Bin Laden's Death to One 28-Year-Old

When we heard Bin Laden was dead, Corvus spontaneously ran outside to shout with joy. "It's over. It's finally over." Tears dripped down his face.

I wasn't quite sure what ended with Bin Laden's death. I wasn't complaining, but I wasn't feeling the overwhelming relief or joy that seemed to take over my boyfriend. He's three years younger than I am, and it didn't occur to me at the time, but we were in different places in our lives on September 11th and I may be five minutes too old for the jubilance. Or maybe I'm just too skeptical to place my feelings of safety in the mortality of one human. Still, I envy the death revelers.

On September 11, 2001, I had just begun my sophomore year at Nameless Liberal Arts College. When someone in my statistics lab stood up that morning and announced an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon, I thought they were doing an experiment for psych class. But no, Google quickly confirmed that the world had gone to shit. Class let out early. Some classes were canceled for the day, others went on with optional attendance. The dorm lounges were packed with students staring at the news, horrific images, and the first time I ever heard the name "Osama Bin Laden."
My most hawkish (and incidentally, at the time, only Republican friend) wanted, to bomb someone. Blow up something in revenge. But being a self-centered 19-yer-old, that was my biggest fear: war. We were in the middle of a middle state, nice and safe. I already knew my family was safe, so my next concern was my of-drafting-age male friend pool. We'd just elected The Bad President and there was no way he was keeping us out of war. I assumed at that point it would at least be the "logical" war, but my peers were the ones who'd have to fight it and I didn't like that. We sat in that lounge and I wanted to be held by the Boy I was pining over at the time as well as every single boy I gave a marginal crap about before they all had to go die for the country.

I had friends in school in New York too close to Ground Zero. One still has PTSD.
I had friends help clean up at Ground Zero.
Then somehow we ended up in Iraq and no one I really cared about at the time had to fight.
But the threat of Terror never felt like it was the threat of Osama Bin Laden. I remember Oklahoma City (though I was quite young) and that was American extremists. There will always be a small percentage of the human population that likes to screw things up for the rest of us, and that is terrifying. I'm glad there's one less ultra-asshole, but he was never the focal point of my fear or pain and therefor doesn't get to be a trigger for great relief.

Maybe if I was just a bit younger, or a bit someone else, I'd need a face for the abstraction of fear. I wouldn't have such concrete non-Bin Laden things from September 11th and he would hold status as the threat of my youth. Maybe he would have been my childhood's boogieman. But he was only a piece of my fear and feels like just one piece of the puzzle, not full closure on a hole in my soul.

I joined my friends for a post-Obama speech tequila shot. Obama is so presidential and doing a shot seemed somehow the most appropriate response to Bin Laden's death, anyway; we drink to life, death, joy and pain, to numb the feelings that are too alive and  to remind ourselves we're alive when we're too damn numb.

Nocturning

My psychiatrist may be brilliant.
I've been in my standard winter useless-lump-slump. Every year I forget that it happens every year and I fight it tooth and nail, or at least "fight it" as much as I can without leaving the house or accomplishing anything and really just fight my own sense of self-worth. But every year I try new drugs and new therapies and new resolutions to not be generally miserable and this year has been no exception. So far it's been a sun lamp and that horrible, horrible Ritalin experiment and lots of yelling at myself to be fucking positive and get off my fucking ass and accept my health and my family and get on with it already.

It's not working. At all. Which is much of why I'm not writing. I don't feel like doing anything, writing included, but I also am trying so fucking hard to be positive and I don't feel positive so I can't write positive so I can't write. Hell, most of the time I can't feel because it's feel crappy or feel nothing. We're messing with my medications again or still or more or however you want to look at it. The migraines have been so much better, I don't know why The Sads have been so much worse.

But in the past 9 hours I've gotten more done than I've been getting done in week-long stretches, and without stressing or straining; just quietly working and accomplishing like I do when I'm not in depression mode. Like I said at the beginning, my psychiatrist may be brilliant.
I was trying to explain to him my listlessness and days of foggy nothingness, migraine or no migraine.
Is it cognitive? Motivational?
I don't fucking know, probably because I'm having too much in the middle of it to have a clear understanding of what it is.
So is it a medication? Does it get better or worse at different points of the day? When I've taken things?
I'm clearest at night. Always have been. I wake up at 9 or 10 and can only start to think then...which is right around or after I've taken my night dose of the same crap I take in the morning and feel like a fuzz-bucket.
So maybe not the medication...

BUT!

