"Don't you have a boyfriend? Oh. . .well, why not?"
This is the question that I was asked tonight by the fourth person in the last week. I suspect it is because I have recently started a new job in the kitchen of a restaurant that is doing quite poorly, which causes most of the other cooks (who are male) to not have very much to do besides speculate on my marital status. Young, skinny, educated blond girls who speak English are not terribly common as line/prep cooks (not that I am trying to perpetuate stereotypes--to the contrary, I am breaking down barriers!), and thus I am extremely interesting for the first time in my life.
However, back to the question at hand. I need a snappy answer to this question, and am having a very difficult time coming up with one. The trouble is that right after the person asks it, time and space sort of congeal for a moment and bits and pieces of the last five years start flashing before me and I can sort of feel my eyes darting around, overstimulated by all the REAL answers to the question that nobody actually wants to hear, and then the present comes rushing back to me and I manage to stammar something along the lines of "er, I dunno. . .I broke up with the last one. . ." and then I trail off and go back to frying processed foods and chopping up parsley for the real cooks, and my head becomes swamped with the following:
"Well, I have them sometimes, but I don't at the moment, and it's not like I feel the need to have one all the time, like I have to get one right after the last one poops out, as if it were a refrigerator or an alarm clock or some other appliance you couldn't get along very well without."
"Well, I have them sometimes, but the last one was dreadful and before that I had a very, very nice one for quite some time and it didn't work out, which I think may be mostly my fault, and besides those two there have been several others and they all fell somewhere in the spectrum of 'kind of icky' to 'jerk,' and I haven't really spent a lot of time analyzing it, but my general feeling is that I need to take some time off from the whole thing and learn to be better at assessing jerks BEFORE I sleep with them (those girls on that new "Cupid" show seem to be very good at this, from what I saw tonight, but I don't think I could ever be that mean) and just becoming a better person in an all-around sort of way so the next nice one has a better time with me than the last one, and why is this any of your business anyway?"
Besides these answers, which you get to be privy to because fortunately this is anonymous, you lucky, lucky men, you, I also have come actually said these not-so-witty retorts that ended up causing me much more embarrassment than they were worth:
"Oh, I'm a lesbian." (Not that being a lesbian would be embarrassing, but I am not actually a lesbian, and the lie was embarrassing. . .I mean, what, I'm going to be in the closet as a straight person? Do I smell the plot of a bad sitcom episode?)
"Oh, I'm studying to be a nun." (I'm not even Catholic, but I do really, really like Dante.) This leads to loud guffaws. Goddammit.
I suppose that this personal ad is not as scintillating as most personal ads normally are, since it is probably obvious that I am looking for ways to avoid dates, instead of potential men to take me on them. But if you supply me with a good answer to this question you will be supplying yourself with a hearty dose of non-jerk karma, which will doubtless come in useful later in your life, with the most scintillating person you manage to snag.
Those of you who are just going to email me with that form email that you email to all of the craigslist ladeez (ah, now we discover that she has been around the craigslist block, which may give some clue into her many run-ins with jerks), I know you will ignore this plea, but I don't need the kind of irony in my life that your form letter response to this personal ad (specifically seeking a way to BRUSH OFF jerks) will create.
Thank you in advance for the help. If I don't respond, please interpret it as my Hotmail account crashing under the weight of (no!) more than ten emails at a time. Also, as a cook I don't log the kind of wasteland computer time that many of you young professionals do. I have the priviledge of staring into a broiler all day.