Lay it on me

An interesting look at why people kiss.

If he can keep a sense of humor, anyone can

Seen on a sign held by a panhandler near the Alewife interchange during this morning's commute:

"Need $$ for LSD and guns"

Do not underestimate the cats

Last month, Lunchboy and I had dinner with my good friend L and during the meal we got to talking about introductions—how important or unimportant they are, how they can be uncomfortable, the role they play in life and relationships.

There’s the friend introductions, the parental introductions and maybe, if you’re lucky, the grandparental introductions.

But one thing everyone forgets to take into account are the pet introductions. If you’re a pet parent, having your baby meet your SO’s baby is a BIG DEAL. I mean, what do you do if they don’t hit it off? It’s not like you can sit them down and say, “Just give him/her a chance. They’re a good person, I promise.”

Well, if you’re me you can still say that, but there’s no guarantee that your pet will understand. If I recall correctly, Scully listened and then decided it was time to have a snack. You could fit her attention span inside a pistachio nut.

Since my lovely roommate is having her horde of drunken friends over to our place on Saturday night, Lunchboy was kind enough to offer a safe haven for both me and my put-upon kitty. But we thought it would be smart to introduce Scully to his two cats before having a full-on feline pajama party. We did a ton of research on how to introduce cats without inducing hissing, spitting, wall-climbing fits of wigging out, but somehow all our research fell by the wayside. Instead of keeping them separated, we just plopped Scully’s carrier in the middle of his living room, unzipped the front and hoped for the best.

For future reference, NOT a good plan of attack.

Scully has moved around so much and met so many strange cats in her travel adventures that almost nothing phases her anymore. Lunchboy’s cats are sisters and they’ve never met another cat before. At first they were nonchalant, but once they figured out that another feline had materialized in the midst of their territory, they proceeded to flip out in gold medal-winning fashion. Griffin crouched low to the ground and shadowed Scully as she explored the house, growling and hissing whenever Scully came too close. Cringer started meowing and hissing as soon as Scully went into the bedroom, and still hasn’t stopped. Eventually, Scully flopped on the living room floor and took it easy. She didn’t go after Griffin & Cringer’s food or water, and she stayed out of the bedroom after Cringer let her know that wasn’t cool. She was a champ.

I took Scully home after about a half hour, but Lunchboy’s cats are still upset. Griffin is back to her friendly, curious self but Cringer is still traumatized. Whenever Griffin comes hear her, she starts hissing and growling and then she hides under the bed. It’s like she doesn’t recognize her sister anymore. Lunchboy is beside himself. Needless to say, we scrapped the overnight kitty stay.

On a more pleasant note, I took LB to meet my parents last night. We were all tired after a long weekend, but it went well. The evening seemed fairly tension-free. We ate a lovely dinner of grilled swordfish and steak on my parent’s back porch, and watched the resident blue heron poke around the pond behind the house. After the kitty introduction, everything else feels easy. How fucked up is that?

It ain't easy being a woman

They say time heals all wounds and when it comes to a bikini wax, they aren’t kidding.

No sane woman would subject herself to such a procedure more than once unless she’s given enough time to forget about the pain and humiliation of the previous month’s waxing. Somehow, three or four weeks is just long enough for the mental scarring to fade, never mind the physical side effects, so that you can venture back to the spa and undergo what is likely the most humbling of aesthetic augmentations.

With a beach day looming on the horizon and the knowledge that days of shaving just weren’t going to cut it (no pun intended), I gathered my strength and my sense of optimism and headed off the day spa down the street. Somehow I’d managed to banish the memory of a Brazilian bikini wax I got as a lark a couple of years ago, when my ex-best friend talked me into trying it after she’d read one too many copies of Glamour. All I remember is that I paid $75 to have a strange woman up-end me like a baby that needs a diaper change and inflict the worst pain of my life on my private parts. Thankfully, I’ve blocked the pain out. Unfortunately, even though I didn’t opt for the Brazilian option, this time wasn’t much better.

There’s nothing fun about a bikini wax. First, there’s the lack of privacy. You’re spreading your legs for a complete stranger, someone who probably sees upwards of 10 hoohas a day and yet lacks the practiced, clinical approach of an ob/gyn. And it’s not just the leg spreading, it’s the leg adjustment—the technician lifts you and twists your legs around so she can get a nice, clean line and that means you’re doing more contortions than the Kama Sutra but without the pleasant association. In order to get that clean line, the technician also uses her hands to lift, push and spread parts of the anatomy that only myself, my doctor and my boyfriend are allowed to touch. You are On Display and there’s no curling up to conceal yourself on account of the Hot Wax. Which is in places that Hot Wax should not be. Ever. And then it gets ripped off, leaving you gasping in pain and seeing stars in the air.

While I was lying on the table at the spa on Friday, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell the technician was thinking. How did I compare to the other girls she waxed that day? Was she as grossed out and embarrassed by the whole thing as I was? Did she think cotton Hanes Her Ways were ridiculous for a 30-year old woman?

The things this woman must see.

She kept talking about how much easier it would be next time, and all I could do was think, “I’ll do whatever it takes to make the pain STOP. What makes you think there’s going to be a NEXT TIME???”

Clearly, I cave easily in torture situations.

In case you wondered

Someone finally created a list of 40 things that only ever happen in the movies.

I would like to add the following:

--Broken hearts always mend within a few days, and best friends are always willing to sit up all night handing out tissues.

--People earn entire degrees without doing an ounce of visible work.

--Men and women hold down high-powered jobs without adhering to any kind of schedule.

Got any more?

A tangled web we weave

Workplace romances are now being bound by legal agreements to prevent sexual harassment lawsuits.

Both Lunchboy and I feel pretty strongly about maintaining a professional demeanor in the office. Other than sneaking a few kisses in the stairwell when we first started dating officially, we usually do our utmost to behave as if we don't know each other in a personal capacity when we're in the office together. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I'd like to think romance isn't something to be legislated, regardless of where it blooms.

Under the spell of the Goblin King

The Jim Henson Company is turning 25, and in an homage to the great Muppet master, the Brattle Theater is showing a double feature of two of Henson's classic fantasy movies: Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.

Skeksis! Oubliettes! The Bog of Eternal Stench! Jennifer Connelly in her first leading role! I'm so there.

No way to avoid the "beam him up"

In a sad development, James Doohan, who played Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek, died today. I met him once at a book signing when I was little. He was very nice for a man who had spent many hours at a table dealing with Trekkies. But apparently he couldn't take anymore, Cap'n.

He will be missed.

Dog days

Maybe it’s not the best idea to do hot yoga when it’s ridiculously, brain-numbingly hot outside. Last night I went to my normal Monday evening class at Baptiste, determined to bull through the heat and ignore the fact that I was dripping sweat before the class even began. After 60 minutes, when I’d almost passed out after every major inversion and felt so enervated that I could barely lift my arms, I rolled up my mat and admitted defeat. I felt like a wuss. Then I noticed how many other people were rolling up their mats or taking extended breaks in the foyer outside the studio just to get some air. Sweat may be cleansing and all, but not right now.

The heat and accompanying humidity are putting everyone in a bad mood. Even with air conditioning, it’s difficult to sleep. Poor Scully just lies on the floor and cries. After yoga last night, I went to Lunchboy’s house and realized that I just wanted to sit on the couch and drink cool beverages. No talking. No interaction. Just sitting and hydrating. Cranky Moxie.

Burning down the house

This morning I received the following email from my beloved roommate. No warning, no precursor, no nothing. I should have known better than to read it first thing on a Monday:

A Has Sent You an Evite!
A’s Birthday Explosion

“i'm turning 25 and deserve a big bash. you all are invited to help me cause one. come over and draw on my walls, dance to bad italian techno, play cheesy party games, eat too much sugar, drink icy drinks, and celebrate the fact that we're all supposed to be mature by the time we're 25, and yet...”

If she wants to cause a big bash, this is a great way for her to get bashed over the head. Though she and I have been home at the same time roughly twice in the past week, at no point did she share with me the idea of throwing a party for about 30 people in our apartment. Hyperventilating, I scrolled through the rest of my email and found a message from her titled, “oops!”

“so i just sent out my birthday party invite... without asking you about the date etc. first. sorry! you're on the list, but obviously the fact that there might be a dozen plus people laughing it up and carousing in our place should have your approval. is sat. the 30th ok for this for you? btw, the drawing on the walls part refers to tacking up pieces of giant butcher paper on the walls and putting out buckets of crayons, inviting people to leave their mark. i'll choose one of my bedroom walls in case of overzealous cartooners. (:”

Where to start? Is the 30th okay for this for me?? How about NEVER? The wisdom—or lack thereof—of drawing on the walls, butcher paper aside? The complete lack of consideration? The inability to use capital letters? No matter what I say to her, she’s not going to NOT throw this party. Which means that Scully and I need to make ourselves scarce, because while it’s easy enough for me to escape to Lunchboy’s place for the night, I refuse to leave my kitty to be terrorized by immature, drunken fools.

What really gets me is how she never even considered how this could be inconvenient. How is she going to keep her guests in the common area and out of my room? Why should I have to feel like I need to protect my living space??? I love my apartment but I no longer love living there, and it’s all my fault for inviting A her to live with me in the first place. She's like a vampire. I invited her into my house and now she's sucking all the life out of the place. Plus, she reeks.

