Bill Hader is SEXY, Dammit! Or: Figuring Out What Kind of Guy You REALLY Like in Your Forties

I’m here to confess: I have a total crush on Bill Hader. A big one. I have since he first started on SNL, and movies like The Skeleton Twins and Trainwreck just sealed the deal. He’s adorable, hilariously-funny, has a great smile, is a phenomenal actor, seems to be genuinely nice, and he loves his wife and kids (THE HOTTEST PART!)

I keep Trainwreck on my DVR just for the ending.

(Wait…it’s not a spoiler alert if the movie has been out a year, is it?  Oh well, maybe so – SPOILER ALERT!)

If I’m feeling sad or like love will never be in my life again, I just go to the last 10 minutes of Trainwreck and watch Bill Hader’s face when he realizes Amy (Amy Schumer) is attempting to dance (badly and adorably) with the Knicks City Dancers to his favorite song, Uptown Girl by Billy Joel.  I mean come on.  COME. ON.  In four seconds, Hader’s face conveys a guy who is in love with this girl but, just in that moment, he falls in love with her all over again.  Makes me weepy every single time.  I have been known to watch it 20 times in a row.  And I’m not even a chick who likes rom coms!  I’d rather watch Alien or Raiders of the Lost Ark any day, but if Hader is involved?  I’m in.

“Okay, whatever!  This is getting WEIRD!”
Hang with me, here. I confess this because I have recently realized a real trend towards this kind of guy over my entire life. I remember walking out of 16 Candles as a young teen and thinking how much I would have gone for Anthony Michael Hall’s character far more than Jake Ryan (and have you seen Anthony Michael Hall as an adult? HELLO!!) After Ghostbusters, I was totally crushing on Bill Murray.

Then Moonlighting came along, and I’m pretty sure I was the only 15-year-old girl at school who was going on and on about Bruce Willis instead of Rob Lowe.  I know Willis is kind of the normal ideal of the “hot guy” now, and most women instantly point out Die Hard, but it was Moonlighting’s David Addison that sold me instantly.  His sense of humor, sincerity and awkward adorableness just made me fall in love with him over and over, week after week.  

How about Andy Samberg? Yes, please. Jimmy Fallon?  And I don’t mean The Tonight Show Fallon.  I mean SNL’s Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy “Fallon.” Don’t even get me started on Chris Pratt, whom I swooned over when he was adorably-chunky on Parks and Rec, long before he buffed out for Guardians of the Galaxy.

And now here I am.  Considering entering the dating world again, and I’m wondering how the hell I’m going to find the sweet, hilarious, adorably-awkward, slightly-nerdy guy I am apparently attracted to. I also had a shocking and kind of nauseating realization that my soon-to-be-ex-husband was none of these things.  He was the tall, hot, macho, “I-will kick-that-guy’s-ass,” moody-but-often-funny, angry, verbally-abusive type.  Basically the opposite of what I have just described and pretty damn close to my father.  Ouch.

But now that I know all this, it’s hard to believe the type of guys I’m describing aren’t all taken, especially at my age.  Have you looked at a dating site lately?  Well that’s a blog post for another day, but trust me, I wanted to scrub my brain with bleach after an hour of perusing Match.com.  I couldn’t take one more bullet-pointed list of “female requirements” from a guy who has no neck and lists his hobbies as carb loading and naked windsurfing.  Jesus.

Wait, they don’t have a dating app for my kind of guy, do they?  The last time I went on a date, you got asked out using touch-tone phones and actual social interaction, so I’m just figuring out this dating app stuff.  AdorablyFunnyDudes.com?  Is that a thing?

Anybody?  I don’t want to join a convent. The nuns would not appreciate my jokes.  I know they didn’t in Catholic School.

Hey Bill Hader – can ya hook a gal up with a friend that’s just like you?

First blog post

Well.  Here it is.  My blog.  A thing I don’t think anyone in the world will ever read, yet everyone in the world has told me I should start.  When starting this blog with WordPress, your first post is, aptly, titled “First blog post.”  I couldn’t think of anything pithier or more correct, so….I left it.

My first consideration here is why write a blog?  What reasons did people give me to write one?  So in no particular order and, in some (okay MOST) cases, not necessarily how I see myself:

1. You’re hilarious!
2. You’re very social and really know how to talk to people!
3. Your stories about your family are HYSTERICAL!
4. You’re getting a divorce after 25 years – a lot of women would want to hear what you have to say and how you’ve grown in the two years you’ve been separated.
5. You are a great writer and journalist!  It’s always engaging and fun to read.
6. Your stuff about your cats is REALLY funny.
7. Your stuff about your customers is REALLY funny.

