December 10, 2009

I'm watching my dog run in her sleep. Her front paws are bending at the joint, flopping up and down and up and down and her hindquarters are kind of twitching. She must be dreaming. Dreaming about running after squirrels or maybe about chasing the mangy neighborhood pitbull out of our yard. She hates it when he comes too close to me though I can tell by the way he acts that he's harmless.

I have a horrible headache from the cold I have. Terrible coughing has kept me up and I want to sleep but am distracted by the dog running in her sleep and the white christmas tree that stays lit all night across from my bed.

I'm assistant directing Annie this year and was digging through some old boxes of pictures tonight trying to find an old pic of me playing the Little Orphan to post on here. I didn't find it, but what I did discover was lots of old pictures and people I had forgotten about. Well, perhaps not people that I forgot, but feelings I definitely had forgotten.

I found a picture I must have taken of Lauren and Jake, Mom, Dad and Elizabeth from probably eight or nine years ago. Everyone looks happy and Lauren and Jake look perfect together. "Look what you had," I wanted to scream at the picture. But my head was already throbbing too much for a yelling match tonight. Then I found the picture of me and Jeremy at Lauren's wedding. We both look handsome and his head is cocked slightly towards me in an affectionate sort of way. I loved him. I'd forgotten what that felt like. But I remembered when I saw the picture.

It's been a long time since I was in love... six years I think.

Then I started thinking... what do I do with these pictures? And sure enough, there they were... Christmases, birthdays, graduations, the Dribbs and the boys... Jake and Jeremy. And I'm sure if I'd gone back further I would have found David too. What do I do with all these pictures? Throw them out? Throw away all the family pictures from certain years because they have men in them that we're not with now? Do scrapbook years 1999-2005 just get left out of the books? Out of the picture frames? How does that work?

And will it hurt Elizabeth's current boyfriend (that she's just sure she's going to marry) if at Christmas I ask him to take our family's portrait and not be in it? I remember when i returned from Italy I insisted that David take my family's picture at the airport and knowing that then he would not be in it himself (having just cheated on me with some freshman). I remember how angry my parents were that I had done that and how rude they thought i was being toward him. But it's a great picture now. It's a keeper. Cause he's not in it. In addition, there's one picture of my family minus Jake from Amy's wedding day. I'm not sure why he's not in it and at the time I remember thinking, "Where's Jake?" but we took the picture anyway. I have it framed still. We all look so beautiful and it really was a happy time for all of us.

I don't mean to dwell on the past. Like I said, I was looking for a picture so as to write a cute blog about me directing what I was once in, and what age I was when I learned to smoke my first cigar (it really is a great picture). And there it was: the past. All those feelings of awkwardness during those teenage years, finally getting pretty in college, feeling proud and grown up with the first adult love relationship I had and how I thought surely we would get married. Seeing pictures of my family with my "brother" who un-brotherified himself when he left my sister and their three year marriage. I miss him. It's true. I miss Jeremy too.

But maybe not. Maybe I just miss the feelings of love toward a brother and love toward a lover. They'll probably come back again with another brother and another lover in some space or time near or far from where I am now, but then again, maybe not. One never knows.

And besides, this cold may do me in. The coughing is driving me crazy. Funny how wherever I am sick, it's the worst feeling ever. A sore throat is the worst illness to get, the most excruciating pain ...until next time when I have the stomach flu and throwing up is the worst possible thing to experience when one is sick... until the next time when I have an earache and it's... you get the picture.

Maybe looking at old pictures and feeling these things is kind of like my dog running in her sleep. It seems vivid, it feels real, but those feelings are just shadows of the real experiences which are now a thing in the past, untangible in itself. And so reinvesting in those pictures is a similar thing - my paw may be pawing, my heart may be throbbing, but it isn't the true feeling of love; it isn't actually running.

It isn't actually loving. You can't fulfill love with a picture and you can't get love by living in the past. The only service we do to our dreams is to wake up and start to live them out in the present, toward the future.

Running isn't really running if you're laying down.

So the pictures are going back in the box and back under the bed. And having written all this, I'm not sure I've made any conclusions about what to do with them. But I know what to do with myself. Live in the moment. Wait for love. And give away love any chance I can get.

