Saying YAY to Sunday.

There is something truly glorious in a sunny Sunday of a slow-paced holiday weekend, when the weather is cool enough to open the windows again, and I feel like I have all the time in the world to do whatever it is I want.  Organize old photos.  Paint my toenails.  Drink fizzy orange juice out of a champagne flute.  Because tomorrow?  No work.  I love that. 

As much as I like to complain about my job and roll my eyes when I think about my boss, really, truly, I appreciate the work and the experiences and the chance to do something that’s just so me. I write.  I analyze.  I learn and I think, and even though I know the whole enterprise is kind of a joke, the job itself seems impressive.  And they pay me commensurate with that illusion, which always helps. 

Too often these last months, Sundays aren’t as nice as they should be, and I let my doom-and-gloom, boo to the Monday ahead attitude make the day something of a tireless march to the inevitable. I’m really going to work on that. 

I can’t imagine a time where I’m just going to love the thought of going in to work.  Nope, not holding my breath on that one.  But I am going to work on being less negative about the whole thing, and it’s going to start with Sundays.  It’s like that whole idea of Sunday Dinners.  I have this picture in my head of Sunday Dinners, something I imagine going on in my grandma’s era; happy times in small Midwestern towns with station wagons parked under big oak trees on quiet streets.  Everyone, all the family and friends, come over for this Sunday Dinner in my head.  It’s like a big deal.  It’s happy, and people look forward to it.  They can’t wait for Sunday!  They eat things like Turkey and roast beef and mashed potatoes.

Not, ahem, popcorn.  Or cereal.  Or ice cream out of the carton, on the sofa, with total senselessness on the television because please, block it out, tomorrow’s almost here, baaa.  Not that I’ve done that or anything.  You know. Hypothetically.

I’ve found a new church that is just spectacular.  It’s a bit of a drive, but on Sunday mornings, the freeways have shed their rush-hour congestion, and I find I really like the space.  So does my car, however; I’ve GOT to remember that the speed limit on most of the roads around here is 55.  Not 80.  Which I might have been doing this morning, without even realizing it.  A speeding ticket of that size would surely kill the happy ideas involved with Sunday Driving, another image I’ve been channeling.  A nice Sunday drive, to start the week off right.  And!  And, there’s a massive, really nice Trader Joe’s right on my way home.  Oh happiest of discoveries! 

I have a new Sunday routine, hooray.  When I’m at the store, I’ll pick out something nice for dinner, and start the week with new groceries, and just be at peace with the whole idea of a brand new page of days.  Happier Labor Day resolutions I cannot imagine. 

Confessions, Perspectives, and Possible Changes.

I’ve been drunk, lots of times.  Very, very, rip-roaring drunk; fall into bed with inappropriate men drunk; “god-I’ll-never-drink-again” drunk.

I’ve had sex.  Not a lot of sex, mind you, and not a lot of especially good sex.  But sex just the same.

I was, until a near-breakdown in my gynecologist’s office this week, on the pill.  I stopped not because I should, or because it was the “righteous” thing to do, but because I don’t like the idea of tricking my body into thinking that it’s pregnant when there’s a net gain of zero to me. 

I have a lot of totally sinful thoughts. 

I have been to confession once.

I spend money recklessly. Or at least with less heed than I probably should.  Let’s just say that when I have money to burn, I usually burn it.  I pay an exorbitant amount in rent each month for the luxury of living alone in an expensive building, and I care about buying nice clothes.  I’m usually too lazy to stake out the crazy deals.  I don’t really feel bad about this.  And a lot of my going-out clothes? Could probably be considered, to a true conservative,  “scandalous.”  I sometimes wear mini-skirts to my job.  Yes, my job as a lawyer/writer/whatever; mostly because I just don’t care. 

All of this, and I’m sure lots more, set a giant chasm between me and my new friend Theresa.  She’s a Catholic, of the hard-core variety.  [And as an aside, yes, this is her real name.  But note that in the Catholic community here there are approx. 500,000 Theresas, so this gives absolutely nothing away]. I’ve known her since I moved here; she runs the women’s group of which I’ve been distantly affiliated for a long, long while.  I went again last night. 

