Camille Goes For Networking, Not Hooking Up

This post is about my friend Camille. I was writing about her love life on one of my old blogs on Wednesdays, and I'm continuing it here because I find it fascinating.

Camille is in law school, so take from that what you will. She an amazing friend and bridesmaid (she's planning my bridal shower thingee). She's also a hopeless romantic/relationship saboteur.

How can you be both a hopeless romantic and a relationship saboteur? It's not easy I'll tell you that. But Camille has it down to a science. She'll meet a guy and start thinking of all the romantic possibilities. We'll chat about possible signs a guy likes her, which happens to be a totally fun chick activity, and then two days later, she's telling me she's completely lost interest.

She loses interest without warning and rather abruptly. I think it helps her weed out the frogs while she's on her way to her prince. But it's certainly amusing, especially when she dropped that guy she met a the wedding of some friends of ours from church. Then she had to figure out if she was going to have to avoid birthday parties and barbecues and the like for a while.

I think you have enough background now for me to launch in to the purpose of today's post. Camille has a networking event coming up. It will have law students, med students, and business students hosted at the University of Chicago. She told her classmates this event was for networking purposes and not for hooking up purposes.

This was of course right before her next sentence asked if she will leave with a date.

I hope she meets someone there. Back when I was in med school, I was convinced that professional people should date other professional people because they understood what it was like and the demands on your life.

Now that I'm marrying a musician who was convinced he'd only end up with another musician, I can understand the need to branch out of your comfort zone. But with Camille's busy schedule, the opportunity to meet so many new men all in one place cannot be passed.

She must be dolled up, looking delectable (yet classy) and being super friendly. I just hope her classmates don't notice she isn't just "networking". If anything interesting happens at the event, I'll be sure to tell you all about it.

How do you meet new men? Should Camille just focus on networking for realsies?

Gloria's Rough Patch Smooths Out

On one of my old blogs, I would write about my friends' love lives. I still think they're lives are pretty interesting, so I'll write about them on this new blog occasionally as things develop.

This post is about my friend Gloria. You should click the links in the previous sentence to read her posts in my old blog.

To sum it up for you lazier readers (I'm not judging), Gloria is my girl who has an interesting love life. The main players are two men, who I call Rufus and Gregory in my blogs. Rufus is the father of Gloria's son. He's an asshole. And he's possibly crazy. The best way to sum up what makes him crazy is to tell a short story.

He has another son who was 1 years old at Gloria's son's second birthday party. I'll wait while you do the math. Yeah, he knocked up two chicks back to back. And while the mother of his seond son was still living with him, and pregnant, he's telling Gloria that they need to be a family and together. He's still telling her that he wants to be with her and his son and make a family unit. I question not only his sanity but also his intelligence.

Then there's Gregory. Gregory is lovely. He's a sweetheart and definitely my favorite of my friends' significant others. He also has a son, but he has considerably less baby mama drama. He and Gloria have been together slightly longer than Easy and I have. They make a fabulous couple. They are so sweet together, and if they could just get over their competitive streak, everything would be fine.

They hit a rough patch recently because Gloria was feeling like a very low priority on Gregory's list of importance in life. I was worried they were going to break up and I begged her to reconsider. She really loves that man, so she didn't need me to tell her to keep her relationship. I did give her a suggestion of a more productive and constructive way to have what-do-we-do-now-that-we've-hit-a-wall discussions.

They're still together, and she seems happier when his name comes up now than she did a couple weeks ago. Even if you work on your problems as a couple, you'll never be perfect, but when you love someone and the relationship is healthy, you keep making it work.

I'm trying to be very supportive because I am campaigning to be godmother for their first child together. I'd make a great godmother! I bake cookies and I take field trips to museums, and I throw a mean slumber party. I'm just saying.

When Gloria was with Easy and I last weekend, we really had a great time. Any time someone is out with a couple and isn't even a bit bitter, that's a good sign.

Now if we can only get Gregory to have some free time, we'd love to go on a double date with them. Gregory is kind of quiet, but Easy had him talking. He brings out the extrovert in everyone. And Gregory is hilarious, so I know it would be a good time.

Introducing... A Variety of Blog Topics!

The exclamation mark indicates some sort of fanfare. Yay!!!

I'm pretending that people will actually care enough about my blog to want to know what they're reading about before they read it. In my last post, I came up with the idea to separate out the different things I want to talk about into different memes in the (counter-intuitive) idea that it will make this blog feel more seamless.

These are not in order of importance, they're just in the order that I figured out the jpeg. So, without further ado, my blog topics.

Up first is one that I pretty self-explanatory.

A Love Life Review

This one will be for when I discuss my friends' love lives. Pink means love right? And the word love is pretty damn obvious. Mostly, it's just pretty...

Next is the one of the ones I designed for talking about my life.



