As predicted

By both Nostradamus and me (prove he didn't!), I feel normal so far today.

A couple of entries:

1. I have tried to watch "Heroes" and just don't think I can stick it out. Great idea, good editing, good shooting. Crappy writing. Not usually the death knell for a TV show (see "all of ABC's Friday night lineups since inception"), but enough to drive me away. Though the previews for next week looked really good. Maybe I'll just watch the last 5 minutes.

2. Trying to join eHarmony, but it won't have me. I joined it two or three years ago, searching from Orlando for someone up here. Then I canceled my account. Well, you just try rejoining with the same e-mail address you used back then.

First, "There is already an account with that e-mail address." OK. Fine. Let's start 'er up again, you.

Then "This account has been canceled." Like an online dating site hall of mirrors, back and forth. Fine. I e-mail them. Reply:

We’re so excited to hear that you’d like to
return to eHarmony. To have your account re-opened
promptly, please call our Customer Care department at
[---] at your earliest convenience. We’re available
7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

We look forward to helping you find the love of
your life.

Mm-hmm, don't let that be what gets you out of bed in the morning, "Andy D." Can you see how hard he tried to not use exclamation marks?

So I called last night. Call volume so high! Please try again later! Too many people finding love! Or maybe not enough! JUST TRY TO GET US TO TELL!

Twice thwarted in just a few days. If I were Marcello in "Under the Tuscan Sun," I'd say it was a sign not to join. Do you concur?

Tonight: Grocery shopping, freelance, etc. See you later.

I don't want a new version of Blogger

It's NOT easy to switch. If it were "easy," I wouldn't have to do ANYTHING. I don't WANT A GOOGLE ACCOUNT.

*sigh*

Anybody else with OS Tiger forever hitting the F13 key and bringing up your calendar and calculator and other things when you mean to hit "delete"? Yeah. Good times. We're brothers now.

Anyway.

Yeah so I haven't posted in a while. I have had ideas, but not the inclination to flesh them out. Here's one:
It's an amazing day when you realize you don't have to meet anyone's expectations, not even your own. (Except to, you know, keep your job, not land in jail, have shelter, things like that.) Realizing you really are in charge of your life. It takes a long time for that to really sink in. Like years.

* * *

Today I feel kinda down, at least since leaving work. Not sure why. Maybe just postmenstrual. Maybe because I didn't want to do freelance, but it seems to be coming my way. Maybe tired of the same old same old. Go home, exercise, feed the cats, do work, give butter and medicine, clean litter boxes, have half an hour to "enjoy" before going to bed. Alternate the first two segments with "go grocery shopping." Blech. Maybe I'm worried about what to do if Otter is still on medicine when I go to Florida. Maybe worn down by the fact that he's up to peeing on the floor once or twice a day again, when something had him down to once a week after the Christmas party. Also, my apartment is COLD and I just want it to be safe and warm and cheaper and I probably won't find another one and will have to stay in this bank-account drain for another year. But I do love my backyard. Rock and a hard place, party of one. (Or six.)

Maybe looking at skirted tankinis, knowing I'll probably never be able to go back to regular swimsuit bottoms again. But I did find out I weigh less than Tyra Banks! Howsabout THAT!

Maybe the well-settled-in feeling that I will never find true love or near-true love or reasonably undeceitful love or please don't bother telling me "You will! It will happen! He's out there!" because I just don't want to hear it anymore. I don't know how to be anything but alone, and that's all there is. I don't feel like going out and joining things because I'm SICK AS HELL OF DOING IT ALONE and that's all there is to it.

Everyone is having babies and buying houses and getting cats and dogs and it's one of them new-beginning cycle times that I will just get to watch pass me by again. And I am OK with that, as far as it goes. New beginnings can come from sad endings.

But right now, being alone feels like it's just wearing me down into a flatness. I'll probably be all right tomorrow, but right now I'm going to let it all out and not care who hears me.

So here's hoping Salem doesn't have a concussion from when he leapt up onto the counter smack into the stack of cat dinner dishes in my hand. Y'all have a good night.

Best diet ever!

Eat only things you hate.

55 degrees and so very, very wrong

This has been a freakish winter so far. Some surface waffle of my brain, the one too tuned in to what the masses think, sometimes sends a flimsy "You ought to enjoy it while it lasts!" warble floating through the brainosphere. And the part of me trying to be more positive pipes up with a mild "Aye!" But most of me just feels weird about it, feels the innate and inordinate otherliness and deep wrongness of this winter weather.

