Baby You Can Drive My Car

This morning my car wouldn't start.

This was not a good way to start the day--or not start it, as it happened.

I am already in the land of bad car-ma, given that I have a copious leak in my power steering hose and four bald tires and I am sure in need of new brakes and rotors and lots of other expensive things. A new battery? Sure, add it to the list.

I have heard a theory that once one pays off a car, the money that had previously gone toward paying that bill every month now goes into maintenance. Since I couldn't really afford the bill each month as it was--and my credit is so poor that this is likely the last big ticket item I will ever be approved to purchase--there is no consolation in the fact that this, the first month out after finally paying off my sweet ride, I now need to find upwards of 1K in order to keep Esme running.

A problem inherent with this need of triple 0s is that the electric slide extends to my apartment, and a power bill largely left over from the cold winter months, a bill immense enough that the power company has informed me I gots to pay up or start living by candlelight. Tomorrow, as it happens. No current in the car, no current in the house, because I can't keep current on the monies. See how that works?

Another issue is that how can Phoebe and I move to my car a la Jewel circa the early '90s--since we are now officially one month behind in rent, this seem likely--if the car itself won't work? Can you park pretend SUVs in mobile home lots and build a porch off them? And if you can and you are me, who is footing that bill?

Every day since I paid off my car, I have fantasies when I drive by a used car lot about walking in and signing it over and exiting with some cold hard cash. Of course it wouldn't be enough cash to solve my world's problems, but for a minute it might be nice. But then I would have to walk home, and then quit my job since I wouldn't be able to get to work, and as aformentioned would face even more (if possible) certain eviction so really this is not a bright idea at the present moment.

So to conclude, in order to keep my decent job, the decent roof over my head, and the decent car to get me between these two places, I need to but immediately find a minimum of 1K. My last blog spoke of love and money. I feel in light of current (no pun intended) events, it bears pointing out that my car was named for one of my favorite stories--"For Esme With Love and Squalor."

Beep beep, beep beep, yeah.

Love & Money

I am reading a terrible book called Love & Money. I began it on the beach and didn't like it. I came back from the beach and kept reading it even though I increasingly liked it less. I woke up today and gave it another go and my dislike almost turned into hatred. I am bored so silly by it that I am skipping pages just to get to the end. And I wonder when did I get so slammed by restless ennui that I cannot even put down a terrible book and say "hey you needn't finish this you know, it sucks and is an unproductive way to spend a gorgeous day." Nope, I just keep reading, hoping, waiting, for something interesting to happen to a crew of wholly unlikeable characters talking non-stop about legal issues that have to do with, you guessed it, love and money. Or at least this jaded author's view of same.

This book is so amoral--and not in a fun dishy way--that it leads me to reflect on topics better left unaddressed, such as what passes for "literature" these days, how hard is it be to write a novel and get it published, what kind of climate is this book reflecting? Thinking if art imitates life, and this is how Americans with love and money are living, maybe I am glad that I am poor in all respects.

As this endless summer draws to its unofficial close, I realize that I am very uneasy with myself. Not quite uncomfortable, but slightly apprehensive, faintly bewildered, a wee bit scared. Curious as to what happened to the goalposts one uses to define one's limits, to point out when we've gone from playing the field to sitting in the stands, to hiding under them, to standing entirely apart from them. I know that I haven't quite lost sight of the stadium yet, but I may be unwillingly travelling further away from it than I intended to. I am not even sure that this is true. Perhaps it is all a matter of perspective.

I am not unhappy. I am tired. Tired of filling in the gaps in my information with flowery prose, designed to conceal my ignorance of cold hard facts. My pencil is worn down and the eraser is a mere nub, but the blue book is unfinished and the bell hasn't rung yet, so I must keep on writing the essay. Again hoping, hoping for that bolt from the blue, for inspiration to strike, for the muse to take pity on my disorganized thoughts and translate them into a coherent tale of derring-do, to get me that much-needed A to send my GPA to its all-time high.

It worries me that maybe I don't even know what it is I want from myself, hence the ever-shifting goalposts that make it difficult to ascertain whether I am spectator or player, sidelines or halftime show. Lately I feel like I am in pieces rather than the whole. Here I am fine, today I am motivated, tomorrow I will accomplish this, last week I did that, and five years ago I was, if not quite whole, wholly different.

