In Which I Up And Quit My Job Without A New One Waiting For Me

I saw my Tarot card reader in August (I'll defend my position on that sometime), and he said, "It looks like a job change is happening...into something entirely new."

"Noooooo," I said confidently. Yeah, my job has been a source of tremendous satisfaction but also the biggest source of raw stress than any job I have ever held, ever, but I made PEACE WITH THAT (dammit!!) after hitting a wall with it last autumn. Not going anywhere, nope, not me!

"Hmmm," he said. He's a good Tarot card reader, he doesn't waste my time. "Whatever it is, it is good. A good change. You are in a time of change anyway, and your energy is attracting positive changes in all areas...not negative ones at all."

So we went on to talk about that, which was nice. When I got readings from him five, six, and seven years ago, it was always, "You are in a challenging time right now...sorry...things are going to be tough for a while," and he was correct then, too (boy, was he).

A month later I was driving to see my next patient, a patient I liked a lot, a visit I did not dread, but I had felt a knot of anger tugging at me all day and I couldn't undo it. Usually I could breathe and smile and let it go, but that day it knotted up tighter and tighter and I couldn't even find the threads. It was midafternoon then, and I had been struggling all day, and it seemed so inappropriate somehow to be going to visit Mary with this anger balled up inside of me. It had nothing to do with her, and nothing to do with the work of hospice.

Just as I was turning down the street to her house, I felt the snap.

"I have had enough," I said to myself (or my self said to me), and I let out a breath.

Time to leave the job.

I think (maybe) I envy people who find jobs they can stick with for years on end. The closest I've been to that was my seven years working with the mentally retarded at the State institution. When it was time to leave that job, I fought that knowledge until what happened was, I got sick, pounding, dreary headaches as soon as I walked through the door, and they would not lift until my shift was done. It took constant physical discomfort to drive me out of there. Otherwise, I would have stayed on until the Governor personally kicked me out. I had loved that job.

I love this job, too. Don't force me to explain why I have to go...it's not that simple. It still took me two more weeks to actually put my notice in, and I am not yet done with completing what must be the longest notice ever (it's ended up being six weeks, mostly because of an unexpected personal issue I had to deal with in the middle of it, costing me money and energy, so they granted me an extension).

I get two opposite reactions, which are: 1) "Do you have a job yet??", with alarm; and, 2) "Hey! Good for you!!", with a grin. It is totally unpredictable who is going to give me what reaction.

My patient Mary has been the most encouraging of all my patients. She and I have a warm and affectionate relationship, and she is a woman who is quite particular about who is allowed to enter her sphere of existence. "I just know you are going to find something good," she told me. "I will be honest, I will miss you...but I can't be selfish, and I know wherever you go, you will be of tremendous help to people. You should be happy with whatever you do. The work you do is so hard!"

Sometimes I forget that.

Coinkydink, Part III

Yep, it's happened to me, too. I think of somebody I generally never think of--suddenly and for no reason I can fathom--and within twenty-four hours they call or are in the car behind me at a traffic light or otherwise swim into view. I get impressions about jobs, too--things like "sure, management does appear to be crazy, but you must take this job, it will benefit you" and "it looks fine on the surface, but watch your back if you can't run for the hills right now". My impressions start at the interview and crystalize sharply the first time I'm officially staff in the milieu I'll be working in, and they are always, and I mean always, correct. As I'm a nurse, and most of us nurses cycle through jobs in a few years' time as a matter of course, this inner gauge is very useful to me.

Intuitive impressions are not the same as wild coincidences, but I put them in the same category, loosely, for they seem to come from a grid that intersects the one I live on (planet Earth, three-dimentional, too much time spent drinking coffee and thinking deep thoughts about nothing) but are not at all from the grid that I live on.

Thinking of my friend Patty from the Berkshires after many months of no contact or thought of her at all, and wondering, "She really liked that guy Dan...but he married someone else and moved to Brooklyn...or was it Queens?...what ever happened with that?", and having her call me the next day saying, "I was thinking about you! It's been so long! Guess what...remember Dan? Well, his marriage didn't work out...he moved back...we are seeing each other again...I'm so happy!", is not terribly life-changing or profound, but...it does make me take note. (They are now married, living in Brooklyn--or is it Queens?--and she is still very happy.)

