The Namesake

Gold Chains. I'm in a mood.
New bath product. Where to start?

Or, anything from my wish list.

Love Me, Love My Neurosis
Carrie Bradshaw's got NOTHING on me

Having gotten all of that out of my system yesterday, let me just leave it at that it was pretty much a lovely trip home and even the parts that were not so lovely were funny in retrospect.

And before I get all introspective...

Could American Idol have been any more boring? Carrie will win because she hit a glory note, but I'm only buying Bo's album. But nonetheless, what a lame hour of tv. Remember the days when the finale was awesome? Not so much. And what's up with the judges saying that the songs are lame? Carrie and Bo didn’t pick them! I'm sure some amazing talent like Tamarya Gray's Musical Rainbow Coalition wrote the songs.

Could The Contender have been any less boring? Wow. I loved Sergio Mora from the start. I'm a happy, happy girl except that that show got cancelled so soon.

Jack Bauer gets to start a new life. I don't care what anybody may say, this was the best season ever.

I've been pondering the distinction between resiliency and ... I'm not sure what the other way to say this is ... resistance to feeling, maybe? Actually, I haven't been pondering it so much as it came up in conversation with D the other day, and his Big Gay Opinion was that I'm starting to cross a scary line where the ability to recover from getting beaten down is becoming less about the ability to recover and more about the ability to simply lock up the fort and not let anybody inside. You know, the age-old cliche about guarding your feelings/deeper parts/vulnerable parts to avoid getting hurt. Oh God. I'm a cliche.

I'm not even sure that I buy that I'm a cliche, and actually when that conversation happened a week ago I told D that I thought that he was wrong and that I'm just as emotionally easy as I've ever been. I said that I thought that this supposed emotional lock down was less of a lock down than it was a reaction to having been in a situation where I didn't feel like I could let things surface very easily for a while and the fact that I was still working through the reality that I wasn't living like that any more. I may have pulled out some bitchy line like,"Thanks for clearing up my life for me. I had no idea. Really." In fact, that's exactly the bitchy line I pulled out. But I was forgiven, and the conversation was dropped, and D conceded that he was probably wrong even though he didn't really ever think he was wrong. He just wanted to avoid getting me, you know, excited.

And he was very gracious tonight when I called and said, "You know, some things happened in the last nine days that cause me to think you may be right. And that kills me."

For the record, it's not that it kills me that he may have been right and I may have been wrong. It kills me that I may be a cliche of the worst kind.

I asked around, a little bit, and 6 out of 7 friends thought that I was still "disarmingly open" and "the kind of person who generally ignores the implied vulnerability of allowing yourself to feel." First, forgive me for having friends who talk like that. It's embarrassing for me, too. But secondly, I don't know. Can you really trust those people? They've known me a long time. I'd go to the mat for them. I probably am excessively open with them because I feel safe doing it. So that data, the sample of some friends, probably shouldn't factor in too much, I guess.

Given ... wait, let me count ... five opportunities in the last nine days to have chosen to be emotionally vulnerable with people who probably had things of value to offer me if I did, I chose to do it ... no, wait for it, it's impressive ... ZERO times. In fact, when I break it down, I consciously chose not to open up about deeply important things to any of these people every single time. At least twice I actually, discernibly, had the thought go through my head, "I bet it would feel good for both of us right now if I just said what I was feeling, but God, I just don't think I should show that kind of weakness."

Then, THEN, today, I had sent some poetry to S for a project he's working on, and he emails me this extensive thing about his theory on the prevalence of flower imagery in my stuff and his theory on it. He's all like (But you have to forgive me for the uber academia of this comment. It's so insane and I think he'd admit that. S is in no way a cool academic like G-Man of Playsure), but he's all like, "I think there’s so much flower imagery in your poetry and your writing because you wish people would see the fragile side of you more than the see the unbending side of you. You wish they'd see that because it would be liberating for you. And it shows up when you write all of the time because you've never learned how to show it to them in real life. And I think that tattoo on your leg is both a manifestation of that and a rebellion against it."  So try to get over how basically silly that sounds and your most likely gag reflex to the fact that this is an actual conversation two people are having and put yourself in my shoes. I'm already at this point wondering if I'm becoming a cliche of the worst kind, and then I read that. I mean, PLEASE.

Do you know that I started this journal entry not in any way having an actual breakdown about this concept, but by this point I've worked myself into a full on frenzy that I've turned some horrid corner and become this person in a steel box? Force field is up. Don't try to penetrate. I'm fine. Me and the cats will be FINE.

I'm going to stop writing while I'm ahead.  This started out normal and ended up with my sounding crazy. I'm not sure how that happened.