Barely There

I went to work today with my glasses on and a bare face. That is to say, I didn't wear any makeup. I don't know how many of y'all know the Midwest, but we Midwestern women like our makeup. That's not to say we necessarily apply it well or pick shades that are right for our us or our current decade, but we know the value of a good lipstick -- especially when we're trying, even if we're just putting our best foot forward at church on Sunday morning.

I don't remember the last time I went out to see people I know without makeup on. But there was something about this morning (aside from my pills-and-booze minihangover) that made me not want to try. I wasn't giving up, per se, but I was giving in -- to the temptation of sadness, maybe. All week I've been swooshing and jangling about in bright outfits and touseled blond hair and megajewelry to put my pain on mute. Today, I wore black and the small diamond studs that the Boyf gave me two and a half years ago.

Maybe it was the giving in that caused me to e-mail N.

After writing and deleting a billion potential works of prose, I sent him three short sentences succinctly expressing the fact that it was possible that I was going crazy. I hadn't contacted him since I ended things. He was nice about my e-mail. Says he wants to be there for me. Says he has "regrets" about how everything unfolded. Yes. Yes. Don't we all? Don't ALL of us -- every single person reading this -- have regrets about our failed relationships?

I'm coming to the conclusion that N tried. My black-and-white version of the story was always, "I tried. He didn't. The end." Truth be told, in his own barely visible way, he tried. But, as Sunny said today (sorry, Sunny, I'm lifting from you for this post), "He gave 100 percent, and that was 60 percent of what you wanted." It just. Wasn't. Enough.

I love big. I expect big in return. Emotions drip out of me like I'm a saturated kitchen sponge -- every time someone touches me, I gush. When N touches me, I pour rivers. I still do. I still love that man more than any man I've ever loved in my natural born life, but he and I are (to quote my friend P) "wired differently." N is dry, even when he tries to be wet. I wish so much that he weren't.

I think about my apartment now -- how haphazard everything is, how neglected it all looks. The good news is that I'm puzzling out how to change that. I fantasize about wiping off my windowsill and hanging the (awesome) framed poster I just received in the mail. My apartment isn't all I think about, but I do think about it sometimes. Maybe this weekend I will get the impetus to organize it and then I will try.

A Blustery Day

I went to my college boyfriend's home, in the rural Midwest, for Christmas one year. The gifts that his family gave to each other were relatively modest. For College Boyfriend's gift, one of his aunts gave him a homemade carrot cake with buttercream frosting, wrapped in aluminum foil. It was College Boyfriend's favorite dessert. Later, he explained to me, "Her family doesn't have much money right now, so she made me a cake." The word "touched" doesn't even begin to describe what I felt that day.

The proceeding story can't hold a candle to what College Boyfriend's aunt's family was going through at that time, but I do understand desperation under certain circumstances. When I felt scared or sad or in terrifying, all-consuming love with N, I would always write him. Paper letters handwritten in black ink, well-crafted e-mails, poignant text messages... Writing was the last thing I had to give him. It was my swan song.

I write him all the time now; I write to him in my head. I write to him in unsent e-mails. I write to him in make-believe letters. I write to him in draft-saved text messages. It is the last thing I have to give him. But at this point, it's just bluster. It's noise and action to save something that can never be saved. That could never be saved, no matter how strongly anyone, on either end, feels. That is to say, me.

But what I feel for N is not not healthy. It is not good. I love him, but what I miss most is the memory of him when he was good for me. I am breaking out of the underworld; I am not Persephone:

"There is more to bitter sacrifice than this."

Awww, Dad

I'm pretty much the worst daughter ever, as I neglected to call my dad on Father's Day. I MAY have gone to the Jersey Shore that day with a certain Brazilian bartender, and I MAY have been way too drunk at the end of the day to remember to call my dad. But that is neither here nor there. I did call him on Monday, so I still get brownie points, but not as many as I should have racked up.

