Just when I thought I was over you

Obviously - I haven't been writing much lately.

I was working to get the second book all pretty, by which I mean spelling error free, and sent out to some folks out east. And when I was finished I started to think I was finished with the blog. I mean really, how long can one person write about her sad pathetic excuse for a dating life.

Answer: As long as the weird shit keeps happening.

So I am driving along today, minding my own business when out of the blue I get a random text message from someone who apparently found my blog through INK and wanted to let me know that HE found it to be amusing - spelling errors and all. He even offered to do some proof reading for me.

Now this random stranger was lucky because he caught me on a good day when I found his shameless lack of digital personal space to be amusing and ballsy instead of creepy and stalkerrific, which I was sure to let him know.

I momentarily considered google stalking him. I have a friend who can find out your shoe size and the last time you had sex just from the last four digits of your phone number. But really I didn't want to know. I'd rather live in denial about my random callers. I pretend they are all nice boys raised by nuns in Sweden instead of a bunch of hairy backed psychopaths with infant skull-sized growths protruding from their necks. Or worse, they might not be men at all.

Random stranger and I shared some interesting cyber repartee safely cloaked in the anonymity of text messages. Non-committal ballsyness. Just like I like it.

And I told him I would be taking him up on his proofing offer. Poor mom had to proof the whole book in two days. He said he retracted the offer.

Puttin' it out there and takin' it away, now if that doesn't sound like a man I don't know what does.

Florida Gone

I knew Florida would be a transformative experience and the women who run the organization that brought me there assured me it might take a while for it to set in. And while the full impact is surely yet to come, the immediate revelations slammed into me Friday quite harder than I expected.

Yeah, the whole fast thing feels over. Big deal. That won't impact the existence of this blog. It might change it some, but like V said,"Just because I would date a 23 year old, doesn't mean a 23 year old will date me." Congress is still out on if my decision will be ratified.

The thing that is getting me, that is really kicking me in the ass, is that for 28 days for 24 hours a day, I got to be an artist. I got to say, "I am a writer and a performer and a myriad of other things," and I didn't have to qualify the statement. And it was validated by people who applauded my work, were enthusiastic to hear more, and seemed grateful to the point of embarrassing me to have us there.

They made us soup, people.

For 28 days, I got to write my own ticket in life. I got to choose the projects that were inspiring me at that moment and only for the sake of teaching a class or doing a radio interview or getting to a massage appointment, did I have to wake up to the sound of an alarm clock. I woke up at the same time I do anyway but for once it was because the sea air was beckoning and I had pages yearning to get out of my head.

It was a beautiful way to live a life. And I know that that can't last forever but coming back and trying to squeeze my artistry in at the end of the day, when I am exhausted and physically drained from nine hours under florescent lights, that is challenging. It is no wonder that the first book sat in a drawer for the better part of the last two years.

There was a momentum gained at sea. There were parties filled with snowbirds who liked to pose naked for calendars - yeah I will let you take a minute to process the visual of that one - there were parties with art lovers and artists alike, there were dinner readings of the work we created, and a group of NICE ladies that took care of us on our stay. Part of me wished I had written mire about the experience, and there are not books strewn here and there around my un-unpacked apartment that tell the tales of some of the experiences but for most of the time I was to busy writing to write. And that was a great new problem to have.

The book is pretty much completed. The essence is there. All the foul expletives are tucked carefully in place. All the nicknames created to protect the innocent and the guilty. I need to clean it up. Obviously someone else will need to fix all my spelling mistakes, although I am not sure who that is going to be since none of my friends or family featured in the book are allowed to read it until if and when it is shared with the general public. I would like them to like me just a little bit longer.

So I am not sure what is next. The trip didn't make me desperate to get the hell out of KC like I thought it might - though it feels so much smaller on my return. I didn't make me want to run, from my life, my friends, my apartment - well maybe the last one - to someplace a little more glamorous. It didn't make me loath my job like I worried it might, but it did make me want to take a sledge hammer to the florescent lights that make me exhausted and blur my sense of reality. No, I came back and realized I like my job. I work with good people who are fun and smart and inspiring. It just made me a little sad to see them again, as some, many even, have found their life's passion and it made me miss the twenty 28 days I got to spend fully enraptured in mine.

For 28 days I got to be an artist. Just an artist. And for 28 days I got to feel like the truest form of me. It was indescribable.

Freaking Hot

If you would like to know where every gorgeous man in Kansas City is hiding, I can now tell you that they are pouring out buckets of sweat in the Bikram yoga studio on 39th and Southwest Trafficway.

If I could have stripped down to my birthday suit I would have. As it was, I was wearing a tank top and short shorts and I thought I was going to die. I couldn't care less that I was surrounded by half naked men that looked like they came straight off of an Ambercrombie ad. It was hot as hell and I needed as much flesh exposed as possible, even if that flesh had lost much of its tone in recent months. Had it not been my first class I might have given serious pause to doing it in my thong.

I was familiar with Bikram, but just the poses not the heat. I prefer my yoga experience to be one that works my mind and spirit as well as my ass but for $29, I signed up for a month of 105 degree yoga led by a drill instructor screaming into a headset in a way that conjured up memories of Jazzercise with my aunt as a kid.