One of my cast-in-iron goalposts has always been these mile markers. To breathe deep, to take stock, to reflect on the good and the bad and the ugly. Not to wallow in remembrance but to energize for the days to come. Sometimes these anniversaries equal all or nothing at all. I have met them with laughter and with tears and with a casual shrug. This particular epoch seems very strange by comparison to the hundreds upon hundreds I have been know to observe, if only with my own private rituals.

Because, different I can handle. Better I certainly wish for. Worse bites the big one. But half a decade to show for all my efforts, and I find today, in an ironical twist, that I sit here in the sad quiet forcing myself to read an epoynomous tome that defines for me without a doubt that was then, this is now. And yet I have to hang in there to see hw it all turns out.

Off to finish this piece of crap.

The Girlie Show

Quite a few years back, there was this crazy sensation called "The Rules" which was based on a book penned by two lollipop heads who assumed that all other women wanted in life was to marry rich. It was touted that Carolyn Bessette followed the basic tenets of these restrictions in order to land JFK Jr.--not returning his calls, being unavailable more than available, becoming the Bergdorfiest of the Bergdorf blondes. The book so far as I recall offered no advice on what to do once you had your white wedding, or how to be "unavailable" after the fact to paparazzo, or how to refuse when your hobbling hubby insisted on flying you and yours around in his Cessna sans flight plan. Things worked out pretty bad for Carolyn in the end, just like they did in Camelot. I don't think there has been a where-are-they-now special about the other case studies, those ladies who fervently followed the rules and found their prince only to find out he actually was a frog of the toadiest proportions.

"The Rules" have fallen out of favor by 2010, and with good reason. Bridget Jones helped, as did the Ya-Ya Sisterhood--disguised as chick-lit, these books let a woman know that it was okay to want to be coupled but to fail at every turn toward matrimony simply by being herself. That good friends and a bottle of wine sometimes were better than fourth-finger, left-hand committment. That being a thoroughly modern Millie meant belonging to an ancient tribe of goddesses who didn't need men to fulfill her--but who definitely wanted gents around whenever the mood struck. But never to the exclusion of her own sex.

I would like to pen a book for women that assumes that women want less to land a man than to win and keep a top place within the sisterhood. If half of all marriages end in divorce, what are the stats on break-ups between two gal pals? And how can we prevent the ladies who love to lunch together from throwing tables at each other and telling tales out of school to irreparable damage? The fairer sex have enough problems to contend with than to create drama within their own ranks, and yet we do it all the time. In my innocence I imagine this has everything to do with never being taught the real rules, the ones that those lucky enough to be born with a vagina ought to have been schooled in since birth. So, let me impart some laws to live by for the ladies, in no particular order.

RULE #1. Distrust the chick who boasts that she gets along better with men than women. This femme fatale has zero understanding of herself and even less for you, her lady-in-waiting. One gravitates toward certain people in life, and their sex has little or nothing to do with it. Being the cool girl that all the dudes like and all the girls allegedly despise makes you public enemy number one to the sisterhood. It's 2010 for crissake, we live in a world populated by gay marriage and drag queens and Brandi Chastain. Tomboys don't have to grow up to be bull dykes or transform into swans in high school. You can join a hen party knitting circle on Sundays and spend Fridays drinking ballers under the table. You needn't eschew the company of women because you just get along better with boys, whther it is because you think you are drama-free, or grew up in a house full of brothers, or don't wear makeup. You can actually make nice with members of both sexes and be quite happy and fulfilled. Stick with just the one and you run the risk of waking up one day in need of tea and sympathy and finding only dirty socks and empty pizza boxes--or the other way around. It's no way to live. Enjoy your girlfriends, and their quirks. Trust them with your secrets and listen in turn to theirs.

