Talking to Strangers

I'm trying to be open to the world these days, to put out into the universe what I hope to get back from it... you know, little things like smiling, patience, silliness, and general friendliness. Some days this is harder for me than it should be. But I don't like who I'm becoming and I'm out of excuses. However, if I'm going to pull some sunshine out of my butt a few times a week, I've gotta figure out a way to de-stress. New work responsibilities are derailing me. Seriously, I've cried so much in the past month that if there wasn't Absolutely No Way it was possible (immaculate conception notwithstanding) I would have guessed I was pregnant.

I recognize I've developed this weird way of being friendly without really being real. Or, when I don't have to be friendly, I kind of wear this "stay away" look on my face, as if to let the world know that the account where I store my soul is overdrawn until further notice. Unfortunately, I seem to sometimes pull the chatty version of this bankrupt ATM out on dates... because she's good at talking and making conversation but really, really bad at actually giving anyone a chance. I mean really, I talk to people I don't know for a living, and make them feel comfortable. I could go on a blind date in my sleep... basically I just turn it into an intake, minus the part where I ask when they met their developmental milestones, or about their family legal and drug histories. But to really be open to people? That's asking a lot these days. I suppose some people compensate for their anxiety by talking, I compensate for mine by asking questions.

Anyhow, this is not who I want to be. I'm trying to be more mindful about being real when I meet people. Mostly it's working so far, or at least I recognize the days I'm totally maxed out and just go home instead of bothering to fake it. I think "two strangers a week" is a good starting point. That means I have to have a real conversation, that I actually show up to, with two new people every week, and work doesn't count. Mostly I just realized (after telling my clients for three years straight... and because I work with surly adolescents, I can say it exactly like this) that sitting around whining, waiting for things to change with little effort on your part, seems like a really fantastic idea, until you realize it's a really shitty one.

Why?

If you are a boy, could you explain to me why boys like to talk so much on dates?

As in, tell a 15-minute story about themselves, ask you a question, let you get two sentences into your answer, and then remember another 15-minute story about themselves they need to tell?

I actually got to the point where I wondered if "looking interested" was a bad idea, possibly encouraging this pattern to continue. I caught myself wondering what would happen if, mid-sentence, I interrupted and said "OK, now we've come to the part of the evening where you pretend to be interested in me."

Tina Fey rocks my world

How is it that I have about 50 movies that I thought I was really interested in watching in my Netflix On Demand queue, and all I ever watch is 30 Rock?

Spring Cleaning

As my roommate and I are both expecting multiple rounds of family in town during the month of April, and as I may have a sliiiight tendency to make nice neat piles of crap all over the house when I don't feel like looking at it in my room any more, we decided to have an official spring cleaning day today. We put on some good music and got very wrapped up in the whole thing. And if there was a camera around, which, thank god there wasn't, there might be photographic evidence of me riding the vacuum cleaner around like a wooden pony, feather duster in one hand, margarita in the other.

And no, I wasn't posing. That's just how I clean.

I had one of those deep, dark moments again last weekend. The boo hoo, poor me, this sucks, why-doesn't-he-realize-what-he's-missing moments of sheer emotional turmoil (over the first breakup, still, which I seem to have gone through another round of mourning after my rebound ended) in which I realized, finally, that am choosing to die here, alone, at my own little pity party. While making a great show of going through the motions of moving on, but really, going mostly nowhere. Or maybe I just put in an order for new feelings, but they've been on serious backorder. I have spent the last nine months content to be defined as The Girl With The Broken Heart. I am the cliche. And I'm kind of tired of it.

I finally got enough perspective to actually listen to the things that were coming out of my mouth when I was sad, and realize how ridiculous I sounded. I wish I could have gotten here sooner, and without doing some of the embarrassing and unhelpful things I have to admit to, but I'm here now. When I was sad, I listened to all those voices that told me I missed him, and we were so great together, and I'll never meet anyone like him again, maybe nobody else will ever love me like that, and after all this time apart maybe we should talk again (which I told myself was for closure, but I was lying, I wanted him to want me back). And I'm throwing up a little bit in my mouth realizing how long I thought those voices were rational.