And... maybe ask my sister's boyfriend to take my family's picture this Christmas.

November 27, 2009

I thought it had been ten years since I was last "home" for Thanksgiving. I've been telling people that. "Last time I was home for Thanksgiving I was in College!" Even wrote that in the title of my facebook Thanksgiving photo album. But I was wrong, it's only been nine years. I forgot that I took nine months off after graduating from college. I lived at home during that time, substitute teaching and working at the church I grew up in, and I got to know my youngest sister Elizabeth, who was only 11 when I'd left for school four years earlier.

Nine years later and we're in a similar place. Although Lauren is obviously no longer away at Wheaton while Elizabeth and I are home, she is still in school, doing her residency at Loyola University and couldn't come home this Thanksgiving. She's on call. So I was just me and Elizabeth and the rents. Just like it was in the year 2000.

In the year 2000.

In just a month I would turn down a marriage proposal and move to another state to start grad school. In just a month Elizabeth would start to crack down on memorizing the Driver's Ed booklet and then turn 16. Now we're 24 and 31. She lives with a man she's not engaged to and I am licensed and ordained in my profession.

Nine years.

Lauren and Jake were together back then. Catherine and David were broken up. No one knew there would be a marriage and a divorce, a Jeremy and a Joseph and all the others in between.

Grandma and Grandpa still travelled back then and flew to Jamaica later that winter. I would use all my savings from subbing to go visit over Spring Break. And now I'm visiting them again. They were the main impetus for coming home for Thanksgiving this year. Grandpa's not been feeling too great over the past few months and I used my vacation time to take a guilty pleasure trip to LA and resolved to go home for Turkey Day to make up for it. Then Grandpa went into the hospital for pneumonia four days before I was supposed to arrive. So I was glad I'd made plans to come home.

I drove a Toyota Corolla nine years ago, and then a boyfriend's car, then a Kia Sportage and am finally back to another Corolla. Elizabeth's been in more wrecks and had more tickets than I have men, which is really saying something. Lauren got the good car in the divorce. So there's that. I've moved eleven times in nine years and travelled to seven foreign countries. Elizabeth just got her first apartment on her own this year and her boyfriend promptly moved into it. Lauren got the house in the divorce and promptly sold it. She's now living with a gay friend of ours from high school in a condo she owns in Seattle.

Work is crazy. I still work at a church, like I did during those nine months after college but before seminary. Instead of a Youth Ministry Intern though, I'm now a Minister to Young Adults and I run a theater instead of a classroom.

Other things have changed too. Whereas Elizabeth worshipped me those months we lived together: making me signs to hang on my desk at work, driving my car around the block to practice, writing me sweet letters when I went away to school... now I'm just the crazy old sister who has too many cats, is too skinny and uses phrases like "compassion fatigue" in ordinary conversation. And I think she's a wanna-be grown up who needs to be more responsible and stop asking our parents for money. But I do think we still have a mutual respect for one another in there somewhere. Elizabeth has no idea what I do for a living which makes me a bit of a mystery and maybe just a little bit cool since there's no way in hell she'd get up and talk in front of that many people, and I think her work as an inner city 5th grade teacher is amazing and the best work she could possibly be doing in this broken world.

Nine years.

Nine years to be thankful this Thanksgiving.

October 19, 2009

I gotta tell you how many ex-somethings I've run into lately. And I'm not talking ex-somethings that I'm friends with and hang out with on a regular basis (only saw two of those this weekend). I'm talking ex-somethings like... that you don't anticipate running into... that you've prepared a big "I'm doing fabulously" speech for when you see him... because you always thought you'd run into the little son of a gun again and if you did you'd be ready.

I was not.

First, The Wee One. This is not a disparaging term, just a name he received as a result of a mentor/mentee relationship with a man named Big Phil and well, at that time, anyone looked little next to Large Roy, so, the name stuck. I was hanging out with a new friend at a restaurant when he walked in. I was startled, but we saw each other instantly so there was no where to hide. I stood up to say hello. Neither of us introduced the other people in our parties, we just exchanged how are you's and what are you doing here's and then he kind of cocked his head to the side and looked at me hard the way he used to when he was trying to peer down to the bottom of my soul and usually found it.

