gay, straight, or german?

i've spent the last 2 days laid up in bed, dying a slow painful death of what i can only imagine is tuberculosis.

needless to say i've had time to do alot of thinking... and watch alot of movies.
let's get the film-critic portion over with, shall we? movie themes that make me crazy (take 1):

1) long, epic dramas in which cute, good-natured men spend long, tortured lives trying to win the hearts of women who, though beautiful, are horrible and mean.
2) the ominous death cough (much like my own) that starts about half-way through said dramas, heralding the long, tragic death of said bitchy heroines... of some nebulous disease (usually consumption, which, from what i gather, can refer to cancer or tuberculosis).

getting back to the point, i really am sick as a dog... and i think it's because of a boy.

preface: shortly after we met my manic hippie ex-boyfriend (mmheb) in new orleans my blogmate and i were talking about that kind of guy that just loves women (prgm and mmheb being good examples). as the words rolled off my tongue it occurred to me that someone as boy-crazy as myself really has no room to talk. "i'll admit," said my typically insightful blogmate (mtib), "you do have a certain appreciation for men."

last friday afternoon i found myself of the u of c quad with mtib and dwtacc, as we'd stolen away from our dark confines to enjoy cheap thai food from the divinity school. a third of the way through my tofu and ginger noodles i found myself suffering from stabbing chest pain and a rather "disagreeable sense of impending death," much to the amusement of my two friends. they assured me that it was not, in fact, a massive heart attack in progress and that it probably had more to do with the spiciness of my ginger noodles. dwtacc tried to comfort me by complimenting me on my j-lo glasses and pointing out that i seemed to have caught the eye of "that bob dylan looking guy over there." forgetting about my chest pain, i surveyed the landscape, only to discover that "bob dylan looking guy" could describe any number of people in my immediate line of sight, and that she was going to have to be more specific.

so i certainly can confirm that hippies have apparently taken up residence in hyde park.

the next evening i tried to put the chest pain, the bob-dylans, and the allergy attack that had resulted from my afternoon among the tulips behind me as i headed to the green mill for a night of jazz and hippie-stalking. i had pitched the outing to my girlfriends as a chance to see an excellent new orleans jazz ensemble, knowing full well that my real motivation was that the invite had come from none other than mmheb who would be in town for the show. truth be told, the band's phenomenal-ness was more memorable than my encounter with mmheb (although he did look awfully cute), and the smoke in the bar played no small role in my impending 48 hours on the couch with my death-rattle cough and overall miserableness...

i might not have been fawned-upon by mmheb as much as i would have liked, but i did get a surprising amount of attention from his equally cute sidekick... which i enjoyed until we hit a snag (he lives in texas) and then a deal-breaker (he comes to chicago to visit his daughter).

so while i will no doubt continue to to be the boy-crazy one in the group, and seem to enjoy men with a wide variety of attributes (in the age of men so metrosexual that i'm not sure what to make of them), even i have to draw the line somewhere... and i draw that line at potential step-mother-ness.