And here's a hand, my trusty friend...

To all my friends, family, and faithful followers:

Best wishes for 2007 and have a safe and fun New Year's Eve!

And if you are staying in and watching Dick Clark, read this when you get bored. It's cool:

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year

And if you are coming home from a night of revelry and you want to watch something while you eat your Fourthmeal, watch this:

Tea Partay


Thank you for being my friend in 2006. I'm very grateful for all of you.

Love,
Erin

The most desolate place in the history of the world must have been the H'ville Wal-Mart on December 27th at 9:30 pm. I went for emergency breakfast supplies, having returned to a quiet house and empty cupboards after Christmas with my family. I seemed to be nearly the only one shopping besides off-hours Wal-Mart employees, their smocks thrown over one shoulder as they shuffled with their carts through the aisles. I remember being that tired over the summer and wondering why I was wasting my 6.50 an hour when I was too exhausted to eat.

I found my breakfast; coffee, bananas, sensible cereal for the health conscious, New Year's me, and then I moved over to the other side to purchase the things I call Single Girl Staples in my head...things I really don't need but like to have to make me feel good, if only for a few minutes. Bubble bath. Lip Gloss. A fuzzy robe the light green hue of Easter basket grass that was on clearance and in exchange for the robe I received for Christmas and didn't like. A glossy magazine with some starlet promising me killer abs for 2007 on the cover.

A few high school kids were standing in groups near the front, laughing and looking earnestly ridiculous in the way only fifteen year olds can and I felt old, browsing the marked down business wear next to the jewelry. I noticed the "Winter Wonderland" that had taken up residence in the Garden Center back in late September had already been struck down, and rows and rows of Valentines and pink and red cardboard hearts lined the seasonal aisles where the candy canes and popcorn tins had been just yesterday. Life, at least in commerce, moves on without ever looking back.

In that sort of bleak little dip in the calendar between Christmas and New Year's I always start thinking about what's going to happen next. How January 1st could possibly herald in better fortune, more responsibility, a better me. It's such a naive way to look at our future...maybe the only great superstition that everyone wants to have faith in anymore...that magically at the stroke of midnight on New Year's we will have another chance to be special, to be better. That the man or woman we hastily kissed on the cheek when the ball drops will be the person we will kiss goodnight for the rest of our lives. That just because you stayed home on New Year's to watch Dick Clark in your pajamas doesn't mean the rest of 2007 will be the same way.

I don't know...I've always been sad on New Year's, even on the occasions when I've been surrounded by my friends and family. Even when I had a relationship, or the prospect of one. New Years always makes me feel so insignificant, because the realization that we hang our hopes on an arbitrary calendar date and time every year seems somewhat hopeless to me.

Maybe it's just a post-holiday lull for me, but every year I dread New Year's. I wish I could figure out why.

Love, Honestly

I just got done watching the movie Love, Actually. I think I've seen in three times in the same number of years, mostly because I have a weak spot for any movie that includes Hugh Grant or Alan Rickman or Colin Firth, and so the combination of the three into two and a half hours of a pleasantly lit, saccharine romantic comedy is too great a pleasure for me to turn down when the opportunity presents itself.

I remember crying the last two times I watched it. The first, in the theaters with The Husband in 2003, holding his hand and sniffling a little as all the plot threads worked together into the wholly unrealistic, but incredibly satisfying ending. The second time on the floor of my living room, a box of Kleenex on my knees and a cat on my lap, the picture of a sad, lonely, recently single girl with too much time and access to expanded cable television on the weekends.

This time, nearly six months removed from Le Separacion and in the comfort of my parents' Christmas Bedazzled den, I watched the movie with a sort of clinical detachment that surprised me. I smiled at the funny parts and I took note of the pithy aphorisms about love and relationships that one of the main characters, a ten year old boy, passed on to his recently widowed father, but on the whole I wasn't moved this time. I could blame my familiarity with the story arc and the late hour of the night, but truthfully, I think I saw it through a different pair of eyes, and I'm kind of relieved about that.

One of the main themes of the movie is that on Christmas, you absolutely must tell the truth. In this case, several of the main characters in the ensemble cast face their own reality about the state of their love lives, and whether that included storybook romance, a failing marriage, or the absence of romantic love in the wake of family or professional obligations. Ultimately (and I don't really consider this a plot spoiler because you can see the ending from a mile away but if you haven't seen the movie and still really want to, then skip the next sentence), every one of the characters ended up with the ones they loved the most on Christmas Eve.

