My Heel Broke in a Traffic Jam en Route to the DMV -- so I Killed Myself.

Sorry, children, about the long pause. I tried a couple times, but it was difficult to think of utterly content-free things to write. (I do realize I come close, very close, at times, but it is a talent that cannot be fully harnessed; it comes when it wills.) And that wouldn't have been the solution, anyway: people who wish to can read volumes from the selection of a semicolon over a period. It doesn't mean they are correct in doing so; nor, however, does this latter truth dissuade them from undertaking the exercise for their own reasons. Despite my silence in this venue, however, I remain very much alive, not to mention sentient and ambulatory. And having rather a good time of it over the holidays, circumscribed culinary choices notwithstanding.

'Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.' Much Ado, II, 1

That has nothing to do with it, though, actually. This does:

A former boyfriend succeeded in making me partially insane and fully uncomfortable by noting, taking to heart, and doing some long-range, possibly trigonometric, extrapolating from, aspects of this blog that in an ideal world would escape every reader's attention. I then wrote the Reader's Guide in hopes of making my intentions for this encyclopedic rant clear as an unmuddied lake.

But allow me to backtrack.

Since the demise of this relationship, I have had little (very little) contact with this person. He writes the occasional ingratiating, or condescending, or cloyingly/disturbingly reminiscent email, and I respond politely yet tersely. I answer his questions (that's the polite bit), but I answer them in as brief a manner as possible (so as not to engage him further). I strive to be ladylike, in other words, whilst neither providing details, meeting his nostalgia with some of my (depleted, frankly) own in return, nor asking him any questions. The letters end with 'Hope you are well,' which I should think would be read as something quite distinct from 'Tell me all about your work,' or 'Who are you dating?' or 'What's new with you?'

But the State of Things being what it is.

Politeness, it seems, can, in its rarity, be mistaken for Friendliness or, perhaps, as it seems in this case, a Desperate Plea for Help. A cri du coeur the nature of which I am still at a loss to discern. Had I wished for reengagement with this party I assuredly would have supplemented his proffered reminiscences with a few breathless sighs of 'Ah, yes, those were indeed the salad days' of my own and some rose-hued specifics to make my argument. But I would not likely have answered his (misty, watercolored) Memories with silence.

But One Cannot Wear Kid Gloves in the Ring.

And although my amateur pugilist days are well behind me, a friend convinced me that however little I was saying I was clearly saying it wrong, even if 'saying it wrong' meant I was merely saying it politely. And that this drain on my psyche was draining my blog, and that that was wrong.

And while I agree, I thought I had sounded rather more austere than previously in my last return email. On the other hand, I still couldn't think of things to write, other than merely reprinting the Gettysburg Address or the Creation Story a few times -- things of my own, that is, into which nothing at all could be read that wasn't solely of a cheery and uplifting nature. Nothing, in other words, to indicate that we live in a world in which we sometimes stub our toes, eat mediocre food, get stuck in traffic, wake up too late, wake up too early -- or kill our cousins, or kill our brothers, now that I come to reconsider my arbitrary choices above.

Moreover, I couldn't even figure out when I was supposed to 'publish' these cheery entries, as a recent missive from this individual indicated that he was paying close heed to the (again, arbitrary, but no matter) timestamp and reckoning from it the course of my days. (And not in the most flattering of lights, I assure you, but more of the sort of thing about which scores of country singers have had much to say through the decades. Except for the latenight online Scrabble dig, which, to my knowledge, has yet to feature in the lyrics even of Dwight Yoakum, literate, postmodern, and good with words though he may be.)

'Certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions.' As You Like It, IV, 1

So I thought about it a bit but remained stuck. I would like this blog to be a way to keep in touch with people, to entertain them a bit, and to be a place where I can, if I wish, vent my spleen. I like puppydogs and minigoats. Tremendously, in fact, and puffy clouds, and saltwater taffy, and veiled chameleons, and broderie anglaise, and maribou slippers, and birdsong in the summer in a field under the sun amongst frolicking animals and wildflowers by a waterfall, too. I like painting my nails, and going to the ballet, and eating Drumsticks, and making perfumes. But I also get stuck in traffic, I also get lost in parking garages, I abhor going to the DMV, I put off the Post Office and UPS for as many months as I can, and I sometimes sit around reading and writing by myself and letting my nail polish dry. And why any of it, or the writing of it, or the patent exaggeration of my angst surrounding it should cause someone to pity me eludes me.

So I thought about it a bit more, but just a bit, because short on the heels of the above conversation came the New Year's Wishes missive. And I couldn't take it. Relative to the others it was, frankly, innocuous, save for a rhetorical device I can't be bothered to go into here. But it was enough, if due only to the cumulative effect of the whole series and of my frustrated, impuissant, polite and indirect efforts to discourage further contact.

Thus was I impolite in my response. And thus one hopes was he disabused of the misguided impression that we are, owing to the persistence of the aforementioned watercolored memories, Friends. It's a shame, though, that it had to come to that; except maybe for Kant, reading is only as hard as you make it.