She was struggling; I was struggling; it just worked out.  We talked until almost midnight, long after everyone else had left.  I bit my tongue at her, to my ear, naïve concerns, and looked at the woman behind it all.  I toned down the surely sultry, to her ear, tale of J and me, and just gave her the elements.  We’re very different in so many ways, but last night, sitting there in the chancery as dusk turned to evening turned to night in the windows outside, we just were. 

She sent me an e-mail just now, inquiring as to my plans for the evening, wondering if I’d like to come over and have dinner.  She’s alone, she said; her roommates are all gone for the holiday weekend.

In another world, I was going to be on my way to New York about now.  One of J’s law school pals is getting married tomorrow, and we’d planned to be there.  We’d stay with his parents, make an at-home weekend of it; catch up, chill out, watch the beautiful bride, et cetera.  Suddenly, of course, that concept’s lost a lot of its luster. 

J’s still on his way, I imagine.  Me?  I’m here, with laundry waiting for me to rescue it from the dryer, and a bottle of wine looking for a corkscrew.

So I’m going to go.  Not because I think she’ll be my new best pal, or a confidante or any sort; but maybe because I think we have a lot to learn from each other.  She can learn some toughness, and I can learn some grace. 

And yeah, I’m brining the wine.  

Meanwhile, Not Much is New.

I renewed my lease today.  One fateful signature confirms that I’ll be here, still, in this cozy apartment-for-one until October 31, 2009.  That seems impossibly far away.  And very sad.

Boredom and the desire to Not Do Work hit an all-time low when I signed up for Russian classes.  Spontaneously.  I was Googling Norwegian lessons, I don’t know why, and hit on group language classes in DC.  Norwegian is not being offered, alas.  But they have a Russian class that meets once a week through Thanksgiving.  It starts next month.  I’m not even sure what I was thinking.  There was a whir and a flash and it was like an out-of-body experience: I was watching me, sitting there at my desk.  I was so distracted by how cute this me looked in her glasses, seeming so determined, that I failed to notice that she’d gotten a hold of my visa, was typing in numbers, and was clicking “confirm.” Then it was done, and there it was: I felt it in that second, and acted.  Fait accompli.  I’m going to learn Cyrillic, and be a spy in my head.

There comes a time when you’ve just got to take some risks, jump down the rabbit hole, and see what’s out there.  You never know what you’ll find. 

The scary part of this approach, though, is that risks don’t always pay off.  Even really well-calculated ones.

My almost-25-year-old cousin is filing for divorce.  She was married the week before the biochemist, and I was there.  We called it The Summer of Love.  Barely two years later, she’s out.  There’s a lot of sadness there, and I don’t even know what to say.

And I’m still finding it hard to put J and me into words; the adjectives and pronouns and verbs, they elude me.  This game of forgetting and moving on is difficult. It was, and then … then it wasn’t.  I have a whole new perspective on our shared two years; I’m seeing it in a different  light.  The light of an outsider.  Looking in, without the lens of the emotion that attached me for so long. It’s getting easier.

I ordered new prints out of my iphoto, an effort to replace happier times smiling out of the photo frames and bulletin boards scattered across my daily path.  I’ve kept the originals in an unlabeled, unsealed envelope: buried, disguised, suppressed.  But still there.  I can’t let them go, not just yet. I’m going through the motions.

Five (5) U.S. dollars just bought me a ticket on a direct, Seattle-bound jet plane for five glorious days in November.  I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving in ages.  This is the product of two fortuitous circumstances: (1) the comp time I earned in Cambridge last week; (2) the miles I have accrued thanks to my Alaska Airlines visa.  I have two visa cards, and I make it a point to keep them both well exercised, fit, trim, and in tip-top shape.  Yes, I lie.  I just really like the rewards.  Nordstrom points and airline miles? Like shopping wasn’t fun enough already, seriously.  It’ll be good to be back.

There’s something about an annotated calendar, classes and flights, etc., that makes everything seem on track again.  It’s a good feeling. 