I thought it was interesting what a dichotomy the movie painted between the "winners" and "losers" in love, though. The ones who found romantic love--or even just the prospect of getting laid--were absolutely triumphant at the movie's end...backed by a soundtrack of soaring strings and featured leaping into the arms of their significant other to applause and cheers from the crowds around them. The ones who had lost, according to the movie, were left alone, having chosen the needs of a family member over a potential relationship, or realizing that their unrequited love would never be, well, requited. In the end, those characters were essentially cut out of the plot resolution, left alone with their dinner for one on Christmas Eve, or reduced to extra status in the crowds, smiling wistfully as our heroes and heroines are reunited. By the end of the movie, the message was pretty straightforward: pursue romantic love at all costs, because if you don't (even if it means you did the right thing) you will lose out for another year. Act fast, tell the truth on Christmas, and make sure those strings are playing for you.

And as I watched that, and considered the overall lesson of the movie, a dawning sense of absolute relief washed over me as I realized I don't buy into this anymore! I think maybe the urge to grab a Kleenex and a pint of Ben and Jerry's over a movie like this used to be so overwhelming because I completely agreed with the idea of romantic love or being wanted or needed in that glorious Hollywood sense being the utter zenith of maintaining self-worth. That, above all else, it was more important to just be in some sort of romantic relationship and desired by someone...anyone at all...than to actually make myself into someone who could be alone and happy as well as not alone and happy, and I know that all of this is like Sally Jessie Raphael Self-Help 101 stuff and you're sitting there sort of cringing that I'm even having this epiphany and writing about it like no one else has ever had this epiphany in the world before, but I assure you I'm not. It just feels really good when you finally, finally get it. Does that make sense?

Anyway.

I don't think I would've made this realization if I hadn't been having two conversations simulataneously with two friends who I consider to be very wise. Within the same hour, one had reminded me that life cannot be lived as a sprint...that all the changes and improvements and transitions we inevitably must undergo cannot be accomplished quickly, or they will have to be fixed and redone over and over again. The other, listening to me complain about the surprising lack of fun and brand new friends and fabulous shoes in my newly single life, reminded me that this would be a good time to relax, take a break from my insta-resurrection of my social life, and fix the things about myself that were broken, but that I couldn't see for all the wreckage of my marriage that had been laying around for so long. Both fantastic ideas, and both tremendously helpful in the last two weeks as I took my little self-mandated breather and tried to figure out my next move.

So, if on Christmas...the most romantic holiday of the whole year...if I had to stage my own Hollywood moment of truth and run breathlessly into a room, or into an airport and stop in front of the people who have inspired crushes, or attraction, and maybe even love...if I had to use this one night to tell them each the truth, I would say these things:

I have no business being ready yet, but when I am ready, I would just like you to know that I have always liked you, and I respect you, and when I think about you I think "I admire him in a Victorian sense" and then I laugh because I know you would get why it's funny, too. And if you ever wanted to see a movie, or go to dinner, or do something that didn't end with both of us bolting for our cars at the end of the evening like two strangers, I'd really like that.

I really like that we're "special to one another", because I don't think I tell you how much I like you as often as you tell me. But I know that your attraction lies in who you think I could be if I'd just work hard enough, and not who I am now. And the truth is, I kind of like who I am now. I know I could be better, but I don't think that it's fair for you to discount me because of how I look. So I just wanted you to know that I like you just the way you are, and I wish you felt the same way.

I think you know you are my dearest friend in all the world, and there's nothing that can really numb that for me. That's why I can say ILYAIKWTM each and every day. So we're okay. Even when it hurts.

I guess I could say all those things. More even, to the people who have touched my life in smaller, less charged ways. Because the one truly valid point of that movie is that love doesn't have to always be big. Sometimes it's quiet, and sometimes it's just being kind to a stranger who won't even get the chance to reciprocate. But those above things...as nice as they would be to say to the right people at the right time would only foster the kind of love that makes you want to hold someone's hand if it were being splashed across a huge silver movie screen. In real life, though, I'm afraid that kind of honesty is just the stuff that would make another person cringe, because love can't happen in 104 minutes. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes the ridiculous cliched love of self to even begin to foster a healthy romance between two people.

But if I were going to be perfectly honest, Christmas honest even, to the rest of you? I'd have to say that the idea of someday far in the future getting to tell the truth to the great love of my life and seeing it returned in his eyes? I secretly still think that'd be pretty incredible.