A Reader's Guide to the Personal Weblog

Since people appear to be reading this, as well as writing to me about what they read, the following are intended to be helpful tips to prevent those people from having difficulty with making either heads or tails - or heads along with tails, if that is their preference - of the contents.

I'd Have to Use Even More Liner. (And driving would be yet more difficult.)

Firstly, take it all with a hearty helping of coarse-grain Himalayan Pink. I have never once, for example, taken an oyster knife, grapefruit spoon, or hydraulic corkscrew to my (gorgeous, seagreen) eyeballs over the sight of Dockers at dinner, despite what might seem to be (glaring and repeated) indications to the contrary.

I'm Not Reuters.

Secondly, the foregoing derives from the fact that this blog is neither a news wire nor a diary. It is not true, in other words, nor does it purport to be. There is truth in it, surely, but that truth, where one can find it, is snuggled up tight with with all kinds of tricks, like exaggeration, sleazy argumentation, grasping at straws to make a point, and lazy recourse to such creatures as litotes, anaphora, paranomasia, syllepsis, paraleipsis, and their wicked, wicked chums, to lend, at times, the sense that I truly do accord the selection of the evening's shoes the same weight as I do truly weighty things. --Or to make things sound more pleasant, or less pleasant, or funnier, than they really are.

I'm Lying.

Thirdly, the same foregoing can be interpreted to mean that some of the details are factually inaccurate. I might say 'Dockers,' for instance, when in fact I was at no point anything like close enough to read the tag inside the pants of the individual in question. In that case, I am extrapolating from: 'chinos of some sort' plus probability, as I learned a few years ago in Harper's Index that about 80 percent of American men own Dockers. Thus, they are indeed likely to be Dockers -- but, again, they might not be. And if it is the case that there was an initial 'd' in the vicinity looking lost and hapless and unbecomingly unadorned, I might say 'Dockers,' anyway, even if the benighted boob under scrutiny was -- as unmistakably as he was inexcusably -- wearing corduroy. The ratio might be close to the following: 15 percent true, 80 percent fic-trutional, and 5 percent abandonedly, recklessly, from-the-gut brutally honest.

Why, Just the Other Day I Ate a Whole Half Rosemary-Roasted Brandywine.

Fourthly, if not all admissions are entirely accurate, so, too, must one be wary of reading too much into omissions. We might take bathing and eating as two obvious examples: I do both so frequently that one could almost consider them 'daily activities,' and yet there is scant mention of either. I have neither the time nor the inclination to make this a minute-by-minute accounting of the day's every activity. I would like to keep work, for example, out of it almost entirely, confining it, if I can manage, to the occasional snarky and quite general aside. Dating, for its part, is poked at only when it can be used to serve as a convenient portal into disquisitions on some of my more general Concerns with Our Decaying Society, or 'make a point' in some way I misguidedly think might be amusing, or open the way for a large-scale rant on a marginally related topic for which I lacked a segue. The blog also features a great many lacunae -- including around dating -- the (non-?) existence of which gaps being attributable in part to a sense of decency and concern for others. I am more than happy, in other words, to prate on at obscene, contrived length about the recurring failures of my structurally-unsound would-be 'hairstyles' and my inability to give a one-word answer to such questions as 'Do you like tomatoes?' while I would hope that I am possessed of sufficient restraint not to catalogue the conversational and sartorial failings of anyone misguided enough to go on a date, or enter into a relationship, with me. This latter is of course true only of the present: my gay exhusband is still gay, and my other exhusband is still welcome to help me find pants whenever he's in town, and anyone base enough to have offended the sensibilities of the Only Perfect Girlfriend in the Free World (TM) may likewise find mention (if little quarter) herein.

I Left My Heart in Ouagadougou.

Which, having covered factuality, intent, scope, omissions, and timbre, leads us to Sixthly, which is the timestamp. And sometimes the date, too, if I, let's say, neglected finishing my birthday greetings to M. Saussure until the day after, in which case I can retroactively date it appropriately and thus save face with the dead. Neither, then, is an entirely accurate gauge of my doings. Six o'clock is six o'clock in Vanuatu, or Yerevan, or the Marianas Trench. Whichever one I had it set to then. Or a different one, as that list above was arbitrary. For the sake of clarity: I am not certain that I have ever set it to any one of those three. Just as geographically savvy alcoholics can always reassure themselves with the fact that the sun's always past the yardarm somewhere and start the day thus with a G & T rather than regret and misgiving, so, too, is it the case that it is frequently oh-six-hundred-hours somewhere -- just not always precisely where I am. Sometimes, frankly, the thing's all written, and I just want to look over it once before work, or upon returning home, which would mean I had 'really' written it before, even though I am pushing send now.

You Can Take the Barolo Out of the Piedmont

But you can't take the limestone out of the nebbiolo. Nor can you, even as a human with a great, hulking, ponderous mass of a cerebrum, it seems, rid yourself entirely of what you once were in order to make way for what you would become. All our stories, all our remembrances, our bad mommies and doting daddies and every dance you were never asked to and each imperfect dismount and second place in debate because you only slightly screwed up the Jefferson line are there, somewhere, even when you imagine you are thinking of nothing at all except the mesmerizing horror that is the infield at the Kentucky Derby. They lie around lurking like recessive genes, just waiting for their one brief instant of relevance, to turn some unsuspecting fetus' right eye blue and leave the left one brown, or cause you to say No instinctively when reflection and analysis might have allowed for more than a few shades of gray.