"Okay great, good to see you, talk to you later," I said in an unusually high pitched voice that must have been a dead give-away to my uncomfortability, and then I sat down in my chair while my friend across the table gave me a "what the hell was that?" look as he walked away.

Friday, that same friend and I gathered with my roommate to head to The Carousel to hear another friend's band play.

The Wee One again. Only it was just the back of him. So I texted him to determine if he was coming back or staying away and in a bold move, I inquired to his relationship status and suggested that if he was currently with someone it might not be the best idea to look at a woman the way he looked at me the other night. He didn't text back.

And the band sucked.

So we left to meet up with my most recent ex-something (and my roommate's good friend) at a local eastside bar. I should have known that this would probably be too much for me, but we'd worked stuff out and are "friends" and in good faith he bought my girlfriends and me each a beer and we all settled into conversation. About an hour later though, a decision was made to go dancing. Oh God. Just say no. Just say no. Just say no.

I said yes, and we all headed to The Boom Boom Room or something like that. I should have known there'd be trouble with a name like Boom Boom. And of course, up on the roof, underneath the stars, I ran into Saul. Saul, number 2. Saul who broke up with me via text message right before I left for Peru. He was the one I'd saved up the big "you're an asshole and I'm amazing" speech but instead i sputtered out some sort of "here with friends, you look nice, gotta go" number most of which I don't remember because by that point in the evening the good Lord knows I was well under the influence.

Seriously? Seriously. God, I'm an idiot.

Sunday's story was less embarrassing. Another ex-something (I know. I've dated TOO MANY PEOPLE. My therapist and I will be discussing this on Wednesday) was performing in a show I went to see starring my beautiful and talented and absolutely hilarious friend, Amy H-D. I don't actually have a nickname for this guy. Only a descriptor: the guy who on our first date took me to see Super Bad. But I'm not traumatized by this encounter and after the show we said hello and I offered congrats on a great performance. Later that night he thanked me for coming and we chatted for a while on facebook.

Oh facebook.

Because Facebook brought me to my big ex-something. Ex-boyfriend actually. I can say that flat out.

I knew it would happen, one day. But I didn't think it would be so soon.

But there he was, Friend Suggestion: David. THE David. Well, not The David, but my David. Except not my David. THE DAVID. On Facebook. "11 people are mutual friends," FB kindly informed me.

There's a lot more than that I muttered to myself. Most of whom I haven't seen since we graduated, thank God.

I knew it would happen but it's still hard to describe how I feel. I spoke with an old friend from college a couple of months ago who told me David had moved to Texas, and even that freaked me out. I used to have dreams that I would run into his family members who I knew lived here in this great State. The one he wanted to move me to to make me his little southern belle wife where we'd live happily ever after.

"I'll never live in Texas," I told him.

Sigh.

I haven't spoken to him in eight years; haven't seen him in nine. Well, that's not entirely true. He's still in my dreams.

Used to be, whenever I would meet a man that I really liked, who I thought had potential, like good-husband material, David would show up in my dreams. He became a symbol for what scared me the most about relationships and just in case I got too close to someone or someone became too good to be true, there he was back from my subconscious and I usually woke up crying.

Not because he was a bad guy. I mean, he was young, I was young, we made mistakes and quite frankly, our brains hadn't finished developing, you know? And while there was a lot of pain and self-discovery if by some of the most challenging means possible to an idyllic little girl, I regret nothing about those four years.

But you know, he was my first, he was my Billy.

I've been watching Ally McBeal reruns. Appropriate for me to discover my Billy is on Facebook while re-visiting one of my favorite sitcoms.

Now when he's in my dreams, people are always trying to get us back together. We've somehow ended up in the same PhD program or I'm visiting old friends. And I resist it but he's smiling at me, and I get sucked in by that smile (like the Wee One's eyes) and I start to think okay... okay... i guess I could do this... and then I wake up. Confused.

Kind of like I was this weekend. The weekend of ex-somethings. And then today my current something became an ex as well. So that was splendid. A weekend of exes and then I become an ex myself.

It'll give a girl a complex. Let me tell you.

And it's like men who used to like me can smell when I'm single again. Tonight I exchanged multiple texts with a guy I ran into right before I went to LA, a guy who, of course, I had been on a couple of dates with last year. "When's your wedding," I asked him that night, wondering where his fiance was. "We broke it off," he replied.

