Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New... Everything?

Hi ho! So I know, I’ve been a VERY bad blogger these last few months. It’s not you guys – it’s me! Ever since moving up to the Big City my life has consisted of pretty much three things: Work, T.E. and maintaining as much of my life back in Hippyville as I can from far away. All of these things are good and important and valuable. And they’re all full-time jobs. So there are a lot of things that I love to do that I struggle to find time for. I miss my camera; miss going out and finding amazing things to capture and show to folks, especially you guys. I miss free time, even for things as silly as watching uber-dorky television stuff or to read my beloved graphic novels. And I miss writing. I miss all kinds of writing, starting with writing here.

In about 7 hours we’re starting a brand new year – apparently we’re calling this one “2011”. (tangent: sometimes I wish we could be more creative with the naming of years, like we are with cars or heavenly bodies or cosmetic colors. Wouldn’t it be cool to say “I was born in the year Chromotoawesome – you?” Or “our wedding anniversary is October 23rd, Rocktubular” Rocktubular would, of course, be a leap year. End tangent.) As I’ve told you guys before, I’m not one for the New Years resolution as it tends to be yet another way to feel like you’ve failed something. However I don’t know how you avoid looking back on the previous year and reflecting. And while you’re reflecting how do you avoid having the odd regret? And if you’ve got that odd regret, how do you avoid making goals to do it different, or even better, in the new year?

I won’t make promises because I’ve read way too many blogs who falter, promise to be better and falter even worse. But I’ll tell you this: I’m calling this year “Undecitastic” and in the year Undecitastic I’m going to try, TRY LIKE CRAZY, to write more. Anybody got any goals to shoot for in THEIR year Undecitastic?

Oh, and HAPPY DANG NEW YEAR, MY PEOPLES!!!

Monday, November 22, 2010

Of Course You Realize This Means War...

I write you from my bed where I’m spending all my time these days. Not because I’m sick (although I was – I got the flu! I never get the flu!) or hurt (actually there’s this whole thing about my toe… I’ll write that post soon, I promise!). I’m at war, my friends. AT WAR!

You know I’ve got kitties, and I love them kitties ever so. But kitties who go outside sometimes bring friends back in with them. Little, bitey friends who are not actually friends but instead terrible creatures which, if there were any justice in the world, would burst into flames the second they came into being! Some people also call them “fleas”. Kitties pretty much always have these flea friends, and normally I’m fine with the occasional bitey visitor. The price of kitty haveness. But there’s a limit, people. Oh there is very definitely a limit.

For me, this limit is when I wake up with 18 bites on my own personal body. LIMIT!

I’m not sure when the tide turned – when I blinked just long enough for the enemy to get a foothold in the house. One day the flea comb was suddenly covered! Suddenly I’d look down and find a black thing jumping on my lap! And the bites. THE BITES! The itchy, red, bumpy, itchy BITES! I can only guess that my chemical warfare just plain failed one month, and now we’re hunkered down in the house with many flanks of attack. We’ve implemented a strict vacuuming regimen. Renewed the chemical attacks. Things have been scattered into carpets, and every flat ‘walk on’ surface got a hot, friendly bleach washing.

Now I’m moving to high tech attack. I was going to basically take off and nuke them from outer space (aka THE FLEA BOMB) but frankly I hate to do those things. Despite all the “totally safe! Non toxic! Seriously, you could let your kid play with us! SMILEY FACE AND HEARTS, Y’ALL!” claims I still spend the next week feeling like I’m walking through death and everything tastes of poison and death and there’s just a lot of death. (don’t get me wrong – I’m in favor of flea death. But this is more just general, all-purpose death) Anyway, I went online to google “seriously, how much general death is there in a flea bomb?” and discovered an exciting sci fi option: FLEA TRAP.

FLEA TRAP! This is something on Amazon that many, many people have tried and raved about. It’s got many appealing aspects, such as: reusable (as opposed to flea bombs which, like real bombs, are pretty much toast once you set them off), inexpensive, non-toxic, non-gassy… And HIGH TECH! Wheee! So this is my solution for the FINAL, EPIC BATTLE! My super-weapon of ultimate killness is winging it’s way to me right now. Then I will set it up and watch the wave after wave of flea death. And will I laugh? Will I laugh as I watch them all die?

Oh yes. I will laugh.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Secrets and Sighs

When T.E. and I first started we were each other’s deep, dark secret; we each had a person or two we’d confessed it to, but everyone else was in the dark. Was that part of the fun? Maybe. Certainly keeping a secret from my family and friends was a very new experience. To be honest I sucked at it – my people figured out there was something I was keeping to myself pretty damned quick, but they let me keep the “what” to myself for a pretty long time. For him it’s much easier – he keeps great gobs of his life pretty secret. Frankly he couldn’t fathom why this was so hard for me – the idea of such a level of sharing with one’s parents was covered in a thick coat of crazy to him!

For me the thrill of being a secret faded pretty quick. How do you not feel somehow like a bad idea when your person fears what would happen if the world found out? And slowly but surely the seal on my secret of him began to break too. Still I was amazed when he told his parents first! Brick by brick we brought down our secret walls and eventually he flew here and met the entire Hippyville family clan! His parents actually paid for the ticket to bring him here for the summer! Everything pretty much came out of the closet and oozed all over the place. And I realized how much I preferred it this unclosety, oozy way. Even when his more dorky, immature high school friends tried like hell to make a connection with me on Facebook (something he put a stop to right quick – my hero!!) I still liked that better than feeling like he was embarrassed by or ashamed of me.

Then he started at University.

He’s in a new place with new people and trying to really make a place for himself and I think this is all very, very good. I WANT him to make friends (though if they could be less hot, young girl things that would be nice!!!) and have a healthy, happy social experience. But some part of that demanded that our relationship go back to being a secret.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t understand that. First of all, what studly young dude wants to talk about his middle-aged girlfriend? NOBODY will find this hot, my friends. And to be honest, I still keep him a secret from my co-workers as I worry about how my boytoy might impact their opinions of me as well. I always hope he doesn’t feel bad about that; doesn’t feel like there’s any part of me that’s ashamed of him. Frankly I’m more embarrassed of my co-workers than of him, but I understand the challenges that this relationship could pose for me at work and the same, at LEAST, must be said about having a mom-aged babe in college.

But with all this mature, worldly understanding and getting-of-it I still don’t like it.

So here’s the plan: I’m going to become THE hottest cougar girlfriend a smokin’ young dude could possible brag about. I’m absing it up (totally a word) all week long and trying to work out all the time and investing in hot shoes and tight pants and I can do all of this stuff because I’m a grown-up with a job that allows me to make the money. And purchase the things. And pay for the gym. Oh yeah, I’m going to BE BRAG-WORTHY.

…just as soon as I get over the case of arthritis in my toe. Because now my old-person foot ailment is keeping me from cardio. And has me wearing sensible shoes. I’m now officially old, starting at the feet. Sigh.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

To Halloween or not to Halloween

First, a few truths:
1) Halloween is for kids. There is no costume that is out of bounds for little kids. They’re cute in all of them. And then there’s the candy.
2) Halloween is for hot people. The ONLY exception to the costume rule for kids is the classic “slutty BLANK”. Hot girls are why grown-ups continue to celebrate this holiday at all. And when two hot costumed people hook up, at say a costume party or the local watering hole’s Halloween freak-out? It’s a wonder they don’t just burst into flames.
3) Halloween is for the sentimental. Raise your hand if you don’t get excited by the annual showing of “The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and I’ll slap you upside the head with a pumpkin pie

…now, with these truths established let’s talk Halloweening for the REST of us. Because I’m no longer a kid, I’ve never been “hot” and though I’m sentimental that starts and stops with classic Halloween tv. So, for instance, what to do when my work decides to do a big Halloween celebration? Do I dress or not? What about any other Halloween parties to which I got invited – go? Don’t go? How to spend the holiday itself – home or out rambling from Halloween Happy Hour to Halloween Happy Hour in cape and short-shorts?

First, the work party. I dressed, but only just barely. I’d considered ambitious costume ideas, but my problems with that goal were three-fold: 1) I only moved some of my stuff when I relocated up to my new life and my rather silly-but-ambitious stash of costumey things didn’t make the cut. Pirate? Sure, except that I brought the puffy shirt and hoop earrings, but not the sword or the corset. Nor did I bring all the pieces for the black cat, the space cowboy or the Amazon Warrior (do NOT ask). 2) I’ve been sick this week, not enough to keep from going to the office but enough for me to want to be at all ambitious when home. (in this moment “ambitious” is being defined as “doing anything beyond sleeping). So on Thursday night, when I had to do this thinking stuff, I was about up to “I want Jello. If only it weren’t so damned hard to make…”-level of ambitious. Making a costume is nowhere near this. 3) The people at my work place don’t know the truths listed above, or don’t care. Either way, for many of them this “dressing up” thing is at epic proportions. So you really gotta decide how much you want to compete when you come in. ½-way is kind of the worst option you’ve got.

With all of this in mind I dressed all in black and topped it off with my trusty Batman t-shirt. You can decide what the actual costume was: Batman? Hopeless Nerd? Michael Keaton? Yes. All of these things.

Next I had actually been invited to a collection of possible Halloween parties for Saturday night, so the question was to go to any, and if that question came up a “yes” then the follow-up question: which one? I opted for the easiest of the three, both in terms of “setting the bar” costume-wise and also comfort –level while there; it was a fete thrown by some friends of mine in their house way up on a hill. “house way up on a hill” is ALREADY satisfying the spook-requirement, and I figured the guest list there would include parents of kids and other items that tone down the ambitions for costumes. And I was right! The other options either had a level of costumery ambition I was completely intimidated by or would be chock-a-block FULL of sexy hot-n-tots.

