare to Aruba among other honeymoon incidentals.

  Feeling guilty that I couldn’t attend the wedding, I bought the couple two gifts: wineglasses and the scuba diving lessons listed on their Aruba fund. I just clicked on the two items they’d listed, punched in my credit card info, and, bam, my friendship obligation was fulfilled. Automatically, a warmly worded response email was generated from their service, thanking me on the couple’s behalf. It was such a simple exchange, and I felt very good about it. By purchasing their wedding gift, I had successfully renewed our friendship for at least another year.

  To celebrate, I put my pants and shoes on and decided to go stand around on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston, where the cars come in from the highway and swirl around before splitting up into smaller streets, where those huge vaulted signs instruct drivers how to exit the city. Standing at the corner of WALK and DON’T WALK, my hands stuffed in my pockets, I thought warmly of my friend Katie and her husband, and of another friend of mine I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a long time who, according to Facebook, had just gotten engaged. I felt myself a rich woman to have a life filled with so many good friends, and then wondered what I might have for dinner that night.

  If I walked over to MacDougal, I could get a falafel for fifty cents cheaper than most other places in the city. The saved fifty cents would be helpful, I considered, as I could put the money toward the upcoming wedding gift. At least I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of picking something out. My friend assured me, via email, that a wedding website was on the way.

  For a while people really disliked the whole idea of wedding registries, arguing that they made gift-giving impersonal and obligatory, going against the very spirit of the thing. On the other hand, people argue, it simplifies matters for both gift-giver and gift-receiver. Gifts are not duplicated, and each gift is exactly what was wanted. No returns! It took a little while before registries caught on, but now pretty much every couple has one. If only we could have this for friends
, too.

  If only there were a friend registry, something like Facebook but reserved for people with whom one is actually friends. Friendships after all are worth only as much as one invests in them. One cannot really be friends with nine hundred people, because it’s the giving that connects us, the mutual obligations that make a friend more than just another casual acquaintance.

  The friend registry would simplify our social lives once and for all, making it easy and convenient to maintain our most cherished relationships with none of the bother of face-to-face meetings. Instead, if we wish to continue our friendship with Bob or Jenn, we just sign up for the automatic payment plan. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could sign an agreement stating that every year on some prescribed date, April 15th, say, a fee of some amount—$20 for distant friends, $30 for close ones—would be automatically debited from our account, like our electricity bill? And if Bob or Jenn are our true friends, they will not simply take the money, but reciprocate with their own deposit, so that no money is ever lost between us.

  Friendship is the perfection of give-and-take, after all, and this way we could keep track of ours online by perusing our account balance. And if our balance ever dipped too low, and we found ourselves unexpectedly in debt, then we’d know, with certainty, what it is to feel lonely.

  SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

  ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MY POSTHUMOUS PAPERS

  THE AUTHOR OF Excavating Kafka claims that the pornography collection Kafka kept hidden in a locked drawer in his parents’ home is essential reading for anyone seeking an in-depth understanding of the master’s work. Fearing that the publication of Kafka’s bestiality plates might damage the author’s legacy, a few scholars moved to suppress them before they were finally published in 2008.

  In early 2009, only four years after her death, the first volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries was published. More volumes have followed. Reborn is a chronicle of the author’s youth and includes reading lists, ruminations on her burgeoning sexuality, and reflections on what it means to be an intellectual. Should a reader feel squeamish about accessing her intimate papers, David Rieff, her son and the editor of this volume, suggests in his introduction that the eventual publication of her personal notebooks was always very clearly his mother’s intention.

  All this raises the question: What should be done with my own papers?

  I’ve kept a journal for as long as I can remember and undertook the project with the expectation that it be published after my death. I informed my father thusly when he asked on my fifth birthday could he read it? “When I’m gone,” I said, turning the tiny key in my diary’s heart-shaped lock. But with the publishing industry imperiled as it is today, I’m fearful. What if, upon my death, I am unable to secure a publisher? Will all my labor have been for naught?

  To get a book out these days, one really needs to sell hard. With publishing houses purchasing fewer and fewer titles, it’s not an easy time to be a writer, alive or dead—neither the Sontag nor Kafka book sold particularly well—which is why I’ve decided to publish some excerpts from my journal now, while I’m still alive. By slipping a few pages in here, I’m hoping to drum up some buzz for when I’m gone.

  It’s become industry standard to coordinate the launch of a book with an author blog or YouTube video—anything to capture the interest of a world turning steadily away from the printed word, which is why I’m arranging for the posthumous release of a sex tape. When the time comes, my publisher can market these items together: “The Annotated Notebooks of Iris Smyles . . . and this free DVD of her taking it hard in the New York Public Library.” I plan to film it in the stacks against the books of my favorite authors as a way of suggesting my rightful place in the canon.

  The following selection of meditations, story ideas, and aphorisms should prove an invaluable resource for future scholars seeking greater insight into my oeuvre and a remunerative storehouse for the savvy publisher invested in its legacy.