Please don't start liking me. Please don't start liking me. Please don't start liking me.

Tonight, of course, he texted me in full flirt. They can smell when you're single. Saul who broke up with me via text texted me, "It was nice to run into you Friday night." The actor wrote me on Facebook, "thanks for coming, how are you doing?"

I'M FINE. DON'T I LOOK FINE? I'M GIVING UP MEN. I'm writing a book called, "How I Gave Up Men," and it's going to be a best seller and you'll all be featured in it. I'm sorry you won't get any royalties but since most of you have a little sliver of my heart anyway, that should be compensation enough.

I mean, I've been on more dates with more men in the past two years than Marilyn Monroe probably did in her whole career and not one substantial relationship out of the lot of 'em. Not one boyfriend. Just ex-somethings.

God, you'd think I'd be an expert by now, but obviously I'm getting worse and worse. My therapist is wrong I think. I'm definitely not making much of an improvement. Cyber-dating cuts to the chase. Friends have good intentions. But none of it works. I'm living proof.

The more you date, the more you weed through men, the more you end up in the weeds.

So while I'm here, I'm gonna take an allergy pill, lie down in the grass and look for shapes in the clouds.

Cause I'm sick of lookin' for men.

August 24, 2008

I'm coming in to sleep with you. I will crawl naked into bed beside you, your own bare body already snoring away.

Even though we had a fight. Not an out and out yelling match, but definitely a disagreement, a difference in ideas. And I went into the bathroom to take out my contacts because I couldn't stand sitting there next to you and discussing it anymore, I had to leave. And then I wiped the mascara out from under my eyes; not because I had cried, but because I was tired, and we'd already been sweaty together once today and I hadn't cleaned up afterwards. Then I fed the dog, and the cats. And i'm sure you heard me call Janie from off the bed to come and eat. But you didn't come after me.

So I sat down at the computer and checked facebook... and myspace... and email... and tried to figure out why my whole body felt so hot and my face tingled like I had an alcohol buzz except I didn't.

How did that conversation manage to upset me in a way that didn't make me yell or cry but just get up passively and leave to get ready for bed.

But now I am, ready for bed that is, and I'm trying to decide if I should go sleep in the guest room because although I'm not angry with you I don't really want to be around you, if I should let you wake up in the morning and find me in there and finally understand that I didn't care about the contacts, they were just an excuse and yes, our conversation bothered me that much. Or if I should just submit to the difficulties of relationships and just crawl in bed with you anyway.

I want space. The guest bed would provide that, but it's my fucking house. I'm the homeowner here and it should be you that leaves my bedroom if anyone is asked to leave. But I'm not really mad, just uncomfortable, and I need some space or something to make the tingling allergy sensation that isn't allergies go away. I want somewhere clean and crisp and pure to climb into where I will feel washed, bathed, and perhaps wake up feeling that cleanness in me, maybe even resurrection.

But I won't. I think instead I'll slide in bed next to you. I'll put in my earplugs because you snore so loud and i'll shimmy over next to you so i can feel you breathe (not just hear it), and I'll let go. I'll let go of this rope I'm holding onto that is cinched around my neck. Let go of the papers I've stuffed in briefcases and notebooks stacked up to the nose. Let go of the timetables and watches and cell phones and calendars and computers and anything else that tries to tell me where I should be at this point in my life.

And I will sigh.

And roll over to my side of the bed.

And reach out my hand so that it just barely touches yours.

And sleep.

Sleep next to you in the bed we'll make together tomorrow morning.

June 11, 2008

Dating is impossible. Impossible! How am I supposed to know who is right and what is good when there isn’t any list? No black and white. No set of do’s and don’ts. Ridiculous. I’m fed up with the whole scene.

I came home tonight to my roommate, a woman going through a divorce who’s husband, when he brought her her mail yesterday also brought her flowers in honor of what would have been their sixth wedding anniversary. Flowers. After she caught him sleeping with a 21 year old two weeks ago after he’d already confessed to three adulterous flings during their marriage and promised that during this separation he wouldn’t sleep with anyone else. Flowers. Fabulous.

