I'm a team player.

Coworker: I want to jump out of a window.

Me: I'll give you a little nudge if you want.

eulogies

I came across an article called How to Give a Eulogy.  I found myself nodding at every other sentence, painfully reminiscing the awful beauty of the process and presentation.  I've done three.


"But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one. [...] You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You're being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done."

"I can recall, inside that moment, that the way I kept my composure was to say to myself, I owe her this much at least."

"I took a deep breath then, and I did the thing everyone does after someone they loved has died. I gathered myself. And I decided to proceed."

boogery blogger

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My favorite blogger recently separated from her husband. It bothers me more than it should. A lot of her readers, the divorced ones and the unhappily married ones, probably really resonate with her posts lately.  Not me.  I feel like I got puked on every time I read yet another post about sobbing and bleakness and the feeling of being sucker punched.  I'm tempted to write her and ask if it's really over between her and Jon, if they are sure they can't give it one more try, because dammit doesn't she realize how hard it is to meet employed, good looking, single guys anymore?


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ringless

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Nothing like spending happy hour with four miserably married men to make you grateful you aren't married.


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Luckily it was a good hair day.

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A few weeks ago I ran into a guy I went on a couple of dates with exactly five years ago.  He was with his wife. 

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dried up

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It's been an achingly long time since I've sat down and written anything.  I'd like to say that from here on out I'm going to be more diligent in exercising my creative juices, but I can't say that.  Creative juices are non existent at the beginning, I know this.  Creative juices don't begin to flow until somewhere around the middle of the plot.  If I wait to write until I feel inspired, I might sit here for another two months, another six, or worse yet twelve and find I have penned nothing.  I need to begin writing again.  Or perhaps I need to stop being afraid of starting a new plot.

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Said with a totally straight face. *

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Eleven Ways in which New Job is like a Relationship:
1. I put in ten hours a day and still make no progress.
2. I hear a lot of bullshit in the course of a day.
3. It's fairly one-sided.
4. I do a lot of work for someone else to get the credit.
5. There's always negotiating to do.
6. I usually have no idea what's going on.
7. Efficiency is key.
8. When I'm there, I want to be somewhere else.
9. When I'm somewhere else, I feel guilty.
10. Everything must be discussed and analyzed down to a fine, invisible grain of sand.
11. One completed task births five new ones needing immediate attention.

One Way in which New Job is NOT like a Relationship:
1. I get monetary compensation for this shit.


* My best friend said this week "Men really do waste a lot of time in my life." When I pondered it in my own life, I found she is right.

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false dawn

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I understand you more now than I ever did, ever could.  I know now that what you longed to give me, no matter how much you desired it, was no longer there to be given, and what you had left was only the absence of the thing that came before it.  I understand this now, because I have found that your absence is all I have to give, which is a thing that cannot be given, and even if could, it is nothing that is wanted by another.

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wipers

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When you think about rain, all it is is tiny drops of water at the mercy of gravity.  I feel that way today--at the mercy of gravity. I am identifiable when lying in a puddle, shimmering in the headlights of your car as your drive towards me, then through me, and then past me without little more thought than an imperceptible acknowledgement of thanks to the CarMakers of the World for windshield wipers as my fine residual mist coats the window and then is gone in an instant.  Already I feel gone, which both liberates me as a rain drop is freed when released into the atmosphere, and sentences me to death as I plunge towards the asphalt in the unforgivable force of gravity.
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a dark wish

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I find a list of literary quotes about breakups, and I want to post every fucking one of them online for the world and for you, to read, to see, to remember.  For myself too if I am honest.  Because sometimes it feels as if you and I never were, and I don't think much about it one way or the other.  But once in a while something comes back in a whisper or in a faraway sound, in the passing of one odd second into an unremarkable one, and I feel something else, something akin to the sensation one has when you expect one more stair and find, uncoordinatingly, that there is not.  In those rare, floundering moments for footing, I lie the blame at your door, I count your weaknesses on fingers and then take my shoes off and move onto my toes, I remember your actions, or rather lackthereof, in any direction, and after I am exhausted by rage, I feel a fool.  At having tried.  At having failed.  At having wasted so much time ignoring what was, in retrospect, a glaring obviousness at your lack of sincerity towards me, towards tomorrow, towards intimacy and love.  Then, there after catching myself from the false expectancy of another stair, I wish with all of the leftover feeling I can muster that you and I never were. 



“The old line ‘You deserve someone better than me’ in this case was not just an old line. She deserved someone who would love her and take care of her and he knew he never would.”
Cheap Diamonds, by Norris Church Mailer

“Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.”
The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta

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