Sometimes something useful happens that goes way beyond my "red light", "green light" psychic impressions or the entertaining parlor-trick type of coincidence I'm used to. Sometimes the Universe mashes my face right into it. It is curious...funny...very human of me how I then go on with things as if nothing extremely weird didn't just happen. (I've never seen a ghost or a UFO, but I think that falls into that category, as well--loosely.)

The story...my job has been completely insanely busy lately ("balls to the wall" as the saying goes, which never gives me an attactive visual of the male who says it), and we are all getting a little edgy with each other. That isn't good at all. My workplace has a culture that doesn't know what the fuck to do with conflict. We are hospice people! We are nuturing, empathetic, accomodating...we don't do bitchy too well. Things can get convoluted very fast if someone is having a rough day and can't voice it so everyone else can cluster around supportively, offering self-care tips and Kleenex.

I was having a bitchy day at work and I didn't want to talk about it. I wanted to keep on being short, surly, and unapproachable. That had gotten me in trouble in the past so I'd learned to amend my behavior in general (I keep telling people "I'm really not a nice person, you know," but they don't want to believe me), but lately work was just over the top, and I was effin tired of the high road. Plus, the social worker I work with had asked me to do something for her before she took a few days off, and I was indignant that she even asked--couldn't she see I was really, really super-crazy busy over here?--and I wanted to keep the indignation going now that she was back. (Somehow, righteous anger feels like a power surge...forgetting that power surges result in blown fuses and the lights going out, but never mind.)

She noticed. She didn't call me on it, but it was clear, she noticed. I ducked out of the office and hit the road to see patients, still energized by extreme annoyance...and a patient called me, overwhelmed, in tears, upset because the social worker had told her the insurance company situation was still messed up and the patient needed to call so-and-so and do such-and-such..."Why do I need to do that? Can't somebody else do that? Don't I have enough going on?", and I reassured her, "We'll take care of it."

The next day I didn't feel so bitchy. (Time passes, and nonsense floats away.) I saw that I had to talk to the social worker about the trouble with the patient and her insurance and her being overwhelmed, but everything between us was so clouded up with issues and irritations that all I wanted to do was avoid her until we could act normal toward each other again. Truthfully, I didn't care (as in "WAH! I DON'T CARE!!") that things between us were strained at the moment, and I didn't want to try to correct them, but on the phone that afternoon as I talked to a dear friend and colleague about it, he said, "You have to talk to her."

"Noooooo. I can't. It'll blow over. But I have to mention how the patient is upset, and I don't know how to say it without it looking fraught. Gawd, I hate conflict...!"

"I know you do, especially these days with all of that going on recently with your ex...but you have to talk with her, straighten this out!"

 I was walking through my neighborhood as we talked, on my way to get my son from his best friend's house, where he had spent the day while I worked. I thought to myself fiercely, "I don't want conflict. I am not in the mood for TALKS. I want this to go away. I'm sorry for being such a rat yesterday, and I am more sorry that I can't get away with being a rat without having to have TALKS about it!"

At the friend's house, the father was the one who was home with the kids. My son and his son have been buddies for two years, and they fit together like gloves--two of the nicest boys you could ever hope to meet. I liked the parents very much--they were good people, down-to-earth, relaxed, and friendly. The father said to me, "He was great, as always, no trouble at all...hey, I've been meaning to ask, do you work with someone named so-and-so?"

"So-and-so" being an uncommon last name, and the last name of the social worker I work with. Who happened to be on my mind at that very moment, so...

"Uh, yeah, I do, in fact, she's on my team...how do you...?"

"I took a class from her [she teaches at the college on the side] years and years ago, she wouldn't remember me, but I remember she worked hospice...she is so nice!"

I blinked, feeling guilty. She is truly a very, very nice person, I admit.

