Saturday night--or Sunday morning, depending on your perspective--and I'm laying in my bed (alone). Nothing wrong with that, right?
Nope, not at all.
I was talking to my friend earlier tonight. It's funny the friendships that can come from relationships that never realized in the way we expected them to.
Anyway, my friend and I were discussing a common topic for me: men. And I had brought up the last guy I dated. I can't tell you his name, but we'll call him Lewin. Yep, that's right. A black, afro-centric, pan-african minded, very politically and spiritually conscious man. Tall, handsome, a bit lanky, but very confident overall, and so intelligent. We had brain sex often. Only thing was I think I got too much of a good thing and I think he still wanted to keep it coming.
Now I'm a bit of a serious person to begin with. Not always (heads up to my roomie for lightening my load) but I have my "deep" moments that make people older than me say, "you're an old soul."
So an old soul I am. I enjoy long conversations, like six hours long. It makes me feel like there will never be an end to conversational possibility for the person with whom I'm speaking. And I will admit, I give a WHOLE lotta points to guys in whom I see lots of possibility/potential.
Anyway, this certain guy, Lewin, often made it so that I felt it was hard to conduct a conversation I felt was regular because he would constantly bring up points I felt were irrelevant to our current topic.
For instance:
After one of our dates to Coney Island (not my choice, but cute nevertheless) Lewin and I were on the train heading "home" when (my memory is cloudy) he said something. Perhaps the conversation went like this:
"I ain't even tryna be on this train when dem young boys roll through this piece," Lewin commented. (By the way, this is a GROSS exaggeration on what he actually said. He would NEVER say anything like this, but whatever he said did make me smile and respond with...)
"Are you ghetto?" beaming the whole while I spoke the words. I just thought seeing this tiny part of him that seemed to escape out of one of the small cracks in his oh-so-large brain was charming and I liked that his less militant self was showing itself to me--his true, natural, un-thought-out self was revealing itself to me, and I thought it a beautiful thing.
But, lo and behold, my response was brutally rebuffed by his less than approving look, followed by, "I don't like the use of the word ghetto," he said with a serious look on his face. He continues, "I feel like people often restrict its use to one of the many global communities in which there are ghettos, and I feel like the use of the word is perpetuated to be a symbol specifically for the black community, so I don't like it or use it."
My response (and you know 60% of communication is body language, right?) was a body slump, along with the so indicative, "Oh."

I didn't at the time understand what the big deal was. It wasn't like he and I were in some huge debate. And I certainly hadn't called Lewin's mother ghetto. (I never met her though, so. . .) J/K
Anyway, I felt like his reaction was a bit over-extended and unnecessary. If I had wanted a critical overview of my choice language and the words that I use, as compared to my self-impression, I would have asked. I hadn't asked.
His response, suffice it to say, threw me just a bit. But there was more to my reaction. The night hadn't been great. It hadn't been horrible by any means. No date with Lewin was ever horrible.
As I look back at "us" or what there was of us at any point, we actually worked pretty well together. But he seemed to have some control issues that I took as male dominant attributes coming out. I wasn't comfortable with these things I saw. And so we ended up not being as great as we were at our beginnings. But our beginnings were so full of stories that will be great to tell on nights not tonight. :)