**

But before I follow up on that teaser of an opener, let me backtrack to the Occupation. As everyone knows by now, the “Occupy” protests have been happening in many major cities around the world, including my own, since late September. I’ve made a commitment to attend every Saturday rally and march. It isn’t wise or practical for me to try to camp out, but I otherwise support the Occupation in whatever way I can, whether it’s by waving at rush hour traffic alongside the sign-holders or bringing the food table a case of hot cocoa from the dollar store. This week, police in riot gear evicted people forcibly from the park with clubs, tear gas, and pepper spray, making dozens of arrests, confiscating sleeping bags and tarps, even destroying the food station with fire extinguishers. This violent crackdown has apparently been part of a coordinated national effort (according to the mayor of Oakland); the Wall Street occupiers have taken their case to court. I’m sure I could spend an entire post on what’s happening in my city and elsewhere, but there are plenty of savvy bloggers covering it already. This movement isn’t going away. And I’ve got smaller fish to fry at the moment…

I do feel badly for not camping out in the cold night after night like some of these intrepid kids, with my hyperactive bladder and my prodigious talent for creating pneumonia out of the simple head cold. Granted, I’m not nineteen anymore. I don’t have health insurance. But the limitless self-sacrifice and perfectionism bred into all good fundamentalist females nags at me that nothing short of dying of exposure for the cause is good enough. I feel guilty for sitting outside on my day off, enjoying the sunshine far from the Occupation, letting the rays work their magic on my moods. I feel guilty for not spending all my free waking hours with the dedicated core, who have been beaten and tear gassed and spent nights in jail. I feel guilty for using a good part of my time at the rallies scoping out the menfolk. Truth be told, I’ve learned to live on less than a shoestring and a prayer, and what I still want more than anything is to cherchez l’homme.

**

Apropos of that very issue, my biggest problem at the Saturday marches has not been police in riot gear. It’s been the problem of having to constantly dodge Eli. Every week, whether I come alone or am “shielded” by my activist friends (usually gay boyfriends like Greg or Danny), there he is, reappearing at every turn, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of people surround us.

Eli had called and emailed a couple of times since our unsavory little hiking expedition. I had not responded. “Don’t dignify him with a reply,” was the advice I received from friends both male and female. I didn’t know what to say, anyway. I couldn’t act as if everything were fine. And I really didn’t want to see him again, even if he had one of my favorite Tom Waits CDs. I didn’t want to have to attempt to explain myself, and face “who-me?” denial or supercilious condescension. Nor did I feel like inviting further unkindness about my ill-conceived drunken flirting.

It would all just be a repeat of the old and unhappy pattern I fall into, practically without fail, with very clever men who, when confronted with my intuitive or emotional grasp of a situation (especially one that may not reflect well upon them) have to pull out their semantic bag of tricks to demonstrate that they’re more “rational” and “objective” than I am — not to mention inarguably in the right. I don’t want play that tiresome, rigged game anymore. I’m done trying to date Dad. I’m OK letting Eli feel superior and right forever, if he wants; I just don’t want him around while he does it.

After one particularly obvious “dodge” at another Saturday march, he emailed me and said that since I hadn’t been responding, and seemed to not want to talk to him at Occupy, he had concluded that I didn’t feel like interacting right now. But he still needed to get my CD back to me.

After some thought, I wrote back:

That’s a fair enough assessment…

I dread ‘breaking up’ with friends, but it dawned upon me quite suddenly that our association has been a somewhat labored exercise in vanity. Yours and mine both. And life is simply too short to waste one’s time. (That’s a lesson I took, anyway, from the recent passing of a loved one.) If you’re looking for some further explanation, well, I don’t really feel like arguing about it. Which is why I postponed reply indefinitely.

I know I’m not such a big part of your life that you’ll miss me terribly much. I do miss my Tom Waits CD, though…you could just stick my name on it and drop it off to one of the dreaded hipster baristas at (the coffeehouse) the next time you’re in the neighborhood. I’m sure they’d get it back to me safely.

All of life is a series of experiments, no? Some of them work, some don’t. Cosi e la vita.

Eli did not reply. I was relieved.

But when I see him at the rallies now — he seems to make a point of stalking angrily by my friends and me — he shoots me the kind of stink-eye you’d typically only see coming from a wet cat who’d been thrown in the bath.

Surprisingly, I can live with that.

**

Thus ends the story of Eli. It was a rather lengthy dead-end street, but I guess I needed to follow it to its natural conclusion to see where it ended up.

Let’s move on to a tale Katherine Woodward Thomas tells in her book Calling In The One, which, as some of you know, I diligently workbooked my way through a year and a half ago in a concerted effort to be more relationship-ready.

Thomas’s client “Melissa” was a lesbian, but otherwise had a couple of essential things in common with me: she struggled with deep feelings of unworthiness, and she secretly feared that surrender to another person in love might mean surrender to control and even abuse. The latter was thanks to a frightening, domineering father; I got my love vs. control issues from both Mom and Dad and their nasty despot of a God.

Anyway, this was Melissa’s experience after working on her relationship blocks with Ms. Thomas:

As is often the case, the first several opportunities that Melissa encountered for romantic liaisons were again with people who were unavailable. One was an actress who was on her way out of town to do a play in another city, with an anticipated long run. The next was a smart and savvy bisexual woman who, it turned out, was still living with her ex-husband. The third, Alison, was the “woman of Melissa’s dreams.” She was everything that Melissa had hoped for — charismatic, bright, funny, spiritual, beautiful, and extremely accomplished. Unfortunately, Alison also happened to be in a long-term relationship with another woman, and together they were co-parenting a child. He was only five, and Alison made it clear that they were committed to living as a family unit until he graduated from high school. Talk about a no-win situation. I wish I could tell you that Melissa wasn’t tempted, but she was. It was agony for her to turn Alison down. But, after a few topsy-turvy weeks, turn her down she did. She made the difficult decision to avoid an avoidable drama, even if that meant that she would be alone in life. Two weeks after making this decision, Melissa met her partner, whom she considers to be the love of her life and her soul mate. Looking back, she now shudders to think how close she came to missing the opportunity to be with her mate, for what would surely have been another heartache and disappointment.

**

I guess you could say I’ve met my “Alison.”

Which, given this story, could be a good sign.

**

To return to the opening line: of course I know no one is “perfect.” The person to whom I refer is not even “perfect” in the way I used to define “perfect.” He’s not a scintillating graduate-level intellectual or committed progressive activist like Eli. He’s not a sculpted yoga god like Sonny who can quote the Dalai Lama while standing on his head. He makes the occasional very bad joke.

Our chemistry, however, was instantaneous and powerful, from the day he walked onto the call center floor three months ago. I felt like I’d been whacked upside the head by Cupid’s Louisville slugger. I didn’t know what hit me. And unlike nearly all the other men (save Sam) to whom I have traditionally been attracted, he makes me feel really, really good. He laughs heartily at my wisecracks, flushing red and showing a broad, irresistibly dimpled smile. He tells me I’m interesting/smart/awesome. He gets neither defensive nor aggressive about my diet, something I’ve come to expect from meat-eating men (cf. Herman Cain, “sissy pizza”). Nor does it seem to bother him one bit that I’ve read (insert intimidating philosopher here) and he hasn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t care less that he hasn’t read (insert intimidating philosopher here). The man seems wholly unthreatened by and is entirely respectful of me. I have nothing to battle or defend. This feels as strange, relaxing, and delicious as sliding into soft suede slippers after years of training one’s feet into hard, pointy pumps. Ahhhh.

Dan’s vocational passion in life is to build beautiful wooden furniture. He’s a master of his craft. His flawless pieces look like they should be sitting in the palatial homes featured in glossy style magazines. He even studied and apprenticed in Romania, his ancestral homeland. So yes, he’s another artist doing grunt work to pay the bills. (Next year he intends to start school to become a radiologist, which will pull in a better income.)

And no, he’s not another seductive, elusive tease like Ted, looking to snare groupies or score with pretty young things. He’s more like some big, friendly, handsome dog, a Labrador with his tail wagging, winning over the prickliest people with even-tempered bonhomie. The surly but essentially good-hearted old alcoholic who snarls at every newcomer chats him up amiably; even the hardcore lesbian feminist who criticizes almost everyone and everything finds him undeniably appealing. He seems to have absolutely no clue what a dreamboat he is (I think he resembles nothing so much as a proletarian American version of Colin Firth), which is totally refreshing after God’s various Gifts to Women, and makes him just that much more attractive. Dan belongs to my generation, so he remembers all the odd pop-culture ephemera from our childhood (e.g. the short-lived, silly TV series “The Greatest American Hero”) unlike our young cohorts. He loves to shop thrift stores. He digs my funky secondhand shoes.

But the real clincher is that he was raised by a fundamentalist mother and stepfather (!), so he knows right-wing Christian insanity intimately, from the inside — although it appears to have done him less damage than it did me. He’s not terribly interested in organized religion these days, but he’s not bitter. Long story short, it is very difficult not to fall in love with this guy. Madly. And in a tedious job where hours creep by like days, talking to Dan makes the hands of the clock fly.

He makes a point of mentioning his Asian-American wife, Mai, fairly frequently, as if to remind us both that he’s taken. His marriage appears to be harmonious; at the same time, our affinity is so strong even our hardcore lesbian coworker has noticed and commented on it. One of these days I need to inform Surly Alcoholic Stan (who is fond of me) that Dan is married — he seems at times to be trying to nudge me in Dan’s direction. I’m obviously not the only person who thinks we’d make a fine match.

It’s times like these that I almost wish we were renegade Mormons living in Idaho. That wouldn’t really work, though, because none of us want kids, and that’s the main justification for polygamy.

If Dan were my husband, however, I wouldn’t want to share him.

**

You-all don’t need to panic or get your knickers in a twist. You know me well enough to know that I have my own personal Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm.” I’m going to have to trust that the Right Thing is either just around the corner, as it was for Melissa, or that unforeseen events will dramatically change the current situation somehow, and let this become the Right Thing.

Dan has said, in a wholly unrelated conversation about his childhood, that he believes in Fate. I’ve always been an agnostic on the question (regardless of all the philosophers and theologians who have argued themselves blue in the face for centuries about it; let’s please not go there again). But say, for the sake of argument, that there were such a thing as Fate. I wonder, then: to what end would Dan enter my life at this precise moment in time? Ms. Thomas might say it’s a kind of test of my progress and resolve, like what Melissa went through with Alison. On the other hand, a romantically minded biographer of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (whose mantra is All’s Fair In Love And War) might disagree. You do, after all, hear stories about eventual couples who were married to other people when they met. It’s not unheard of. Many unpredictable things happen in life. Mai could have an affair with her coworker, and decide she wants to leave. Nearly half of all marriages don’t survive.