So then the costume question again. I poured through my closet and the costume stuff I DID have up here and finally landed on a workable option: 1930’s cocktail dress (THE best piece of clothing I own) plus vintage hat (no idea how that got moved either. Possibly I thought they’d come back into style?) plus garter belt and stockings (I’d claim authenticity, but it was honestly the only forms of leg covering I had in the house!), pearls and a dot over the lip ala Marilyn and you had it. 1930’s starlet? Possibly. I preferred to think of myself as the original Lois Lane, ready to break the next big story, Chief!

Next year: Amazon Space Pirate Cat. With heels.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like... What? Too soon?

Yes, my friends, you may be trying to figure out whether you want to be the slutty nurse, slutty cat or slutty sewage waste treatment technician for Halloween, but I’m already firmly focused on Christmas. Why? For a few reasons, all of them awesome:

1. I am anti credit card. However I am pro “give everybody you’ve ever met a gift.” This means I start my Christmas shopping in July. No joke – my first gifts are always purchased at this summertime art festival in Hippyville.
2. T.E. comes home to me in December. Sigh.
3. I have so many people I like to shop for, but if you cram them all into the month of December the fun of gifting becomes “Gah! Stress! Crowds! Money! Stress! Gah! Christmas BAD!!!” And that’s a terrible thing to do to Christmas…
4. I’ll have someone to help me wrap presents this year because T.E. will be here. Yay!
5. I have this very ambitious plan this year that involves having all gifts that need to be shipped already bought and wrapped in November, and shipped off by Thanksgiving. Go ahead and hate me!
6. Did I mention the hot, young Englishman? I did? Good. Because he’s awesome.

Oh, and also Christmas = piles of yay!

In order to facilitate this level of manic, almost obsessive holiday adoration I have to have it all organized. Almost to the point of needing a psychoanalysis. And/or Prozac. To that end (the organization end, not the shrinking/drugs end) I have created this elaborate, nay even color-codified spreadsheet.

It shows names! Gifts! Budgets!
It tells me who’s finished and who’s not yet finished!
It tells me who’s naughty! Who’s… wait, no. That’s someone else’s list… (and I bet HIS list doesn’t include “months to shop in” color coding!)

But still, totally an awesome list, people!

Armed with my list and my astounding selection of Christmas-themed wrapping paper (over twenty different patterns! Snowmen and Santas! Sparkly and shiny and sparkly!) I now head into this coming holiday season not just prepared – I’m OVER PREPARED! I’m a quarter finished! I’ve got things lined up to purchase at each paycheck! For some people I don’t just have an idea of what to get them, I’ve got a BUNCH of ideas! I’ve actually got to go through a list and pick just one thing – I might even be able to give other people ideas for gifts since I have too many!

Oh yes, I’m ready my friends. Bring it on, Old Man Winter! Come on, tidings of comfort and joy! I’ve got your fa la la la la right here! I am SO READY for my Happy Holidays!

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Valuable Yet Conflicting Commodities

I know what’s gonna kill us, T.E. and I. It’s not the age difference. It’s not the time apart. It’s not the challenges of being monogamous from far away.

It’s the time zones.

Frankly the people who put the places where they went couldn’t have put our two places – west-coast US and London – in worse places. We’re exactly 8 hours apart. In other words, I’m going to bed about just as he’s getting up. I’m getting off of work right as he’s crashing. And the 16 hours where he’s up and doing stuff and awake and cognizant and not sleeping and available for a lovely conversation and UP? I’m sleeping. Or working. Sleeping and working. Neither of these things are conducive to lovely conversation. They’re conducive… well, mostly to sleeping. Or possibly working. And not conversating.

For the first year I would come home from work and T.E. would be there, waiting for me. Often it would be past 1am for him, but he would stay up just to talk to me, sometimes for hours! At the beginning he told me that he’s always been a late-night kind of guy, he’d be up anyway, it was cool, etc., and I totally believed him and didn’t think much of it. He had less time commitments, being out of school for that time, so he could sleep in if he needed to and I let that be the rationale that we had a totally workable situation.

Jump ahead to the summer after he left here, headed back to London to get ready for starting at the University. He took advantage of wicked-nasty jetlag to switch around the schedule. He started getting up at 7am for us to talk, thinking that he’d need to adjust his timing for classes. He figured once he got to Uni the world would expect him to be at specific places. At specific times. Specifically non-noon times, and so day after day, even though he still didn’t need to, he went to bed relatively early and got up at 7am. We’d talk for about 90 minutes, then I’d hit the sack and he’d go on with his day. I was sort of amazed how well he stuck to this timing, especially since he really hates mornings just like I do.

I, on the other hand, struggled to stay up and alert night after night, except for all of those times when I fell asleep. Nothing says “you’re important to me, and all those nights when you stayed up way, WAY later than this to talk to me really mean a lot.” like a long, resounding snore. I realized at that point that I’d never given him the credit he deserves for sacrificing so this crazy relationship could keep going.

Finally he started at University and got those dreaded early-morning class schedules he had been preparing for. And get this, people: they have scheduled him for classes as early as 11AM! What are they, BARBARIANS? LUTHERANS EVEN? (or was it Presbyterians – what’s the religion that says “thou shalt get up before noon, but only just barely…”?) All his prep for having to get up so early was for naught, and within a week the stress on his system from the early mornings was showing itself pretty clearly.

So THEN we tried the afternoons again, but that didn’t work much better. Seems no matter what time we can connect it’s always a time where he’s tired, either because he’s getting up or settling down. And I hate to be that thing that makes him tired, know what I mean?

We’re trying something new tomorrow: I’m going to wake up at 4:30am so we can talk about 12:30pm for him. The Queen immediately saw the flaw in this plan – she asked me “and you’re going to bed at 10:30pm?” I found it so cute that she would give me such undeserved credit; I think we all know the odds of me getting to sleep earlier than my normal time of roughly midnight are pretty slim. Or possibly none. So tomorrow it’s going to be my turn to be tired.

I have faith in us and our desire to make it work. We’ve just finished mapping out the dates for his trip here for the holidays – we clearly know how to dedicate ourselves to this. But I’m also very aware of the problem we have before us: how to keep our connection and our sanity. For the record, if I have to pick from those two I pick us. Here’s hoping he does too.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Earning My Grownups

I have schedules for the things that I gotta do. The biggest schedule-based thing for me right now is working out. In just over 2 months T.E. comes back to me for the holidays (more on that at a later date when the idea of writing about the upcoming holidays won’t be as likely to get me shot by readers who are all still in the “No! The “Holidays” are months away! Leave me alone!” continuum) and when he comes up that escalator I want his one thought to be this: “She was totally worth the last 10 hours on that f*cking plane.” For such a thing to be possible, at least in my head, I either need to lose another 15-20 lbs, as well as flattening my tummy and giving me almost Madonna-arms/boobs, or I need to be standing at the top of the escalator covered in chocolate and money. And I don’t have enough money for that, so I gotta work out. GOTTA.

And therefore we have scheduleness. It looks like this:

SATURDAY: full cardio plus abs
SUNDAY: full cardio plus push-ups
MONDAY: full cardio plus abs
TUESDAY: full cardio plus push-ups
WEDNESDAY: full cardio plus abs
THURSDAY: full cardio plus push-ups
FRIDAY: ice cream and carbs for dinner and falling asleep on the couch and maybe more ice cream!
SATURDAY: …what, didn’t we already cover this? Did you have a coma since the last Saturday?...

I originally planned to work out EVERY SINGLE DAY, but had to add my important Friday plan for two reasons: The first is that if I don’t give myself some bit of a break I eventually get bitter and self-pity-ey, and I end up taking a Friday, or a Thursday, or possible a Wednesday-through-November off from working out because “didn’t you see how good I was for like two weeks? I’ve earned this. Now give me more bon-bons.” The second is that I couldn’t work out the pattern for the two extra things (abs and push-ups) and having it fold back around in this unpredictable way, where “who KNOWS what I’ll be doing on that Tuesday! AHHHH!” was just way too much pressure for me. Break it into a 6-day pattern with a break makes Femtastic’s brain “AHHHH!” just that much less. Better for everyone.

So this last Friday I had things all scheduled, like a hair cut and a games night and such, and so having the night off from the workout was not just good, it was necessary. From the scheduling. I had a nice time and came home feeling no guilt whatsoever because hello, it’s Friday! But then Saturday I was going to do those things that Friday is not obligated to do. I fully intended to work out, I did! I was to cardio, listening to my new, woodsy audio book and then reading my totally insightful and epiphaniostic workbook and both improving my body as well as growing my soul and improving my brain. (yes, all of that in just an hour. Shut up.)

But more than that, I was going to CLEAN! LAUNDRY! COOK! There was to be BLOG POSTS! And creativity on EPIC SCALES! When I went to bed on Saturday night I was going to be tired, sure, but it was going to be that satisfied, accomplished kind of tired where you nuzzle down into your soft, clean sheets actually smiling, and your dreams all have you running marathons or winning Nobel prizes or curing fatness (in a way that involves no working out or diets but doesn’t make you a lazy piece of crap either. It’s coming – science is on it.) I was all about this day plan.

So the question has to be this: how is it that when I finally did go to sleep Sunday morning at about 1am I had accomplished a total of “I totally suck” and felt like I was not only the President of the “Slackers club for men and also women” but also a client? It was like I needed a day off in addition to my sanctioned day off because on my sanctioned day off I didn’t do any of the “need to” things, but I did so many “get to” things that I was still winded; nay pooped! Possibly all the way to knackered out! This day off was NOT approved by the “days off” approval board, and even as I type this I just KNOW that there’s a strongly worded memo or letter coming my way to condemn me for unauthorized days offing. These things cannot be done spontaneously – they need planning! Scheduling! A rigorous checks-and-balances to make sure they’re not done willielily, let alone nillielily!