"She is the nicest, nicest person I think I ever met! She taught some wellness course or something...she really stuck out in my mind. The nicest person!"

I agreed, gathered up my son, and we walked home in the warm late summer sun. Okay, I was given this. Clearly I was given this, as a little bit of a jab in the ribs to wake me up, but also as a useful gift I could pass on.

The next day I called her first thing.

She began, "The patient is so upset with me! I feel so bad! Everything has been so frantic at work, and those days off I took, well, I could have stayed away much longer, easily, it's been so stressed out around here...I feel so bad!"

The patient had told her at the time how upset she was, so I didn't have to bring it up, which was a relief. We talked about the issue and made a plan, and when we were done I said, "Hey...I've got a heartwarming gift for you," and told her about what a former student of hers had to say about her.

"Really? Oh, wow, I have tears in my eyes! Thank you so much!" (We really are constantly thanking each other for every lttle thing over here in Hospiceland. It is not such an annoying thing after all, I guess.)

"No problem, glad to pass it on. We all need an extra uplift these days."

And the last of the rancor drifted off into the ether, no longer of any use whatsoever.

I e-mailed my friend and colleague about it right away. "You have some powerful medicine, girl!!!" he e-mailed back. "That was a fucking ANSWERED PRAYER, is what that was," I replied.

Work is still a madhouse ("a hospice, a madhouse?" you are thinking, worriedly, but no fear. Lots of admissions, too few nurses. No botched diagnoses or medication screw-ups. All is well), but the social worker and I are riding it out gracefully...which means, of course, "to be full of grace".

(Carl Jung, the guy who came up with "synchronicity". You know, as in...it's more than a coincidence.)

Coinkydink, Part II

I have the Eye of Horus tattooed on my right wrist. My one other tattoo is on my left shoulder blade and is of a small spider in a small spider web, and I got that in a roadside establishment in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1990 (where the bikers can get "L-O-V-E" and "H-A-T-E" tattooed on their knuckles if they haven't gotten around to doing so in prison), and I am fond of explaining that tattoo with a "It's the only spider I want on my body", which I think may work, because I never wake up with spider bites.

The Eye of Horus tattoo happened about as impulsively as a tattoo can happen without alcohol involved; I was in San Francisco April 1992 for a week by myself, and woke up in the hotel one morning with the thought, "I want an Egyptian eye tattooed on my right wrist"--and by that afternoon, it was done. I didn't even know what the symbol really meant, only that I wanted it and that I was happy to have it. The design was thick and solid, not fine and scrolly like many Egyptian eye designs can be, and I'm left-handed so my right wrist made sense--as if it could do the watching, while my left hand did the doing--and all I thought about it was, "It's there to keep me honest."

Later I found that when the curly bit under the eye goes in one direction it's the Eye of Ra, and in the other direction it's the Eye of Horus, and Horus is the Falcon God and there is a myth tied in with Osiris and him being raised from the dead by Isis, and so on and so forth, but I can never remember any of that. All I know is I still like it, the ink has held up beautifully, and I have never covered it up with a wide watchband as a nurse manager told me I would end up having to do, "nursing being a very conservative profession." (Since then we have had nurses with pink hair and nose rings, so times they are a-changin'.)

People always ask me, "What does it mean?", and I am always at a loss. I usually default the question with a weak "Oh, I just like it", and the next question is "Did it hurt?", and I say, "Yes, along the bone, there, but it's not right at the bend of the wrist, so it wasn't too bad, not like the back of the neck...I hear that REALLY hurts." This is a conversation that has been repeated countless times through the years.

A few weeks ago my friend and colleague Jerry asked me, out of the blue, "What does your tattoo mean?" Jerry is a dear friend, and our conversations get deeper and more cosmic than conversations generally go in life, so I tried to answer his question, but could not. "To keep me honest" had been the starting point all those years ago, but my tattoo meant different things to me than that, and the eye was never one of reproach or judgement. I didn't talk to it (that would be rather psychotic, eh?), I didn't get an otherworldly vibe from it, I didn't even think of it as "a tattoo"...those were what other people had, with their colorful sleeves and the initials of dead loved ones embedded in roses. Mine was part of me, like a fanciful looking birthmark.