All Growed Up

 That's not my hair, but everything else about the clip art just...works. With this meme, I'll be talking about career, finance, grad school, and all the general grown-up stuff that's coming at me full force. It's coming almost as fast as my 30th birthday feels like it's approaching. Okay, I"m being dramatic as 30 is still over 3 years away.

Up next is one I had a lot of fun making.

Living My Life

I may or may not be completely self-centered. Well, 80% self-centered. But I love this one and I'm looking forward to having this jpeg identify when I'm waxing poetic (except I hate poetry) about my life with Easy or my hobbies or my family or whatever else goes on in my personal life.

After I did this one, I figured that could cover all I had to talk about my friends and myself. That left politics and television.



Let's Talk About Politics



On The Small Screen

 So perhaps the phrasing isn't so clever. But I love these and I'm looking forward to having a more clearly defined topic list from which to choose. Coming up with the jpegs helped me further refine what I'm going to talk about. I love movies, but I don't have much to say about them besides whether or not I liked them.

So you can pretty much be guaranteed that if you read my post you'll read about: 1) my personal life, 2) my career and other grown-up topics, 3) my friends' love lives, 4) politics, 5) television. It feels good to have some focus!

Lion Plays Host in St. Louis

Lion is one of my best friends from college. He's going to be my best man at my wedding. I was writing about him love life over on my other blog, My Life's Love Medley. But since I've consolidated all my blogs, I write about his life here now. You can read my older posts about his love life, where I used to write about him on first Wednesdays, then Saturdays here.

In my last post about him, I talked about how he was coming to Chicago to take a test for school and staying with my fiance Easy and I while he was here. Then Easy had a gig down in St. Louis, where Lion is from. The three of us, plus a friend of mine Lion met at our engagement party, were all going to go down there and kick it for the weekend. It was going to be awesome!

Well, you know how things in life don't always go as planned. With all the things that constantly change in my world, me (and the people who are silly enough to want to spend time around me) have got to be able to roll with the punches.

Not quite like this.



But more like this.

Image via Cartoon Stock

One of those punches was that our friend wasn't there. She had a family emergency come up and wasn't able to join us. We still had a pretty good time. Hopefully the next time such a trip comes up, she'll be there and I'll actually get to observe Lion in action. He did spend some time with a lady friend of his. But she wasn't interested in spending time with Easy and I in St. Louis because I said she couldn't come to our engagement party since she happened to be in Chicago that day.

Who asks to go to the engagement party of a couple they've never met before? I gotta say, I'm okay with never meeting one of the many Ashleys that rotate around in Lion's life, especially a particularly tactless one. Moving on.

This trip to St. Louis was a very different one from the last time I was there and stayed at Lion's brother's house. It was still fun though. I'm still waiting to actually observe Lion in whatever it is that he does to these chicks to earn their practically life-long allegiance. Once I figure it out, I'll be happy to share it in this blog.

Camille Sees A Sign

Camille is one of my friends who's love life I wrote about on my other blog, Camille's Wishful Wednesday. In this new blog, she won't have a day, just an update as they arise. If you read that other blog, all the updates I'll have on my friends' lives will be here. If this is your first time reading about it, you should go back and read the basics so you understand the background.

To sum it up, Camille is the hopeless romantic saboteur. She would love for a prince charming to come sweep her off her feet. Not this prince charming.

Image via osamasaeed.com

More like this prince charming.

Image via tvrage.com

By the way, Happy 39th Birthday, Idris Elba, with your fine ass. Moving on.

So Camille would love to be swept off her feet, but she's always finding something wrong with guys. High standards are good, but she'll drop a guy for not liking the way he dresses. She sabotages things before they get off the ground. Occasionally, she finds a guy she really does like. There are just more frogs than princes in her world.

So recently, we've taken to just imagining things about guys for amusement. In my last post about her on my other blog, I talked about the guy at her school who was watching her in the library and what that might mean.

This past week, a friend of hers met a guy and hit it off with him. Guess what? He has the same last name as the guy Camille is wondering about. It's a sign!

If you didn't know, some of us women do things like that. We look for signs and over-analyze everything for lack of actual interaction to go by. He's Just Not That Into should have taught us better.

Image via amazon.com

At least we know better than to think our flights of fancy mean something deeper. It's mostly for fun.

But then again. Wouldn't it be nice if they ended up together and all these little signs at the beginning pointed to it like in a movie? Easy and I definitely seem like characters out of a romantic comedy sometimes...

Seriously, we do. The best example I can think of is that we break into song and dance no matter where we are. We waltzed, in front of people, at an arts festival in Bucktown after one of his gigs. We break into songs, in harmony, to sing songs that would be the soundtrack for life's moments. And when certain songs come on, no matter where we are, we must dance to them. It drives all our single friends crazy, just like in a movie. All the quirky things I used to do myself became less quirky and more a sign of our sympatico nature once we both do them together.

Image via timberlake-justin.com

Tell me someone gets the sympatico reference!