Belated

Why write now when I haven't blogged in almost two months? A Boy, of course. I'll get there in a moment...

I never wrote about Thanksgiving, how much we had to be thankful this year. My cousin adopted a child. My other cousins are pregnant. Amber stopped by and she's all kinds of pregnant, too. I've created an actual business that's started to make actual money that I enjoy and works extremely well with the chronic migraines and depression that I need to accept as part of myself that's not going anywhere any time soon. And my mom had the fastest, easiest experience with breast cancer humanly possible. I don't think we've ever cried so much as we went around the table and did our "I'm thankful for..."s.
My babycousin (the adoptee) is almost one and friggin adorable. My parents still have this plastic horse on wheels that was my favorite 1st birthday present. I found it in their basement, Lysoled the hell out of it, and brought it up to see if Babycousin wanted to try it out. She loved it and I love that she loved it. Maternal instincts creeping in, biology and all that...raising the next generation with my own experience...someone please start singing "Circle of Life."

I never wrote about my business taking off over the holiday season, money coming in for the first time in a substantial way, paying down the credit card I pretend doesn't exist from a few years back, seeing 800 shop views in an hour, front page, treasury after treasury, hard work paying off.

I never wrote about The Ritalin Experiment. As happens every year, fall showed up and so did a general feeling of gloom and constant exhaustion. My psychiatrist thought I'd do well on a "stimulant" meaning Ritalin. It was a good thought. Unfortunately, I had a paradoxical reaction and it took me two weeks to realize my total lack of desire to do anything and deep dark depression were a result of the drugs and not just a part of me I deserved (isn't depression fun?)

I never wrote about my mom's surgery. Breast cancer reconstruction stuff. The last of it. She was getting back to her negative fussy ways, but then about 24 hours before going under, she saw her therapist and POOF! back to positive thinking. Amazing.

I never wrote about the ovarian cyst I got the day before my mom's surgery. I ended up driving myself to the ER in agony, getting probed by nice people with creepy machines and dumb people with nice drugs and then missing the entire  time my mom was in the hospital. Not ok. Ok with my mom (who was wonderful about it) but not with me. I felt guilty, like somehow I'd made myself sick so this would be about me instead of her. They got a nice clear view of the cyst in the sonogram, so if I did somehow give myself the damn thing, I've gotten good at materializing my psychosomatic symptoms.

But I never wrote about the boy, either.
At first I thought he was gay. I misinterpreted something as him flirting with another guy, and I must have thought he said something else early on, too, because I filed him away as "gay" very quickly in a way I don't normally do. So he was my fun new friend I didn't see that much. He was there for Halloween, we hung out for a good chunk of the night as I got consistently more and more wasted. He was gone by the time I was almost ready to follow home the snarky stranger.
I think Halloween was when I first thought, "Wait, why exactly did I think he was gay?" Went from "Too bad he's gay" to "I don't think he's gay..."

Apparently I'm extremely dense. Aural Girl is amazed at my obliviousness, and Possible Boy knew exactly who I was talking about because "it's just that obvious that he likes you."
Still, I wasn't sure until he was talking about Neighbor Guy basically trying to rape him no matter how many times he said "I'm. Not. Gay." (Glad to hear Neighbor Guy is sticking to his M.O., falling for straight boys and  then not taking "no" for an answer.)

I had to reevaluate The Boy. Because now he could actually be a Boy. What? Further investigation was in order, but I saw him at most once a week at the bar. We didn't actually hang out until right before he left for the east coast for a month-long winter break vacation.
But.
The day we hung out, we were together from 11 AM to 11 PM and had a really fantastic time. Driving around in freezing rain and an estate sale and making music and cooking and more music and being awkward and then just a little bit of smooch on my way out the door. He followed me out to my car in his t-shirt, oblivious to the cold in our mutual dazed bewilderment. The freezing rain slush had turned to snow. After our final bits of giddy and apprehensive, I managed a cool "See you in a month," and drove home.

And then he flew away. To a Carolina. For a month. He won't be back until mid-January.