So today has to be better. It has to. And yet, here it is 3:45 and this blog post is the sum total of what I’ve accomplished. I’ve got time to do some catching up – but do I have the moxie? The where-withall? Here’s hoping, gentle readers. Fingers? They be crossed!

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Thing...

So there’s this thing about T.E.

OK, that’s a silly thing to say – there are several things about T.E. and you guys already know a bunch of them, like that he’s in London and that there’s this big time difference and that we never expected our silly, online flirtations to go anywhere over a year ago, and…

But there’s this thing about him that you guys don't know. It’s kind of a significant thing, or a big thing (but not a big thing) or a tricky thing. It’s definitely a thing – that much I know. And I mostly figured I wouldn’t say it, but there are other things that I sometimes want to vent about here with you guys that I can’t when you don’t know about the thing so I’ve decided to tell you about the thing.

So here’s the thing:

T.E. is younger. A bit younger. Quite a bit younger.

He’s kind of a whole person younger.

Another way to put it would be this: he’s half my age. One could also say it this way: I’m twice his age. You could do it mathematically: my age divided by two equals his age. But no matter how you slice it the bottom line is this: Call me Cougar, people, because I’m in love with a twenty year old, and I haven’t been twenty in twenty years.

Meow.

When he first told me his age I think I blacked out for a few minutes - there might have been a quick aneurism. He assures me that my reaction was very suave, and mostly consisted of saying “NINETEEN??????” over and over in ever-escalating volume and pitch. A proud moment for me. After that I know that I tried to figure out if there was any way I could go forward and not feel insane, and the answer was, of course, no. But I went forward anyway, because what the hell? We’re just fooling around, nobody even knows about him and in two weeks this will just be the crazy thing I did that one time on the internet. Doesn’t everybody need a crazy internet thing story? So mine is the fling with the hot, sweet, sexy, brilliant, funny, twenty year old English guy. It could be MUCH worse than that! So I went forward. Short term. Temporarily. No big deal.

For over a year.

After he came to the U.S. and we spent an amazing four days together it became absurdly obvious to me that I’d been kidding myself about this being a fling – it had been three months of flinging and we were no less anxious to be around each other than we’d been in the first place. Officially we were still just hanging out or fooling around or whatever but I knew in my heart of hearts that I was smitten and it was going to be at least impossible to walk away clean. But even still I was embarrassed enough by my Cougarising to keep him a deep, dark secret – only her majesty The Queen knew he was even coming here.

And then words starting with “L” got said by both parties (that's right -- I said "Lasagna" and he said "La Crosse". It was magical) and we were well and officially screwed. And through all of this he had the nerve to stay twenty years my junior. But even though I’ll say with all honesty that I wish he were older, or I were younger (except no, I don’t want to be younger, I just wish he were older) it couldn’t change my level of smitten or how we just kept moving forward more and more. To the point where I just had to tell my people that there was a guy (“Hooray! Femtastic FINALLY has a guy!”). And that the guy lived in London (“Ooh! How cosmopolitan!”). And that the guy was twenty (“....”)

It’s been just over 15 months. He’s spent a total of 12 weeks here with me. He’s met my family; my friends, and they all think he’s lovely. They like that he cares for me, and about me. That he makes me laugh, and makes me blush. They like that he likes me, and he loves me, and though I’m sure they ALSO wish he were older… well, he isn’t. And there’s nothing to be done about that.

So that’s the thing. You guys can make it as big or little as you want. There was a time when I would have thought it the biggest thing in the world. Now the big stuff to me is the lovely and the caring and the laughing and the loving. That he can be so amazing and fantastic to me and for me at the age of twenty just makes him that much more impressive. That I get to be the focus of his attention at the age of forty?... Just makes me lucky.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Intervention

I think my loved ones did an intervention for me. I just don’t think they invited me to it. It’s like a big, weird, secret intervention which they decided would go over much more smoothly if they didn’t have to deal with any of ME there. (In all honesty I’d have to agree with them because I’m a troublemaker and also I can get cranky sometimes and stuff.)

And what are they interventioning? (Interventionizing? Interventioneswaaaahhh?...) About what do they believe I need an intervention? One word: sleeping.

My people are very sure that I don’t get enough sleep.

For the last forever+ a year I’ve been very sure to get 6 hours of sleep a night. Six. It is the right number of hours for me, and I know this from weeks of trial and error. I used to get eight hours of sleep, and then I always, always, seriously ALWAYS woke up exhausted. So then I got more than eight hours and woke no less exhausted (which, I’m sure you already know, was the desired result.) Then one night I got six hours of sleep. Just six – two less than the eight that everybody thinks you need to get and Eureka! I woke up less sleepy!

(important note: there is no amount of sleep that will allow me to wake up in the morning with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, unless that song was Don’t Fear the Reaper or possibly something that would go by the name of “please, kill me now…” I hate the mornings, always do, hate them bunches and bunches and avoid them when the universe lets me do it. The best I can hope for EVER is “less sleepy”, which is where we left our hero…)

Six hours and I felt pretty decent! I got six hours for days and kept waking up pretty decent for days – I made a connection right there. “six hours = works good for me!” To VERIFY my scientific discovery I got eight hours a night for a few days and lo and behold: “PLEASE kill me now!” in three-part harmony. So I went back to six hours and went back to decent and there I’ve stayed: SIX HOURS EACH NIGHT. I HAVE SPOKEN.

But there’s this thing: my friends keep arranging for me to sleep in.

If I stay at my parent’s house and I say “hey, wake me up when you get up!” they don’t. They wake up, but they don’t wake me up.

My friend stayed here over the weekend and both nights we arranged for when to do the waking up thing, always capped with “and if you wake up before that just wake me up.” But then I’d wake up and come out and she’d be all awake and reading, and yet nobody woke me up.

My sweety and I often have weekends where we talk as I’m going to sleep and he’s starting his day, and we plan for him to wake me up the next morning. Always I say “wake me up in six hours.” Always he wakes me in eight hours, and when I ask where the two hours went he tells me with great emphasis that I need more sleep than that.

I’m not a paranoid enough person, so it took me this long to figure it out, but finally I understand it: interventiony goodness. They all got together and agreed that I was not to be trusted with my own sleep schedule. I’m insane, probably from lack of sleep of course, and they are going to save me from my sleep-deprived self. “We will make for her the sleeps!” they said. “We will arrange, through sneakiness and slyness and other skills often perfected by spies and ninjas and paparazzi, for her to get many more hours of sleep, thereby lengthening her life and lowering her blood pressure and making her blond and tall and about 23 years old! We will stuff and shove two more hours of sleep into her six-hour window even if we have to drug her to do it. Because we love her.”

So, I’m feeling the love of course. My people love me, even if they believe that I’m less able to make reasonable judgments about my own health and body than a woman with a serious head trauma and a multiple personality disorder. They love me and they want me to be healthy and happy and awesome. And apparently the sleep-police have assured them that it’s not at all possible for me to be any of these things if I don’t get a full, solid eight hours of sleep. And so from me they are bound and determined to save myself.

So here’s MY plan: I’m going to go commando and get my six hours, to protect my sanity and not kill some innocent bystander at a morning bus stop due to being cranky from too much sleep. I’m going rogue. Going under the radar. Going underground. I’m going to set alarms and read in bed and find other ways to chip away at the very generous but crazy-making extra hours of sleep that my people are bound and determined to heap upon me.

Oh yes. It is on.

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Square One, Mark Two...

Have you ever had a friend that you love but is far away or really busy or something like that, and you want to keep in touch, but you lose touch because far away or really busy or something like that, right? So then time passes, probably a lot of it (far away, busy, something like that…), and when you want to catch up there’s all this STUFF. The trip you took and the club you joined and that thing that happened with the guy and the deal and all the bits of you know, and it’s going to take you SO LONG to catch them up you can’t finish the email. Or find time for the call.

And then so MORE time passes. Which is mostly good, but also makes things even more tricky because with the “more time” also comes more STUFF, which is even harder to cram into the letter/email/smoke signals/interpretive dance of catch-up you keep wanting to do. So more time leads to more stuff which leads to… do you see where this is going?

Well you, my beloved readers, are my far away, really busy friend. (or I’m yours. On this detail I am not clear.) We’ve lost touch, and I keep trying to write you these long blog posts about the trip and the club and the guy with the deal and the bits, but these posts never get finished. Or written. OK, I honestly mostly just think about writing you these posts. But they’re sure as hell not getting written, which means nothing is getting written. Which is less stuff than I’d like to have written. By, like, 100%. At least.

So what’s the solution? Well, when it’s friends that I can’t keep in touch with I normally have them killed. (it sounds way worse than it is, I swear!) But at last count there was just over too many of you guys to really manage that. After all, I’m busy. And you’re all so far away. So I’m just gonna start from here. From right now. We’re going to move forward, and we’re just going to hope that the stuff I never got around to posting in the last few months just won’t come up. (except the thing with the iguana and the peanut butter and the Diana Ross wig and fake boobs. There’s no way that doesn’t come up one way or another. Not with the way you guys love peanut butter.)

Monday, August 09, 2010

Say, you look familiar - have we met?

Look, the bottom line is it just kept being a choice between writing to you guys, WHOM I TOTALLY ADORE, DON’T GET ME WRONG!!!!, or doing stuff with T.E. (get your mind out of the gutter you dirty, DIRTY minds! What kind of stuff do you think I’m talking about??? Oh. Oh, then we’re good. Sorry about the “dirty minds” thing – you totally pegged it…) Can you blame me for the choice I made? CAN YOU? But still, now I feel bad about it. Also I had this big fantasy of having all these blog posts while he was here and being able to relive the whole visit in my blog, yadda yadda yadda… Man, did THAT not happen!!!