Unfortunately, I am neither omnipresent nor omniscient, and am forced to live my life forward, without 20/20 foresight. What I do know for sure is that whatever happens, it’s essential for me to hold to my own integrity. And have, dare I say it, a little faith.

It’s worth noting that I went through something like this once before, many years ago, with my dear friend Ben — and I (mostly) behaved myself. Ben was a brilliant Buddhist scholar with a wry sense of humor and impish blue eyes, and he was as fond of me as I was of him. He also married his fiancée, a warm and compassionate woman he loved, during the time that I knew him. I managed my feelings toward him pretty well, most likely because I didn’t feel as deprived around him as I did around the men I usually chased after. I felt loved, seen, and appreciated by Ben, and for that reason most of the time felt as if there were no significant lack. The only thing I ever felt I lacked, where he was concerned, was an intimate sexual relationship…on those nights when the gang would go out for beers and nachos, and I’d had a drink or two, I’d look across the table at him and feel a hopeless yearning (not to mention a wicked horniness). It was a bittersweet sort of ache, without the sharp edge of rejection that made my usual romantic obsessions so consistently and profoundly painful. I truly felt that if Ben could have been two people, he would have been with me too. Somehow that was a consolation.

**

It is heartening to meet someone wonderful, whom you find incredibly attractive, who also finds you wonderful and incredibly attractive. More often than not, I’ve wound up spending my time with an Eli or a Ted, someone who keeps me handy merely to stroke his ego while he chases other women. Once in a while there will be someone like Bart, the old college classmate who, despite my attempts to discourage him, cultivated a long-term crush on me, and recently announced that he was coming to town with his two daughters to scope out real estate. He wanted me to meet him and the girls. I nixed that meetup in genuine alarm. I was always slightly repelled by Bart, for reasons other than (or in addition to) his substantial girth. Possibly pheromones, possibly personality. But here I am, apologetically groping for acceptable reasons to refuse him.

And why should I? Sometimes I buy into that old double standard that women must look and act as alluring as possible (men being the visually oriented ones, after all), but must be able to “see past” a man’s slovenly exterior. The old Beauty and the Beast trap. And sometimes I resent that. There’s a voice (Mom?) that always whispers, “At least Bart likes you. You should take what you can get. The attractive ones are all jerks, anyway, who play around or think they’re better than you.” You may have heard this called conventional wisdom…

Meeting Dan gives me hope that the so-called conventional wisdom isn’t ironclad. Because, damn, the man is fine. He flips my switch like you wouldn’t believe. And he’s not a jerk. He’s not a player. He’s not aware enough of his own hotness to even think about being a player. I’ve seen pictures of his wife, and she’s not Zhang Ziyi.

Dan is an astoundingly modest man. Dan is an astoundingly attractive man. Dan thinks I’m astoundingly awesome just the way I am.

I sincerely hope that there’s another one out there just like him for me.

I realize I haven’t published anything in well over two months. I had my best friend from college visit me in July, and in the midst of that my little Mac iBook, the one I bought in 2006 with my grandmother’s money and took to Italy, finally bit the dust. With any luck (and some money I don’t currently have) I’ll be able to retrieve the hard drive data at some point. I lost the entirety of the post I’d been working on in June/July, but now I’m back in business with a Powerbook G4 (the same vintage as my iBook), which I obtained from our old coffeehouse buddy Dex for a hundred bucks.

The good news is that he left a whole cornucopia of music in the iTunes library for me, from classic jazz, salsa, and soul to newly minted alt-rock bands — including all kinds of indie hipster music I’d never even heard of. (I’m listening to Arthur & Yu as I write.) Dex may just make me cool yet. What’s more, I finally have MS Office, which means that creating documents (like resumes and cover letters) in my computer’s word processing program will no longer create obstacles or present major compatibility issues when it comes to prospective employers and writing gigs.

So at the end of the day I’m essentially better off than when I started.

Some adversities are blessings in disguise.

**

That statement could apply to all kinds of situations, as a matter of fact.

Oh, where to start? Anyone who took the time to read the comments thread on my May post knows that that cute little artist guy Nick turned out to be disconcertingly paranoid. Whether it was because of being alone in the studio all day to obsess upon his neighbor troubles, or because of the quantity of weed he was smoking every day, I have no idea, but I didn’t stick around to find out. He backed out of our dinner date, amid some rambling about being busy (did I mention that he also called himself “fucked up” and “out of my mind?”) – which I found to be an actual relief. I was sorry to see those sinewy arms go, but even I’m not willing to deal with a whole lotta crazy anymore. I’ve got my hands full maintaining my own mental health.

That’s the new policy: no more blank checks, no more extending limitless credit, no matter how tasty a guy is. (Or how smart or talented, for that matter.)

But that brings me to our old friend Eli.

**

Eli texted me right on schedule, wanting to get together for a drink. I was happy to hear from him after the letdown over Nick. After all this time, Eli was a free agent again. What might happen with us now?

In my last post, I framed Eli as a possible Mr. Darcy figure, someone who had caused me to revisit my initial impression of him as a curmudgeonly misanthrope and intellectual snob. I had become impressed, over time, with his attentiveness to his ailing mother and grandmother, and had been pleasantly surprised to hear that he had read Eckhart Tolle (without derision or irony). More recently, I had wondered if his renewed interest in world travel had been in any way prompted by my divulgence a while back that his commitment to staying in-state with his family had been something of a crush-deterrent.

So I was primed to explore the possibilities with Eli – short or long-term. I felt ready for anything. I arrived at the neighborhood bar (our favorite meeting place, owned by the same couple who owns my neighborhood coffeehouse), snagged us an outside table, and waited.

And waited. The tables filled up with the chattering happy-hour crowd. I began to wonder if Eli had forgotten. It wouldn’t be the first time – although the first time it happened, I reasoned that any busy person could forget a single date. (Not that I would ever forget about a drink with anyone who even remotely interested me romantically.)

Finally, after twenty-five minutes, I called him.

Indeed, he had forgotten. He was there within the half hour and was apologetic; I made his penance my second glass of wine. But I couldn’t shake the knawing thought that he found me so forgettable. So I drowned it in alcohol. Under the table, our knees were touching; looking at Eli’s model-worthy face in the fading twilight, I found myself thinking that even at his current heft, he was a damned handsome man. I was purring uninhibitedly about how I had often managed to “get my needs met” outside of relationships, and referring to how his ex had “starved” him. He was regarding me with an inscrutable (but what I thought was an interested) look. When he walked me home, he declined my offer to “see my apartment,” but I felt hopeful nonetheless. He had, at one point during the evening, proposed taking a day trip to the mountains next week, so I emailed him the following afternoon with my work schedule.

His reply, several days later, was brief to the point of curt, and seemed more like an evasion than a genuine excuse. He’d hit a curb, supposedly, and didn’t want to go anywhere until he got the car looked at. “Bummer,” he appended unconvincingly.

Disappointed by his anemic response, I replied: Well heck, Eli, if you changed your mind and don’t want to go, just say so! You don’t have to go and hurt your car!

I didn’t hear anything from him for three weeks.

**

At this point I guess I had to have been pretty clued in that I couldn’t (and shouldn’t) expect more than lukewarm ambivalence – at best – from Mr. Eli. (Whooee! More ambivalence! Be still my beating heart!) So why did I consent to go on a hike with him when he finally emailed me back? Well, for one thing, I was just so darn surprised that he got back to me at all. Two, I like going for hikes in the mountains. And three, I was still willing to extend him some credit, because of our two-year relationship, because I thought I might be wrong – like Elizabeth was about Darcy – and because, let’s face it, he’s a damned handsome man.

Without a real destination, we meandered along the mountain highway, through a number of old mining towns. Eli found it necessary to point out the old mine building, now a museum, where he and a girlfriend had had a quickie in the gift shop restroom. I didn’t know what to say to that. I certainly had no comparable bragging story. The precious little sexual intimacy I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime has generally taken place in the standard private locations. (Later I would remember a drunken handjob administered to Seamus while he drove down a major city boulevard, but at the moment, no such misadventure came to mind.)

Here I must observe that there’s something fundamentally unsexy about the way Eli talks about sex. It’s so detached and cerebral, he may as well be talking about a surgical procedure. I’ve encountered this phenomenon before among extremely well educated men; Erica Jong made no small fortune writing about it. The more these guys talk, the less you want to actually do anything with them; you sense that you’d feel like a bacterium under a glass slide, subject to only the most scientific scrutiny and analysis. Any shadow, any sparkle or sizzle conjured by the erotic imagination dissipates like a vapor under the bright fluorescent light of their droll and sophisticated reductionism. I didn’t have the words to name this at the time, I just knew I was the opposite of turned on.

But I digress. We finally arrived at the large lake adjacent to a popular ski resort and took the exit, driving along the lake’s edge until we found a trailhead. It was here, at the outset of our hike along a service road, that Eli decided to treat me to descriptive tales of all the fascinating women he’d been dating lately.

**

First he brought up the ever-so-interesting hipster chick with tattoos and piercings that he’s apparently been out with several times. And then there was the friend of his friend’s girlfriend, whom he was apparently successfully “vibe-ing off of” when they all went out together. But he still didn’t think either of these excellent ladies could hold a candle to the PhD in Economics from Italy (yes, you heard me right) who had given him “butterflies…for the first time in a long time.”

Oh. Is that so?

He definitely wanted to see this femme fatale again (“this could really BE something”) but couldn’t figure out what or how much he should tell Tattoo Girl. What should he do? Any advice?

Such a dilemma. I feel for you, pal. Fuck you very much.

I could feel the tips of my ears burning, the way they had so many times before when it dawned upon me, terribly, how low my status actually was in a romantic or sexual interest’s romantic or sexual ranking. I was being given the buddy treatment, yet again. As if there were nothing of any interest to him whatsoever between my legs. As if I were some benign, neutered being — a maiden aunt, an elderly nun.