If I'm naturally nocturnal and am clear at night, what if I actually allow myself to be nocturnal? Get shit done at night when I can get shit done and sleep during the day when I'm a grog-monster? I can still see my friends in the evenings, when I see them  anyway, and spend some portion of business hours awake so I can make  phone calls and go to stores and things.

It took me about 24 hours to get over the idea that staying awake all night and sleeping during the day made  me an automatic freak of nature and quite possibly bad person who just couldn't make it in society. But why? Other cultures have different sleep patterns than ours, anyway. It's just when the sun shows up that tends to dictate the most popular times for productivity, and even that's BS as proven by the existence of Cleveland where the sun never shines yet at least three companies still operate (though I hear one is in talks with Miami).
I'm still adjusting and figuring out what works with my biological, medication, dog-walking, hypothetical social, and errand-running schedules, but today started to feel right. I slept hard from 5-10 PM and it's now 7:15 AM and I've done all kinds of Etsy stuff, written this, worked on a BS time-wasting project I enjoy (in which case maybe I should be nicer to it and stop calling it a BS waste of time), did all the dishes, researched prices on printers and contact lenses, talked to my brother and Aural Girl on Facebook, and walked the dog twice. Maybe the return of the bitter self-hate is an indicator that it's bed time again. Also I'm itchy, another good sign. I'd wanted to write a bit about The Boy, but I'll give the extremely condensed version instead:

Boy. Talked hours and hours of IM pre-Christmas. Then didn't hear from him between Christmas and New Years. Heard from him New Years Eve, ended up talking to him on the phone for a long time, now no sign he's alive for a week. He's on vacation and working on his own stuff (and getting a shitton done, it sounds like). And I had a fear it'd be like Love in the Time of Cholera or something...passionate love letters curdling when faced with actual proximity...but he comes back in a week and I'm trying to play it cool when we all know very well I'm a giant dweeb whose unsure about everything in the entire universe, worst of all myself and second-worst-of-all Boys.

7:30 AM. Sounds like a good bed time to me.

Spiky

Sooooooooooooooo...
I've been up since 6:30 AM and I've been doing stuff the entire time. Cleaning and laundry and shopping for May gift-getters and at around 10 AM I was going to take a nap so I could get back to a normalish sleep schedule but then I wanted to sweep every possible surface before I took a nap so I could mop after my nap and then it was noon and the pain showed up and I hadn't taken my pills yet and I needed to eat and while I was eating I started doing stuff on Etsy and putting together pretty collections of possible gifts and then it was the afternoon and I had to do the one project I absolutely had to do today and then my psychiatrist called to say he actually had gotten the lab results fax and my nortriptyline levels were high (duh shit, this is why I'm crashing most days when the sun sets and in a content but shaky stupor during my awake times). At some point I blinked and it was 6 PM. I made dinner. Now it's approaching 9 and I'm still quite alert, unshowered, and need to go to Walgreens to get my new lower-dose prescription nortriptyline before it closes or I go to bed, whichever comes first. Before I can go to Walgreens (3 blocks away) I have to drive to put air in my tire (1.5 blocks away) which has been soft since before the last time I drove, two weeks ago. Tomorrow morning at 9 AM I intend to be at a demolition sale in Park Ridge. I may be a little bonkers, but it's an easy drive.

Oh, good, it's raining. I'm being 50% sarcastic. Good for my head, bad for walking to get the car and then finding the car a new parking space. And that whole putting air in the tires thing. Maybe I'll get up tomorrow at 6:30 again.

The rest of my week has been a blur; everything  feels blurry. I haven't seen Aural Girl in some ridiculous amount of time.
>>Insert note: thunder and lightning outside, so my dog has to be touching me: my legs are crossed and he's resting his head on my elevated foot.<<
I only saw Possible Boy last Sunday for grocery shopping. And I feel like I haven't seen anybody, including myself, in ages. I've seen My Twin (new official code name for friend from junior high and high school with whom I'd lost touch and now we just started meeting up weekly downtown) but in my dreams I frequently see people from my past so something about it feels surreal. It's wonderful, but surreal. We used to say we were twins back in high school because we'd say the same thing or think the same thing all the time. People used to say we looked alike, and we had similar builds, but I'm blonde and pasty white while My Twin is deep mocha African-American and uses her hair an art medium. Still, we held ourselves the same (despite her dance background) and had the same speech patterns and we fed off eachother like Hall and Oates or something. Then we went our separate ways, I thought I'd failed her by being too young and self-involved...Ten years later, we've both changed and grown up and gone through a lot, and the same stuff that made us "twins" as kids seems to have ripened into an older but just as twinny version. I go around collecting people I like and identify with; My Twin was a cornerstone of my collection.
And then I got snippy over the use of the word "meta."