It might hit 60 tomorrow.

Most people point to global warning. Some say it's just a blip on the grand meteorological landscape and el nino is nothing to get your panties in a bunch about. But this is the second mild winter in a row, and the second one that the Farmer's Almanac had predicted to be unusually cold. And that Ben Franklin is NEVER wrong.

If a regular old coldness and beslumbering blanket of snow doesn't come along soon, grapes, apples and other crops may start to come in early, throwing growing cycles off for years. Sap is already running, and the bees are out. The bees, people! The bees!

But back to me. I am glad for the low use of my heater, but that's about it. If you pay attention, you can feel it in the air: Everyone knows, on an unconscious, primal level, that this is deeply wrong. There is a mild disturbedness oscillating through the air. You can feel the buzz rising off people, swirling around in a mass interrobang: the subtle, subliminal "wtf?!"

Is It Weird?

We existed for millions of years. A few short decades ago, someone invented the computer. Now there are millions of techies out there super-adept at programming them, coding Web stuff, etc.

For millions of years we existed without them. But there was this part of our brain that was ready for them, maybe wiring itself throughout the millennia. Ready.

What else is lurking up there?

Besides pie recipes and patterns for monkey pants, I mean.

(How about the ability to be happy with ourselves as we are? Ha.)

Ode

I have started missing Florida more. I can think of it now without feeling smothered, remember all the things I loved about it before I moved there and in the first couple of years after I arrived. For some reason, memories of driving along certain parts of highways make me wistful, I guess because they took me to and from places and people I love still. And I just ate a Florida grapefruit, so how about that!

Yesterday what got me was thinking of all the places to go at any given moment. I always miss Disney World, but I suddenly and strongly missed being surrounded by the ocean on 3 sides. There is a part of me that is always aware of just how far I am from the ocean and other bodies of water. Years ago, I felt landlocked here in NY. I hope that doesn’t happen again, but I had a flickering taste of it yesterday.

And you do get used to that perpetual summer, even as you think you never will, feel your every part aching for the seasons that you grew up in. Because you lived away from seasons for 10 years, and now that you’re back, WOW do they zip right on by. Right now summer feels like forever ago. (Of course, we’re not having a normal winter, either, which throws everyone off a little, even those who sing The Praises of No Snow.)

Most of the time it’s Disney World, though, something people who didn’t go there as children might not get. Goofy as it will sound, and as much as most people won’t understand it, there is magic there, and for children like me, great promise.

I flash back to being in simple places like the open mezzanine in the Contemporary, and I can remember feeling the quiet buzz of magic and dreams and anticipation there. Just standing there, or moving from store to store, waiting for your mom as she finishes buying something. The fluctuating sounds of people around you, the warm night sky outside. Having just come from dinner, heading to the coolest game room on earth downstairs, and knowing you’ll be getting on the monorail soon to go back to your hotel room, worn out and suntanned and ready to sleep for another day of it all.

There is especially nothing like Disney World at night, from the lights of Main Street to the quiet contentment radiating from families who just had the best day of their lives. Children conked out on their parents' laps on the bus back to the hotel, autograph books and giant lollipops and spinning blinking Buzz Lightyear toys clenched tightly in their sticky hands, dreaming of magical meetings with princesses just a few hours before, so long-awaited and hoped-for. Parents talking like old friends with complete strangers who just had the very same day. For me, a lonely only child with a neverstopping imagination, Disney was a haven, the only place in the world outside my own house and backyard where I actually belonged. Peace. Escape. Hope. Dreams. Magic. That is my Disney.

I always figured I would meet my guy there, too, but oh well.

So for a while, not so long ago, Florida called to me; warmth, sunshine, constant green and blue and gold called to me. Specks of sun glistening on big, big water, all the way to Africa. The ocean I almost never visited while only 45 minutes away from it. Thanks, Florida, for the cushion, for the soft landing. Glad we’re back on good terms.



A brief list of things miss’d:
PR’s
Memories of India
Ichiban
Sand Lake south/west of I-4
Mall at Millenia [sic]
Supertarget
Movie theaters
RBMA!

The smell of the ocean, even in the middle of the state
The wind through the trees at night
Being out by the lagoon behind the Polynesian, waters lapping the shore, sounds of happy people in the distance

The ocean under a night’s sky

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