I had sushi with my best friend from high school (elementary school too, actually) this morning. It was pretty lovely. I’m not at all sure what I should nickname her, since I’m still trying to protect the innocent around here.

Sigh.

Anyhow, her yoga-teacher-brain-scientist-developmental-psychologist boyfriend (I know, right?) said something about how I should come out to Toronto more than once every five years. And we were like, actually, right now, it’s once in a lifetime. Once every thirty one years? I guess I’ll be back when I’m sixty-two.

“That really doesn’t seem so far away,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like a lifetime. I feel closer to sixty-two than I do to, say, twenty.”

And my friend said, “Well, since you’re not ever going to be twenty again, you really are closer to sixty-two than to twenty. If we’re talking about probability, you’re way closer to sixty-two.”

She’s so funny.

I think what I really mean is that twenty seems like an age when you worry about what you look like and worry about whether you’re feminine enough, mature enough, appealing enough and you read shit like Cosmo and you pretend to be fine with how mysogynist the world is because you’re too hip to get angry about it, right?

Sixty-two seems like an age where I will completely not give a shit whether I’m appealing enough because I will be so busy with all my great creative projects and intellectual pursuits and scads of really interesting friends. And if someone should happen to flirt with me or something, it will be kind of a nice surprise, but then I can go back to being this intellectual, fulfilled person with the internal assumption that the world sees me as asexually as I see myself. I don’t think I mean asexual – I think I mean non-attractive. But not as in ugly, just as in completely neutral. I see myself as neither attracting nor repulsing. You know, like how men get to feel every day without having to articulate it. I feel like myself, with lots of interests that supersede “are my legs soft and smooth enough” in importance.

So anyhow, where I’m going with this is that then I had two men hit on me on the street (separate occasions and different locales). And it wasn’t remotely like, “Oh what a pleasant surprise that someone finds me attractive.” I discovered that I quite, quite prefer this concept of being neutral. Of never being found attractive by anyone other than Ian ever again.

And it was ridiculous hitting on. When I told one of them that I must unfortunately decline his offer of a drink because I’m happily married (pretty much married, though very much happy) with three kids. He replied first with a little gasp and then, “How DARE you be so cute.”

I walked away without saying anything more.

Funny, ’cause he was way more overtly creepy but didn’t actually creep me out. The other man made a great deal of innocuous conversation until he had wriggled the conversation around to an offer to show me some Toronto sites. But in addition to his being TOO casual, I had recognized him as having passed me going the other way about a block ago. And the conversation had only started because I had decided I was going the wrong way and, on turning around, was startled to find myself passing him again. And then he stopped me to make casual conversation about my camera.

Yeah. My future-step-dad had some tweet about wishing he’d had that talk with his new daughter about the dangers of the big city. I assume he was being facetious. But it had me chuckling to myself all day. Why do men always kind of secretly or not so secretly assume they know more about keeping women safe than women do – is it because they feel like they know the male attitude enough to know the dangers?

From my point of view, any woman who hasn’t been brainwashed into believing herself helpless is a living expert on her own security, and has probably not lacked opportunities to demonstrate her expertise.