:: just ::

I need to be up in about five hours, and need more than the usual amount of thinking and brilliance once I'm awake. This is probably why I can't sleep - no matter how I fold the pillow or how methodically I breathe. I am being held captive in Today, begging for passage into Tomorrow, and hoping this midnight writing will at least bump me up to business class if I ever make it on board.

For some reason I've been thinking a lot about 2006 as I lay here folding and unfolding my pillow. That was a particularly bumpy year for me, with highs and lows like an EKG beating in my days. I was visiting 2006 in my journal yesterday and came across an interesting bit of self-analysis. I wrote that my fatal flaw was that I didn't want to be alone, going into unnecessary detail about how that little fear would keep me from ever being un-alone. I was convinced it was the prison of my own making, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I thought of it like taking a candid photograph, which is impossible the moment someone knows there's a camera in their midst. Smiling at the camera is nice but isn't candid. Wanting companionship is great journal-material but also happens to be stronger than 100% DEET as far as companion-repellents go.

At least, that's how it seemed in 2006.

If I've learned anything about love & relationships since then (and I hope I have), it's that there isn't a fail-proof method for either attracting or deterring them. I don't mean you can't ever end a relationship or that you can't keep from getting into one. I've found ways to do both, albeit clumsily. What I'm talking about is that fatal flaw business, which is not about doing but being. I thought I needed to be something or someone different. Clearly, that was the problem all along, right? I wasn't her. I guess I'm glad to feel, in 2010, that I am her. And looking myself over carefully, I see that I've been her all along. That there wasn't something terribly wrong in 2006 that I expertly mended between then and now. I'm just me.

And I'm really happy to be.

:: worth ::

Some nice person left me a comment today, and now I feel like a writer again. Thank you, Nice Person. Writing is what was supposed to be happening in between everything else, and really, because of everything else I'm chasing after. Incidentally, there has been quite a bit of chasing and not much documentation at all. I've hardly written a word. It's almost as if none of it ever happened. So for record's sake, this little post will be the first page in old library books, stamped with just the essential information. Most people will skip over it; a few will find it fascinating that no one at all checked it out for two solid years and then three different people read the book in a month. I'm writing this for the latter.

• I started nursing school. I did it. Or rather, WE did. All of us. Everyone who told me I'd make a great nurse. All of the sick people in Gerai who let me see firsthand what suffering comes when no one knows how to sterilize or bandage. And the crazy poet who never stopped talking. Maybe her most of all.
  
• We planted a garden. Spinach, peas, carrots, kale, swiss chard. I'm most proud of the swiss chard because it is pink. Turns out I like pink things, even leafy pink vegetables. It will make the prettiest salad.
• I've been married for five months. Five! Someone asked me today what I thought the purpose of marriage is, if it's to have children and populate the world or if there's something deeper going on. I'd have to say, at this five month mark, there's been no earth-populating and yet I know we're not stagnant. We're busy figuring out how to speak the same English. What "now" and "later" and "on time" mean. How to be nice when it's 88 degrees and the electrician still hasn't come to put in the ceiling fan.
• I am in bed by 11 now. Most of the time. Sometimes even 10:30!
  
• I started a book about third culture kids today. Although I've known about this book for a while, and even talked about it at length with a stranger in the Jakarta airport last summer, reading it for myself today made me teary-eyed. In a happy way. It's nice to be re-reminded that I'm not alone, not half as weird as I feel, and every bit as important as that Nice Person made me feel.
  

The end. (for now)