RULE #2. Boyfriends come and go, but friends are forever. Oddly enough it seems there are actually women out there who never heard this old axiom, or who like to pretend they haven't. We all hope we'll settle down with our best friend, and if we are straight females we suppose this will be a human of the male persuasion. But whoever this buddy-boy ends up being, he will never take the place of your best gal pal. So here's a little bit of sisterly advice. Do not engage in relations of any sort with someone your friend has been involved with. Ever. No ifs, and, or buts; no refunds; no change of heart. Unless she rents an airplane and skywrites for all the world to see that she is a-ok with you shagging her ex, she isn't. And she is way more important to you in the long run than he will ever be. Because it isn't just her friendship you will be ruining--it is any friendships you have going forward that will be dead in the water before you leave the harbor on the Sloop Jane B. Even with express permission to rekindle her old flame with your own matches, be careful. It tends to be in poor taste, if nothing else. I would suggest if you do gain her blessing have it signed, sealed and delivered in menstrual blood. It is a big world out there, surely you can find someone to bed who hasn't previously been inside your girl. Even the casual hookup can have its ramifications here. It is far easier than to turn off your siren song when in the vicinity of her ex-whatever than to deal with the record screeching to a halt when the two of you enter the room in defiance of this very important rule. Class goes a long way in the sisterhood.

RULE #3. Should you choose to break RULE #2, accept the consequences; meaning, get out of Dodge. Not on a mini-break, but on a permamenent relocation. Once you have chosen a guy over your girl, you live there now. You no longer should show your face in her town. Go live your life and be as happy as presumably you set out to be when betraying your friend, just do it far far away from her and hers. This is the price you pay for laughably following your heart. Don't expect forgiveness and don't expect forgiveness to mean you may remain in the fold. You wanted to lay down with lions, you no longer can be trusted with the lambs. Hurting someone may be inevitable in life, humilating them is a choice. Don't make that choice to a sister.

RULE #4. Put as much time into maintaining your female friendships as you do your family's. Just like sometimes you can't have a headache in bed for the fourth time that week, you can't ignore a request to hang out and listen to a friend's whining over a lost boy, a lost job, a lost opportunity. And take the time to express your own fears and gossip and happiness. We put so much emphasis on couples. There are scores of self-help books dealing with relationships--how to find lasting ones, and how to maintain them, and how to keep love alive, and how to stay united with our significant others in the face of everything that comes down the pike. But unless we look to fiction, there are few tomes on keeping your friendships not just intact but in full bloom. Heads up, it takes work girls, just as much work if not more than running your household or parenting your kids or making sure you have date nights with your menfolk. You don't presumably, especially after a certain age, share a home with your girlfriends. You aren't responsible for each other's well-being or bank accounts. You do not have the recognition of church and state that binds you together in the eyes of the world. You do, however, have a bond that goes way back to primordial waters and deserves to be cherished 'til death do you part. Stay in touch. Have fun. Make the effort. Take the call. And do not assume that just because you know you have done nothing active to hurt your friendship, that it can't be hurt just as much by passivity. Be actually there for your girls, not just in passing thought but in waking deed. You know how every time you have a night out with a pal, or all the girls, everyone exclaims "it has been too long!" and "this was so much fun!" and "let's not wait so long until we do it again!" and then, you don't see hide nor hair of each other for a long stretch afterwards? Don't wait. Do hang.

RULE #5. Learn when to tell her she looks fat and when not to. For example, that dress she wants to wear to a big event that will have 200+ people staring at her rolls? She needs to know it is empire-waist time. That bikini she somehow pulls off even though she looks nothing like Gisele? She needs to know she is woman enough to wear it proud. Because you are proud of her. This is actually a very important rule. Friends don't let friends look bad. Friends do think their posse is the best-looking one around. Friends know when to find that balance.

At my beautiful flesh-and-blood sister's wedding, I gave a toast that quoted the lines from "Sisters", our favorite "White Christmas" song. It was especially apt for me and my little bit, whom I have known and adored her whole life. It is also the soundtrack to these rules, for the sisters who share DNA as well as those who chose to pledge each other's sorority in childhood, in high school and college, in their 20s and their 30s and whenever the mood strikes. Those who see us know that not a thing can come between us.

'Cause with a little help from your friends, and these rules, the sisterhood simply rocks.

Fences

Here's what's up in the days of the moon half-full, mind half-gone. It occurred to me this morning that I have spent a lifetime pretending everything was alright. It occurred to me because I got sucked into (and yes I blush) an episode of "If You Really Knew Me" on MTV yesterday. In this show, it seems a team of 20-something do-gooder enthusiasts show up at a typical crappy American high school and force various stereotypical groups to interact with each other through games and sharing so that each self-absorbed teen can see that everyone has problems, and so we should all love each other, and be friends. It is edited so that there isn't a dry eye in the house as kids admit to being bullied and knocked-up and pushed around. And at its conclusion there is more empathy for one's fellow pupils and the hope that this kind of radical outside-the-box thinking will endure and this generation (Z, is it already? how time does fly) will change the world.

