Natalie

In the dicey process that is getting back together, sometimes a girl needs to take the reins.

I've always had a strange aversion to overt girliness. Once, at the airport, my bags were selected for a random inspection and I actually found myself wishing that my copy of Eat, Pray, Love were a rogue water bottle instead—preferring the disdain of the SFO screening agent over being taken for a "stereotypical SWF" by my cute security-line neighbor.

Everybody plays the fool sometimes. I just never thought it would be me.

Of all the unflattering depictions of women that appear on TV, I've always found the girls on The Bachelor to be the most disturbing of them all. Beyond the marriage-equals-happiness message the average competitive husband chaser usually sends, it's her utter blindness to the reality of her situation that I find most unnerving.

Meeting up with the one who got away can turn an entire life upside down.

I read Nabokov's Pale Fire during my junior year of college. The whole "unreliable narrator" angle came as a shock—especially coinciding, as it did, with the Melrose Place episode in which a supposedly dead Kimberly turned up at Michael's beach house.

Keeping it real on the first date proves that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.I’ve never been one of those put-together girls. Oft denoted by glossy ponytails, they’re the ones who drink red wine and wear white without spilling on their clothes or staining their teeth. I couldn’t be further from the immaculately manicured kind; however, I’ve successfully sold myself on the fact that my general state of disarray is part of my charm.

In which two hopeful romantics cross paths—and purposes.Anyone who’s taken high-school economics will recall that the Law of Scarcity is based on two founding principles: Man has unlimited wants, and resources are limited. It’s that hard-to-get factor, of course, that adds to an item’s desirability. And though the jury’s out on whether there are enough “certain someones” for everyone in the world, the idea that an alleged certain someone is made more desirable by his or her unavailability has a proven track record.

The struggle for freedom isn't reserved for the battlefield.Allow me to ease my lawyer’s mind and preface this story with a disclaimer: In Mexico, the drinking age is 18. Which I assume applies to the legality of consensual acts that take place while drinking—kissing members of the opposite sex who may or may not yet be 21, for example. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When texting attacks: a Valentine’s Day special edition. Technological advancement doesn’t always make for the betterment of mankind. As was the case with the Manhattan Project, the introduction of text messaging has had its share of catastrophic results. And so, it is with the hope that I might educate even one person about the dangers of “texting while dating” that I offer up this cautionary tale.

What do you do when that someone new belongs to someone else?I’ve never been one to take something that didn’t belong to me—even when it’s “OK.” For example, when downloading Radiohead’s pay-what-you-wish latest album, In Rainbows, I opted to fork over a voluntary three pounds rather than snag it for free. (Whether my action was the result of my conscience, or paranoia that Thom Yorke himself would be compiling a naughty/ nice list of his fans, is up for debate.) The point is: It’s this very trait that  surfaces the moment I find out someone I’m interested in is already involved.

Anticipating the future can be sweeter than living in the now.No news is allegedly good news. But when your job consists of writing a monthly column about your life, no news is writer’s block, which is not good news at all. And yet, as I sit down to write this column for November, I am knee-deep in September, and aside from the angst caused by my impending deadline and curiously headline-free social life, this time of year makes me inexplicably optimistic.
 

Wherein the untrodden territory of online networking brings out the teenager in me.In the general repertoire of put-downs, “that’s so high school” packs a particularly dismissive punch. But sometimes all it takes to zap the  most upstanding adult back to the social habits of those formative  teenage years is the prospect of navigating unfamiliar territory.