That’s surely the coward’s answer to unwelcome sexual interest from a friend: waxing enthusiastic, passive-aggressively, about the people who actually excite you. I know, because I used it myself in high school on the unfortunate Jerry Baines. I don’t use it anymore. It’s really an adolescent tactic, as disrespectful as it is immature. And disappointing to see in adults.

But it did show me, once again, and very starkly, that side of Eli I had glimpsed in the beginning that had turned me away: that ruthless ranking of people on a narrow worthiness scale of his own invention, the personal vanity that brings with it a sense of entitlement to minor offhand cruelties. I had been here before. Déjà vu.

I feigned nonchalance for the rest of the hike, refusing to betray any inkling of humiliation. But my balloon had burst. The rage would come later.

**

It’s been difficult not to slide back into the depression that dogged me for years: that helpless, hopeless feeling that the relationship I’ve longed for my whole life is out of reach, that I am constitutionally incapable of drawing in or holding onto mutual love and attraction.

It was hard to get out of bed the week following my excursion with Eli. Not because I missed him personally and wanted to be with him – he had shown me some true colors, and they weren’t pretty – but because I’d invested (and wasted) so much time believing there might be something, someday, between us. In retrospect I don’t know if I’d have met him for drinks so often if he weren’t so bloody good-looking and clever – an “objective” catch. To be honest, I get ten times more enjoyment and emotional sustenance out of coffee with Greg or even just an email conversation with my best friend from college.

I picked up Calling In The One again, to find I had bookmarked a certain page:

Our fantasy is that, once we see our pattern clearly and make a definite decision to do things differently, our external world will begin to change immediately. In lieu of meeting yet another unavailable person, we will suddenly begin meeting only available people who are ready to make a commitment. Instead of meeting more mean and abusive people, we will suddenly begin attracting kind and gentle souls who offer nothing but love and encouragement. This is rarely the case. What is more likely to happen is that, instead of immediately attracting a whole new kind of person into our lives, we find ourselves attracting exactly the same kind of person, or a person who at first appears to be different but isn’t really. (Emphasis mine.) We are challenged with temptations that are similar to the ones we have faced in the past. Only this time we’re wiser. This time we know exactly where a particular path will lead. We must make the more difficult choice by saying no to the enticement of doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results. We must choose to remain empty-handed rather than settle for repeating past mistakes. This temptation will generally happen not just once, not just twice, but usually several times. It’s as though the universe is testing us –are you truly finished replicating the familiar and known? Have you really given up the need to prove that you aren’t worthy of love? Are you willing to stand in the void rather than compromise yourself again?

Now there’s the million-dollar question. It’s not exactly my choice to remain empty-handed (the choice seems to have been made for me), but my usual M.O. is to go running after the person who has thrown all manner of ambivalence and even humiliation in my direction, in the misguided belief that I can somehow win him over this time. “Doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results.”

Part of the pattern is, of course, to put the most generous possible spin on everything, no matter how unlikely it is. Eli is a busy guy…so busy that he forgets dates (would he ever forget Miss Italy 2011?) and is incommunicado for weeks at a time. He really was worried about the effect bumping into a curb would have on the car. His boast about the gift shop was actually an ill-conceived attempt to seduce me. And he talked about all those other women to…to…well, to impress me, of course – in some weird, counterintuitive way – or perhaps to make me jealous. Yeah. Because that’s just how clueless Eli is when it comes to women. Sure, that’s it. Gee, poor Eli. I’d better give him another chance

The difference now is that I can actually step back and ask myself: Why the hell do I even want Eli? Why would I want someone who thought it necessary to communicate with me in such an indirect and potentially hurtful manner, for whatever reason? Why would I want to be an easily forgotten item on his to-do list? Why would I want to subject myself to further comparisons to ostensibly more accomplished, exotic, attractive women?

Eli and I had talked in the car about Obama’s “framing” problem – that he accepts uncritically the terms the Republicans set out for him when it comes to the debt, taxes, government spending, etc. I could add here that I don’t want to be continually subject to Eli’s ways of framing things: his hierarchical ranking of people according to their surface merits, his emphasis on intellect and academic achievement, his cerebral de-eroticizing of sex. I find his “frames” quite frankly depressing. This is not what I want. This is what I thought I wanted in 1986.

**

Those origami love-cranes still hang from the “love and relationships” corner of my apartment. I lay across my bed for a while on Sunday afternoon, watching them twirl in the apartment’s cross-breeze, searching for some handle on the sadness I felt.

The choice not to do the same thing over again: surely that’s the beginning of change. What Katherine Woodward Thomas called “standing in the void” is simply refusing to repeat history, and waiting, unoccupied, in the quiet faith that there will be something else. Faith is hard for me – for obvious reasons – but I do already have one experience of “something else.”

What I can’t help but wonder is whether it would behoove me to broaden my search parameters – not just beyond the borders of city or state, but beyond the borders of country. I just found out from a mutual friend that Tony DeRocca (the surly music critic about whom I obsessed for three years) wound up in Sweden after meeting his mate online.

I wonder which site he used? Internet dating got me 50 first dates and an unstable Pole. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should turn my efforts toward pursuing my secondary dream in order to facilitate my primary one.

**

Here are some interesting recent synchronicities, to that end:

I run into the ex of an old bookstore friend at my neighborhood coffeehouse. He urges me to get in touch with Melanie, who now lives elsewhere, via Facebook. I locate her easily, and we exchange a number of affectionate catch-up messages. I happen to mention my dream of living in Europe, and how much I miss Italy. She turns me on to the United World Colleges, whose pre-university program teaches its students socially conscious, ecologically minded, hands-on engagement with the world around them. At one time she had explored teaching there. The program sounds like something I could definitely get behind. What’s more, the UWC has a Duino campus – where Rilke wrote his famous Elegies – and when I view its campus on the Web site, perched on a high cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, I gasp audibly. I ask Melanie for more information about her experience, and she puts me in touch with an Italian alum she worked with in DC.

Yesterday I’m at a different neighborhood coffee bar using their Internet. The owner has donated some tattered books from his personal library to a bookshelf beside my table. I notice that the one on top is a beginning Italian (college-level) textbook. Excited, I ask the barista if I can borrow it, and she can see no reason why not since I live nearby. I bring it home immediately and am inordinately delighted to sit in my kitchen re-learning Italian vocabulary over dinner and pronouncing the lilting words out loud. Ah-bah-STAN-zah BEH-neh. Pretty good. The language itself makes me happy. It fills my tongue, to borrow from Rilke, like a beautiful fruit. I’ve missed speaking it.

Once more I feel as if, in some small way, I am taking steps toward the life I envision. And you know how I love those swarthy brown-eyed brunets.

I began my last post writing about the news of Iris’s passing and the course-altering impact it had on me. It was only because of her that I began working my way through the book at all. This month I was confronted with the untimely deaths of not one but two wonderful young men under the age of thirty. One was the son of my friend Peg from work. He and I had never met, but she always spoke of him with glowing pride, and as if they were best friends. Kirby was an accomplished exhibition skydiver, killed when a practice landing went wrong. He was all of 27.

The other was the son of Lynn, a woman from whom I rented a room eight years ago when I needed to escape from my apartment (situated over two ex-cons who fought loudly and violently). I lived for a year with Lynn and her then-teenage son in a small two-story 1930s house in West City Park. Lynn ran an almost entirely sustainable household: we recycled everything, flushed sparingly, composted, and hung our wash out to dry. Her son Mike was a tousle-haired, good-looking blue-eyed boy with an easygoing and affable manner. He provided a welcome counterpoint to his mom, who could be anxious and high-strung. Unfailingly polite and even-tempered, at sixteen he looked and acted years older. When we met for the first time, I think we were both a little taken aback and even a touch infatuated; there was a shyness and a subtle embarrassment between us as we shook hands and made conversation. Later we would become familiar and comfortable with each other, watching DVDs and eating our respective dinners on the living room couch. We both became addicted to the first season of 24, making dates to watch this or that episode together when he was home.

So it was a cold shock to hear that Mike, now 23 (the same age as Sam, I realized with an odd feeling), had suffered a massive asthma attack while working on a remote farm in New Mexico, miles from a hospital, and had not reached adequate help in time. It can’t be, I thought. Not Mike. Not Lynn’s beautiful blue-eyed boy.

**

But it was true. It was all true. And I attended two memorial services in the span of just two weeks.

Both of which were strikingly similar — and unexpectedly celebratory. Both featured slide shows set to music and abundant anecdotes supplied by friends and relatives. More impressively, what emerged about both Kirby and Mike was that they were tremendously admired by their friends, family, and peers as leaders who pursued their passions courageously and encouraged others to do the same. Kirby jumped out of airplanes on a weekly basis; Mike rode rapids, hiked mountains, and traveled out of the country alone at the age of eighteen. Laughter competed with tears as participants told hilarious tales of one-liners and pranks perpetrated by each of these mischievous boys. It occurred to me that Kirby and Mike would probably have liked each other very much.

More than ever, I was reminded of the old carpe diem, seize the day. “I’d rather die in the pursuit of my dreams than live without them,” I told a work friend after Kirby’s service. Even if I never get where I want to go, I have to believe that I’m moving toward it. I have to keep taking small steps every day, or at least every week. The black cloud of depression that used to engulf me held within it a sense of just biding time until the end, of having given up hope. It was while living with Lynn and Mike, full of despair one night about my poverty and my lack of achievement  — feeling stuck in my dead-end job, living in someone else’s house — that I very nearly downed a cocktail of painkillers and muscle relaxants. It may have been my lowest point in a twenty-five-year period of low points. (Mike was a bright spot in that dark time.)

Cynics would say I’m fooling myself in order to feel better…but which is preferable, honestly?

**

Self-belief and courage are more than half the battle, or so saith Julia Cameron. Through The Artist’s Way (and thanks to another departed friend with a zest for life, Iris) I am in the process of recovering both. As our astute friend from Down Under predicted I might, I have been further distancing myself from my family of origin in an act of (artistic) self-preservation. My “morning pages” — the three pages I now write every morning without fail — have revealed the extent to which I’ve let the dread of their inevitable disapproval thwart my every aspiration. (A mock article in The Onion perfectly encapsulated my adult life rather pathetically with the headline “Man Waiting Until Parents Die Before Doing A Single Thing That Makes Him Happy.” It may sound like a gross exaggeration, but it was one more harsh wake-up call. My chronic underachievement and chronic singlehood do keep me under their radar.)

