Moose in the Kitchen

I am exhausted. For no apparent reason. I have theories ranging from physical (staying up til 2 a.m. and Jillian Michaels’ coven of perky sadists) to emotional (“you want to be self-employed? how sweetly misinformed you are. now get over there and apply to some wretched temp job”) to psychosomatic (“can you catch black magic? cause that woman’s glaring at me for taking the last coffee sleeve and she looks like the sort to study up on voodoo. i feel faint”).

But this soothes me:

1. Dating doesn’t need to be inherently dramatic.

2. Any persistent drama is cultivated by yours truly.

3. That said, if the only way I can get peace, blessed peace, is to stop dating altogether…SO BE IT.

4.  The last time I was as patently uninterested in dating as I am now, it was 1986 and I was eight years old.

5. Generally understood dating principle: Like draws like.

6. This insidious principle seems to be guiding me toward wanting to become a better person so I can find the kind of person I want.

7. Logic which seems both flawed and totally valid.

8. This is understandably confusing.

9. Yes, waiting until you’re perfect to let yourself have something you want is simply setting yourself up for a really, really long wait.

10. But I want someone who embodies certain principles that I don’t currently embody myself. It doesn’t seem fair to expect qualities in my date/mate that I don’t possess.

11. We’re always growing and changing, so maybe I should let it be OK that I’m not perfect and hope I find someone who grows and changes with me?

12. Maybe?

13. I have a sense that I’d like to become more…me before I find someone. Because it will result in a better match.

14. Does that make sense?

15. No?

16. Damn it.

17. All this is more indicative of stalling than any kind of devotion to valuable dating strategy.

18. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not the right time.

19. Which means it’s not the right time.

20. So I should just stop thinking and return to my Enjoy My Life Until I Want To Date Again policy.

21. My brain doesn’t like this plan because it means I won’t be slavishly devoting energy to listening to its whirling dervish upheaval.

22. Sorry, brain. Better luck next time.

For anyone who reads the Love Project – it’s still alive. Barely, haltingly, and freshly off an accidental hiatus, but alive. I don’t usually mention it here because it’s so…devoutly earnest. But my death grip on sarcasm wasn’t doing me any favors and a little wholesome squirming is good for the complexion.

Anyway, I mention it because Google reader stopped picking up the feed for awhile after I tried to be all masterful and computer wizard-y and change the domain. But the new domain – www.loveprojectblog.com – works now, should you be interested in sticking it into your feedreader.

Favorite posts

When you’ve been whaling on yourself with every tool in your not insubstantial mental arsenal for the past three decades, stopping is not just about stopping, it’s about changing one hell of an ingrained pattern.

Read the rest: How to Apply Basic Human Compassion To Yourself, Rather Than Reserving It Solely For Others

By stepping off the hamster wheel in my frontal lobe and concentrating on what was actually important, I improved my experience of that day – and the relationship – exponentially.

Read the rest: Do Something Concrete

Everyone knows The Light. It’s one of the best things about being newly in love. You glow, you float to work in a gleeful post-coital haze, and your daily run is no longer the stuff of complaints because you’re too busy glowing and floating. It’s like someone turned the dial on your life toward bigger and brighter.

Read the rest: Choose Your Wattage

My mom and I drove up to Nevada City this weekend to celebrate a friend’s 80th birthday. She’s the matriarch of quite a clan, full of siblings who actually like each other and good-natured ribbing over the collective lack of vocal talent. If memory serves, “WE SUCK!” was the rallying call of the off-key John Denver sing-a-long.

I was the only person there born between 1970 and 1985, and so the kids table was drastically diluted by my presence. And possibly corrupted, though I admit nothing. The 32 and Under Table, as it soon became known, was marked by more wine than advisable, given that only two of us were of legal drinking age. I’m fairly certain the eleven and under contingent stuck to Sprite, but they were the leaders in my other Exploit The Children effort, the one entitled The Little Candies In The Green Mesh Bags By Everyone’s Plates Are Delicious So Go Steal Your Parents’ And Bring Them Back Here.

My only defense is that they far outstripped me in devious candy-acquiring techniques. Those kids were downright felonious; surely a mere half hour of my unwholesome encouragement can’t be held fully responsible.

Low on proof of my corrosive influence, but glasses of wine hold still. Nine-year-olds on candy-thieving ninja sneak attacks do not.

The photo I really wanted was of the eldest granddaughter pouring me a ludicrously large glass of wine. Or the nine-year-old returning to the table with five green mesh bags held triumphantly in his slightly grubby fist.  But those moments pass too quickly for accurate pixellated capture. Which is why I rarely take pictures. Because why bother? But I’m beginning to realize that other photos are just as worthwhile – for retaining the context of the moment, if not the action.