So it is that I predictably turn to poetry to try to get at the nuances of what I might be feeling, for example, or that someone else consistently knocks himself out in squash when he fears he would otherwise be knocked out by something less manly. Where we start to bump up against the things we'll later be banging our heads on if we're not careful is where I try to intuit what you mean by 'squash' and you wonder what it is that Farrokhzad has that you don't.

The answer in either case is usually Nothing and Stop Being a Fatuous Boob, but we can't know that if we stay mired in our own heads. Someone observing me or listening to me is always going to filter what I do or say through his own experience. What might to me feel like the knife-edge of recklessness might to him seem dull and commonplace. Other things might be boring to me while appearing to him frighteningly exotic. And I seem to you perhaps apathetic and restive when I'm really just shy, as I meanwhile tire of what I see as your brittle callousness when you're actually struggling madly to know what to do...

People have gotten tripped up with me when they, in thinking I have so many words at my disposal, believe each one always must be the fruit of exacting, deliberate selection. This puts an undue amount of exegetical weight on 'nuts!' when I drop my keys in a puddle. It also makes it hard to talk crap, which is frequently necessary and often welcome. There is also the problem of the 'literal reading,' which can be done with some books but no persons, since you cannot know what precisely one individual construes as the difference between 'languid' and 'languourous' in the privacy of his own head.

You need, in other words, Context, which only comes over time. I know when an exhusband is being snarky about something in a friendly way, and I also know when he means he really does hate something in the depths of his heart. I know which friends are not disingenuous in embracing ostensibly contradictory opinions and which ones have an unambiguousness of speech that William Penn would covet. Not knowing them, one might think their apparent frankness were there to mask actual doubt -- but it's not; they know what they think, and they say it.

Which brings us to Dating, and why one sometimes just has to cry in bed. I am strongly of the opinion that neither party can give an adequate representation of what he or she is actually likely to bring to the hypothetical relation they are in theory potentially considering as a possibility. Everything relevant comes later. Well, almost: as I have lengthily and tediously admitted earlier, I do understand some people's need for leggy honeyblondes, divinity-school dropouts, effete flutists and partners who iron their socks.

But bracketing all that, or else assuming those factual and obvious criteria are met, the stuff that would constitute the soaring and glorious bits of the relationship once it was not hypothetical cannot be glimpsed over coffee, or even between heady sips of an unfolding Piemontese red. One can't know the depths of a lover's solicitude until it has been evoked. You simply cannot have a discussion about Potential Solicitude - in the main because there is no such thing. A former lover finally got me to the point of intimacy with a cogent and convincing argument that this was something we should no doubt know about, something that would prove quite relevant, and we weren't going to know anything about it, whether it worked for us or not, until we actually undertook it. It wasn't especially romantic, I admit, but there is little about romance that is -- until you get to that point where it all is, where you are routinely overtaken by love because your husband is brushing his teeth, or switching to fourth gear. And of course, if you get to that point, you come to the stunning realization that you no can longer care that he doesn't iron his socks.

Schlieβlich, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.

Nobody, I imagine, intends to spend the evening in bed crying.

Well, that's not true, not even for me: I remember that in the past on occasion I tried to schedule nervous breakdowns. I'd force down some wine (beer doesn't help for this, and I'm 'scared of' liquour), stare at a wall or read A Lover's Discourse or The Captain's Verses or something equally drippingly love-riddled while listening to Dwight Yoakum or Leonard Cohen assuring me that it could be far, far worse, and hoping that the expulsion of excess saline from my system would dismantle and implode the oppressive palimpsest of whatever melancholia and frustration had been of late clogging my chi and messing with my chakras.

I'd stare, and think terriblyhorribly plaintive thoughts in so deep a way as to verge on the Continental, but it very seldom worked. These days you can orchestrate Armageddon but not a good old-fashioned emotional meltdown. Lucky, then, that they sometimes come unbidden, or I'd have no chi left and all of my chakras would be stuffed down somewhere in my perfectly-manicured feet.

If you actually know me, then you know I have struggled with this for some time. Dating, that is, not missing appendages or wondering what to do for hosiery. I don't miss any appendages, for what it's worth, just some extra organs and clearly extraneous bones in my face. Plus, I have the addition of bone filler in there, so I'm actually ahead of the game!

No, it's Dating. Nothing ever killed me so much. No deadline long or short, no employer going bankrupt and issuing bad checks, no marauder on the street, no toilets exploding as soon as the gay husband pulls away to go to a music conference. No bad tailoring, no smashed face, no ventilator or morphine or housemice stealing a great-grandmother's platinum square-set diamond ring I was only so recently considered 'mature' enough to be given. All of that I can take, and more, too, and still feel well enough to enjoy what remains of the remains.

It doesn't work for me. I don't know how else to say it. I think there is perhaps one person who knows precisely what I have at stake, but he is far away and has enough unpleasantness of his own going on but if he were here he would let me cry on his shoulder and it wouldn't help me in the slightest but at least I wouldn't be reading Neruda.