So here I’m gonna try to do “T.E.’s Summer Visit – the Good Parts Version”. Hold on tight…:

T.E. shows up and it’s instant awesome with magic sprinkles. There’s all sorts of worrying about what this will be like over time, and whether or not we can live around each other and what if, what if, what if… and then we get that there’s nothing to worry about. Because instant awesome. With sprinkles. Of magic!

We geek, and I’m talking UBER-geeking. Games night, followed by another games night, followed by face to face D&D’ing, COMPLETE with high-tech mapping, Oreos and Funions. (sadly there was a distinct lack of Mountain Dew. Not sure who dropped the Dew ball, there.) And yet even Dew-free the geeking fun was geektastic! One of my favorite things about T.E. is our mutual geek appreciation.

Whee! I got a Wii! My fabulous boy arrived right after my birthday gift did, and turns out he’s so stinkin classy he got me a Wii. A BLACK Wii (because everything is more cool in black.) With extra Wii thingies, and stick-on thingies. All in stylish, slimming black. Right now my tv area is so slim looking, like it went on a tv-area diet… We Wii’d with cool Lego games where Batman bursts into bits. But even more we discover the joy of “hey, let’s watch right now with no previous planning at all…” and we went to Netflix through the Wii and Voila! Instant fish! Or even better, Instant tv or movie! Thanks to my slim, black Wii and online Netflix mojo we burned through the 2nd and 3rd season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. INSTANTLY!

We had awesome sex.

Three words: fancy French unitards! Yes, that’s right – we Cirqued! Kazoobalitamosquiso, or whatever the new Cirque show is called, came through town and we cirqued it up good. His first Soleil, my 6th and a big pile of “holy crap!” dusted liberally with “how does she do that???” and garnished with a dash of “body parts don’t do that. They don’t. Make them stop doing that.” However I learned this year that it’s not always a good thing to have friends who also go to the cirque show. There was this amazing moment where the guy on the top of the Wheel of Deathly Bad JoobJoob and Nightmares of Gravity was jumping rope (yes, like a school girl. A super-hot, buffed, French greased UP school girl, thank you very much!!) and he caught his toe and almost took a 2-story face plant. Big gasps! Big squeals! BIG FAKE! Turned out macho man did that same dance with death in every show. Sigh. (it was still cool at the time.)

Happy Birthday USA! Now let’s go and shoot stuff! We spent Independence day down in Hippyville, enjoying not only ‘splosions of celebration, but we also went out with a friend who has an epic gun collection and shot stuff! Wolves and bears and wild hobos! (ok, paper plates. About a dozen paper plates. But they were wild, untamed paper plates, who could have attacked at any time with no warning. And those paper plates will never threaten another person again.) We shot sniper rifles with these scopes that brought everything right in front of you. And then made them dance around, mocking you. “Sure, I SEEM right up close, but can you stop moving around to hit me? CAN YOU?? That’s right, little girl. Go home and cry to your mama.” And then I killed them. Hee hee. There was a shotgun that fully intended to dislocate T.E.’s shoulder from the rest of his shapely, English body, and a machine gun that fully refused to be aimable, and Dirty Harry’s gun. Because yes, we totally felt lucky.

Also games, games, movies, comic books, zoo, mini golf, movies, games, Costco, library, comic books, games. (and awesome sex.)

…and that, in a whirlwind of stuff and things, is the nutshell breakdown of 2 months living with T.E. right here with me. It was so wonderful, every bit of it, and we’re going to do it all over again in about four months, when my English gentleman comes home for the holidays. In a word: Yay.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

...and we're back!

Oh hey, I didn’t see you guys there. Waiting. Wondering if I’ve once again fallen off the end of the planet. Or perhaps drown in my huge tub of self pity and “could you get over yourself PLEASE???” juice. Yup, totally didn’t see you there at all.

OK, I’m sorry! I’m sorry for being gone again, and I’m REALLY sorry that the last post I managed to put up here was the big old “my birthday party wasn’t milestone-a-licious enough! Oh woe is me and the like!” My only defense on that is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Like free internet porn or clam chowder-flavored salt water taffy. (they both exist. No joke.) I can’t really give a GOOD reason for being gone, at least not the whole time. But the month of May was spent in three very good and noble endeavors:

1. Cleaning up the house for impending visiting from T.E.
2. Freaking out about the visiting from T.E.
3. Beating myself up figuratively (and also one time literally if stubbing your toe three times in one day!) for freaking out about the visiting from T.E.

…see now, with a busy agenda like that who has TIME for blogging?

I could go into all sorts of introspection about these three things, breaking down the need to clean for someone who honestly doesn’t care about the level of clean of the apartment and then also about the freaking out (which we all know was the true reason for the cleaning) and on top of that the beating myself up (which we all know was just a side effect of the freaking out) but since he’s HERE now there’s not much reason for it. I mean really. There was no reason for any of it.

Because he’s been here for three weeks and it’s just AWESOME!

There are, at last count (I’m not counting, but I’m sure somebody is. People just need hobbies is all.), about 16 reasons why this thing between T.E. and I should not work at all. Some of them you know and many you really don’t know (except for those of you who do, but you’re keeping your gob SHUT) but even though they make sense in the world out there they bare no resemblance to our world at all. Where I worried that after 5 days we’d be getting on each other’s nerves we’re at 3 weeks and we’re nothing but gooey. (there’s a whole post coming all about being gooey, and more specifically WHO THE HELL AM I AND WHEN THE HELL DID I BECOME SOMEONE WHO IS GOOEY?????????? Stay tuned…) We love being together; we enjoy stupid, mundane things like making dinner or watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And playing goofy Wii games where we’re superheroes made of Lego bricks-

Oh, brief and quick tangent: know how I bemoaned my milestone birthday? Well I sucked for doing that, but even so T.E. totally ROCKED the birthday gift thing. He got me a WII!!!! I’ve been pining for one pretty much since they were first released and he knows me and he totally got me one. Not only that, but he got extra Wii-motes and chuk-thingies, and the whole thing is in STYLISH BLACK. He’s such a class act, my man… And so tangent endeth…

I have many cool things that can be blog posts so I fully intend to be better and write more. The biggest issue will be finding time where I’m willing to pull myself away from the awesome English dude to do the actual writing. But even this I will try – I will TRY – try to do. Hopefully he’ll suck at some point and I’ll be all irked and stomp off and pout while writing to you guys.

…yeah, sorry but that’s just not going to happen.

Monday, May 10, 2010

I Am Forty

About 2 weeks ago I decided “hey, I think I’ll turn forty.” The timing worked out really well, what with it being almost exactly forty years after the day I was born, and so I went with my instincts. My gut. And I did it. I turned 40. About ten years ago I tried out turning thirty and it worked out really, really well – one of my favorite birthdays ever - so this “forty” thing seemed like a no-brainer. And in the grand scheme of things turning 40 went just fine.

But just fine.

Ten years ago I had a similar urge and went off and turned 30. And my thirtieth birthday was AWESOME! I had streamers and hats and noisemakers. I brought out every ridiculous kid party thing I could think of, including gift baggies and cupcakes and piñatas for all ages. (I briefly considered filling the grown-up piñata with tiny liquor bottles and condoms, but I at the time I neither drank nor did the other thing, so that idea didn’t really work. Besides with, given how hard you gotta slam modern day piñatas the idea of slimy condoms smelling of tequila just didn’t seem to say “celebration!!” It more said spring break in Texas, or possibly Mario Lopez’s bachelor party, so… What was I talking about? Oh, right! Awesome party!) I enjoyed pretty much all of my thirties, and I honestly think part of that successful decade was due to starting it off RIGHT.

Jump ahead to this year. Things have changed some, not the least of which is the Tastic family tradition now of combining all the birthdays in a given month into one big Birthtastic Bash. This is both smart and also frankly necessary, given that the majority of baby-having women in our family seem to have their baby-making sexy-times in the same few months, thereby grouping most of our birthdays as well. Starting in March and running through July there’s a clump of birthdays each month and if we hadn’t corralled them together like so many unruly ponies we’d have had to dedicate every weekend to a birthday all spring and summer long! Whew! So clump them we do, and it works pretty well. Except for when one of the birthdayers has a milestone.

For my fortieth several things happened that kind of impacted the wonderous quality of my birthday. The first is probably the most embarrassing of all: I forgot it was coming.

Don’t misunderstand: I knew I’d be having a birthday. That’s been pretty dang consistent for the last forty or so years, so at this point I just assume that I’ll have one each spring at some point. But honestly I hadn’t really taken stock and noticed that the birthday coming up was a big one until I’d already been screwing up the year spot on checks for a few weeks or a month. (side rant: I hate it when the year changes by a whole decade! At least for the last 9 years I could get as far as “200” before I had to do the math in my head! I’ve been writing “200” and then scribbling out that second zero for months! Not cool, change! Not cool!)

By the time I had properly considered the impending fancy birthday I knew there wasn’t really time to do anything special. I didn’t want to complicate the April birthdays and have to shun my normal birthday partners. I’d not saved up any funds for a fancy-schmancy shindig. And now that I’m living really far away from everyone the planning involved was more complicated by a factor of frosting, mylar balloons and party tiaras, so meh. And that was kind of the feeling I realized I was having about the whole thing: meh. Meh to complex, long-distance planning. Meh to scheduling two parties in April. Meh to figuring out what was sufficiently fancy enough to announce “Femtastic didn’t die for a whole 52 weeks AGAIN!!!”

So I didn’t do nothing.

When I decided to bag the milestone thing I honestly felt fine about it. I was even proud of how not selfish I was being! “Look at me!” I would say when I observed my non-shallow, non-self involved behavior. “Look how grown-up I’m seeming! I could even go buy a house or learn how to use grout! I’m EVER so mature! Tra la la!” (this is, I’m sure, something only the most mature people can get away with saying. If you’re not mature try saying it. See? Doesn’t that just seem weird? Because you’re NOT mature. Riiiiiight…) I tra la la’d my way right up to my perfectly fine and dandy birthday party, which would have been excellent and all such things on any other year 8 years past or the next 9 to come.