When I look at that photo up there, I’ll remember the people sitting next to me. The salmon. The Labradoodle named Diego. How nobody knew the words to The Boxer, but sang gamely and tunelessly anyway. That photo will jog the memory of what was happening around the wine glass, which will in turn remind me that a lack of incriminating evidence is probably for the best.

How often do I do that in life? Not do something because I’m convinced it won’t happen the way I want or expect it to? QUITE OFTEN, I IMAGINE. Different than what I want or expect isn’t always a bad thing, and is sometimes even better.

Today is one of those halcyon San Francisco days when you can delude yourself into thinking summer really IS coming this year. That it’s safe to put the winter coat in storage and rely solely on sundresses and flip flops.

It isn’t, of course.

But for today, when the sun is bright and hot and girls in Dolores Park think nothing of stripping off their jeans and lolling about in their underwear, one can pretend. (Really, girls in Dolores Park? I mean, if I had thighs that svelte I’d be tempted too. But I don’t think I’d stand up, wiggle out of my jeans, and flop back onto the grass. Repression or basic park pants-wearing etiquette? I can’t be sure.)

Chaining myself to my desk proves hard when the sun is shining, so I kept taking restorative walks. On one of these walks I realized that my life is mostly text. There are entire sections of my life that may not have happened because there are no pictures to prove it. Because I never take pictures, preferring to rely on the talent and fancy cameras of friends.

New Thing: Take at least one picture a day, to record all the lovely moments I probably won’t remember by dinner-time, and definitely won’t remember when I’m in my 80s and wondering who stole my teeth.

This is totally cheating, by the way.

This fractured Prince Charming in ink was on the wall at Foreign Cinema, which is – as noted – totally cheating. Because I was there on Wednesday. But since I just decided to do this one-picture-a-day-so-I-can-have-some-pictorial-record-of-my-fleeting-life thing twenty minutes ago, I’m giving myself a pass. Life is so much nicer when you let yourself get away with things.

At least there’s a record of today’s cloudless blue sky in my cerebral cortex. Until it’s displaced by the need to remember where I left my car.

Layer One

I dance perilously close to the edge of Bank Balance: Zero Dollars on a regular basis. I don’t have to do this. I could earn more. I could scale back. But tottering on the edge of zero is, oddly, my comfort zone. Despite the fact that it sounds NOT AT ALL COMFORTABLE, NOT ONE BIT. Since the psychology runs deep here and there are many things more entertaining than listening to a neurotic sort through her deeply ingrained money issues, like maybe inspecting your toilet paper for wrinkles, I will proceed to Layer Two.

Layer Two

I like being single. I like it a lot. Do you know how much time and space gets freed up in your brain when you’re not interested in anyone? A LOT. A LOT OF SPACE. ECHOING CAVERNS OF SPACE. ENOUGH SPACE TO BUILD YOURSELF A NICE TWELVE-BEDROOM STARTER HOME WITH TENNIS COURTS AND MAYBE THE PACIFIC OCEAN. I’LL STOP YELLING NOW.

Not being interested in anyone means I’m not constantly checking my email to see if he wrote, I’m not engaged in cyclical justification for whatever shiny crimson flag he’s waving, the one lovingly embroidered with “I’M NOT REALLY ALL THAT INTERESTED IN YOU,” I’m not actively ignoring my own gut instincts because I like him and if I like him and ignore my gut instincts then I get to stop dating.

After trying to explain this and failing miserably on every point but the hand-flapping, a friend summed it up nicely: “You’re not interested in bullshit dating.” Yes. That’s precisely it. I’m not interested in bullshit dating, but since that’s all I understand at the moment, I’m giving myself some space to grow out of that phase. NEXT PHASE, PLEASE.

Layer Three

Fears. I have a lot of them, as do we all. Fears like to congregate, cuddling up together until they harden into a tunnel of pitch and brambles and bat guano. A tunnel you have to walk through, something you’ve been trying to avoid by waiting for a bus, a bus that will carry you easily through the tunnel, where you can sit with a magazine and other people, knowing all you have to do to get there is wait for your stop. But it’s not coming. Because that bus doesn’t exist. Nor does the little red wagon pulled by some obliging soul. So it’s time to start walking.

My fears include: Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear that I’ll spend all this time and effort on something and then it will the wrong something. Fear that I’ll hurt someone. Fear that I’ll die. Fear that I’ll end up broke and alone because I did the wrong thing. Fear that I’ll get what I want and it won’t feel like I expected.

Intellectually, I know they’re ridiculous. Or, if not ridiculous, then something I can make peace with. But knowing something intellectually isn’t the same as knowing it emotionally. In order to fully understand how ridiculous those fears are in the emotional center of my little reptilian brain, I have to confront them. Which means WALKING THROUGH THE GODDAMN BLACK TUNNEL. Don’t ask me how I’m going to do this because I only just now admitted that the tunnel even exists. Let’s not rush things here.

