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.)