Another thing that has come up again and again in my morning pages is rage toward my mother, much of it having to do with the shame I inherited from her regarding my sexuality, particularly my decidedly robust appetite for men. Watching Black Swan, I both laughed and shuddered with recognition at Nina’s frilly little-girly bedroom, full of dolls and stuffed animals. My mother, like the unhinged Barbara Hershey character, would have loved to keep me in that room, metaphorically speaking, for the rest of my natural life. “What happened to my sweet girl?” I will love Darren Aronofsky forever for understanding the infantilizing that young women endure at the hands of overprotective and/or religious mothers, the parental (and sometimes cultural) mandate to remain thin-blooded Virgins at the expense of their vital, juicy Whores.

**

Now that I’ve mentioned both the phrase carpe diem and my robust appetites, I suppose it’s only natural that I should arrive at one of my favorite subjects: men, and my ongoing quest for The One. Because a great deal has been happening there as well.

I might start off by mentioning that one of my Artist’s Way activities (and quite possibly my favorite to date) was to make a “dream collage.” Using travel and lifestyle magazines purchased from a nearby thrift store, I cut out dozens of photos, including pictures of gorgeous sunny places in Europe and on the Mediterranean, happy couples (including an appealing man feeding a normal-sized woman in a disheveled bed), a woman meditating by the sea, another woman riding a bicycle in France, and of course some seriously tasty men (including a wryly smiling Johnny Depp). Most of the men were anonymous models from the pages of a Details fashion spread; I didn’t recognize them. When they were all arranged in a visually pleasing manner on a black posterboard, I sighed contentedly. The images gave me joy. And hope.

Around that same time I found myself wondering how my old friend Eli, the beautiful doctoral grad student, was doing — and whether he was still with that visually impaired girlfriend of his or not. Things had not been going well for them when I’d seen him several months ago. They were fighting; she wasn’t meeting his needs, if you know what I mean; he had gained quite a bit of weight in his lower body. He was wearing his straight brown hair long and pulled into a slick ponytail, which with the added bootyliciousness made him decidedly less attractive to me (although he still had “such a pretty face,” as they often say about heavier women patronizingly). Thinking of him now, I considered whether, even in his more hefty state, I might possibly offer him some relief…if Jessica had finally driven him away by continuing to starve him of what he was really hungry for. I did care about him, after all, and he was still far from unattractive. Even if he weren’t the One, I might be okay with some good old-fashioned friendly tomfoolery. I had needs, too. I proceeded to entertain a few possible scenarios in my head.

Exactly two days later I got a text from Eli out of the blue. “I was just wondering how you were. Want to meet for lunch this week?”

He always does this. I don’t know how he knows.

**

We set a date for Friday noon. On Monday, for my weekly “artist date,” I dressed up in a special-occasion velvet top and matching scarf just for the hell of it, and walked down to my old neighborhood to check out an art gallery I’d never visited. When I tried the door, it was locked. Walking away down the street, I heard someone call out after me. “Hey!”

A wiry brunet with disheveled hair, roughly my age, was grinning at me from the doorway. He had big sleepy brown eyes and a scruffy beard and was dressed in a holey, paint-spattered sweatshirt and jeans. His look fell somewhere between “homeless” and “adorable.” I turned back and came into the gallery.

The artist’s name was Nick, and he was clearly a gifted painter. His large acrylic canvases were abstract and expressionistic, layering a variety of brushstrokes in a skilled interplay of color and form reminiscent of de Kooning. I knew Greg, my GBF (gay boyfriend), a talented abstract painter himself, would love them. I wound up talking to Nick for almost two hours. He had been living very much on the edge lately, having no other means of income, but seemed utterly confident that he was going to make it. He mentioned that he was also a writer, so I wound up divulging my own artistic aspirations. He showed me some of the paintings he had in back, and was floored when I mentioned Jesus at the wedding in Cana while viewing a painting he hadn’t yet told me featured the Sangre de Christo (Blood of Christ) mountains.

The whole space was practically vibrating with a sort of breathless and intoxicated energy. I found myself giggling a lot. Nick kept apologizing for talking too much, and said that I had a way of drawing him out. My eyes darted surreptitiously over his spare, compact frame when he looked away; he was just the sort of lean, hard, and veiny that makes my mouth water. I wanted to just sink my teeth into him, devour him on the spot. (My “scenarios” that night certainly didn’t lack for excitement.)

When I brought Greg back with me the following week (and yes, he did love those paintings), he was abruptly called away by a friend with a broken leg who needed assistance. Nick and I were left alone for about an hour. “Is he your boyfriend?” Nick asked, as if he dreaded the answer.

I could have danced for joy at the tone and the nature of the question. For once in my life, I could tell a guy I actually liked was interested! I was more than happy to inform him that Greg was gay and my best friend.

Greg called me from the car while Nick and I were talking — I didn’t hear the phone ring — and left me a message that made me laugh uproariously in front of Nick. “I’m on my way back now,” he said, “unless you two are having sex.” I didn’t tell Nick why I was doubled over. He looked a little crestfallen.

I haven’t been back to see Nick since that night, but I friended him on Facebook. I don’t think either he or the gallery has a phone; he’s that poor. If I want to see him, I have to go over there. And as I mentioned, I’ve had other things going on…

**

Eli and I met at my favorite nearby Thai restaurant. Walking in the door, I spotted him — his fine hair shorn to a far more flattering length, a day’s stubble on his face. He looked a lot sexier than last time, if still uncharacteristically thick.

Eli had two big pieces of news: first, that he had given up on his history Ph.D, and quit his ten-year amended and revised (and at this point loathed) dissertation. Second, that he was finished with Jessica. The relationship was good and dead. The love was gone, and they both knew it. He hadn’t officially ended it yet, however, because he still had “a lot of projects to finish around the house.”

Eli didn’t understand why this made me erupt into helpless laughter. He looked almost wounded until I explained that I found his sense of responsibility unbelievable. He had already filled me in on his current “job” taking care of his elderly grandmother, for which his family offered to pay — offending him in the process. He didn’t see why he should be paid for doing something he was already glad to do for his family. (Do you recall my mentioning that he also looks after his disabled mother?) Honestly, Eli is like no man I’ve ever met. He’s a caretaker, effortlessly assuming the role traditionally expected of the women in a family (on pain of being considered “selfish” otherwise). Of course I didn’t know any of this about him last year, when I jumped to conclude that he was exactly the kind of arrogant misanthrope I knew all too well.

Over Pad Thai and Panang curry, I listened while Eli further unburdened himself. He was having a crisis about having to enter the “real world” job market now and find some soul-crushing administrative or customer service position he really didn’t want. I argued on behalf of creative entrepreneurship and unconventional vocations; Eli felt he had to make decent money “because I want to travel.” This revelation made me pause for a second. No, he still wants to live here, I told myself. His family is here. He was very clear about that. Aloud, I maintained that there were all kinds of ways to travel on the cheap, and reminded him about my stay at Centro.

Toward the end of the meal I started talking more about my own life, actually gushing a bit (as is my wont these days) about my sunnier lease on life since the twenty-five-year cloud cover lifted — how learning to practice the art of simple presence and silence the torturous mental chatter had been so instrumental to my healing.

“Now you sound like Eckhart Tolle,” said Eli with a smile.

“You’ve read Tolle?” I gasped.

He had. In Cairo, during grad school. He had been in the midst of a painful breakup and undergoing chemotherapy (did I mention Eli successfully fought cancer, in his 20s, in a foreign country?) when he picked up a copy of Practicing the Power of Now at an English-language bookstore. And he began to try to practice it. “I got to the point where I did have these moments of incredibly vivid perception and clarity,” he recalled. “I remember gazing at something purple, and having nothing in mind but this really amazing…purple.” He chuckled. “It was like being on drugs or something.”

Privately picking my jaw up off the floor, I mused that I was beginning to feel like a Jane Austen character. Could this diffident skeptic who seemed so prickly and elitist at first blush (and whom I had written off a year ago, for all of Elizabeth Bennet’s reasons) be my Mr. Darcy, after all?

**

We parted ways with a customary noncommittal and platonic hug that gave no intimation of what more intimate contact might feel like. Shortly thereafter, I met up with Greg at our favorite coffeehouse for an impromptu debrief, and he came up with a brilliant unconventional career for Eli: leading history tours abroad. Greg’s roommate had gone on such a tour; apparently there was good money to be made at it. It sounded perfect: what a great way to combine Eli’s love of history, travel, and teaching with his foreign language skills! “And you could go along, of course,” Greg joked with an implicit wink and a nudge. Probably already envisioning our wedding. How I do love Greg. He’ll say out loud things I haven’t yet dared to think. It’s wonderful to have a friend who can both read your mind and be one hundred percent on your side. (Not to mention switch gears on short notice.)

A few days later I finally got around to buying a glue stick to affix those magazine images to the posterboard permanently. As I was pasting up photos of Rome and Sardinia and Athos and couples strolling in the surf, I reached for one of the male models, an intense-looking brunet with penetrating blue eyes and seductively parted lips. Looking at him again as if for the first time, I stopped dead. And then erupted into incredulous laughter.

Who do you suppose he looked like?

**

Eli and I exchanged a few emails in the days after that. In my last message, I informed him of Greg’s brilliant idea, and added, “If you like that, wait’ll you hear about my foolproof fitness plan.”

It was a teaser, and I feared he might have taken it the wrong way when I hadn’t heard back from him in almost three weeks. Was he affronted by my suggestion that he needed a fitness plan, or did he grasp the hidden innuendo and decide not to pursue it? Did he even think of me that way?

**

The morning after I finished writing all of this, I received an email from Eli. He had just unearthed an earlier message from me that had gotten buried in his spam folder. He apologized for not responding and asked me how I was doing. He must never have gotten the email about Greg’s Wonderful Plan For His Life either.

I don’t know what to do now, especially now that my schedule has settled down and I have time to visit Nick or turn more attention to Eli. I guess the risk you take with every choice or action — the risk I try to avoid — is making a mistake. But what’s the alternative? Stay in my room like a hermit? I’ve been there and done that. I have the spirits of two bold, adventurous young men haunting me with carpe diems…and two men who are very much alive prompting me to step out.

Contemplating my years of solitude and monastic simplicity, I was reminded of a Rumi poem I love, which reads very differently to me at this particular moment:

Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who’s not himself
longed for by anyone else.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live.

