Ten Truths about Me

1. I sometimes feel sad when I am laughing.

2. I have never had a person who was close to me die. I cried for 3 weeks when my cat died.

3. I sometimes hate the friend who has been in my life the longest. I used to call her my best friend. I don't anymore.

4. The thought of being with *him* is more exciting than the reality of actually being with him. I am addicted to the anticipation.

5. I have another addiction that no one in my life knows anything about.

6. I have had 7 long term relationships. I have only said "I love you" and meant it to 3 men in my life. 2 of the men I was engaged to and the other one shattered my heart into a million worthless fragments.

7. I relate better to animals than I do to most people.

8. I will leave St. Louis when my father dies and never, ever look back.

9. People who are intensely emotional interest me the most.

10. I am good at a job that I hate.

Is It Just Me?

Is it just me or does anyone else feel entirely ripped off and scammed that James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces is a complete work of fiction being passed off by him as "as truthful as I can remember memoir." Now, let me get this out of the way first and foremost: I did NOT read this book because it was an Oprah book club pick. I happened to see it at Target one day and being as, in the past year, I have become obsessed with books dealing with drug addiction, it seemed right up my alley. Would I have bought it if I knew it was a work of fiction? Hell no. Why, you ask? Because in thinking I was dealing with a brain damaged recovered drug addict and alocholic I managed to overlook an awful lot of the book's shortcomings: for example, the guy cannot write worth a shit. A 4th grader has a better grasp of the English language than this thug does. But I was willing to overlook the atrocious writing because I felt sorry for him and his allegedly troubled life. Yet now we find out he was a college graduate, former frat boy who has no evidence of any dental surgery, let alone massive root canals done without anesthesia or pain killers and I just feel totally defrauded. But as the old adage goes, "There's no such thing as bad publicity" because his book is now Number 1 again on Amazon. WTF people? Had I not already purchased the book, I certainly would not be running out and buying it right now just to see what all the controversy is about. Are Americans really this stupid and easily manipulated? And to prove that I would not buy the book had I known going into it that it was a work of fiction I offer you my Exhibit A: It was only in the middle of the entire brew ha ha/controversy over the book that I learned there was a sequel to the book entitled "My Friend Leonard." Now, had I still believed the book was true, I would have dropped everything to go purchase Part 2 of his amazing saga. But, as we now know, the ENTIRETY of Book 2 is complete and utter fabrication because it is about his time in jail post rehab - a jail term that NEVER happened - which Frey has, at long last, at least admitted this much as being false. So, I am now trying to erase the whole ordeal from my psyche and will NEVER read Part 2 of this saga. Again, I just feel completely defrauded. I know I should return the book to Target where I bought it because I don't want to give that lying bastard one penny of my hard earned cash. But right now the book is presently being passed among all of my friends who just HAVE to read it to see what all the fuss is about. WTF ever people. At least I can sleep easier at night knowing that each one of my friends who reads my copy of his work of fiction is thereby depriving him of another potential sale of his book. There. I guess that makes me feel better but not by much. I still just feel manipulated and swindled. I cried while reading that book for shit sake - something I would not have done had I known it was all made up. And this is the man that Oprah says kept her awake at night for weeks. Well, screw Oprah. She apparently is just as dumb as the rest of America. But I digress.....

Is it just me or is this hot then cold then hot weather totally bizarre for January in St. Louis? Not that I don't appreciate a warm day in January where we can get one but it makes it virtually impossible to acclimate to the cold weather such that when it is 30 it feels like zero degrees to my poor old arthritic bones. Yeah, you heard me - I'm old and arthritic at the ripe old age of 36. Getting old just sucks. I used to be a competitive gymnast for Christ sake. Now I can barely make it out of bed without groaning and moaning and limping and being hunched over and hobbled for the first hour of every day. And it doesn't get much better throughout the day - I think I just get used to it. Ah, how I long for the days when I was doing a triple backflip off the balance beam. What happened? How did I get this way? Where did it all go so wrong? Allz I remember (yeah, you heard me Allz - I'm from Mizzouree remember and that's how we say that word here) is one day I woke up and my whole body was just recoiled in pain. And that folks was the beginning of the end. The day when the slow decent from youthful vitality gave way to cranky aged worthlessness.