Now since I do not have the benefit of just starting out in the world of the nearly-grown-up and being forced to hang out in the school gym all day telling my innermost secrets to frenemies, I merely reflect on myself and how right at this moment I done made a real mess of things, and yet I continue to give the complete wrong impression to everyone and my mother that this is so.

It is said that ACOAs have no idea what normal is. I will counter that in this day and age especially, it is difficult if not impossible to define "normal." There is no one way to lead a life. Even in the subset of certain definitive lifestyles there are different ways of going about one's bizness; however, I think what is meant by the 12-steppers is that when you grow up in an addicted household you are really living on the edge of having not one fucking clue what is ever going to happen and you don't even have any precepts of what oughta be happening, and growth of a personal nature is generally not an option since you haven't that luxury. You have to roll with the punches, and follow rules that most kids wouldn't know existed, and above all keep up the pretense of living a life worth living when you are not within the walls of your domicile. And sometimes, perhaps incurring even worse damage, when you are in the bosom of your family. There is much to be gained from such adaptability, such self-reliance. It's your story and you are sticking to it.

The big problems arise when you are old enough to vote, and realize that you must mimic what those around you do in order to fit in at college or a job. You don't show up in college with a definitive sense of self because you were never allowed to develop one, so you observe the behaviors of those around you and in a typically hideous Frankenstein's monster way, stitch up some of their behaviors with your own fight-or-flight responses and the gut instincts you always knew existed beneath the daily crazy you endured. Again you exhibit typical ACOA behavior by trying to please all of the people all of the time, and watching your few acts of rebellion bring crushing punishments down upon you.

And then for better or worse, off you go then into a lifetime of confusion and misunderstandings. Who cares, so what? It doesn't mean you can't be happy and successful and fulfilled, that you won't eventually figure out actual likes and dislikes and rights from wrongs. But the tricky part is the self-doubt that all of it is just an act. That without meaning to you have created this persona who is not the person you are, nor the one you set out to be, and when the chips start to fall you are quite possibly totally fucked because you have gotten so good at looking well-adjusted, or crazy-overdramatic, or in love with misery, or a busy bee, or whoever you have been when relating to a certain group at a certain time. And really that helps nobody, least of all yourself.

Interesting to me at least. And to be clear not in a pity party way, in a holy shit this all sucks right now way.

Maybe VH-1 can make a show for 30something me-s who nobody knows.

Bugsy

As ever I wonder, why? Why would one deliberately hurt someone else, someone you profess to love and care about? It is not that hard to be happy, sure. It is more dramatic to be sad so I get that; however, it is even less hard to not fuck over others. There is drama there as well, but the kind that leaves you feeling in need of a shower. And in this case, cleanliness is not next to godliness. So when you do something that is forbidden, is it just because the thrill of maybe getting caught pumps up the volume of an otherwise muted relationship? And if that isn't all there is and a bag of chips, if the balance is so perfected and the scales are weighted so that the loss is worth the gain, then why lie about it? And a lie of omission is just as shitty as an out-and-out falsehood. Possibly worse.

This goes back to why I don't mess around with people I know in the end I won't care about. And maybe I am alone in this. But I like this part of me, who has weathered many storms and yet still hasn't forgotten how it feels to be the only person left on the strip during the hurricane. Don't help me batten down my hatches only to tear through yourself and leave water and mold and total destruction in your wake. And don't come back through town when the sun is shining and even the ruins look fab.

Words are not said to speak as loud as actions. Guess that is a cliche that rings true. I am certain I am not the only one who gets it. But this time, it odesn't matter, because no one else is here.

Why don't you run outside and jerk yourself a soda.

How will I know?

Is someone always someone else's one?

Sometimes I wonder who wrote the book of love, or lust, or one-night stands. That anoynomous author is one twisted sister, whoever she is, but we all keep reading--the lonely, the lovelorn, the beloved.