It's not the way it sounds

I know that when Ben Lee sings "Catch My Disease, " he means he wants his lady friend to fall in love with him, too, because love is a disease. He means it in a playfully romantic kind of way. But really it sounds like he's trying to spread the clap.

A little perspective

Thanks to Carmen for cherry-picking this off NPR:

On the problem of feeling overwhelmed by your life and guilty about not doing more with it RIGHT NOW : "High performance doesn't come from crisis. It comes from the kind of focus that crisis forces you to have.....It's often when when we're not in an obvious crisis [anymore] that we're in the deepest crisis."

This is nice to hear. Whenever things are crazy, I can't wait for them to calm down. But when they're calm, I obsess about whether I should be planting trees in the rainforest or helping baby seals in Canada rather than plugging in to corporate America.

Finger lickin' good

Suffering my first Kentucky Fried Chicken hangover. By that I mean it's the first time I've ever eaten there, not the first time it's ever made my stomach do loop de loops. Usually I stay away from the fast food, but last night a bunch of us geeked out for the season premiere of Battlestar and my vote for vaguely healthy food was overridden in favor of the Colonel. Urp. Two biscuits, two pieces of chicken, a crapload of cole slaw and mashed potatoes later, my innards are staging something like a military coup.

Battlestar was eh. Not enough Starbuck and too many separate plotlines going on in the name of starting off the second season with a bang. Cylon babies everywhere!!

Moving on up (but not in)

A line from the iconic 80s movie About Last Night that sums up the latest doings with Lunchboy:

"A drawer????? A whole DRAWER??? You mean, I get a drawer all to myself???"

I think I'm ready to commit to clothes. We've already done the toiletries and groceries. And it does get annoying when you realize you packed a white T-shirt but no bra, and your bra is miles away in your own apartment.

Cloudtastic

I was a bit of a pseudo-science freak in college. By pseudo, I mean I got through a year and a half of a geology major before figuring out that my brain wasn’t built to handle mineralogy, so I switched to English. But I still liked science, so I took a bunch of atmospheric science classes and got a job as an editorial assistant for the head of the Science, Technology & Society department. Atmospheric science is really cool. I fell in love with cloud formations and they are still something I have fun scoping out. So when I saw these pictures of mammatus clouds online, I had to share. These clouds are both beautiful and slightly eerie—for a while, I had dreams in which mammatus clouds were descending from the sky and threatening to suffocate me.

I cannot be alone in my geekitude.

Here are some examples of other neato cloud formations.

UPDATE: Mr. Daisey has even COOLER pictures of mammatus clouds!!!

The bottom 10

Okay, Zeke. I had no idea you held such vast power in your hands, what with the naming of the names in Strongbad emails. I'm so flattered :) It almost makes up for the time I had to clean up your puke--I just thank my lucky stars it wasn't off your keyboard.

Hogwarts hell

Harry haters of the world, unite!

Geese aplenty

My office complex is overrun with Canada geese. We humans may think we’ve got the superior intellect or the advantage of technology, but really we are at the mercy of the geese. They have the run of the place and they rule with little, webby iron fists.

Feet, fists, whathaveyou.

These geese are cute and they are not afraid to use their cuteness to assert their needs. Our geese dictate traffic patterns, lawn privileges, picnic bench usage and sidewalk space. They roam in large flocks and think nothing of creating their own crosswalks so they can get from pond to reservoir to lawn.

Two months ago, the geese had babies and everyone in all three of the office complexes on this street gave way to collective gosling worship. Except for the speed freaks, who thought nothing of plowing through the geese while the flock was crossing the street, leaving extremely disturbing brownish-yellow gosling-shaped messes on the road. Who hits goslings?!?!?!

That said, the geese have all access to the office complexes under tight control. Every day, there’s an impromptu traffic jam caused by a goose family making their way to their next meal. The mother geese herd the goslings around like counselors leading groups of young campers across the street, hand in hand. The mommy geese look both ways and shoo the goslings along whenever there’s a break in traffic—they totally know what’s up: Cars bad—geese good. Even when I’ve just dealt with a slow commute on 95 and am trying to get to work by 9am, I find it hard to get annoyed with the geese as they waddle across the road. Still, people race by the flocks as they emerge from the reservoir so they don’t get stuck while Junior crosses the pavement. And when the traffic gets really backed up, I’ve seen very respectable people dressed in professional clothing get out of their car and wave their arms around to scare the geese off the road.

Still, today there was a dead adult goose by the side of the road. Apparently the cubicle warriors are losing patience. It’s a sad thing.

Keep it to yourself

Last night my roommate informed me that she had quit her summer job because “it wasn’t doing it” for her. Also, she wants to take a multi-week trip to the west coast with her skanky boyfriend, and it’s hard to take off for 14 days when you have a thing like job holding you down.

“Can you afford to do that?” I asked, visions of unpaid rent dancing in my head.

“Oh, yeah. My teaching job pays through the summer. This was just for fun and extra cash.”

Whew.

So now, no roommate for the last half of August!!!! This is especially pleasing after this morning, when she AND her skanky boyfriend decided to shower together right when I needed the bathroom to get ready for….work. You know, that job thing she finds so inconvenient. The BF is at our house almost every night now. HE should be paying rent, and he should certainly not be taking up the bathroom when it’s needed by people who ARE paying rent, namely me.

I really, really don’t need them showering together when I’m home. I mean, we’re all adults here but come on—a little decorum, please. Just say no to naked skankiness. It’s enough that A has plastered the kitchen calendar with the reminder stickers from her birth control pills, so now everyone who visits our house knows what her uterus is up to.

Home sweet home

Arts & Crafts bungalows are truly magical spaces, and this is a beautiful tribute to the sense of family they inspire.

Sort of separately, the LA Times is starting an occasional series on residential architecture in Southern California.

Hey, it's that guy

It’s been a long time coming, but today the NYT does a profile of Jeremy Piven and gives the man his due.

Let me just say that while Mr. Piven deserves every ounce of praise for his brilliant—and dead-on--performance as bootlicking agent Ari Gold on Entourage, I have been a fan of his since One Crazy Summer, back in the day. He is the ultimate supporting best male buddy, the guy who plays crazy fun frat boy like no one else. Who else can utter biting witticisms under his breath with perfect comic timing like he does? When Mr. Piven’s face pops up on a show or in a movie, you know he’s going to make the project better. He and John Cusack are the ultimate comic foils for each other, as demonstrated in One Crazy Summer, Grosse Point Blank, Serendipity, Say Anything and The Grifters (ok that's not comedy). He's also the voice of Elongated Man on Justice League.

Am I slightly obsessed? Yes, and here’s why. Not only is Mr. Piven cute and ubiquitous, he’s actually talented. I tried to recognize this fact 6 or 7 years ago by submitting a “Hey! It’s that guy!” piece on him to what was then Hissyfit but is now Fametracker. Wing Chun turned it down in favor of a piece on fucking Christine Baranski, and then she ran something on Jeremy Piven a few months later that was written by someone else. TWOP and Fametracker might be endless goldmines of cultural snark, but I am forever bitter toward Wing Chun because of her oversight.

BTW--the NYT article says that "some viewers complained that "Entourage," which focuses on a movie star and the hometown friends who mooch off him, was fake-insidery, inaccurate about Hollywood or so full of private jokes that only its producers (including the creator Doug Ellin and the actor Mark Wahlberg) could think it was funny. "

Anyone who's ever lived in LA (or lived in California and had friends in LA) can tell you that the reason Entourage is so good is because it SKEWERS the entertainment scene in the most stingingly accurate way possible.

UPDATE: Apparently Defamer thinks that Virginia Heffernan went a little overboard with her Piven worship. I say suck it up, bitches.

Starry eyed

On tonight's episode of "Dancing with the Stars," they showed a lovely friendship-building montage with John O'Hurley racing up.......the Santa Monica Stairs!!!!!!!!!!

Really, it's doesn't take much to make me happy.

Just because

National Geographic Traveler published its list of the top 30 things to do when visiting Los Angeles.

Get a clue

As I was rushing to get ready for work this morning, I opened the refrigerator door to grab some yogurt and noticed that:

A. the fridge light was out and;
B. everything in the fridge was lukewarm

Clearly, there had been no power to the fridge for a few hours at least. A and her skanky boyfriend (who is now growing facial hair, all the better to make him more skanky) were banging around in the kitchen until almost midnight last night, so I asked the boyfriend if he knew what had happened. No, he did not. When Alli emerged from the bathroom, where she had gone right when I needed to dry my hair so I could leave for work on time, I said, “Hey, did you notice that the fridge isn’t working?”

“Oh, yeah. I did notice that,” she said. And then she LAUGHED. Clearly she had noticed that the fridge was no longer chilling our newly purchased groceries and it just never occurred to her that this situation might not remedy itself without any effort on her behalf.

“Well, it needs to be fixed or all the food will go bad. I’ll call the landlord, unless you called him already.”

“Oh, no—I didn’t call him. I wasn’t sure what the problem was.”

Well, THAT’S WHY WE CALL THE LANDLORD!!!!!!!