One if by Land, Two if by Sea, Three if She’s Gone Completely Mental.

There are a lot of perks of being a writer off on assignment.  Fancy hotels with premium cable, stipends to spend at any restaurant you want, the opportunity to learn a lot of really interesting things. 

Like anything, though, there are also down sides.  Being alone, for one … I’m so jealous of people who travel for work in groups.  I’m also not a real fan of the giant PRESS designation slapped across my conference name badge: yes, I’m the peon who got in for free; no, I’m not really one of you.  I usually just turn it over, blank side out, and sit there, taking mad notes in my cute suit, and just act all enthralled.  But I think the hardest part is the hours.  When you’re in sessions from 8am to 3, learning all about various aspects of nuanced law, you’re expected to go out for a drink or something after: let it all sink in, meet people, get out of the indoors for a bit.  Having to come back to the room and write it all up—as much as possible before 5p deadline!—rather makes the macbook the enemy. 

I’ve been acting like a Harvard regular up here in Cambridge since Tuesday, and finally, the charade is up.

The campus is beautiful, and I feel about ten times smarter just walking around—like the buildings are positively seeping with intellect, just there for the taking.  I love the history of this place.  I love imagining how things used to be, looking at the buildings and picturing everyone who was here before.  That’s one of my very favorite parts of the east coast.

I filed my last stories last night, went for a few celebratory pints at the Cambridge Brewing Company (thanks, expense sheet), and switched the bedside alarm firmly to OFF. 

My cheapskate boss demanded I take the least expensive flight back.  The journey’s but an hour; I could be leaving now, and could put in at least a half day in the office.  Oh, happy fortune, the cheapie flight departs at 6.45 in the p.m.  Boston, today you are mine.  As soon as I get out of bed.  

A Happy Post! With Pictures!

I want to send a giant THANK YOU out to all of you for stopping by, for commenting, for emailing and calling over the past few days.  I’ve found myself in some pretty unfamiliar territory; I’m scared and uncertain and anxious about so much, but your support means the world to me.  This place called blog is magical indeed. 

Before the crisis of dissolving the us, and just as I was dipping my toes in the deep water of deciding whether to trust that there is something happier in store for me, I was on a pretty fantastic vacation.

In another life, my mom must have been a cruise director, because seriously, she had every detail marvelously orchestrated.  We had just enough days on the beach and off on adventures.  We ate at some of the neatest restaurants.  It was the perfect balance of structure and relaxation. She should go on TV, my mom. “Mom’s Comprehensive Group Guide to Kona.” Or Tuscany. Or Greece.  Or somewhere really cool.  Tonight, on the travel channel, she’ll show you how it’s done!

This was the first actual vacation I’ve taken since being a real career girl.  Vacations when you’re a student just aren’t the same.  They’re excellent, yes, but it’s a different feeling to be using annual leave, to be skipping out while other people are working, and to feel like you really need a vacation—rather than just that you get one, or you want one, or you and your friends think it’d be just a blast.  It was hard, at first, to block out the thoughts of work that kept creeping into my head.  Coming back, though, I really feel like I’d been gone for ages.  It is one of the happiest feelings.

We were in a secluded resort on the Kona side of Hawaii’s big island for six amazing nights.  We had three rooms among the six of us; my youngest sister and I were in a room adjoining that of the biochemists, and my parents were in a larger suite elsewhere (smart, I say!).  It really worked out perfectly.  My youngest sister and I have always been really close, and we agree on things like, say, disabling the air conditioning immediately on entry (so freaking cold!).  We kept the screen doors open at night, and fell asleep to the sounds of the ocean.  I still dream of that. 

We went on a sunset sail, and we toured a coffee plantation.  We spend many hours at the beach, and beside the pools.  We visited ancient Hawaiian ruins, and took a helicopter tour over the volcano.  We snorkeled out where the sea turtles and octopi live.  (And an aside, I love that the plural of “octopus” is “octopi.”  Is that not one of the best words ever? I think it must be.  We saw octopi.  And it was amazing).