For drinks tonight, I sat with another friend who’s wedding anniversary would have been yesterday. He’s pissed because, according to him, the trend is for women to date tight-jean-wearing men or doushbags. That’s the trend. Tight jeans and assholes. Neither of which attribute he wants to embrace. “Yep,” said his friend later after a stimulating conversation on Sex and the City and Made of Honor, “Doushbags. Why do women go for a womanizer turn good guy? Why do they put up with that?”

Sick of hearing my gender criticized for poor decision-making, I spoke up in our defense. “Women don’t intentionally go for assholes,” I explained. “It’s just that the nice guys aren’t asking. And as for the bad guy turn good guy, women are nurturer’s by nature and regardless of whether or not we want to have children, we are maternal. We have Christ-complexes. We see men and we see their potential, because we’ve seen our fathers and our mentors and our friends screw shit up when they were young and turn out to be great husbands thirty years down the road. And that’s why we date shitty men. They make us laugh and we have good sex and we see their potential fifteen years down the line.”

I suppose my company tonight would have told me that I should set my standards higher if they weren’t so shocked by my outburst.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “It’s just that I’ve been working on this in therapy and you hit a nerve.”

“Well, when you’ve been hurt like we have…” the young un-divorced, un-married kid said. And he pointed to my good friend who’s wife mysteriously left him two years ago.

And I wanted to blow up again. I wanted to scream, “YOU’VE been hurt?!” For every ONE shitty woman who’s left a great guy like Cory, I can list you TEN shitty men. While it’s true (as they admitted over drinks), it happens on both sides of the table, STATISTICALLY, it’s men who do the leaving, the fucking around, the screwing people over.

I wanted to yell at him about my dad and my sister and my roommate and ask him who was more hurt now, but this kid is 23 and doesn’t know dick about marriage or pain and it’s unfair of me to ask him to see beyond his own experience at this time.

I was traumatized by relationships at 23 too when my boyfriend of three years left me for another girl both times I went overseas.

My acupuncturist would probably say my standards are too high, that I can’t expect men to not go to strip clubs, not look at porn and not comment on other women when their fiance’s aren’t around.

That’s what my ex-boyfriend did. And it royally pissed off one of the guys he was with who watch the whole thing happen. He looked an attractive woman up and downs and confessed, “God really knew what he was doing when he made women in mini-skirts with cowboy boots.” At least we’d already broken up by then. Course he has a fiancé now, but at least it’s not me. The fucker checked out my sister at my ordination ceremony. This “great Christian guy” loves good-looking women and it’s embarrassing.

Now that we finally live in the same city (and he’s engaged to someone with whom he’s never lived in the same city – shocker) I know that that’s not the type of man I want to be with: someone who makes those comments and upsets my friends by being disrespectful to me.

But is that too much to ask for?

My acupuncturist would probably say yes and my friends tonight would have probably said no, so who’s standards do I get to go by? That’s what I want to know. Do I give men a little grace to grow up and get over their hormones and hopefully become admirable feminists who love their wives and cherish the sacredness that is the feminine? Or do I hold men to a higher standard now of setting good patterns of behavior, of being healthy now, of respecting women and trying hard in relationships now? It’s fucking confusing!

I can’t pull this off.

Sex is natural or Sex is sacred. Men are jerks or women are jerks. Porn is inevitable or porn leads to bad sex patterns.

Maybe I should have just stuck with the plan my conservative youth minister laid out in the youth group. Stick to hand-holding and minimal kissing and marry a Christian and you’ll be alright.

But that’s so not right and not now and not normal and not healthy!!

So what is?!?!

What is?

What is healthy? Or at least resembles healthy?

Cause I want it. I want it so badly.

For all my men bashing, and fears of infidelity, and settling, and one-foot-out-the-door relationships, I want a real one so much.

I want a good man. I want a man who respects women. I want a man I respect and adore and laugh at and laugh with have great sex with. I want a man who is spiritual and quiet sometimes and gets me and I get him. I want to get married and work on our yard together and raise children and encourage each other toward love and peace and harmonious living.

“When your hearts and the timing is right, you’ll know, and then the rest of it – the practical stuff that you’re consumed with now – won’t matter, because you’ve met the right one,” my mentor said tonight. Oh god, I’m no where close to that. And it’s not fair. I’ve never felt that. How can I hold such high standards as to let my HEART dictate what happens?