If I hadn’t had to leave for work, I would have gotten into it with her, but I think her skanky boyfriend could tell that my head was about to rotate 360 degrees on my shoulders.

There are days when things are fine, and then there are days when I wonder if I can make it through a year of living with this girl.

Things that make you go hmmmmm

Many thanks to Mr. Daisey for this, the history of the vibrator.

The list

Everyone's got one--a celebrity sex list, that is. The people you can sleep with in a completely theoretical sense without getting busted. Today Lunchboy, his friend D and I threw around a football and discussed who was on ours. Barring a few surprises (Beyonce? Can you tell I don't watch enough MTV...) it was just good fun.

Moxie's List:

Matt Damon
Clive Owen
Brad Pitt (cliched but true-especially after seeing Mr. & Mrs. Smith)
Spike
Jason Statham
Ralph & Joseph Fiennes
Jeremy Piven (can't explain it but there it is)
Val Kilmer (only in Top Gun, Real Genius and Willow)

UPDATE:
Okay, okay--there were girls on the list. I took them down but now I'm putting them back up...

Angelina (scary but come on)
Rachel Weisz
Kate Winslet
Jennifer Connelly

Sometimes my drugs, they taste like home to me

Growing up, I was a love-o-holic and a love-o-phobe all at the same time. I couldn't stand to be physically affectionate with my family, but I plastered my walls with pages torn out of Teen Beat, Bop and 16. I couldn't wait to fall in love, even though I couldn't allow myself to be loved by the people who loved me most. My ex-best friend couldn't be bothered with boys--her walls were covered with pictures of fighter planes. She couldn't wait to be competent and settled in the world. But me, I just wanted to connect with someone, whether through daydreams or kissing photos on the wall. It's why I am unembarrassed about my New Kids On the Block obsession during middle school. I loved Joey McIntyre--there it is. Judge me if you must. But in my head, I was dreaming up future families, adventures to be taken, love to be had. The force of my imagination was audible--you could hear it in the shrillness of my screams at the NKOTB concerts I attended, all three of them.

That was the thing, though. It was always only in my head. My romantic notions had no basis in reality because the real thing seemed so overwhelming. But of course things were different when it came to actual boys. In classically female fashion, I assumed that the boys wanted the same things that I did--romance and drama--and so I steamrolled my crushes without meaning to. They slipped notes into my locker--I wanted to go out to a movie. They held my hand--I wanted to be making out. Maybe my problem was that I should have gone for older men from the start. But the result was that I scared all the boys away with the intensity of my yearning for romance. When I got into high school, the boys started being a little more enthusiastic about making out, but they still had so many oats to sow. I always held on way past the expiration date of even those short high school flings, and it meant that my heart got broken again and again. The desire to be part of a couple always overrode my common sense.

Then the serious relationships started--first with Mike during college, then J right after college, and immediately after, with Glenn--and I still let my nesting instincts take the forefront. I was in love with love. I couldn't wait to start planning my life with a partner. I wanted to introduce my boyfriends to my friends and parents immediately if not sooner. I always said the L word first and, in the end, it always bit me in the ass. My enthusiasm blinded me to reality. When problems surfaced in the relationships, I'd work and work to fix things, to change myself, to make myself easier to be with, when what I really should have done was turn on my heel and walk out the door. So the relationships always ended, leaving me in tears, wondering how I didn't see it coming sooner. I looked around me at my friends' relationships and wondered how they could be so healthy about things. How did they do it?

Somehow I've done an internal 180. Call it growing up, wising up, being whole in myself, whathaveyou. I honestly don't know. But whatever it is, it has helped make everything with Lunchboy happen in a timely, organic, healthy way (god, it sounds like I'm talking about produce at Whole Foods). I'm not even sure how or whether to articulate it. Carmen summed it up well by saying that every step with Lunchboy has been a pleasant surprise. It has.

Part of it is that neither of us went into this with a ton of expectations or needs. For the first time, I have had no desire to try and predict where things are going. Or to label anything according to the way other people do it. The friend introductions are happening slowly, and I'm still not ready for him to meet my family. It took me weeks to be okay with using the term, "boyfriend," rather than just calling him, "the guy I'm dating."

When I first realized I was falling in love with him, though, I told myself I was imagining things. I fought it and rationalized it and refused to be swept away. But then there it was, the love, warm in my solar plexus like an internal hug, waiting to be articulated. It hung in the air between us, unspoken, braced by fear. For a whole weekend, the words sat on the tip of my tongue, filling my mouth so that I had to bite my cheeks to keep from saying them. It just seemed so soon. When you say the L word, it changes everything. Were we ready for that? Was it for real?

Eventually we broke the silence and when we finally said it, the words felt so natural that it was almost anti-climactic. And it changed nothing. Rather than define our perception of the relationship--like, what's the next step?--it felt more like we were establishing a foundation on which we can build whatever we want. Rather than trumpet it to each other all the time, we don't say it that often and that is just fine with me. Now I know that love is a gift and not a guarantee. I don't want grand romance and drama. I want reality and whatever ends up coming down the road.

It's official

Pulling a Moxie = supergluing your fingers together.

Just say no

Please, guys. Trust me, women don't want to see this. Even if you're in superb shape, subtlety works twice as well.

Planetary confusion

Men are disappointing me.

I’m not talking about my father, my guy friends or Lunchboy. I’m talking about Men, as represented in a book I recently picked up in the hopes of gaining a greater understanding of how the opposite sex deals with life.

Gender relations are usually pretty fascinating as a topic of research, but so far this book is falling flat. Some of the essays are funny and some of them are sad, but they all have a few overriding themes. For the most part, the authors are all male freelance writers married to ambitious, upwardly mobile women who have born them a child or two. The wives are (lovingly) labeled as strong, independent feminists who neither want nor require that their husbands support them in any way. The arrangement seems to work out for the authors, who all seem to be house husbands who don’t do much around the house and are pretty proud of that fact, but not for the wives, who are busy working, running the household and taking care of the children.

Not surprisingly, the guys all write about how their marriages don’t quite have the sexual luster that they used to, because their wives are too busy and too exhausted to put out regularly.

So far I want to tell them all to get a job, do the dishes and stop whining to their wives about sex. Rather than gain a greater understanding of the opposite sex, I have learned the following: Don't marry a freelance writer.

To be completely fair, I also bought the book's female counterpart, which I haven't read yet. I suspect many of the essays are by the wives of those male freelance writers—or by female freelance writers whose husbands don’t do anything around the house, fulfill few if any of their needs and demand sex all the time. I hope I am wrong about this.

Hot hot heat

Boston's been hot as an oven the past few days and I am soaking up the heat like a sponge. Even though I'm a New Englander, I'm bewildered by the way Bostonians complain bitterly about the cold winters and then complain equally bitterly about the hot, humid summers. What are you waiting for, the 5 days of spring and the two weeks of fall? If you don't like the dominant seasons, move elsewhere.

That said, the heat made it really easy to accept Gimpadelic's invitation up to his family's house in northern New Hampshire this weekend. His house, perched on a hillside, is one of the most relaxing places in the world. His family was smart enough to buy up a bunch of real estate there at the turn of the century, and three generations of Gimps have spent summers, falls and the occasional frigid winter weekend up on the hill, watching the birds migrate and the White Mountains change with the seasons. His grandmother had her appendix out on the dining room table. Every corner of the house is full of memories, from old books and the first trout his dad and uncle caught in the lake, to well-loved linens and antique boardgames. Gimp's been kind enough to invite our group of college friends up once or twice a year. The house's logbook is now full of funny stories and amazing bird, bear and blueberry sightings. It's the kind of place where it's not hard to watch whole days go by without moving from the porch/couch/hammock and those days are some of the best ever.

Lunchboy and I drove up on Saturday. I wanted him to see the place because I have so many happy memories there, and because Gimp is one of my two best friends. We hung out on the porch and tried to see Mt. Washington through the haze. Then we jumped in the lake, grilled some chicken on the back deck, drank ourselves some wine and played a game of Scrabble. Sunday was more of the same. We banged out a hike on Blacksnout despite the oppressive bug infestation and then went for another swim in the lake.

Damn you, Gimp, for playing me the Brazilian Girls because now all I can hear in my head is "pussy pussy pussy marijuana" and I can't sing that out loud!!!!!!

My dad is still home in bed, and I called him every day to check up on him. He is sounding healthier and more energetic every day. He's meeting with his doctor to go over the pathology report from his surgery on Thursday and we'll know more then about whether he'll need further treatment. It's a good sign that he's getting sick of talking about the whole thing.

Just desserts

After yet another weekend of apartment squalor and the sink piled high with filthy dishes, I got a panicked phone call from A last night. The sink was overflowing, she said. Did I have the number for the landlord?

It's impossible to overstate how glad I was to be at Lunchboy's house.

She must have called the landlord because when I came home from work today, there were two plumbers sitting at the kitchen table and parts of the sink were strewn all over the kitchen. I noticed a few baking pans tucked strategically under the sink--she must have tried to catch the overflow with clean dishes.

"What do you think caused the backup?" I asked the plumbers.

"Not sure yet, but it's probably food-related," one of them said.