Between the five cameras on active duty that week, we amassed over 200 photos of the trip.  I imported them all into my iphoto, and for the first time ever was frustrated with the mac’s efficiency.  It ordered them all chronologically, which is great in theory, but aggravating when you have one sister whose camera thinks it’s June 2004, another whose camera thinks it’s February 2009, and a brother-in-law whose camera thinks it’s January 2002.  Fix your cameras, people!  I spent the better part of my flight home manually correcting the timeline. 

A few highlights:

I’m not a huge fan of my feet.  I think they’re oddly shaped and I mostly hate them.  But, they make for a nice “I was here”-style photo, so observe:

 

More feet (hmmm).  But, this time they’re covered up and all set for snorkeling; this is me and my youngest sister.

 

The volcano from the air.  I love looking into the lava; it’s like a window to inner earth.

 

And lastly, a particular favorite of mine; this is my sisters walking on the beach immediately after we arrived; the bags were delivered, but not yet unpacked, and we had a whole vacation yet undiscovered.

I’m back.  Right now, in this moment on the couch, it feels pretty good.

 

Hold, Please.

I just had to put an important attorney on hold because I spilled a giant mug of green tea across myself, my desk, and my keyboard in the middle of our phone conversation.

Embarassing, yes. But far easier than the hold I put on J last night.

We are “taking a break.” We are on the way to breaking up. I never saw it coming, but I always did, all at once.

Looking at it now, writing these words, it hardly seems real. I looked him square in the face, and told him I wanted out of the relationship. I did this. I broke the one thing I thought I’d have forever, and I did it with a clear conscience and the firm belief that it’s for the best.

In short: I’m unhappy. I’ve been unhappy for a long time, and looking back on my writing here, and my thoughts cached elsewhere, I see hints of it. Cleverly disguised, framed as pure bliss, as this is it, as I’m in love!—but I know just how much effort went into that created perception. I wanted it to work, and damn it if I wasn’t going to make it work.

My mom tells a great story of me as a two-year-old. I had a puzzle, graduated wooden ladybugs that fit into four holes. At one point I was fixated on fitting one of the ladybugs into a hole that was too small, a hole in which it was not designed to fit. She heard me from the other room, yelling at it. “Fit!” I screamed. “Fit! Fit!” She says I sat there for a good long time, inconsolable, trying to force it in. “It’s like you and J, sweetie,” she said to me last night. “You’re determined to make it work, and you’ll take it on by sheer force of will if you have to. But if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.” She said I’ve always been heroically determined. It seems that can also work against me.

I do not believe that J and I will ever be as happy, or have as warm a relationship, as my mom and dad. I want that. So badly.

As much as it hurts to say that I don’t want to be with him, I know that it’s worth it, to hold on for something more extraordinary. I want to believe that real happiness is out there somewhere for me. A happiness I don’t have to massage, or force-fit, or convince myself of by writing big words.

This separation, or break, or whatever, was not a decision I took lightly. It’s not something that came to me on a whim. For me, right now, I really think it’s best. But oh, is it hard.

He’s hurt. He’s angry. He keeps calling me with tears in his voice. He thinks he’s the one for me, is sure we’re going to make this work, swears he’ll make me the happiest girl in the world if I just give him one more chance. It’s messy. I feel like a cold-hearted ice queen, and it’s going to get messier still. He’s just not going to see this from my perspective.

There’s a lot more I could say, and a lot of feelings that keep bubbling to mind, tingling the tips of my fingers but not quite finding the keys to hit to express themselves coherently. I’m sad. I’m choosing to be alone even though alone is the last thing I want to be. I’m breaking his heart.

Someday, I will be stronger. Someday, I will be happier. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope, the Bible says. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. Someday, someday, I will be fine again. And this hope is what’s keeping me going.

Chocolate Should Not Be Blue.

I’m sitting here, back in my apartment, absently eating peanut M&Ms: remnants of a neatly packed and ziplocked flight-time snack sack, courtesy of mom.  She’s totally adorable like that.  For some reason, right now, it’s striking me as tremendously odd that they’re all so unabashedly artificial in their coloring.  They’re a bag of marbles, or croquet balls for the fairies.  They don’t seem at all familiar; not something this girl called me should eat.

