Glug.
It is raining hard this morning. Days like this are when I’m glad I have my kooky beginning-work-before-the-crack-of-dawn schedule. Why is it that storms like this always arrive during rush-hour?

I haven’t had coffee to wake myself up in the morning for a while, now, and I’ll admit I’m feeling pretty smug about it. But then I go and have 4 to 5 cups of green tea within a two-hour period. Because, you know, the antioxidants.

Mystery Billboard
There’s a mystery billboard on a road near our house. It depicts a big bed with a white bedspread beside a table with what looks like two dozen cone-shaped water-cooler cups on it. Or something. Because I always drive by it before I can figure out what the hell it is, exactly. There’s also some tag line that I can’t even remember because it makes no sense to me.

Actually, the sign’s been up for a couple of months now, and early on, I not only gave up trying to figure out what it was pushing, I decided I didn’t want to know. I hate billboards but kinda like the idea of giant public photos of indistinct meaning. I avert my eyes now as I drive past. I still see that fuzzy mass of white out of the corner of my right eye, but instead of causing me to feel all harried and advertised-to, I think of downy pillows on a cloudy day. I relax.

Old and undignified.
Okay, so let’s just say there’s a woman who’s really closer to 30 than to 20, now. (Not me.) She has been closer to 30 for a year and some change already, but now it can no longer be denied. She has a few grey hairs. Just a few, but there they are. This does not bother said-woman in the day-to-day. She’s looking forward to her thirties, when she imagines life will feel a little more settled.

But sometimes....
Sometimes, she goes out to dance to punk and new wave music with two friends who are much closer to 20 than to 30. Let’s call them Audrey and Marlys. The friends, that is. They are wind-up toys of whirling energy. One particular Friday night, going out with said-friends feels especially right. Nearing-Thirty-Gal has gone through a major break-up several months prior, you see, and being around Audrey and Marlys makes her forget she’s spent the last six years of her life trying to be in grown-up relationships. And on warm spring nights like Friday, when she looks back, all that time has the look of youth wasted.

So they go out and dance and N.T.G drinks cheap Pabst after Pabst but before that, one of the first things she notices upon arrival at divey bar is one very attractive young man there. After a few hours, she finds said young man tends to be standing near wherever she is as she moves throughout the bar, so she strikes up a conversation. They chat for a good little while, although if pressed now, N.T.G. wouldn’t be able to tell you what they actually discussed, since N.T.G. forgot on said-night that: While it tastes like water and quenches sweaty-dancing-thirst like water, Pabst Blue Ribbon is not actually water.

After a while, N.T.G looks around the bar and waxes profound to the striking feller, holding her silver can aloft, perhaps teetering a bit, "Gaaaaawd, I feel so old whenever I come here. I mean, everyone’s like, totally young." And striking feller replies,
"You can’t be that old! How old are you?" N.T.G. feels herself grin because it seems as though they’ve reached that co-conspiratorial, us-against-them point in their conversation. And he actually seems much older than the 20-year old art students scurrying to and fro all around them.
"I’m 27."
A beat. Then he says, "Oh."
"Why? How old are you?"
"I’m 22."
"Oh." Shit. Because as I know and as N.T.G. knows and as I’m certain you know too, dear reader, 22 is the equivalent of 12 in boy-years. But the thing is that N.T.G. quickly brushed this fact aside because 2-something in the a.m. on Friday marked countless hours and minutes since a decent kiss - and 22 wasn’t exactly you know, statutory. Not quite.

However, also just then, at 2-something in the a.m. on Friday night, as we’ve mentioned, N.T.G. was also several cheap beers to the wind and so when "Debaser" came on, she had to go dance sure as birds gotta swim. So she did, and when she got back to where she and striking young man had been talking, he was, yes, gone, so very gone across the bar talking to another gal, where he would remain the rest of the night.

And she thought, "So this is how it begins."

I’ve got a crush on me. (But it’s fragile, at best.)
Are you waiting for someone to tell you you’re good at what you do? Are you waiting for someone to let you know you’re the real deal, in terms of something you’ve always wanted to be good at, but have been afraid to try for fear of failing?

