Online Dating

Ingredients for this My Time: killing yourself only after deleting an internet account.

Oh, Honey, Honey, Honey. Let me tell you. I had heard recently from a friend about something called "online dating." She wanted a change, and she's a real go girl, so she went online.

I'm the "problems" on the right, you see...

Anyway, to alleviate some of her problems, which seem to be that men dig her and she's awesome, said classy woman joined an online dating site and had this to say about her first day of this experience: "guess how many men contacted me the first day? guess."

"OVER A HUNDRED! HAHAHA HHHHAAAAA MANIACAL LAUGH I LOOK GREAT IN A THONG I BATHE IN GOLD I'VE NEVER POOPED HAHAHAAAAAAAAA."

So, after several months of waking up with Taco Bell lettuce in my bosom after drinking two bottles of A VERY SENSIBLY PRICED BORDEAUX HA HA HAAA THIS IS HOW I LAUGH THIS IS MY PROBLEM HA HAAAAA THE TACO BELL PEOPLE KNOW WHO I AM

Which, by the way, Honey, if one were to be a woman, and one were to be a woman going to Taco Bell on Valentine's Day around midnight, and one were to order 4 items WITH EXTRA LETTUCE, one would expect that the EMPLOYEE wouldn't ask something like "how is you V-Day going?" without said woman responding with how dare you ask me that which one woman might have already done. To start the yelling which proceeded over the mic, that is. When all you want is some base comfort, Honey, something cute that loves you through your champers and food hole (mouth) and wants to say to you, "hello, M'Lady, eat me! Cheerio! I love you! When no one else is there, I am,"

"We love you, Dagmar! xoxox"

You don't want to be asked HOW YOU ARE. YOU TRY TO STAY "ARE,' AND NOT "NOT ARE." THAT'S HOW YOU ARE.

Anyway, so I decided that if I plan to marry for money again, I better put myself into the new, real, sad world. So about ten minutes ago I filled out a form on an online dating site, and guess who my first "match" was? And guess what was written next to this man's name? It was my ex-huzzie, the fucking classy man, and "responds often" was by his name.

Oh, look, Honey, there he is. The man who could never pay enough alimony to make it count for the times he said he loved you, lying through his teeth, just to prove something to himself just to play "taksies backsies" later with the ol' "I can't have sex with a woman and also meet her other needs. I'm proud to know my limitations." I mean, do some god damn sit-ups instead. And get over this childish pursuit called "pride" and enter the part of adulthood known as "shame" like the rest of us. Anyway, Honey: Account. Deleted. Too bad. I was planning on using this photo as my "come get me" pic to show them how fun I really am, fun enough to be drunk alone in Estonia on Father's Day and performing a photo shoot with HATS:

i. am. a. good. time.

The thing I love most about this experience besides the fact of all the things I love only to keep me from killing myself is that my ex-husband's ex charity board member is the one who told me about all this glorious online dating where men flock to your vagina with hundred dollar bills and champagne, promising you rose gardens and dignified silence. So, he's "on" there while she's "on" there, and if I ran into him, surely they've run "into" each other. The point is, Honey, that clearly it's only me doing the running in this world, and it's not into a penis wrapped in a gold marriage proposal.

Where am I running? To whom? Well, that time I was in Estonia was my second. The first time I was there alone, also, running. The first time I went I was married to a rich gentleman from the Midwestern country--the first time I had heard of or been to such a place. I was living and loving in Seattle, near the water and draped in furs. This man showed up in town in a 3-peice suit and a lot of wealth to share, so I left with him in his limo to finish something called "tour." I awoke the first time in Wyoming for the sunrise, then in Ogallala, Nebraska for an exchange of last names. I was sold. Where's the preacher, I thought. Of course Estonia alone was clearly the place that was smartest to go, right? Wrong.

The second time I went was the third time I had bought a ticket (this has happened to me with Italy, too. Blast that country for my inability to make it back!). The second time I bought the ticket was to Finland in the middle of winter. I decided to go to the Arctic Circle with some yoga pants and a hoodie for Xmas, and thought that maybe I wouldn't ever come back. I would say goodbye to my mother country, Estonia, and journey north and slip into the sea, the snow, the white, oblivion and stillness. That's when I ended up in a "rest home" for "rich women" and realized that I needed, more than anything, for someone to tell me to stay. Which is no one's job, of course. Oh, JOBS! What's having one of them like? I wouldn't know!