In this day and age we have therapists and self-help books and The Real Housewives of New Jersey to guide us through the rocky terrain of relationships. For better or worse. We see all sorts of crazytown marriages and hook-ups and all that comes of this overexposure to how the othe halves live is that we are all too smart for our own good when it comes to choosing a someone to watch over us. And we are all too dumb to say what we mean and mean what we say when exchanging three little words. So mass hysteria ensues. And most troubling of all, we know damn well that relationships are hard work--but we miss the point that really they are kind of easy.

No man is an island. You didn't come into this world on your own steam. The second you popped out of the womb at least one other person was in the room with you. Is that what the Oedipus and Electra complexes are all about, not so much sicko Hamlet-style confusion but this innate need to immediately connect with a hand, a breast, a mouth? To find anew the very reason for your existence and drift into a dream, safe and warm and fed, to the strains of a dixie lullaby?

I have a sneaking suspicion that like in an arranged marriage, one can find a kind of contentment with just about anyone else. There are of course mitigating factors. Don't get with someone who beats you or shoots up in the baby's room or is butt-ugly and unemployed. But in reality, everyone has to adjust to being a two where there was once just a one. And is it really all that difficult to do so with someone you chose to get caught up with in the first place, rather than just spin around the barn in some insane square dance of podner-switching? Is it really of utmost importance to always look like Goldilocks for the porridge that is just right?

It's tricky. When someone professes undying love for you and you don't share or appreciate the sacrifice, does that make that person wrong? Or are you the one who failed the class? How far is too far to go? We all make the same mistakes. We confuse wanting to jump someone's bones with eternal devotion. We turn our noses up at a perfectly good match because we don't feel weak in the knees every second of every day and later regret it when said mate belongs to someone else, and is happy. We bail on partnerships of long-standing because we think we need to know what love is in order to do it better. We are too young to settle down and we got together when we were too immature and we realized what we truly wanted during a mid-life crisis and we didn't think about the ever after that comes after happy. So divorce rates are high--but still we keep taking the plunge.

And what happens when you find youself head over heels for a certain someone who isn't returning your calls? What is the difference between knowing why the caged bird sings and turning yourself into stalker jailbait? How the hell do two people ever manage to be in sync long enough to say I do? That is the B-side that never made it on the airwaves.

In relationships, is every man out for himself? Do the women and children always come first? How the hell does it all work. It says so in this book of love, or lust, or one-night stands that ours is a love that's true. But are we reading the same edition?

anything's possible

When the mountain wouldn't come to Muhammed, Muhammed is said to have gone to the mountain. This was, of course, back in the day when it was probably easier for M-Diddy to hit the road. He wouldn't have needed a passport, and terrorism hadn't been invented yet, and no one thought twice about walking 500 miles (and 500 more) just to be the prophet who showed up at your door. Kicking it old school, and to boot this is a guy who had 13 wives. So maybe there is something to be said for this approach.

Nowadays, being a traveling wo-man is a lot more complicated, and a lot more expensive. One has to decide if one is Muhammed or the mountain. Do you leave Mecca for some funky cold Medina, or do you wait for the divine messenger to hike on over to you? Tough call.

Why in this modern age, can't I just hop aboard a magic carpet ride, to float me off for 1001 nights with my own personal sheik of Araby? But instead of divine intervention, all I have are wishful thoughts that want to bridge the Gulf of Araby--between what is, what is, what is--and what can never be? Truly there is nothing we wouldn't give to cross this great divide.

Please can I get an a-men?

Hot Mess, with Music

I like words. There are no words. And it doesn't matter, for once.

we're heading for a wedding

Another summer Saturday aches on, to be culminated with some more wedded bliss between two very awesome people. It is my second solo wedding appearance of 2010 and while I do not imagine it will have the same funny and fucked-up outcome of the last, it hopefully will be a fine time had by all.

I have come to wonder of late if I may ever have a wedding of my own, be it a quickie Vegas drive-thru chapel deal or somber city hall affair or a big white church event with all the trimmings. I took for granted all my life that I would walk down some sort of aisle at some point and say I do and embark upon a bicycle built for two for all the days of my life.

Of late it occurs to me that this may just not happen. Ever.

Not everyone gets married. And hell, I know more than most that happily ever after is hard to come by. I just never fully realized that it would be this damn hard. Relationships are tricky things. I have gone into them thoughtlessly, I have gone into them thoughtfully--but in the end it doesn't matter which door I use, because the mere fact that I am starting up a something with a someone defines a natural disaster waiting to happen.