I babbled a bit about the Falcon God, and the rebirth of Osiris, and blah-blah, and then I said, "I don't know. I just woke up one day in San Francisco and wanted it, so I got it. I just liked it...and I still do."

It bothered me that I had no answer to that very reasonable question about a symbol I had permanently etched on my body. Why couldn't I answer that? What did it really mean?

It so happened that April of 1992 marked the start of what was the worst year of my life. I returned home from that trip and jumped immediately onto a runaway train of drama, danger, mental torment, and bad, bad choices far beyond what I had ever dabbled in before. That sickening ride ended with a whimper in March of 1993. One dreary morning, looking out my window in a sort of freeze-frame of activity, the thought came to me, "There must be another way," and just like that I was off the crazy train, never to return.. Life has been life since then, for sure, but it has never been so dark and ugly as that particular year.

The day after Jerry asked me, "What does your tattoo mean?" my bosses sent me to a nursing home to do an admission. I was at the nurse's station copying meds and various tidbits of information from the chart, when the charge nurse on the floor--who was very friendly and chatty toward me, not at all like the typical nursing home charge nurse who finds us hospice nurses to be superfluous pains in the asses--said, "What is your tattoo? Is that the Eye of Horus?"

"Yes, it is," I said in surprise.

"What did you get it for?" she asked, looking at me keenly.

"Um, I don't know, it's pretty old, actually. 1992. I just liked it, and the ink has held up really well..."

"That's a sign of protection, you know."

I was shocked. With all the explanations I had heard, and all the images of it I had seen on this and that piece of jewlery at the New Age stores in my city (and my city is a Mecca of New Age stores, by the way), and knowing that a very typical place to get a Eye of Horus tattoo is on the back, I had never realized that it symbolized protection.

"It is?"

"Oh, yes! People carry it for protection, the gods keeping an eye out for you. It's interesting that you have it on your wrist...tell me, did it hurt?"

I have meant to tell Jerry, "Here's the answer to your question...your question, and mine!", but work has been too busy and I forgot. Maybe he'll read this instead.

a link:  http://www.squidoo.com/the-eye-of-ra-tattoo

the Eye of Horus on the back of the neck (ouch, better her than me)(and mine looks WAY better):

Coinkydink, Part I

There is a friend of mine--we'll call him Jim--who has been avoiding me for months, and I can't say that I blame him. Whenever our paths cross, some mildly weird stuff starts to unfold, absolutely meant to kick his ass.

We were low-key e-mail buddies who had not seen each other since high school and really never knew each other until Facebook. One day he posted about the movie Wings of Desire, which is one of my favorites of all time but had forgotten about--in brief, it's about angels watching over the citizens of Berlin in 1987, before the Wall came down, and one of the angels falls in love with a beautiful, lonely trapeze artist who wears angel wings for her performances and has a liking for the music of Nick Cave--and the next day while in Five Guys with the kids waiting for our food, thinking of the movie and how I must get the DVD and watch it, I looked up and there was Jim, twenty-five years older than when I saw him last, smiling in recognition.

Jim said the whole thing was odd--he had been watching the movie the other day, after just purchasing the Criterion DVD realease, and the next day found out that Rowland S. Howard--one of the musicians featured in the film, along with Nick Cave (and one of the several painfully skinny guys playing guitar with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths)--had died.

 There was some vague talk about having coffee sometime, which didn't materialize before the next coincidence came up. I had just finished reading a novel by Chuck Klosterman and right away thought of Jim--Jim being deeply into music of all kinds, and Klosterman having made his living writing about music, sort of the American equivilent of Nick Hornby--so I e-mailed him, "Hey, check this author out," and he replied that he would. The next day (repeat: THE NEXT DAY), he visited the books-for-sale table at the library, just for something to do, and there on the top of the heap was one of the nonfiction, cultural commentary, music-focused books by Chuck Klosterman.

