What the Hell is This?

Considering that I could be blowing up everything that’s happened in the past few weeks into some big huge tempestuous drama, I’d say I’m sailing on an amazingly even keel.

More than that: I believe I’m finally experiencing some of what those Law of Attraction people were crowing about. By refraining from thrashing around unhappily when things don’t go my way, instead riding the crests and lows of feelings and happenings, I’m finding the tide is turning more and more in my favor. I’m actually thriving. At work, donors are yielding amazing sums to me on a regular basis: bonuses have lately accounted for a third of my paycheck. I won David Slocombe’s lottery again. Strangers have been cooperative; friends have been generous. I’m marinating in the enthusiastic appreciation of several younger men. I may have finally found my niche for a career.

Rejection can sometimes be the best thing that ever happened to you.
**

I don’t want to spend the whole post on what happened with my self-titled best friend, but in retrospect perhaps a person should consider it a red flag when their so-called best friend repeatedly brings up what it will be like when their relationship ends. (Who does that?) Add to that a kind of idealization and enmeshment that usually only occurs within romantic relationships, and you’re cooking up a recipe for trouble. I’m always uncomfortable being put on a pedestal; it usually means I’ve got a long way to fall.

In the end it boiled down to fuzzy boundaries, along with some fear and class tension, the collision of resentful prosperity with what Adbusters magazine calls the “precarity” movement. Along with the aforementioned idealization and its flip side, disappointed rage.

Despite my erstwhile pal’s vehement and angry insistence to the contrary, she really had become (as she often joked) my “Sugar Mama,” paying for all the outings I generally consider luxuries, like eating at better restaurants and going to first-run movies. I hadn’t bought my own dinner or ticket for at least six months. “Don’t worry about it,” she would say, over and over and over again. (I made the mistake of believing this the twentieth time, after watching her and her father spend sums that added up to my entire debt on each other.) It made for somewhat of an awkward dynamic, to add to what was already the awkward position of being her only reproach-less friend — elevated virtually to sainthood because I had never hurt her or made her angry. I won’t even touch on certain aspects of the relationship that might have bordered on the homoerotic. Needless to say the boundaries were unclear.

At the heart of my own conflict was the fact that I didn’t put that much stock in (what to me were) extravagances. I could live without them if I couldn’t afford them, which was most of the time. What I really wanted to know, as would the majority of my other friends — a ragtag group of starving artists, self-employed freelancers, social workers, alternative health professionals, LGBT “orphans,” and communitarian counterculturalists — was: are you part of my chosen family? Will you be there if I fail? If something happens, can I crash on your couch? (Those of you who have been reading me a while have seen my good friend Russ assure me, without my asking, that I have a place to land in Seattle.) Thanks to our emotional enmeshment, my friend could intuit when I was holding something back. This thoroughly upset her in the midst of several personal adversities. She wanted me to be completely emotionally available, and I was conflicted. She prodded and prodded and probed until I finally confessed, tentatively, and with some embarrassment, what was on my mind.

You would have thought that I had asked her to take care of me in my old age, the way she hit the ceiling. She called me back at ten-thirty at night and kept me awake for another hour, essentially taking a dump all over my lifestyle and choices. (I didn’t do much to defend myself, even though I had plenty of ammunition for a devastating response. I even owned up to every criticism I thought was fair.) She compared my underachievement and poverty to a drug addiction, self-righteously anointing herself my intervention coordinator, and accused me of expecting “handouts” rather than being willing to work for a decent living. For a minute I felt like an unwed mother who had wandered obliviously onto the set of the O’Reilly Factor. She aired considerable resentment about having to drive all the way across town to see me. Since I wouldn’t pull my lazy ass together and get a real job and a car, I was costing other people dearly (in time, gas, etc). How selfish was I???

**

“But you’re not constantly polluting the environment,” countered my GBF (gay best friend/gay boy friend) Greg, a talented abstract painter who makes his living landscaping and pet-sitting. When I called him the morning after that nasty little “intervention” in tears, he took the day off from trimming hedges to meet me at the coffeehouse and take me to the museum for some art therapy on — what else? — his “family” membership. Greg would let me crash on his couch any day. He knows I’d do the same for him.

“Obviously your friend has never heard the phrase ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’” Greg joked good-humoredly, as we munched on simple cheese sandwiches made on crusty peasant bread. He was baffled by how ferociously my other friend had taken offense at a concept he found as normal and natural as breathing.

“You only say that because you’re my enabler!” I corrected him. “She told me my other friends would deny I have a problem. We’re codependent.”

On the top floor of the contemporary art museum we lay among an interactive display of soft beanbags by the window, gazing up at the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the skylights. Greg, like me, has struggled with various degrees of depression and anxiety for decades. We’ve known each other during periods of loneliness, creative block, and misery, as well as in the midst of relationships, artistic productivity, and happiness. Greg related to me how crushing it was, like the final nail in the proverbial coffin, to overhear his friends in the next room discussing his “laziness” at possibly the lowest point in his life, when he was literally crippled by depression.