 
You know, Honey, most folks would say that I'm a pretty boisterous, say-what-I-think kind of rich gal. I am. But I'm also a runner. Not that kind, with your feet. I wear heels. It's not that I fear intimacy--hell, it's the only thing I'm really good at. It's that I run from showing how good I am at that to folks who are going to fuck me with a pre-nup. Which is another way to say, maybe online dating in a small town isn't for me. When I saw him, with a long, sincere description next to a picture of him looking pensive and DATEABLE, I thought, I'm going to throw up. Then I thought, I'm never getting married again. Then I thought, my vagina. MY vagina! What did I do to her? Then I thought, run run run run. But my vagina had already run, Honey. I didn't even click on his profile. I couldn't. Without a complete profile even, it was me that wanted to be already always clicked on.

Which is another way to say that I want a lot, but whatever. If I could trust a man enough to marry him again, maybe then I could have a clear button to click on. But the truth is, I've never not trusted anyone, which is why I escape. I throw everything up on someone, wait for them to run after me as I run run run run, and before I know it I'm in Estonia for Father's Day, researching where my family is from, what is true for us. I escape, and I'm not happy, but I'm safe. Which is a kind of happiness. Which is another way to say, HATS!

My First Love

In thinking about The David Lynch Family Hour, I am reminded the importance of choosing our own family, Honey, and I wanted to share with you the first billionaire I married, GG Allin. He was a dreamboat of excess, perfect for an elegant woman like me. They don't make 'em like that anymore, Honey. Sadly, GG died but the wealth he brought me lives on. To meet a Virgo with such deprivation. It's hard to think that can happen again. A lady can dream...

David Lynch Family Hour

Ingredients for this My Time: a tape recorder and notebook to make notes for your memoir. And probably xanax and wine nearby JUST IN CASE.

Honey, when was the last time you lived with your family? I mean, stop judging me, because you don't know what it's like when your mother is evicted and your brother gets out of jail and there they are, at Grandpa's, LIVING when you VISIT. I mean, the more you judge, the more I have to pretend I care about what you think, and the more we have to TALK instead of CONSUME which really makes this all MUCH EASIER IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Look, when you're raised rich and well, you have the freedom to develop...eccentricities. So, your family exists with them. And oh, to be a MAN like in a WES ANDERSON MAN FILM where being rich equals a sophisticated separation from a culture to come to terms without the terrible strain of having to talk to someone but always with the insipid knowledge that you'll be whole again when you CHOOSE IT

Oh, look at you always on the verge of choosing wholeness. Honey, I applaud you. Because this blog is really for women, yet, as we know, the readership is mostly men learning how women want them to spend their millions. So, let's learn something about ladies today, okay? Here are some memories they want you to spend your money on erasing. That means that when you marry said woman, you have a good shrink with gorgeous accessories to accommodate a lady's NEEDS

I just bought two of these lovely "purses" in a German airport. Leave it to the Germans to help us all forget!

What your little Daggy wants to forget:

Scene One: Shared bathroom with 22-year-old brother. Left of sink: "Maximum confidence" deodorant, Axe body spray, Oxy cream, Mach 5 razors, and (from sister, for guidance) Keihl's chamomile toner and exfoliating facial wipes. Toilet: the place that kills several trees this summer, as so many anti-bacterial wipes need to be used to wipe away any last drop of urine.

Scene Two: a can of nacho cheese and a large Palermo's pizza on the kitchen sink. Mother claims, "I went grocery shopping," and pulls out her leftover items from the "99 Cent Store" plastic bag.

Scene Three: Brother sinks head into hands and curses under breath. Tears manifest. Mother has forgotten novelty corn-cob-shaped corn cob end holders for brother's corn cob.

Scene Four: Dude shows up after dark asking for mother. Mother answers door in underwear after being told by daughter not to let strange man in. They argue behind a closed door. They go outside to smoke. Gatorade bottles. Firetrucks show up to help neighbor. Neighbor has fallen down stairs, isn't breathing, has broken neck. Mother smokes in front of the firetruck in her bikini underwear. She watches while making her own wind in her own personal spot light

Daughter says to mother, "mom, why don't you put on some pants?" Mother asks, "why are you so mean? God," and mutters under her breath. Mother cries. Mother puts on pants. Mother goes to comfort everyone in neighbor's lawn forever.

Scene Five: Mother asks daughter nine times across the course of one week, "isn't my pool raft really cool?"

Scene Six: Daughter gives mother informal drug test. Daughter says to mother, I can't wait to afford a personal trainer because I'M SO FAT. Mother does not take bait. Result positive.

Scene Seven: a repeated image of brother laying in bed staring at various times a day. No television. No book. Sitting and looking into clasped hands on a bed. Forever.

Scene Eight: daughter walks into kitchen and finds mother folding various things into tortillas late at night. Mother looks around for an escape route and says I'M HAVING A MIDNIGHT SNACK.

Scene Nine: Daughter cooks spaghetti sauce concoction and eats that for dinner. Mother takes said concoction the next night and pours it over one pound of pasta and eats it.

