end to end.

It hit me the other day right after I saw, for the first time, a 3D ultrasound. I was reading through my "Top Stories," as I do every morning, and there it was. A little alien-looking creature with its face pressed up against its mothers uterus. The father is an friend of mine, and for a second I felt happy for him. After that, though, I realized I don't even know the girl and here I am looking at her genitalia on the freaking internet. That was three weeks ago. 

Yesterday, I saw someone's obituary in the very same feed, which brings me to today. Are our real lives really just a timeline on the internet from beginning to end? And will I ever have the urge to post my unborn baby's picture on the internet before they even have a chance to protest? 

Then again, will I ever actually have a baby? Probably not, and maybe in some small way because of this. Because while we're busy experiencing the most important times of our lives, we're distracted by the nagging urge to post it on the internet before, during, and after we experience it. And in the case of an unborn child, the very most important thing we could do  is shamelessly posted on the internet, most likely for good. No eraseys. 


I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but I have to question the intent and the good sense of it. Sometimes it forces me to take a long hard look at my internet lifespan and whether or not there's enough content, and whether or not I'm a good enough person to be as happy as everyone looks. I wonder why I don't laugh more than I do, and I wonder when I'll start playing music again, and I wonder if I'll have time before I go to delete my profile completely so no one will turn it into a makeshift memorial for me. 


All of this makes me want to make my life and everything I make of it more tangible. I find myself wanting to mail birthday cards using the U.S. Postal Service (gasp), or wanting to write letters to friends and relatives at least once a week. I want to take a yoga class and not take pictures with my camera that doubles as a phone. I want to play my guitar more often, often when no one will hear it, but sometimes where they can, in which case they can feel free to take a picture and share it on the internet. As long as it's flattering. Because there's no real way to escape it. Even if I don't have a profile, someone else will, and that someone else may want to prove to the world we were really there together. Maybe.


All of this simply led me to one true reality that I decided to post on the internet. I want to live, not distractedly, but wholeheartedly, and the only friends I'd like to share pictures of my uterus with are the ones with whom I'm willing to share the better part of my life with, in person.

Halloween, or Things My Dad Hates, Part 1

I'm sick with a terrible cold today, but somehow, I'm up and able to do some rambling. If "somehow" means three ibuprofen, one glass of Airborne, a Mucinex, and a sinus rinse. Add a dash of stir crazy, and you get this.

I never liked Halloween very much. The main reason was, and probably still is, my father's reasoning that it was nothing but a shit show--one that encouraged kids to dress up like idiots and beg for candy. But no, my father wasn't mean. What he really meant was, I don't want my daughters going out in the dark to be either a. hit by a car, b. abducted by a strange man, or c. poisoned or injured by tainted candy. Or d. all of the above.

Now that I can very easily purchase as much candy as I damn well please, it's easy to look back and say that I don't blame him. At least not for that little bit of childhood misery. I mean, at the time trick-0r-treating was still done in the dark without parental accompaniment. True story.

Because any of those things could actually happen, he was abhorrently against Halloween and any of its traditions... except for that one time when my school held a costume contest. And that time, he really wanted me to win. 

I don't know why he did it, except maybe that I've got a sob story ten miles long about the mean kids at school. I think now perhaps somehow, somewhere in the middle of that story he wanted me to feel accepted--even though he spent most of his life teaching me that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of me if I'm doing the right thing. So he made holes in a white trash bag for my arms and head, and a white hat out of heavy card-stock paper, and drew and colored in red sharpie the Colgate logo. 

If the quality of my school years improved because of this, I don't remember any of it (and thanks for kicking my Garfield lunch box around the school yard, jackass).

Only the best lunchbox I ever owned.

In 2008, I decided finally to participate, and actually dress up for Halloween.  And again, with a few things I had around the house, including poor eyesight, cat-eye glasses and a hat, I went as Adrian. You know, from Rocky. I had watched it for the first time just that year, and not because it's my father's favorite movie, so you can see the irony. The funny thing I've found about dressing up is that I actually start to feel the part. 