“People who haven’t been in it don’t get it,” I said. “They want to know why the hell you can’t run with cement blocks on your feet.” (My readers know as well as Greg that I consider it an accomplishment that I’ve made it to this point alive.)

**

“But I’ve always admired you for that!” cried Constance, my bookstore friend of nearly twenty years, on the phone. “You’ve always tried to take jobs that ‘first, do no harm.’ You think about the impact of everything you do — on the environment, on other people, in other parts of the world — doesn’t this woman realize that some of your choices are conscious?”

Constance, who inherited her childhood home when her mother died, let me stay in the guest room on a number of nights when my rock-drummer neighbor’s nocturnal activities were driving me into a state of chronic insomnia and anxiety. Her five cats trigger my allergies, but I know I’m always welcome there. She is “family.” This Episcopalian sister of mine clucked over my friend’s extreme emotional reaction to what she regarded as a benevolent, even Christian concept.

“It’s obviously not about you,” she said. “That poor woman. I’ll pray for her.”

**

Contrary to my former girlfriend’s predictions, things seem to be improving for me by the day. She made it clear that she believes one had damn well better give up one’s self-indulgent joie de vie for eight to ten hours a day, forty to fifty hours a week, so that one’s remaining hours can be spent in comfort with all the amenities. Whereas I would rather sacrifice those amenities entirely. I used to tie myself in knots worrying about the future every single minute of every single day; now, for the most part, I enjoy just being. I finally get what Eckhart Tolle was talking about, sitting there on his park bench blissing out. I want to relish every moment of life. These days I gravitate toward situations and people — like my crazy, flawed, recovering, wholly authentic call center cohorts — that fill me with the kind of joy you just can’t purchase. Even if it means eating oatmeal for breakfast.

But just one more outrageously, unfairly good thing that happened to me after I got dumped for greedily taking advantage of handouts was that an old and very dear college friend in New York offered me several sessions with a top-tier career coach. This coach has since helped me to figure out that what I really need to do is work for myself, and is going to help me get my own business started, complete with Web site and blog.

**

In the midst of all this drama, I watched a beautiful love story for grownups, The Painted Veil. It made for interesting viewing as I was contemplating idealization and how it can so quickly turn into its opposite.

The plot: two emotionally immature people, played by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, marry for all the wrong reasons, but ultimately grow up enough to truly love each other. Norton’s Walter, a bookish bacteriologist, spots the beautiful, poised socialite Kitty across a crowded room; idealizing her without knowing her, he becomes infatuated and calls it love. Watts’ Kitty is bored, trivial, and dying to escape her mother’s watchful eye; Walter’s marriage proposal offers her a fast out. Later, living in Shanghai with her new husband, she begins a clandestine affair with a married diplomat that conflates excitement and novelty with love. When Walter finds out about it, he turns into the sort of cruel, vindictive, petulantly bitter withholder that naive romantics often become when disillusioned. I’ve met dozens of men like him. His idea of punishment is extreme to say the least — dragging Kitty along into the middle of a cholera epidemic in the Chinese countryside.

Kitty, however, is slowly brought out of her petty rich-girl self-absorption by the magnitude of the events unfolding around her, and finds purpose in caring for others. She and Walter begin to see each other in a different light. Kitty has been blind to Walter’s integrity and dedication; he has completely missed her cleverness and biting wit. They are both becoming stronger, more compassionate people in the midst of overwhelming adversity. Walter’s stony facade begins to crack until the day he is prepared to fight for Kitty against an angry mob (much as she wished he had been prepared to fight for her against her lover). They start to fall deeply and passionately in love, for real, the second time around.

The ending is both tragic and redemptive. It’s a truly wonderful and overlooked film, far superior in my book to the Oscar-winning English Patient and its turgid yet somehow hollow romance.

**

But speaking of romance, the other thing that would be a potential source of drama involves the menfolk. Specifically our old friend Ted.

Oh, Ted. Ted. Wherefore art thou Ted? We’ve gotten so much closer in recent weeks, this ineffably, damnably attractive forty-nine-year-old pharmacist and I. We just keep discovering more and more common ground. We’ve discussed everything from Palestine and the flotilla incident to our Christian camp experiences. We’ve quoted Dr. Demento and filthy limericks at each other. I told him all about getting dumped by my girlfriend. We’ve been to a political rally together. I sincerely enjoy being his friend. We have chemistry to burn. Lately we’ve taken to eating dinner together in the break room and sharing our food. I imagine many people have assumed there is more going on.

And then there’s the small matter of his having Jonathan’s eyes. Before we were close, you see, I never really noticed, because we just didn’t make that much eye contact. But there they are. Dark brown, warm, laughing at the corners. How the hell’d you do that, Ted? Why the hell’d you do that, Ted??!!!

