I watched American Hustle yesterday. It’s been so long that I’ve been into someone that Christian Bale as a con man WITH the comb over is looking good enough that I’m like, “I wouldn’t say no.”

So then I tell myself to get a grip.

The movie ends and immediately AppleTV starts playing this show and the guy on screen is someone I’ll never be able to look at the same way now that I know him.

I text Andrea with a photo. She says, “He looks sad because he hasn’t licked your fingers in months.”

I forgot about that. At the bar last year when no one was around to notice, he just stuck my finger in his mouth. Well, he asked first. He’s not a creeper, just kinda cringe. It felt like nothing. Less than nothing. I have a lifetime of dissociating to rely on when stuff gets weird. So it happened to someone else.

But also, who sucks on someone’s finger…in NYC? He didn’t even know where my finger had been.

I tell Andrea that I would let Jeremy Allen White from The Bear suck my finger and she says he was on Shameless. I ask if he was hot in that too.

“He is. His character is a self destructive genius. You’d be all over it.”

She knows me. I have a type. And yes, while they’re all awful, two things are also true:

1. Geniuses are rare, so the odds are always in my favor that I won’t run into one and fall into self-destructive patterns; and
2. Sure they’re awful, but they always have such great taste in music and I haven’t heard anything new in AGES that fills that unactivated sacral space of mine. Rock and roll. Leather pants. Painted nails. Eye liner. Sex on a stick.

So I start searching through music. Some ambient. Some techno stuff—don’t ask what, I can’t keep up with all the subgenres of pew-pew untz-untz music. And then some playlist called “Road Trip” that’s full of minor hits. Kings of Leon. The Verve. I’m getting frustrated. Nothing’s scratching the itch.

And then something lands. Kasabian. Um, yes please. May I have some more?

It’s all the sexy stuff I love about English rock. It’s lad rock. And just like that, I am ok. I don’t need a dude to clue me into music. I just need an algorithm.

Yay for nerds.