Mark had left almost five years ago (shortly before my own trip to Italy) to teach yoga and practice massage therapy at a spa on one of the Greek Isles. Now he was back in town, and teaching at a new community studio. Excitedly I contacted Iris’ husband (a Facebook friend who was never on Facebook) so he could let Iris know about Mark. I hadn’t seen either of them in more than two years.

Iris’ husband sadly informed me that she had died of lymphoma last summer, after a battle that lasted only a matter of months.

**

I was devastated. Iris had been a source of inspiration to me. She was a vibrantly alive woman in her middle years, a lover of yoga, a maker of delicate, ethereal collages that she showcased in local galleries and venues, a teacher and advocate for educational nonprofits, and a woman madly in love with her husband of thirty years. “I want to be you when I grow up!” I gushed to her at the last art opening I attended.

It seemed so unlikely (not to mention unfair) that she should be gone, just like that.

Mourning Iris with a mutual friend, I heard about how Iris used to station herself at a table in a neighborhood coffeehouse with her journal and a copy of The Artist’s Way. Iris had apparently worked her way through its program. I knew the book well; we could barely keep it on the shelf at the bookstore back in the early 90s when it first came out. Snob that I was, I had always thought it somehow coarse and common. As if any old Joe or Josephine could be an artist! A real artist wouldn’t need someone else’s self-help workbook. The very idea!

Nearly twenty years later, remembering Iris’s utter lack of pretentiousness and her unmistakable fulfillment as both an artist and woman, on the heels of her death (which came far too soon), I thought about my own stuck-ness as an artist. I thought about my age and about how many more years I might have to make my own dreams come true. I thought, maybe I need to take another look at that book.

**

I am now on Week Four of The Artist’s Way. And so far it’s been a very interesting process. My dreams have become more vivid, memorable, even lucid (including one featuring Tony DeRocca the surly music critic, in which I realized I was dreaming my past). I have discovered new sources of inspiration and encouragement. Much of what has happened to me lately has seemed to flow together as a coherent whole rather than a series of disjointed and unrelated events. Even my fundraising numbers have improved. But the most palpable positive effect is that it has restored my sense of possibility.

I have also had some issues — which have threatened to turn into major obstacles — with Julia Cameron’s beliefs and her way of expressing them. But I’ll discuss that matter presently.

I should also mention that I quit the free dating site. For now, at least. I’ve rethought and rebuilt the profile I want to have, most likely on a paid site like Match. The facetious profile I had on the free site may have been entertaining, but it wasn’t helping me find Mr. Right. It was helping me find emotionally unbalanced European scientists, and the occasional married man. (My last chat-buddy mentioned his martial status right before we were going to make a coffee date. “Does that kill it for me?” he asked sheepishly. Uh, kind of.)

**

In the hours before I received that final, unhinged message from Jacek, the Polish chemist, I took myself to one of Mark’s new yoga classes at the community studio.

I had been feeling misaligned and achy, my hip and shoulder out of whack the way they have been on and off for the three-odd years I haven’t had a real health care provider. Brainstorming possible “artist dates” with myself (an exercise from the book), I had found myself wishing I could go get a massage, but a yoga class drop-in fee was already a stretch at $12. I knew that one of Mark’s classes would be good for whatever ailed me. One of his adjustments alone felt like a miraculous laying on of hands.

I arrived to find Mark standing alone in the room, gazing out the window at the street below. No one else had come. He came toward me with arms spread as wide as his smile.

When I say Mark is one of the most beautiful men I know, I mean that the way he inhabits a room and speaks to his students makes him that way. I’m not a fan of extremely tall men (a strike against the chemist); I’m certainly not attracted to bald men (Dad); I almost always prefer brown-eyed brunettes (my brother John). But I’d bet good money that one class with Mark is enough for a woman of any age or orientation to develop at least a mild crush on him. It’s hard to describe how he manages to project an atmosphere of total safety and utmost care into a room as he intones “gentle breath…easy breath” in his resonant baritone. I’ve run into my share of men who tried to pose as enlightened, sensitive New Age yoga gurus, who were given away by a celebrity-sized self-absorption. Mark is genuine.

Sitting cross-legged on the mat, I mentioned the discomfort in my hip. Mark started asking me a series of questions about the discomfort I was feeling there, and then about the pain I referred to in my lower back and my shoulder.

Instead of leading me in the class he’d prepared, Mark had me lie down on the mat and proceeded to give me what amounted to an hour of Thai massage. He was the consummate professional, of course, and I was in bliss. The touch of his strong, gentle healer’s fingers was enough to make me nearly weep with gratitude; I wanted to curl up like a newly hatched chick in one of his large hands. It’s a helluva thing to let yourself be completely vulnerable and in need of help with a man who heals you rather than hurts, diminishes or exploits you, whose only aim is to restore you to a sense of wholeness.

I found myself telling him about my years of depression, the intense agoraphobia and anxiety I had lived through four years ago, and about how Eckhart Tolle’s writings on the mind were the first to break through the leaden walls of my private hell. Mark divulged his own unhappiness upon returning to the States several months ago, fiercely resisting his circumstances. It had taken him a while to quit making himself miserable by wishing things were otherwise. (He had had to return to the States, or risk deportation.) This spontaneous intimacy didn’t feel any more dangerous than letting Mark put his hands on me.

**

I was still glowing from the session with Mark when I came home and found the email from Jacek in my inbox.

I was unprepared for the crazy tale of rage, betrayal, incarceration and general chaos he told, which made my blood pressure surge after all that rapturous relaxation. For brevity’s (and privacy’s) sake, I will only say that the man had done a couple of stints of hard time, and had been legally barred from seeing his ex-wife or their children — in his telling, because his wife was a “frigid monster” who wanted all of his money, and not by any fault of his own. According to Jacek, he was the greatly aggrieved victim in the story, the so-called innocent abroad, with no responsibility whatsoever for his heinous fate, and the American justice system was corrupt, and the damage to the kitchen (evidence of his violence) was negligible, and the bitch set him up, and that “Nigger judge” put him away.

Any credibility his rather incredible version of events might have had was pretty much undermined by the outrageous racial slur.

Well, that and the egomaniacal bloviating in his preamble, where he insisted that before he was so tragically framed, women like me would be lining up to date his handsome, successful catch of a self. (Please, Jacek. I didn’t even find you that attractive. I just was just trying to be fair.)

I did reply. First I told him that if the story were, in fact, exactly as he told it, I was sorry he had endured such an ordeal. However, I added, we are still responsible for whom we choose as partners — which is one reason why I was being so selective. My poor choices in men had led to a great deal of suffering for me in the past, “although not to jail.” But my last paragraph was where I really stuck it to him.

I told him that “the last guy I dated” (Jamal, and I know that’s a stretch) was an intelligent and creative black man who didn’t have all the trappings of external success, but who had a great deal of personal integrity. I wrote that he might have said “Well, Jacek, now you know what living in America is like for a ‘nigger.’”

In other words: Take that, you narcissistic racist asshole. (I wonder if he even got it. I have severe doubts about his level of self-awareness.)

**

Such madness could not have been better juxtaposed with its antithesis in the space of a single day. What have I been talking about? Moving away from crazymakers, emotional batterers, mental gladiators, and the emotionally illiterate and moving toward men who might actually enhance my newly recovered sense of well-being and wholeness. I could not have written a more marked contrast as fiction.

The crux of what I have been groping toward rather ineptly in these past few posts was partially brought into focus by Tom Shadyac, the director of such crowdpleasing hits as “Ace Ventura” and “Bruce Almighty.” An unlikely source, for sure, but the man underwent a sort of personal epiphany after suffering a traumatic head injury that for a time made everyday living pure hell and had him praying for the sweet release of death. He did recover, finally, and went on to make a film entitled “I Am” — which will probably not have one tenth the distribution or one hundredth the audience of his other films. In it, he asks the question: What is wrong with our world?

The answer he pieces together, through interviewing sources as disparate as biologists, Howard Zinn and Desmond Tutu, is that we have been living within a destructive paradigm based in erroneous assumptions about the natural world and our own psychological makeup. The depression with which I (and so many Westerners) have wrestled is a wholly understandable symptom of a culture that promotes separation, loneliness, competition, and selfishness, thanks to a willful misreading of Darwin (giving his “survival of the fittest” idea a larger significance the author never intended, and ignoring all of the symbiosis and cooperation in nature) as well as a macroscopic pre-atomic view of physics (that objects act and are acted upon, but are not intimately interactive). It’s an antiquated Industrial-age model of the world, in which isolated individuals, islands unto themselves, act in ferocious opposition to one another in the scramble to amass scarce resources, rather than belong to a community whose health is integral to their own well-being. The director points out that in early indigenous cultures, taking much more than one needs at the expense of others was viewed as a sign of mental illness. (When our body’s cells do this, we call it cancer.)

This outdated paradigm informs the way we in the West think and behave, the assumptions we make about reality. Including our fashionably alienated postmodern intellectuals, who are nothing if not islands unto themselves. I was trying (and probably failing) to contribute to an online discussion recently — begun by one of our favorite cynics — about the ostensible elusiveness of happiness. Here’s a clear difference between Eastern and Western approaches: as far back as the Greeks, we were asking: Is happiness possible? without ever once addressing the hidden psychological and subjective underpinnings of our premises and our subsequent reasoning. We strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. It finally took William James, hundreds of years later, to suggest that such factors might actually have an effect on the way we think about things. Whereas the Buddhists have been asking for thousands of years: What is the cause of suffering?

They were way ahead of us. They started on the inside. They recognized how the mind’s existing narratives themselves can perpetuate misery, and strove (through meditation) to quiet that chatter and bring awareness into the present moment, in order to see more clearly. My former therapist used to say “beliefs are like wearing a glove to touch the Beloved.” (She could just as easily have substituted the word “philosophies.”) We get so insulated inside our brains, our versions of reality, that we no longer even touch the world around us.

I can’t even begin to describe the difference between a walk in the park while completely present with a clear mind vs. a walk in the park while chewing on the pain of my past or obsessing about the future. The former used to be a complete impossibility for me; at best, I could only hope to distract myself from the latter. And not very effectively.

So I guess you could say I want a partner who can really walk with me in the park.

**

As glad as I am to be working my way through The Artist’s Way, I’m currently having trouble with the author’s liberal use of the G-word. Julia Cameron is apparently a big believer in a helpful Creator. Now when I reframe this (as she suggests early on, for the atheist or agnostic) and consider that what I’m trying to tap into could also be described as my own creative unconscious, or possibly the collective unconscious, or even some kind of “spooky action at a distance” (to steal from Einstein), I’m fine with it. But I don’t think Julia realizes that for those of us who have been utterly traumatized by fundamentalist religion, when she uses the word “God” she may as well be saying “your rapist.”

