A haiku inspired by a quote from Karl Lagerfeld:

Sweatpants are

A sign of defeat.
You lost control of your life
So you bought sweatpants.

Someone searched my blog for “Adam Gertler girlfriend.”
Does that person know something I don’t? I mean we did meet once and he is sort of a friend of a friend so that’s kind of like being his girlfriend. You know, if you carry the completely delusional one.

(I know that Adam and I have a friend in common because she invited him to her birthday back in February and speaking of that friend, I just remembered that I never blogged this story.)

My friend Courtney, the one I tagged along with to interview Jamie Oliver, had her birthday celebration at James Beach in Venice. The next day I had a full schedule so around 11:30 or so I decided it was time to call it a night. I went over to her to bid my farewell when we were approached by this German guy.

“Whose birthday is it?”
“It’s hers,” I said.
“Oh,” he said with disappointment, “I had hoped it was yours.”
“Oh, uh, I’m sorry…? I was born in the spring.”

So we start talking. Him telling me how beautiful I was and how German guys love Black girls (but in a way that wasn’t sleazy and annoying as that normally is) and me telling him the random bits of German I know. (“A large coffee is $1.50,” and “You know me well now never speak to me again,” from my days as a barista and Kit Kat Girl, respectively.)

He’s 32, a cameraman. He invites me to come to the beach the next day where he’ll be shooting something for the History Channel I think. I thank him, but decline since I have plans to go to farmers’ market with the chef and sous chef of Vinoteque for the first time, then to go help build a garden in San Pedro, and finally to go to another Jamie Oliver event that evening.* He was leaving the day after that to go shoot in Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska before returning home to D.C.

“Am I never going to see you again??” he wanted to know.
“Wow, that’s dramatic. I-I, uh, don’t know.” I’m very graceful when being hit on, obviously. “How about we do this? You find me on facebook and then we’ll see what happens from there?”

He immediately pulls out his iPhone and finds me.

“You’re not just gonna reject my request are you?”
“No. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t tell you to find me if I didn’t intend to accept it.”

Relieved, he kissed my hand and said good night.

I told Courtney about it because I’d been really charmed and it had been such a shocking contrast from the last time I was hit on.

When I got home around 1, I thought I might as well accept his request now before I went to bed. His privacy settings are really high so all I could see before accepting was the high school he’d gone to in Berlin. It wasn’t until we were friends that I could see something he’d neglected to mention in our 40-minute conversation:

HE WAS MARRIED.

And if that wasn’t enough, not only was he was someone’s–a beautiful Black girl’s– husband, they had been on a reality game show about being newlyweds THAT I WATCHED!! It was a summer series a few years ago (2008 maybe). All the couples lived in a house together and they were the first couple eliminated.

The funniest part of all this: Before I left I remembered some more German and I started to tell him but, considering that it was the lyrics to the song “Married” (from Cabaret), I thought, no, he’s too smitten with me; I don’t think it will come across right. So I posted the song on his wall and said, “Remember when I said I remembered some more German? This is what it was. How apropos.”

He deleted it.

*I ended up not being able to go to San Pedro or to see Jamie launch his menu at Patra’s Burgers because I tweaked my ankle at farmers’ market.