I'm pretty embarrassed about this, but keeping secrets to look cool hasn't been getting me anywhere. I was on his side of town recently, and was trying to drive home after dinner with a friend who lives a few blocks from his place, but somehow pointed my car his direction. I'd seen him that day, and he was all nice to me, and invited me out to happy hour afterward, and asked about my family, blah blah blah. And I resisted going out, keeping plans with my friend, but the siren call of reconnecting was soooo... strong... tractor beam... kryptonite... cannot... resist..... I was newly single, and really, why bother learning how to miss someone new when missing someone old is so much easier, more familiar? "I'll just go talk to him," I thought, "tell him how stuck I am and maybe get more closure." I parked outside his apartment. But then I thought about walking up to the door, unannounced, and what I would say. I sat in my car for a half-hour, playing out every possible scenario, every possible conversation, every way it could go. And I realized there was no good answer. No possible conversation was going to give me what I wanted. He can't give me what I wanted. So I just drove home. In the immortal words of Heather Armstrong, it sucked, and then I cried. Although, really, looking at it from this rational place I am in today, wearing my pajamas at 2pm on a lazy Sunday, enjoying my totally cushy life, she had a baby and clinical depression, and I just had one giant pity party that I was starting to realize was coming to an unceremonious close, as I was the last one standing around in a room full of dirty dishes and stale chips.

I went to the library and checked out this, and this, and even this. I checked them out from the old lady librarian, of course, because I only check out smart-sounding titles from the Hot Librarian, but I brought them home and bolstered my self-respect by gladly allowing the author of He's Just Not That Into You to tell me stories about women who've done much more psychotic things in the wake of a miserable breakup. I mean really, all I did was have a hard time dealing with losing someone I loved.

And I planted my tomatoes.

Plan B

I am now taking recommendations for books in the category of "memoirs and wisdom-in-the-form-of-humorous-anecdotes from people who have realized that life does not turn out the way you planned."

Even though I never really started with a plan, that part, too, seems not to have gone much as planned.

Hippy

I used to be... ummmm... chunky. No, really. Ask anyone who knew me from ages 10-15. My dad used to put me on diets. Long legs, big belly. I was hott. Maybe that's why I got called Big Bird in middle school. Anyway, I know I'm not fat now, but I live in the world capital of oh-god-please-make-me-look-like-Barbie and I'm still a big advocate of learning to love the body you're in. Mostly because I know mine is probably, realistically, beginning its long, slow downhill slide and I anticipate needing to remind myself to love my wrinkles and moles along the way. Anyhow, that all came to mind tonight because I saw a video of Kelly Clarkson. Who I love. The woman actually has hips.

In which I look like the Jolly Green Giant...

I bought an absolutely ridiculous jacket at Goodwill. I mean really, green fur?! It's fabulous, in a totally I-can't-imagine-where-I'll-wear-it-but-I-needed-it-in-my-closet sort of way.


Something about it reminds me of a long-lost friend. The one and only KC Lynch, from my college newspaper days, Daily photog extraordinaire, funky and spunky, artistic and creative and brilliant (no, really... she started college at 14) and one of those people who made you feel more alive just to be around her and twitterpated just to know that she counted you among her friends. We worked together for a few years, spending countless midnight hours in the darkroom and slaving over the light table in the orange-walled newsroom. She helped me execute a staggeringly huge fashion guide one year, covering for me when I lit the curtains on fire in that sorority house we were shooting in, trying to jerry-rig a diffuser. When she moved to New York, I spent a week in Manhattan with her, staying up all night, smoking on her fire escape, just blocks off Times Square, and we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. She knew herself and spoke her mind, and she made me want to do the same. That was 10-plus years ago. Then she moved to Chicago and disappeared. I've used all the old emails I had, googled her... but no luck. Hope she's out there doing well somewhere... here's a shot from the Daily days of KC with her artsy-fartsy-fab boyfriend.


Hmm... ooh, I think this is what we were shooting when the curtains caught on fire...


Funny what a jacket brings back...