But in my head I just kept thinking “this is your fortieth birthday party. And it’s not nearly shiny enough.”

The voices in my head are terrible, tacky, gray and itchy things that say the things I certainly know I shouldn’t ever say out loud. Things like “ok, but really that’s just a weird looking baby.” or “Patchouli is just nasty smelling and I don’t care how earthy you are, nobody should wear it!” or “yes, man-who-is-so-incredibly-overweight-that-he-drives-a-scooter-around-the-Safeway, I AM looking at the five boxes of Pudding Pops in your cart!” They have no sense of shame or decorum. They think that the rest of the world should have to pay attention to speed limits, but that I’m just that much better a driver, and that comb-overs on men and facial hair on women should just be universally mocked. Publically. I would never go anywhere with the voices in my head because they would embarrass me so badly I’d have to never return to that place. Ever. EVER. So I know better than to ever listen to them.

But this time they weren’t wrong.

And this was nobody’s fault but mine! I should have put in the time! The money! The energy! I should have taken the necessary steps to look back on my fortieth birthday party with as much enthusiasm as I do my thirtieth! I shouldn’t have “meh’d” out!

Let me be very clear here: my birthday party was lovely. I like sharing it with the folks in my family who have April birthdays. I got cool things. I got flowers from my wonderful English Sweety! I ate my body weight in amazing, gourmet cupcakes and cheese puffs and things and such! For my thirty ninth or forty first birthday this would have been a super-excellent birthday! But what I’m here to make sure the rest of you guys learn from my foolishness is this:

Milestone birthdays are important. They are those things that you can only ever do on certain times. They are special events that everybody gets but not everybody appreciates. Nobody would ever begrudge you making a big deal on a milestone birthday, and how often is complete and total selfishness SANCTIONED by our society? Answer: Oscar night, your wedding day and your milestone birthdays. So do NOT let them slip by. Celebrate them. Be sure you look back on all of your big days with a massive, poop-eating grin on your face. You won’t regret it if you do, but you will regret it if you don’t.

I await comments about your favorite birthday celebrations. Hit me, my peoples!

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Gods and Cakes and Things You Won't Believe I Did.

I bought a scale. Bought it and then, even more impossible, I got on it. I stepped on to the vile, evil thing and it had the nerve, the utter GALL, to tell me terrible things. Terrible things! Oh the things said to me by that damnable scale, it’s a wonder that I didn’t hurl it Frisbee-style out my window (though my bathroom has no windows, so that would mean going out all nudesque to the first door that opens and that would be cold and I don’t like to be cold so that could be a discourager…). And yet?

And yet, if it weren’t for the scale and the things that it said to me then my BFF wouldn’t have been able to tell me the lovely things that she told me, like that I’ve lost 25 pounds in the last bunch of months. Wow! That’s a double-digit number and double-digits are a good thing; a thing I don’t think I’ve seen in forever, actually.

Now the other thing that the scale did yesterday which I very much appreciated was it told me that the amount I weighed was the same amount it told me I weighed LAST Monday. That might seem like a bummer after working out 4 days in that week, but honestly I found it to be a mitzvah. Because although I worked out 4 times I also ate fourteen million cheesepuffs and my own bodyweight in cupcakes. The fact that I could do that and not GAIN double-digits of badness is kind of miraculous. I’m not kidding there. If some gun-toting nutbag put his toted gun to my brainpan and demanded that I cite three things that proved that his deity, or any deity, weren’t imaginary but instead actually existed I’d point to the tremendous tonnage of cheesepuffs and cupcakes eaten and yet not reflected on my evil, evil scale as item 1. (I’d point to the existence of the Snickerdoodle Cupcake as item 2, and the third one would have something to do with this thing that T.E. can do with… ok, never mind. But it’s the best of the three. No kidding.)

What was I talking about? Oh, right – the scale and the miracles it has helped to reveal. And gun-toting religious nutbags, although I think I’ve exhausted that third thing.

So I’m doing all these things. Because here’s the other shoe dropping after the good news from The Queen. 25 pounds is great, but I have to confess that I suspect all of those were lost by about November. And that since November I’ve lost hardly anything even though I keep working out and WORKING OUT and I believe it to be just plain rude of my body to not lose more weight even with the working out I’ve done. Rude and also unkind.

So now I’m punishing it.

I’ve changed some things specifically so that I’ll lose more weight, but I would be lying if I said I’m not enjoying the idea of taking things away from my body. Things that it loves, like many cans per day of Pepsi and pasta for dinner and Cap’n Crunch WITH Crunch Berries. (my mouth especially misses the Crunch Berries.) I’m drinking things like massive glasses of milk for dinner and I’ve cut out carbs after lunch and do you have any idea how hard it is to find dessert that isn’t carbs? Cookies! Brownies! CAP’N-FRICKIN’-CRUNCH!

I’m also changing up the workout to not be just my biking, but now including time on a thing that is officially called an elliptical, but which I think was originally called an “Wow, it’s really only been 7 minutes on this thing and yet already I want to never, ever do it again!!!” I also think that it was originally engineered as a method for milking water from human beings for that time when we’re going to run out of water on the planet. It’s gonna be kind of salty, my friends, but thanks to this “elliptical” torture device we’ll never want for some kind of watery beverage. After only 30 minutes on this thing I’m a festival of cold, terrible sweat drips.

So I should damn well hope that I lost weight and will lose weight and didn’t gain weight. (even after a diety-affirming personal body weight worth of cupcakes.)

Monday, April 19, 2010

Time Management

Yeah, I suck. Sorry about it.

Here’s the thing: I either don’t have anything to write about or I don’t have time to write. I mean when I have the time I have nothing meaningful to say. Do you want to read about how I cleaned off the balcony of my apartment so I could sit there on the nice days? Or the fact that today was a nice day and I sat out there? Or the fact that I need to get a little table so I can sit out there more because even though they call it a laptop if you keep it on your lap for something along the lines of four hours it will melt your leg skin into a single sheet of leg? (God, I really hope you don’t want to read about that stuff, because honestly I’d really rather not write it. I am so not kidding.)

Why don’t I have other stuff to write about? Because my life has, of late, become a fairly two-dimensional existence. There’s work, which takes about 10 or 11 hours of the day (if you count the hour in the morning where I’m getting up and showered and dressed and stuff. And I do. Because god knows if I didn’t have to be someplace at 7am to do the work I’d definitely NOT be up at 6am to get ready.) There’s sleeping, which should take 6 hours but sometimes only takes 5 and a half hours, (which then leads to my needing to find an additional 45 min. for my best friends to all give me grief on how I don’t get enough sleep, which frankly eats into the sleep time because what other flexible time do I have to give up, people?) and there’s working out which is taking about an hour a day or so. Doing the math (and by the way, I have a standing rule where I don’t DO math on the weekends, people, so I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I’m making right here!) That leaves around 6 hours of time. And in that time we must carve out about 4 hours. For T.E.

That sounds bad. Like he demands four hours, or like I’m doing it out of obligation or doing it for his enjoyment only. It’s 4 hours (sometimes more!!) of time for he and I to talk and laugh and he sometimes sings to me (no, he’s not a great singer, but he sings to me anyway and I think it’s just so cool that he does, so you can just shut it, Mr. Fourth Tenor!) and we watch stuff together through the wonder of the interwebs and we have those gooey moments where one of us just spontaneously tells the other that we think they’re pretty close to perfect and we kind of can’t believe that we got lucky enough to connect and stuff… These things are all wonderful and lovely and excellent. And they all take time. Time I’m happy and eager and lucky to spend, but time none the less.

But then, at the end of the day, that’s all there is. Sneak in dinner and the odd load of laundry or changing the litter pan and I’m done! I don’t have time for other cool things, much as I’d like to. I’m living a bit of a hermitted experience despite both T.E. and I having said on a few occasions that we really don’t want either of us to become socially stunted. (look at my fancy head-shrinky terms -- heard about them on Oprah.) It doesn’t help that these four hour windows are between the hours of 4:30 and 8:30pm, so it’s a nice little chunk of the day earmarked for being at home and comfy. It’s hard to be motivated to go out and do other things, especially given that the end of our conversations are pretty much just me listening to him sleep and trying not to do the same thing. (you think it’s hard not to yawn when hear someone yawning? Try not sleeping when sitting next to someone who is cuddled and breathing that long, slow rhythm of the totally asleep…)

So when I squirrel away some time with my laptop and my thoughts and my quick little tippy-tappy fingers and want to write to you guys I’m honestly stuck more often than not for what the hell to say.

So today? I cleaned off my balcony in my fancy big-city apartment and made a place to sit and watched the sun set while I talked to T.E., my laptop slowly burning a rectangular patch on my lap. If I’m lucky I’ll get to do it again tomorrow. If you’re unlucky, it’s what I’ll write about. Bear with me for just a little while…

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Full Disclosure

I have to buy a new pair of ice cube trays. I had two, but now I only have one. One works just fine but the other had to be thrown away. I threw it away because a significant requirement for an ice cube tray is that they be water-tight, and one of my two trays lost the ability to be water-tight due to the holes that suddenly appeared all over it. Suddenly appeared immediately after I smashed the sucker against the floor of the freezer 2-3 times in a FIT of rage after the ice cube tray had the audacity to dump all of its perfectly-made cubes on the floor.

I do not respond well to fits of rage.