It got to the point where I was aching with every fiber of my animal being to grab him by the collar and wrestle him to the ground to have my dirty way with his picky and particular old ass. I was going to work most days with butterflies in my stomach. Now you know I didn’t go out of my way to feed this beast, or obsess on and on about the man; I didn’t want to let the ebb and flow of these feelings jeopardize my newfound equilibrium and happiness; but there it was. Fierce, almost overwhelming sexual longing for an affable middle-aged schmoe who likes young women.

One evening as we were finishing one of our shared finger-food banquets, I ventured, with a deliberately provocative tone of voice, “You know, Ted…we don’t have to confine these little picnics of ours to the staff kitchen.”

Ted laughed uproariously and turned a color of crimson I hadn’t seen since that little blonde twinkie decimated him six months ago.”You’re making me blush!” he cried. He seemed genuinely pleased, yet didn’t take the glaringly obvious bait — instead murmuring something vague about my coming to his housemates’ Halloween party if they decided to have one. (Not exactly the way to jump at an opportunity, dude.)

And he was still chatting up the chickadees.

**

It wasn’t like I didn’t have other opportunities of my own; Ted simply wound up being my first choice. It had actually been a toss-up for first place between him and Tanner, but Tanner hadn’t been around much — and as gorgeous and lean and tattooed as he is, he just hasn’t yet developed that grownup-man-sexiness the less ostentatious and softer-bellied Ted possesses that drives me out of my feckless, everloving mind.

Even without Tanner, I still had other options, like earnest, puppylike Tim, who follows me around and grills me about my relationship status, ponytailed Chris, who wants to take me out tango dancing, and Denzel Washington lookalike Jamal, who calls me “my girl” and tells me daily how much he loves my beautiful smile. I was getting frustrated hanging out in limbo for Ted when I had a whole fan club of mostly younger men. Just the other day Derek, the sweet young ex-junkie who sits in the cube next to me, exclaimed (regarding my new haircut) “I love your hair like that! You’re so cute! You’re the hottest old lady I know!”

I ribbed him endlessly for the left-handed compliment, but he made my day. I felt completely enveloped and permeated by warmth and love for the rest of the day. That afternoon someone gave me a thousand dollars for the ACLU and five hundred for the DCCC.

That’s how it’s been happening. When joy saturates every corner of my being, things seem to take care of themselves.

**

Oh, but back to Ted. Our office had an election night party at a local pizzeria

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Tom Tancredo

…and I, after wine and pizza slices, had the strength to force the moment to its crisis.

I was inebriated; he was leaving. I walked him out. I told him how much I enjoyed being his friend, and that if that was all there was to it, that was fine with me…but that lately I had also had the overwhelming desire to kiss him.

He laughed heartily again and hugged me, visibly pleased, said he was flattered, but he had been seeing someone (it had been on and then off and was now on again) and that he should have told me before. I said yes he should have! I don’t want to waste my time! Then I told him about Jonathan. I said I didn’t know what portion of my feelings were affected by his resemblance to a dead man I should have loved. The guy hugged me four times before finally leaving. Real ones this time, not those noncommittal one-armed embraces he had been giving me where you barely touch.

I know for certain there is real affection there. I am also fairly certain that whomever Ted is after is fifteen years younger and fifteen pounds lighter (and possibly fifteen IQ points dumber) than me. He’s Holling Vincoeur, and wishing he were otherwise won’t make one whit of a difference. (I was just remembering the Northern Exposure episode where Shelly gets her nose all out of joint over her husband’s scintillating rapport with a female contemporary, an old friend with whom he stays up half the night talking and drinking. After trying to make similar topical conversation and failing miserably, she tearfully confronts him with her jealousy. He reassures her “Oh, honey…I don’t love you for your mind, Shelly, I love you for your body!”)

**

Things were a little awkward initially after that — I thought I would die the next day — but the familiar warmth returned quickly, and to an even greater degree. Soon we were discussing Buddhism and the Dalai Lama over the cubicle partition. At the kitchen table he appeared to be blushing. I don’t know what to make of that at this point. I love the goofy old bastard, quite honestly, and he still gives me butterflies, but I know better than to think I’m going to change him.

I’ve started letting Tim in a little more in the meantime. He’s a sweet if totally hyperactive brown-eyed blond, probably around 30, who reminds me of some of my early elementary school crushes. His attentiveness is almost baffling. Hopefully I can persuade him to shave the ill-conceived moustache, but even then, he seems a pretty certain source of devoted affection. And I’m tired of men who are as diffident as cats. Tim is a friendly puppy, wagging his tail, begging for a bone. Maybe I’ll give him one!

**
The nicest thing about being an “old lady” is that you’ve had time to learn the truism with which lesbian novelist Jeanette Winterson ended one of her books: no emotion is ever the final one. It’s this lesson that’s helping me ride the waves, which may be why I seem to be working with the current now instead of against it.