Once Upon A Time...

...I was single, and dating, and because I lived in a small town with few people of my age and education level, I was dating through the internet personals. I'd done it for a while, with varying success, and I had an ad up, and people answered it. And stuff. And then one day I sat down and I wrote what I thought of as my "real" ad. I didn't show it to anyone, I just wrote it. Kind of like a wishlist to the universe or something.

It went like this (boldface is the online site's questions):

Last great book I read
You should get to know me because I'm pretty fucking smart. And funny. I'm an avid, catholic, tasteful reader and I think about what I read. I speak Chinese, read Spanish, and stumble about in Russian.

Most humbling moment
My friends like me. My dogs are (mostly) well-trained and good-natured. My cats are, well, cats. I sing on-key. I memorize poetry but don't recite it. I can tile a floor, make a stained-glass window, fix my plumbing, or paint a house.

Favorite on-screen sex scene
I'm a pragmatist, a cynic, a caustic pessimist with a stubborn Romantic streak (as in Goethe, not walks on the beach). I cook, I sew, I quilt, I bake, and I have enough Taekwon-do under my belt to defend myself. I swear like a sailor and mangle common French phrases.

Celebrity I resemble most
I'm a dilettante who admires dedication, a hermit who yearns for intimacy and an intermittent and indifferent athlete. I drink like a fish and rarely regret it in the morning. I don't dance. I smoke and then I quit and then I smoke and then I quit...

Best (or worst) lie I've ever told
I take less than a minute in the morning to 'do' my hair and forever to get out of the house. I believe lies while I'm telling them; I have an amazing capacity for self-deception. I like semicolons. I'm chronically late to everything. I tend to win at Scrabble. I am overly loquacious. I don't play chess.

If I could be anywhere at the moment
I want someone who will challenge me, who will make me run to keep up. I want someone to show me things I wouldn't find on my own, to know things I don't, to keep me on my toes. I want to find someone who will argue with passion but without rancor and win the argument as often as lose.

Song or album that puts me in the mood
I want someone who finds my faults rather endearing because they are mine. I want book recommendations, good conversation, help with the crossword and a lot of personal space. I want someone who will call me in the middle of the night and not apologize, who needs me and hates to admit it.

The five items I can't live without
I want someone who makes it worth my while to take the risks inherent in intimacy. I want someone who makes me want to meet them halfway, who doesn't kick me when I'm down, who will sneak into my solipsistic life and haul me out and give me CPR.

In my bedroom, you'll find
I want someone who speaks their mind. I want someone who knows who they are and is interested in finding out who I am. I want someone who will put up with my neuroses and scars because they have enough of their own and they know how it is. I want an adventure, a challenge and a partner in crime. I want not to settle; I refuse to compromise on my potential for happiness.

WHY YOU SHOULD GET TO KNOW ME
Because I so very rarely invest my time and energy in other people, and when I do I mean it. Because good people are never a waste of time. Because I know all the words to the Chiquita Banana song. Because I write doggerel for fun. Because I believe in whimsy and Occam's razor at the same time. Because I have a penchant for the wildly implausible. Because I find it easier to be intimate with total strangers than with people I know. Because I have no expectations but I allow myself some hope.

MORE ABOUT WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR
I admire singleminded pursuit of useless abstractions. I don't fight, and I hate whiners. I need a connection with other people that I'm not even sure I'm capable of anymore; maybe someone will prove me wrong someday.

Less than a month later, I met the man who is now my partner. Though I didn't meet him through the personals. And yesterday was our first wedding anniversary. While I am, on the whole, accustomed to getting what I want out of life, that was a seriously tall order and it still seems nothing short of miraculous to me that we found one another. Happy anniversary to us!

Birth-day

On this date, at this time, thirty-one years ago, I was born. Thanks, Mom!

If at first you don't do anything...

From here, a nice tidbit of information that speaks to Getting Things Done's "cringe factor". The whole idea of "cringe" and how to fight it is, thus far, the most useful part of Getting Things Done for me, as the book is written for the overburdened more than the undermotivated.