I tell you this story in much the same way I need to be sure to tell it to T.E. Not because he’s a big ice cube sympathizer nor do I think he’ll notice the change of ice cube trays and be alarmed – he’s generally pretty easy-going in the area of ice cubes and the trays in which they come. But I need to tell T.E. in the interest of full disclosure because I do not respond well to fits of rage. I break things. Or sometimes throw things. Or throw things which breaks them. Or break things by throwing other things into them. All of these things have happened at one time or another after I’ve done the “rage fit” thing.

And the other thing is that it doesn’t take nearly as much as you’d like to think it would to rage-fit me. You’d like to think that something which would cause an ordinarily rational and calm person to start hurling office chairs would have to be a big deal. Like putting out my own eye. Or being mugged at gunpoint. Or taxes. For me a lot of the time it starts with me hitting my head.

I really. REALLY. Don’t respond well to hitting my head.

Honestly, I’m hard-wired on this one. Like there’s a special nerve in my head that is directly connected to my “rage” nerve. Or rage lobe, or whatever it is that leads to the rage-fits. I’m not so clear on the biology of it, but what I do know is that my world is pock-marked by silly amounts of damage I’ve done to things in the less-than-split-second immediately following my hitting my head. Freezer doors, remote controls, phones – all innocent victims of those things that I simply have to do when one immovable object (my head) meets another blunt construct (anything else in the world ever, ever, ever).

Another one is toe stubbing. I stubbed my toe getting out of the shower the other day and I remain quietly proud that all the breakable things in my bathroom are still in the same number of pieces they were in prior to the toe stubbing. Or at least I was quietly proud, but that was before I wrote of it and posted it on the whole big internet. But before that I was quietly proud. Yay me.

So anyway, these are the things that don’t come up between he and I, since I haven’t hit my head or stubbed my toe around him yet (knock on wood) or had any other thing to make me rage-fit-girl, but that he really needs to know about because when I eventually DO hit my head or stub my toe or have to talk to the cable company or drive behind a bus or any number of other things with him around he needs to know what’s coming. Understand how very much it has nothing to do with him. And know how to load the tranquilizer gun.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Here's the Thing...

So there’s a thing. About the relationship I am currently enjoying (which is a tremendous understatement – I’m not just enjoying this relationship. I’m loving it. I’m rapturizing in it. I’m rolling around in the wonderfulness of this relationship like it’s dark chocolate pudding with lovely, frothy whipped cream!) with T.E. there’s a thing. There’s an age difference. T.E. is younger than me.

By a bunch.

He’s enough younger than me that when I tell people his age (and they already know mine) there’s always – ALWAYS – about a 7-8 second paaaauuuuse. As if they’re running through all the knee-jerk reactions that first occurs, trying to decide “do I say any of the things in my head right now? Or bite my tongue? And also when did Femtastic lose her mind?”

And just in case anybody is worrying about these things, let me say NO, I am not breaking the law, people! Nobody is doing anything wrong! We’re just doing things most folks probably don’t. And even that’s not it because what we’re doing is what most people DO want to do, and in fact are dying to do or if they’re not they are sad, sad people who do not seek enough “awesome” in their life. But we’re doing it in a unique way. In a way that gives people pause. Really, really long pause.

In all honesty I got a little pause the first time I found out T.E.’s age myself, so I’m not judging the people who do the pausing. I feel their pain, because I’ve had friends or family do things that I questioned and you have that struggle between wanting to be supportive or feeling like you are honor-bound to speak up and express the concern. What I would like, really, is the reaction that my oldest friend in all the world gave to me. She was HONEST with me, while supporting and listening both. She told me that she worried about this younger guy’s maturity and would he be mature enough for me? But she also told me that in the end she trusted my judgment and wanted me to be happy. And when I explained what makes this man extraordinary and tremendous and a huge exception to the rule she listened to me. This reaction gave me both respect but also honesty, which I know was hard for her, but so good for me.

Either that, or I want the reaction that another of my old friends gave me: she met T.E., loved him and is dying to see him again. Just like me! (OK, nothing near as much as me, but the enthusiasm is wonderful none the less.)

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The Next Big Step

T.E. is coming back in the summer – I told you guys that, right? Right. Anyway – coming back in the summer and we just purchased the tickets and he’s going to be here for (get this. Seriously, this is extremely worth getting) SEVEN WEEKS. Not two, and not four (which would be a month, by the way, and this is MORE than four months which means MORE than a month, by the way) and not even six (which is kind of like a month and a half, so this is kind of like more than a month and a half. BY THE WAY!!!!)

So, so awesome.

Now I have had more than a few people react to this with “woah!” and “wow!” and those types of thing-deals. However when you slow down these reactions and play them backwards they, like the Beatles song Number 9, say something totally different. They say “are you sure you can spend that long together?” and “Dang, this will be a real test of your relationship!” and “Yeah, this will be it. This will be the end of this crazy boondoggle.” (oh, and also it says “Paul is dead” but I think that’s a fluke…)

I understand where this comes from – honestly I think even T.E. is feeling a little of the pressure. His exact quote was that he is “cautiously optimistic.” It’s not wrong that this will not just be more time than ever before, but it will be more than twice the time previously enjoyed. It will be over a month and a half! At a certain point I know it will stop feeling like a vacation and an indulgence and 36% magic with sprinkles of “fabulous”. Despite all the time we spend together now, this will be ALL THE TIME FOR A MONTH AND A HALF.

So how come I’m not nervous?

Honestly, I just see this as good. As a thing I want so, so badly. When he’s not here I just wish he was, so seven weeks of not wishing for something I can’t have feels like time where I can finally breathe. Where I will finally be living that moment instead of passing through it headed to the moment I really want. I worry sometimes that my life is screaming by these days because I’m living for these moments. The evenings and the weekend and the summer and the holidays and all those times that being with him makes me feel just a tiny bit more whole.

The time that we will get to spend this summer will be seven weeks – 49 days – 1,176 hours – where I will just be living each hour as just an hour. Each day as “right now” instead of “just waiting.” The things I long for I’ll be getting. And in the face of that I don’t know how I could possibly worry about it. The idea seems almost ungrateful! I’m not saying I expect it to be perfect – this will, in fact, BE a bigger test or challenge or ‘running of the gauntlet’ for us and this relationship and I honestly do know it. But I still don’t see anything to worry about.

So you tell me – am I crazy? Or just in love?

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Wanted: Partner With No Past

I’ve been assured that one of the things that makes me both rare and possibly valuable in the “relationship market” is the fact that I’ve had so few relationships before. Supposedly people really like their partners to have very little or no baggage, and no ex-partners to have to contend with. For me I’m normally really aware of the lack of experience I have at the more complicated partner things, thereby making me feel all sorts of lost and confused a bunch of the time. But according to those who know better than I it’s rarely the problem I think it is. And for no ex's to worry about? Apparently awesome...

T.E., being a pretty amazing person, has ex-girlfriends. Well of course he does. One could ask “if he didn’t then wouldn’t you wonder what’s wrong with him?” (and then I go “but I don’t have hardly any. Does that mean there’s something wrong with me?” and then they go “no, but that’s because you’re really unique in that way.” and then I go “so then him not having girlfriends wouldn’t be a bad thing either if he were really unique.” and then they would get uncomfortable with this awkward conversation and pretend their phone rang and go somewhere else. Far away else.) Technically I have absolutely no problems with the fact that others have loved him before I got my chance. Technically I also don’t think of myself as a jealous person.

(Tangent: I know I’m not normally a jealous person, and here’s how I know: the
crappy dude I relationshipped with before was known for wandering and lived far
enough away that I couldn’t possibly keep track of his activities and people
even told me point-blank that he cheated on me and to this day I STILL don’t
suspect anything nor did I ever have a single jealous twinge. So there.)

And yet there is this one “Ex” of T.E.’s that seems to magically create buttons I never had before and then dance on them in swanky, foreign stiletto heels. We will call her “Aussie Girl”. (because she comes from there. I don’t have to be creative when I’m naming Ex’s)

When T.E. and I first connected he was also connected to her. In fact they were pretty tight, and he was really invested. She was exotic and exciting and dramatic – things to which I definitely could not lay claim. T.E. was totally upfront with me about the fact that there were other people with whom he was also connected at the time and since it was just flirting and fooling around between us I never questioned that. As we got more serious, he and I, things between the two of them seemed to hit potholes, but I had decided that I had no business having opinions about his other interactions and I stuck to it. I ignored those things that weren’t he and I, and I got pretty danged good at it.

Finally he and I spent our first weekend together. It was astoundingly good, and much more than just fooling around. I knew then that my level of investment was higher than I ever expected it to be, and I kept my walls in place, but became much more aware of them. So it was with a certain amount of (totally inappropriate and kind of bitchy) glee that I learned from him that things with Aussie Girl had crapped out. In a word: she’d disappeared. She’d forfeited the game, thereby giving me the “win” and I wasn’t at all sorry to hear it. I tried to keep my catty remarks in check, but inside I did the happy “I win!” dance full stop.

But then she came back. (and how dumb was I to not have considered this possibility when I’d had the win in the first place? If you win because they go away, you run the risk of losing if they come back. It’s simple math, people…)

She didn’t stay for long. (She’s exotic and exciting and dramatic, sure, but she’s also flaky and scattered and maybe a wee pinch crazy-ass-nut-bags, so…) I got my “win” back when she vanished again, but this time I knew how weak a win it was and it took me a while to get over the sense of impending “she could come back at any time” doom.

Still, a big bunch of time passed and she stayed good and gone. I got more confident with what he and I shared. He got more invested in me. One morning he said three words to me that I’d never heard from a partner before, (I'm really hoping you know which words I'm talking about, but I'll also expect snarky cracks in the comments) and in that split second the last of my self-doubt went up in a puff of smug, triumphant (pink and sparkly, smelling of jasmine and hot dogs) smoke. This was a “win” I felt like I’d earned all on my own and wore it like a goddamn badge of “ain’t I somethin’!” honor. Heck, while he was here during the holidays his phone began singing (iPhones – they sing. Have I posted about my total and complete love for my iPhone? I haven’t? Good god, what is this other crap I’ve been wasting words on! Soon, my pets. I will gush about my iPhone soon…) and when I grabbed it to bring it to him I only slightly flinched at seeing it was another ex. Because CONFIDENT! STABLE! NOOOO JEALOUSY! He’s MINE and I’m HIS and everything else is just noise.