In fact, while doing an exercise that involved identifying enemies of my creative self-worth, in addition to my mother (with her horror of my sexual curiosity and stories) and Jeannie (with her refusal to understand or respect why I didn’t want to sacrifice great swaths of time and energy to jobs that would drain away all my energy), I wrote down “the God of the Born-Agains.”

In that punitive parent’s universe, after all, initiative is crushed because you might do or write the “wrong” thing. Everything you might so much as think is subject to a line-by-line analysis according to the apostle Paul’s (or whomever’s) principles of purity and righteousness (with the critical Deity looking over his shoulder, frowning like a humorless deacon in his Sunday suit). There’s even that oft-cited verse in Genesis that talks about the imagination of man being evil from his youth. The message is clear: Watch yourself! It’s no mystery, then, why today’s “Christian” art is so bad.

So I wish she had understood that for some recovering artists like me, talk of “God,” with all its oppressive churchy connotations, can be damn near intolerable. For some reason those religions that speak of a more impersonal and somehow grander God-concept, something not even remotely anthropomorphized, don’t bother me much. Her use of the term, however, is just too close to that big-daddy-in-the-sky idea. The personification that taught some of us to associate “love” with subjugation, capricious punishment, invisibility, and shame…and drove our creative impulses underground. I have a feeling that if Julia had understood all of this, she might have chosen her words a little differently.

As it is, I do my best to work my way around the language. I know that the “trust” that she speaks of cultivating is that same trust in “invisible help” that David Whyte talks about, which he doesn’t associate with a personal deity but with the happy serendipities of a life lived intentionally from the root of one’s being. It may simply be that when one is alert — as our German friend has often noted — the opportunities are more apparent. Or we may even attract them to us, for reasons we don’t fully understand.

Perhaps my greatest objection is simply to the author’s certainty about things that no one is certain about. This bothers me in anyone, be it those who insist there can be absolutely nothing other than the material world (which is not exactly material, when you get right down to it) to those who insist there is one big God and his name is Jehovah and he’s coming to get you.

**

One of the things I’m putting in my profile is that I’m looking for someone who “believes in no god and every god.” That should vet both the fundamentalist fanatics and the Dawkins-style all-religion-must-die atheists, and just possibly find me somebody who recognizes the value in poetry and mythology without being a peyote-smoking shaman.

What do you think the odds are?

The light has been returning, as the days grow longer again and we set the clocks forward, and so has my equilibrium and happiness — unresolved tensions with Ted notwithstanding. (Per some breaking gossip, it appears as if he may have quit or been let go after an angry confrontation with management.)

As I continue to go on dates with strange men from the free dating site — including an extremely tall Polish Ph.D who cautions that he will “test my humanitarianism and liberalism” — it occurs to me: I don’t want any man to change this. In the past, I have identified so completely with my caustic amours that their pet miseries became (and added to) my own.

**

When I was younger, I used to think if I can just get with this or that guy, life will be complete, and I will be happy. Never mind that my interactions and conversations with that particular individual more often than not left me feeling the exact opposite. I have the unfortunate (or enviable, depending on your point of view) tendency to fall into the reality and thought-world (and depression) of other people the way one might slip on some slick tile and fall into a swimming pool. And it’s hard enough for me to climb out of my own thought-pool. It took me twenty-five years the first time.

Of course you, loyal readers, well know that one of my habits is to think everything completely to death. I went to the proper philosophy-oriented college for this, of course: the brain-wanking went on around the clock, and it was highly fashionable to be as grim as possible in one’s premises and conclusions. Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that the truth of a thought was directly proportional to how painful it was to entertain. Perhaps because the “truth” with which I grew up depended upon the paranoid avoidance of all other, threateningly contradictory input, and facing that input and experiencing the subsequent disillusionment was painful. I felt deeply betrayed by those who had, I felt, sold me a so-called bill of goods.

Closed-minded cynicism seems to be common among kids who go through these kinds of betrayals: we tend to view the world through the prism of our personal injuries and disappointments, and take the good things for granted. What’s worse, we would rather be “right” (this time) than heal, or make the changes that might just possibly allow a thin sliver of sunlight to penetrate the gloom. Pessimism becomes a habit, a chronic disease that becomes part of our identity. We wouldn’t know who we were without our bitterness and our depression.

Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it at all when it went away.

And it’s hit me, amid all these coffee and lunch dates: I’d rather be by myself than with someone who triggers those old habits. I feel like an alcoholic might when confronted with dates who are big drinkers. I like being out of pain. I like enjoying the present moment. Simple presence — and not some constant remove from the now, the restless daydreams of a dissatisfied imagination, into which I’ve escaped since adolescence — is what saves me now, every day.

**

My saucy gay 74-year-old former monk friend, who turned me onto the contemporary English poet David Whyte, has lent me a DVD of David giving a live talk in San Francisco. During the course of the talk, David recites several of his poems with his gorgeous, resonant Yorkshire accent, including the poem “Start Close In.”

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

**

Give up on other people’s questions, he says. Don’t let them smother something simple. This is exactly the danger when, like me, you have a tendency to get derailed by other people’s realities. Especially when those “other people” are men — who tend to have better-policed boundaries and a more robust ego than I do — particularly men to whom I form some kind of romantic attachment.

“You don’t let anyone take you away from the conversation that you were born to, and that you were made for,” David cautions.

In today’s world, we should be saying “no” about three times for every “yes” that we say…a good “no” says that there’s a bigger “yes” to be said…and it says that you have a promise inside you, and a faithfulness that you’re holding to that’s beyond this present sense of besiegement…

Lately I have felt somewhat besieged by the demands of my gentleman callers. Last week a man about whom I felt decidedly ambivalent (at best!) decided he wanted to see me again — right away! (Not free tomorrow? What about this weekend?! Soon! Soon!)

I could already feel my old habits kicking in on the first date, when confronted with his educated, urbane naysaying — the placating nodding, the disingenuous smile, the beginnings of invisibility. I wasn’t comfortable being myself. I was making an effort to identify with him and to please. The things women learn tacitly from our mothers and from cultural messages that relate the expectations for our gender (as wives and mothers): Take care of everyone! Don’t hurt anybody’s feelings! Don’t be disagreeable! (Even the most ostensibly “liberated” women I’ve met occasionally find themselves slipping into passive aggression rather than face a conflict head-on.)

After a few attempts to direct the flow, I let my date dominate the conversation, which, while certainly intelligent and even interesting, was not particularly warm or personal. I found myself glancing at my watch.

Of course he liked me; I wasn’t even there. I was a mirror. As I have been so often in the past. This is not what I’d call being “faithful” to the “promises” I’ve made to myself. This feels like a leap backwards, visiting unhappier days…and I have no desire to return to those days.

A “no” to this suitor may be a “yes” to me.

**

Words cannot express, however, the love and gratitude I feel toward David Whyte. I wouldn’t mind losing myself in his expansive and generous worldview, but he wouldn’t want me to walk any path other than my own. And for that I say: Can we clone him, please? He is precisely the sort of man I would love to meet.

I did actually meet him, once, at a signing at a local bookstore. He was as gracious, approachable, and good-humored as he seems on tape, a striking Anglo-Irishman with what they call distinguished graying at the temples of his thick shock of dark hair. With his look and his presence, he could easily have had a career as an actor. He is in an apparently happy second marriage now, and has two children, including a son who recently graduated college. But surely he can’t be the only man alive who perceives the grandeur in everyday objects and listens respectfully to silence? Who has such a finely tuned sense of the numinous he can elicit an almost religious awe in atheists like my former monk friend with a single well-spoken observation?

I’ve spent time with plenty of self-titled (why would one want a label anyway?) nihilists and pessimists and positivists and scientific materialists and existentialists and Marxists and hedonists and anarchists and academic Buddhists and all form of hyperintellectual wank-ists. I just can’t take the fluorescent-lit mental masturbation anymore, which turns arid and sore without the lush swampy wetness of feeling, intuition, and mystery — those “dark,” “irrational,” and yes, even “feminine” elements that resist pigeonholing, analysis, and compartmentalization. “Not everything that counts can be counted,” said Gandhi. A bumper sticker sound byte, but nonetheless astute.

I want a poet, damn it. At least one in spirit. Not a furious slammer-jammer or a conventional sentimentalist who pens syrupy greeting card verse, but someone who will get the things about me I need to get gotten. Who won’t attempt to make me feel crazy, or wrong, or as if I should just kill myself now. Who will help remind me of beauty, and of why human experience is unbelievably rich, instead of trying to make me forget it (again) now that I know it. Someone who doesn’t take every bloody fucking miracle of existence for granted just because the religious fundamentalists are out of their minds. It’s not an either-or proposition, for Christ’s sake.

**

When I got an email from my would-be beau after our second date, interpreting my own experience for me in condescending terms — that my hesitation to see him again was not because I didn’t think he was a good fit (I didn’t), or because I wasn’t sexually attracted to him (I wasn’t), but because I was “afraid” — that was the dealbreaker.

For a moment I flashed back to the various passages in Fear of Flying, which I had read again recently, in which Isadora Wing obediently accepts the arrogant armchair psychoanalysis practiced upon her by her cool-headed Asian husband and her potty-mouthed British lover. Erica Jong expertly captures how even the smartest, most educated women will still go on allowing the males in their lives to be the final authorities and to infantilize them (with an indulgent smile and a metaphorical pat on the head), as if Daddy still knows best.

Another story David Whyte tells is the old myth of an early tribe in Ireland, a peaceable lot, lovers of beauty, whose attitude toward strangers is hospitable rather than hostile. These gentle souls are confronted by a very martial group of new immigrants on a hillside. The latter group charges the former with their weapons raised, and the peaceable natives “turn sideways into the light and disappear.” David describes them as “refusing to have that kind of conversation.” They will not engage under the terms set by the aggressors. He warns us against falling into our habitual patterns of engagement and contention, the same old tired arguments we’ve had a hundred times. And I know as he speaks that I don’t want that.

One of the nicest things about being with Sam (who is twenty years younger than I am) was that he showed me implicit respect (respect for his elders?) without my having to fight, negotiate, or otherwise struggle for it. He didn’t seem interested in exerting or exhibiting power over me in any way. That was refreshing — and healing. It showed me that not all my relationships with men have to be about who wins. Just being with Sam felt like winning.