I went to yoga and when I got back, A was sprawled on the couch.

"What did the plumber say was wrong with the sink?" I asked.

"They said it was rice," she replied. "But I don't believe them. I think it must have been someone above or below us that backed it up."

Right. Because the people above and below us let their dirty dishes accumulate until the sink resembles a Mt. Everest of filth. God knows what went down that drain but I'm waiting to see if she bothers to wash the floor after letting nasty water spill everywhere.

The all-clear

Seeing a parent in the hospital is a profoundly disturbing, deeply upsetting experience. Even if they're there for something minor, the combination of the flimsy gown, the sense of mortality and the odor of industrial cleaner hits you right in the gut. Or at least it hits me there, especially when the parent in question is my dad. Dads are meant to be pillars of strength, banishers of closet monsters, mowers of lawns and a permanent set of shoulders on which to ride. They're not supposed to be pale and wan in a hospital bed with a drain coming out of their side.

My dad's surgery went well. His doctors won't know for another few days whether the cancer spread beyond his prostate, but so far they're optimistic. When I saw him yesterday, only a few hours after he'd shaken off the anaesthetic, he was pestering the floor nurses for ice chips and pain meds, and insisting that he had to get up and walk around.

For the record, three phrases I never want to hear from my dad: Kegel exercises, catheter bag and bowel function. From the doctor, maybe, but not from him. TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

They're sending him home tomorrow so he can stop bossing the nurses around (or at least that's my theory). He's determined to make sure he doesn't have to utter the word "cancer" again, and I can only hope he's right.

Alternatives to the real estate market

I love this idea. But I'm not sure how it would work in cities where the weather is as vengeful and unpredictable as Boston. Also, I need to understand the bathroom situation a bit better.

What the world needs

Is plenty of Moxie. Which is why everyone should head to the annual Moxie Festival in Lisbon, Maine, home of the Moxie Museum. There'll be a Moxie-chugging contest!

From the festival web site:

Predating Coca-Cola, Moxie had its beginnings in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1886, where it was originally billed as "Moxie Nerve Food" and was thought to have medicinal capabilities.

On the original label of an early Moxie bottle, the elixir made claims to "...recover brain and nervous exhaustion; loss of imbecility and helplessness. It has recovered paralysis, softening of the brain…"

Moxie was hyped as more than your average tonic. The Moxie Co. was able to latch onto the events of the time to promote the drink which eventually outsold Coca Cola.

One interesting by-product of The Company's brilliant marketing campaigns is the abundance of memorabilia and collectibles that have remained.

Many professional collectors say Moxie collectibles are superior to other better known products in quality and as possible investments. Secondly, the popularity of the soft drink led to "Moxie the beverage becoming moxie, the descriptive word for pep, energy, and a special spirit." [From The Moxie Encyclopedia; Q. David Bowers]

It's good to know how scientists are spending their summer

More breaking news on the Big O. Now scientists have tried to prove the startling, revolutionary, completely novel idea that women's orgasms are connected to their brain function.

You think?

Weekend weirdness

Next week my father is having surgery to remove a cancerous prostate and I've managed to not think about the operation for the most part, until it finally hit me: My dad is sick and he'll never be the same after this operation. Even if they get all the cancer (which they better), his daily routine, his bodily functions, his ability to behave like an adult man is going to be irreparably altered. And if they don't get all the cancer out, he could get even sicker. My relationship with my dad has changed so much over the years. I used to be a huge daddy's girl but once I grew up, some of his personality traits started driving me nuts and I pushed him away for a long time. He was wonderful last summer, though his tendencies toward theatricality and litigiousness shone through every so often. Still, he's my dad. He loves me to death and I love him, and I can't wrap my mind around what life would be like if he weren't around anymore.

On a more superficial note, this weekend is my not-wedding anniversary. My shrink's been asking me for weeks if the date bothered me and for the longest time it didn't, but then it got me down. And that just made me mad--there's nothing to be down about!! Life is so much better without Glenn. I thank god that I didn't marry him. I'm blessed with amazing friends, a close-knit family, a great job and a good life. Somehow I found my way to a new relationship that, while new, is going well. It makes me so angry that the past can still kick me in the gut. I spent a year getting over that experience and I am tired of feeling pain because of it. So this weekend is celebratory for me. It's just a date, just a day, but it's a day that is triumphant for me. At least I'll try to make it triumphant. In a lot of ways, it doesn't mean anything at all.

Nose shock

When my roommate took off for her 5-day sojourn in Toronto, she left me with her stinky cat without ever asking if I would mind taking care of him. There are many things I can deal with and caring for cats is one of them. I'm a certified cat lady. But today, when Lunchboy and I came back to the apartment, the stench was palpable and overwhelming--and the roommate isn't even here! After we both recoiled and wrinkled our noses, I went in search of the smell's source. Turns out Clyde, angry at being left alone with a box full of recycled peanuts, decided to knock his whole litter box onto the floor of A's room, scattering nasty stuff EVERYWHERE. Then he rolled in the mess and tracked nasty recycled peanut dust through the whole apartment, all over the couch and into the kitchen. It was beyond vile. I almost lost it--why should I have to clean up after her stupid, messy, smelly cat and why should she and the stupid, smelly cat get to ruin the entire place? Seeing that I was close to meltdown, Lunchboy stepped in and took charge. He set up a fan in the living room to suck out all the nasty air, helped me spray the whole place with Citrus Magic and insisted on sweeping up the mess in A's room. I opened all the windows and swept up the litter from the rest of the apartment. By the time we were done, it wasn't quite as rancid but Scully still won't hang out anywhere except my room.

It's evil, but I take a great deal of satisfaction from the fact that A, being a completely irresponsible flake, forgot to move her car for street cleaning before she took off for Canada, so it got towed. She'll come back tomorrow and will have to wait until Monday to get her car out of hock.

A breath of fresh air

My lovely roommate and her skanky boyfriend just left for a 5-day trip to Toronto. The upside is that she’s gone for 5 days and I have the place to myself!!!! The downside is that she (predictably) left a sinkful of nasty dishes, an overflowing trash can and a dirty kitchen that she’d promised to clean but clearly didn’t. Sigh. Now I can put her grouchy cat in her stinky room and close the door so he’ll stop bullying poor Scully. His bullying method of choice? Using Scully’s box. I sort of can’t blame him because A makes him use the recycled peanut variety of cat litter, rather than the sandy kind that cats instinctually like. Scully, being a lady, won’t use the box if he’s been in there. As a result, I’ve come home on the weekends to find lovely surprises on the floor of my room. This was extra fun when the temperature hit 90 degrees.

I Febrezed the couch and now it smells much better. Unfortunately, the Citrus Magic hasn’t made a dent in the bedroom stink.

Toronto, beware. It’s time to break out the air fresheners.

For better or for worse

Couples in all stages of a relationship are flocking to couples therapy to fix their problems before taking the leap. Divorce lawyers are in the corner, growling and hissing.

Step-level approach

Being new to this whole dating thing, I'm filled with a mix of trepidation and bemusement as I watch my relationship with Lunchboy progress according to a series of steps that are small and huge all at the same time. Being put on speed dial. Leaving toiletries at his house. Meeting the friends. Exchanging house keys. It's like a board game, but I'm talking Jumanji, not Candyland. With each gesture, each step, another door opens inward and we roll the dice to see how well we do with being at this new level of involvement in each other's lives. So far, so good. I keep having to take deep breaths in order to not freak out at how natural the whole thing feels. Yesterday I somehow managed to Superglue my fingers together while he was working around the condo and I was cleaning in the kitchen, and he didn't laugh at me. Even though I felt like an idiot, he didn't make me feel like I was idiotic. Instead, he stood at the sink with me and read the directions on the package so we could figure out how to get the stuff off. Yes, he was laughing while he did it, but then so was I. How can you not laugh when you feel like Joey on Friends (except Joey would have Superglued his hand to his face). But it made me realize that i feel safe with him. With Glenn, everything was a battle. With Lunchboy, everything seems to flow smoothly.

Still, the keys are a big deal to both of us. Toiletries can be abandoned or stuffed in a bag and taken home. Speed dial can be erased. Friends will take your side no matter what. But giving keys implies trust and, like that trust, keys are hard to give back. The last time someone gave me keys to their apartment, it meant a lot but I still didn't feel welcome in their house or in their life. This is different. This morning he left at 5:30 to catch his flight and I stayed to let the electrician in, because there's some cross-wiring with the condo upstairs. This morning his kitties, who are afraid of almost everyone, stayed asleep on my feet after he left for the airport, and they let me comfort them after the electricians tromped around the house.

This is real. And it's good.

Grammatical skirmishing

Is it a noun? Is it a verb? Is it floor wax and dessert topping all in one? You decide. But if politicians, consultants and journalists divorced from all sense of grammatical decency have their way, our lovely language is doomed to be minimalized.

It must be in the water

The female orgasm is getting lots of press lately. First there was a hullaballoo over whether the big O has any evolutionary purpose. Now a study from the UK is saying that woman can use their ability (or inability) to get off as a useful indicator of whether their partner is worth keeping around.

Even the Chronicle's Mark Morford weighed in on the subject.