So basically, I’m told, I’m funny.  Yeesh.  As someone who has never taken that well to compliments, probably because neither my parents or my soon-to-be-ex  rarely gave them, I poo-poo’d this for a long time.  Oh, and then there’s that “friend” who told me she had a “vision” that I would write a folksy, Americana novel.

Note:  Reading my last sentence, I should probably interject some important info here before anyone who accidentally stumbles onto this reads on:

• I use quotes, capitalized words and italics a lot, mostly for sarcastic reasons but also to really drive home a point.  I overuse them.  I know it’s a problem, but there it is. Example: that “FRIEND” turned out not to be much of a “FRIEND” at all after my separation, and I think she’s entirely full of shit about her “VISIONS.”  I believe in a lot of things most people don’t, but I can also smell bullshit from 20 paces.
• Based on THAT last sentence, it’s important to note that I cuss like a sailor.  A LOT.  If I was ever interviewed by James Lipton for “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” I would absolutely answer that my favorite word is fuck.  I would probably also use that word a lot in the interview, so the episode would never air.
• This just keeps building, so referring back to the PREVIOUS bullet point, I am sarcastic.  VERY.
• I’m wordy.  Seriously.  You may just stop reading at any point because I just go ON AND ON AND ON when I write, and I know my friends talk about me behind my back as “that friend” who sends texts where the iPhone just goes “oh fuck” and has to put that little arrow because it’s too long to put on one screen, and then you have to hit the little arrow to read all of it, and basically I just get back a lot of “wow” and “that’s crazy” because how the hell does anyone respond to a text that long?  Finding out about “voice to text” was the worst day of my contact lists’ life.  Like FUCK just call them already, right?  Uh yeah…..WORDY.

I’m sure I’m leaving something out that will likely offend/inflame, but that’s good enough for now to get rid of any pearl clutchers.

Anyone still here?  This thing still on?  Okay, well, I guess the reason I really started this blog is because there’s a lot of shit swimming around in the old noggin’, and it’s just a mish-mash at this point.  I need a place to sort it all out.  Marrying your high school sweetheart and having him kick you in the teeth with a nastily-requested divorce a month shy of your 25th-wedding anniversary kind of turns the grey matter to mush, ya know?  Although, on the other hand, I have found it was the greatest gift he could have given me.  It’s such a cliche’, but I really am finding out who I am.  God knows I didn’t know at 20 when I walked down that aisle.  Trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up – at age 47 – is exhilarating, terrifying, thought-provoking, puke-inducing business, and I highly recommend it/caution you to avoid it like the plague.  Did I mention I’m also terrible at making a decision?

Which brings me to the title of my blog, “A Roomate at 48,” which makes no sense given that I just revealed I’m 47.  I’m almost halfway to 48, and “A Roommate at 48” had a very Judy Blume-y ring I liked, which was literal and also figurative about my life. Besides, it’ll be true in seven months and 27 days.  So sue me.  No, don’t sue me.  That was sarcasm (see bullet points).

The Roommate part?  Well, I left my parental home and moved right into my married home at 20.  I didn’t even go to college, so I’ve never had a roommate.  Unless you count the man I was married to, who actually referred to us as “roommates” a few times during some of his less-verbally-abusive tirades.  But finding myself in a less financially stable place, even though my business, by most standards, would be doing very well if not smack-dab in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the world, I decided if I wanted to stay in my tiny-but-comfortable 2-bedroom rental home, it was time to bite the bullet and get a roommate – at 47.  I’m now on my second one, by the way, after two months.  Yep. Talk about doing it wrong the first time.  A blog post for another day.

And so if anyone besides me is really here and decides to read on, I will talk more about the trials and tribulations of a middle-aged, separated broad trying to find a non-college-aged, non-insane, non-meth-smoking roommate in crazy L.A., being a “journalist” (sarcasm intended), a few celebrity encounters (okay, that was mostly to entice you to return, though it IS true), the downfall of my marriage, how I’m trying to figure it all out in my forties, my thoughts on re-entering the dating pool, which I haven’t been in since girls wore leg warmers and Johnny Carson was still on The Tonight Show, funny quips about my daily struggles with crazy customers….basically, I will vomit my brain all over this bitch.

If you find it interesting, let me know.  If you don’t, please do me the courtesy of remaining silent, at least for now.  I’m still in the early phases of construction on my “not taking criticism too personally” skyscraper.  Right now, it’s basically those little wooden sticks with ribbon you see marking off an area where a building will be but hasn’t been started on yet.  The wooden sticks and ribbons took about a year to be installed, and I’m hopeful the foundation will be poured in the next month or so – so give a gal a break.

End of “First Blog Post.”