So I quit the Match.com. They made one check a box for reason leaving (no one wrote me; I found someone; I'm too busy; not the right time...) and write a 'suggestion' as to how they could better assist people finding people. I couldn't see very well at the time, so brevity was in order, but I did try to think for a moment, for my own purposes not theirs, get some clearer if not clear idea of what the deal was, and what I managed was something hideous and dripping with bathos on the order of 'if you are an exception it is perhaps better to be alone.' That was my unconscious sense of things previously, and it appears I have circled full round to embracing it as an explicit Mission Statement or something akin. In between I thought --

well, it doesn't matter what I thought. I thought I'd take a chance, that's all.

But why should it be so hard? Why do I think I'm so bloody different that I have anything to whine about at all? In a way I don't: I think we're all walking stereotypes of one sort or another. If I am in any way misanthropic, I am universally so, and, after all, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch. As anthropoid as you. So I'm lumped in with the lumpens, and with you, so have no fear.

However, leaving aside the fact that we all have our share of frailties, fears, and outright stupidities, we are nonetheless individuals, whether you imagine us to be barred subjects, children of God, overembellished limbic systems, or neurotic egos tucked inside moribund skin bags. This being the case, I have my singular perspective on life, my unique experiences, my own tendencies, my particular desires, and my peculiar, annoying idiolect, to boot. All of this makes me ill-suited to most; it may well make me unsuited to all. The latter, at any rate, is my current stance, despite the enormous social pressure on us all to sort ourselves in twos at any cost.

However, my faraway friend insists that part of what makes me different also makes me want to be in love, be in a large, expansive loving relationship with one person. And I think he is right sometimes, but I don't want to hear that sort of thing. To hear that I was made to sing, but have to figure out some way to do it without a throat.

In the Christian tradition, Lucifer was the king of the angels, a big guy on the heavenly roll call, and when God told him man was now above him, it was his ego, his excess of pride, that made him wince and protest and ultimately get demoted and exiled, the job transfer to Hell. In the Sufic tradition, it was his Love. Iblis was as true, as natural, a Lover as could be imagined. Roses sprang up where he knelt in praise. He was a creature of fire, yes, a djinn, and man was made of dirt, which pales by comparison. But it wasn't a sense of superiority that caused him to disobey God. Rather, how could he prostate himself before anyone, anything, other than the object of his worship?

God sent him an impossible task, according to this reading. An immoral order. Mercurial and vain and wishing to have His new creation - and His Will - acknowledged and obeyed, He issued an edict: the Angels will bow down. But Iblis loved; he loved God beyond anything; he spent his days in adoration and veneration. So, he obeyed the First Commandment, and his heart, and his love - for he could bow down before no one but his only Love, God - while flouting the letter of the new, para-doxical dictum that God had now promulgated. For this mind-numbingly difficult choice, his sentence was revocation of the one thing his heart desired: to live in the sight of God and continue to be the Lover he was meant to. He was forever thus denied the one thing that defined him, enriched him, gave him meaning and life. In this telling, God sends him to Hell, where Shaitan nonetheless continues to sing his praises and to whisper Hallelujah, with every damned breath.

Well, I'm not a djinn, interior design preferences notwithstanding. But I don't like things that look like other things while not possessing the core, the essence, that is constitutive of the real thing they are so cruelly resembling. And so I want little truck with facsimiles of Love, approximations of ardor, or close cousins of intimacy. To me, casual sex sounds like the sort of thing someone might resort to because the bowling alley is done fulled-up.

If you have any sense in you, you walk between two worlds, all the time everyday. There is how you endeavor to be, which is the fruit of years of study and prayer and introspection and pain and glory and hard-won knowledge. And then there is the reality of living in a postmodern, postindustrial, capitalist culture, in which one still must be functional, and be able successfully to fill the gas tank or snake the toilet or insert a hyperlink or navigate the wilds of a wine list when necessary. In which constant self-less-ness does not work. A culture, as well, predicated not merely on the ceaseless satisfaction of desire, but on its constant cultivation. Obviously those two appear at odds.

Yet in Love these two, and so many other ostensible antinomies, can be reconciled. In true Love giving is a form of receiving. In true Love the Lover seeks less his own selfish satisfaction and rejoices in pleasing his partner. He takes joy, as well, in actions that further their Love, their bond. He finds that their desires mingle, and her pleasures become his own. In pleasing her he pleases himself. No one commands Iblis to sing as he does, in other words; he simply cannot help it.

They also create a world and a refuge. They see parts of each other no one else does. The sad, the holy, the weak, the child. The pained, the vexed, the parent, the patient, and all the flecks of the eternal spirit dimmed to others' view by the pressures of everyday life. And it becomes, rather than frightening, a relief, a release -- because of the different, extraordinary sort of trust that exists between and over and around them.

And to some extent all of this sounds absurd and fantasaical. And I know I am fourteen in some quite obvious and substantive ways. But I retain the right to my position that Love can be this sort of thing by pointing out the frequency with which people take the Song of Solomon and anything by Rumi to be secular love songs. Ergo, I am not alone in this notion that Love can be something quite distinct from Like.