I wished for an excuse to write love letters, but at this point it would be for the storyline and the love of myself.
But it turns out, he tends to be awake at stupid hours of the night creating things. Whether it's a bad habit or just my natural clock, I've been  indulging my nocturnal tendencies and spending hours and hours (like, a good 5 hours a night) "talking" to him on Facebook chat.

I'm not quite sure he's real. I suppose there's enough about him that is just completely his that he can't be purely a narcissistic projection of myself, and there's so much I still don't know. But so much of what I'm finding out seems to fit very well. I'm not getting completely lost and stupid because, via instant messages, he seems more like a concept than a real  person. We'll see when he gets back. As long as he keeps making me feel better about myself instead of worse, he's an improvement on most of my past emotionally-involved Boys and I"ll gladly live in fluttery-but-cautiously-optimistic limbo for a few more weeks.

[No code name yet because I haven't decided on one.]

Compressing

Trying to decompress a bit after many days in a row of crazy.

Starting last Tuesday:

• RCN stood me up and I got stuck home all day while developer's contractor guys switched my incongruous sink for happy-matches-the-rest-of-the-condo sink.
• crashed at NBF's house

Wednesday:

• happy 27th birthday to me!
  
• crawled back home by 7:45 AM so contractor people could come put granite on sink
• good RCN person came after I did much yelling at every RCN person possible
• therapy
• psychiatrist
• picked up NBF and dragged him around for rest of day because it's my birthday, dammit
  
• rented cargo van
• drove to Wheaton to pick up 1920s art deco table and chairs I found on Craigslist
• tried to drink a shmancy beer to celebrate but fell asleep after a few sips and was out for the night by 11 PM

Thursday:

• drove (still in cargo van) to O'Hare to pick up NBF's dad
• waited in cell phone lot while NBF's dad got his luggage
• discovered NBF's dad was actually at Midway.
• drove downtown to meet NBF's dad half-way from Midway to us
• NBF, his dad and I carried 1920s art deco table and chairs from van into condo
• picked up futon and big squishy armchair with ottoman and brought them to condo from NBF's house
• stared stupidly while NBF and his dad carried furniture up stairs
• lunch!
• drove myself in cargo van to Container Store to pick up Elfa closet components for awesome office closet that, once installed, will be the greatest thing in my life
• carried 90% of heavy closet crap up to condo all by myself when NBF and his father appeared (NBF left his cell phone and keys in the van when we parted ways for the afternoon...oops) and they helped with the last bit before I had to run off to return cargo van before Enterprise closed.
• Filled van gas tank and returned van. Flirted with fabulous boy at Enterprise place. Wondered why boy was working at Enterprise.
• Picked own car back up. Filled it with gas, washed its exterior, had 70-year-old car wash operator tell me I'm a beautiful woman and my husband should spoil me and they'll spoil me at the car wash whenever I come back, spent an hour cleaning out car's interior down to my leather wipes so it would be presentable for driving NBF's parents either that night or the next morning
• Shower. Nap.
• Back to O'Hare. Birdie's flight came in after 11.
  
• IHOP for pancakes.
• Sleep like dead people

Friday:

• Coffee with NBF's dad and Birdie at coffee shop across the street until NBF called to say he was at my doorstep, so he joined us having finished his last paper minutes before
  
• Shower and get pretty for graduation. Original pretty sun dress had to be scrapped for layered wear thanks to Chicago refusing warm weather on May 17.
• While NBF and Birdie went straight to the graduation, NBF's dad and I drove back to O'Hare to pick up NBF's mom (NBF's parents, being divorced, hadn't seen eachother in five years. Weeee!).
• Turned around to go get tickets from NBF.
• Turned back around towards O'Hare.
• Rain
• Met up with NBF's mom at the O'Hare Enterprise, which is not near the main stretch of other rental car companies and required my driving back up a one-way stretch on the Avis car return and doing several U-turns before following the Enterprise shuttle into a parking lot behind a hotel
• NBF's mom wanted NBF's dad to drive, which was the whole reason we had to go to the airport even though she was getting a rental car. Then the two of them were going to follow me since I knew where I was going. I also printed up directions for myself and them just in case. They followed closely until the very end when we had to start making turns, at which point they decided to pass me. In the end they followed the directions, which turned out to be slightly wrong, I had them stop in a parking lot, went and found them, and eventually led them into the correct parking lot. We were 15 minutes late and shouldn't have been allowed to sit in the seats Birdie texted me that she saved us, but the woman watching the door we went in was nice and we just spent 15 fewer minutes sitting through boring crap.

