This will be my one hundred and second post on Bumpin’ in Brooklyn, which is to me an astonishing accomplishment. Since I started this blog I’ve moved twice, had three different jobs, and had sex with eleven different women… not too shabby. Through it all I was extremely consistent, until recently, in posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ve also had a lot of fun, and learned a lot, both about writing and about relationships.

So why am I throwing in the towel? Honestly, I’m exhausted. Putting myself and my actions under this intense a level of scrutiny takes a considerable amount of effort. I decided when I first started Bumpin’ in Brooklyn that I didn’t want this blog to be a diary, telling stories about my randy exploits, but I wanted to actually analyze what I do and what people around me do. I think I’ve done a good job of doing that, but it’s worn me down and I need to tap out.

Don’t worry, fans, if you still want to keep on reading what I write I won’t be disappointed. I’ve decided to focus exclusively on writing about films. I am a reviewer and staff writer for the site Box Office Prophets, and have contributed once (and hope to continue contributing) to Overthinking It. Instead of writing about my sex life -or lack there of- I’ll be writing about movies, and maybe sometimes TV.

To make things easier for you, I’m starting a new blog, “The Film Depository.” I generally won’t be creating new content specifically for this blog, but rather will be posting excerpts from and links to posts that I write for other sites. It’s mostly a way for me, and people who like reading what I write, to keep track of my output on the internet. If I write something that doesn’t get published at this or any other site, I’ll put the whole thing on there.

I hope that you all enjoyed reading this blog as much as I enjoyed writing it. I’ve enjoyed the feedback that I’ve gotten over the months, including the hatemail that sadly waned after the first couple months. Most importantly, I hope that you all keep on bumpin’… or something profound like that.

Keeping reading me at Filmdepository.wordpress.com

And the other waiters who work there are generally pretty awesome. I get along with all of them, we joke and make fun of each other and hang out outside of work. Considering I don’t know too many people in this city, it’s really nice having access to an entirely new circle of friends. One of the big things I was worried about concerning my move to Austin was finding fun people to hang out with and not spending all of my time in my apartment watching reruns of House. Now I don’t have to worry about that any more.

In fact, not only are my coworkers very cool, but some of them are also very cute. The majority of the other servers are ladies, and of those the majority are quite attractive, another plus of working there. Some of said attractive ladies are in relationships, which is lame, but some of them are single, which is decidedly not lame. Narrowing down that list even further (servers>ladies>attractive ladies>single attractive ladies), I am interested in two of them.

This is an interesting situation that I’ve never found myself in before. At my last job, there was one girl I was interested in, it was abundantly clear that she was also interested in me, and we acted on our mutual interest in each other by boning. Easy peasy. At my job before that there was nobody I was interested in, which was even easy peasier but resulted in much less boning. This time, however, things are complicated… pomplicated.

So there are two girls I’ve been flirting with, Betty and Bethany. Now I’m a notorious flirt, and seems like they are too, so this doesn’t really signify anything. I have no idea if either of them know that I want more than friendship. Being in this position (and wanting to be in another position, if you know what I mean*), I have to tread very lightly. First of all, I probably have to pick one of them on whom to focus my attention. If I launch an assault on one of them (not a literal assault, unless they’re into that sort of thing), I will almost certainly lose any chance at scoring with the other.

But not necessarily. If I go out with my coworkers and we get drunk and there is dancing and I happen to hook up with Betty, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t hook up with Bethany later on. It will probably get me a reputation as a manwhore, but really I’m okay with that. However, hooking up with both of them would undoubtedly deny me a chance at having something serious with either of them, which I wouldn’t want with Bethany but might with Betty.

Here’s the trickiest situation of them all: if I go after one of them, and get shot down, I can’t immediately launch an assault on the other. Obviously my coworkers all talk to each other about everything, so it would get around that I had been shot down. I don’t mind being thought of as a manwhore, but if I get a reputation for being a creeper who hits on every girl I work with, that would suck.

So, to reiterate, treading lightly is the key here. I really just need to let things develop, not force anything, and if I’m out with a group, only go in for a kiss if I’m absolutely certain it will be returned… and of course it will get even more complicated if I’m hanging out with both of them at the same time. But hopefully if I’m in that situation my head will explode from thinking too much about everything and I won’t have to worry about any of that anymore.