Scene Ten: Grandfather yells at brother. Grandfather is wearing white socks pulled up to calves, tight white underwear, a white surgical glove on right hand with vaseline inside, and nothing else. The gloved hand points at brother. Brother listens, and obliges.

 Scene Eleven: Daughter opens bedroom door to refill wine bowl. Mother's door is open. Brother's door is open. They are adults sharing a house and sleep with their bedroom doors open. Daughter decides to make a wine spritzer to utilize the crashing sound of ice from the ice machine. One week later, the pattern continues and no door has closed.

Scene Twelve: a lone red pubic hair in the bathroom sink. Whose it is, the daughter wonders. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE SHE HAS TO WONDER IF IT'S HERS OR NOT.

Scene Thirteen: Daughter researches laser hair removal online.

Scene Fourteen: Daughter researches teeth whitening online.

Scene Fifteen: Daughter researches the Real Housewives of Vancouver online.

Scene Sixteen: Daughter thinks of herself as such. Daughter pauses, then continues the day's work on a PhD dissertation that many result in getting the average 3-year wait for a tenure-track job at a university in a place unknown, confused that this wanting something so uncertain and without benefits of sure happiness creates such a drive for success.

Scene Seventeen: PSYCH, HONEY! I had dinner with an eccentric man named David Lynch tonight. We went to a lovely Zagat-rated (that's ZaGOT) El Pollo Loco, like another rich and eccentric man from the upper echelons

Bud

and we talked over romantic candlelight that none of us we're willing to match with frank conversation, because, well, we're polite and don't speak frankly out of interest in not knowing ourselves and being comfortable and eating salmon.

Honey, you know why I married irritating men? Alimony. You know what I got alimony? Because it's a lot better than struggling through your intellectual juices to be exhausted and draining of potency. You know why I want potency? DIVORCE. BATTLES. Look, Honey, we make our own family. If you don't want to wonder if that's your pubic hair, then you can go and find a group of different-hair people to seek solace in IN THE BATHROOM. And if you don't want to struggle turning passion into marketability, don't get a PhD, get smart. A PhD happens once, and alimony is FOREVER.

I'm returning to the midwestern country this week to revisit the gigantic, expensive spiders that can be drained for the perfect facial that will work so well your face will feel like a 12-year-old's because THAT IS WHAT WOMEN WANT TO LOOK LIKE I MEAN FEEL LIKE I MEAN LOOK LIKE. Champers on me, Honey! We all know YOU clearly need IT. So it's ON ME.

"love,"
Dagmar Ottenham

paranoia goes well with sangria

Ingredients for this My Time: paranoia, a litre of sangria, old patterns, insomnia

Oh Honey, here I am in a foreign land, with my body yet even IN MY HEART.

I'm coming to the close of my month in Greece, shopping for my next ex-husband, Cappy McOilBaron, and wouldn't you know it, he has not appeared yet on his white steed boat to wisk me away to the yacht bedroom where I can roll around in his money on a circular bed and grease my body up with oil, then insure said body for millions.

OH, BODY! What has happened to you? ADULTHOOD, obviously. And while my analyst tells me my PTSD ( I HAVE been through many divorces, after all) forces me to be hyper-vigilant, which means prone to paranoia (although paranoia has a much more long-term psychopathic connotation for docs), this knowledge, while under stress, does not help your lil' Daggy differentiate between the panic caused by my mental issues--which are called "eccentricities" for rich people like me--only the poor and those lacking elegance go crazy without putting champers in their champers hole--

that's for Moet, honey

or the silent hatred of my fellow peers. I think, you see, there is a private discourse around me that my rich, elegant friends are too unaware of its implications to share. Because we all lack shame and compassion, thank god--money does that. But the insecurity, Honey, only money can solve that. There is truth in the patterns that come up when a lady is searching for a new ex-huzzie. The insecurities blossom like one of those god damn stink flowers, and suddenly, the elegant lady you are falls to the floor in her kimono, wondering how many emails one can send to the board members of the neoliberal economic planning boards you sit on, asking, simply DO YOU LIKE ME? DO YOU LIKE ME REALLY QUALIFICATION QUALIFICATION SORRY BUT SERIOUSLY, TELL ME I'M ACCEPTED. Which doesn't make sense. If another bitch in a diamond bedazzled sweat suit doesn't like me, I should hold my shoulder pads high and walk on. But, alas...

In my profession, in a rich world of charities, functions, mingling with exes on yachts with their hotter Russian girlfriends who have LIKE NO FACIAL PORES, polite turning of heads is the way to dismiss a woman. But is this dismissal or simply how the rich affirm, aka, don't engage? I don't know. Affirmation doesn't come easily, as it is hard to pat someone on the shoulder when her shoulder pads delicately keep her dignity in position.