  IRIS SMYLES: SELECTED NOTEBOOKS

  Watched Perfect Strangers last night: the episode where Balki and Cousin Larry get snowed in at the ski lodge. Bronson Pinchot is a virtuoso. And while I’ve been a devoted Pinchot follower since the show’s inception, more and more I find myself excited by the actor playing Larry. Neither of them appeal to me sexually, however, and I’ve begun to wonder if I might be lesbian. I’ve begun experimenting with Kate and Allie and Murphy Brown, watching as many as four episodes in the last month. But on a physical level, I remain unmoved. I must confess to becoming excited when I happen upon Alf. The alien is coarse, distinctly anti-intellectual, and yet something about him thrills me. Third grade, I trust, will resolve these ambiguities.

  I had that nightmare again, the one in which I am a single thirty-year-old woman waiting in line to see “the summer’s hottest movie” starring four sexy singles who live in Manhattan and “have it all.” Woke up screaming, “Fabulous!” Mother is baffled by my anxiety and by my insistence on calling her “Mother.” “Call me ‘Mom,’” she says, but I feel it’s too familiar; I’ve known her only nine years. Maybe when I’m ten. When I told her I was afraid to go back to sleep, Mother submitted that I try to “think happy thoughts.” “Think about Minnie Mouse,” she said. Then I dreamed that Minnie and I were both thirty and single and sharing a “fabulous” apartment in New York City.

  OPENING FOR A SHORT STORY

  It was a dark and stormy night with a 60 percent chance of precipitation and temperatures hovering in the mid- to lower fifties though the wind-chill factor made it feel more like forty.

  TO DO

  Try to work the term “hand gig” into conversation. Whereas “hand job” denotes steady work, perhaps with a boyfriend, “hand gig” has freelance connotations.

  Start a book club called “Club Foot” in which members read only novels featuring characters with clubbed feet. Of Human Bondage, Madame Bovary, etc.

  Continue work on novelization of Weekend at Bernie’s II. Play around more with the POV. “As the weekend drew to a close and the sun came up over Bernie’s decomposing body, his face looked ashen, yet there was still something in his sunglasses that suggested life. I looked out to sea, put my arm around Bernie, and said, ‘Friend, there are more adventures in store for us yet.’”

  INVENTIONS

  The Roominator

  A refrigerator that keeps things at room temperature. Ad copy: Few things other than revenge are best served cold. In fact, many foods taste best at room temperature! The Roominator utilizes special technology (cardboard) to store those foods at room temperature for up to three or four hours prior to serving.

  Stuffed Plants

  For children who feel they’re not ready for the responsibility of caring for a stuffed animal.

  Septuagenarian Dolls or Stuffed Curmudgeons

  A refreshing alternative to the traditional baby doll, these small, wrinkly old things need a child and/or hospice nurse’s love and care. With Septuagenarians, instead of pretending to be a mother taking care of a baby, children can pretend to be an estranged middle-aged son or daughter taking care of an elderly, ailing parent. Some Septuagenarians will have a string you can pull to make them say grouchy things like “You’re a disappointment!” and “Hand me my cigarettes!” Others wet themselves. (Depends sold separately as are calcium pills.) Just as the popular Cabbage Patch Kids came with their own birth certificate, each Septuagenarian comes with its own last will and testament.

  The difference between an “alcoholic” and “alcoholist” is that the alcoholic drinks because he can’t help it, while the alcoholist, like the feminist or Marxist, drinks as a matter of ideology.

  A fast-food restaurant called Burger Viscount that serves only the lower nobles.

  IDEA FOR REALITY SHOW:

  AMERICA’S NEXT JOHN SMITH

  Thirty men named John Smith gather from all over the country to compete for the title of “Best John Smith” and a cash prize. Identity crisis meets game show meets reality television . . .<
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  FOUR NEW QUESTIONS

  FOR PASSOVER SEDER

  Why are men with eye patches considered sexy? What does the one eye have that the one leg doesn’t?

  Why are all porn actors called “porn stars” no matter what level they’ve reached in their career?

  Aren’t muffins just cupcakes without icing?

  An alien killing machine with acid for blood, yes. But is Ridley Scott’s Alien happy?

  INVENTIONS

  Baby Botox

  Who wants a wrinkly old baby?

  Indoor Hats

  For the bald gentleman who dislikes a cold head, but is too polite to wear his hat indoors. Similar to the toupee, but without the stigma, the indoor hat looks just like real hair.

  Festive Penis Calendar

  Each month a photo of a penis dressed variously in bullfighter outfits, Three Musketeers costumes, as Scarlett O’Hara, etc.

  Designer Colostomy Bags

  Partner with Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel.

  SHORT STORY IDEA

  About a courtroom artist and the difficulties he faces as his style evolves toward Conceptualism.

  Went to the movies and saw Last Chance Harvey, a love story between two middle-aged adults starring Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. I was the only person in the theater under sixty and enjoyed the feeling of civilization among the elderly. The theater was perfectly quiet. Too quiet. After a while, I started to worry that one of the seniors might die and no one would know until the movie was over. I couldn’t concentrate on the film, feeling compelled to look around every once in a while, just to make sure everyone was still breathing. I wonder how long it takes a body to smell; people say the dead start to smell much quicker than you’d expect. When the movie was over, I made sure I was the last to leave so I could notify the usher should anybody have been left behind.