While our lady parts are hogging the spotlight, another study found that men get more potent if they see their woman with another man.

Take action

Help extricate Katie Holmes from the clutches of Camp Cruise. Because someone needs to stop the madness.

Mars and Venus collide on the runway

The new Eurotrash. Suddenly, I understand why whole generations of men are shirking family life in order to express themselves by dressing badly and acting like assholes.

Meanwhile, women are trending toward more modest clothing and behaving in a more "ladylike, old fashioned" way.

This is going to get ugly.

I'm convinced

I hear Tom Cruise loves women.Katie Holmes in particular.

Love is grand but apparently Scientology makes you incapable of subtlety.

Valley of the dolls

A childhood pseudo-friend was addicted to the Sweet Valley High books. She owned them all and mocked me for my inability/lack of desire to buy them all. But she didn’t appreciate it when I reminded her of this fact a few years later in high school, when she was all Goth-y and addicted to the Sex Pistols. It’s hard to prove you’re not just posing as a Sid Vicious fan when you have a shelf full of teen chick lit lite at home.

So Amy Wecker, wherever you are, be advised that Sweet Valley is making a comeback. Brace your brain cells.

No more yanky my wanky

Molly Ringwald says she's in talks to make a sequel to Sixteen Candles.

What will it be about? Their reunion? The possibilities...

If you work it out, tell me what you find

One year.

Last summer I thought I’d expire before I reached the year mark, and yet here I am, feeling silly for having known that kind of despair and not being able to articulate it in a less clichéd way. A year ago, I was in the worst place of my life and now I’ve done a complete 180. It’s *weird* to think about how much changed in such a relatively short period of time (I say that with tongue planted firmly in cheek, since for months I felt like every day lasted about a year). Time crawled like slothful bather turning over in the summer sun, and then it sped up imperceptibly, so today came almost without my realizing it.

Glenn and I talked on Saturday. We hadn’t spoken since early March and I really didn’t want to talk to him, but my aunt was up in Vermont and she wanted to know if I needed her to pick up anything from Glenn’s family’s house there. Somewhere in that house is a box of my winter things—nice fleece hats, thick gloves, a scarf that belonged to my late uncle and another one that was knit for me by a friend’s mother. Glenn’s mother promised to mail the box to me last fall, but she never did and I haven’t been able to just let the box go because I’m sentimentally attached to what’s inside. So I called.

How did I almost marry him?

That’s the only question I still ask myself. Judging from our conversation, we’re 3,000 miles apart in much more than just geography. I have moved on. In a lot of ways, he still seems stuck, though he’s finally moving out of the apartment we shared in LA. Oh, the symbolism. He’s single and proud of that fact, but proud in that, “The happier I try to be as a single guy, the more likely I am to meet someone” kind of way. He talks to me like I’m still one of his best friends, as if we talk every day, as if I want to know the details of his life. He didn’t notice that I answered his (few) questions with huge generalities because my life is none of his business. I know he wants me to be happy, but I don’t want him to know anything other than the fact that I am.

At no point did he say anything that led me to believe he ever valued or appreciated me, or doubted the choices he made. He did say that he spent Memorial Day weekend remembering what we went through last year, and he knew it was the year anniversary of my decision to call it off. When I hung up the phone, I felt like I’d been talking to someone on another planet and, though I was upset, I was so glad that I wasn’t on that planet with him.

I don’t even know what to write about the whole thing anymore because it’s all been said. Worked through. Processed. Finished.

In the infinitely wise words of Austin Powers, “That train has sailed.”

American Apparel update

Oh, the poor New York Times. Why did it take you so long to get up on this amateur porn as advertising ickiness? I'm so glad I'm not the only one who finds the whole thing gross. But I did write about it first.

Word to the Bligh

You're going to rock the Deutchland! GO POLLY PRISSY PANTS! I expect full reports on your adventures with the musicians of Bremen.

"We" is a four-letter word

How did it get to be June already?

Last night I was watching reruns of Sex and the City, and I caught the episode where Samantha falls for the salsa club owner who woos her with his repeated use of the term “we.” We is a powerful word. Even the most independent, self sufficient woman knows how easy it is to fall into the “we” trap. When you’re used to determining your own future, it’s disconcerting to discover how strong the urge to couple up can be. Being single can be lonely but it’s really safe. You can’t get hurt when you don’t let anyone in. How much you’re moved by the “we” can be a world shifter, especially when you don’t see it coming.

Even when you’re determined to stick to reality, the power of hypotheticals can undermine you, sort of like the scent of a well-cooked steak can tempt a vegetarian back to meat. It’s alluring to consider a possible future that features a co-star, rather than just a single name above the title. No more solo vacations! No more movies by yourself, or getting through Valentine’s Day as fast as possible! But the whole settling down scenario is ten times more captivating and dangerous to play with. A good friend told me recently that women (and more specifically, I) get into trouble because, as men are known to think with their penises, we tend to think with our desire to settle down rather than with our brains. It’s hardwired into us, as much as I and my other friends try to fight it. But at least it’s good to be aware of. The hypothetical settling down scenario is like a mirage in the desert—you want it to be real, but you can’t depend on it actually materializing.

I could make a camel analogy here, but I won’t.

There’s been a lot of “we” lately with lunchboy, and it’s scary how not scary it is. Our version of “taking it slow” is aggressive domesticity, and it’s working for both of us so far. I worry sometimes that he wants to settle down so badly that I’m just the next possible candidate, rather than someone he genuinely cares about and likes for who I am. The other night, I was joking around about consigning my ring and I said, “A girl can’t lose all her diamonds in one year!” He grabbed me around the waist and said, very seriously, “I’ll buy you diamonds down the line. You’re worth lots of diamonds.” I was like, “You don’t have to say that,” though what I really meant was, “Don’t say that if you don’t mean it.” But how can anyone mean it when they’ve only known me for two months? How could I know that I’d want that from him?

What I do know is how terrifying it is to lie in bed with someone and realize that you could care about them in a deep, real way. The vulnerability is staggering. Can I put my newly healed heart on the line, knowing that there’s a huge possibility it will get torn to shreds again? I find myself making assumptions about the way this will end, trying to prepare myself so that when the inevitable happens it won’t hurt as badly.

Risky business

An article in the NYT takes a look at how the brain reacts to new relationships. It also explain why breakups suck so much:

"Researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say - intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new."

Shock and awe

The long weekend was roommate-tastic and not in the way I’d hoped. Let’s see. There was the enormous pile of dishes in the kitchen, so big that it flowed out of and over the confines of the sink and onto the counter surrounding the sink. This made it hard for me to wash my own dishes and I certainly wasn’t doing hers just to make room for my own. Then there was the bathroom sink. It backed up—I don’t know why. All I know is I came home on Friday morning to find the sink full of nasty, dirty water and bits of….something, as if someone had thrown up insulation into the sink. When I asked A about it, she said, “Oh, it stopped draining so I used the toilet plunger to try and unclog it, but it pulled up all this nasty stuff, so I just left it there to drain.” Did she try to scrub the sink after using the TOILET PLUNGER to clear the pipes? No. Did she leave the nastiness there until the water eventually drained, leaving gray clumps of pipe litter in the sink? Yes. The concept of Drano apparently didn’t enter the equation.

On Saturday night, she and a friend came home to the apartment at 3:30am. I know this because they were less than subtle about their entrance and preparation for bed. Now, I am a self-professed sleep dork and I wear earplugs to bed, a habit I picked up in college when T came down with a barking cough and refused to go to the health center. The point is that it takes a lot to wake me up at night, but somehow A and her friend managed it just fine. Crashing, banging, loud laughing, stumbling into walls, a complete lack of consideration---it was just like being back in college again. In the morning, she asked, “Did we wake you up last night when we came home?” Yes, you did. “Oh, I’m sorry. We were at a cocktail party all night.”

On Sunday, her new boyfriend made an appearance. Or rather, his smell preceded him into the room and heralded his arrival. If you mix the odor of stale cigarettes, incense, bad BO, unwashed hair, unbrushed teeth and general rankness, you’d get an idea of what this guy smelled like. And what A’s room smelled like for the rest of the weekend. She’s talked about this guy like he was the second coming of God, but when he finally vacated the bathroom, I found out that he’s actually the second coming of Gollum. Short, skinny, with a hooked nose and frizzy black hair down to his waist, he looked like an Orc--specifically, the Orc that tries to eat Merry and Pippin before they escape into Fangorn. Except the Orc probably smelled better. Lunchboy came over yesterday to help me with some furniture and I asked him to stick his head in A’s room just to make sure I wasn’t being an oversensitive drama queen. “No,” he said. “That’s AWFUL.” I lit a candle outside A’s room and I have no idea how to discuss this with her.

Hold your glass up

Lo and behold, the roommate and I worked out our towel differences with a minimum of awkwardness and have proceeded to begin living together as smoothly as two people who are rarely home at the same time can, I ignore her dishes in the sink and she ignores the growing pile of laundry in my room. Her cat hasn't arrived yet, so Scully doesn't know that she will soon have a playmate. Here's hoping she and Clyde have a more harmonic start to their relationship.

The sun came out today for the first time in weeks and it was glorious. Crab though I might about the weather, the rainy season has yielded up three rainbows this month alone. It's hard to find something wrong with a rainbow.

