What I Have Been Doing Lately

A lot of my New Year Resolutions are going well:

• Try one new thing every day - Mostly circles around wine, but I'm trying it too with breakfast locations
• Do not buy any new books - And the pressure seems to be off so that I can just enjoy the 600+page book I chose to read next
• Do not buy any new pens - I still have a whole cup of new pens at work, and thinned down the disposables at home
• Give up Facebook - well, the worst parts of it
• Tweet more - and having fun at it, whether I'm read or not
• Blog more - what this post is hoping to help with
• Give up sex for a year - which will be easy after you finish reading this post
• Not hoarding food - good days, bad days, but mostly a success
• Want what I've got - a challenge this week, but I got back there
• Stop reacting

Still working on that last one.

Here's what put that last one into real practice. In the last week my father went from having had a heart attack to having had one in the last year to getting hernia surgery to being uncommunicative to being unavailable when I tried to return calls he asked for. After a distinct and well-established level of gullibility, I decided that he is getting a letter. He has a girlfriend he is currently living with and a best friend who knows more about his health than I do, so really, trying to take care of him from 3,000 miles away seems futile and draining. I know, I'm awful and will go to hell. I've been told that before I stopped worshipping him because I'm Unitarian, so no real change can be claimed there. But I am defensive about the whole thing, which means that everyone else wins while I hate myself for not being able to do something I can't do.

So letting that one go is step one.

Then, if I get past that, there is another.

Turns out the guy that I got all excited about at the end of the year is not only a jerk that dated me in hopes of sex, but the one reason I went out with him turns out to be a lie--like the others, he's married. Has been. The whole time. Found that out on Facebook yesterday morning. Suddenly sex seems gross and love seems even more than a joke than ever before. I was reading my chosen paperback this morning and the hero falls in the love with his lady and I had to put the book down--it was the suspension of belief that I couldn't muster. I was reading an article in the New Yorker this afternoon on psychology and how men fall in love much faster than women and the comment that sprang to my lips was, "Must just be in New York." When you're 38 and no man has ever fallen in love with you, that truth seems much stranger than fiction. More self-hate piled on the initial foundation of the father dilemma.

And yesterday afternoon I developed my second cold in a month. So this morning when I woke up I made it simple. Yesterday was my day to explore--I went to North Beach. Today was my day to soothe--I ate eggs, with cheese. I had tea and water and soup. I talked to myself in the grocery store just for the companionship. I am sipping another red wine that I'm trying out for the first time tonight (see resolution number one), and a new chocolate brand I'm trying. I've been writing all day and feel human again. I'm wearing a Giants shirt because my boys comfort me. Tomorrow, I will not be at work, or at my work. I will be volunteering in the morning with a food bank and then meeting some friends in the afternoon, and then getting a massage in the evening, thank God. I will not be surrounded by enemies. Hopefully tomorrow will be another comfort day, before I go back to Oakland and its charms on Tuesday.

When I left work Friday afternoon, one of my employees asked me what I was doing on my day off on Monday. I told him I was volunteering at the local food bank. "Oh, so you DO have a heart then!" My boss thought that was hilarious.

No, you're right. I will probably go to hell, my dearest charge, for putting up with your bullshit and getting insulted by you for it. But my heart is called there. I was asked and I said yes. I was asked to call my father and I said yes. I was asked out by the fifth married guy and said yes.

In the words of Natalie Wood's character in "Miracle on 34th Street":

I believe, I believe. I know it's silly, but I believe.

Someone, somewhere, loves me for what I'm willing to be.

Onward.