Is it just me or does being in debt suck? I realized today that I have 2 years rather than 1 from this April to continue paying off my car. God that sucks. And considering the damn thing already has 62,000 miles on it - it's going to have about 200,000 when it is finally paid off and will probably be worth a grand total of a dollar as a trade-in. Great. Super. Now, in my defense, my mechanic keeps trying to reassure me that it's not really as bad as it seems because about half of my collective miles are highway miles which apparently puts far less wear and tear on your car than actual city miles. Whatever. Doesn't help the reality much that I will have 2 years of car payments during which time I could very well have costly repairs too since my warranty is set to expire at 70,000 miles which will probably be around April as much as I drive. Great. Super. And what exactly does it say about Chevrolet that they REFUSE to warranty their cars any further than 70,000 miles?! I remember when I bought the car I yelled and hollered and threw a tantrum because I wanted an extended warranty that went to a minimum of 100,000 miles like all the foreign cars do but was repeatedly told GM offers no such warranty protection. You know what that means? That means some number cruncher at GM has ALREADY done the math and determined that it is not in their economic best interest to warranty GM cars past 70k miles because the costs to GM outweight the price of the warranty paid by the customer. So since some number cruncher has already done the math for me it seems I'm up shits creek for the next 2 years as I try and pay it off while hoping beyond hope no catastrophic mechanical repairs come along while I'm already paying $425 a month for the damn thing. Gee, that would be just swell, wouldn't it? To hell with American cars. The next car is going to be a Honda with a STANDARD 100k warranty and an extended warranty that goes until 200,000 miles. Because you see folks, Honda stands behind their product whereas GM apparently wants to run and hide from theirs once it gets to 70,000 miles. What does that tell us about who has the superior product? No fucking wonder GM is in bankruptcy. And it's not like I'm taking jobs away from Americans by buying foreign. Most Hondas bought in America are MADE in America whereas my lovely GM product was assembed in Mexico. Nice. So much for "Buy American." I'm done with that load of crap. I'll be patriotic up to a point but when I start to feel my patriotism in my pocketbook that's when I say fogetaboutit. Honda here I come.

And finally, is it just me or is it a mere coincidence that Osama bin Ladin wants to declare a truce with America right when he is losing and we are kicking his stupid terrorist ass and taking out all of his henchmen? But I'm sure we can take his word for it that he would leave the rest of the world alone if we would just leave Afghanistan and Iraq. Yeah, right. I got your truce right here for you, Osama. Come and get it...

The New & Improved Me

Let's just say I have learned a few things about this blogosphere since I began posting last June. I have learned that people like to see daily or at least somewhat frequent updates. I have learned that just like with the now controversial book "A Million Little Pieces" people want and expect your posts to be entertaining, interesting but above all, true. When I first began blogging I set out to keep a big part of my life and who I am shielded from those who might try and want to know something about me. I didn't talk about my life very much, my really good friends, my politics or my significant other. In fact, I went out of my way to keep these things from my readers. Why you ask? Well, for one I didn't want my blog to become this public treatise on all the people that matter in my life. I didn't think that was fair to them. Also, I still won't be talking about politics (much) because there are way too many political blogs out there and the type of reader I'm trying to interest in what I have to say would be more interested in what is in their heart vs what they read in the morning paper each day. I also did not want to be a boring blog where people talked about diaper changing, parenting etc so I initially deliberately tried to appeal to the single bloggers. I did this because on my blog I want to talk about the trials and tribulations of being single (as I still am despite my significant other - I believe you are single until you aren't - meaning, you get married) and all the fun things that singles do: shopping, art gallery openings, culture and nightlife in and around St. Louis, travel, etc. These are the types of things that would interest me, and do interest me, when I am looking for new blogs to read. What I have found is that the blogs that interest me most are the ones that either have a high emotional content or ones in which the author of the blog has such an uncensored wit as to be utterly hysterical and quite candid. So, because that is what interests me, mostly because that's how I am as a person, I now want to present that side of me. I'm hoping everyone will think this is a huge improvement.