A whirly-headed moment of weirdness today--I realized that at this time last year, Glenn and I were embarking on our little world of pain. He had already cheated and we spent all Memorial Day weekend "working on things," which meant he kept telling me how I needed to fight for him and I had no idea why he had gone off the deep end or needed to be fought for, but I gave what I had left. This occurred to me when I was sitting on lunchboy's couch after a great day together. Last year I NEVER would have thought that I'd meet someone cool, or get my life together again. But it's happened and I cannot articulate how glad I am to be in this moment.

Last night lunchboy and I geeked out to the extreme at the Buffy singalong. It was my first glimpse at the depths to which the Buffyverse's geekdom goes. The line to get into the theater stretched down a couple of blocks--the thing sold out fast. Picture a large theaterful of people singing along to a TV show for an hour and a half, and you'll start to get an idea of what it was like. I was semi-embarassed for myself but I have no trouble admitting that we had a complete blast!

It's fun to know that after 24 hours with lunchboy, I neither want to kill him nor push him away. I don't feel suffocated but I also don't feel like it's moving too fast. We have fun together. We joke and laugh and watch silly shows on Tivo. We do basic, boring domestic stuff like go food shopping and unpack his new condo and play with his cats and it's FUN. We don't jump to conclusions or make assumptions about what it is or where it's going (at least I'm not). For where I am in my life, it's just right.

The sun is gone for good

Brian McGrory, you're a man of my heart.

Shower skirmish

The new roommate and I are engaged in a silent battle. Every morning she takes the first shower (because she’s up at the buttcrack of dawn to get to school by 7-something) and she leaves the shower curtain open with her towel hanging over the curtain rod. When I get to the bathroom two hours later, I have to choose between hanging her towel elsewhere while I shower, or simply leaving it over the curtain rod to get soaked. Being a moderately considerate person, I move her towel to one of the MANY hooks in the bathroom and proceed to shower. After I’m done, I hang my towel on one of said hooks and leave the bathroom.

Somehow, between showers, my towel migrates to a hook that is far away from where I originally hung it up and her towel ends up over the curtain rod again.

It’s pissing me off. Why do I have to deal with her towel every freaking morning? Why can’t she just hang it on a hook so that I can take a shower without having to move it?

Also, she has no products. I’m all open minded about her earth-friendly lifestyle, but it’s still amazing to me that, as a woman over the age of 21, she has no body products. Almost every woman I know has managed to accumulate at least 5 bottles of face cleaner/shampoo/body scrub/body wash etc. Go into the bathroom in any woman’s apartment and you’ll find the shower crammed with stuff. But not her. The new roommate has a travel soap container (after yesterday’s post, I have to express gratitude for the fact that she owns and uses soap), and a single bottle of Suave Kids Orange Splash 2 in 1 shampoo/conditioner. No razor, no anything. She uses like no space in the medicine cabinet over the sink. She uses less than half of one shelf in the linen closet. This girl travels LIGHT. I’m far from super-girly, but it makes me feel like a superficial pack rat. And forget ever asking to borrow nail polish remover or cleaning alcohol from her—she doesn’t own it.

But the towels. Aiee, the towels. We may have to sit down and discuss this before the claws come out.

Pants of the crank

My new roommate moved in over the weekend. She is a nice girl. Her furniture, however, is not. I needed someone who had a couch, mostly because I didn’t have the cash to buy one myself. She has a couch and so I can hardly complain, but the couch is:

1. ugly
2. large
3. dirty
4. smelly

Even Scully won’t go near the couch. My apartment used to smell really nice, and now when I come home I get hit in the face with that unwashed sheets/hair smell that I usually associate with guy’s apartments. The weather continues to be awful, which is probably why I’m all kinds of cranky, but it also means it’s too cold and gross to open the windows and air the place out.

She’s a teacher and she told me last night that her kids are responding to the awful weather in one of two ways. Either they’re totally hyper or they’re completely depressed. She herself is totally hyper and I am completely depressed. It’s not a pretty picture.

I should have gotten a studio.

Suddenly I feel too old to be dealing with roommate adjustments. She’s young (24), overly cheerful in a way that doesn’t really mask her underlying flakiness, and completely disrespectful of shared spaces. Do I want her ugly black plastic CD tower in the living room, especially when she keeps her stereo in the bedroom? No. Did she ask? No. Will I say something? Absolutely, though right now I’m being passive-agressively annoyed by the whole thing. She used to live with her boyfriend and it just doesn’t occur to her that she can’t put her stuff anywhere she chooses without at least discussing it with me. I feel like an old, anal, disapproving bitch.

I should have gotten a studio. And we just signed a year-long lease. This could be a really long year.

Whimpster

Somehow I doubt this is what Christine Lavin had in mind.

13 going on a total lie

A friend asked me today whether I had ever done the dance from Thriller, being 30 and in the same age bracket as Jennifer Garner in 13 Going On 30. And I realized that the answer is a resounding NO. I personally was too scared of the zombies in the Thriller video to ever do the dance. Nor did I know anyone (or go to school with anyone) who did the dance. There was certainly no spontaneous Thriller-izing at school dances. Everyone was way too concerned with staying as far away from the opposite sex as possible while still managing to spend the entire evening waiting to see if anyone would ask them to dance.

We did, however, do the dance from REM's Stand.

Shifting gears

I don’t remember how to date.

It’s a sad fact, and it’s totally throwing me for a loop. When I sat down to think about it, I realized that it’s been almost SIX YEARS since I had a normal, non-long distance dating relationship. You know, the kind of gig where two people get together after work, make dinner, watch TV and then someone goes home to their own house. Where you spend the weekends doing your own stuff and then meeting up for dinner, a movie and then one of you sleeps over.

I get that part of things—maybe it’s like riding a bike and you never forget, but I feel like I keep having to take a huge mental step back and remember what I, as a female in a new, “Let’s take it slow and see what happens” kind of dating relationship, am supposed to do. What’s kosher? Is there a dating book I need to read again? It’s like taking the GRE and desperately trying to wrest the memory of how to apply the Pythagorean theorem from that dark corner of my brain where all things math-related were banished immediately after I absorbed them.

Mostly, I just need to relearn how to get to know someone. Are they solitary? Do they like to share the cooking responsibilities, or are they territorial in the kitchen? What side of the bed do they sleep on? Can they be disturbed when “24” is on TV? This is the fun stuff, the nitty-gritty part of seeing if two people can successfully be in each other’s lives. It’s a process, and that’s where my brain is struggling to shift gears. Last time I was with someone, we lived together and that’s just a totally different way of navigating the process. For the longest time, I was focused on the end result. We had made the decision to get married and that was exactly where I wanted to be in my life.

Cut to the present. I'm back at square one and for the most part I am okay with that. There's kind of no point in feeling impatient or frustrated with starting over because the only thing I can do about that is be patient and remember that getting to know someone has its own rewards, regardless of the eventual outcome. It feels great to have my own life separate from the relationship. I like staying at his place, but I also like coming home to my own place and doing my own thing. I like that his job means he’s out of town 3-4 days a week because it means that the balance between my time and us time is geographically enforced.

The other day, after things had been resolved and the tension had started to dissipate, I had a moment of deep calm. I realized that while I WANT this, I don’t NEED it. I had a full, rich life before meeting lunchboy. I don’t think that was always the case in past relationships, and so there is a definite feeling of freedom now that I didn’t enjoy before. The guy always became the center of my world and then when we broke up, that world fell down around my shoulders. This time that’s not the case, so if things with lunchboy don't work out, I'll be fine. For the first time I think I may actually be starting something healthy, and that feels good.

Go away

Enough with the rain already.

A luscious mix of words and tricks

I don't know what it is about rainy Saturdays, but yoga has been rocking as of late. We did 8 wheels today and I could have done 10 more--I felt strong and loose and centered. When we got to sivasana, I wished the class were longer because I didn't feel finished or ready to rest. And it's really a mystery where all this energy came from considering the amount of wine I drank last night. J is in town and we had a lovely dinner at Argana in Kendall Sq. Then we hit the B-side, the Middlesex Lounge and the bar at the Hotel MIT. It was a great night, marred only by my drunken urge to text message lunch boy, which I regretted immediately afterward.

T came to yoga with me today and we got into a heated discussion about the disgustingly small number of strong men we have in our collective lives. When I sat down to think about it, I realized that I only know 3 or 4 men whom I would describe as strong--who are decisive, centered and have their priorities straight. Maybe there's something to be said against the whole women's lib movement if the end result is that women are so driven, strong and self-reliant that a whole generation or two of men have grown up believing that they don't need to take responsiblity for their actions, emotions or decisions because we don't need them to fill that role anymore. We do. I know so many women who have held their heads high through experiences that destroyed them emotionally, but I know very few men for whom I can say the same.

Tonight is A's business school graduation party and I cannot wait to go.

Can you handle my truth?

I’ve learned an important lesson these past few weeks, which is: Never share your blog with a person you may or may not become romantically involved with. At least, don’t share it with them until the relationship is on extremely solid ground, like if you’re getting married or something. Otherwise it’s just a big mistake. You end up giving away state secrets rather than just sharing something that is deeply personal as an indication that you’re starting to trust them. At first it was a fun way to send little messages or drop subtle hints, but now it’s a pain in the ass because I have to edit rather than be completely honest.