I am in my late-twenties. My (also grown-up) friend Audrey has a friend whom she knows is absolutely smitten with her, and she was sort of interested herself, but what seems to keep her from jumping his bones is the fact that he’s so tentative, so impressed by her and always awaiting her approval. She and I talk over beer at the Brickstore Pub, and we tsk-tsk this guy because you know, if attraction’s gonna be mutual at all, you kind of want someone who likes you to impress you right back, to take action instead of just getting all tongue-tied and sixth-grade shy.

And then I pack up and go to my writing class, where exactly twice now, in two months, my prof has given me distinct hints that she thinks I “really have talent” and “will make it” etc., blah. And then she ignores me altogether, for weeks at a time. Her disdain leaves me salivating and chomping at the bit. I pine away. I dream of impressing her and entering the Inner Circle of Real Writers, who Know each other by some tacit sign –what? What is it? I dream of publication – which, the other night, she told me she thinks is my destiny. This was the Second time she threw a bone my way. Did I tell you that? Did I?

I think it’s probably been ages since Audrey’s would-be suitor has had a girlfriend, and likewise, it’s been forever since I’ve had any kind of mentor. And I realize that true success for either of us, in the long-run, has nothing to do with whether our objets de obsession pay any attention to us at all. My prof is purely symbolic for me, like Audrey just might be for this feller. What we all really want is proof that we’re alive. Which probably means that Mr. Guy’s fascination with Audrey is the healthier of the two of us. I’m not trying to wrap this all up in a neat package; I’m just thinking about how when you want one thing too much, you tend to lose sight of yourself. You tend to make yourself into someone who’s not worthy of whatever it is you want.

the next morning.

the next morning
Originally uploaded by alice deaver.

We had a Mexican fiesta for my birthday.

The Latest from Our Fair State
I'm convinced that (our State Superintendent of Schools) Kathy Cox just does not feel complete and whole unless, every spring, she proposes something completely evil.

(For you out-of-staters: This is brought to us by la mujer who last year proposed the scrapping of the teaching of evolution, which she called "a controversial buzzword.")

The latest.

On Saint Patricks' Eve
Here in the U.S., across the sea from much of what takes place in the world, one of our principle cultural assumptions is that of the melting-pot, (at least among white people.)

Three generations ago, our Italian ancestors were reviled, and another few back, it was the Irish; these people with their strange smells and strange cookingand crime (automatically theirs, as a group.) Move up just one generation, and these things had become mainly jokes and loose stereotypes, and even these faded by the time we came around. Now, our cultural origins are reduced to anecdotal fodder at bars:
-Oh, you're German? I'm a quarter-German.
-My middle name is Dutch, so I think there's some of that back there, too.
-Anyway, want another Bass?

And we go to Europe. We ride the trains which pass so easily from nation to nation there, and we are surprised that there could still be any great difference at all, between these white people over here, and these ones, nine hours away. After all, everyone's the same and everybody's equal, as we like to say, and will say, automatically if roused from a deep sleep and asked. We view their differences as
antiquated curiosity.

-Look, we say, reading from Lonely Planet. -Over here, they make these funny clocks. And over here, they make this dish with sausage.
(It's actually a dish your great-grandmother would recall with pleasure: the way the fennugreek would burn the nostrils, the way the sausage's thin skin would burst
between the incisors when her mother made it every week.)
-We must buy one of those clocks, says your companion.
But you wrinkle your nose at the sausage-thing followed by eight more hours on the train. You'll grab a sandwich. They have those, right?

birthday eve
A couple nights ago was my Birthday Eve, and Clara and my roommate Emmy took me out for karaoke at el Bar de los Stars. It had been a long time since I’d done karaoke, and of course I’d like to blame that in part on the fact that (my now former live-in boyfriend) Hunter, as an ex-cooler-than-thou – and thou, and thou, and thou - record store clerk, eschewed All Things Karaoke. But the truth is during those three years, I still could’ve gone out and sung along to a synthesized drum-beat if I’d wanted to. However, having a new pal who’s equally into the fake rock-star cheesiness, just makes it easier to do so. It’s one of the rules of karaoke: You can’t pick a slow, sad song, nor can you karaok, (a perfectly viable verb), alone. These are just my rules; I realize you probably leave not a dry eye as you rock the melancholy karaoke tunes all by your lonesome every night, but I like to have back-up friends in the crowd and keep the beat comin’, so.

