dating

I did something today that should be making me really happy but is leaving me feeling more mixed: I booked tickets to go to London, Ontario at the end of January.

Why, you may well be asking, should anyone be happy about buying tickets to anywhere in Ontario at the end of January?

The answer, of course, is love. I'll be flying to that fair city in the dead of fracking winter to visit D.Jack. And when I get there, you can be very certain that I'm going to be very happy about the getting there.

But the going that precedes the getting? Oh, not so happy about that, not at all.

I've been putting off buying the tickets and putting off buying the tickets. Tomorrow maybe, or I'll just wait for [issathing]. My hesitancy was throwing me off a bit.

Why wasn't I on booking that visit like white on rice?

It hit me this evening, not so long ago. Because it's also making me sad. I think one could properly say that today I have been moping. I pulled it together for a coffee with Steve, but other than that, I have been Eeyoring around the house and all along my route of chores.

Of course, it's fine. It's only for a few months, and now we have plans to see each other in January and in February. It's not like I'm lacking for stuff to do of an evening and the internet - our main method of communication, even when we live close - is always right there.

Notwithstanding: I'll miss him, and sorely.

Though the fact that he is in my life to miss? Some happiness in and of itself, right there.

Steve mailed a few days ago and mentioned that I sounded kind of wan. I just wanted to take a moment to rectify that, in case others of you out there are thinking the same thing.

My life is a bit strange right now.

On the one hand, there's all this stuff I have to do. My work is putting on a conference starting this weekend. If you or your work has ever put on a conference, you know that it's a lot of details based on a lot of people who change those details on a seemingly regular basis in a way that is very difficult and frustrating to track. It is super stressful.

I've also got two writing assignments due in early November, which means getting them done by the 31st. Also super stressful, though more fun and satisfying.

And then, Halloween, though fun, is ill-timed this year. Apparently my work doesn't get that Halloween is the GAY XMAS and so I have to have a good costume and go to a party full of cute girls in their costumes. (A word of advice? If you are over 30, you should avoid American Apparel during the week leading up to Halloween.) So it will be a quiet and not drunken GAY XMAS for me. That, oddly for GAY XMAS perhaps, ends with me picking up my man-beau at another party. Because apparently Halloween is also INDIE ROCK XMAS.

This leads me to the other hand.

I have to tell you, and no one is more surprised than I am, that this dating business seems to be going remarkably well. I am, dare I say it, happy. If I were still the gushing kind, I might even have added some superlatives to that. Suffice it to say that I leave my office after a hairy day of "What the fuck now?" and on the short walk home, I find myself looking up at the grey sky and smiling for no good reason.

You know, it's just really nice to feel like that. I'm grateful for it.

Not much in the tank for you, dahlinks; a busy week at work and socializing and interviewing for articles has left me feeling a little worn thin. The weather, too, isn't helping. So grey and damp. Though today is warm and that was soothing when Chris and I left for breakfast this morning.

One of the interviews I did was with an ex of mine. When the editor contacted me to do the story, I was surprised and amused. My initial reaction was something along the lines of fuck no. The break up went, shall we say, not so smoothly. It involved me threatening to talk to the police and then, much later, courts and lawyers and bitter recriminations.

Which makes a good, though unbloggable, story.

But then I waffled. I have said a lot of terrible things about that ex, both in private and in public; much of it justified, some of it not. What I was being asked to write about - his musical talent, essentially - was something that was only a problem between us in that I found it very hard to leave, for a variety of reasons.

I knew I could write generously and honestly about pretty much any creative project that he was involved in. I thought it might be good for me to say something nice.

But I didn't really think it through.

The interview went well even though the last time we saw each other in person, it was incredibly angry: with righteous tight-jawed silence on my part, and verbal outbursts on his that I left the judge to deal with. This time there was a group of us, there was something other than the dead horse of our relationship to talk about, there guinness and laughter. I even drove him home after, and we talked only slightly awkwardly of mundane things.

So I'm feeling good about him, good as in settled, good as in, you know, he's not that bad a guy. I remembered that he is interesting and funny and one of the most genuine people I've ever met. In the nearly 4 years since we split, I have sometimes looked at the sum total of what I got out of that relationship and wondered how I could have wasted 4 years of my life with him (as I'm sure he did too). This finally put that to rest. I loved him for good reason. Just too long.

And then I started listening to the recording.

Have you ever transcribed anything? If you have, you're probably already cringing. If you haven't, I will tell you that it means listening to a recording in little loops. You'll get a chunk of words typed out, flip back a bit, listen forwards, get another chunk, flip back again. It can take up to double the amount of time. And that's with a good recording.

