Just a Quick Point...

If my parents -- either of them -- were ever to use the phrase "he completes her" when speaking about me, ESPECIALLY ON A PUBLIC WEBSITE like facebook, they will find that the nursing home I choose for them isn't very nice at all.

Let's start with a gin fizz.

Sometimes I imagine that I am a pretty, young waitress serving drinks in a crowded bar. And the Universe is a gorgeous woman finishing a cocktail several feet away. When she look up from her glass, she catches me watching her. We smile, and I offer to take her drink order. Too far away for me to hear a reply, she gestures that she'll have whatever I recommend. At least those are the words I hear when she lifts her eyebrows with a smile and a hint of challenge.

And this is where we are, the Universe and me. We're flirting over drinks, sure there's a connection but enjoying the slow unfolding of the story. Our story. Because there's certain to be one. I can feel it in my veins when I look into her eyes.

The Honeymoon Period

In middle school, I was one of those girls who turned bright red and emphatically denied any hint of attraction to the skinny smart guy I couldn't stop staring at.  There was never a mark on any of my notebooks, much less one that involved someone else's name and "4ever".  But even though I kept a strict lockdown on any written records, I didn't recognize the importance of not talking incessantly about the person I didn't want people to know I was obsessed with.  Yeah, I'm not really that sneaky.

In general, each person got a 1 year run at the top of my crush list.  At least that's how I remember them: Ryan (7th grade), Raychel (8th), James (9th), Brian (10th)*.  When I was around 20, my father asked me what I thought an obnoxious question at the time: "Aren't you about tired of [your boyfriend]?"  The question took me aback, and then I realized he was right**.

I have this tendency to meet someone I like, obsess over them and then just as quickly have everything they say drive me absolutely bonkers.  The above boyfriend and I broke up after we fought for two weeks.  Because two weeks is evidently as long as I was willing to let someone annoy me before I kick them to the curb.  If I still had to get all new friends every time I had a bad two week stretch, I'd just never bother making friends.  Or I'd have already dumped the entire city of Boston.

Add to this that I didn't make it to my 4th wedding anniversary before filing for divorce, and well, any rational person would stay far away, or at least in "the friend zone."  I'm not exactly a poster child for commitment.  Or the open and honest exchange of feelings.

But 18 months ago today, I drove into a parking lot*** to meet some dude off the Interwebz who was trying to casually lean against his car in a big leather jacket and look cool.  I'll admit that sight made me roll my eyes with a grin and wonder what the hell I was thinking doing this.

Since then there have been thousands of text messages every month, dozens of emails every week and only the very occasional phone call.

It became very evident early that it was going to be difficult to get tired of this one.  He's just so polite and kind and thoughtful.  So I've been spending a significant portion of my time with him, in hopes of bursting the bubble and sending him away.  But as my missed 1 year deadline demonstrates, he doesn't discourage easily, and I'm still smitten.

In fact, I try to avoid going out in public with him, since we end up just making eyes at each other, oblivious to whatever else is going on and grinning like fools.  But despite my attempts to keep him secret, hide him away and generally annoy the shit out of him, he's still sticking around.

So thank you for a wonderful 18 months, William.  Here's to hoping for an everlasting honeymoon period; we already have a much longer streak than I knew was possible.  ;)





*After about 16, I finally realized that I didn't have to either only love or hate people or just crush on a single person.  I'm still working on the first, but the second seems to have stuck pretty well....

**though of course I never told Daddy that.

***a well-lit, public and relatively-crowded parking lot after sending two friends the address where I was going to be and a set time that I would check in with them.

Thinking About Rocks

One of the ways I was taught to think about my relationship with responsibility was to picture myself as clear, empty bucket.  In life, there are many, many things I can choose to put in my bucket.  Some of them are big rocks: like god, a job and family.  Some of them are little rocks: money, books, friends.  Some of them are pebbles: clothes, technology, my car.  And some of them are just sand: fancy cupcakes, a new purse, millions of picture frames.

Figure 1. Two glass containers each intended
to contain sixrocks, some pebbles and some
sand.  The container on the left has the sand
at the bottom, the pebbles in the middle
and three of the large rocks on top.  The other
three rocks are unable to fit in the container
and are surrounding the outside.  The right
container has the large rocks at the bottom,
the pebbles surrounding them and the sand
poured in around that.  All six rocks fit. **

The lesson, of course, was that to fit everything I want in my life, I need to prioritize the biggest things and put them in my bucket first.  If the sand and pebbles go in my bucket first, there won't be enough room for the big, important things at the end (Figure 1).

The recent beginnings of My First Job Search (MFJS) has me thinking about this metaphor.  Because now I get to choose how large a rock my occupation will be.  And sometimes what I want is a large granite slab that would either seal off the lid to my container or crush it completely.  Or maybe not.  Maybe my clear bucket is made of something stronger than glass.  Maybe what I think of as my entire bucket is only the small depression in the bottom of a larger bucket.

Sometimes what I want my job to be is a small, smooth black river rock.  Something I can pick up and hold in my hand lovingly but that doesn't test the size or strength of my bucket.  Something that will allow me to fill my bucket with lots of other things.

Sometimes what I want -- sometimes, I think, what we all want -- is for my job to just be pebbles.  Sometimes in a daydream, I win the lottery.  Sometimes I wind up working a 9-5 job*.  Pebbles would mean I could fit anything else I wanted into my bucket.  But do I want anything else?  Do I want anything else if it means my job is merely debris from a real rock shattered years ago?

Now ...gulp... it's time to pick the size of my rock.  Does anyone have a back brace?




*My dad always taught me that you can't expect 9-5.  The best you can expect is 8:30-5:30 with a half-hour lunch.
**I stole the illustration from a motivational blog.  It's not worth linking to.  Call me a thief, if you want.

Being a Princess

Figure 1. The only tiara I've
ever had.

I've been very stressed over the last couple of days,* and one of my coping mechanisms is to curl up in a little ball, ignore everyone else around me and rip split ends off of the end of my hair.  I'm told it's a disturbing habit to have because it makes me look certifiably insane.  It also has the unfortunate side effect of leaving little pieces of hair everywhere.  On a bad day in the lab, the floor around my desk looks like it belongs in a a barber shop.  Luckily, the janitor has a good sense of humor about it and only calls me Goldilocks while he's sweeping under my desk.

My baymate remarked that her 3-year-old daughter has a similar bad habit, and she's trying to cure her / break her of it.  She tells her little girl that princesses have beautiful hair and that they don't wrap it tightly around their fingers or pull on it.  So in the mornings, when she has very good all alone in bed all night, she reports her mommy that she's a princess and look, her hair is so pretty.

This is just an adorable story and was very well told to me, so I was laughing quite hard listening to it.  Then I added, I guess I'll never get to be a princess.  Because I obsess over my bad habit instead of trying to break it.

Then she told me that I was already a princess, and I felt much better.





*couple of days = three months