"Lock your knees! Lock your knees!" she would scream into the head set, sweat pouring down her face as she stood on a giant wood block at the front of the room. Isn't locking your knees a bad thing I would think silently to myself while trying to push through the dizzyness and nauseousness and the tiny black spots that were appearing in my vision. I know that that is an end result but never in my many years of yoga have I ever heard anyone actually advocate such a position as it can easily do damage if performed incorrectly and in this case could end in me toppling over unconscious.

I am fairly sure I have never sweat that much in my life and I could tell it would take at least a month to get use to the heat so that I could relax into the positions that were once easy and have been lost from extended time sitting hunched over at a desk.

It was hard not to stare at the ass of the man in front of me. Staring at someone's ass was inevitable and really it was a choice between his and the ass of the woman in her mid-fifties standing right in front of me who was wearing a pair of sweatpants that had been cut into shorts, which were slowly changing from heather to charcoal, starting at her ass crack and spreading outward. So if you think about it, I really had no choice. And the more he started to sweat, the more I couldn't turn away. It was this horrible vision of what could be such a lovely sight made more painful by the fact the he caught me staring and made eye contact several times in the mirror. I wanted to mouth, "I am sorry but what to you want me to fix my gaze on!" That was the other thing the woman in the head set kept barking. "Don't close your eyes! Don't close your eyes! And I want to see smiling faces, people."

I managed to make a fair attempt at almost every pose except for the ones involving back bends. The second my neck went back and my eyes strained for the walls behind me I was sure I was going to vomit. So I chose to abstain from those poses for my first go round.

When I left the studio and felt the rush of cold air overtake my body I thought I might weep for joy, the kind of weeping reserved for the big O. In the locker room all the other women asked me how I liked the class; the instructor had also chose to point me out as the newbie to the entire class before we began, assuring me that should I pass-out or vomit, no one would judge me. Thanks. I told the other women drenched in sweat, that it was a lot like a first date. Mildly nerve racking before I began, overall rather nauseating, slightly painful at points, with the occasional moment of thinking I would rather jab my eyes out than stay one more minute but all in all not enough to let me make a verdict on whether I was really into it or not. So I guess I am going to have to go through it all again to see if the pay off is worth the pain.

I am going back tomorrow for round two.

Felon

Freshman year of high school I was sitting in Algebra class flanked by four girls who were at the time the most popular fourteen year olds around. I hate math. Much is known about this. And stuck in Coach I-forget-his-name’s class, I was completely bored.

I wasn't friends with these girls. In fact, I was down right terrified of them. The hierarchical system that was high school was particularly challenging for a social late bloomer such as myself. I spent too much of my time swimming around in my own head wishing I could be anywhere in the world other than St. Charles, Missouri. Some place a little more glamorous, more metropolitan, and less inundated with suburbanites obsessed with Dave Matthews.

Maybe that was the problem; I never got his appeal.

Regardless I was sitting there and these girls, who all happened to be freshman cheerleaders and who all happened to be dating senior football players, were discussing the rapturous natures of their relationships. At that point I made an entirely undramatic, and entirely unequivocal decision. I would immediately begin dating a senior football player.

There was no romance in my decision, or rationale for that matter, since for a person who could barely keep her loud mouth shut, I was utterly terrified of the opposite sex.

It was pure pragmatism.

I was bored and needed something to discuss while the man in front of the class with protruding nose hair, mid-section and ass crack, made homoerotic advances towards his JV players.

So I would commence dating. It was as simple as that.

Within a few weeks I was dating a guy who subsequently told me that he wanted to name his first son Felon because he had so many and I continued to date him through freshman year and even when he went off to college where a rousing relationship with a beer bong forced us to call it quits. The girls in my math class stopped dating there senior boyfriends one week later. I was still bored.

Hindsight being what it is, I don’t think I can really consider what we did dating. I hid from him in the halls, too freaked out to talk to his friends and on the weekends, and I mean every freaking weekend, we went to dinner at Applebee’s and a movie. Oh suburbia.

But this is not the point of my story.

Felon Boy was my introduction to the dating world and like so many of the decisions I have made towards my relationships since then, my decision to date was made - I hate to say this - arbitrarily.

“Okay. Today I am going to date.”

A little over six months, I woke up with another enlightened decision, most likely made while having nightmares about David Hassellhoff, (who is a douche by the way, not that we didn’t know that, but I feel as though I must personally attest to this and to his inability to drive, as he tries to mow down pedestrians in Burbank, but I digress) and I decided that I was done with dating. At least for a little while.

My last weekend in Florida, I woke up with that same feeling of awareness. I had made a decision unbeknownst to myself, and this phase, this fast, it just felt over.

Maybe it was because I finished my second book, an unexpected gift of my beach-side sabbatical. Maybe it was because I achieved what I hoped to accomplish in it all - an exploration of self-contentment, as illusive as it may be. Who knows why it felt over but somehow it just did.

Now just because it felt over to me, doesn’t mean the universe is going to agree with me, so until further notice, I think it will just be life as usual. And now that I am not busy writing, maybe I will have time to write.

We’ll see. I am not sure what phase is next but I am pretty excited for whatever is on the horizon. Let’s just hope it is not a guy named Misdemeanor.