Ashes and Updates - in which I continue to blog my heart on my sleeve

It's Ash Wednesday. I gave up Facebook, I went to church, and remembered that for all of my angst, "De polvo soy, y al polvo volvere" (I am from dust, and to dust I will return). I was happy for the ashes on my forehead, and sad that church is still a lonely place for me after 3 1/2 years in LA. From college on, up until LA, it used to really be the center of my community and social world. Now I go, I sit by myself, and I try to find things to get plugged into but somehow, I haven't put much energy in to the right place at the right time yet. So I sing, and think, and enjoy it for what it is, but it feels somehow grey and lifeless compared to what I know church can be.

I frequently wonder what I want out of church anymore. With work being exhausting these days, and having too many cases that feel hopeless and overwhelming, I think what I want is a place where people gather to celebrate and hope. Where I see (relatively) healthy families. Where people work in community with a sense of hope (even when it's naive) that Yes We Can! make a difference. But sometimes I don't want to spend time thinking about anything big or grand. I just want to keep embracing the community I have, and dig my fingers into dirt, literal or figurative, and live. Read, play frisbee, walk with friends, grow tomatoes, waste time on facebook, do crossword puzzles. I used to want big, grand, idealistic Life all the time. Now I kinda just want normal.

In other news, I'm single again. Sans heartbreak this time, but certainly still bittersweet. I think we were two people trying to fit each other into a space left behind in the shape of someone else. As far as rebounds go, I think it was a soft landing. I have no regrets. He was different from Goat in a lot of ways... some of them were really healing, like realizing that I do not, in fact, have overwhelming emotional needs and that, say, wanting to know where a relationship is going after two years is not asking too much. But he lacked some things that really helped me connect with Goat, and when I felt disconnected from him I just found myself missing Goat more. I had inklings that he was going through something similar, and they were confirmed in a kind of painful way, but interspersed with the usual getting-over-and-readjusting to single life, I find myself excited, once again, about having a life in my own life. Not living out of a bag and traveling to another county every weekend. I may want to be an old married woman - sooner than later would be nice - but not at any cost. I'm not opposed to dating again, but in the meantime I want to play frisbee and get on my bike and go to church and see my friends and plant those tomatoes.

Friday Night Plights

I'm not sure when I became a person who gets really excited about staying home Friday nights and having the house all to herself... maybe shortly after I bought a kitchen table and started listening to NPR.

Anyhoo, here it is Friday night and I've been wandering around the house in circles for hours, doing what I love to do, but rarely do: going on a rampage of cleaning, straightening, recycling, Goodwill-ing, and generally feeling like I have some small measure of control over my space. I called a few friends who both had plans tonight (OK, so they were both sick, one from being pregnant and one going insane from having a crazy boyfriend 3000 miles away who puts off making plans for weeks and then announces he's coming 10 hours before his plane lands), so I've actually been relishing the chance to spring clean. While listening to Neil Diamond.

I saw the old boy this week, too. We got a beer, and chatted on our own (i.e. not in front of hordes of mutual friends) for the first time since break-up therapy. When people ask how it went, I have to classify it as good/hard/good. Good to catch up, hard to remember all the things I love about a person who was my best friend for most of my time in LA (and who I did so much growing up with, in many senses of the word), and good to remind myself that no matter how wonderful someone is, it would be masochistic to be with someone who isn't ready to jump into change with you. Perhaps the best part of it, strangely, was being able to talk about things that were hard and sad, and not to feel responsible for each other's feelings, or for making each other feel better. It was hard to tell him about the new boy, though, and to hear him say that it was hard to hear it.

Despite crying all the way home, I still felt like moving foward is moving in the right direction. The only way I can describe it is to say that it has started to feel like my sadness is about something lost in the past, no longer something lost for the future. I have had very few plans for my life, but I thought I was going to marry him; it was the first time my ideas of the future ever had a common thread. And when we broke up, my entire picture of the future disintegrated, as if I had been hiking up a mountain and the trail had suddenly ended in a jagged, barren chasm. But it doesn't feel that way anymore. I can see options and trails again, and I don't know where any of them go to, but I'm cool with the fact that I'm wandering through the woods again. I'm OK that the common thread right now is just me.

Office Spacey

me: I need a band-aid... do we have band-aids?
Office Manager: In the first aid kit.
me: Where's the first aid kit?
OM: I don't know, check the disaster plan, it should be listed there.
me: Where's the disaster plan?
OM: I don't know.
me: Ummm.... thanks.