Because the fault lines and mass destruction and rebuilding that follow the earthquakes that are break-ups change you infinitely. Your heart does go on but it's not the same heart. You suddenly have hairline cracks on the surface, and deep fissures beneath, and strata upon strata of mess to climb over when you meet someone new. And the more your being feels the tremors that may or may not send you sliding into the sea, the more you wonder is it even worth it to fight Mother Nature.

When my faux-marriage ended, I clawed for air against the inevitable in large part because I didn't want to not be me anymore. Didn't want to lose not so much the trappings of a comfily coupled existence but the deep-rooted layers of my whole being. I didn't want the shift in plates that would inevitably follow the cracking open of my little eath-self. I knew a change was gonna come and I was pissed off because I liked me just fine the way I was, and I just didn't want to have to deal with it all and become a different version of myself.

And in the end that is exactly what happened, of course. I was just....different. Some of my buildings had withstood the quake, some were destroyed beyond repair, some bigger and better and stronger ones were erected out of the smoldering ruins. And when the next one hit I knew, at least, how it would go down though I couldn't predict when. Compared to the big one the next registered smaller on the surface scale, but bigger in internal Richter. Because I knew from experience how tough it was to sift through the ashes and reconstruct myself out of the rubble.

So when I am faced with more matrimony that is so not mine, I reflect that maybe I should move away from myself, to this non-volcanic place where there are people willing to stand together before their gods and their families and their friends and commit to living in a land where there is less chance of seismic waves exploding beneath their feet. But you can't get there from here, and wherever you go there you are, so the aftershocks keep on reverberating through me no matter how far from the ring of fire I wander.

Tell me everything's gonna be alright

What, exactly, is success? And how are Gen Xers supposed to achieve it even after they define it? These are some questions I am musing upon as I read up on old writings and consider my current affairs. I equate success with happiness. For me that sort of genuine happiness is best whipped up as a trifecta: when I am doing good work, when I am not broke and scared, and when I am in a sweet, sassy, sexy sort of partnership with someone who believes in me as well as in himself.

But I done lost my joie de vivre, and now I am not so sure that money can't buy me love, or as my mother so eloquently put it to me my entire broke-ass life "it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is a poor one."

Let's examine that little nugget of solid motherly advice for a sec. I don't think it is too easy to fall in love, period, and finances have never really entered into it for me anyway. Besides, when you are not to the manor born but rather to the South Philly born, that does tend to level the playing field a bit. The gap grows wider as you cruise through life based on your looks and your religious and ethnic backgrounds, your interests and activities and schooling and career choices. And suddenly you may just find yourself (don't tell mama) single, and trying on all fronts (art, ducats, menfolk), but not actually finding what you would define as success. The days are long but the nights are longer and you start to see, sorta kinda, why people settle. And you wonder if you ought to.

When I was in high school I was asked to do an exercise on "Happiness." The class was asked to take ten minutes and journal what we thought happiness was. Mine read "Happiness is me, some towheaded kids, some dogs, a big white house with a picket fence, and John F. Kenndy Jr, who is my husband." I cracked myself up with that one. And fact was, I kinda sorta meant it at the time, I was offended that the inimitably hot Father Bond had one word for me upon reading this little masterpiece, accompanied with a sexy sneer: "Shallow." In my defense I think it was the week he both stopped smoking and was told by the administration that he had to actually give us tests and grade them, but still. I wasn't shallow. I was hopeful. Which is a worse curse than the hex of being an artist.

(Not much) later in life, with things with John-John not quite working out as we had all hoped, I changed tack and decided that what I needed was a nice Jewish boy. Growing up I was pretty sure I actually was Jewish, especially the strange period where I looked like a blonde Anne Frank (followed by my many appearances as Gwyneth Paltrow's ugly kid sister) so it seemed a logical leap. At any rate, less than twenty-four hours upon my arrival at college, wearing my kinda sorta shiksa appeal on my sleeve, I fell truly madly deeply in love with one. My father's quote, delivered with a shake of his head, was "We send her to Catholic school for 15 years....so she can meet the one Jewish boy who attends her Jesuit school." (I believe I should have just capped the "J" words in that sentence for emphasis.) In my defense this mad college crush has developed into one of the best relationships I have ever had, though sadly it led to no glass-breaking under the huppah. No Hebrew school carpool for me or kugel by the dozen. Sigh. In the boy's defense he wasn't nor was his family actually practicing any kind of formal worship so those things probably wouldn't have happened anyway. And we would have killed each other anyway if the first four years of our on again/off again relationship was any indication, and now he is happily married to some other shiksa and they have a happy little dude out of the union. Mazel all around, really.