Woes which Hope thinks infinite

Dating is hell. Strike that: dating is an unappealing and tedious proposition from which few emerge fully intact, and Internet dating is hell.

I'm well past being concerned about whether it is some weakness in me which I should be compelled to abhor and exorcise that makes me imagine I might like to be in love. I have come to accept that I am a human, and thus a primate and a mammal, and that makes it perfectly excusable that I should at times want to be near others of my species, or even to form especial bonds with some. I've stepped down off the ego-stretching machine I had initially bought for a weak-willed and insecure boyfriend and admitted that in a previously unimaginable number of respects I'm just like everybody else.

So I shouldn't feel bad about wanting to couple, partner, bond, reproduce, marry, or whatever. Just because something is prosaic doesn't mean you shouldn't ever do it: I can eat lasagne from time to time and still remain exceptional -- can't I? Just because I own pointy boots doesn't mean I read women's magazines -- right? A few average habitudes does not an average person make. Well, necessarily, at any rate, I tell myself: there is cause there for caution.

And beyond that, one has to be reasonable, as well. If I can manage to accept that my desire for an exceptional, fulfilling, challenging, sublime and transcendent connection to/relationship with someone else does not inherently condemn me to a life of mediocrity in every possible arena, then I have to be reasonable and accept as well that there are steps I should take to find this. I am as likely to be stricken by a romantic coup de foudre while redecorating my apartment again or making a nice paella for Kirkland arrivistes as I am to be pulled over for driving while confident.

Which leaves me few options other than dating. I thoroughly despise being 'hit on' while out. If I want to have a glass of wine by myself and bring along a portable Proust, it is not a plaintive and desperate invitation to discussions of literary theory or why Americans cannot enjoy Loire reds. Given my predilection for answering such come-ons with monosyllables when possible (as with 'Good book?' as a shudderingly convenient example) and with the unbecomingly catty 'I'm not here to make new friends' when not, I cannot depend on Chance to render unto me the Übermensch I so richly deserve.

This leaves friends of friends, friends of relatives, friends of clients, friends of students, and friends of fellow volunteers. Scratch all of them, because whether anything does or does not work, it's far too tangly and I like my things silky. I do rely on referrals, connections, goodwill and guanxi in other areas, and tremendously value the imprimatur of a trusted friend on almost anything. But not as regards his good friend Joe.

Wrack and Pillion

Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?

I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.

There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.

I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.

And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...

But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.

Silence, Exile, and Cunning

I have aborted many posts and left several others unfinished. This situation is not unlike having a (semiliterate) monkey sitting on my shoulder and intermittently offering up his idiosyncratic editorial suggestions by means of shrieks, cackles, head-batting, and hair-pulling. It is of course absurd, as it is all in my head. Or at least the concern about the monkey is in my head; he is really there. It is simply a matter, therefore, of figuring out how not to notice the shrieks and jabs, and of getting on with a proper rant if that is what I wish to do - whether I fear an articulation of my frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes will be taken not as frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes but rather Existential Angst, or not.

Here, then, ladies and gentlemen (and those of you who fall wildly outside the bounds of either category), in an attempt to rid myself its spell, is an explanation of the basis for my recent silence:

You all no doubt remember the exboyfriend: he of the pitying emails; the (misinformedly, but no matter) disparaging or condescending remarks; the absurd nostalgic reminiscences; the inapt, sesquipedalian, purported compliments gleaned through a reckless and foolhardy combination of thesaurus, ignorance, and overconfidence. If you don't, I do, so fret not.

As stated in an earlier post, he brought it to my attention that not only was he in his reading imbuing my posts with a grave, tragic, and positively Dickensian tone or subtext or metatext that they in no way had while still in my cute little brain or on my even cuter little screen, but also scrutinizing the timestamps of the posts for Clues as to my (grave, tragic) state of mind! Now, I admit to getting a cheap kick out of every flight under the radar I can manage, and the cheaper the flight, the headier the kick, so I had already earned some Skybus miles by changing the timestamp to that of various locales when the fancy struck.

But, dear friends, allow me to say that I really hadn't thought anyone would ever look at that. Really. Sure, there was some amount of 'ambiguation' in there, but that was more than balanced by the sheer girlish fun of being able to click on 'Vanuatu.' Not to mention 'Moosejaw.' When is it not fun to click on Moosejaw? And when, in addition, was the last time you, or anyone in your circle, anyone you can think of, noticed the time a posting was posted on any blog? I have read thousands upon thousands of blog entries on topics from politics to perfume to push-up bras to peacock husbandry, and never once did I notice at what time of day the writer lambasted Bush or Clinton or the dumbed-down Shalimar.

So, we have that problem: the Internet isn't private, so I don't care if the exboyfriend or my mother or former husband reads it. What troubles me is that there is an ex-something giving it a close, and erroneous, reading. Now, I don't write this in any way like a diary. I may be short on editing, which is a similarity between the two, but if I had a diary, I would never write about either Brigitte Bardot or John Calvin in it. Really. You can trust me on that, as well. That being the case, I don't feel ill that someone out of the past is getting an uninvited and unwelcome view into the depths of my psyche -- because the depths of my psyche are never on here, if I even have any depths in that psyche at all.