It could be the negative 6 hours of jet lag taking over, but I feel like a lot is suddenly foreign. I’m like an actress in someone else’s life: I know the role, how to grab for my metro card and to greet the security guard by name, my e-mail passwords and where to hang the keys, but it isn’t mine.  None of it is mine.

The battery in my watch died.  It’s frozen at 11.50, precisely the time we left my house for the airport.  I didn’t notice till we’d landed, and the helpful voices on the intercom advised us to adjust our watches for the three-hour time change.  I left my house, and time stopped.  I was in a state suddenly not my own, in a life a seeming shell of what it once was, before I noticed.

J greets me as I come out of that “if you pass this sign you must continue to exit” part of the airport; I see him and I know how I’m supposed to feel.  But I don’t.  He hugs me and I hug him back; he says he missed me and I say me too.  The words fall from my mouth without meaning; lines in a script of how it’s all supposed to be.

I should have missed him.  I should have ached to come back to his arms.  I should love him the way my mom loves my dad, the way my biochemist sister loves my brother-in-law; I should talk about him the way my youngest sister rattles on about her since-we-were-16 boyfriend.  I should have been able to imagine him next to me in a beach cabana, smiling and sunscreened the way all the honeymooning and freshly married couples were.  Shouldn’t I have? 

“The only thing missing is me,” he said, looking at a picture of the six of us after a snorkel trip.  I smiled, but the disagreeing voice in my heart let me know I’d swum way out of bounds.

I feel like I’ve known how this story was going to end for a long time, I just wasn’t ready to face it.  I’m still not certain I am. 

He’s coming over in an hour or so.  He’s playing Mr. Perfect; he’s already brought over groceries, and he’s making dinner tonight.  Something, though, is missing.  Something, at least on my end, and at least in the right now, is unsettlingly artificial. 

Little Bag of Contraband, and Other Pre-Vacation Adventures

The very first day that liquids became dangerous on airplanes was, unfortunately for many family friends, immediately after my sister’s wedding.  Lots of perfumes and conditioners and lotions, brought to the nuptials without issue, were left in a tragic graveyard pile at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.  Flights were missed as the TSA lines ran out to the parking lot. It was, in a clichéd word, chaos.

Since then, we have learned.  Hence my contraband, set and ready for tomorrow’s island-bound flight: 

 

With some careful coordination, it all fits into that quart-size Ziploc, yes siree.  My lotions: yes, all three of them.  My perfumes, and lip glosses, and hair help, with note that that gel—endurance every man deserves!—was the only travel-sized model I could come by.  The curl scrunching gel, alas, did not make the final cut.  I’m convinced it’s all the same product, really, just with tricky little subtitles to target hair-product-hungry shoppers such as (writer waves her hand frantically) me. The after-bite insect relief, since I’m know to attract an average of three times the mosquitoes of anyone else in my family.  My liquid makeup essentials. Hand sanitizer, for good measure.  In sum, a week’s survival pack.

My parents are checking one bag, so things like sunscreen can come along, though otherwise ours is a strictly carry-on scheme.  We’ve been a carry-on family for a long time; it came from the era of us being old enough to want lots of things, but too small to actually be responsible for hauling it all.  “If you can’t carry it, you can’t bring it”: the birth of a family motto.  Not exactly seal-over-the-fireplace material, but hey, it gets us from here to there.

It doesn’t really mean that I pack less: I just pack more efficiently.  Like, squeezing four pairs of shoes in along with more clothes than I’ll likely need. 

Mom, my sisters and I went and got pedicures today in preparation.  It was so relaxing, oh good gracious. It was a spa pedicure, where they dip your feet in paraffin as you lay back in a dark room with quiet music and an aromatherapy eye mask.  It’s possible I feel asleep for a little bit.  When I opened my eyes again, those shiny pink toes?  They were mine.  I find I’m almost always a red on the toenails girl, but I figured I’d go a bit softer and tropical this go-round.  So Essie’s Antique Rose it was.  It’s such an understated, “on vacation” color; perfect, I say.