All those fears relate to work/career/money stuff. I suspect there’s an entirely different tunnel waiting for me with the word “Relationship” inscribed at the entrance, prominently featuring my inability to let myself find someone who qualifies as Not Bullshit Dating. But I can’t think about that right now because if I do I’ll just sit down and watch more Glee and I’m not allowed to watch Glee until I’m finished writing. And I have to be flossing my teeth while I watch. No watching Glee as an alternative to despair. I only get to watch Glee as an alternative to flossing my teeth without musical entertainment.

You know how some days you feel really in the groove of things? You hop out of bed to exercise in the morning, you choose the apple over the apple danish, one work task flows effortlessly into the next, and nobody cuts you off when you’re trying to make a left turn? Yeah. I love those days. Too bad today isn’t one of them.

My stomach started acting up yesterday and I went to bed thinking all would be well in the morning. And then…it wasn’t. So I didn’t exercise. I’m sure it would have helped, but my stomach prefers coddling. Unfortunately, lying prone to satisfy the Stomach of Doom is far more conducive to watching Glee on Hulu than it is to working toward looming deadlines. In an attempt to rejoin the land of the living, I got up to take some Tagamet and make a smoothie. A smoothie that promptly eluded my control to splatter blueberry colored goop all over the walls, the floor, the stove, and my favorite white dish towel. I didn’t know there was that much smoothie in the world, let alone in my glass.

I just found some dried smoothie on my nose. Wow.

Being in that lovely flow is a science. When I’m not there, I know exactly how to get there. (Stop watching Glee, start working. Stop eating donuts, start eating apples. Stop surfing Facebook, start doing yoga. Stop staring at Twitter, start writing a blog post.) But when you’re not there, it takes sometimes superhuman effort to do one of those things. Especially when Glee is so darn compelling and Will is crying.

It sometimes takes a big shift in perspective to realize that what will make me happy in the moment won’t necessarily make me happy in the long run. (Damn it.)

Pub trivia renders me pretty much useless. Not as useless as I would be at, say, nuclear physics or CIA headquarters, but my main function on trivia night is more Fetching Pints than Accurately Naming the 27th President of the United States. Before I go to trivia, I like to make sure people are well aware of this, so they won’t suffer undue disappointment thanks to unrealistic expectations. I’m a relentless advocate for setting the bar as low as possible, especially when it comes to my own performance.

But I’m starting to wonder if this is the best way for me to approach life. I’m a little hapless, I admit. I knock over cupcake stands at weddings, I get lost easily, I rarely have a firm answer to questions involving horticulture or car mechanics or what makes a bagel chewy. But is this accepting my limitations? Or giving myself an easy out so I don’t ever have to work too hard?

I honestly don’t know.

Kristin and Scott recently pledged their troth in a lovely, tear-tugging ceremony with strewn petals and hair drifting cinematically across porcelain foreheads. It was eloquent and heartfelt and everything a wedding should be. At least until The Incident. When fate and a cozy venue made a dastardly pact that put me, my elbows, and the dessert table in the same space as physics and gravity, two sets of laws I’ve never particularly warmed to.

Yes, I knocked over the wedding cake.

In my defense, it wasn’t the entire cake, only a portion of the cake. Because it wasn’t a cake at all, it was a beautifully laid table full of vintage cake stands with the prettiest, lightest, most sold-a-tender-dewy-soul-to-the-devil’s-bakery-for-such-perfection cupcakes you’ve ever tasted.

It was A Moment, I don’t mind telling you. I felt my elbow collide with something, a rather unstable something, and I watched in wide-eyed horror as a turquoise cake stand tipped backward and nine cupcakes flew from their safe flat surface and into the air, arching in slow motion toward a bitter, painful end. Time slowed down as those carefully frosted tops landed upside down on the table cloth.

Then time sped up and suddenly the stand was righted and all the cupcakes were back in place, tops miraculously unsullied.

I’m fairly certain Nathan fixed everything with a neat economy of motion as I stood in slack-jawed horror, but I honestly don’t remember. Disaster burns itself into your cerebral cortex in a way that the aftermath doesn’t. I’m just glad I restricted myself to guppy-faced panic and kept my hands from flapping themselves toward further disaster.

Soon my heart stopped racing and I picked up my champagne to edge carefully away from the table. I joined Holly across the aisle, where she was flipping through the shots on her camera. Where she found this:

My guilt, captured in pixels for posterity.

Saturday was one of those idyllic San Francisco days when wine flows, shoulders burn, paella is inhaled, iPods are recovered in Kinko’s against all odds, trips to Tuscany are planned, you find yourself holding a can of Coors Light on someone’s roof, and the next day is a total loss. Because the human body needs ample recovery time after such an influx of awesome.