It is, rather, that everyone else can read it and 'get' it somehow: laugh along with me, or snort knowingly and superciliously, disagree, and then write me a vitriol-laden missive declaring the merits of lobster-buggering, muscle shirts, and Chinese knockoffs of 'Tuscan' furniture -- all the while knowing quite well that I was drying my fingernail polish, not slitting my wrists, while writing my half of the preposterous argument. The only person who doesn't is, regrettably, someone whom I regret dating. I was speaking with a friend at length last night about this, because it is making me angry that I am able to be angered by it, and from that conversation I think that last sentence is the crux of it. Perhaps.

Why? Because I got over it. I was sad, cried a bit, felt a loss, missed the endearing text messages for a while -- and then didn't. That, gentle reader, should be the end of the story. It was the end of the story, for heaven's sake. Normally, with whatever sort of loss, you feel it, you embrace it, you experience it for as long as it takes, and then you do something else: the Reckoning. Logic steps in and you evaluate everything. You get dispassionate, objective, and forward-looking.

Let's say you just got fired from a great job. The pay was super, you loved the people you worked with, and it was a not-terrible commute. Obviously, that's quite a loss. But after the late-night crying jags, or the whiskey- or pound-cake binges, or whatever serves the purpose in your case, have done their job, you realize you always hated the lighting, that you were never truly challenged, that the color scheme kept you on edge all day, that you are well-rid of Paul and his incessant nose-clearing, and that the benefits package was dismal at best.

And I think once a sane person gets to that stage, not only can he no longer find the former object of affection as charming as before, but he can, moreover, muster only a modicum of interest in the comings and goings and overall emotional state of the ex. A consequence of this reality in my case was that I had no feelings whatsoever about the exboyfriend reading the blog, except the same vague hope as with anyone else that he might find bits of it amusing.

Then came the emails after the gloriously apathetic hiatus. And then came my terse responses. And then came proof of their lack of efficacy.

All of that was enough to make me regret yet more having been involved with this person. That regret was pushed to at least the third power by the tooth-grittingly noxious email iteration of purportedly flattering attributes gleaned from abusing a thesaurus. Then, my dears, after the late-night Scrabble dig (again, erroneous, but, as is the case with so much, the things we don't know about are often freakishly coextensive with the things we don't know about), came one more accursed Benediction. And that, although I did write a direct, clear, terse, and explicit email in response, shut me up and shut me down, as far as the blog was concerned.

But why? Because, look (alright, fine, I will get personal), we broke up because he is in some substantive ways disturbingly immature. Somewhere past the point at which I stopped thinking of him and being capable of wishing him either ill or well, he gave birth to a new self that felt the need to wish Peace upon me at every turn. I am well aware that peace is a good thing, and I have friends who close utterly everything with 'peace,' but they are typing it while wearing Birkenstocks and/or a black tab-collar shirt. In other words, they wish everybody peace, and they simply cannot help themselves. There are many more problems with his use of the word in this context than I can go into in an already-too-long blog entry, but another one involves an equally unnerving religious association, and that is that when I read it, I cannot help thinking, not of a normal guy offering normal well-wishes, but of a whole congregation of Methodists or Presbyterians shaking hands at the end of service while in unison reciting 'Peace be with you,' 'And also with you.' It is appropriate then, most particularly so if heartfelt, but the idea of shaking hands with a boyfriend, lover, or husband, before going to sleep, or upon meeting for a date, or as we leave for work, and uttering that -- well, it makes me grimace every time. And I cannot wrest this image from my mind.


Gratuituous Pretty Thing, because this is tooooo long:

(MMMMM, sparkly...)

(Yet filled with REAL HUMAN HAIR!)

Nor can I forget the condescending tone in which he first began to wish me Peace. The later versions may have been less wordy and less patently offensive, but they are still no less incongruous nor less unnecessary, unwarranted, or unwanted. For there are two problems: one is the very easy 'We Were Done and I Was Done with the Getting-Done Part so I Am Done with Difficult Feelings about You and thus Well-Stocked on Peace, Thanks All the Same' and the other is that, for all my overblown rhetoric and ability to conjure verbal storms over a chipped nail or newly-wobbly heel, I simply have had a sufficient number of sufficiently harrowing experiences to have vast, vast reserves of equanimity upon which to draw: I do not need anyone, even if he is not an exboyfriend, munificently to bestow it upon me in order to dwell in it, because I have seen things that are serious, and therefore I can tell when things are not.

However, it does get a bit more prickly once we consider the fact that he is an exboyfriend. And he is an exboyfriend whom I am no longer with for various reasons, none of which reflect well on him. And, as stated earlier, I was many months ago past the point where rekindling glowy feelings was possible: I remain in the 'objective' phase that, once having been attained, sticks with one forever. Things, therefore, that might have seemed nice at the time cannot help but be tinged with the overall regret about the whole thing. For lack of a better word, the whole thing seems decidedly icky (apologies to everyone), and knowing what I know of him now I cannot but see that him doing the things that the 'old' him I cared for was doing at the time.