*I probably mean doggy style.

I don’t believe in subtlety. In general I consider it a monumental waste of time. If I want something, I tend to be very blunt and ask for it. The topic that I’m talking about today is kissing, so I’ll get more specific. When I want to kiss someone, first I of course intensely overanalyze whether or not kissing that person would be a good idea and what sort of short and long term ramifications would result from such a kiss. But once I’ve decided that such ramifications would be either positive or negligible, I have two courses of action that I take. Either I tell the girl that I want to kiss her or (and this second option is more likely to happen if I’m drunk) I just kiss her. It’s really fairly simple, although I tend to complicate it because that’s what I do.

I will now delve into a purely hypothetical situation, because it’s one that I’ve never actually dealt with in real life. Nobody I don’t want to kiss me has ever tried to kiss me. True story. Partially it’s because I’m not terribly discriminatory about who I want to kiss, and because women have been trained to let men do the chasing so if I don’t want to kiss them they’re unlikely to make a move. But whatever the reason, it’s never happened.

But what if it did happen? This isn’t an issue that has caused me to lose much sleep, because the answer is fairly simple. If somebody tried to kiss me, and I didn’t want them to, I wouldn’t fucking kiss them! Is that a complicated or outrageous claim to make? I don’t think so. I think it’s fairly logical and would avoid a lot of drama down the road.

Clearly Bess doesn’t feel the same way. Bess is a very difficult girl to read, which is part of what made the wooing process so difficult (that’s right, I’m the first person to unironically use the verb woo in over 30 years). On what I can only assume will be our last date—although you never know—I kissed her a handful of times, and every time she kissed me back. These kisses didn’t have the same passion that our earlier smooches did, and I could tell that she was holding something back.

But she never stopped me from kissing her, so I wasn’t sure what was going on. It reminded me of our third date when we were making out on my couch. Things were going really well and I had gotten plenty of good boob action in, so I decided to, well, let’s just say… do stuff to her vagina. My hand made its journey down to that area, only to discover that her legs had been clamped shut. It would have been like trying to pull open a bear trap if I hadn’t gotten the hint. And really, hint is the right word, because it was a pretty vague and indirect way of making that area off limits.

I remember hooking up with a girl in college, and the one time I took a shot down south she grabbed my hand, without missing a beat, and put it right on her breast. It was perfect, because it sent a loud and clear message without interrupting the flow of the out making, and who was I to complain about having my hand on a girl’s boob? I feel like a lot of the time people aren’t direct because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or whatever, and frankly, I find it more frustrating than if they were just open about what they were thinking/feeling/wanting.

So eventually I gave up and asked Bess what the deal was. Put simply, she’s still hung up on her ex and isn’t interested in anything more than being friends. Bummer. But at least I know now, and don’t have to worry about it anymore. And anyway, things change, and maybe she’ll decide that she’s dumb and actually does want to date me. Until then, I’ll keep on kissing people I want to kiss and not kissing people I don’t want to kiss… because I’m smart like that.

And yes, I was definitely a bit nervous last Friday night, because I was about to enter into a situation that was completely unique to me. Very little that I had previously experienced could prepare me for what I was about to walk into, but I was willing to be open and embrace my new ambiance.

I’ve mentioned in the past the shared proclivity that The Ex and I have for tickling. I enjoy tickling, she enjoys being tickled, and we developed our love of this activity together (and no, I’m not going to tell you what tickling is code for). Although we’ve gone our separate ways we have both taken part in this activity with a number of other partners. I’ve found several other girls who enjoy being tickled and she convinced Q-Bert that she really enjoys tickling her (pronouns get confusing with same sex relationships).

In fact, The Ex has gotten quite involved in the Austin tickling scene. That’s right, there’s an Austin tickling scene. A bunch of people who tickling, being tickled, watching other people getting tickled, and all those other fun things. The Ex managed to find these people, largely through the help of the internet, and has befriended many of them. Now, if The Ex and I still hated each other I wouldn’t get an opportunity to join in these scene, but thankfully we’re friends, not just because it’s awesome having her as a friend, but because it makes it easier to get involved in all sorts of fun, tickle-related activities.