The great thing about my dad, though, is his view of relationships. He's a wonderful man -- into gardening, into drinking Miller High Life, into working for the church, into playing cards until the wee hours of the morning -- and I think that he thinks that every boy I date is as well-meaning as him. As. If.

When I was in the Midwest this past week, my dad was making copies of our written family history for me to take back on the plane. As he Xeroxed, I pawed through my closet, looking for my old softball glove and twirling an old baton I used to love, and I talked to him about men.

"[The Boyf] was good-looking," I said absentmindedly, stacking and unstacking some old books in my closet, looking for an old family photograph I had stashed there years ago. "I don't know -- I don't know if I'll ever find someone as handsome. But at least I'm prepared for that."

My dad paused, still making copies.

"You never know," he said with his back to me. "You might break the heel of your shoe on the sidewalk, and someone will be right there. Or maybe you'll be at the grocery store, and you'll meet someone."

I loved this. I loved every word of what he was saying. It was so charming -- the chick-flick version of the New York life he thinks I lead. The "meet cute."

Little does my dad know, though, what actually goes on. No parent should, really. But wouldn't it be funny if he did? Wouldn't his words of advice or reassurance be different? For me, it would go something like this:

"You never know. That bartender you've been scamming on could turn out to be un-sketchy and maybe take you out on a real date. Or that guy from the online personals might not be as bald as he looks in his photo, and then maybe you'll go from awkward beers at a neutral location to a less awkward dinner to wedded bliss. Or? That creepy IT guy from work could turn out to be a real charmer -- once you get past the whole creepy IT guy thing, anyway."

Reality is much less charming.


Listen to Dr. Blogstein and I rock it old-school TONIGHT at 9 p.m. EST on Blog Talk Radio. We promise witty banter...but don't hold us to much else. Though we DO have freaking Dick Van Patten, from "Eight is Enough" and a heck of a lot of other stuff (including "Wonder Woman"! Awesome!) on tonight. I think that means you should set your cell phone timer/Outlook calendar alarm for 9 p.m. and prepare to be entertained.

Sage Advice from a Midwesterner

One of my top goals for the vacation to the Midwest I took this past week was to reconnect with my two younger sisters. I tend to still think of them as roughly 11 and 7 years old, respectively, which is wildly inaccurate, as they're young women now. Middle Sister is 24 and quite the boozer, and Youngest Sister is 20 and decidedly pure and uncorruptable. And then there's me, with my, ahem, extremely social drinking and intermittent come-to-Jesus/I'll-never-drink-again moments. It's a wonder all three of us came from the same parents.

Being the near-alcoholics that we are, Middle Sis and I quickly became hell-bent on getting Youngest Sis to drink. And what sort of alcohol, pray tell, does one buy a young college-age woman who doesn't have much drinking experience? Say it with me now: Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine. Don't pretend like you don't know what it is.

Going to a liquor store in the Midwest is like going to a candy store for this New Yorker. First of all, everything is so cheap it's practically free, and they have every kind of liquor/beer/wine/glorified lighter fluid you can imagine. So I shouldn't have been surprised when Middle Sis and I strolled into the convenience store (called something like Kountry Kabinet or similar) and found no fewer than four flavors of Boone's chilling in a glass-doored fridge, as if they'd been plucked directly from Mr. Boone's farm especially for us.

"Oooh, they have it!" I literally squealed to Middle Sis. "What do you think? Strawberry Hill, yes?"

And then, out from under the fluorescent lighting of the store, came a hick voice to end all hick voices. Sitting in a plastic booth that could have been a furniture remnant from a McDonald's circa 1987 was a grizzled, portly gentleman with a Budweiser T-shirt and crossed eyes. We had no choice but to listen:

"You giiiiiirls are in luck. They haaaave your flavor," he said.

"I haven't had this in years," I said, trying not to look at him. But he wasn't finished yet. With a sense of urgency that can only come from one boozer to another, our new friend said:

"Well, git you some!"