Bruce Almighty

I think this quote may sum up a good chunk of what I've gleaned from the past couple of years:

"Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is uniquely your own"

- Bruce Lee

Let there be light

The lightbulb in my bedside lamp just burned out. For the first time. In SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS. I have a spare, somewhere... which I have moved with me, SIX TIMES, waiting for this day.

I have no idea where it is.

Updates

Well hello there... why yes, it's been a while. Life has not been boring, I've just been sorting through things that I seem to be very guarded about, and have found that somehow, even the blog has not been a place that's felt entirely safe.

Truth is, I'm doing well. Very well. But the older I get, the more I realize that "doing well" is not always equated with feeling good, or understanding everything. I'm wrestling a lot. Crying some. Trying to equate it with the idea of giving birth... that it is painful and joyful all mixed together and that hopefully the end result is something hard-earned and very worthwhile.

A few posts ago, I mentioned a new crush, and was feeling quite upbeat about the prospect of letting go of the past. Turns out, it's not always as easy as I would like it to be. The crush became a date which became a world traveling companion which became a boyfriend. All very well and good. He is, by all accounts, incredibly genuine, and kind, and generous. And he's actually doing pretty well in the area of emotional intelligence. As in, able to talk about his own, and able to roll with some of my more overwhelming ones without needing to try to make them go away.

But the problem seems to be that the process I was so glib about in my last post -- making space for someone new and letting go of someone old -- just doesn't feel as good as it sounded when I wrote about it in the rose-colored light of a new crush. The problem is that along with this round of wonderful seems to have come another bout of grief, like a shadow. Is that normal? I mean, I kinda think it is, it makes so much sense that part of the reality of saying goodbye to someone can't start to be real until you find someone worth giving a chance in the space they left behind, and you can never be "ready" for that before it happens. But part of me feels like I'm cheating on the new boy even by being sad about the old one still. Although I recognize that a lot of this is exacerbated by having had to see the old one every week during the fall beach league... I think a little less social overlap is in order.

In any case, like I said, doing very well. Trying very hard to just relax, keep being honest, and enjoy the potential.

brief, unsatisfying update

I am not dead, I am in fact, very busy, but also doing very very well.

As in, proving-to-myself-that-life-does-in-fact-go-on well.

More soon.

Fire rant

It's time again. Out of the east, the Santa Ana winds tear through the valley, like clockwork every October, a hot desert wind. It's just the way things go here. And yeah, I complain about it, because my allergies kick up, and besides, it's October, for cryin' out loud, and I just bought a new sweater, and I'm tired of it being 85 degrees because I want to wear it, whine whine, but I know what's in store and I choose to live here.

And it's fire season. The winds leave a wake of smoke and destruction. The San Fernando Valley is burning tonight, about 10 miles up the road from my office, and thousands of people are being evacuated, and it's all over the news. So I'm reading the story tonight, in the LA Times, and I notice a few of the "comments" people leave after the story, and I can't believe the response. "These winds are so predictable," they say, "why doesn't the city do something to stop this from happening every year when they know the winds are coming?" Over and over in the comments, people keep complaining that every year, we have fire.

Do I really have to spell this out? What, exactly, do these people hope that the city does to stop a force of nature from time immortal? Fire is fire, people, it's a fact of life. If you're gonna build a house in the mountains, in the path of hot desert winds, and in the vicinity of oh, maybe one or two adolescents and/or sociopaths who think it's funny to set a fire when the winds come just to see what happens, just what exactly do you expect the city to do about that, other than knock on your door at 3am and kindly tell you to get the hell out before you go up with the place?

I think this kind of stuff ticks me off so much because it's just part of the general American M.O. to think that we are capable of being completely, utterly safe from harm. I'm not sure where, in our survey of human history, we came up with this idea, but as a country we seem to have done a decent job of propagating the idea that we can buy our way out of the consequences of everything from germs to terrorism to acts of god.

And even within that genre of complete hubris, I think the "fire" uproar pushes an extra-special button of mine. Fire is such a necessary part of the ecological world. The landscape gets decimated, the landscape recovers. Whether we do controlled burns, or leave it alone, it will all burn, someday. Even the canyon where my house is. Someday. And while I feel deeply for the losses of the people who are affected by it, I'm still irritated by the assumption that we might have superceded the laws of nature just because we needed to sprawl.