So Friday night I joined her in what promised to be a fascinating activity: a tickle party. An entire house was opened up to guests to come socialize, eat delicious snacks, and engage in full-frontal, no holds barred tickling (I’m really glad I chose that as code, as it makes this post so much funnier). I was a little bit nervous, but mostly excited, and it gave me an opportunity to bake cookies, because my mother taught me to always bring food a kink-themed party.

And I was not disappointed at all. Not only was it such a unique activity, but it was a lot of fun. Everyone there was really nice and I made some new friends. Most importantly, I got to watch some absolutely wild tickling. Like, you have no idea. Seriously, it was fuckin’ off the wall outrageous crazy. I had decided not to partake in any of the activities, because I mostly wanted to use my first time as a way to absorb everything and take in all of the craziness that I was watching. And watching is still a lot of fun.

My only hope for how next time I go to one of these parties is that I have someone special to go with. I don’t necessarily even mean a girlfriend, just someone I like having sex with who I know is into the whole tickling thing. But even if I don’t have such a person with me, I’m still excited about my next tickle party. As I’ve said, it’s rare to take part in something that is totally out of the realm of everything you’ve done before, and it’s even more rare to enjoy it as much as I did. Hopefully they’ll all be that much fun.

*For those of you who are curious, I made double chocolate cherry cookies, and they were some of the best cookies I’ve ever tasted. The recipe is here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Cherry-Double-Chocolate-Cookies-239292

Don’t worry, this post isn’t about sports. I’m merely making an analogy. Successfully courting someone (and yes, that word does sound comically old-fashioned) is a lot like being a quarterback. You might go into things with a certain expectation of what you’re going to do, but when surprising or unusual information is given to you, you have to be able to completely alter the way you’re going to go about getting things done. You have to be able to think on your feet and react to anything that comes up. This is really where the analogy breaks down, because in dating your goal is the exact opposite of the quarterbacks; unlike the quarterback, you’re aiming for the sack.

So now I’m the quarterback, and Bess is the defense, and she just called a suicide blitz (if you don’t know the rules of football this analogy might be going over your head, and for that I apologize). If you’ll recall, I suspected that something was up that Bess wasn’t telling me, but I wasn’t sure how to talk to her about it without scaring her off, so I decided to just let it slide and figured either I was imagining things or it would come up naturally. And it did come up naturally… when I asked about it.

Bess admitted that she’s been feeling conflicted, and it took all of my will power not shout “called it!” at that moment. Apparently, some unspecified amount of time ago, Bess had a very bad breakup with some sort of boy creature. Recently, he admitted to her that he wants to get back together with her, even though he lives some unspecified distance away from Austin. Her question: should she get back together with him or not?

I consider Bess to be a friend, and my natural instinct in situations like this is try to help my friend come to the decision that is best for them. Unfortunately, I can’t do that this time, because I’m rather biased. In my opinion, what’s best for her is to dump this guys sorry ass and spend all of her time with her junk wrapped around my junk. Is that what’s best for her? I have no idea, but it’s what’s best for me, so that’s the party line that I’m sticking to.

But when she told me about the awkward situation she is in, I realized that I needed a plan. I have a clear goal in mind: to convince her that I am the right guy for her and this boy creature is not. My old plan of just straight up pursuing her works fine in a normal single guy chasing normal single girl situation, but that’s not what I’m dealing with. I don’t have to just be good, I have to be better than the alternative, which calls for a very different strategy.

So at that moment I called an audible. I said to my offensive line and my wide receivers, “okay guys, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to be there for her. We’re going to give her space, we’re going to give her time. We’re not going to pressure her. We’re not going to harp on this issue. We’re going to pretend that we’re not worried about it, that we’re just a really nice, supportive guy who gives her everything she needs. And then we’re going to fuck her.”

And that’s what I’ve been doing, hopefully all leading up to that last part. Unfortunately, as we’ve both been rather busy, I haven’t seen her in a week, but hopefully I’m going to see her tomorrow, and I’ll keep going with that strategy. I will execute this play perfectly, and by the end of all this I will end up in the endzone… and by the endzone I mean her pants.