Especially if Alan Rickman were somehow involved.

I am alone in my parents' house, evidently stranded in the wake of Christmas Eve Morning church attendance. I have a vague memory of being prodded awake by my mother at 8:30, but not being able to form sentences to explain why I couldn't lift my head from the pillow. The cold medicine I drank last night after our Christmas Eve Eve get together (the first in a string of four increasingly elaborate parties with my family) was so potent I succumbed nearly instantly and floated in a half-asleep daze for the next twelve hours, 'til now. I still can't keep my eyes open, though a tepid cup of coffee is bravely doing my part to lift the fog.

I got in to town last night after a solid week of adrenaline-fueled sleeplessness and outright, giddy exhaustion. We had double Christmas programs this week, and class parties, and potlucks every day and I had my first houseguest since J and I moved in two years ago even though I'm still in the middle of the World's Slowest Cleaning Project EVAR, and, and, and...

And so by the time I got to my parents' I was pretty much drained, and no amount of grande latte with nutmeg in the foam was going to cut it. I was just dog tired, boss.

When I get tired I have a tendency to be a bit more honest with my thoughts and feelings than usual. It's pretty much like being drunk, especially because I also tend to bump into low-lying objects and feel a burning, fundamental desire to belt out every Mariah or Celine or Whitney or Chaka or Melissa ballad that has ever been sung on American Idol because at that moment I just know exactly what they mean in that 7th-grade-girl-writing-in-my-Lisa-Frank-diary-with-the-brass-lock-with-my-glitter-pen-about-WHO-I-LUV-4F4-and-then-spraying-the-page-with-some-Exclamation-perfume-because-that-seals-it way and if I sing them to you, right up in your face, I just KNOW you'll know too, y'know?

Fortunately, since last night was a family dinner, there were no such recordings in the house of my 90 year old great aunt, so I was left with just a poor sense of balance and an especially candid tongue...a deadly combination in its own right. And I think I might've implored my family to stop being so sarcastic and mean to one another, and I think I might've used the phrase "it's Christmas, goddamnit" and I think I might've also open hand-slapped my brother on the shoulder and fell backwards against our van, laughing, when they all started snickering at me for demanding that everyone be nice on Christmas.

This all might've happened, but I can't remember because I drank cough syrup and fell asleep on the couch watching the Oxygen channel. And now I am in my parents' house alone on Christmas Eve, and they're either at church or have been raptured and so I can't work to instill the spirit of Christmas compassion and kindness into them for the remaining days of 2006. Because as I am reading about all the people who believe in the power of Christmas to bring each of us together, I have to tell you that the one thing in which I truly have rock solid faith is humanity's ability to be kind even when we don't want to be. That it's in everyone, but that sometimes it's too difficult to maintain because the rest of the world is just so nasty and mean and it's easy to succumb to all that. I've noticed it especially in my family, where every act of kindness is tempered with some sort of "don't want to get too close to the world" sarcasm or aloofness in the end. So I'm going to keep asking them to just stop with the pretense, to just be nice, to accept Christmas gifts with a thank you and not a comment about what they don't like, to enjoy family members for what they are and not worry about how annoying they can be. To just finally relax and understand that it is okay to be happy. That it's never okay to be hateful. This is my one Christmas wish and I feel very strongly about it, drunk or no.

I guess, though, if they're really Raptured and gone, they wouldn't mind me drinking some more cough syrup and cranking up a little X-tina on the stereo.

Have you seen the commercial where a young woman at a family Christmas party flashes a diamond engagement ring and everyone in the room starts whispering "He went to Jared"?

If you haven't, you are clearly not watching a lot of TV which means you are a better person than I, and you are also missing out on some fairly egregious holiday efftardery.

The point of the commercials are that the husband, or the fiance, or the boyfriend or whatever cared enough about his partner and his relationship to make the trip to one of the sixty clearly uber-exclusive locations to purchase the exact right stone and setting to profess how pure and devoted his love really is. As the news of the gift ring circulates through the living room or the restaurant, the phrase "He went to JARED" is uttered with a different inflection for each person. The elderly gentleman in the cardigan vest says it with a touch of paternal pride, the bitter older sister turns to her own husband and remarks, "HE went to Jared", because the last time she got a diamond from her spouse was the Christmas when she found the lipstick stained phone number of their son Payton's KinderMusik teacher in the pocket of his trench coat. Even a ten year old girl gets in on the fun, and utters "He went to JARED..." with such wistfulness and hope in her face that the viewer is left with the sense that every little girl should grow up understanding that true love is only ever about four little words: clarity, cut, color, and carat.