On most tv shows, characters go through some trial or tribulation and learn some life lesson, but things have  to be set back pretty much to zero by  the end of the episode so that you don't have to worry about the continuity and congruence of the episodes. I think I'm a little like this, too. I was reading through posts from last summer to see if I'd already given My Twin a code name, and it's the exact same thing day after day. Posts individually may seem like they mean something or are going somewhere or like perhaps I've really learned my lesson this time, but the accumulation is no more than pencil shavings, and I'm not using a pencil.

Life is so weird. Place your bets now on whether or not I'll make it to the demolition sale tomorrow, if I'll make it to any other sales, and who will go with me. I'm giving 5-to-1 odds I'll have a male or no companion. Who knows a bookie?

I want to poke my uterus with a stick

Crampy. I had a very good yesterday. From a single sushi roll as I dined alone for lunch in Highland Park after my therapy session, to mediocre chicken vesuvio with Aural Girl and Possible Boy at the weird restaurant we've been meaning to try. I got stuff done and walked two different dogs at the beach.

Today, I feel crampy and overwhelmed by each project I think to tackle. Cleaning my bedroom and master bathroom was high on the list, but I'm making excuses. I think I need to put on real pants and take the dog to Walgreens and pick up my birth control (which I missed taking at 11:11 AM and can't be helping crampland) and maybe some Aleve because lord knows I'm not on enough drugs.

Relatively Sane

Sometimes it's satisfying to move a huge pile of boxes from one end of the room to the other, or paint all the white roses red, or do some other completely inane task that keeps you occupied and leaves you with some form of proof that it's been done. I never gave "busy work" enough credit. Today, I was busy all day. I was working on my Etsy shop and researching things and tidying up select portions of my house. None of it will cure world hunger or pay my bills, but it was definitely something, and it felt good. It's ok for it to feel good. My parents' version of the world, where any business-type venture is only valid and worthwhile if it's going to sustain you and your great grandchildren, is insane. It's bullshit and it's insane and I should laugh at them for being crazy. But when you're raised by crazy, the whole world becomes relative and possible and it's never quite safe to laugh at anything but yourself.

Now, I'm off to do something crazy: going with Aural Girl to see a friend of mine from Arts Camp 13 years ago at his random restaurant gig in Irving Park. Why not?

Be A Part Of It

Next Sunday I'm flying to New York. Possible Boy will have already driven Aural Girl and her dog to her parents' house and experienced a big bustling family Christmas. Birdie and NBF are both in New York. So are lots of other swell people I know. And I like visiting New York. I used to want to live there, but now it feels too crowded, too nonstop, too type-A to make it my permanent residence. The Annabell who wanted to live in New York had no children, a string of not-so-seriuos boyfriends, lived in an apartment the size of a closet, wrote for a major publication, and wore spiky heals and feather boas right through menopause.
I'm not that Annabell anymore. The spiky heals and feather boas perhaps, but current Annabell craves something concrete, grounded, stable to hold onto.
Speaking of which, I need to clean up again. The Mess is back on all available surfaces. I'm finishing projects. trying to see things to absolute completion. Right now, my life is the sum of my projects. Everything is a project. Photograph things, list things online, mail things, fix this chandelier, fix and clean up those shoes, find a way to wash the lace, photograph the things that are now fixed and clean, do online promotion things, go to stores and try to sell them things, make cards, make envelopes, buy more things to sell, buy basic life necessities, make food, eat food, tidy things, clean things, call to straighten out a doctor billing issue (because at any given moment in my life, there's always at least one), pay the bills, balance the checkbook, turn a ceramic nativity into a menorah, etc. etc. etc.
My life is juggling bubbles, and since I'm the juggler, I have a huge amount of influence and control, but since I'm not a very good juggler, I get frazzled and punch myself instead of catching any bubbles.

Last night Aural Girl brought over a bottle of wine and we got silly and went to the bar. I had on a sweater dress I'd gotten from my parents for Chanukah and she was trying out her new stretch belt with satiny shirt thing and jeans. I didn't think my outfit was anything particularly special, but one of the bar regulars who has repeatedly made it clear he wants to do me (and I've repeatedly made it clear I have zero interest) thought this dress was the hottest thing ever and kept telling me so. As I flitted about the bar, talking to a few of the people I like talking to, Aural Girl stayed glued to her seat. When I noticed she hadn't moved and wasn't talking to anyone, I made my way back to her corner.
If I had my entire life on film, internal monologue included, I could find all the scenes where I was in AG's place. As we talked, I recognized that feeling and space in the universe: feeling inferior, jealous in a way that you don't wish the other person had less but just wished you could do or be what they do or are. I want so badly for AG to see that she is every bit as shiny as I am, that it's her turn to be the Pretty One, too. We're both so used to being The Smart One or The Friend. She's actually done far better than I have pulling relationships out of nerd status. I tried to remind her that for all the random boys who like me when I'm smiling, the one I was interested in wanted her. But I of all people should know, when you don't think you're pretty, you just don't believe the people who say otherwise.

