Perfect Storm

Knee deep in irony for the open bar gala held in remembrance of a person killed by a drunk driver and with no acknowledgement to the guests about making sure they made responsible arrangements if they were going to attempt to get their money's worth from the open bar, I had such a kick ass time. It was the perfect storm of people I didn't know, empty stomach and alcohol. The people I did know I didn't know enough to care what they thought so I just had a good time. I danced until my hair was wet. It was so awesome. No one pressuring me, no one checking in to see if I was having fun, no one insisting I do anything. I just enjoyed dancing because I like dancing and I was pretty pickled in appletinis. It was great. I'm trying to get through my second bottle of water before sleeping...such a great night.

Strangers with candy

Stranger=bad
Hot Stranger=hmmm....

I love men. So I'm back out there again, casting a line in the pool of internet dating. I had one picture up for 2 days. Nice enough picture, always witty and insightful profile. I decide to conduct an experiment. I put a photo up of me sleeping-not really sleeping, just a photo I took when I wondered what I looked like with my eyes closed. 30 seconds later, some 25 year old guy messages me. A hoot I tell you. He asked me to write his profile. Then he started flirting with me. I gave him a bit of a hard time. Too, too young. He's just a baby. My sister should be dating him. But if one is to believe what he told me, he just moved here from Cali (he gets the crappy timing award and the who the f moves from California to the east coast in the winter award). So he's bored and doesn't have any friends. Then some random guy from New York messages me. His profile is annoying and full of complaints about the behavior of other women on-line who 'don't really want a good man' so I told him distance was a deal breaker (it is). Still, I love how my little experiment returned immediate results. Men respond to the intimacy of that picture. The 25 year old asked me to tell him the craziest thing I had ever done. I told him that it was entertaining a conversation with him. He persisted. Then I told him it was taking fingerprints off a dead man. He was clearly looking for a sexy crazy so I had a lot of much fun messing with him. After dead men I told him I had flown a plane (true story). Then he asked for embarrassing and I told him about my dance with salmonella. I thought I had cooled his enthusiasm but he said he wanted to meet me. Ha. No f-ing way.

I often wish I didn't, but I do love men.

She's just so awesome

I like Angela so so much. Read her newest post here.

Or read it here

Sometimes, even with their famous kindness here, it feels a little like they have stripped us naked and thrown us out into the blizzard with a pair of tap shoes, saying, "Dazzle us. We know you can." I sat down to class yesterday, next to the other student who has the same fellowship as me, and he said, "They told me they expect more. More from us. There are expectations," and the anxiety billowed off him like storm clouds on a mountaintop. "Fuck that," I said, and we laughed, because how else can you respond to such expectations and live? This is all I've got. I'm giving you all I've got. But I walked home from class talking to myself and swearing into my scarf and the wind all the way back after a teacher's biting comments to me.

Some days, I feel like all my interactions here are with people needing propping. We all need to see that kind face and those scrunched eyebrows looking back at us and saying, "I know, I know, IknowIknowIknowIknow." There is so much fear of failure. We're writers. Of course there is.

"I feel like a seventeen-year-old asking this," says a fierce and brave man in class, "but is it even possible to write and be happy?" The room is silent because we are all afraid of the answer, and later I lie on the hardwood floor of my office crying, because no one tells you how to jump into those dark pools and not drown, they only tell you to dive deep and bring up treasure.

"Fuck it," being my favourite phrase of late. Fuck it. Fuck it. I think Jesus understands.
I will not can not should not shall not play that game. Fuck it. And my mouth tastes like happiness as I say it.

Insecurity; driving achievement since 0 B.C.

I was all set to write this morning how insecurity is the least useful human condition. How self-limiting and self-fulfilling it is, how annoying it is to the people who love you. But then I thought of how many people I know or am aware of who spend their entire lives trying to achieve their way out of their insecurities. Sublimating insecurity with achievement generally proves unsuccessful at addressing the actual issues, but the world is often better, or sometimes terribly worse (Hitler, anyone?) for it.

Grateful

There I was, thinking if the one person I know in Philadelphia is busy I don't have anyone to hang out with. I was trying to remember a time when I only knew one person to hang out with and resolved to somehow build a deeper bench. Then I finally decided to get my rear in gear and get some errands run. I was out 5 minutes when I got a call from my friend in D.C. telling me to come back because she was at my front door. Then they did a double surprise by having one of them hide and knock on the door 2 minutes after I found the first one at my door.

My girlfriends drove up from D.C. today and surprised me.

It's not my birthday, I'm not having any personal or professional crisis, they just came up for the day to see me. I love surprises. This is probably the best one I've ever had. We've had great fun eating and talking our way through the day, commiserating, counseling, laughing our asses off. It's not a small thing they did. The trouble they went through to come here makes me feel special.

I'm grateful.