I want more of that. I want a peer and a co-explorer, not another father. Not another competitor seeking weaknesses to exploit. Sonny was, oddly enough, a movement in the right direction, when I think about things from this angle: his open-ended curiosity outweighed his need to label everything, including me. He was definitely more like a peer, at times something like a fellow traveler, not a self-appointed authority figure or scold. (Like what my brother used to be, before he bought his acre of land, became a father himself, and stiffened into rigid fundamentalism.) Sonny loves yoga, Eastern spirituality, women…and David Whyte.

So even while I was making not quite the best choices for myself, I was starting to make better ones. Progress. And then Sam. In this light, it’s hard to be pessimistic.

**

David also mentions that the root of the word “desire” is the Latin de sider, “of the stars,” suggesting that to have a desire is to hold one’s “star” inside oneself…to follow a sort of true North of the soul.

What kind of “star” was my irresistible, persistent desire for Ted? I never had it under control, even a year ago, when I felt pangs of jealousy about his fondness for young women and resolved not to surrender to my nascent feelings. A lot of good that did. Lately I fancy I see his face everywhere — on strangers in the street, in newspaper photos, on extras in movies. As if everything and everyone were conspiring to make me think about him. They say we see what we look for.

Now he may be gone. I may be delivered, belatedly. I’ll miss him, even though he was blocking the entrance for anyone else. I doubt he’ll contact me, either by phone or online. Part of me wishes he would. A large part, actually.

But what kind of “conversation” were we having, really? On the surface, a good one, an affable one between peers who liked and respected each other. He appreciated literature and Eastern thought and had an attitude of curiosity toward the larger world. Beneath that sunny veneer, however, existed the all too familiar narrative of the carrot and the stick — of one person subtly lording it over the other, hinting at rewards never to come. I said yes to being toyed with, alternately the object of intense flirting and casual ignoring.

Is it any wonder that the only way to take back my power was to ignore him right back?

Maybe that was my way of turning sideways into the light.

For one thing, I don’t particularly enjoy having to give anyone in my family a violent verbal shove or contemplate total “divorce” from the lot of them, even when my mom insists upon continuing to pound my buttons as if they were nails and all she has is a hammer.

It also kills me to force distance between Ted and me when all I long for is the opposite.

I keep thinking of Aron Ralston, the guy who sawed off his own arm to save his life, or the animals who chew off a paw to get out of a steel trap. I feel like I’ve been trying to chew off a paw. It’s an act of desperation to cut off a part of yourself in order to (supposedly) save yourself and get free. It feels like sawing off living flesh.

**

I do feel much stronger about my exchange with my mother, because it was truthful, and confrontational, and not least of all (to be brutally frank) because it was more painful for her than it was for me. My worst agonies of maternal alienation and abandonment already happened a long time ago. Really all I did was quit being invisible in the name of protecting her. And the truth is, I feel much freer now.

In a nutshell: she pushed the religion on me one more time (after I expressed something resembling self-doubt in my Facebook feed) with the tired message that I “already know where the answers are.” (Wasn’t I just describing for you in my last post how fundies pounce on the faintest indication of vulnerability as an opportunity to proselytize?)

I lost my shit, kids. This time around it was the last proverbial straw hitting the camel’s back.

The first thing I did was to adjust my privacy settings so that she could no longer comment on my posts. Then I decided to take away her ability to so much as see them. Finally I sent her a private reply.

In my defense, I could have been a lot meaner.

Will you never let it rest? Oh, no, that’s right…you’re working on Commission. What you seem to forget is that you’re trying to sell me the same old lemon that never drove for me (subjectively speaking) in the first place – and a bizarre, bloodthirsty theology cobbled together from literalized myths from a plethora of ancient sources (objectively speaking)…

Do I ever try to force my beliefs (or lack thereof) on you? NO. Do I live and let live? YES. Why can’t you have just a tiny bit of respect for me, too, for a change? (That’s what finally gets to me. The constant picking. It’s like with parents who can never be happy with their child the way he or she is.)

Oh, no, that’s right…I’m going to “Hell.” I’ll tell you what…if “Heaven” is anything like that nutter Jesse Duplantis made it out to be (in that badly written book [my brother's wife] forced upon me), there’s no way I’m hanging out at that infinitely soporific church picnic. Send me wherever Mark Twain and Bill Maher are. I can’t imagine any decent god would want to live without them, myself.

I’m going to regret this outburst tomorrow, but…I just can’t take the picking, always picking. And the smugness of “being right.” You’re as bad as some of the more strident atheists I know. Fundamentalists (on both sides) and their certainties!!! I’m long overdue for a good explosion.

It took her a week to respond. Her reaction was predictable: shock, hurt, and the confusion that comes with years of stubborn, intentional denial. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years,” she lamented (with a nice heaping helping of parental guilt), “and wondered what was going on in your life that produced such an outburst.” Ever the willful innocent, she continued “I never expected to receive such a hurtful attack, not ever.” My reply was an “attack,” as if it came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. As if she had not been attacking my choices and beliefs for decades.

Clearly (and perhaps deliberately) misunderstanding what I meant by “respect,” she defended herself by talking about the admiration she had for certain thoroughly unobjectionable qualities of mine, like the “tender heart” that led me to take my first job at a local homeless shelter. (I swear on Lucifer’s balls, every time my mother talks about my “tender heart,” so help me Jesus, I want to go out on the street and kick a puppy or snatch a little old lady’s purse.) She expressed bafflement at what I called “picking,” and insisted she only wanted to “share” things like “videos and stories” that had “touched (her) deeply,” completely ignoring the fact that it had been yet one more presumptuous evangelistic prod that had pushed me over the edge.

With a feeling of weary, almost callous resignation (perhaps the feeling one has when it’s time to get an actual divorce) I realized that just because she was never going to “get it” didn’t mean I had to sit down and STFU. I wrote back.

Follow my metaphor for a moment. You’re sitting behind someone who used to agree with you. Now she just does her own thing, and tries not to bother you or anyone else, but you feel the need to keep intermittently poking, prodding and nudging her. It’s not good enough for you to peacefully coexist. She must agree with you!

For twenty-five years this goes on, you poke and you prod, and from time to time she turns around and politely asks you to stop.

Finally, after twenty-five years, she suddenly turns around and gives you a violent shove that sends you sprawling, shocked and hurt, onto the floor.

Honestly, can you blame her?

Of course, much of the problem here also lies in the phrase “Who wrote that?”

I’m afraid that no matter what I say, I will fail to communicate with you in any significant way. The fact is, I’ve tried several times in the past few years to “come out” to you — which would be easier if I were actually gay, then there’d be a thorny but concrete identity issue that might possibly work some change here — but at this point it seems like whatever you don’t want to see or hear is going to get filtered out. Or maybe it’ll be just chalked up to “evil” or “sin,” which are handy catch-alls for otherwise normal human traits and behaviors that often frighten and/or confuse fundamentalists of all stripes.

When I say “respect,” by the way, I don’t just mean “admiration for certain desirable traits.” I mean respecting other people’s boundaries — which runs completely against the whole born-again modus operandi of “witnessing,” I know, Henry Cloud notwithstanding. I also mean respecting the differences and choices of others, which in evangel-speak would probably be translated to “tolerating sin and destructive choices” — so there’s really no way I can win here.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was an angry outburst. I hoped to shock more than hurt, although I could write entire volumes about what, within the belief system I was raised in, has hurt me. Perhaps now I can start doing that publicly. What I couldn’t tell you before is that the work I did with that career coach revealed that one big thing I want to do is somehow help others who have been screwed up by Manichean evangelical Christian doctrine/culture. Franky Schaeffer (prodigal Greek Orthodox liberal son of Francis) is a role model of mine.

I have to say, part of my outburst, at least in my opinion, was damn funny too…what I said about Jesse Duplantis and church picnics and Mark Twain…that’s my real sense of humor: sharp, pointed, ironic/sarcastic, highlighting absurdity. It’s nothing foreign or affected — although I tone it down to the point of disappearance around every (member of our family) but (my brother). I don’t think he would have been as shocked as you, or found me quite so unrecognizable. He’s a lot tamer and more conservative than he used to be, but he still has a little bit of a subversive streak.

I’m more than a marshmallow peep, Mom. I’m not just sugar on the outside and a soft, chewy center. I’m also tart and I have bite. Don’t you like Macintosh apples?

Sorry to have hurt your feelings.

That was over a week ago and I haven’t heard from her. But at long last I feel freer than ever to say whatever the hell I want, even without the anonymity of this blog. Perhaps I’m that much closer to setting up my own fundamentalist-recovery Web site.

I thought the marshmallow peep comment was particularly inspired.

**

On Super Bowl Sunday I went over to my 74-year-old gay friend Richard’s house for wine and cheese, and we watched Howl instead of the game. It was an imaginative project, built around the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular opus. James Franco completely inhabited the otherwise inimitable character of Ginsberg. He was astonishing.

The reason I mention the film is because of something Ginsberg said to a writer from Playboy during their lengthy recorded interview (shown between clips of the trial, Ginsberg’s first public poetry reading of “Howl,” and hallucinatory animated interpretations of the poem). He talked about how he would have been unable to write such an uninhibited, nakedly honest poem if he had ever thought about his “daddy” reading it. Instead, he strove for the kind of intimate self-expression one experiences with one’s closest friends. “Don’t hide the madness,” he said. “You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”

I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.

**

But it’s been another film, or more properly a film series, that has given me a non-fictional character with whom I could wholly identify, who makes me feel less alone in my particular life ineptitudes, and who gives me some hope that I can eventually prevail.

Out of a longtime curiosity, I requested Michael Apted’s 7-Up series from Netflix. This is the ambitious ongoing documentary series that began in 1963 with a group of fourteen seven-year-olds from various areas and social classes in England. Apted intended to follow up with them every seven years, although as the years went by some of the grown-up children wound up opting out.

It’s fascinating. Even at seven, the children have distinct accents, opinions, and personalities. (One upper-class Londoner named John is practically a miniature William F. Buckley.) Some become more subdued by fourteen. But by twenty-one, a few have changed pronouncedly. Neil Hughes, a middle-class Liverpudlian, is one of those few, and the filmmaker’s interview with him made me burst into tears. I saw myself in the series’ only societal dropout — rejecting his upbringing, questioning everything, devoid of self-confidence, unable to find his place in the world.