Jim e-mailed me about this in wonderment, and we both agreed it was some sort of sign. Jim had been professionally stuck for years, working in the far, retail-centered fringes of the music industry his whole adult life, with a little mix-DJing thrown in there now and then but nothing that had lead to anywhere. He wanted this year to be the year of change, but didn't know what to do or how to go about doing it.

I happened to notice that Nick Cave was coming to town, playing a show at the House of Blues with his side project Grinderman. I got tickets for me and Jim, and we had coffee at Atomic Cafe in Beverly one sunny fall afternoon a month or so before the show, and talked about where we were in life and where we would like to be. Jim suggested we then get some lunch somewhere, so we left the cafe and ended up across the street at a nice little joint called Wrapture that sells excellent wraps, salads, and that sort of thing. Jim talked about his DJing, and some mixes he'd come up with, and how he had a copy of one in his car and would give it to me before we parted, which made me happy, for his taste is vast and eclectic. There was a pause in our conversation, and Jim said suddenly, "Wait. Wait. The music they're playing. I know this," and he got up and spoke to the guy behind the counter, and returned to where we were sitting with an incredulous smile.

"The music they are playing is a mix CD I made a few years ago. I can't believe it," he said.

"What?!" I exclaimed. "Did they see you come in and then put it on?"

"No, they had no idea. I just about never come in here, they didn't realize it was me until I said something."

"Wow...the Universe is trying to get your attention, I think."

"Yeah, no shit! My mind is completely blown!"

The Grinderman show was short but intense, completely worth paying the babysitter for. Nick Cave was looking not too much like the guy singing "From Her to Eternity" in Wings of Desire anymore, but he hadn't lost a trick. Jim and I had a great time.

I e-mailed him, "We should be each other's ass-kickers! Isn't it obvious? There are things I want to do but drag my feet, and you too...we can be each other's 'Life Coaches'. Whaddaya think?"

"Sounds perfect!" Jim wrote back, and I pretty much have never heard from him again. He's still on Facebook, and he still has the same cruddy job, and he is still posting beautiful music nobody has never heard of but should...

...and the Universe is still patiently waiting for him.

(Jim is passionately into Icelandic musicians. I don't have the savvy to put all the little lines and squigglies above the letters to type her name properly, but below is the song "Innundir Skinni" by Olof Arnalds. I have zero clue what it's about, not knowing one tiny little whit of Icelandic, but it soothes, and the video is simply gorgeous. I have the CD, and generally can't tolerate listening to it in city traffic during my workdays--much too incongruous with my surroundings--but I had it repeating as I drove around Provincetown last April. It went very well with the quietness of the dunes. (See my "Provincetown" post for details of the peace I found on that solitary, overnight trip I took in mid-April before the tourists had descended on that part of the world.))

Life Management Skills

The one time I've been arrested I didn't see it coming. I was driving a barely mobile VW bug that an old boyfriend had lent me out of pity and got pulled over for the expired rejection sticker. (Driving decrepit vehicles passed on to me by others was a strong theme through my twenties, ending notably with a red 1976 AMC Hornet that sported a long white shoelace for tying shut the driver's side door.) The police officer took my information and ran it through, and when he returned to my car, surprised the hell out of me by asking me to step out as there was a warrant out for my arrest.

"What? There is?" I said. "How can that be? What for?"

He cuffed my hands behind my back, and it was a rather frightening feeling. "I don't know what for, all I know is that it's out of Barnstable County," he said, and it took only a second for realization to dawn.

"Ooooooh," I said. "Okay. I know what it is."

Whatever shabby car it was I owned in 1988 got impounded for being unregistered and uninsured as me and a few others were speeding it down the highway to the Cape. Friends of my boyfriend were renting a house in Cotuit and I was happy to let him and some others drive us all down there after we'd seen a show that night at the Channel. I didn't give my car's illegal status a thought, but after we'd been left at the side of the road somewhere around the Bourne Bridge at 2am, my car gone elsewhere on the back of a tow truck, it occured to me that the Law took it very, very seriously.

