Oh I Believe In Yesterday

Yesterday, I was going to try to sell these chandeliers I got at an auction. $50 for one, $15 for the other. The $50 one is apparently worth at least $300 if I can sell it to a dealer, who will turn around and sell it for double that retail. The other one I like more though it's worth less, maybe just a hundred or two. If someone wants it for enough I will sell it, but I'm really tempted to keep it and put my shiny crystal chandelier in my front entranceway and this new big brass number in the dining room because it goes really well in there...

Yesterday, I only made it to one antique dealer and made zero phone calls. She didn't buy it but I didn't expect her to. I didn't have a migraine until very late in the day. I had Neighbor Guy.

There's an old Sesame Street bit with Itzhak Perlman. A little girl goes running up some stairs and plops down in her chair with a violin. Then Itzhak Perlman (who had polio as a child and walks with crutches) struggles his way up the same stairs, sits down and says "Some things that are easy for you are hard for me." He then picks up his violin and runs scales, arpegios and noodles all over the fingerboard. Then the girl says, "Yeah, but some things are easy for you that are hard for me" and plays a Suzuki Book 3 Bach piece.

I see people's feelings like they're spelled out on "Hello My Name Is" tags. I'm not always right, but I am more often than not. It's why I used to think I was psychic, and I still have trouble reminding myself that other people won't immediately catch on to the little signs and signals I think I'm sending out as obvious announcements of my feelings. I attribute it to being a writer; it's the insight of a therapist with the hubris of assuming I'm right and then sharing it with the world. Think Dr. Phil and first-person journalism.

My dog and I were drinking water and smoothie respectively on the coffee shop patio when Neighbor Guy came walking past with his dog. Last time I saw NG he was drunk and depressed. Now he was clearly sober and depressed but kept insisting he was fine. I asked him what he was doing, he said nothing, so I scrapped my always-changable plans for the day and asked if he wanted to hang out. So we did.

Either I'm naturally drawn to depressed people or everybody on earth is actually depressed once you get to know them.

Apparently Possible Boy thinks I'm a possibly perfect Possible Girl, but he already had things getting started with Other Girl before he even met me (he was talking to Neighbor Guy about her the day we met) and he's never been in a real long-term relationship and doesn't want to do anything to mess up the possibility of Other Girl. I'm not getting any of this from any kind of frank discussion with Possible Boy, but between Saturday night as a bit of a third wheel and then asking Neighbor Guy like the big fat jerkface I am, I'm pretty sure this is the "true" story. What ever happened to the grand institution of Dating? I don't know Possible Boy well enough for him to feel like a great loss, but I'm sad to put the possibility on ice.

Yesterday, Neighbor Guy and I contemplated an upsidedown tomato garden on the ledge of a window down the street. A man walked out of a building and Neighbor Guy immediately engaged him in conversation, except in "conversation" NG was doing all the talking. As we started walking in the same direction, NG invited this new person to come hang out at the bar and I tried interjecting as much as I could to smooth a path between NG and propriety as he continued to point out where he lived down to his dog in the window. Our mostly dumbstruck companion managed to pointedly mention his girlfriend early on, shattering NG's dreams of settling down with an upsidedown tomato garden of their own, but that didn't stop NG from sighing as he mentioned his imagined love's eyes or checking by the bar repeatedly later in the day.

This sort of crush is quite foreign to me. I need some sort of words or personality bit to spark me. Neighbor Guy just needed blue eyes and thin lips (WTF? thin lips? what is wrong with you, NG?) That's part of my dilemma with Possible Boy. I know very little of him. I mostly like what I know, but it's so clearly just this tiny little surface sliver, I don't feel like I want to fight for him since it might turn out I don't like him after all and he'd be much better off with Other Girl. I just want a friggin' chance to get to know him to figure out just what kind of Possibility he is. Why are boys so frustrating? Why aren't these things nice and logical? Never mind. They would be totally sucky boring if they were logical. They just make me want to throw things the way they are.