And that him, and my difficult feelings about that him, was the reason I said No and left. And for that him unctuously to wish me 'peace' as though he were my priest, or as though such a damaged psyche had any to spare to be tossing around to others, is offensive in the extreme. Additionally, as you already know, I have a position or two as regards decorum, and such an act is indecorous as could be. If you willfully and deliberately hurt someone, apologies can sometimes be great, can make a difference under the right circumstances. Some things, such as murder, are patently too horrific for an apology to serve any purpose, but for many other things they can be welcome and utile. But to disrupt someone's peace by being a cad, and then, months after she has regained her usual tranquil state to wish her 'peace' once again repeatedly and condescendingly, is rude, base, puerile, and noxious.

So, I do hope I did this with enough lack of detail not to be horrible myself, but at the same time with enough vigour to have it serve as the necessary-and-sufficient catharsis that will allow me to begin once again prating on about inane and insubstantial things with a level of ardour, passion, and confidence equalling that of Margaret Thatcher's hairdressers for the last forty years.

'If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.'

And if Mr. Amis is right, then the following, though it violates several of my personal rules of conduct, has a point and a justification for having been written. Also, God willing, enough of this sort of thing and the monkey will find a new home. I just pray he does not take the neighbor's cat with him -- although he can have the 'pet chaise' as a sop if that will help speed the move.

Right, then: the Reckoning. As I said, once one gets past that, does the necessary math, weighs all variables accurately, and accepts due responsibility for whatever share of idiocy and misjudgment is his own, then the final stage of dealing with the loss is complete, dispassion has been achieved, and forgetting has commenced. And the harsher, or more honest and complete, the accounting, the quicker and more effortless is the business of getting on with things. Additionally, as I intimated earlier, having previously experienced and addressed genuine grief, loss, and tumult in one's life gives one invaluable perspective as to the actual magnitude of loss on future occasions.

Love, I will forever maintain, is transformative. Its positive effects racinate into all other areas of our lives. When we are in love, we see the world differently, and we walk differently in it. With regard solely to the object of this Love, however, one of its effects is a loss of objectivity, a willingness always to focus on the good, an abundance of forgiveness and an overflowing empathy. And I believe all that is necessary, salutary, and good; without it one couldn't arrive at, or maintain, genuine Love. Without it there would be no substantive difference between romantic committed relationships and pleasant casual friendships.

But when there is a fissure in the emotion, when something big enough has transpired to rend that beautiful gauzy veil, then the Lover can most definitely address the situation, and the other person, with the same logic and dispassion as he can any other individual or set of circumstances. This, too, I think, is necessary and constructive: if one's spouse has gambled away all the retirement funds, being able to acknowledge that and to take steps to address that and the relationship as it now is cannot but be preferable to blithely ignoring what is clearly a grave reality.

It is a bit nasty and embarrassing, though, even if it only transpires within the privacy of one's head. One's judgment, or even sanity, can be called into question as one reflects upon the various things glossed over in deference to the continuance of the Love-state.

And this is the part where I violate my ethics in hopes that doing so will banish the monkey.

When I got to that point, after a bit of crying and missing having someone to do special things for, I then had to endure feeling like an idiot on a number of counts. That, my dears, hurts more than anything. I do strongly believe we should all be idiots in love, or 'childlike' if that makes you feel better about things, but at the point where it seems as though the idiocy was 'for nothing,' one is necessarily inclined a bit more toward self-flagellation than is normally the case. In some sense -- if there was Love, at any rate, or at least one believed there to be -- one has to find the relationship to have been senseless and inherently flawed in order to be able enthusiastically or even calmly to accept its demise. The practical problem with this is that by devaluing or fully invalidating the relationship, one does the same to one's investment of time, ardour, kindness, openness, and boundless empathy.

And by God does that sting. The specifics of the thing stick in the mouth like ammonia from Dutch licorice (Hello, Andy!). One has to address the horror of multiple versions of 'I was in love with someone who __________!' The things that leave the most enduring bad tastes vary from person to person, clearly, but that is, for some of us, at least, the worst stage of the grieving.

In other words, I might be able get on just fine knowing that I accidentally dated a bank robber or married a serial philanderer. You might well be able to integrate seamlessly having been briefly engaged to an expert on artificial bovine insemination into your self-concept, or never regret for a moment the dalliance with the writer of how-to Morris Dancing books. But you may well experience a lasting difficulty with rectifying your posture after coming to terms with the psychic scars of having plighted your troth to a Scientologist, Nikken distributor, or collector of porcelain cat figurines.

This is where it really gets tawdry. And, again, I apologize, but it's all to a good cause.

In my case, the following. And let me preface it all by admitting that I believed myself to be 'in love.' I said those words, I felt that glowy feeling, I had caritas and agape and eros and the rest radiating ceaselessly from my ever-dilated pupils. My voice was soft, my gestures were kind, my thoughts were noble, and my emotions true. So it's me, not him, that was the problem.

So.

1) A thesaurus is not a dictionary. A synonym relationship is neither an equal sign nor a copula. I myself have never owned nor sought recourse to a thesaurus, and I freely admit my relationship to words has never been typical. Still, however, even if we postulate they might possibly have their place, sometimes and for some people, thesauruses are extremely limited in their usefulness and MUST, as any sixth-grade teacher or history professor despairingly red-lining term papers will insist, be used with extreme caution, if not outright fear.