Last night we were Skyping, as we are wont to do on… well on pretty much all nights actually… and he said suddenly and from nowhere “Oh look. Aussie Girl just popped up.” After a little more chatting they settled that they’d both like to at least try the “being friends” thing – an idea that I’ve always supported. In the abstract. With people who are not "MINE." Now what I should have thought and felt and all was “oh really? Tra la la, who cares? Because ever so confident and stable am I, and did I also mention that I am impervious to the feelings of “jealous” and such?” I even thought that was how I was thinking and feeling at the time. I was proud of my reaction! ‘Just look at you,’ I thought to myself ‘bein’ all fine and not caring.’ I may even have mentally punched myself in the mental shoulder, all ‘nice job!’ like.

So it was a pretty crappy kick to the shins when all my dreams that night seemed to be various versions of “and here’s how you lose the whole shebang…” Dreams where his attention wandered or his interest waned. Where I found myself helpless and lost and sometimes even sad. I seriously resent being sad in my sleep! This is a total miss-use of sleep and I won’t stand (-er, lie) for it!

You’ll be pleased, my people, to know that I did raise the subject with T.E. I set boundaries for what I could and couldn’t handle, and to his never ending credit he assured me repeatedly and emphatically that she was a pool of crazy he had no interest in diving back into, that he wasn't even sure the friend-thing would work and that he loved me. I don’t doubt his veracity at all – he’s honest with me; he’s someone I know I can trust. However I also know that relationships of ANY kind tend to evolve, and I’ll never totally understand what the appeal was the first time around, so how can I know what sort of appeal might come through again. I’m nervous. He’s told me he’ll sever ties if I want it, and though I love him for offering I feel like that would be a fail on my part. I don’t want to be that chick. I just don’t like being nervous either. Wish me luck with my own bag of crazy, people.

(I mean come on. How could someone with a super-cool IPHONE be nervous? It just makes no sense…)

Monday, February 22, 2010

Getting on Top of the Pile

I’ve mentioned a couple of times now that I changed jobs during my time not posting. Without going into too much detail about my old job, leave it to say that the job challenged me in all the ways I didn’t want, but didn’t challenge me in ways I craved. I felt stuck and stranded and when someone offered me a change I jumped at it.

I’ve been at the new job for about 6 months and while it did fulfill all the promises made at the outset I think it may be OVER delivering. Because even though I work too many hours and scramble through my work day like I’m racing someone and have lists 2 pages long of “to do” items every danged day I still end most days feeling like I’ve failed. Or like I can’t do anything but.

Part of the frustration for me is this feeling that the target moves on me constantly. Whether it be priorities or goals or even expectations I just can’t seem to get my sights set correctly. This leads to a few things, not the least of which is a general sense of panic every day. A few months ago I took part in an executive coaching thing. Now normally I go into such things with a very LARGE grain of salt, and this was no exception. But as opposed to so many that are ‘here are 20 questions – answer them and they will tell me everything there is to know about you.’ this was just me and a guy chatting for an hour, followed a week later by me and this guy chatting for another hour. The first hour our chatting was all about him asking me questions. The second hour was all about him cracking open my head and reading me the contents in a most freakishly psychic fashion. He NAILED it.

The big “aha!” moment of that for me was the a revelation about how important it is for me to have clarity. I need to clearly know what is expected of me; what is happening around me; what my targets are. When I have this clarity I go forth and make it happen; I engage people and they will follow me, oh yes they will! Without that clarity I flail around trying to make anything and everything happen; my energy gets manic and frankly I drive people away. I have felt the panic from the lack of clarity but never understood it for what it was. Unfortunately now I should be able to see it when it happens and all too often I know I’m feeling something bad, but I don’t know what.

I think I can do this job. The part that everyone else seems to boggle at – namely the people management – is the part I KNOW I can do. But where I’ve begun to worry that I’m failing, or doomed to fail, is the other stuff. The scope of the job is more than I can do – this much I know for a fact. Since the start of the new year I’ve been on a never-ending quest to get the picture clearly defined so I can even understand what the whole scope is, but even that seems beyond me. For the first time in a very long time I’m worried that I’m about to get officially dumped, and no amount of hours or scrambling seems to be able to make the difference. What’s more, as the days and weeks go on I find myself resenting the job more and more because it’s not achievable yet achieve it I must.

But in the end the realization I’ve been making is that at some point I’m going to need to stand my ground with those above me and draw a line. Say to them “I cannot work more than I am, nor can I do more than I have been. If this is not enough then you either have to hire me an assistant or leave me the fuck alone. Or fire me, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone else to do it any better.” Wish me luck when the time finally comes! (and if you have an awesome job that requires less than 10 hours of work a day let me know, ‘kay? I might be in the market soon…)

Friday, February 12, 2010

Cracked Mirror

The last time I had a serious relationship (or actually any relationship at all really) one of the big, BIG mistakes that I made was not being me with him all the time. I became more and more bogged down in being what I thought HE wanted me to be, or wanted from a partner. While it sure seemed like a good idea at the time, especially because my self esteem was a little lacking at the time so being me seemed like a really BAD idea, in the end it was pure catastrophe. Because eventually “me” kept bleeding through, and every time it did it pissed HIM off. Hard to blame him, really, because it was me that kept changing the rules there. When all the chips had fallen, along with a great deal more tears than I’d have preferred, I promised myself that if I ever had another chance at trying love I would be very sure not to make that mistake again.

I’m proud to say I’ve stayed true to that promise so far (knock on wood). In fact, T.E. and I kind of fell into a rule early on that we are always honest with each other. Always. Even when the truth is harsh or sad or what have you, and it has been all of those things at one time or another.

But what I struggle with this time around is when I’m being me, but I don’t particularly like who “me” is in that moment. I have the harder time with our honesty rule, not because I don’t want to be honest but because there are times when the truth of the matter is one I’d rather not admit about myself. Case in point was tonight.

Managing our communication when we have an 8-hour time difference is not an easy task. More often than not it’s T.E. that ends up having to keep late hours to make it possible, and I appreciate his sacrifice always. For a while we honestly indulged too much, resulting in not a few days or even weeks where he was going to bed only a few hours before I was! While that was fun it was really hard on his life and finally saner heads prevailed. We set rules and boundaries on our time, saying that we’d only be able to connect for a couple of hours each weekday night. But we also made ourselves a bargain that the weekends we could go crazy. Stay up as late as we wanted. Who cares if we slept all funny? Who cares if the rest of the weekend we played catch-up? It was worth it to be able to put in some quality time together when we could.

One of the things that I’ve come to understand about myself is that I don’t respond well to surprises. I’m not a spontaneous gal. I like to know what’s coming, and especially true if what’s coming is disappointment. So tonight when he climbed into bed at our weeknight curfew of 2:30am (his time) I was a blue roo because I didn’t know it was coming. I felt like I’d been doused with ice water, and felt those stupid chin tremors starting to come up. And with them those feelings of “ok, now you’re just being stupid…”

T.E., as I’ve said before, gets me. He knows when my sentences have become clipped, or when I’m letting the silences last a little longer than normal. After a while he sensed something was up, and he checked on me. He asked how I was, and I said those 2 words that I always say when the real answer is “I’m shitty” but I don’t want that known: “I’m fine.” But I also know him, and I know that he’s on to me and my standard answer, so I quickly covered and changed it to “good. I’m good.” And then I wondered if I was breaking our honesty rule.

I wasn’t fine – I was blue, and kind of irked that I’d expected the reward after a long week and diligence on our curfew to be a nice, long evening together. But I didn’t like how I was reacting, and so didn’t want to share it. I didn’t want him to feel responsible for the pouting that I was just barely keeping at bay. It was my damage and I wanted to be damaged by myself, so to him I was “good”. Even when I wasn’t.

So now I’m trying to figure out if I broke our rule. If the rule is “honesty all the time” but the honesty feels like something private is it still wrong to keep it back? Sigh. This relationship stuff is hard. I think it would be much easier if I were only a little bit perfect. Maybe I’ll work on that next instead.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Battle of the Bulge -- Now With Dinner Theater

So here at my shiny, new apartment complex there’s also a shiny, new workout room. It’s… petite, but it suits my needs. Now instead of my bike rides 3 times a week I can take bike rides 5-7 times a week. Rain, snow, sleet or falling frogs, I can still take my bike ride. Which is very, very shiny. (Well, as shiny as anything that sweaty can honestly be.) Plus also there’s this added advantage of being able to read a book while I bike. This, I can assure you, is much more difficult on moving bikes, as there’s that whole thing about needing to watch where you’re going and balance and stuff. So in the “reading while I bike” department the stationary bike in the workout room is a VAST improvement!

Most of the time there’s just me in there. I tend to head down there fairly late, so as to not have to share my panting and wheezing with others, but most of the time there’s someone else trotting on the treadmill or… something with jaunty elliteration on the elliptical machine. I just sit on my bike, pedaling away. But the other night was odd. I’d been zooming along for ten or fifteen minutes when the first guy walked in. He is most often the one who shares my sweat-space, so we did that silent nod-greeting thing and he jumped on a treadmill and took off away from me. (Except of course that on the treadmill you don’t go anywhere. And besides if you DID I’d totally have caught up on him on my non-moving bike, so…)

But after a couple of minutes another guy walked in. And in fact this guy was two guys. And these two guys jumped on the other two cardio-machines, one treadmill and one elliptical, and away they went. From my spot on the bike I had, in those moments when I looked up from the book, this funny little view of a trio of strange hineys bouncing down the road away from me. An amusing enough site that I admit I looked up more than once. A couple three or four times actually. And on the third or fourth time my middle hiney guy started to flap.

