wedding ring

JY's endless muffhunt led us a few weekends ago to a club in downtown Oakland where patrons were smiling and polite as they sweated on one another to the rhythm of terrible music. So many reasons to love Northern California: its attitude of lovey dovey acceptance, its limber homosexuals, its terrible music, its charming, bumpkin patois. (The dance party was called "Hella Gay.")

JY, who like most of us is more sassy and extroverted in the little white square of a chat box than she is in the wide world of non-online life, broadcast with her body language fear of contact, which is exactly the wrong message to send when one is sniffing for truffles. I took the lead in smiling at and hokey pokeying next to strangers. I became one of those people who says "HI!" really loudly and thrusts a hand forward for vigorous shaking - because one lesson I learned from improv is that people respond better to strong, clear decisions, even if they are imperfect, than they do to hedging. Do you shake a hand or hug goodbye a friend of a friend you've just met at a dinner party? It doesn't matter, as long as you commit emphatically to one or the other. I'm not very good at this, and am often doing the bee dance of indecisiveness, alternating hesitant offerings of hand and embrace, embarrassing everybody, so I was happy to practice my social skills on strangers, in the service of securing for JY somebody to snuggle, and soon I had directed the attention of a western shirt-wearing lezzie to JY's erratic dancing. Western Shirt's friends followed her, and then we all crowded around the same twenty-five square feet of space, chatting and spasming. I kept my movements to friendly Jazzercise, to entice the ladies, but not to give them the wrong idea.



While JY worked her dork game on Western Shirt ("I admired her loafers!" she later breathlessly recalled), I did what wingmen are supposed to do and made polite, unintimate noises with my mouth toward Western Shirt's friend, whom we shall call Kati, pronounced Katie. Topics glossed included "Oh where do you live?" and "Well now what do you do?" and "Heh heh heh!" (when the speaker couldn't be heard over the noise). Almost immediately Kati said, "Some people say they work in retail. You ask them what they do. 'Oh, I work the cash register at Urban Outfitters.' No. That's not retail. I work in retail; you don't." She said she was the regional manager of a loose-leaf tea retail store. "My friends think I'm a nerd and all, but I could stay home all weekend reading about maximizing profits." She asked my name, then my last name, then noted that her two previous girlfriends were Chinese and that she liked that "type," and asked me for my number. Rather, she asked me to input her number into my phone - she watched over my shoulder while I did this, to make sure her name was spelled the "Japanese way" - and then had me dial her phone with mine. "I'm going to text-stalk you!" she said, and I said, "Heh heh heh!" and cringed. I got a few flirtatious texts in the next two days, which I ignored, and felt bad about ignoring, and so then I spent a non-billable hour consulting with friends and drafting a properly contrite and ego-cushioning text response, which I never sent.

Those friends also pointed out that I was a fucking coward, and the right thing to do would have been to say at the outset "I'm not interested" or "I have a girlfriend" or "さようなら, rice king!" but I was caught off guard, I wanted to keep the peace to facilitate JY's chat with Western Shirt, I didn't know how to politely reject her - all excuses basically boiling down to I was a fucking coward.

ANYWAY after this episode I decided that since I am a fucking coward, the best way to communicate unavailability to potential suitors would be the most passive way, me being the Chinese type and all -

(Graphic designer Yang Liu's take on the difference between the German and Chinese approach to problem solving.)

- so I asked R, who not only has banana-eating fruitarian friends but also makes silver jewelry and knits on the side, to make me a decoy wedding band, so that when the next awkward situation arises I can push my glasses up or staunch a bleeding nostril with my left ring finger, signalling to future Katis both that my mucus membranes are sensitive to the dry Mediterranean climate of the Bay Area and that my heart belongs to a sleepy passive bottom with a Brooklyn address. Ohhh you're going to get mad at me for writing that and you'll make me delete it, won't you??

R is very talented. She asked me to come to her house for a ring fitting, and she made me a simple silver band that week. It's about a third of an inch wide and gently textured with indentations from a ball peen hammer. It fits perfectly and I love it, and I don't take it off, not even to shower or sleep. S says, "But people will think you're married!" but there isn't anyone who would be fooled into thinking that I'm married that I wouldn't want to fool. S also said, "Nobody put a ring on it...so you put it on yourself!" and then she obscured the rest of her statement with her own uproarious laughter. The joke's on you, S, for I secretly tattooed the words BRISTOL PALIN under that ring! HA HA HA!

Here is the ring, as modeled by R:

R, who is even more obsessed with documentation than I am, has websites to document all of her jewelry projects and her knitting projects. She also put together a pictorial tutorial on the lost-wax casting method of jewelry making, which you can check out here.