So Far

I have watched cartoons, drank coffee, and thought a lot about leaving Philly. I get so tired of life, the routine of walking the dog around the same streets, of grocery shopping, of having the same clothes to wear, of shouldering the same struggles at work, at home, in life. As I was thinking on these things and walking the dog last night, I considered my wanderlust in terms of simply seeking different scenery to do the same old thing. Location is important and does impact lifestyle but the fundamentals don't really change. I literally live three steps from a gym and don't go. I live minutes away from a theater and haven't seen one play. I think this weekend I will do what many women do when they need to shake things up. Get a new haircut. I don't know why that makes everything seem new and possible but it does. So I need to get out of my robe, take the dog for a walk and find a Hair Cuttery or something.

In other news, I have been waking up early for about 2 months now. I'm at the point now where I manage to waste enough time to negate the benefits of being up early. The only thing I consistently manage to accomplish with the found time is making and consuming coffee. Which is awesome because I arrive at work fully caffeinated but it's not the boon it was when I first started rising early. I do this with the help of my wake-up buddy which if you have trouble getting up, I highly recommend. I'll probably dedicate an entire post to extolling the benefits of a wake-up buddy but for now, it's time to hit the streets for the a.m. poop scavenger hunt. She's lucky she's so cute.

Warming up

Need to write so apologize in advance for what I think will be a rather disjointed post.

I still can't listen to Crowded House, Don't Dream It's Over because it reminds me of IBC. It's possible he liked me after all but I was too much of a freak to allow it to happen. I don't have any illusions that I missed out on someone that could have been a long term relationship but I still think he's a swell guy. The nicest guy I've met in a long time and someone who liked smart women. A guy who was intimidated when I smoked him (and all the other men) on the shooting range but also bragged about me all day and greatly embellished my skills and performance for comedic effect. He's been dating someone for over a year now and our communication has dropped steeply off. But I wrote him today and then day dreamt about him for the rest of the day. One day I hope to find out if I was right about how he felt and apologize for being such a tool.

Magnifying mirrors are manufactured in hell. No one should ever look in them. It completely distorts your world view.

I don't understand this notion of athletes and other public figures apologizing to their family in a press release or apologizing to parents and others who considered him a role model. Need to search closer to home for your role models, mom and dad. Tiger doesn't owe you an apology.

Had repeated waking dreams of choking out whiny-ass co-worker.

A short note to haters

Dear Hater from Omaha who posted a Facebook comment that our storms out east were otherwise known as 'Wednesday' in Omaha,

Yea, I lived there for 5 years and Omaha doesn't really hit it out of the park with snowfall totals ever. Wanna talk crippling ice and the opposite of hell windchills? You totally have (and can keep) your bragging rights there. Otherwise, shut your pie hole.

We're number 1!

A dubious distinction when we're talking about crippling snowfall but I still think it's cool to break records. These are the areas they actually plowed. I know, right?

Making pretty children

My father wrote me yesterday and told me I was absolutely beautiful. He then went on to congratulate himself and my mother for making pretty children. I know it's not supposed to count when it's your dad but I still feel pretty terrific.

Happy Tails, a Fort, and 10 (unsuccessful) tries to take a photo together

This picture doesn't do it justice but the tiny people in the picture actually built the fort and had returned with beer. I told them I thought it was awesome.



Unsuccessful attempt to get picture at fort. Every picture that I look decent in or manage to even be in the frame, she looks like she's being held against her will.

Fill in the _______

I have bathed, eaten, and napped today. Aside from walking the dog, I have not accomplished much. If I knew that most people or even many people had not even left their house, I would probably feel better about myself. But I suppose there will always be someone I can compare myself with when I'm determined to feel bad about myself. Which brings me to something I've been mulling over for a few days, filling in the blanks.

Filling in the blanks is what happens when I see a person walking down the sidewalk with a yoga mat. I assume they have their shit together in spades and I get frustrated with everything they are that I am not. I don't know a thing about them but I take that snapshot of them walking down the sidewalk and slide it in the self-recriminating section of my mental wallet. Same thing during encounters with couples. Even if I know enough about them to wonder how it works, I still ascribe to them some quality that eludes me and all the happiness a heart could hold. I can even envy a friend of mine who is working through a painful separation likely to end in divorce for at least managing to get married. Or a girl walking down the street looking cute and put together for making an effort and enduring some small suffering, a cold head, less comfortable feet, to look nice. I can fill in the most innocuous observations; if I made it into a drinking game, I would never be sober.

I have shied away from determinations and resolutions this year but I have been making a semi-conscious effort to stop assuming everyone has some slice of the life I want for myself. To reflexively denigrate who I am and what is great about me because of what I am not. I just watched a movie where a guy realizes his rival never had the life he envied. Truer words were never written. I used to interview people interested in applying for my old career field and I always led with the things that sucked about the job. When people saw us, it was always for that 1/10 of the time we seemed to be doing something exciting or cool. They didn't see the remaining 9/10 of report writing, meetings, lawyers, evidence collection, autopsy, trash covers and all the other spade work that came before and after the 30 minutes of actual cool stuff.

