The sex advice Dan Savage has a book of his best columns compiled in a book. In this book, there is a section of what he’s termed the “how’d that happen.” My favorite of the entirely bizarre and just plain wrong letters is about a woman who is house sitting and wakes up to the oral pleasuring of a frisky dog which drives her onto climax. While the whole situation is ridiculous, her next statement is the stinger: “and then the next night it happened again.” I remember sitting in the dorm room lounge at the end of the hall my freshman year and passing the book around, reading the letters out loud, and giggling for hours.
Sometimes there are things in real life, though never (in my experience at least) relating to dogs and oral sex, that beg the question: how’d that happen? I asked it when I got into a college that my high school grades certainly should have restricted me from getting into (math and I were not one after my freshman year of high school!) And I asked that again when my phone rang on Thursday morning as I climbed the steps that led out of Columbia’s subterranean gym, which I had illegally infiltrated with the help of a friend’s student I.D.
Despite my complete and total flub of getting back to the D.C. non-profit organization about setting up an interview two weeks after they initially called me and even with multiple interview responses to the president and founder that could be construed by some as contentious (which would be a kind euphemism to say the least), when I picked up my cell phone, I was greeted by the organization’s executive director who happily stated, “I’d like to offer you the job.” Without hesitation, I responded, “I’d like to accept it.”
I had attained employment and the fairly impressive title of “associate director for membership and events.” No matter that I was certainly more qualified to write an academic paper about a membership department rather than actually start one.
I left New York on early Friday morning entirely tired and excited and nervous. I needed to find a place to live and I knew that I should probably go back to D.C. that weekend and start looking. But the exhaustion drew me home.