The truth of the matter is that lunch boy did not break up with his girlfriend. He started the process and the breakup is ongoing, but I don’t know if he’s actually uttered the words, “It’s over.”

He went from “I don’t want to break up until after my mother visits and after I’m sure the gfriend has a place to live,” to “I need to wait until the gfriend is settled in her new place and that she’s okay.” He is a good person. But he cannot stand to be the bad guy and it’s making everyone involved miserable. Because we’re friends (and also because I’m sort of the catalyst behind the breakup), he talked about it a lot and I listened. I empathize with how difficult it is to end a relationship. Really, I do. But there’s only so many times you can hear how he’s frantically worried about her wellbeing, especially when you’re emotionally involved and you’re invested in the outcome of the situation.

“Your independence and self-reliance are some of my favorite things about you,” he told me.

That’s a great compliment, but historically it has translated into, “You’re strong and that’s nice because then I won’t have to worry about your feelings very much.”

Of all the things to take on a leap of faith. I am doing my best to be patient, but it gets harder when he doesn’t give the answers I’m looking for.

“Can I trust you?”
“I don’t know. You can trust me to try and not hurt you.”
“When do you think it will be figured out?”
“I’m not sure. And I don’t want to give you a timeline if it’s going to turn out to be a lie.”

I asked him to give me space until he gets the gfriend situation squared away. I want to trust him and believe that it will work out, but it’s hard to see through the haze of fear and the desire to just barricade my emotions behind titanium doors. Last week I gave him the key to my building but not my apartment. He got in the front door, and now I have to fight not to slam it behind him.

Shout out

I realized last night that my poor friends are probably about to strangle me. They put up with months of bitching about wedding planning, and then more months of sobbing and emotional neediness after the breakup. And now they’re being subjected to every nuance, detail or bit of information I can think of regarding lunch boy that I can possibly dredge up from my memory. Why? Because I’m terrified of making another mistake. My friends are smart and intuitive and militantly loyal. They are also unstinting with their advice and so far no one has shrunk away from my new edict: brutal honesty. Last summer, I heard a lot of, “Well, I didn’t want to say anything at the time because you loved him, but I really thought he was selfish and immature.” Which was true. But it’s why I feel the urge to overshare when it comes to my love life now. If I tell them everything that could be relevant to how this thing folds or unfolds, then they will give me the necessary massive wakeup call/slap upside the head if for some reason I start to fall back into old patterns, and we can all avoid more tearful emoting.

Drama. I am tired of drama. Not Johnny Drama—for him I am waiting with bated breath (although E is my favorite)—but the kind that makes you tired of talking about your life by the end of the day. So instead I will celebrate the fact that one good friend is graduating from law school, another is graduating from business school and moving to Germany, and a couple of others are blasting their way through PhD programs in rock star fashion. You guys are amazing and I love you!!!!!

You've got mail

Electronic communication is a blessing and a mindfuck, particularly when it comes to relationships. I know I’m way behind the times on this one. My past relationships never relied on things like IM, email and text messaging to move forward. It was always phone, phone and in person. Well, when Glenn and I were dating cross-country, there was a lot of email and IM between weekend visits, but we were also on the phone constantly. As in, $300 phone bill constantly.

So this whole lunch boy thing is a new experience for me. We do almost all our communicating via computer and cell phone, and it’s got me to thinking about whether technology is aiding or abetting our ability to get to know each other. For one thing, it’s much easier to say things over email or IM than it would be to say them in person. That’s good, right? I’m all for the good communication. But it does mean that you don’t have to look at the person’s face when you say something, or hear the inflection in their voice when they talk to you. And that means it’s really easy to lay things on the line, put your heart on your sleeve or say things without really thinking about them first.

What does it say about two people when they’d rather talk electronically than on the phone or in person? To me, it says that email and IM make it easier for me to maintain some emotional distance while still staying in touch with him and having him be a daily part of my life. Periodically I go through moments where I want to cut off all communication and hang him out to dry because it feels like I’m being taken for granted or he’s not making a decision as fast as I want him to. For this I have to thank my mother—again. She of the drama queen tactics and martyrdom guilt trips, whose outbursts were carefully calculated to get us to do whatever she wanted. I take full responsibility for the times when I actually give into this urge—that’s my fault, not hers—but I also have to acknowledge the source.

Anyhoo.

1. Email is good because you get these little electronic surprise presents in your inbox, and it makes the day go by so much faster. But it also sucks because when he doesn’t email, I sit there staring at the screen and wondering what the deal is, and feeling like a loser for noticing that the horrible little Outlook preview box hasn’t appeared in the lower righthand side of my screen for hours and hours. Then the day drags and I wonder how I got to be 30 years old and I’m still waiting for the boy to “call”. Wasn’t I supposed to get past that like 10 years ago?

2. IM is deadly (and not just in the inappropriate sense). It eats up hours and hours. And it’s such a game. Do I want to sign on? And when I do, if he’s already online it becomes a staring contest—who will ping who first? Who will have hand? Then there’s the fact that it’s easy to talk about everything and nothing. Suddenly I find us talking about stuff that I would never consider discussing with anyone else so early in a relationship. And the next second we’re talking about how I flunked algebra in high school and how his room service sucks. It’s easier than the phone and harder at the same time. Plus, you can save the conversations for posterity (and possible future blog material). So evil, I know. C—I can feel you cringing from here.

3. Text messaging is similar but more dangerous. Literally. You try typing a message on the phone while driving, knowing that you’re being stupid but also knowing that you have to respond tout suite. It’s bad when I send a message and he doesn’t reply, but it’s good when I get off the plane and have three messages from him waiting for me, welcoming me home and asking how the flight was.

All this is probably ridiculously passe, but it was on my mind. Still,I wonder what happens when we actually have to talk face to face, when we can’t hide behind a computer screen and take as long as we want to think about a response. Will it still fly? Or is the relationship blooming only in an electronic sense?

Things that make you go "Ewwwwwwww"

I can report firsthand that the bathroom at the Porter Sq. CVS is not a lovely place to spend time. How do I know this? Because I came down with a UTI in the middle of my book group last night. We went from discussing literature to discussing some of the less delicate physical situations we'd all been through, as I desperately dialed my doctor's emergency line and begged for antibiotics immediately if not sooner. Thank god for peridium. Without it, I would have been curled up by the pharmacy window in a shrieking, whining, sobbing ball of pain and discomfort. With it, I found myself leaning over the front counter and politely (but with a not so subtle air of desperation) asking an older staff person named Shirley if I could possibly use the bathroom while I waited for my prescription to be filled. Being the kindly soul that she was, she agreed and took me into the bowels of the CVS basement, where I gratefully availed myself of the facilities.

With peridium, I can pee in technicolor. There's a silver lining to every situation. Being a woman is so much fun sometimes.

I have friends going through a lot worse right now so I will refrain from bitching too much, but UTIs are quite possibly the worst hell on earth. Coupled with a cold and a stomach ache from said antibiotics, they are just misery incarnate. I used to be so good at preventing them, with my army of cranberry pills and my bottles of water. Alas. My mind was elsewhere.

Planetary disarray

Lately it seems like everyone I know is going through some major life adjustment. Perhaps adjustment isn’t the right word—how about insane, crappy, horrible difficulty that’s a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10. I’m talking everything from coworkers, friends and family dying, to friendships, relationships and marriages ending (or suffering deep internal injuries), to making gut-wrenching decisions that no one should have to make. People are moving and shaking as they go. May has certainly rolled in like a lion. It feels like life in general is mushing around, reforming in mysterious ways and making room for the new.

Months like this make me wonder whether there really is some planetary influence that holds sway over us, like some vast universal magnet that can pull the wrong way if it’s inadvertently tilted. Is Mercury in retrograde? Should we all be burning sage and cleansing our personal space? I wish so much that I could make my friend’s lives easier, to take away a little of their pain. I wish I could see the reasons behind the carnage, but not if it means parroting clichés that make me want to punch other people when they say them to me. Everything does happen for a reason, but the really crappy part is that you can’t see the reason until you’ve been through the shit, so what’s the use of pointing it out until later?

In my life, the transitions are less dramatic. My roommate moved out today, so I have the place to myself for a week before my new roommate moves in. Then there’s lunch boy. That’s been a transition in the making from day one. He’s going through like four transitions of his own, so things are still guarded but they are *things*. Or they will be. We laugh and talk and sneak kisses in the stairwell, and my stomach gets all fluttery just knowing that he’s sitting down the hall. Once we both get our lives in order, who knows? I think we could have ridiculous amounts of fun if we both stop being so afraid of it.

This weekend is all about cleaning. Cleaning the apartment within an inch of its life, turning over my closet, rearranging what little furniture is left, sweeping up drifts of cat hair tumbleweeds, opening up the windows to let the air in. Cleaning out the old and making space for the new. I’m cleaning house in every way possible, with my hair pulled up and the stereo cranking Duran Duran.

Men are from ???

Finally, someone articulates why I can't deal with Philip Roth and his contemporaries.