Whenever these commercials are over, I usually have to unclench my fist around whatever napkin or blanket or cat I decided to grab and shake out of disgust. I couldn't put my finger on why I was so irritated for a while, other than that a company using a first name...and not even a POSSESSIVE first name...is just sort of stupid. If it were a first name that could reasonably be a last name too, that might be different. Kyle Jewelers. Mitchell Jewelers. They sound stately and refined. But "Jared"? Not even "Jared's"? That's like giving morons the world over the right to call their businesses things like McKayla Scrap Metal or Chad Fresh Halibut. It just doesn't seem right.

Anyway.

Where did this belief that every woman expects a diamond and every man expects a car or a hideously expensive piece of technology come from? When did it get perpetuated and why did advertisers decide to turn it into such a nasty business? I saw another commercial recently with a woman's world-weary voice informing us that "Every Christmas, you swear to not exchange gifts this year, but every Christmas he knows you really mean 'Please get me a diamond.' So every year he gets the diamond, and every year he hides it in his underwear drawer. And every year when he's gone out for stocking stuffers, you take it for a test drive."

Um...I feel like Santa Claus just stopped being real all over again.

I won't get into the self-righteous soapbox speech about how spending thousands of dollars on an eternity necklace or the perfect pair of studs just seems so wrong, because I know that somehow there's a trickle down effect and a jeweler is able to provide for his or her family because of your purchase, and they provide money to someone else and so forth. I get capitalism, and I get that these pieces aren't just ornaments, but also investments for some people. But seriously? Women are supposed to expect a thousand dollar piece of jewelry every year? And they have the right to get offended if it doesn't materialize under the tree next to the husband's belt sander and surround sound system?

I've been spending a lot of time doing some minor grief counseling for several eight and nine year olds who also found out that Santa Claus isn't real this year. The first time it happened I was completely taken off guard, and I shooed the girl out of my room and told her to ask her parents about it, even though the parents were the ones who accidentally let her find Santa's stash of presents. After that I spent an afternoon thinking pretty hard about it, and the best explanation I could offer them was that no...Santa Claus the person isn't a real live guy anymore. That there was a St. Nicholas but he probably wasn't really a portly man with rosacea and a luxurious beard. Even so, people all over the world dress up like all different kinds of Santas to help remember the good things he did, so that's why we see Santas at malls and parades. And so to abate the disappointment that inevitably follows I tell them to think of how every time they do see someone dressed up as a Santa, there is always a sense of happiness and generosity around them, and that it makes us want to pass that sense of goodness on to other people. So, that in effect we can all be Santa Clauses ourselves, even without the beard and the suit, because we can pass the spirit of Christmas on to other people. Sometimes I don't convince them, and sometimes the kid has confused Santa Claus with Jesus Christ and I've effectively told the child that God is Dead! (irate parental phone call to follow), but mostly the message gets through and the kid can go home and appreciate that his gifts were an act of love, and ultimately a remembrance of the compassion we all desperately need in our lives.

So I have to wonder, if we go to such lengths to protect the magic and the intimacy of the Christmas season for our children, why are we so callous about it in our own lives? Maybe it's all just a metaphor for what's wrong with so many relationships today...we've been socialized to believe that an adversarial partnership is not only acceptable, but expected. The doofus husband and the demanding wife will continue to butt heads until a precious gem or a piece of technology brings them momentarily together on December 25th. That hearts are captured by the man with the biggest bank balance, and that women can bargain their time, attention, even tolerance away for possessions.

Whatever the reason, that Jared commercial has really made me stop and evaluate how what I expect out of my holidays and even kind of how I can be a better partner the next time I get involved in a serious relationship.

At the very least, the next time I need to buy some piece of crap, mass market jewelry by a company that insists upon using a stupid name, I will remember those commercials and point my car straight toward a Kay instead.

Five Unique Items

I'm purloining this meme topic from Dr. Andy, who inspired me to browse through my neglected CD collection and wind down memory lane in the process.

Name a CD you own that no other friend does.