So, it would seem that the Star Bar likes to concentrate its greatest onstage talent in one evening, because it turned out amateur stand-up night immediately preceded the fake rock-star’ing. We got there around nine, and and that’s when the guy on the phone had told Clara it would finish up. So we got drinks and stood around while a guy onstage told jokes about New York versus The South. It felt very weird because I’d just finished watching an actually-funny David Cross DVD, before coming out. So the next guy came on and he talked about how no women will sleep with him. By the time the fourth guy or so was on, waxing - originally, as you might imagine - about Certain Sexual Acts with menstruating women, I idly picked up a tabletop placard. It said the laff-fest would actually go until 10:30. Just then, Fear of the Red Tide Guy seized his advantage of spotlight and microphone and started attempting to hit on my roommate Emmy, from the stage.

And well, we left.
Spent the rest of the night at a bar down the street that, besides the obvious advantage, also featured french fries. And now I’m wondering: It was all men who showed up to participate in the open-mic stand-up thing, and I’m venturing to wager that just about all the women there were waiting around for the karaoke. Is this the Star Bar’s idea of a mixer? Does it work? Shudder.

As long as we’re on the birthday topic, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my awesome friend, my oldest friend in the A-N-T-A (cool kids are sayin’ it), for the best birthday present ever: A real, honest-to-beautiful-goodness cowboy hat from Mexico. Thank you thank you! I’m gonna find a way to wear it at all times. Yeehaw!

Alpha.
I used to feel bad for Buddy Holly Danger Cat, because Otis, our old dog, basically wanted to eat him. It was a tough household to live in, trying to keep them separated all the time. It hadn’t always been like this. As a puppy, Otis got beaten up by a different cat, and so had a certain respect (Read: fear) of Buddy Holly for much of his life. But then something changed. I don’t know what happened. Otis got ahold of this website or something, because two years down the road, he was lunging and barking at our cat like he was A-number one alpha king. And Buddy Holly stopped standing his ground, and just ran like hell under the nearest piece of furniture. This led me to think: Ah, there are no absolutes in the pet-world: Where once I felt sorry for Otis, who cowered while the cat guarded a doorway, casually sharpening his claws, my sympathy now lay with Buddy Holly, who seemed to lose one life like those old Warner Brothers cartoons every time the dog rushed him.

Last night, I was watching “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” with a friend, and I think I said, “Aww,” or something when this constantly trod-upon character, Meatwad, got tortured yet again, by Shake. “Don’t feel sorry for Meatwad!” said my friend. “He would be just as mean if he were smarter!”

All of this, plus things I’ve been observing lately as I’ve stuck my big toe tentatively back into that rooty-tooty fresh ‘n fruity world of, yes, dating, just makes me wonder about the whole confidence-thing. I’m convinced that feeling confident is the only thing that matters as far as how satisfied you end up in life, in the end. All right, so there we go, let’s close the whole book on the matter, right? On this blog and on every doubt we’ve ever had, too. Because that’s it and that’s all.

What I’m wondering about lately, though, is how the hell confidence is doled out in the scheme of things, and by what cackling demon. How come I’ve (semi- pseudo-) dated some people who just dazzle me at the outset with their amazing self-confidence and eerie charm, only to later be dropped to the freaking ground when I realize that it’s all bullshit bravado and there ain’t no there, there? How come the people with zero substance seem to be the most proud of themselves? And then of course, how many people have I known who are just fabulously witty and kind and smart and physically attractive, but are convinced they’re losers? And the worst part of it is the self-fulfilling prophecy part. You become who you think you are. Not to say that you can’t change it, but really – only you can change it. I don’t know how. Go ask my dog.

Iambic, Schmiambiac.
I’m supposed to be writing a sonnet. I’ve always had a respect for structured poetry. For me, actually trying to write some is like giving the Tour de France a go after years of cruising the neighborhood bike path with my dad. I actually fancied myself a person who writes? HAH!, sneers the five-foot Petrarch. Write this, bitch!

So that’s where I’ll be today after work. Wish me luck. It’s showdown time.

This and a thousand other things are distracting me, right now. Actually, everything is distracting me from everything else, so that I’m never really present. Which is an added challenge to ever feeling relaxed or even just passably okay. I’m supposed to go to a meditation group today with my roommates, but instead I think I’ll be home, struggling with the mighty iamb.