And git us some, we did. Not only did we follow his advice, but that became the inside-joke catch phrase for the entire trip. And even though Youngest Sis only drank about 1/3 of the bottle before going to bed like the oddly angelic being she is, it was damn worth it to buy a perfectly chilled bottle of Boone's from the Kountry Kabinet deep in Nowheresville, Midwest, on the advice of a drunken stranger.

Good Times

I got my first iPod a few months ago, so I've been going through old CDs looking for music that I can fill it up with. Random "Rhythm is a Dancer" find? Gym playlist. Old mix CD from an ex-boyfriend? Some damn good James Brown to groove to on my commute.

And then I unearthed this CD from Fitness magazine that my friend D gave me eons ago (probably a freebie that someone gave him).

Here's part of the playlist:

"Save Tonight" by Eagle-Eye Cherry
"Steal My Sunshine" by LEN
"Hey Leonardo" by Blessid Union of Souls
"As I Lay Me Down" by Sophie B. Hawkins

Now, tell me you can't remember exactly what you were doing when at least one of these songs was being overplayed way back in the late '90s. For me, I'm brought back to a time when I regularly shopped at DEB, drove around my Midwestern town singing to the radio with my guy friend J during breaks from college because we weren't old enough to go to the bars, and dated the most inappropriate guy I could have possibly picked for myself on my college campus. Good. Times. Sing it, Sophie!

Also, if you can't get enough of old classics, you MUST tune in to Dr. Blogstein's Radio Happy Hour tonight at 9 p.m. EST so I can finally show all y'all exactly how seriously I take my karaoke. I'll be singing as well as competing, American Idol-style, against everyone's favorite native South African with the sexy-as-hell accent: Neil. (Clearly, I will win, but let's be nice to him anyway, 'kay?)

Idol Hands

Depressed today.

And I know I should so not be blogging right now. These are the kinds of posts I get embarrassed by in my sleep and delete when my alarm goes off, before 8 a.m., before anyone has the chance to read them.

Tonight was the kind of night when, even as my hands are puncturing the wine seal and pushing "0-5" on the remote control, I know I should not be opening a bottle of Three-Buck Chuck Cab and watching two hours of American Idol. I know I should be pitching stories to amazing publications and readying a fiction manuscript for a first read. I know that the difference between the movers/shakers and the wishers is action. I know that. But that's not the way it happens for me.

Because about an hour into Idol, I start realizing that this 24-year-old I see butchering a rock classic had a pizza-parlor job up until about two weeks ago, and that she'll probably make more money this year than I will in 10. And I'll start thinking about how I actually tried to do something with my life, and I'm not much better off than she was, working at her pizza parlor. And I'm certainly not as good-looking.

And then I'll start thinking about how I'm so pathetic, sitting here and watching this American Idol trash, just like every Midwestern household I've fought my way out of. I'll start thinking about how I should be reading the New Yorker right now and muttering to myself about the state of the country. Or at least I should be reading the Times in print form and bringing it up in conversation tomorrow. But I don't. Because, at my core, I am from the Midwest, and I am not an intellectual, and I am not as motivated as my parents' generation, and that makes me sad.

And then I'll have another glass of wine and start thinking about how lacking that extra iota of determination means the difference between watching American Idol and coming up with the idea for a show like American Idol, and I'll start willing the Cab to push me deeper down, until I hear that loud attic fan going on in my head and I don't think about stupid things like American Idol anymore.

Then about halfway through that last glass of wine that had rested in the very bottom of the cheap bottle before I started pouring, I'll start thinking about the past.

And then I'll start thinking that I should really not be blogging. Not in this state. And that I will delete every single word come morning.

I cannot get out of my own head. And to make up for that in some ridiculously short-falling way that can never truly atone for how selfish I am, I am going to mail a package to a group of female soldiers in Afghanistan tomorrow. I am going to send them cotton balls and hair elastics and tampons and some good-smelling body wash and tell them that there is at least one young woman in New York City who thinks of them and how large their sacrifices are, especially compared to those of us in the tri-state area.

Go to anysoldier.com for details on how to send your own care package.