Since the majority of my CDs are school-related items, and I run the risk of everyone who also took a jazz class or a Stravinsky class or who spent weekends listening and evaluating to horn audition excerpts and idly wondering why they didn't have a social life also having these recordings, I have to eliminate 90% of my collection out of hand. My mind first turned to a CD I got when I was 13 by a band named Gretchen (self-described as "Pearl Jam meets Gin Blossoms meets Carly Simon") because I KNOW no one has it because the band never got signed and I might've seen their farewell performance in a coffee house in Rolla, Missouri when I was 14, but that might be cheating. I've ended up with a CD called NBC Celebrity Christmas, because I'm pretty sure no one else in the world felt it was necessary to spend ten dollars to hear the cast of "Just Shoot Me" sing "Sleigh Ride", but I got it because Stockard Channing was on it and so was a version of the Coventry Carol and that's my favorite. Plus, it's been on rotation on my stereo at some of my more memorable Christmases, including the one where my roommates topped our tree with a cut out Victoria's Secret angel and we posed, in our pajamas, for a house Christmas card with our holiday message written on Sharpie marker across my white wife beater t-shirt.

Name a book you own that no one else on your friends list does.

I'm going to go with Elizabeth I: Collected Works which not only was a pretty fascinating read, but also is useful as it marks the divider between my Books I am Not Embarrassed to Admit I Own and my Paperbacks That Are Either Hot Pink Or Have a High Heel or a Cocktail On The Cover.

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that no one else on your friends list does.

Hm. This might be the hardest one, because my DVD collection is pretty small. I'm going to say "Waiting for Guffman" because it just makes me beyond happy to watch and quote, and anyone else who understands...who really GETS why this movie is so exactly dead on and perfect in every way is my BF-4F4.

Name a place that you have visited that no one else on your friends list has.

Backstage at the Verizon Wireless (then just Sandstone) Ampitheatre. In 1996, for my
mom's 40th birthday, her friends took her to see a Monkees concert and they made me tag along. Since I was a fifteen year old girl with little or no vested interest in the Monkees I spent a lot of time sulking and pacing between the general admission seats and the little vendor area at the top. During one of my laps, I found a VIP pass on the ground and decided to be adventurous. I put it on, and walked backstage with such little attention or questioning it was as if Jesus himself had ordained me to be there. I lied to a roadie and told them I won a radio contest to be a "Roadie for the Day" and spent the rest of the evening moving instruments in and out of a bus, sitting on amplifiers with groupies and eating M&Ms from a small candy dish in the green room. Also passed out water bottles and sweat rags to the Monkees, which finally sort of made me lose my sense of bershon about the evening.


Name a piece of technology or any sort of tool you own that you think no one else on your friends list has.

Wow...I got nuthin'. I'm not much of a technophile, and my "tools" consist of a hammer, a screwdriver, and a set of ratchets for which I have absolutely no use. I do have an antique mixer my grandma passed down on me that I absolutely love. It's cumbersome and hard to clean and weighs like 60 lbs. but it also has 10 speeds and it works better than any three hundred dollar KitchenAid mixer I've seen. Cooking and baking is an extremely important ritual for me, because it's not only an act of love for the people I'm serving, but it's also basic..therapeutic in its simple logic and procedures. Anyway, I wax rhapsodic about this mixer because when I take the time to get it out and actually use it, it unfailingly gives me the perfect building blocks to put together something really wonderful.

Apparently my soulmate lives in Cleveland

I have a girlcrush. I googled something I can't remember anymore and found this blog.

Midwest Grrl

Such guilty happiness. So many pictures of shoes. Sigh.

Two weeks ago, before I caught tonsil leprosy for the second time in as many months, I attempted to be industrious and healthy by going to the gym at 5:00 am every morning. I hate being one of Those People for whom the cliche "Is there life before coffee?" is applicable but unfortunately I am That Person. Very much so. So the fact I was voluntarily exposing my retinas to fluorescent light before I have had the chance to take myself and my 18 oz. stainless steel travel mug full of Breakfast Blend to our happy place was kind of a major step for me.

When I'm at a gym I generally keep my head down and find a piece of cardio equipment in the row that's reasonably far away enough from everyone else's in the room so there would be very little chance of my spandex-clad ass being in the direct line of someone else's sight. I also like to be cloistered off because when "SexyBack" comes up in the queue on my iPod I get a little excited and start bouncing. Same thing with "Toxic". Shitty music just makes me ecstatic.