So NBF graduated law school and moved back East. No more NBF. Pretty devastated. Plus side: finally being forced to make new friends, leave my cave, etc. Negative side: no more NBF around to satisfy my social urges when I'm not up to doing anything beyond waddling my ass eight blocks down the way and curling up around somebody else's dog.

Birdie is super-swell. Some of our mutual college friends got married and made babies and live in the Midwest, with a pair in Champaign, IL and another in Bloomington, IN. Despite my reluctance towards long car trips (my life-long motion sickness has been worse and more migrainey in the last few years...bullshit asshit faceshit since it wasn't so long ago I did northern Ohio to Key West and back in a weekend) Birdie talked me into meeting the babies and their parents in Indianapolis and then following the Bloomington set home for the night.
So. Much. Fun.
We met up at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis which was awesome. We spent the entire time in two of the exhibits because our friends' one- and barely-two-year-olds couldn't get enough of the dinosaurs and then played themselves silly in the Playscape.
Our Bloomington-based friends' baby boy fell in love with me the moment he saw me. He wanted to show me everything and hold my hand and have me pick him up a lot. Apparently he never does this, not even with his mom's sister, and I'm not that well versed in the art of very small children, so I felt like the most special person in the universe. Both of the kids are completely awesome and gorgeous and all four parents are just so good. They don't let the kids set things on fire or anything, but they're totally cool about letting them explore and not freaking out if they fall or eat their noodles off the floor. I took a bazillion pictures (on my Flickr and Facebook if you know me in reality) and am uploading them right now. There's also a number of pictures on other people's cameras of me dressed as a turtle, palaeontologist, and bee thanks to the child-sized costumes into which I fit, provided by the museum.

My condo is now just me and my dog and the mess from my house guests that I feel strangely compelled to clean. When my apartments were messy they felt right. When my condo is messy it feels wrong. My apartments were nests. My condo is pretty. It is warm and soft because it is pretty, not because it gets filled with crap.

Piece of story I conveniently left out: Friday night. Birdie and I were going to go to the party of a completely different friend of mine, but he lives 45 minutes away by car and we were exhausted and ended up at NBF's friends' condo a block from my condo. NBF's friend is a very attractive boy but he has all kinds of crazy and baggage and story I know about so while jumping him has always been a bit tempting it's also a bit out of the question. Well, said friend has a brother. His brother was in town for graduation. His brother (henceforth known as Beetle) is also very attractive. We played Rock Band, partook of some substances, and made out to the first half of Team America before slinking off to a more private setting for fun and mutual body appreciation. I'm amazed at the difference between boys who know what they're doing and boys who don't. Boys who understand that girls also want to have fun and are not just there to please boys. I'm amazed how gratifying a compliment is when I know it's genuine. How powerful and awesome I can feel. And how much fun it can be on such a non-emotional level. That's another amazing difference: emotional versus unemotional Boy ravaging. The kiss seems less urgent, the touch itself has a different burn. It tingles and pulls from a different place. I still haven't had emotional sex, and as a result, part of me still feels like a virgin. The act may be the same, but even a kiss that means something and one that doesn't are such completely different beasts it's hard to think of them as the same thing. I wonder if and when the person on the other end can tell. One kiss is acted and thought out and just a prelude and a push below. The other I want to hold and devour. Does the kiss recipient know? I've heard such things about the difference in sex. I'd like to see for myself, but I suppose that requires significant emotional attachment to a Boy. Am I really ready for such things?

Today was my decompression day. Tomorrow I have to get back to reality. Terrifying.