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Sparkle (0)
"Can you hear us?" I ask my friend Sugar who's on the other end of the line, as I place the phone--on speaker--between myself and our friend Parker.
"Loud and clear," she responds. We hear some splashing as she shifts in the tub. I imagine her reaching for a glass of wine and taking a long sip.
It'd be a great ad placement for Verizon: two perfectly coiffed figures, basking in the warm Honolulu sunset, sucking on fresh coffee as a third friend lounges in bath bubbles across the Pacific in snow-bound Seattle.
You know, if my carrier were Verizon. It's not, but it doesn't matter. Technology is an amazing thing.
"So after a week of nursing him back to health, he disappears," Sugar tells us. She's talking about her boyfriend, Anteyus, whom she's been seeing for a couple of months.
Sugar isn't one to give herself up to anyone--sex is one thing, but Anteyus didn't want to be one of those "disposable guys"; he'd pursued her passionately to get her to commit. Then, he'd become violently ill and Sugar had spent days caring for him.
"I owe you the world," he told her as she, usually a total temptress, stood over his washing machine uncharacteristically laundering his vomit-stained sheets.
That was then. Just days later, she couldn't get him to take any of her calls or even answer a text. When he finally did phone, he asked whether she wanted to come over for some sex.
"Just like that," she tells us, clearly irritated. "Never mind that this whole city is in a complete standstill because of the snow. I take care of your sad ass all week long and now you can't be bothered to call and when you do, you want me to brave the elements to see you? Forget you."
It was too late anyway--Sugar was already busy texting back and forth with an ex-fling.
It reminded me of a conversation I'd overheard while waiting in line for the restroom at Uncle Bo's recently.
Girl 1: I hate how I get when I don't hear from him. I become a crazy person. I can't think about anything else at all, just stare at my phone like an idiot.
Girl 2: That's what you get for putting all your eggs in one basket. You should never focus on any one person.
I relay this exchange to Sugar and Parker and Sugar laughs.
"That's right," she says. "Line them up so when one fails, there's always another one to fall back on."
"Aren't you afraid that will cheapen the experience?" Parker asks.
"No. No. What cheapens The Experience is sitting at home on a Saturday night drinking Kahlua and Bailey's Irish Cream alone, waiting for your phone to ring."
A mathematician friend of mine once put it this way, "If one is skillful with the creation of their life, his goal is to experience as many points as possible. Specifically, nothing should be engineered as a single thing but as an N-dimensional set, where N approaches infinity."
I wouldn't go as far as infinity—after all, we are somewhat bound to a pesky dimension called time--but I can't say I disagree with Sugar entirely, either.
It’s later and I'm grabbing coffee with Sarah at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Waikiki. I met Sarah in college a couple of years ago. She came to Hawaii and never left, and though she's always talking about moving to Los Angeles, I'm beginning to doubt that she ever will.
"I go by the rule of threes," she tells me, without looking up from her Blackberry, which she's thumbing furiously. "Always have three objects of interest in hand in the event one or two of them flake--which they will."
"Doesn't that cheapen the experience?" I parrot Parker.
I interviewed a woman recently for a book about love I’m helping put together. She and her partner are polyamorous and looking to expand their relationship into a trio. I asked whether she thought it was possible to love and be committed to more than one person.
"You can," she told me. "You can love as many people as you like. The only real thing that prevents you from having sustainable relationships with everyone is time. Time is a scarce resource."
"Cheapen the experience?" Sarah asks me, setting her phone down and taking a sip of her green tea. "Not at all. It enriches it by making you less hysterical. You're not waiting around losing your mind. If they call, they call. You give them their space to figure out where you fit into their lives. Meanwhile, you're having steamy