So when I trudged in two weeks ago and looked up at the profile of my roommate from freshman year of college, someonewhom I hadn't actually seen since the May of that year, I stopped short and considered walking right back out. Valerie, my freshman roommate. Eight years and the only perceivable change was she had replaced the ribbons that held back her ponytails with a standard-issue ponytail holder. When we were standing in the middle of the Tate Museum in London during our 10-day blink and you'll miss it tour of the UK, our English literature professor described Valerie as a modern-day Botticelli angel, and he was pretty much right. She was pure in both countenance and deed, and the girl read her Bible and watched "Seventh Heaven" with the same sort of focused zealotry that I devote to "Laguna Beach" or waiting for the moment when one of my cats falls off the back of the couch while they sleep. It's the little things, you know?

I can honestly say my major contribution to Valerie's life during our year together was managing to spill an entire jar of salsa on her grandma's homemade quilt and also breaking every non-drinking, non-smoking, non-carousing rule we solemnly agreed to follow when we met for our pre-freshman year pizza dinner at the Mazzio's in Butler, Missouri. I'm not sure if Valerie hated me or not because she was such a sweet girl and I don't think she'd ever say anything bad about anyone, but I can't imagine that she liked me all that much, especially when I'd stretch out her tiny, tiny shirts when we played dress up with each other's clothes. I decided to make a graceful exit out of her life, mostly for her sake, so my sophomore year I took a dorm mentor position that came with a single room and spent the rest of my tenure at that particular college breaking up with my boyfriend and being dour and listening to a lot of Aimee Mann.

So, back to the gym. Valerie and her husband were pumping away on treadmills a couple stations down from mine and every morning I saw her I envisioned the awkward convesersations that might ensue were I to approach and confirm, it was in fact her. I wondered if she'd even recognize me in my rather matronly new state, so I put the idea out of my mind and kept my head down as usual. I watched her kiss her husband on the cheek as she left and he stayed to hit the weights, and I wished her well...another name to write in my history book and wonder about eight years hence.

This evening after school I was in dire need of one sugar cookie with green icing and sprinkles so I ran into Wal-Mart to inspect their baked goods when I passed Valerie on the way out. The conversation we had was so completely nonchalant and so devoid of any sort of pretense or surprise that we actually WERE talking in a Wal-Mart in the town in which we had both been unknowingly co-existing for two years that I felt like we were both eighteen, sitting on our single beds and curling our hair, and discussing who'd tape "Buffy" and "Seventh Heaven" while we were gone to our respective sorority meetings. I wanted to ask about her husband and her job and all the things that had made her eight years older and if she ever wore hair ribbons and if she had ever looked me up to see if I was all right like I had done with her, but I didn't want to ruin the moment.

So she invited me to aerobics at the gym on Thursday nights. She called it Ladies' Night and laughed before she walked out the swishing doors. I went off in search of my sugar cookie and was glad that not all of my friends are relegated to the annals of my memory.

Growing Pains

I realized, over the course of the weekend, that I'm just the teensiest bit addicted to the world of Instant Messaging. When most of my friends graduated college, or transferred, or dropped out, or just moved on in some other way, we all turned to IM to stay in touch. But as the years progressed, their old circles of friends were replaced by new ones and chatting with someone was more of a means of catching up, rather than a vital, daily part of their social life.

Not so for me, I guess. After everyone moved away I turned to The Husband, and that was the end of the going out, seeing people...you know the rest. So in my world, the conversations that transpired in the little white boxes on my computer weren't a supplement to social interaction, it WAS my social interaction.

I thought, somehow, that being single again would suddenly usher in a fabulous new world of Sex and The City-esque friends and adventures. I guess I expected to wake up the day after J finally moved out to find a closet full of Chanel dresses and Manolos and a phone address book full of colorful girlfriends and boyfriends and we'd all raise hell and I could make up for the last four years by being carefree and wild and 26 going on 22 for at a little while.

But right...of course...everyone else is 26 going on 27 now, and I hadn't considered that. I laughed over Thanksgiving break when I left messages for a couple of friends to see if they were going to attend the semi-all town get together at one of our city's three bars and they returned with "Um...no one really goes out anymore." Four years. I had forgotten. They grew up and got dogs and mortgages and settled down and I guess I'm still waiting for God to call my number in that respect.

So anyway, I exist in an Internet social world, and I really don't like that at all. I figured out where all this slow-burning anger is coming from, too, when I had my epiphany about the Internet thing. The anger isn't isolated to the one friend who wrote the blog; I'm angry at everyone. I'm furious at the world, and I loathe myself the most for feeling that way. I expect my friends to say the right thing, to extend friendship and comfort and companionship to me when I don't really have much to give back in return. Right now, I'm not the kind of girl people want to be friends with, or men would want to want. I get that. I need to change, and I can't expect that change to happen by osmosis through the dim light of a computer monitor.