Why? See above. But also because not only does one not get an actual denotation, as with a dictionary, one does not get context. 'Blue' or 'tawdry' can 'mean,' according to a thesaurus, 'dirty,' but the neighbor's cat, although he sometimes comes in with sticks and burrs stuck to his coat, never returns from his tours looking either of the above.

Sometimes the words in a thesaurus entry can indeed be said to be part of the same cognitive category. Fiery, hot, steamy, sultry, sweltering, feverish. Fine. But none of those words equals the other. I didn't just pull a sultry loaf of pumpernickel out of the oven. I know I didn't. And the sixth-grade teacher in me bristles at this sort of thing every time. Thesaurus abuse doesn't make anyone sound smarter; reading, and absorbing the content, and noting grammatical nuances one wishes to remember, do.

2) Nor does mispronouncing fancy words help one's case when trying to impress others with one's erudition. (And we are leaving to the side for the moment the issue of why anyone should wish to do that.) (But stick around: there's always tomorrow.) (Which I think, in terms of my dating of these posts, is actually yesterday.) Again, the dictionary can be a great resource. Good dictionaries, as well, can assist with some of the clarificatory context issues that thesauruses can't, and thus demonstrate the sorts of things that, unlike pumpernickel, can at times accurately be described as 'sultry,' for example.

On this note, I sometimes used to refer to my last apartment as 'the seraglio' jokingly in print. It had a great many pillows, a low bed, little furniture, many textures and prints, and even a narghile a friend had given me in acknowledgment of my deranged decorating 'style.' Not everything said in print is worth saying aloud and vice versa, and when speaking I called the same residence 'my apartment.' This habit was cemented into law when the exboyfriend insisted on using the former label when speaking, and pronouncing it in such a way as to make every sinew in me twitch in pain.

I don't correct people. Especially as regards language. My idiolect is my own, and my reading and study have been far broader than most people's, so I know I use words many other people don't. Sometimes they are in the active-use pile from one discipline or language, and because they are there, they might come into my head for quite different contexts than originally learned. But just as I can't be expected to discourse rationally about mathematics, I don't expect anyone to have precisely my reading, educational, or cross-cultural background.

However.

It is always ill-advised to use a word you don't understand or to say a word you don't know how to pronounce. This is trickier in English than any other language, because we have adopted words from so very many different languages, and there is no consistency as to the level to which we have Anglicized the various adoptees. To avoid buffoonery one must have knowledge, not merely confidence, on one's side. Seraglio in English cleaves to its Italianate past, as does intaglio. One doesn't sound well traveled or educated by summoning a waiter with 'garkin!' nor by describing the day's events as having been largely 'comb ill fought.' At the same time, it is past the bounds of both common sense and decency to subject a dear friend to snapshots of one's vacation in 'Paree.'

I am not perfect, but when I want to say something was ghastly, and I can't quite come to quite the right word to describe the precise way in which it was as ghastly as it was, I am more than happy to stick with what is at hand and describe the various ways in which the ghastliness manifested itself. The fact is, context often determines whether the same word will be pejorative or praising, and no thesaurus can give that insight. Even 'tepid' can be a good thing under certain circumstances, and 'righteous' can be downright slanderous.

The point is, I cared about someone who engaged in this sort of behavior. It's not as though I was deaf or illiterate while we were dating, but I chose not to focus on the less appealing aspects of his personality. Then, once graver unappealing characteristics emerged and I divested myself of the thing, all those nasty bits came to the forefront of my consciousness. At that point, I did what math I could manage, figured there must have been some rationale not immediately perceptible that would ultimately vindicate my unswerving belief in my own sanity, and went on with things. A bit less trusting of my powers of discernment, perhaps, but confident in my ability to hone them should it appear necessary that I do so.

But then the thesaurus came out again and, having already gone through the dispassionate charts-and-diagrams phase, I no longer had the willpower or motivation not to look with wide-open eyes. Or to be other than horrified by what I saw. Consequently, I had to revisit the self-flagellation stage, but with no vestigial gauzy glow at all. No, now it was 'I was in love with someone who _________ and whom I have unwittingly given license to continue to do it!' Why, in other words, would he have thought I found it charming then, and (of far more consequence and spine-chilling potential) in what way am I complicit in his assuming I will still find it charming now? And why, oh why, oh why, is he noting the timestamp?

As you know from numerous posts, I am hung up on the idea of adulthood. And I think the greater part of embracing adulthood consists in accepting responsibility. Indeed, welcoming, cherishing, that responsibility. It is a harder course, yes, but far more rewarding. (Also tremendously less annoying to others.) So at this stage it is of no consequence to me that the thing is over, or why it is over: that pugnacious primate pulling at my hair is ME, demanding of myself that I please explain to me why I did whatever it was that I did to make him feel that flirting with me, reminiscing to me, and attempting to charm me with stolen, inapposite adjectives or insult me with inaccurate barbs is polite, permissible, quirkily winsome, or anything other than base and futile.