Yes, flap.

He was running along, treadmill flying under his feet, and his arms started to flap. Arms straight out to the side, hands palm-down, away he flapped. So enthusiastically I had to look down to his feet to make sure they weren’t coming off the ground. My funny, runny stranger flapped and flapped as he ran and I felt the first giggle coming up kind of like a tequila burp. But be proud of me, my people, for I stifled.

Then the fourth guy showed up.

First of all, there’s never been three, so you KNOW there’s never been four. So that was surprising enough. And yet I was fully committed to ignoring and getting back to my book and disregarding the unprecedentedness of a fourth guy. Still, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that he was headed to the weight machines. I also noticed that he was a little guy. Not short, but more slight. Spindly even. So it definitely caught my attention when he decided to lift so much weight. Because it really was a lot of weight. Frankly, it was pretty much ALL the weight. I’ve never even looked at the number on that bottom weight because I knew I’d never see that come off the ground ever, but I know that some of the numbers above it include combinations of 8’s and 0’s. Mr. Spindly pushed up this big HEAP of weight. Probably a whole 4 or even 5 times.

He then moved to another weight machine and once more lifted all the weight. Numbers of 8’s and 9’s going up into the air another 5 or 4 times too. And then he rearranged the weight to pull from here rather than there and pulled yet again all the weight! With the spindly arms!

After the fourth pile of “all the weight”, though, Mr. Spindly looked dejected and grumpy and wandered back out again. At this point I realized he’d been killing time waiting for someone to step off of a cardio machine, but flapper and his two buddies never even looked back. And so off Spindly left.

And right after that my flapper stepped down. He was done treadmilling, and therefore done flapping. The guy on the elliptical also stepped down, and stepped out, and I knew the show was coming to a close. I felt kind of bad, because it had been a big night in the workout room. And then, as if he heard my mental cries of “Encore! Encore!”, flappy gave it up for one more big performance. He began high-stepping his way across the floor. Not nazi-style, mind you, but more along the lines of “can I knock my own teeth out with my knees? Can I?”-style. Step, step, step he went, first east to west and then back the other way, back and forth across the room twice. I watched, holding my breath and the guffaws contained within that breath, as his knees came higher and higher.

And then he was gone. And it was all I could do to not applaud.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Meeting Our People

When my sweety (wait, what are we calling him again? Right, The Englishman. T.E.) was here around the holidays we went back home to Hippyville and he had the joy panic-driven fear-fest experience of meeting my people. Practically ALL of my people. Family, the Royals, and even the ‘rents. I give him BIG credit for throwing himself to the wolves like that, and he passed with FLYING colors. Witty, friendly, classy and the snazzy English accent can’t HELP but impress.

The big worry was really meeting the parents. Because let’s face it – parents are scary. Even uber-cool parents like mine are scary because HELLO! They’re the PARENTS! And the funny thing was that my Dad, who has always been the very picture of “not your average guy”, went very much into average guy mode when he got the details of my relationship with T.E. He did ‘posturing’ and ‘glowering’ and even a little ‘he’d BETTER be worried about me!’ I honestly waited for him to grab his dick and spit, so dude-like was my Dad all of the sudden. So I was mostly worried that this new-found dudeness was going to spill out when he and T.E. met and I was going to have to splash them with perfume and a hose to break things up.

But to my “yay!!” everyone was on their best behavior at the first, and that segued nicely into just being the cool guys that they actually are after a day or so. No competitive hand-shaking or ceremonial dick-measuring necessary after all. I was very proud of both of them.

Since I don’t go to London (there’s reasons for that. It’s not like I don’t WANT to go to London. It’s LONDON! There’s rain and pubs and a place where words like “bangers” and “mash” describe FOOD! Logistically it’s just complicated is all. But I digress.) there isn’t the same opportunity or requirement for me to meet his people. So I’ve been sucking up long-distance. I sent his parents a Christmas gift – one that actually reflected what I’ve been able to glean about them from my sweety. This seemed like truly high-quality suck-upping! And it seems like it payed off, as I’ve been promised a “thank you” email in response. (yes, I am this excited at getting an email. Shut up.)

And then tonight T.E. introduced me, via crazy swinging Skype party, to his very best mate. After the ‘rents T.E.’s best buddy (who we will call The Romantic, or T.R.) is really the most important person in his world, so this was a big deal to me. It came w/out planning or warning, so I had all of about 30 seconds to consider the idea, prepare my most fabulous anecdotes, do the virtual breath check, etc. In the end it was pretty much an accent-fest, with these two FABULOUS-sounding voices bouncing back and forth like a sexy tennis match! A good time was had by all and according to T.E. I passed muster with the buddy too. If we like each other and our people like each other what else is there, right?

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Love Sick...

So as I already mentioned one of the best things ever was the three weeks that I got to spend with my sweety around the holidays. It was truly awesome and totally yay.

I got sick.

(wait, you got sick and yet it was awesome? I’m confused.)

Dear Confused:

Yes, the time together was awesome and yes, I got sick. Now big chunks of the time I was NOT sick and those times were very awesome. There were movies seen and games played and family and friends introduced to and all these were good things. Awesome things. And if this was the whole visit I’d stand by my “was awesome” stance with confidence. But it was even better than that, BECAUSE I got sick.

More than that, I got sick AND I did NOT kill him! Not at all! I killed no part of him, nor was I even tempted to do any him-killing!

Oh, but wait, it gets even better: he took CARE of me. While I was sick. And I didn’t kill him even more AND (this is the big part): I LET HIM TAKE CARE OF ME.

(even bigger part): I LIKED HIM TAKING CARE OF ME.

For any of you who have been reading for a long time you’ll remember that a couple of years ago I went on record on this site saying that I never be able to have someone in the house when I was sick, but instead would require anyone in the house to be… not in the house. Also known as ANYWHERE ELSE. This is something that I was truly sure was gospel, based on many things not the least of which was the fact that when I’ve been sick in the past I didn’t even want my MOM, the person who birthed me and who was my chief “Meh. I’m sick. Take care of me.” person growing up, to come look after me these days. So if you don’t want your Mom to take care of you how could it be that anyone else would do? Answer: it couldn’t. Hence ANYWHERE ELSE.

And yet there I was, lying beside my sweety in bed, feeling like if he really loved me he’d go ahead and kill me out of my own best interest, and yet loving that he was there for me to roll over and snuggle up next to. Loving those moments when he touched my head to see if I was hot or encouraged me to sleep some more or just generally looked over at me with the expression that could only say “Awww… how are you feeling, baby?” He took care of me and I absolutely loved it.

This morning I woke up with one of those headaches that reminds you how much easier life might be if you scooped your brains out with a melonballer. (of course I’m not much of a cook, and don’t like melon. So no melonballer in the house. Dang.) Lying on the couch, feeling pukey (both literally and figuratively), I found myself wishing so much that my guy were here to take care of me again. How crazy is that? Must be that “love” thing. I’m really going to need to get used to that.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Start of a New Year

Sorry about falling off again. For the most part it was focusing on my sweety while he was here for a whole THREE WEEKS. (Woo hoo!) since then there’s been a lot of time with work and life and stuff, but I’ve been totally thinking of you guys. I swear!

So I don’t do the “new years resolutions” thing because in my experience that’s just an extremely efficient way to make yourself feel wonderfully awful later. And really, aren’t there more than enough ways to do that in this world already? And yet still as the Christmas stuff gets boxed up and I sweep the latest little batch of pine needles up in the kitchen and I FINALLY get used to writing “2010” on stuff you really can’t resist thinking about what the next 12 months hold for you, right? Yeah. Right.

So here, for your eyes only, is what I’m going to try to do with 2010:
  • Size 8 by my 40th. It’s possible, and not even impossible ever. It’s currently 3am and I just finished another hour on the bike here in my apartment’s workout room. See how dedicated I am? How serious? How possibly insane and/or nutsy? All these things are important for a true weight loss goal. (also The Queen told me about this cool weight loss app for the iPhone and we all know that anything is possible once there’s an iPhone App.)
  • 200 sit-ups and 100 push-ups. There’s this whole work-out challenge thing online where they promise that you can, in six weeks, be able to do 100 push-ups and 200 sit-ups in a run w/out stopping or, SUPPOSEDLY, falling over totally dead. I’ve tried this. Actually I’ve tried it twice. Both times I get to the 5th week and do what we like to call “epic fail”. But dammit, I’m not giving up yet! (Later on. Later on I’ll probably give up. Like 2011 or something)
  • Debt Free, Baby! OK, this is a little bit of a boondoggle because I can’t actually get completely debt free. I took almost 2 years of classes through the community college in my home town and owe monies from that, which I can’t take care if on a short 12 months. HOWEVER just about every other debt I have out there I aims to kill all dead and killed-like by the time I start over-spending for Christmas 2010.
  • Keep up the blogging. No, seriously. What? Why are you laughing? Aw, c’mon guys! I’m not kidding!
  • Build even more on this amazing “love” thing. I never saw this coming last year and I have a total of F*ck All bonafide experience in relationships. But I’m not going to let that stop me. This is the best thing to happen to me in… (doing the math)… (fingers don’t fail me now)… forever. Just plain forever. So the one thing this year I’m going to do, SO HELP ME DEITY OF YOUR CHOICE, is not mess this up. And if I’m smart I’ll even enjoy it.
I’ll see you guys back here next time. In the meantime if anybody has any suggestions for an annual goal I haven’t included here I’d love to hear it, my Peoples!