We All Have Our Types

Some people are leg people.
Some are guitar player people.
Some appreciate kick ass cooks.
Some like crooked teeth.
Some swoon over accents or ease in multiple languages.
Some fawn over individualistic anarchist bike messengers who all dress the same.
Some magnetize with beer pong almost-champions who never give up.

It is good to know your type. And far be it from me to yuck another's yum.

Especially because me? I am coming to realize my type, at least when it comes to the Y chromosome:

Turns out, I'm a sucker for stuck men. More specifically, I melt for men with tools who are having a hard time moving forward. And even more specifically than that, men whose inability to get real has translated into throwing themselves into "home "improvement." Which I think makes me a 'men who bury their grief in mountains of unmoving lumber and sawdust covered in time-dust' person.

Show me a man who has suffered traumatizing familial and/or social loss and who has, in his inability to communicate about and/or deal with his grief, taken to dreaming up countless home-change projects and started to tear apart his house rather than ripping out his own guts, all to keep his mind occupied and his hands busy and his muscles too tired to think. Show me a man who can even get through the stage of wrenching apart his house's innards and maybe even buying the lumber and nails and unearthed the power circular saws from the basement only to get stuck, in the same way he is stuck in his grief, and thus leaves his unfinished business as is all over his house perhaps forever. Because, for a long time, that has been my people.

I say that since, as I write this, I realize that might be the old me. Because as I see this pattern, I find I am moving forward myself.

So now: Show me a man who faces change by rebuilding his home one slab and tile and dust mask donning at a time. With turtle-like velocity. But he's doing it. Because that is my people.

Unless he is a she. In which case, show me a woman with her condo in order, a file-don't-pile system in place and utilized, a woman who is barreling through the universe. And she's my girl.

It's good to know your type.