Advice such as "just buckle down and do it," "get organized," and "try harder" are based on a dysfunctional definition of procrastination. What they're really saying is: "If you weren't such a lazy bum you could do this. No fooling around. Life is dull and hard. There's no time for fun. Work is a horrible thing to contemplate, but you have to do it anyway." Most procrastination happens because through procrastinating we are temporarily able to relieve fears: fear of failure, fear of being imperfect, fear of impossible expectations. Most of these fears, in turn, are ultimately based in the idea that work and life are awful struggles which we must somehow get through and that this whole horrible process will somehow make us better people in the long run.

How do we get around these fears? By temporarily setting them aside, not in favor of reading the police blotter looking for possible future Cowboys coaches, or slam-dancing with the dog, or (insert your favorite procrastination activity here), but — SETTING THESE FEARS ASIDE IN ORDER TO MAKE A SMALL, IMPERFECT START ON WHAT WE WANT TO ACCOMPLISH.

And on that note, I'm stepping away from the blog and heading back to the mines.

You Have A Queer Feeling

It is a very strange feeling when one is loving a clock that is to every one of your class of living an ugly and a foolish one and one really likes such a thing and likes it very much and liking it is a serious thing, or one likes a colored handkerchief that is very gay and every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing and thinks you like it because it is a funny thing to like it and you like it with a serious feeling, or you like eating something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.

— Gertrude Stein, quoted in "Someone Says Yes To It: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and 'The Making of Americans'" by Janet Malcom. The New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2005.

Revenge of the Sith, reviewed.

So, I went to go see Revenge of the Sith last night. And I'm afraid I annoyed the people around me by laughing helplessly at about half of the dialogue. I tried not to, people, I did. But.

Gina Barreca's feminist analysis (mildly spoilery) was spot-on, and I thought the whole thing, while far better than the previous two movies, was pretty painful. It's too bad there's no "mute" option in movie theatres, because that would have rocked; the film's visually stunning.

(Except that still wouldn't have stopped me going OMGWTF who sleeps in a nightgown that has large metal pieces and huge round beads all over it? (a) you would strangle on those straps and (b) you would wake up with horrid little bead-imprints and jewelry-marks all over you, and some of them would bruise. OW.)

So I'm talking to my partner after, trying to figure out if I would have disliked the original trilogy like this if I'd seen it for the first time now, in my thirties. And you know, I'm a late media bloomer - I think I saw the original trilogy for the first time on my 21st birthday anyway, so it's not like I grew up on it. And I still don't think so.

For one thing, I like happy endings. And the original trilogy is about an emergence from darkness into light, whereas the prequels move in the opposite direction. And for another, while both trilogies revolve around the development of a whiny adolescent, the original trilogy has Han. The original hotass rebel Bad Boy With A Heart Of Gold. And Leia, who fires guns and snarks! And I like all the secondary characters better.

Sometimes I think the invention of the "talkies" was a sad, sad thing. Revenge of the Sith would have been a much better film with a guy up front underneath the screen banging out "da-DA-dadadaDAda! danadaDAda, danadaNA..." on a piano or organ or whatever they used to use. Yis.

Observing my own neuroses.

Sometimes, when I am doing my work, I feel this low-level panic every time I look at it. It's not that there's a great deal to be done, or even that it is particularly difficult or particularly urgent. But I open the document and my heart starts to race and I want to cry or scream or throw things. Though I can force myself through it, it does not appreciably lessen the tension to be actively working on it, unlike normal procrastination. It feels like fight or flight, but it's just a Word document and an email window. I have no idea why this happens.

Glaucoma sucks.

My dog is going blind. We knew this was coming, but it's still really sad.

Fucking glaucoma, man. She lost the first eye just in January, and now this.

Consumerism and the young professional lifestyle

When I first saw Knock Knock's Take-Out Menu Organizer, I thought, "What sort of yuppie fool gets takeout so often that they need a special pricey binder for all the menus? Why don't people just cook, and save money on food and organization?"

However, like many of my kneejerk, "I would never" snobberies, this has come to an abrupt end. I have always been better at talking the talk than walking the walk, after all. With both of us working more than full-time, we now not only employ a dogwalking service on a fairly regular basis, we eat out several times a week. And I can never find a menu of the place I want to call, whereas we seem to have duplicates of all the ones we never use, and we don't really have a place for any of the menus, so they shift from drawer to drawer, always in the way except at mealtimes...

In short, we are pathetically bourgie and I am addicted to office supplies. And our menus are now tidily ordered by type of cuisine in the Knock Knock binder.