But here's the truth, Honey, about those of us in analysis for PTSD, otherwise known as Pretty Terrible Steady Divorces. I wonder, as I shop for an oil baron with my stomach not six-packing as it used to, with my face strangely become toe-headed as I age, and with my thinking that I'm not in the company of like-minded women who dare look at me when I speak, out of fear I will ruin something like comfortable silence...the truth is, an elegant lady can lose it occasionally, and when she does, she might be getting that pat on the shoulder pads without realizing it. Is it their rejection, or simply them living their own lives? Paranoia has solipsism, but so does polite silence. We who are lonesome wonder, in our elegance without six packs, are my shoulder pads my barrier in understanding if I'm being patted/affirmed? Or are they not being patted in a friendly way for a reason? It's a terrifying thought and reminds me of the one dream I've been having in Greece, a return from years past that is reliving in my mind, even after my blue clouds. My heart is unlike my own, for I never have a handle on it. For weeks I have been trying to reach a dear friend, a duchess of Romanskilia, to no avail. My heart aches, but the truth is that this aching is old, and the fear of being hated is its product.

In my loveless oil baron Greek dreams, I wake in a hazy part of the elegant town I lived in with my rich father. I know he is dead--a duel with a duke of some Romanian sect brought him an honorable passing--but has come back. I will be with him. But he is aloof (as are the people I wonder about in my waking world). He has another woman in his life and they have an understanding I don't have access to (what I fear about a discourse happening about me in my waking world). He ignores my screams from the ground--the dirt, can you imagine me there, Honey?--he doesn't hear me. In these dreams he never will hear me, and instead, he has met a woman while I am forever a mere child without the ability to express my adulty feelings, Daggy without divorces, an elegant child clawing out her own skin and screaming to be accepted, screaming for that diamond ring of social standing. While I'm generally A VERY CALM, COLLECTED WOMAN, it is in these dreams that I have the most reactions. I grab at his flannel shirt, scream, fall to the ground, logic with him. But I can't logic with his great ghost, his decisions to leave me on the street corner. It is here I awake, sweaty (which reminds me, I'm def planning a trip to Juarez soon to get rid of those sweat glands along with my NOT MARRIAGE MATERIAL PORES) in a room of my own, in Greece, where my insecurities have shown themselves to be in double. The problem, Honey, is the truth. In this dream I return to the place that was ours

tie-dye and overalls: a winning combo of familial love

to learn it was never mine in the first place, and I wonder, in this life I awake to, what will never be mine still, again, and newly. I would like to say that people here in Greece like my elegant brand of richness, but I dunno. Politeness and silence mix in the discourse, and then, my shoulder pads sink into my sagging shoulders a bit. Another truth is that I would like to say that my father loved me, but the truth is that his love was hidden, too powerful a force for him to share. A rich soul burdens the tongue. It silenced him and he watched me from afar. The pictures of my childhood are ones of a red kid looking bewildered, unclear who the voyeur really was in our love.

This brings us to sangria, of course. Mix a bottle of cheap red with fruit, a tad bubbly water or champers, and fill that sangria hole when no one else will for you. They turn away from your hunger, it feels like, but you're a paranoid Dynasty character, so who knows. You may be getting your shoulder pads embraced without knowing it under 5 inches of rubber and cotton, but you may not be. Intuition comes with elegance, but paranoia comes with wealth. A sangria hole is also for talking, but it's worth knowing what's work talking through, and to whom, considering one's first love existing on two sides of the lens--if you don't know that daddy loved you, Honey, maybe you should start there and not worry about your peers.  Because, really, who wants peers that don't want you? There's too many rich, fucked up, amazing society circles in this world to get caught up in one. And yet, even the most elegant ladies need to know what they need to say, and fuck the propriety--you pay to the charities, that is your propriety--of politeness. You could say it and risk the consequences, or shut your mouth with sangria and let it work out the seething. You are here to meet an oil baron, and nothing else. Which is another way to say, the paranoia you feel about not being loved by peers, no matter valid or not, is beside the point of learning how to break the lens of being your own voyeur. Stop. watching. yourself. It ruins the drunk.

Honey, take it from me, the more humor you bring to not being able to read SHOULDER PAD TOUCH OR REJECTION SIGNALS makes your paranoia no more than wondering what waiter will fill the sangria carafe next. Which CAN BE a daunting endeavor. In the gaps between those refillings, remember the people who remove your shoulder pads and touch your skin to the bone. The people where there is no weighing. And how skinny, therefore, they make you feel for finding that clavicle under the fat. Those rich friends are always draped with enough velvet to share.

the one on the right, aghast, proclaims: that is silk, not velvet!

Then, one more litre for us all, one more litre before strolling the coast for another ex-husband.

Back to Malibu-Lite soon, Honies. Champers on me, and just for you, a xanax in my mouth before we meet up, because we all know I could be right, I could be wrong, but I could always relax into life a little more.

love,
your Daggy