The one I got is pretty lousy. By the end of the second time through, just to remember what we'd said and pick out the parts I had to listen to closely, I was nearly out of my skin with irritation. Even though what he's saying is perfectly intelligent and interesting, the intonation, the verbal tics, the laugh. All the same as four years ago. So it was a good interview and I'll have plenty nice to say in the article, but man. Oh man.

Just like riding a bicycle.

Looking at my house this morning, one could only assume that I'd had a very busy and very good weekend.

My favourite pair of heels had been abandonded in front of the closet, one of them tipped over after I tripped on it rushing out the next morning. The bed was pushed over about 6 inches and there was a pile of [redacted] that had ended up on top of my dressing table after being moved around in a clump from flat surface to flat surface. There were clothes hanging to dry in the spare room, there were piles of dirty clothes on the floor in every room. There were clothes hanging on the doorknob in the bathroom.

The main floor fared no better. A big pile of dishes, pepitas left in the oven after roasting. Clean clothes hanging in the bathroom. Dirty yoga clothes in a pile on the stairs. Bulk food still sitting in bags on the counter after being bought Saturday morning.

One would be right.

It was a very busy and very good, and in some ways very hard, weekend. The very good included a Sunday night friendly friend potluck, a Friday night puttering by myself (2 loads of laundry! 2 episodes of Top Chef! 1 giant bowl of soup! 2 beers!), a shit hot Saturday night with D.Jack, which can be further subdivided into three categories of overlapping fun, including live music at Raw Sugar and nice drinks and food at the Moon Room and a whole pile of [redacted] at my house.

The bulk of my days, however, was taken up with hours worth of yoga anatomy instruction. It was crazy useful (who knew the foot has three arches!) but fucking hard. It's hard for me to sit for 5 hours straight, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Add a second-day bleeding backache to that, add a few hours in stilettos to that, add some brutally hard concentrated yoga to that, and by Sunday at 2 pm I was severely uncomfortable.

And then we started on the shoulder work.

It's hard for me to do shoulder work no matter, since my shoulders are square but not strong. But add to that a possibly sadistic teacher who had us do said shoulder work with the soles of our feet pressed together and brought as close to our crotches as we could and by about 8 minutes in I was crying, because that is what happens when I spread my legs and externally rotate my femurs.

I'm pretty down with that. I've been therapized up the yin-yang, and I'm not so sure I've got much else to say to a kind person who is listening without stake to my babbles. At some point you need to just let the fuck go of what you learned to hold onto. What I am holding onto, I am holding somewhere in my hips and hamstrings.

I'm good with doing that in yoga, I'm good at managing its public manifestations. But add to that a sore back, add to that various floods of cyclical hormones, add to that sore legs, add to that the swirls of nausea that sometimes accompany the leak of tears, add to that a room full of strangers who didn't want to partner with the weird tattooed girl with the hairy armpits and oh, oh, I was hollowed out, leaving the potluck in the first wave, crawling into sheets that still smelled like d.jack and falling hard enough asleep that the firecrackers didn't wake me up.

There's a breathless moment that I love, right before a date.

You've prepared all you wanted to prepare:

• your house is clean (dishes done, toilets wiped down, couch vacuumed, cat hair swept);
• your self is clean (trimming, tweezing, scrubbing, bubbing, good smells applied);
• your props are assembled (the right purse, the new lube, lipbalm, keys, we're ready).

It's like fall, this feeling, or the first warm smell in March. It's possibility. It's humming anticipation.

Well, Internet, I've been keeping a secret from you.

Okay, not so much a secret. Just private. It's going around, it seems.

Normally, I'd be spilling all over myself to tap tap tap you out all the news concerning this information. With selected details and careful gushing.

I have been dating.

It's true. There is a person I have been meeting on a regular basis. We go out, we get tipsy, we remove our pants. Not always necessarily in that order, and occasionally one of those elements is absent.

In and of itself, this is not particularly remarkable. I've dated a fair few people over the past few years. Most of them have morphed from lovers to good friends. Occasionally they've hip-scotched over that line, one way or 'tother.

Thing is, I blogged about them all, and while I don't think blogging had anything to do with anything at the bottom line, I am reminded of a saying I stole from Jennifer. Do what you've always done, get what you've always gotten.

While I am not going to complain about the getting of good friends, the word that I have for the feeling that I'm feeling about my dates with D.Jack is this one: protective.

Blogging dating puts on some pressure. It forces me to say something, to make decisions about what I'm feeling, to make borders of definitions. And make them public.

So I am doing what I have not always done. I am giving this one room to breathe.

You know you've probably done too much dating in one city when the person that you're pretty sure is your ex's current date is also the person who calls from the spa to remind you about your chocha wax.

A little hurriedly. With just the slightest hint of embarrassment in her voice.

Me too, sister, me too.

You know something that I am very glad about?