A Tribute to a Fellow Blogger

Ok, I admit it. I'm not the world's best blogger, folks. I don't do it regularly (but more frequently than some, mentioning no names, LAURIE) and maybe most of what I decide to blog about isn't all that interesting or inspiring. But pardon me for about the next 10 paragraphs while I digress about someone else's blog - a blog none of you have probably ever read. For about 4 months now, I have being reading a blog written by some guy *down South* who is painstakingly and excruciatingly slowly picking apart the entire trail of his love life up to this point in his life. Why would he do this you might ask? He says its in the hope of maybe learning something from seeing it all on paper and maybe, finally, for once and for all, being able to walk away from it all and make a new life for himself in the romantic department. He has stated that until he gets over and past and done with, once and for all, this one particular woman who came in and out of his life multiple times spanning several years, there is no hope for him. He called this *a project* and the project ended today on his blog. He finally said all he had to say about this woman he still eats, lives and breathes every second of every day, to this day - yet who he has not seen in over 10 years. This guy is my age (36) and he is still pining away for a girl he created a lot of drama with in his early twenties. Then he goes on to admit that since she left his life for the last time 10 years ago he has thrown some really, really good stable, loving, warm and wonderful women out of his life without so much as as shrug all because they weren't psychotic and screwed up and drama-prone like his long lost toxic lover from so many years ago. This guy's blog has a HUGE following, too, from what I can tell on the comment section of his blog. My initial reaction to this whole *project* was WTF? Is it just me or should someone just smack this guy up the side of the head and say "Dude, get over it. It was TEN years ago. She's gone. The more you dwell on it the more you will NEVER purge yourself of *it* and her and everything that goes with it." Another thing that bothered me about his posts was he claimed to recall, seemingly irrelevant things in very specific detail: for example, how his toxic lover's hair smelt in certain moments as he ran his hand through it oh so long ago. Or what dress she was wearing on March 13, 1993 as he kissed her in the moonlight. The whole thing just smacked of a bad romance novel. So, I have been reading his blog with a combination of mild interest and complete annoyance all of these months. And it ended today. But the question is, did it really? Is this guy better for having talked about *her* month after month, day after day, in excruciating detail, or he is just that much worse off for having focused on it every day for so long? And just when I was about to comment on his blog and leave a not so nice *piece of my mind* regarding his *project* I got to thinking. Don't we all have that *one person* in our life who so utterly screwed us over that after which we were never really the same ever again? Don't we all have someone for whom it took us way too long to "just get over it" and on with our lives? So, in the very moment I was about to strike with my less than tactful opinion of him and his *project* it hit me. The entire point of his blog came crashing down on me in that one moment of utter clarity. He wasn't doing it for him - he was doing it for us, his readers - for anyone who has ever, ever been totally fucked over yet still totally in love with a toxic person. The type of person who carelessly and thoughtlessly kicks aside good people who would and could love them so they can instead chase the memory and the dream of a bad someone else. Now who among us has not done that? His *project* and all the horrid events it details has, at some point, probably happened to each and every one of us. We are, at the end of the day, just regular folks trying to find love and happiness in this thing we call life in spite of all the bad that has ever happened to us. And so, after months of passively reading his blog I became a participant today. I looked at my own *project* and realized I am one of the lucky ones. The warm, wonderful, loving, caring, dependable person I kicked out of my life 10 years ago to instead pine away for and search for and long for the toxic drama that *T* brought to my life during my early twenties is back in my life today. Because you see, two and half years ago, I sat down and wrote a love letter to end all love letters to the person I pushed away in favor of *T* - the toxic piece of shit he was and still is today. I