I did get my car out of hock the next day, but I never did go to court to get the other half of the business settled. I didn't know I had to. I never got a notice in the mail. I don't know what mailing address the Law had been given, but it was likely I was no longer living there, because I moved constantly in those days, and wasn't too up on change-of-address forms or keeping in touch with former roommates. I was always moving on, making a clean slate, leaving the trouble behind. That particular trouble found me, however...five years later, but there I was.

I was let go on my own recognizance, of course, and was obligated to appear at court in Barnstable the next morning at 9am, which was 88 miles from where I currently lived and the car I was driving was not actually safe enough to even leave the driveway. I had a problem.

I've had a lot of problems in my life.

Simple things do not come easy to me. I've had to learn, slowly and painfully, how to ask people to help me with stuff. For a long, long time, I could never ask people to help me with stuff. That impounded car on the Cape? while the car's paperwork was in my apartment in Boston, as was my checkbook? I hitchhiked home. Alone. It never occured to me to ask any other soul on this planet, including my boyfriend, to help me out with that. I waved his quizzical protests away with an air of self-sufficient confidence and walked to the highway the next morning and stuck my thumb out. The first ride was a hippie dude who gave me a string of brown and orange beads "for good luck", which I have to this day, in fact can see from where I type this, hanging on my wall. The second ride was a very friendly middle-aged man who let me off at the traffic circle, then asked, "Can I take a peek?", pointing at my shirt front. "No," I told him, knowing better than to be shocked, and he waved goodbye with a smile. The last ride was a seafood truck taking a load of shellfish up to Boston. He shook his head at me. "You know a girl hitchhiking alone is dangerous, right?", and drove me right to my door.

I solved problems that kind of way--the stupid, hard, occasionally dangerous way--for a long, long time.

Another thing I've had to learn about is how to create comfort. For years, I didn't have a proper winter coat. I had a $10 wool men's overcoat from the thrift shop, and it was so battered when I got it that holes popped out of it almost instantly, and it was lined with nothing but silk--no more protection from the weather than a freakishly long sports jacket--but I had that thing until it smelled too bad to wear anymore. Then I had a black cloth overcoat, which was even worse, because it wasn't warm even the slightest. My boots leaked so I wore bread bags on my feet, just like my mom had us do when we were little and went to go play in the snow. I had to be physically taken to L.L.Bean when I was 29 to get proper winter footwear.

I had one serrated steak knife that I used for all my kitchen knife needs, including slicing watermelon. I had yard sale dishes in colors nobody could tolerate, and told myself it was funky and punk-rock. I slept on a futon on the floor. None of my curtains matched, that is, when I had curtains. I cut my hair myself, or buzzed it with clippers, and I still feel a little out of place when I'm in a hair salon, being so rarely in one for such a long time.

I didn't know how to live. I didn't know how a happy, peaceful, well-lived life should look, even though I had examples all around me; I was at A, I saw people living happily over at B, and I didn't know how to get there.

We each, on our own, have to learn our own way...how to get there...but we can't do it without help.

I can't, anyway, and I get the feeling that it's purposely set up to be to be this way, it just took me a while to realize it.

I ended up renting a car to take the trip to the Barnstable County courthouse, and it took having to rent a car again a few months later to ask for an extension, but the fine was paid.

The last car I've owned was a 2002 Dodge Intrepid, and although the gas mileage wasn't impressive, it was the most fun driving I've ever had in a car of mine, and the kids loved how spacious the backseat was. Now I drive a company car, a 2010 Honda Accord, and yeah, I'd buy one, but truth? I'd love to get something more sporty.

My favorite winter jacket is a weathered brown leather lined with faux sheepskin, warm as toast, a Christmas gift two years ago. When I wear it I feel like the most attractive female in the room. I like that feeling. I didn't get it much in the past.