There’s no prescription for the heart. No formula. No black and white. No right and wrong.

It’s knowing, feeling, sensing

Oh god. It’s so impossible…

May 14, 2008

Matthew is 38 with the almost leathery-type facial skin that shows a man has lived, partied, perhaps to an extreme in both areas. He's also 38 years a bachelor, rich and unashamed. Matt reminds me of my ex-boyfriend, the one with the old looking face aged by too much smoking. The one who died of cancer. Except Matt's wealthy, intelligent, well-traveled and owns a boat. Mike was just an artist who drank too much. But he made me laugh.

Matt makes me feel young. He makes me feel 29. I feel immature and inexperienced around him. Our academic specialties are in different disciplines so I don't have much to contribute to any conversation and there's no sense in going into what interests me. So I feel little like a kid pretending to be a grown-up, timidly side-stepping to get out of his shadow.

The man I actually like is just my age. I spoke to him on the phone the other day to wish him a happy 30th birthday. While he'd too been dreading it, he was pretty pleased that evening because a 21 year old girl had hit on him. "Bravo," I thought and looked instinctively down as I often do when I'm embarrassed or disappointed even though I was on the phone and he wouldn't have been able to read the insecurity in my eyes as they lowered to my lap. I noticed my hands that for the first time are starting to show evidence of age. My veins stick out a little more than they used to and as I stare at them, I can see my great-grandmother's blue veins with pale skin barely clinging to them, and then my mother's hands, more my color but with scattered age spots and saggy skin, and then my own again with every pore showing as pores tend to do before the lines between them connect to form wrinkles above the veins just starting to bulge. They are the hands of a 30 year old woman and I I realize I kind of like them.

I too feel a slight satisfaction when a 19-year-old boy does a double take as I walk by. But I don't want to date one.

A co-worker also turned 30 this month. Last weekend I went to her party. An afternoon gig, there were friends from her hometown in Sheridan, TX there with their families. Girls with babies and pictures of themselves in wedding dresses littered the picnic tables. They are young though, significantly younger than we are, with smooth skin and not a wrinkle to be found. No sign of obscene laughter or insane tears crept out of their round eyes for there were no lines giving testimony to that. Their cheeks still bulged a little without the definition of jaw and mouth that often develops for women in their later twenties and thirties. For the first time, I saw women cradling babies and doting on toddlers and knew for certain that i was not one of them. I turned from them to an old friend from seminary, not married and also without children, a few years older than me. I studied the females before me. Although they were all "baby-bearing age," their faces, their skin and eyes and mouths marked the differences in their generations. And I knew which one I belonged in.

And I liked it. I looked at my friend and she was beautiful. The young girls' smooth untarnished faces were enviable no doubt, but as I looked at my fellow thirty-something, I prayed to look just like them: like life could be evidenced not by a baby in the arms or a wedding dress on a photo, but simply by the look on my face, the contour of my body. The gentle but strong eyes, the freckled, colored skin, the strong bones and muscles and hips whose due reverence comes only from time. Who knew? Who knew I would treasure growing "old?"

I'm an adult, I realized. And today I realized I want to be with a man who wants to be with an adult. A woman. Not a teenager playing dress-up, not a twenty-something seeking more experience than life is willing to give her yet. I don't want to play with older men whose lives make me feel little and small, older men who I help to feel young. Neither do I want to play with younger men who stroke my ego and seduce my pride. I want to be with someone who sees me for me. Who sees the eye crinkles and the thick-pored hands and the strong shoulders and the sometimes all too bountiful hips and the tummy that could stand to be tucked and loves it. Loves it all. Loves me.

Because I love me. And I'm about to turn 30. And while I once thought that age to be old and depressing, I now find it invigorating, and appealing. Downright gorgeous if you will. And maybe someday someone will say the same thing about me.

April 10, 2008

"God is fucking with me," my roommate announced tonight.

Technically I've begun with a digression from my intended topic, but I feel it mildly relevant. She's in the middle of a divorce that her adulterous husband doesn't even have the guts to file for, and being almost instantly introduced post "I'm leaving you" conversation to a different man who is now falling for her, she's in the awkward position of liking him but not wanting to lead him on, of loving her husband but being angry with him for toying with her. Suffice it to say, men are not on her top list of gender preferences right now.