Dog is warm. Night is late. Tummy is hungry again.
Until next time

Worm

Very long day with too much driving in Friday traffic and getting mad at myself for things and not eating for many hours at a stretch. Tequila and Aural Girl heal all wounds. My psychiatrist official prescribed a sun lamp for seasonal depression. Why can't it just be ok to hybernate? Juggling my four main doctors and eight regular prescriptions makes me want to hybernate, too. Where's that One Magical Thing or Person that can make everything improve in a constant and noticable way?

Un(w)hol(l)y Developed Ideas

In the future, when Humanism becomes an actual religion with its own rites and dogma, it will have its own ceremony, akin to a christening, welcoming new babies into the world. Parents will choose for their child a Humanist name. It will consist of two names, usually the same number of letters, written on top of one another. The name can then only be pronounced by two people simultaneously, so no Humanist can speak his or her full name alone.

Name generator gave me 10 random girls' names, Serena and Emilia had the same number of letters and sound, poof! Instant Humanist name. Works in any language. Two Hebrew names for Annabell according to another generator, אהובה and תפארה, Humanist-ized:

At the naming ceremony, it takes more than one person to say the name of the child just as it takes more than one person to raise and shape the life of the child.
At weddings, Humanists look deeply into one another's eyes and say together their full names, able to speak them in true completeness with one single other person. Superstitions will arise about couples who fumble during the speaking of names—fumble the first and you will have many children, fumble the second and one partner will be unfaithful, fumble both and you will be killed by pirates on your honeymoon cruise.

That's it, I'm starting a cult.

Or walking my dog and then making pie and photographing as many things while it's still daylight as possible. Cult might be more lucrative and make a bigger impact on society, but being a regular human being is my current project and, while I find it rather difficult, its rewards are far deeper and more stable than having my visage carved into the hedges by human lemmings.

In Decisions

I can't make a decision right now. Will somebody else please be in charge? Just yell at me and boss me around and tell me where I should go and what I should do and when. I feel like a floating head and I don't know what I "should" or even what I want. If I want to be around people or not is more decision than I can handle. People good? People bad? I listen for the internal applause after each suggestion to gague my own reaction. Is there anything that makes my heart aflutter right now? Anything with any pull at all? No overwhelming emotional response, so what ever happened to logic? That used to be my first method of choice. What right now is "Best" for me to do? Go out, see humans, have conversations, face whatever dark underlying fear of Maybe is snaking around my throat? Or crawl into bed, read, and go to sleep ASAP so I have the best possible chance of making it to Iowa tomorrow to see my brother play soccer in his college championship tournament thingy?

In Running With Scissors, a few of the characters frequently opened the bible to a random page, closed their eyes, pointed with a finger, and took wherever they landed as an answer to their question, direct from God. I want to feel that sort of certainty from as simple a ritual. I want to quiet the worry and the questions.

That may be my answer for tonight: if the worry and the questions are being fussy, the last thing I need is to be around other people. Sometimes it works out and I end up engaged in conversations with fellow fussy souls, but I can't storm off into the night and expect to make lightning.

One problem with the stupid hormones I'm on: I no longer have a normal cycle ever, so I'm never sure if mood flare-ups and/or "heavy spotting" are my period or if I'm just randomly fussy. I was talking to Other Girl tonight about life revolving around medical shit.

Wow. I'm not going anywhere. I'm totally zoing out now. Across the street there is a tv playing something with a lot of movement. I'm staring at the tv, watching the motion. Iowa tomorrow? I'll see where I am in the morning. I'd like to write about the character I met at dinner, but I'm done forming sentences.