And yeah, yeah, okay, I"ll admit it...my winter boots are still the L.L.Bean ones I was forced to buy over 16 years ago. They leak. Last year I used bread bags, and you know? Instead of bumming me out, it made me smile. Things have changed a lot for me, inside and out.

This year I'm getting new boots. I promise.

Thoughts About Love

I've been single for almost seven years now. I didn't think it was even possible to go this long without love and not get all squirrely and miserable about it, but I know now that I could probably go the distance, if it came to that, and be content.

I used to read romances when I was a teenager, especially in my early teens when the bodice-rippers read like soft-core porn. The bestsellers had fewer "heaving bosoms" and "steely thighs clad in tight buckskin", but they had their moments (being bestsellers, after all), and I would skip ahead to the scenes when they got down to it, and then go back and read the whole book.

Forbidden Love was a huge theme in the bestsellers. Sometimes the heroine was married to someone else, sometimes a jerk but more often a really nice guy. She loved her husband and he loved her, but this other great Love of her Life would keep popping up, resulting in angst and secret love children and all sorts of mess. It made for a good read, but struck me as being pretty stupid overall. Even as a young teenager, I would think, "Why don't they just get together or move on? Don't you outgrow this stuff eventually?"

I figured that I was way too smart for that nonsense.

I married a guy who seemed to be a nice guy, but was no Great Love. It was a Moderate, But Pleasant Love. Maybe it could have grown into something deeper than that, but instead it took another direction entirely, and we parted after a little less than ten years, emotional strangers. When I see him (because I have to, we have two children), it seems impossible that we were ever together at all.

When I think of Great Love I think of three men I've known. I don't know how this measures up to other women--maybe they have known more, or less, or none, or just the one, like the heroines in the bestsellers--and I can't say exactly what it is that sets them apart from the other men I've known, quite a few who were really, really great guys, but something does. The first man was gay, but he couldn't acknowledge that at first, so we plunged into a very intense, romantic, heady friendship that probably only those under twenty-one with artsy pretentions can experience (as we were). We've lived 3,000 miles apart for the past twenty years, but still have a bond that runs deeper than many old friends do.

The second was married, and that is that. Married, or in any way attached, men do not spark interest in me, in fact, they generally dampen it right out of existence. He was the disorienting and upsetting exception. He and I are not friends, as that could not work. It is peculiar that we can't be friends--I am extremely comfortable with being buddies with guys, but again, he was not just some nice guy who I liked a lot, and I really couldn't tell you why.

Am I a pragmatist at heart? For with both these men, rather than longing for them with a passion that time could not abate, I have long since "moved on".

Then, there is the third man. He is not gay, and he is not married, but for his own reasons, was not available, and still isn't. Maybe that will change, or maybe it never will.

Presumably, those bestsellers do so well because the women who read them daydream about romance. They want passion and excitement, and enjoy feeling it vicariously through a book. I wonder if most of those women are like me, though...have met the guy, felt those feelings, and knew it wouldn't work, so chose the better road...

...and go read trashy novels to appreciate what a disaster it would have been if they hadn't let go of that One, Great Love.

I am content to be single, but I do dream of love. You know--the kind of love where I can go to bed with my socks on, and he doesn't notice because he's too busy flicking through the DVR. That kind of love. The kind I didn't read about when I was thirteen.




(Below is a clip from the miniseries from the book The Thorn Birds. Nothing says "forbidden love" like having a lifelong crush on a priest, having his love child, and pretending it's your husband's...it makes the rest of us look fabulously wise and savvy in comparison. Richard Chamberlain was darn cute back then...too bad he's gay, huh?)

Music in the Car

Driving down Route 93 into Somerville to do my first death pronouncement on a patient who was mine and who I was fond of, and fond of the family, and personally sad about, but glad for their release from sickness and decline...

...early in the day, and the commuter traffic heavy, so I put in a CD a friend had burned for me and that I had not yet taken the time to listen to...

...music in my car always helps.



(This is, of course, the first song, called "Sleeping Lessons", on that CD my friend burned, The Shins album Wincing the Night Away. A little bit of a crazy synchronicity, that...)