My next move was to play opposites attract. I think we are safe in blaming Paula Abdul for this one. I met a friend of my best friend one night and was hooked. He was so different from me. He didn't finish college. He was a master skateboarder and used to ride me around town on the pegs of his bike. He wore cute skate clothes and he was excited about everything (except when he smokem peace pipem) and he was a tall drink of water. Plus, he fucking adored me. He had decidedly working class origins. Being working class once removed myself, I figured I could hang. So I did hang--for about a decade. Which really had never been the plan, it just kind of happened. Though the years brought many quotes of varying hilarity from my parents, I think the sk8r boi himself gets the honors for this paragraph. "It's like I'm a hick dating a supermodel." Though he was actually a suburban kid and I am barely 5'5", we really couldn't ever get past this pronouncement. I also learned that like any good supermodel, I could effortlessly develop an eating disorder in the year that followed our nasty breakup. So, moving on.

For my next act, being an actor, I decided to go for one of the same. Talent begets talent and onstage things seemed pretty fireworky. Offstage they were damn pleasant. I wasn't looking to commit, I was actually having fun. All fun all the time. I felt like I had awoken from a nightmare only to find oh, that was just a bad dream, your real life actually isn't like that, so get out there and play ball! This is when I discovered that I like to have fun, and that my earlier affairs had perhaps lacked that crucial element all too often--being drenched as they were with pesky little buckets of teenage angst and playing house. So I was a little piqued that out of nowhere, the fun was done, and the teenage angst and playing house I thought I had left behind with my 20s was in fact how this little liasion was going to go down. I don't have a good quote for this section because by then I learned to keep my mouth shut to my adagey parents about my personal affairs, and the boy in question is a quiet type. We are still one of the best couples I know to date. Except we are not actually a couple. Sometimes I think that is very sad, and sometimes I think that is very good, and in general I think it is very incomprehensible. Not even in a bad heartbroken way, just in a strange confusing way that in the end brings us neither love nor money, and screwed up some career stuff along the way. It is what it is.

Which brings us to the summer of love, in which we don't know much but we do know "it is of the utmost important to lead off with a bang. And a grand finale later." We have delivered on the first. Fairly spactacularly on many levels, I might add. Let the good times roll! But then the temps climbed and rains came and the fireworks fizzled. So now we are eagerly awaiting the big finish. And looking back at the past has cleared up the settling issue. Since I am not on the Oregon Trail it is unlikely to happen. Cause even though we ain't got money, this Gen X girl believes that (somehow!) everything will bring a chain of love.

All Shook Up

On Sunday, I rested. After two activity-filled days, I found myself sleeping way in this morning (until afternoon in fact) and then puttering around all day bored silly by life. I made breakfast and walked dogs and attempted the Sunday crossword and watched my boys bring home a win phinally and now am taking up this fog blog. Becvause I am bored silly. This seems to be the pattern of my summer. I am either flying high or crashing low, and I dislike this state of going to extremes.

I am a curious conundrum of lone wolf and social butterfly. I prefer the socialing to be on my terms and am not so desparate for companionship that I wish to waste my time with anyone I am just not that into. I would rather go it alone if it comes to that. But I find that of late, my need for solo downtime is fulfilled within an hour or two. Then I am raring to go onto the next thing, I want someone to play with.

I hate Sundays. Always have. The day before one has to return to the dread work week. Even when Sundays are good days there is still a pall over the proceedings, the shadow of what will come at the stroke of midnight. I feel like I have spent too many Sundays of late mucking around my house and making myself crazy with the heat. Left to my own devices, I am a pretty poor excuse for a grown-up. All I wanna do is have some fun, and when the fun is done I am displeased with myself.

Cranky, cranky. I have spoken to no human today. I feel sticky and useless and disgusted with my lot in life. Blah blah blah.