Gardner Ale House, 2008

Knowing this, I decided last year to be Miss Holly Golightly. It wasn't far from where I was in my life at the time, and I had found my Paul Varjak, so it made sense. He went as Murray, from Flight of the Conchords.

Which brings me to this year. Jeremy and I are actually going to be and dress as a couple, and an unlikely one at that. I'm not going to give away exactly who just yet, but let's just say this time it involves pink lipstick, a flannel shirt, perfectly up-swept hair, and a mustache. In the meantime...

I'll follow.

I hate the cold. I hate winters. They always wind down such a long and slippery slope for me, emotionally speaking. 

I'm unemployed this year, which I didn't expect. In hindsight, I wish I could have found myself without work for at least part of the summer, but no, luck is not always with me. There must be a reason. I think it's that I'm supposed to revisit my writing career--possibly with a newspaper again. But I thought today, perhaps not. I thought maybe instead, I'm supposed to work on my semi-autobiographical mostly fictional story. Which I've already started. I just left it there, dying to be told when I hit a bump in the road that not only left my metaphorical tires flat, but my rims bent as well. It's just sitting there, waiting. It's been waiting a long time...

"I know how I hate to wait/Like even for a bus or something/An important phone call/So I can imagine how darned impatient/Everyone must be getting"

So I thought some more. I tried to find a workshop, or maybe a writer's group somewhere around here. You know, for inspiration. Maybe a little boost. Alas, neither seems to exist. So I think this might be it. I just have to do it.

"So I think it's time now/time to reveal myself"

So to make unemployment work for me, I can see now that I should really take advantage of the time and make it count for something. Something bigger than cleaning and cooking to avoid writing because of a stupid bump in the road, especially since said bump in the road is probably fodder for this and any other writing I may do.

Here's a little excerpt of something I wrote before all of this other static came into play:

I wouldn't even want to be stranded with him, if you want to know the truth. He's too moody, too meticulous, and too stubborn. Sometimes he's cold as hell. But we're not on a desert island. We're not even living in the same house or in the same town, and shit, I thought it was worth the trouble. I think he's worth the trouble. There, I said it.

I'd say why, but it's a million little reasons already, which seems impossible, I know.

If you think about it, we've only known each other for three months and nine days, but that's 13,824,000 seconds, so if we only spent 1/4 of that time together, that leaves about 3,456,000 seconds to come up with reasons it's all worthwhile. I'd stop here if I thought I could, but I started this equation, and now it seems like I have to follow it through. I guess you have to figure some of that was sleep time, so take away 1/3 - give or take - and you've still got 2,304,000 seconds to come up with reasons, so a million really isn't that many. On top of that, neither one of us sleeps through the night, so all kinds of possible reasons are probably accounted for somewhere during that half-sleep half-wake time, which I will admit I have trouble remembering. It's all relative, and we're talking seconds, here. Man alive.

I don't think it sounds stupid, because when someone tells you you're beautiful it only takes one second. When they tell you you're brilliant, depending on their diction, it's the same. I'm glad we met, same again. And that's just the words. There are all sorts of things that happen in seconds, in between the minutes and hours that I can't even describe without making us both uncomfortable. Maybe I will one day. For now I'm just going to recount that one really cold night, when he reached over the stick shift of his car and put my heated seat on number 3, then grabbed my icy left hand and stuffed it under his leg to warm it up. Two seconds, two reasons. It's pretty simple math for a now complicated situation.

Sometimes I think if everyone thought about things in terms of reasons and seconds, we'd all be a lot kinder to each other, but I'm not trying to change the world. I'm simply telling a story.

And so on (and on and on). I know I have something in me. Looks like me and my clicky little 50-words per minute fingers are the only ones that will be able to coax it out.

I can't believe I wasted 17 days of unemployment not thinking about this.