Today I walked the dog on a bright sunny day in record breaking snow. We encountered an awesome fort, complete with a cardboard flag. The snow was powdery and my old combat boots were warm. I talked with friends, had a yummy lunch and a lovely nap. I am clean. Large swaths of my house are clean. I am going to see if I can set up a mini-tripod to get a picture of me and Baloo at the fort. I'll bet at least one person who sees us will wish they had my life.

Botch.com

Every now and then I am tempted to outsource my dating life and rejoin a dating website. I just get an itch to engage, to just have guy energy around me. Usually you can search before you join and so I'll just do a quick run based on age and location. And then I am again cool with being single because the search never returns a profile or picture I just have to know more about.

Wow

Imagine my surprise after a full 24 hours of news coverage on the snowstorm pummeling the northeast U.S. to log on to my computer and see that something else was indeed happening in other corners of the globe. I'll bet people in Haiti with the means to get news know how much snow fell in Philadelphia. For craps sake people, how many ways can you talk about salt, snow, ice, and precipitation totals?

I am Legend, you are Legend

Further to the introspection following another night of PBS, I have been thinking of Cuban Pete. I caught snippets of a program where he was speaking to a class at the Art Institute here in Philadelphia. He and his partner did a dance version of VH-1 Storytellers, dropping names of people and places the students had no context or appreciation for and then at his own request and urging would dance for the students. They were respectful but not engaged and one guy in particular caught my attention with his bemused expression. His eyes. They were the same eyes I have when having a ridiculous and unnecessary conversation with a homeless man. I could tell the students thought Cuban Pete was funny, thought the whole thing was funny. The instructor was breathless with praise for how well he could articulate his joints and how well he moved (read: for his age). Praise born of low expectations. Another student talked about how well he used to dance and called him a living legend.

But I looked at those kids and thought, you are Cuban Pete. You will talk about that Chris Brown joint and try to krunk when you are 70. Jay Z will be at the Art Institute of Philadelphia rapping to a bunch of bemused college students and they will watch his old videos with a smile tugging at the corners of their mouth, entertained by what we considered entertainment. Beyonce's Single Ladies and the viral phenom of copy cat videos will have kids born in 2050 rolling in the aisles. Only the annoying hipsters of the future will know who Coldplay is. If we're lucky, we'll all become living legends. But that is the beauty of youth. Why shouldn't we all think for a time that we are creating the earth anew? Some people actually do crank out something in their youth that changes the world. Still I loved how caught up in how cool they were, the students, and how none of them seemed to recognize their future shuffling along to Mambo music and telling the stories of when he was just as cool as they.





p.s. on the video, his dance partner in his twilight years; straight scary lips. Heath Ledger as The Joker. For reals.

I am becoming

The kind of person who watches PBS and is seriously considering a membership and tote bag. I am recognizing myself. I am checking myself out in the mirror and choosing to have something good to say. I have been grateful, incoherently grateful for french press coffee, a twin sized furry soft fleece blanket I have co-opted as a throw, and for my wake-up buddy whose 0530 call ensures my eyes will be heavy at 2100.

I have been grateful for my ever willful dog. For forcing me to scream and yell like a crazy lady when she quickly tries to choke some unidentifiable sidewalk contraband down her gullet. For making me reach in for it and continue yelling and commanding her to drop it while she does Lab calculus to determine if she can resist long enough to swallow it whole. I'm grateful that my lab-o-lantern is slowly growing her hair back and that she doesn't have gross stitches to rub against me anymore.

I am grateful for a friend who thinks I should write a series of books and thinks it is a terrific idea for the title of one to be Soul Turds. That one will be dedicated to her.

I am curious why I continue to engage when homeless men talk to me. Last weekend a homeless man asked me if I would marry him if he stopped drinking. I told him that anything is possible. Why would I say that? Why? That's the sort of response that lands a girl on Dateline Mystery. Anything is possible? Really, Ava? That is possible? You and nameless homeless guy who called you the 'n' word last time you saw him? That is possible? All I could do is laugh and check over my shoulder often as I continued on with my walk. I can be so incredibly stupid sometimes. I would like to become someone who does not feel obligated to engage in crazy conversations with homeless men.

Still sorting and working through this blog fast. It's not a writers block, there are volumes being composed in my head. I just haven't figured out where I'm supposed to write them down. I started toting my journal to work and have jotted a note or 2 down there. I feel like I'm looking for a pair of good looking comfortable heels. So, so elusive. So, so fantastic if you find them. I've been getting up at 0530 and have been very resourceful at finding ways to eat away at all the time I should have. Today I watched Steve Wilkos until 8 am. WTF? Yesterday I napped after coffee on the couch in the gratitude provoking fleece throw. I guess this will just be my slug week. Last week I was doing push-ups, yoga, and laundry before work. This week, not so much. Yin and Yang.