As a start, I've decided to delete my all my messengers as an experiment to see if the time and the expectations and the anger I wasted there could be converted into something positive in my real life (such as it is). Maybe I'll reorganize my house, or practice my horn more, or take up a hobby (although the last time I decided to give up the whole Internet cold turkey, I freaked out with major withdrawal and decided to crochet an afghan and I ended up with 129 dusty rose-colored fleurchamps in a tupperware container and no earthly idea how to connect them into a blanket until I got back on the Internet to research it and ended up staying for four hours chatting after I reloaded MSN and Yahoo). Maybe I'll just spend a week dusting my baseboards and decide that's all I really needed to accomplish with my little period of isolation. In any case, I'll be sure to blog every second of my withdrawal bugs and mini-nervous breakdowns and annoying things I realize are rattling around in my head when I don't have someone else to blather to anymore.

And of course, I would still love to hear from all of you by email. Or cell phone. Or blog comment. Or Christmas card. Or messenger pigeon. And if someone DOES break down and decides to get their skank on at the Echoes this Christmas, you know where to find me.

The Don and Rene Show.

I'm just about to leave and travel the fifty miles of prairie moonscape to my parents' house for the weekend. I've been spending a lot of time there, partly to visit my grandma as often as I can before the year's up, and partly because even though I'm completely into this journey of defining myself as an upwardly mobile, dynamic person who looks and acts her best at all times, it's still nice to know I have someplace to go where I can wear the same pair of sweatpants pants three days in a row and no will notice. Or, at least won't judge me outright for it.

I used to absolutely dread coming home, even though the comfort of being there always outweighed any burgeoning spark of independence I had during my college years. It seemed like every visit was another opportunity to disappoint my parents; we would have a painful discussion about yet another apron string that needed severing and then, given whichever adult privilege or responsibility I asked for, I would return home and fail spectacularly at it. My learning curve at being an adult is apparently a very steep one, second only probably to my learning curve regarding the correct tweezing of eyebrows or ironing dress pants.

Coming home during the marriage was another source of tension on all its own. My parents, naturally, were curious why I would spend weekends with them sans a husband, and my own stress from dealing with such a craptacular relationship combined with the exhaustion of hiding how bad it was from everyone made me, well, a humongous bitch. I took it out on my family, and since I wouldn't tell them why, the tensions were never resolved until I finally came out with it last February. The whole situation embedded a deep and bitter resentment in my mother, who didn't understand why everything couldn't just stop being broken...why I couldn't muscle up and fix everything that was wrong with my marriage. It put a small rift between my brother and me, because his senior year of high school--the one that was supposed to form the bedrock of stability and small-pond confidence he needed to take to college with him the next year--was shattered because his fragile big sister had just broken down and needed all the attention. And I think it even made things weird between me and my dad, because his daughter had not only failed at working hard enough to keep her marriage together, but since my husband's infidelity and all sorts of other weird things were involved, she had been embarrassed, too, and that's not something you ever imagine for your little girl when she's playing on your knee.

But now I think that since the aftermath of all of this is finally coming to an end, every member of my family is sort of faced with the strange opportunity of figuring out who they are. I guess that's the result of having so much alone time. My brother, who has completed half of his freshman year at Yale is finding new ways every day to become a superstar, a Captain of Industry, a Local Boy Makes Good. My parents--empty nesters, and realizing they had personalities before they devoted them to children--are figuring out things that will finally make them feel alive again. My dad wants to golf. My mom quit smoking and is currently a notorious Internet muckraker for our city politics. They're getting cruise literature in the mail. The other day they tried spices on their grilled chicken, and they lived to tell about it. Life, if not exotic, is at least good for Don and Rene.

And me...well, I guess my path is the whole reason this blog exists. My path involves figuring out why I feel so screwed up and then finding ways to fix it so when I'm in my fifties, I'll be able to send my kid in college a postcard of Puerto Vallarta from the cruiseship. And I guess part of the whole me-fixing process is just giving up on being so angry with the past, and realizing I'm really okay with my family. I even like them a lot.

Even if they do still think H'ville counts as the city.

Reconsideration, in 12-point.