told my throw-away lover many things in the letter the gist of which was that for years I spent searching for what I thought was *T* in other lovers but I finally, finally realized it was him I was looking for in the eyes of each new lover, and not *T*. I told him that he became the True North by which all of my subsequent relationships had been judged. I also told him "I never wondered why you left; I actually wondered why you stayed so long." And that was the truth. He had the great misfortune to be my rebound relationship from *T* and I was absolutely horrible to him. While with him, I drank too much, was very self-destructive and basically made his life a living hell for 2+ years. And yet, at every turn he looked at me and said "How can I show you that I love you today?" And yet I stomped all over that. Kicked it into the gutter like yesterday's empty beer can. We broke up; we got back together. I had drunken rages and completely disregarded all that he had to offer me for the better part of 2 years. And then one day, he had had enough. He wrote me a letter and set it next to my things at his house and said it was over. At the time, I didn't even care. I threw my stuff in my car and immediately met up with a new guy *that same day* and never looked back. But I did look back, didnt' I? Because in each subsequent failed relationship, all of which I ended ( meaning I dumped and didn't get dumped), I was looking for him and his unconditional love in those men. I was looking for his eyes, his touch, his intelligence, his sense of humor, his sexuality, HIS ARMS around me at night, his ability to understand exactly how I was feeling without ever having to say a word. And so, ten years and 4 failed long term relationships later I wrote him *the letter* and to my utter surprise he welcomed me back into his life with loving and open arms. This is a love that has withstood the test of destructive acts, hate and anger, other people and relationships in our lives, and time and miles apart and years of distance. And yet, in June of 2003, there we were in Chatanooga, TN falling into each other's arms again. ONLY THIS TIME, I vowed to love him like no other and to be the woman he so richly deserved all those years ago. And you know what's funny about that memory I have of Chattanooga? I remember everything about it in complete detail. I remember exactly how I felt the minute I saw him in the lobby of the hotel, I remember the shirt he wore that day and how he later that night held me in his arms and said things every word of which I can remember to this day. I, too, remember how he smelled, what he tasted like and exactly what if felt like to have his hand resting in mine again. So, to have been such a Doubting Thomas for all of these months regarding the *blog project* I referenced above, I can only say, "I'm sorry." I too have moments in my life the exact essence and detail of which I can remember to this very day. I believe some moments in our lives just become indelibly marked in our psyches such that it's like carrying around a mini movie of that memory wherever we go for the rest of our lives.I say I am one of the lucky ones because I realize not many people get the kind of second chance in life with their one true love that I have been given. I realize this and I try to honor this every single day in how I love my beloved and how I absolutely treasure every moment spent with him as if it were our last. So, to the blog I have been reading for 4 months and not fully understanding the meaning of it, I say - "I get it. I truly get it now. And thank you. Godspeed, my friend. May you one day have the love in your life that is in mine and may you never ever look for your *T* in a good and loving person again. Thank you for sharing *your project* and for making us realize that in one way or another, we all have our own *projects* tucked deeply in the recesses of our hearts. And that we all are just at varying stages in our own personal *projects*". Some projects end happily, some sad, and some just end - like his did today. But I like to hope in the optimistic part of my heart that today is a beginning for him and not an end. For he too deserves the love of a good and decent woman. Let's just hope that the next time one knocks on his door, he has learned not to slam the door in her face while instead looking for the ghost of his toxic lover. Because if he chooses that same trodden path, then his *project* really will have just been a waste of time. But, if he chooses instead to move forward and love a new person with all of his heart without ever even thinking of his *T* again, he can be an inspiration to us all just as he was for me today.