We were home at spot-on five o’clock.  “Cocktail hour,” dad announces as we come in from the garage, and whipped us up some drinks.  I’d say this was just the vacation bug, but I know better than that.  It really is an every day practice around these parts.  I usually get home from the gym around 8, and call home then; of course, that’s 5 here, and these parents of mine are all loosed up and ready to chit chat.  I love my family.  Every time I’m home I think I so seriously hit the jackpot somewhere, to have been born into so much perpetual fun.

It is freezing here, though.  “Why don’t you go get some warm clothes, and we’ll take a walk!” Mom said to me after breakfast.  Um.  Warm clothes?  How quick I was to forget that August up here doesn’t spell the 90’ humid days I’ve grown so accustomed to!  It was 53’ this morning. Fifty-three, people.  As in, 21 degrees away from ice cube town.  I think it might have hit 61 in the height of the afternoon.  Thinking more on the east-coast summertime wavelength, I brought exactly one long-sleeved number, a track jacket I just (cough) bought at the Nordstrom sale and have, in fact, been wearing basically nonstop since takeoff. 

I’ll wear it again tomorrow, as we head off to the islands for a week.  In vacation spirit, I’m leaving the macbook behind, but send a world of Aloha until my return…

Wine With Breakfast.

(Not, in fact, recommended). I have a problem when it comes to traveling. I’m much better at the anticipation, the weeks of calendar crossing, than I am at the execution: T-0 hours usually leaves me in a frenzy of must clean the house, must pack the bags, must get everything perfect and oh gosh, I know I’m forgetting something, what is it?

At approximately 3.30 in the p.m., I’ll be busting out of this joint, claiming my place on a Seattle-bound jet plane, and focusing on sunshine ahead.

It’s something of an unsettling feeling, to finally be here, and now, on the first day of August (! How?). Every night, as I’d pass by the airport, I’d think ah, only a few more days/weeks/months! Now that the day is here, though–and while of course I’m excited to go home–I find myself thinking along the lines of, oh come on, I could take another week at least. I want to savor the “coming up” quality of this vacation more, it seems, than the actuality; it’s like I want to keep saving it. More than that, I really don’t want it to be over.

It’s this perpetual anticipation model that causes me to just live life as usual until BAM, time to go!

J was a sweetheart and came over last night to help me clean. There may be something wrong with me; I really can’t leave calmly to go anywhere without the house being organized and spotless and really, really tidy. I think it stems from knowing that coming home from vacations sucks, and if the house is messy on top of that, well, then you’re in sad sadness.

He did an amazing job. Really, I was just going to straighten things up. Mr. Deep Cleaning J took over, and was awesome, and now I feel kind of like my secret life as a well-masqued slob has been busted wide open. Curse you, dirt and grime behind those boxes I never move, and crumbs I tend to ignore because I can’t be bothered to work the vacuum extension!

As a prize (or something), he was enlisted to help me eat all of the food (really good food!) that I had in my fridge that wouldn’t have lasted till my return. Yet another symptom of my poor planning, not realizing that “this week!” means “stop cooking new things!”

Which brings me, of course, to breakfast. An omelet (good eggs!) A bagel (would go stale!) Milk, the last of my OJ, and a nice glass of red wine, to send me off in style. J advised against it. But I just couldn’t throw it away. I opened it a week ago, and that vacuum pump is a great thing, but leaving but a glass’ worth lingering till the 11th? Probably would have to get poured out. It was a nice bottle that I should have remembered yesterday. So unlike me, but que sera sera, right?

All of this ended, of course, with me que sera seraing it right onto the train this morning, going all Heeee! It’s Friday. Heeee! I’m going to work, and everything was all very hilarious.

And now I’m here, frantically tying things off, wondering why my paragraph spacing is so determined to be all squished and ugly, and still pretty sure I forgot something.

Till next time, warm wishes for a happy happy weekend!