Three months

Zoinks, last week was one of those weeks. I went from 2 clients to 13 pretty much overnight, and added 8 students for my other job, and discovered that trying to keep track of 21 people other than yourself is do-able, but only if you don't stop to think about your personal life during the day. Or, really, any point during the week.

It's been over three months now; I don't know where I expected to be three months down the road, I just know that was the timeframe I gave myself initially to get over the worst part of a broken heart. Right after breaking up, I told myself I would wait at least three months before I made any major decisions, like to move to Kansas or quit my job or get another tattoo. I'm three months in and none of those things sounds remotely appealing, so I guess I'm glad I didn't make any rash decisions. I'm still settled, I still like my life, I'm still mostly content where I'm at. Even more so, in some ways, because losing the cross-town commute and double-life-mode has deepened my roots in the life I'm in. But doing "mostly well" possibly makes it harder when one of those days sneak in, when I still feel like my heart has been partially carved out with a dull grapefruit spoon. They're not frequent, but another one recently hit. And when they do, I feel like everyone must surely be tired of hearing about it by now, so I mostly keep it to myself, until I can't anymore, and I find a safe place/person and lose my shit for a half hour or so, then I pick myself up and move on for another month. All in all, I'm not too worried.

Dating has been interesting to throw in the mix.... mostly I've been meeting people that I didn't end up being interested in (was that Transformers tee-shirt supposed to impress me? It made an impression all right...), but then out of nowhere I realized I had... gasp... a crush on someone. It's been almost three years since that happened. I knew I was crushing, I suppose, when I realized I'd passed up a chance to go to an REI garage sale just to see him at a party... and if you know how much I love REI, and how much I love a good bargain, then you know I must have meant business. And I flirted, the perfect combination of shamelessly and tastefully, and it appears to have actually gotten me somewhere, and good god when did I learn how to do that? But it seems that while going on dates was easy (which, up until now, mostly involved having a drink with men I say goodbye to and never really think about again), liking someone involves a different kind of letting go. Because to even think about making real space for somebody new you have to start to let go of the missing, and the regrets, and the what-ifs, and all the other things you've been hanging onto to try to keep a piece - however scant and hollow - of the person who's gone.

In fact, I am coming to think that "letting go" is not so much being able to shake our hands clean of the thing that we're moving on from, but rather just loosening our grip - with every new conversation, every "yes" to an invitation, every "what the hell, why not drive to the next county on a Friday night to talk to someone who intrigues me?" - so that we put ourselves more directly in the path of something new coming along out of the blue, and bumping us, and perhaps a bit more of what we'd been holding onto goes flying out the window.

Talk Nerdy to Me

I appear to be a complete geek magnet.

I hate to even use that phrase, and put it that way, because tonight I went out with a sweet, gentlemanly, friendly guy for a blind date, who I had interesting conversation with for two hours, who did absolutely everything "right" (whatever that means for a blind date), and I in no way want to slam on him as a person... but yeah. Not geeky in a hot-geeky sort of way. Just geeky. He played the pipe organ. At one point in time he was talking about adopting cats, but he was concerned about being the "single guy with cats," and was wondering how many cats would it take to put him in that category? He thought four was definitely too many, but wasn't sure about three, and what did I think? What I was really thinking is that he had just officially confirmed what I knew, in the very pit of my stomach, the minute he walked in the door... I was going to have a very pleasant evening but, in no uncertain terms, I was not going to be interested.

The last two guys I went out with have been computer scientists (the first one - of "not-a-date-date" fame, who finally asked me on a real date last weekend - was much more socially inclined than this last one, though, and if he were to actually flirt with me somewhere in the middle of one of our great conversations I would probably not be upset), and I'm going out with another guy next week who will probably put the first two to shame (in a "Booger" from Revenge of the Nerds sort of way, from what I gather). Apparently I am sort of in the "what the hell? why not?" phase of returning to dating. Maybe I'm secretly dating geeks because it's so easy for me to talk to them, and therefore, honestly, a bit of a confidence booster before I actually put myself out there for real?

Don't get me wrong, I like smart people. But there are different kinds of smart. And while I get a kick out of a good conversation about, say, the future of artificial intelligence, at the end of the day I just want to fall asleep in the arms of somebody who gets me in a totally different way.