And she's living with me. Lovely combination.

She has a theory that America is in an epidemic. "I've never had a boyfriend who wasn't addicted to or at least looked at porn. And every man in our group of friends back home struggles with porn. Christian or non-Christian. All my boyfriends did."

"What?!" I said incredulous. "I don't think I've even had a boyfriend who looked at porn."

"What?!" she said incredulous. "You never caught one of them looking at it?"

"No!" We sat staring aghast at one another.

So I called one of my ex-boyfriends.

"Do you think most men look at porn?" I inquired, daring him to contradict me.

"Yeah."

"What?!"

My roommate looked at me wide eyed with a hint of smirk on her lips.

"Well, if you consider 51% a majority, I'd say yes," he explained.

"What if I consider 80% a majority?"

"Well..."

"Still Ann," my roommate popped in, "51% is still one in two people! Even those odds are atrocious."

So I recounted to my ex-boyfriend her theory and my defense of men. "Do you think some of my ex-boyfriends look at porn?"

"Yeah."

I am so naive.

We hung up the phone. How depressing. Men are addicted to sex. It's crazy. Isn't it possible to love and treat with utmost or at least mild sacredness a man and a woman's sexual relationship? Geez guys. Get a grip. They're just boobs.

My exboyfriend texted me.

"I think the issue lies more with lust than porn," he wrote. "Porn is just one of the many manifestations of lust."

Fucking fantastic.

After a good two hours of processing this and analyzing which of my ex-boyfriends looked at porn online or on the potty, I sat quietly defeated on the couch with my cat sprawled across my lap. "This sucks."

"It's obvious women are better," my roommate concluded.

"Yeah," I agreed. "And whoever said God was a man ought to be shot."

October 8, 2006

The Question: Who do you believe?

The Contestants:

Your parents, who raised you (thank god), and have for that reason witnessed your greatest failings and your greatest accomplishments but, truth be told, not much in between because you have been gone for over 10 years...

Your friends, who have stuck with you through thick and thin, who have also seen you at your worst and best and don't really give a flying flip about either because they're not that into titles and they think "shit happens" to everyone, but they've also only heard your side of the story so...

Yourself, who really believes that you are learning to be a mature person; that overall you've made the best decisions for your life. Otherwise you'd be married with children in Missouri, probably without a Masters or a very fulfilling job or any of the amazing friends you've made in Texas, and well, did i mention the children? Or you'd be married in Waco, and right now your husband's on the road (and did I mention you have your Masters but are still waiting tables at a cajun restaurant?)

Except you're not. You're one of ten chosen pastoral residents in the nation (at least that's what some other contestants told you to put on your resume). You're talented and you know your gifts and how to use them. You're "cute" (as the old ladies as church like to call you) even if you don't have your sisters' unfading beauty. You're articulate, funny, creative, enchanting and charming. You see needs and you seek to meet them. Thanks to your parents, you have a heart for the marginalized and thanks to your friends, a mind keen on creativity. And heck, you've got a great body even if you're "pushing 30" as your sisters love to remind you.

Dad, you taught me to go for the gold. Mom, you taught me to stand up for my rights. Friends, you taught me that love is unconditional and I am so thankful for you all.

But right now, I'm sticking to myself. I don't even want to be analyzed by my therapist.

If everyone could just not ask questions, not offer opinions, not make sure I'm not beating myself up or giving myself undue credit. Just let me be me with my thoughts and my empty coffee can.

You filled me up, but one day the bottom of that coffee can broke, and the pennies cascaded out the bottom. With your love, I repaired the can, but now every time a penny or a rock or a token or a memory is dropped inside in clinks loudly and reverberates against the metal and I'm reminded of how empty I feel right now.

It will take a little while for it to fill back up. Do you understand? So please, continue to love me... but i can't handle any more opinions, please.

I have to work out these deaths, some literal, some metaphorical, and I have to find the resurrection. It may take three days and I may not recognize it when I see it, but I'm confident when he calls my name, I'll be changed.

Again.

Again.

But we must be silent and I must go to the garden or I might miss him.

Again.

Again.