And the bike holds sway over all

Screw national security and the possibility (however thin) that a plane might take out some buildings in the capitol---Bush had to finish his damned ride. At least we know what would happen if Glenn were president.

Bon Vacances

“Heaven looks a lot like San Francisco.”—Tony Kushner, Angels in America

Weekend milestones:
--Binding in Mari A, B and C in yoga class on Saturday. Renate tells me it was a half primary class. While it definitely kicked my butt, I somehow made it through without embarrassing her. My standing balances were crap, though.
--Getting food poisoning from food in Berkeley for the second straight time. Those eggs were damn good, however.
--Gay brunch with my lovely gay friends in the Castro. I’ve never seen so much chicken sausage in my life. Plus, there was a resident cat. Perfetto.
--Three hours of urban hiking around Glen Park and Twin Peaks, and finding a steep new set of stairs to climb.
--A spectacular 12-mile hike through Muir Woods, Mt. Tam State Park and down to Stinson Beach on Sunday. We took the Dipsea trail and it was such an incredibly clear day that we could see all the way from Oakland to Pt. Reyes, including the Farallons.
--Deleting B from my cell phone directory.
--Not freaking out when I heard that Glenn was dating up a storm.
--Keeping a sense of perspective when lunch boy broke up with his girlfriend.

Julia Roberts, move over

The inimitable Mike Daisey comments on Jennifer Wilbanks and the whole runaway bride phenomenon.

Mike, how come I didn't make the cut!?

Elevensies

11 months today. It feels like it’s been a lot longer, though. I rarely think about Glenn anymore, and when I do it’s in a peripheral, past-tense kind of way that doesn’t have any bearing on my current existence. I don’t dream about him anymore and I don’t cry over him anymore. Sometime last month, I removed the platinum and diamond band I’d been wearing on my right hand and since then I’ve no longer felt connected to the end of that relationship. It sucks that the breakup happened, but it happened for a reason and I’m glad to be where I am now, rather than in a bad marriage to someone who wasn’t right for me.

Dream for an insomniac

Call me cheesy but last night, as I was grappling with my now-permanent state of sleep deprivation, I somehow found my way back to a movie that I doubt many people would call memorable but which has stuck with me for years. See, if you take away the carefully constructed emotional barriers I put up during waking hours, you'll find that I am an incurable romantic--a dangerous tendency to cultivate, especially when you know that romance guarantees nothing in life.

Here, then, is a dry toast to the two most romantic moments of my life thus far:

#1--My best friend R was my boyfriend for two months our freshman year of college. That winter, I somehow managed to come down with a bad case of mono right around Valentine's Day and, being the overenthusiastic college newbie that I was, I was crushed that I couldn't make it to the Valentine's Day semiformal. R, who avoided anything that required clothing more dressy than jeans or a flannel, showed up in my room at the health center wearing slacks and a button-down shirt, and bearing a boom box loaded with a carefully compiled mix tape.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. He hadn't said anything about stopping by and, since we had a thing about kissing, I didn't want to infect him with my disease.

"I heard there was a dance in the health center," he said.

*melt*

We swayed to Tori Amos, Alison Moyet, Kate Bush and Dave Matthews for about a half hour, until I passed out from mono-induced exhaustion. R's ability to sweep me off my feet is still the reason why I insist that Lloyd Dobler is the patron saint of sensitive new age guys. R and I have been best friends for going on 12 years now and I still hug him for that moment every so often.

#2--A few days before Glenn was scheduled to move from LA to Boston, he went AWOL. I called, I emailed, I panicked when I couldn't reach him. Had he changed his mind about moving? Did he get hit by some insane driver on Barrington while he was out buying more boxes? Distracted, I met a bunch of my friends for a night at the Comedy Connection in Faneuil Hall. The show was hysterical, but I was checking my cell phone every 5 minutes and my friends were clearly concerned, not just about my sanity, but about the distinct possibility that something had gone wrong.

After the show was over, I drove back to my apartment in a sketchy part of Waltham, only to find that I had locked myself out of the house. As I came around the corner, I saw someone sitting on my front porch and I freaked out--I thought it was some stranger there to assault me and I couldn't even get in my front door. But it was Glenn. He'd changed his flight and arrived two days early to surprise me and there he was, waiting by my door with arms open to hug me.

(#3 is the engagement day, but that's wiped off the books)

So in the spirit of sleep deprived hope, I am posting two quotes from Dream for an Insomniac that appeal to the starry-eyed girl within me, the one who hopes to stop being so jaded and cynical one day:

"Anything other than mad, passionate love is just a waste of time."

"There are too many mediocre things in this world to deal with, love shouldn't have to be one of them."

California here I come

Excitement!! This weekend I am off to San Francisco to party with my gay husbands, dork out on yoga with the fabulous Renate, and otherwise throw down with my west coast posse. What a concept—a weekend in a place where the temperature climbs above 60 degrees in May. J and I are hiking Point Reyes on Monday if the weather holds up. If it doesn’t, we’ll hit Mt. Diablo.

It’s a perfect time to go. Lunch boy’s girlfriend is back in town and he has some thinking to do. I don't particularly want to be present for that, mostly because I know the odds of it coming out in my favor are low. Still, I do not think I will see B over the weekend. Hooking up with him would be like eating at McDonald’s after going on a gastronomic tour of Italy. And no one needs junk food jigginess.

Blast from the past

When I go to work this morning, I opened my email and found a note from T, one of Glenn's very best friends in LA. He wrote to say hi and see how I was doing, and to give me an update on how things were going in LA. It meant a lot to hear from him--he and I were good friends back in the day, and I missed him a lot after everything went down. I'm touched--he's the only one of Glenn's friends or family to reach out. We hung out with T all the time. If he wasn't at our place, we were at his house up in Mandeville or meeting him for Mexican food at Poquito. He was supposed to be a groomsman. His office was across the street from my yoga studio and I used to stop by after class and say hi. It's really good to know he's doing well.

I caught you a delicious bass

I’ve been thinking a lot about commitment lately, mostly because I’m realizing how averse I am to the concept as a whole right now, and partly because of lunch boy.

Commitment is nice and good and in a lot of ways it's what makes the planet turn. In an ideal world, the ability to commit goes hand in hand with responsibility, maturity, faithfulness and duty. In relationships, commitment is key. It’s sort of what makes a relationship a relationship. Commitment is a choice, a risk, a creation of vulnerability, a decision that must be adhered to or the whole concept goes out the window. Depending on the moment, commitment can be freeing and wonderful, or boring and claustrophobic. Either way, it’s part of being an adult.

The importance of commitment was pounded into my head at an early age by my mother who, when she wasn’t busy chasing me around the house with makeup or nylons in her hand, made sure I knew that I had to do what I said I’d do, follow through on my promises (even when it meant I ended up mowing the neighbor’s lawn when I really wanted to be reading on the back porch), and to feed the cat when he needed food rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

Sometimes commitment can bite you in the ass. People leave. Things end. And still you have to live your life.

When I was in sixth grade, a girl in my class was killed in a car crash. I was supposed to babysit the night I learned about her death—-a commitment I had made several weeks before. My mother refused to let me cancel, even though the last thing in the world I wanted to do was chase a bratty, spoiled kid around his parent’s McMansion for $6 an hour. Dazed and out of it, I went off to babysit, and the kid was just as bratty and unmanageable as I anticipated. Before they’d left for the theater, I had (very responsibly) told the parents about my friend’s death and I let them know that I was not in a super playful frame of mind. They took their son aside and told him to behave. Which of course he did not. At one point, desperate to get my goat, he said, “I bet your friend was ugly and nasty and deserved to die.” Shocked and appalled, I turned around and said (without thinking), “Billy, if you don’t shut up I’m going to smack you.” Yes, he was little and he probably just wanted a reaction, and yes, I should have known better, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. He didn’t shut up and when his parents came home, he ran to them and told them I’d threatened to hit him. I got a call from his mother the next day saying how disappointed she was in me, and how they would no longer be needing my services. My mother apologized to me and said she should have let me stay home.

Thanks to my mom, I used to be queen of commitment. But yesterday I realized that I am now terrified of it. I am afraid to commit to buying furniture for my apartment because having a lot of big possessions makes it harder to fly by the seat of your pants. I’m averse to signing a new lease because it means I can’t just bug out of town if the next winter makes me shriek with misery. I don’t want to look at condos, not just because the amount of money in my savings account would make a broker laugh til they cried, but because I’m afraid of committing to this city, and owning real estate would make it that much more complex if I decided to leave.

I’m always looking for an escape route now.

I think this is why I’ve been so okay with the lunch boy situation. We may click like crazy, we may have a great time together and we may make more sense than most of what comes out of George Bush’s mouth, but even though the risks are obvious, it’s super safe in one really basic way. If he’s involved with someone else, than the entire issue of commitment is off the table. No commitment = no vulnerability = Moxie does not get hurt. Again.

That’s the theory at least. When you’ve progressed to the point where you’re watching Family Guy in your underpants on someone’s couch, vulnerability is definitely part of in the picture.

That’s not to say that I couldn’t commit to him in a girlfriend-free situation. It just means that I’m afraid of it, and I’m acknowledging that fear. My shrink would be so proud.