So perhaps if I took that line about "being good at math" out of my online profile, I'd change my odds?

Fish. As in, others in the sea.

I went on a date on Saturday. Or, well, it wasn't a date-date, but it ended up feeling like a date... the kind of thing that's definitely not a date, unless it becomes retroactive because you wind up together, old and gray, sitting around in your rocking chairs arguing over whether that was your first date, and really, how often does that happen? Thus, a "not-a-date"-date. I had a great time, he was really a nice guy, a friend of a friend. Then, of course, I came home and lamented the fact that I had a date-like-thing, because it reminds me that I'm dating, and I hate dating. But I'm trying to get over that, so I went on a second-date-like thing tonight (or a "second-hanging-out" or "second-not-a-date-date" or whatever the kids are calling it these days), and also had a very enjoyable evening, but then walked away confused, and realizing that I think we had both been possibly interested, but then waited on the other person to act more interested, and then both walked away not knowing whether either of us was really interested.

I just went to break-up therapy with my ex-boyfriend. Trippy. Challenging, to say the least, but cathartic. I mean really, who goes to therapy after they break up, just to do the breaking up better, unless they're working out a major co-parenting arrangement (well, or unless they're a therapist with a twisted curiosity to watch a professional handle an emotional un-coupling, even if it's her own)? Me, that's who. Who needed some support and safety and containment (as in, one hour, not-a-minute-longer, then say goodbye for now with someone there to tie up our loose ends and keep us accountable to not getting all mushy and misty-eyed and missing each other on the way out the door). I'm not suggesting that we're BFF now; we amicably agreed to steer clear of each other for a little while longer. And I won't pretend that I'm done being angry, but it feels better to have said some stuff and not just be beating my own head against the wall alone at the end of the day. Honestly, if we were never going to see each other again in social circles, then maybe just running for the hills would have been an easier path to take. Or if I were one of those people who could compartmentalize broken, cut-off relationships with no resolution. But for better or worse, I'm just not one of those people.

Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Take the next 45 minutes of your life and go directly here to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

I made it!

I made it through my birthday! Maybe I was just so prepared to cry that I held out through it, kind of like when you see a wave coming and take the time to plant your feet, but if you get blindsided, you're more likely to find yourself pushed under, slammed around, and having to spend a week getting the sand out of your nose.

I was extra-specially glad to see the work-week end this week... for a few reasons. First, I am vacating myself from LA and road-tripping up to Berkeley with Natalie this weekend, so the promise of vacation and old friends sort of heightens the drag factor of the working world. Second, it's just been an emotionally draining week on multiple, unrelated personal fronts, and was topped off by emotionally draining clients today, who cried and yelled and argued and made excuses and had to lay on the floor because they were so anxious and generally required me to do my job, of being a therapist who helps people sort through, contain, and express unpleasant emotions, when really I had just finally settled into my summer routine of staring at a computer doing paperwork and reserving all my emotional energy for myself.

So, needless to say, a little road trip up the 5 sounds delightful!

It's my party, I can cry if I want to

*** warning: another post that seems to have degenerated into musing about adulthood and other non-perky subjects and may only be relevant to women in their 30s ***

Every year I cry on my birthday, and this year probably won't be an exception.

I've been feeling a little wallow-ey, so I just came home from work and devoured another chunk of Alli's "better than sex" cake (which is a very ambitious name for a cake that won't even hold me afterwards while I fall asleep). And I decided at the last minute to take tomorrow off of work, so I'm dreaming of the possibilities. I had a little bbq on Sunday and as the evening ended, I felt astoundingly... grateful for so much about my LA life. I wish I could hold onto that feeling all of the time, but hey, I'm human.

