How To Attract Creepy and or Crazy Men

Why is it that the guys I seem to attract are crazy, creepy or just wrong altogether? I think I have identified key factors about myself that may be contributing to this:
 
How to attract crazy and creepy men:

• Talk about living with wolves.
• Be obsessed with dead baby jokes. (Although I have seriously made some progress here...)
• Go to bars by yourself just to sit and draw or write poems.
• Wear feathers in your hair.
• Talk about your passionate love for chess.
• Be slightly domineering and assertive (for some reason, crazy and creepy men love strong women).
• Be open-minded (to the point of allowing weird conversations go on way too long).
• Have crazy parents to begin with that are at fault for placing you on the path to being accustomed to crazy behavior from others. (read here for more background)

How to be a creepy and or crazy man:

• Buy me Barbies for my 27th birthday (this is never an OK thing to do for ANY adult woman’s birthday).
• Stare at me every single time I get up to go to the restroom in the hallways of my office.
• Now this particular person has graduated to saying hello. I don’t respond. No one likes to STARED at every time they go to the restroom.
• Take pictures of my apartment when I am not there.
• Ask me to kiss you after asking me if I have ecstasy pills on me.
• L.A. clubs are kind of crazy. Do I look like I have drugs? Seriously…
• Love Jesus a little too much and or think I am going to Hell. (please see here)
• Ask me to wear my hair a particular way prior to going out with you (yep, didn’t end up going out with him after that).

Sadly, all of those things mentioned above REALLY did happen to me. Even sadder is that there hasn’t been a normal instance to balance any of the creepy crazy instances out. Disillusionment and fear is settling in rather quickly.

FAILED: How to ruin your vacation in two seconds flat...

In less than ten days I will be somewhere in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

I’ve been thinking about this trip for a while – months.  Recently I’ve been reading  Eat Pray Love to get myself motivated for what looks like it is shaping up to be another solo journey.  I haven’t taken a trip by myself since I was 22 and I backpacked the Mayan Route in Southern Mexico.  It was a beautiful, spiritually enriching, and often, a lonely journey, but one I needed to make.

So of course, while I’m planning to take this trip with activities like swimming in the most beautiful cenotes only native to this region and hiking up some majestic pyramids, what do I do last night?

I think I broke my toe.  In the spirit of having wild backpacking adventures I choose to wrap some gauze and electrical tape (it was either this or duct tape) around the offending toe and limp around my apartment all day like nothing is wrong.  Sure, I could go to the doctor, but why?  He’ll only tell me something that I don’t want to hear like not to walk on it or to take it easy or something. 

This reminds me of the time I almost died from this crazy wave in the ocean (read that story here) and the first question I asked the doctor who was about to stitch my face up was:  “So when can I go back in?”  The doctor, slightly surprised at my question (which I guess might happen when you’re a young female foreigner that needs stitches on HER FACE) broke my heart by saying a whole seven days.  Seven days?!?  I wasn't about to hang around a sleepy beach town where I can't go to its only attraction for seven days!

Conclusion: doctors are stupid and unnecessary.  Disclaimer: my scar healed quite beautifully and you can barely tell now…but that’s irrelevant.  We’re talking about my toe here…

Pain is nothing.  I will still snorkel, dive and hike around one of Mexico’s most beautiful states.  Did you know that the average temperature for Merida right now is 84 degrees?  Did you also know that I live in Chicago?

It should be better by the time I leave, right?

Sometimes I suck at dating.

I know it’s hard to believe.  Well, this wasn’t really a date persay, but I had kind of wanted to date this guy eventually because I liked him.

So I had a few drinks and was talking to this gentleman for quite a while.  He seemed really sweet and didn’t mind me talking about dead babies at all so in my mind, it was going well.

It was close to 2 a.m. and so I asked him if he’d like to go back to my place to make some art because I lived so close to the bar.

He agreed.

You’d think making some sort of move to show that I was interested in him would be easy for me considering he’s coming to my apartment.

I'm sure he was thinking I was just as weird as this guy thinks Liz Lemon is...

WRONG – I am like the Liz Lemon of dating – I somehow will find ways to screw something up even when it’s “in the bag.”

We get to my place what do I do?  I go and get my easel and markers and charcoal and instruct him to work with the charcoal while I work with the markers, and oh would he like some tea?

Charcoal, Jen – seriously? 

I don’t think he actually thought I was serious about the art…

It’s late.  We are tired.  So I ask if he would like to watch a movie and he says he would love to.  Okay, good…movies are good, there could be some cuddle action…maybe a kiss. NOPE!

 Another great potentially romantic moment ruined by yours truly.

First of all, I put a documentary on about coal mining.  Really, Jen, COALMINING?!? That’s real sexy.

Then while he’s sitting on my loveseat to one side so I can sit next to him and I step over him to sit on my other couch.  

This time I actually realize I screwed up and am thinking okay, you can still salvage this…just go sit next to him, Jen – it’s not so hard..just go and sit next to him.  Five minutes later I’m still thinking about how to maneuver this incredibly complicated action and finally think: Too much time has passed.  You made your choice.  You have to stay here now.

Naturally he falls asleep.  Why?  Because it’s 4a.m. and WE ARE WATCHING A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT COALMINING!!

I go to my bedroom and fall asleep.  The next morning I wake up excited thinking, okay today’s a new day and he slept over so we can grab a bite and some coffee and talk some more only to awaken to find that he’s gone.  FAILED!

I finally turn my phone on to a nice text message that says it was great chatting with you and hanging out blah blah blah…but one of those that just means that we’ll probably never do that again.