Dreams, Screams, As It Seems

I'm sore today. Wine, weather, and attacking the treadmill to exercise my panic attack demon all caught up with me. Lots of sleep. I only did a tiny bit of work, and nothing with visible money results or getting out of the house.
In my nap dream, my whole body hurt so badly I could barely move and I was trying to take a bath to loosen up my muscles but I couldn't move to turn the water off and I knew I was sleeping but I couldn't wake myself up and I was worried about what was real and what was dream because the hot water felt unquestionably hot and the cold knob on the faucet felt hard and solid and cold and my aches felt present and the water wet and with all my tactile functions and reactions intact, what did that say about my dreaming? And more importantly, what did that say about everything I do and feel when I'm "awake?" All these questions bothered me mid-dream as the hot water kept rising and I wanted out of the bathtub but couldn't get there on my own. I tried to yell "Mom!" but I couldn't break through the layers of dream. I wanted to shout something, anything, to wake myself or alert people in the conscious world so that maybe they could help me escape.

I dream this way a lot.

Possible Boy sent me a text message from the bar with a photo of the pumpkin I carved lit up sitting alongside the cash register and booze. I carved a row of various beer and booze glasses, so it makes sense back there. Possible Boy also texted me nice things. When I said I hoped our raucous adventure last night didn't dampen his day today, he said (and I quote), "Nope not at all, in fact I was smiling all day because of it."

Tomorrow is Halloween. I think Little Red Riding Hood may make her first full appearance since freshman year at Nameless Liberal Arts College's Safer Sex Night. Possible Boy and Other Girl are coming over to raid my costume box (yes I have a costume box) so that they, too, can participate in the dress-up madness. I. Love. Halloween. Alter-egos on parade. Be something you're not, or that you want to be, or that you are but you don't usually show or try not to show. My dog has a pig costume, but otherwise he'd make an excellent Big Bad Wolf. Well, Little Bad Wolf. Maybe I can steal Neighbor Guy's dog. That's a big friggin' dog.

The universe is huge.

Tonight I was going to finish some of my projects. I didn't finish one. Now it's 1:30 AM and if I don't go to sleep I'll be a zombie tomorrow even without a costume.

What ever happened to individual rocket packs and rocket boots and all that? They figured in so prominently in the 60s and 70s projections of the 21st century, but I certainly don't have one. I would love to move around in three dimensions instead of two. That's a whole other thing I've been writing in my head and will probably stick in here before too long: seeing and moving and living on limited dimensions and planes of existence.

Get ass in bed. Read until pass out. Be awesome tomorrow.

Gnu Yorker

The New Yorker does a cartoon caption contest at the end of every issue. This was only the second time I've entered something, but the perfect caption seemed obvious to me.

"Brother, can you spare a lime?"

Today I checked to see what captions made the finalists for voting, and there at the top is "Brother, can you spare a lime?"
With somebody else's name getting credit.
I have no doubt many people submitted "Brother, can you spare a lime?" It's like back at Major Greeting Card Company, when we went through everybody's card ideas and picked out what went on to production: people would write the same card independently. If there's something that fits perfectly, more than one person is likely to come up with the idea.
But according to the rules of the caption contest, if multiple people submit the identical caption chosen as a finalist, they select the "winner" by lottery. That seems totally lame to me. Why does one person get all the credit? Caption printed up with his name under it, like he's the only one in the world. One of my life goals is to be published in the New Yorker, and I suppose this is cheating, but dammit, I want my name on everybody's coffee table, too. Even if it's in a list of the 100 people who all wrote the same thing. Get my name in that magazine before I hit 30 and I can work on writing great works of creative nonfiction later.

I want to be in bed. It's cold outside and all the pretty plants and flowers are shriveled and dead. I want hot cider and down comforters and hibernation. Is there a warm, sunny place on this planet with stable barometric pressure?

I tend to scoff at and avoid consistency, but maybe I would love it. I had the two parents at home thing growing up, but neither of those parents are particularly regimented. Is it too late to learn without being a fuddy-duddy asshole or born-again religious freak?

I'm wearing my glasses. And on the computer. Each of those things separately hypnotizes me into zombieville. Right now I'm toast, only instead of popping up when I'm done, I sink lower and lower into the chair.

Mmmm...toast...

Grave Robbing

At an estate sale, I sift behind Death's recent visit, life's recent departure. A calendar with a meeting marked on August 17th that wasn't attended. Crutches and walkers in a corner, adult diapers- things that herald the end of life. And then, nothing. No more use for all the things accumulated over a lifetime. Things things so many things. Why do we make more things when so many already exist? Humanity will never run out of things. I swoop in and buy things that people forgot they had long before they died. I sell them to other people who will forget them, but I also fill my house to make it pretty and warm and feel like something I made. A nest of things, a living space work of art that should somehow express oneself, welcome others, aggrandize, and still be a comforting home.

A man in the bookstore said he'd seen me three times today. Apparently he was at the antique store, too. I hadn't noticed him.

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.