I had coffee last night with an old friend from Berkeley, and we were musing on the general joys and tribulations of growing up, and he reminded me of a quote from his sponsor: "it's all about learning to wear the big boy pants." They don't always fit and they feel more formal than I'd like to be and sometimes they chafe... but I guess you just keep walking. You learn the world is rarely fair, and that it's definitely not going to take a smoke break for your emotions. You learn that maybe, just maybe, feeling happy all the time is not a constitutional right. You realize that sometimes (though not all the time) the best thing you can do is just let yourself be lonely and not try so hard to fight it when you don't have the energy to spare. You start to suspect that your magic wand may be permanently on backorder. But there's room in the pants to grow into, and you also learn what's worth spending your energy on, or as a friend recently put it, that you're "too old for insecurities, flightiness, and uninteresting things." You start to believe that life's really too short to worry about your upper-arm fat. And you get better, a bit, at knowing what you want and saying no to the stuff (or people) that you don't.

Lately I am learning that I am capable of being very, very pissed off (yes, I wasn't really sure about that one... I'm usually very easygoing). I am also realizing, and it is not very fun, that I may have Issues with expressing anger, or at least expressing it towards the thing that's actually making me angry, and then I get angry with myself for acting like I'm not angry, and then before I know it I find myself getting off the phone with the thing that's making me angry and then, oh, say, calling up someone 1000 miles away to scream about how angry I am. Yes, I know this helps no one. And I'm confirming that because I don't really "do" anger well, it comes out as "sad," because that's really the only emotion I'm good at expressing, well, pretty much anywhere. So tomorrow could just be the day where everything going on in there, all the gratitude and anger and getting to talk to so many people I love all over the country, and everything else, just winds up coming out through my eyeballs.

I'll keep you posted.

...be vewwy qwiet, the wabbit is sweeeeping...

I'm keeping quiet for a reason these days... though I can't exactly describe it. I think I'm imploding maybe, just a bit. Or, as my lucky LA friends can attest, it's a bit more explosive, as they watch me light off like a rocket, blow off steam, then glide gently back to earth to wait another hour or so for the return trip. The word "irritable" would sum it up nicely. I'm exhausted this week (I put in 20 hours over my usual schedule, at some other jobs) and feeling like I've hit the "angry" stage and have definitely not been getting enough sleep (partially work-related, partially because I stayed up one night watching an entire disc of Six Feet Under and working on a kick-ass sewing project until 3am), and I have just generally been on overload. I have a few chances to help it work its way out a bit this upcoming week though, so for now I feel like I've taken one step back again (into all the icky feelings) but I sense the promise, if I stay here for a little while and do something productive with them, of getting to go Mother-May-I-Take two big steps forward as fall rolls in. Keeping my fingers crossed, at least.

Mental Status Report

When we do intakes at my agency, we have to do a full-page "mental status" report for our clients (including taking a guess at their vocabulary and intelligence, often based on the 8 words they've spoken in the past two hours). But oh, how I wish we had a category for parental mental status.

At an intake last week, the parent reported that she used to let her daughter do gymnastics, but then she pulled her out and made her stop because gymnasts are really short, and she didn't want her daughter to be short when she grew up. So, no more gymnastics.

"Ct's Mo exhibits marked cognitive difficulty re: logic and reality testing..."

It's my party...

Yeah, there's nothing really going badly this week... pretty much cruising along, mostly just bored and tired. But methinks it's time for a good cry, and I'm just curious now what will actually bring it on.

If it doesn't happen soon, I may need to induce. Taking recommendations for a good tearjerker (bear in mind that I have been known to cry during commercials when the time is right).

Relationship People

It's funny how you can forget about things you once said.

I was having coffee with a friend the other day, and she reminded me that waaaaay back when Goat and I were starting to date, I was freaking out and kept worrying that maybe I just wasn't a "relationship person." I'd had nearly 30 years of being mostly single, moving around, starting over, traveling the world, doing whatever I felt like whenever I felt like it, and I was really worried that being in a relationship would feel boring, tied down, stuck... although at the same time, on some level I may have been just a teensy bit worried that maybe I was actually incapable of being content. I suppose I could say that about a lot of my 20s, and for 90% of my friends. We were having adventures, exploring, making great friends, but always looking for what was coming next. I had a string of jobs I didn't enjoy, never felt like I had roots, I was always either moving or people were moving away from me. And even though it was exhausting, we weren't ready to stop, because we weren't really happy, or settled, where we were at.