Every morning I reserve a few blissful moments before staggering to the shower to sit and drink a glass of orange juice and focus my eyes on the scrolling words of my computer as I check my email and the little circuit of websites I visit regularly. Nothing important…I save the news and the sports scores for my plan time because I really haven’t found much about my job that requires actual planning yet. Maybe that’s something I should ask about at some point.

A couple days ago, one of the bloggers I read regularly—a guy I know in real life—wrote an exquisite entry about a beautiful girl he’s encountered at his school, how he’s utterly drawn to her, how he’s flummoxed by his behavior around her, and how part of this immense attraction is his desire to connect…to acknowledge how striking she is, and then to beg her forgiveness for an intrusion upon her insecurities and pain. It was poignant and raw, perfectly composed, and of an emotional depth that I find rare in the world.

So I shocked myself when my first reaction was to hurl an expletive at the screen and hit my fist on the keyboard…a futile cyber-substitute for slamming a door on the face of an offensive person.

My day was ruined after that, and I arrived at school already on a mission to be a holy terror. I yelled at my classes, which made me doubly mad because I never, ever raise my voice with kids. I slumped at the lunch table and scowled at the Wisterias, my disdain for them practically a blinking neon sign over my head as I slammed forkfuls of rice into my mouth and glared at their yogurt cups and Diet Cokes. I tried checking his blog again to see if maybe it was a fluke, an aberration of instinct, but I had the same reaction the second time around, so I stomped out of the building with my jaw clenched and burst into tears the moment I hit my car. I came home, pulled my comforter over my head and hid there for a few hours, afraid to subject anyone else to my toxic anger.

While I was ensconced in my down feather and cotton igloo, I tried to make some sense of the absolute rage that blog entry had inspired. I’m in the middle of reading this book about Buddhist meditation and health philosophy that says the emotions that pass in and out of us each day are only harmful if we ruminate over them (duh) and that in order to attain the sort of peace we struggle for in our lives, we should allow the emotions to run their course, acknowledge them, and move on. Unfortunately, how to actually DO the latter part of that philosophy is in Chapter 8 and I’m only on, like, Chapter 4 so I still feel like I have a license to pick apart and overanalyze every weird feeling I have. Ergo, I obsessed.

I had to rule a few things that weren’t the cause before I could really get to the root of the problem. Was I offended by the quality of his writing? Absolutely not. In the world of amateur blogging, this one is definitely worth the bandwidth. Did I have some completely out-of-the-blue, latent feelings for this guy and so I was hurt by his florid writing about another girl? Nope. We have an easy acquaintanceship based around good discussions over Very Important Things and some not so important things, and if I had to pigeonhole our friendship, he would’ve been filed away in the “Buddy” section, along with my college housemates and Daryl, the guy who worked in electronics at Wal-Mart with me this summer.

What I finally figured out, after three hours of bedroom navel gazing, was that the writer essentially hit upon a subject that is basically my Achilles’ Heel: the subjects of physical attraction and the human need to be wanted.

I have been, during the days in which I wasn't able to bring myself to blog, taking yet another round of personal inventory following a conversation with one of my best friends. He declared me "overnice" and said he noticed I got pushed around a lot and didn't say much back in return. One morning...I think the morning before my last round of strep started simmering in the hot, steamy netherpoints of my tonsular region...I woke up and decided I was done being nice. Or at least done being so nice that I was afraid to speak my mind. So I started telling people things that needed to be said, and I felt better with every one.

So when I got angry by this post, I instantly decided I needed to talk about it so I could get over it and feel better, and you could understand maybe that I DO do more things than just smile and get out of people's way. When I realized this, my writer’s block was broken and I wrote. I wrote for two straight hours, filled up three and a half pages of a Word document, and even snuck it in in an attachment to my school email so I could write more during my plan time. And when I sat back, ready to copy and paste my mini-manifesto into the entry-starved white box on my Blogger homepage, I realized that none of this…absolutely none of it at all really resolved the situation. It didn’t help me feel better, and I decided that hashing out exactly why I felt such hostility for a friendly acquaintance who couldn’t even possibly know he had done anything wrong—who DIDN’T do anything wrong other than unwittingly write really coherently about something at which I’m an utter failure—would just plunge us both into a level of awkwardness into which even I would not dare go. I thought I would derive some sort of sweeping life lesson out of my printed screed…that if I could make my own feelings about the subject as tangible as his, then somehow saying the potentially hurtful things I wanted to say would’ve been acceptable.

So as I watched two of the three pages of words being consumed by my backspace button, I realized the inherent lesson in all of it was that sometimes actually, things are just better left unsaid.