Other than the fact that it is almost not-February?

That I am not dating.

Oh, I know, I was all mopey and sad about it a couple weeks ago, and lord knows, I probably will be again, but it is such a relief.

Last spring, a few days before my first date with Mae, I was chatting with a co-worker about the date. He asked me if I was excited. I'm not sure if he was expecting my response.

Well. Yeah? She's really cute and seems really interesting. But I don't know about dating, y'know? Either you go on one date and it's bad and why did you bother, or you go on one date and it's really fun, so you go on another. And it's really fun, so you go on another. And so on and so on until they rip your heart out and stomp on it.

It's true that perhaps I was not quite yet ready to date.

But even now, even with that wound well-healed. I'd maybe change "until they rip your heart out" to "until it becomes obvious it's not going to work and hopefully no one's feelings get really hurt."

What it boils down to is that I can't see the start of dating without seeing the end of dating.

In some ways, that's fine. You can learn a lot about yourself and other people by dating for a few months. To continue the example, I really enjoy the connection that Mae and I have, and if we'd never dated, it wouldn't be as rich. I would consider it a loss.

What allowed me to open myself the way I did with her was the thought of something more permanently romantic. The hope that this one might not end.

I'm not entirely sure what the last straw was as far as my hope goes, but what I do know is that right now I'm not in the mood to start something that I most assuredly will finish.

Or it has for the past year, when whatever rom-com ending I'd brought out and dusted off for my last serious relationship got rewritten into something more art house bleak.

The start of the cycle is a wail: I'm going to be alone forever.

Though I have only rare moments of being lonely, in those moments the idea of being sans partner for the rest of my life is chest-tighteningly horrible. I wonder what's wrong with me, what I've done to deserve it, how I got too fucked up to maintain a healthy relationship with someone nice. I wallow in that deep deep pool of self-loathing even though I know full well how full of love my life is.

Thankfully, those moments are only briefly intense. I may tread water for a few weeks after, the weedy hopeless thoughts brushing against my ankles.

Then I pull out. I get fine with my singledom, happy about it, even. But so far, it's been happy in a fuck you kind of way. Like my happy wants to wreak vengeance on a society that tells me I am less than without a lover. I am out to prove how little I need someone.

When I'm that kind of happy, I'm usually still on the look out for a partner, or a lover who might become a partner. Being on the look out, of course, means looking fine, being on, having your sights set. It can be a lot of fun.

It takes a lot of energy, the bouncy energy that whips around your body and brain.

It gets tiring.

Last week, I reached the final phase of the cycle. I have given up trying to find someone. I let the fuck-you happy whirl away.

What is left is calm. Middle-of-the-lake on a windless night calm. It feels mostly good. It feels like I have more energy for the stuff I'm interested in. It feels like holding a yoga posture in which I've gotten solid.

This calmness does come with a sense of grief, the nostalgic loss of a future I had written. Not in stone. But like I was gripping one of those finger games with one spot empty, and you have to click the tiles to make the picture. Only the ink was half rubbed off the plastic, two intertwined hands the the only part visible, and I'm guessing at the rest of the tableau.

It is hard to give up wanting something. The absence leaves you hollow.

Though only for a bit, or in waves. In between the crests, you fill your life up with the stuff you want to do. You build the life you want to live. You figure that someday, maybe, someone might share it with you. If they're lucky. Or they won't, and that will be fine too.

Because it is a cycle, the sentence at the end is the same as the sentence to start, just spoken in a wry half-smiled murmur.

I fell apart on several people at the end of the night. I've done it on Mitch before; not Ariel, but we're that kind of friend, yknow, and I'd spent the last half hour standing beside her crying, so it probably wasn't that strange.

But James? Poor James. He's someone I know mostly from around, from running into each other in bars, on the street, a smattering of emails. We've had good conversations, whenever. Tonight, as I was snapping my coat shut and torturing myself by watching Mike's nimble fingers over the Rhodes, maybe the same Rhodes he was playing when I fell for him, remembering those fingers inside me, his smell, the way the back of his neck felt under my lips as I spooned him, all the broken promises, James walked by.

"How are you?"

My eyes were red, my face blotchy. I hadn't stopped crying since the Acorn took the stage.

The inflection in James' voice let me know he knew something was wrong.

I just shook my head.

He hugged me. My chest heaved, I buried my face in his shoulder, wrapped my fist in his lapel.

"I haven't seen him play in three years," I said, when I caught my breath.

"You didn't know he was in the Acorn?"

"No."

"He went down while they were touring with Calexico."

"I hadn't heard."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too."

He kissed my cheek, hugged me hard. I said what I'd already said to Mitch one hundred times, what I'd say to Ariel moments later.

"I'm fine, it'll be fine."

And it will.