What a difference a few years makes. Somewhere along the way last year, I woke up and realized I was really... content. It was a surprisingly delicious feeling. Not that I never wanted anything to change ever again, but I felt like I was finally on some paths, in work and in life, where I wanted to just keep going in those directions, and for once I wasn't thinking about jumping ship and overhauling life and wiping the slate clean and starting over somewhere else again. Meh, maybe it's a normal part of getting a little older. Or maybe everything kind of fed off each other, and I wouldn't have even thought about settling into a relationship if I hated my job and was still feeling the need to make drastic changes that could send me fleeing. Maybe I never really let myself fall for people I dated in other places because I had one foot out the door before I even started.

Anyhow, somewhere along the way I seem to have become one of those "relationship people." Go figure. Clearly, I miss Goat for a million reasons about who he is, but I also just miss the boring little life we had going. So it's very interesting to realize that about yourself, and then find that you're single again and not sure what to do next. I could revert to "old single mode," filling my time but avoiding roots... but I think it would be at the expense of my shiny new ability to be content. I think, somehow, it will all answer itself without too much angst on my part. Or at least I hope. Or at least, with less angst than I had five years ago about all these things.

random

One of the fun and interesting things about this year is that I went from calling my bosses "Dr. So-and-So" to -- at their insistence -- calling them by their first names. Including the guy who the place is named after. Well, that was hard enough to do... but you really know that you've arrived as a "colleague" when you head out on a lunchtime trip to Jamba Juice and they insist that you take the front seat while they crawl into the back.

books vs. movies

My two competing interests these days seem to be my Netflix account and my LA public library card. For a while it was great to just come home and zone out to The Closer, but I finished season 3. So today we've got Freakonomics vs. season 1 of The Sopranos. I think we're tipping towards the book today... one episode of The Sopranos wasn't quite enough to suck me in, but the book's intro already has me on the edge of my seat. When I was in school, studying economics, I always said I was fascinated with it because, at heart, it's not really about money at all. It's the study of how people make decisions. And, as the authors put it, tantalizingly, it's the study "of how people get what they want." Might be right up my alley.

Plus, I think I'm ready to think again a little. Not that I haven't been thinking lately, just about different things. Since I arrived in LA, actually, I've blessedly learned a very important thing: how to be a being, doing person a bit more instead of always an asking and pondering sort of person. Really, I think I've learned how to live better in the last few years. But it's been awhile since I read anything that makes for good dinner table conversation.

The I Want to Die Post -- but it's not what you think

Oy, I just threw up on my feet. That was disgusting. I have apparently contracted some type of food poisoning or GI bug that put me in bed all day mostly wanting to die. I seem to have passed that point of the cycle, but am, unfortunately, still in no shape to get vertical. OK, now that I've grossed you out....

I've been doing alright the last couple of weeks. Up and down, understandably I suppose. About half of the last month, either Goat or I have been out of town on vacation and that made it easier. I've been doing pretty well here on my side of town, in the world where I was always known for myself, but I discovered last night that it's considerably harder to go back to the west side, where I feel like I was more known as half of a couple. So, it was much to my surprise that after a few weeks of cruising along, dealing with it when I come home at night but mostly engaging myself successfully in life during the day, I went to visit some friends on the west side and suddenly felt like I had jumped back a month in time to the first week, where I felt really fragile and emotional. OK, so I was also over there helping a friend plan her wedding, and was, unbeknown to me, well on my way to being violently ill, which didn't help, but let's just say I didn't have the fun, relaxing evening I'd hoped for.

Mostly I just feel really stuck in the "to have contact or not to have contact" department. The pros of contact are that I get to connect with a person I still have a strong connection to. The cons? Well, that's easy. Staying connected to a person I have strong feelings for but can't be with, which is gonna mess with my head.

But the truth is, this "no contact" thing? Not feeling much better right now. Will it in the long run? I don't know. Basically, when I talk to him, it just feels like this was the natural place things had to end up now, given reality or timing or whatever, and I just feel sad, which I can handle. But the longer I go without talking to him, the more hurt and flat-out-rejected I feel, as if I was weighed and measured and found lacking (basically, the difference between "we broke up" and "I got dumped," which can be a distinction quite lacking in subtlety).... which is bearable when I'm engaged in life during the day, but can tend to spiral down into Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles at the end of the day, or when I'm, say, laying in bed wanting to die from food poisoning. And yes, Ruthie, I know that was a run-on sentence.