A bright-eyed and precocious child at seven, Neil is, at twenty-one, perched on the edge of homelessness — living in a squatter’s flat and doing day labor after having dropped out of a third-class University. His expression is one of perennial woundedness and bewilderment. Battling depression, directionless, he has a strained relationship with his devoutly religious parents, who (as he relates, with a nervous calm masking suppressed rage) taught him that “if one was to survive in the world, one had to believe in God” and that he should “always think of other people first before yourself, to a ridiculous neurotic degree.”

I don’t think I was really taught any policy of living at all by my parents…I was just left to fend for myself in a world which they seemed completely oblivious of. I found when I even tried to discuss problems that were facing me in school, my parents didn’t seem to be aware of the nature of the problem.

At that point I felt such a powerful recognition and sorrow I started to weep. The cluelessness and helplessness of which he speaks is, I believe, part of the fallout from growing up within a narrow religious worldview in which all problems are “spiritual” in nature (rather than social or psychological), we are essentially powerless to direct or change our own lives, and everything is a matter of God’s will. That is, some invisible, inscrutable external Being is in control of our lives, not us. Decisions are made and problems solved through prayer and submission to His divine will.

Given the overwhelming silence and absence of said Being, and the reinforced belief in one’s own helplessness (and worthlessness), this does not prepare a child to go confidently into the world and shape his or her own destiny. What it does do is encourage passivity and paralysis.

When Apted asks Neil if he is “kicking against stability,” Neil replies that there never was any stability to begin with. “I think I’ve been kicking in midair the whole of my life.”

Ouch. I hear you, brother.

“How many parents really think of their children as individual human beings?” Neil blurts out passionately, tangentially, at another point, interrupting his interviewer. And I found myself thinking of my own losing battle to show my parents who I am. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years.” That unwillingness to let one’s children, or even other people, be visible — it seems to also come with this religious territory.

At the end of the conversation, Neil rues his inability to “take any positive course of action” and hopes that one day he’ll be able to “wake up in the morning and feel this day is going to be worthwhile.” Which I couldn’t have said better myself.

By 28-Up, Neil is a drifter in Scotland, living in a rented trailer, picking up odd jobs. He waxes philosophical about what Thoreau referred to as the majority of men living lives of quiet despair. He never wanted the 9-to-5 life and evenings spent watching television. (Another thing we have in common.) I already know that by 49-Up he will be living in a small England town and be involved in politics, so somehow it’s reassuring to see him flounder, rootless and directionless, the way I have all these years.

If Neil can find his way, I can too.

**

But then there’s the ongoing story of Ted.

After a while, Ted seemed to grow used to the status quo, i.e. my assiduous avoidance, and by then I had become too passive and cowardly to change course. Following three weeks of no contact (other than being in the same big room), I was at last getting to a point where I didn’t think about him that much outside of work. I was going on some Internet dates, which, though unsuccessful, were at least dates, and resulted in some interesting conversations. (What would be even nicer would be if I could inspire interest in someone I actually found at least marginally attractive.)

Granted, on the days I did see Ted, I still felt that undercurrent of low-grade misery that comes from prolonged, unresolved inner dissonance, of behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to one’s true feelings, and my numbers suffered. (I’ve had four quota warnings in six weeks. Good thing they like me too much to fire me.)

Then those nonexistent rom-com scriptwriters decided to fuck around with me again.

Ted had, one particular evening, decided to be more in-my-face than usual anyway by taking an empty station just on the other side of the row partition from me. Perhaps because my (nervous) energy level spiked as a result, I started scoring some solid pledges right away. There had been a system crash earlier in the day, but we hummed along without incident for an hour into the evening shift. Then suddenly my computer screen froze. I kept “pitching” the donor without the use of my script, and had just persuaded her to donate ten dollars a month to the ACLU, when the line went dead.

Another system crash. The supervisor rebooted everything. In the meantime, I jotted down the donor’s information and phone number to complete the transaction manually, and went to the reception area to call her back. Twice I got voice mail. The second time, I left a message explaining what had happened with the system. I told her she would probably be getting a call from someone else in the near future. (Ruefully, I assumed I’d lost the pledge.)

When I walked back into the call room, Ted and the supervisor came rapidly toward me. My donor was back — on Ted’s line. Apparently when the system came back up, the autodialer must have redialed her number and sent her to his computer. I had to finish my call from his station. (Out of all the call stations in all the rows of all the sections of the call floor, as Bogart once said…)

With a laugh, Ted told me that both he and the donor could hear me leaving the message. It was the most we’d interacted in a month. Again, as in my last post, I experienced that fleeting warm and homey feeling of everything being all right with the world.

Ted either left of his own accord or got sent home at the shift break, but my performance continued to shoot through the roof for the rest of the night, and saved my whole week. That’s the good news. I can’t say if the indulgence of renewed fantasies involving furniture-smashing resolutions of sexual tension later that night, leading to certain unmentionable conclusions, is good news (Russ would probably say so) — but it might just as easily be comparable to the indulgence of a self-destructive drug addiction. After all, you come back to work the next day, and he’s way over there again, and it hits you that this is never really going to happen, and then you feel about as shitty as a junkie with a crack hangover.

Ted may be leaving soon. I know he’s had a number of interviews, and last week he was in the director’s office with the door closed, which may mean he was giving his notice — but not having talked to him, I don’t know. Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me how lame that is.

**

My rational mind tells me to get free and get on with my life. My emotions and my body still crave Ted. Avoiding him is an act of both despair and helplessness, because I feel on the one hand too weak to follow my mind’s ruthless resolve, and on the other utterly helpless to get what I want from him.

Is it worse to divorce yourself from what you know you want today, or to sabotage possibilities you might want in the future, but don’t yet know you want? Especially if you have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to win either way?

If Ted simply leaves, it will be taken care of for me, by virtue of my own passivity.

Which is how good little Christian boys and girls like me and Neil have been trained to deal with our life challenges.

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.

Sometimes that’s a good thing.

**

Tyler Tervooren, another Portlander like Chris Guillebeau who advocates risk-taking and living an unconventional lifestyle, said something (which I can’t find to quote now) to the general effect that being courageous in the everyday choices we make accustoms us to taking risks and being bold in more significant areas of our lives.

It was for this reason that, presented with the option of either taking a permanent, secure job in a toy company’s Internet department for a $30K salary (in a basement with mostly women) or becoming a full-time fundraiser for the anti-corporate underdog in our Democratic primary (in a a diverse and bustling campaign office), which by all accounts would be temporary and hourly, I chose the latter.

The former was a sure thing, but would definitely be stressful and suck precious hours of my life away (underground) for no real purpose. The campaign job was risky, but held promise as well as meaning. It would enable me to advocate for and help elect a real “people’s candidate,” while also possibly providing new connections and leading me in any number of new directions — if I wasn’t automatically out of a job after the primary.

In the midst of this decision, I had my first truly bitter fight with Jeannie. To make a long story short, she believed she was acting in my best interest, while I was shocked at her sudden “bossiness” with me and apparent lack of trust in my gut feelings.

What I derived from this episode, however, was a greater understanding of how Sam must have felt when I “bossed” him and showed little faith in his judgment. I didn’t like it, either.

Choosing the campaign involved a leap of faith. It was an act of trust in the future as well as belief in the candidate, and belief that fortune does in fact favor the brave — belief that my life will only change if I start making choices based not on what is already known and safe, but on what draws me forward and closer to a greater expression of who I am and what I value. It was the same kind of leap I took last year at this time.

As you know, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

**

For the past month I have also been working with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in Sonoma, California. We have weekly hour-long sessions that are meant to correspond to each section of the book. So far I don’t seem to have Called In The One, but I have definitely become more “magnetic” (to borrow from Katherine Thomas) when it comes to the opposite sex. More on that presently.

Beth’s input, along with some of Frank Schaeffer’s well-chosen words in his latest book (Patience With God), helped me deal more effectively with the latest Come-To-Jesus letter from my mom.

Dripping with the catchphrase-laden sentimentality peculiar to born-again Christian women, her missive gushed about how her life with her Heavenly Father/Lover (shudder) was so much more fulfilling than mine. (That incestuous blurring thing BACW do with their version of God I’ve always found unsettling.) It also took for granted, as usual, that her literalist cult had the corner on the “Christian” label and on what God wants.

God has always had a wonderful plan for your life, and has always wanted to reveal it to you. He has given you delightful gifts — tenderness, kindness, mercy — plus all the “smarts” with which He has endowed you. And the life He offers is one which is filled with His loving presence!

Do you still feel that the Christian life is one of rules and regulations legislated by a tyrant God? Not so! It is a life of a loving relationship with the God who designed us and Whose will is only for our good! You may feel your life is full of excitement and adventure, but I assure you “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” A life lived with God is a life of deep satisfaction because it is lived according to the blueprint of the Designer! And instead of being confining, it is a release into freedom, life as it was intended to be!

To top it all off, she sent me a Facebook message later that same week complaining about the words I’d used on someone else’s thread. “I didn’t bring you up to use such crude language,” she scolded.

First a child’s blush, and then a flash of rage, made blood ring in my ears. How dare she? The letter was already presumptuous to the max, but this was beyond the pale.

I took a time-out to cool down rather than going with my first impulse and using language that would have made her sorry she’d said anything at all.

**

Instead, I explored with Beth the critical relationship issues that surface in my dealings with my ever-proselytizing mother. Namely — the inability to stand up for myself; the distasteful bind of being either projected upon in the most saccharine manner (as sugar and spice and everything nice) or dismissed as invalid (stubborn and sinful); invisibility. All of which inspire a sort of primal and inarticulate rage.

To this day, after all, I often allow men with strong personalities to dominate and silence me. I have attracted admirers who idealize me so much I don’t even recognize who the hell they think they’re enamored with. I have chased many highly visible (attention-grabbing and handsome) men to whom I have been essentially invisible.

These relationships are mirrors of what I picked up from my earliest connections. Jeannie and I even discussed how the dynamic of our conflict resembled the dynamic of me vs. my mother and her well-meaning but overbearing Come-To-Jesus letters — just days before the latest one arrived.

So, theoretically, I should be able to apply the remedy where it all began.

Beth had me imagine the part of me that feels this rage as a small child. What does the child want? she asked. How would you take care of this child, as the responsible and mature adult? What would you say to her? What would you say to your mom?

This simple visual aid was remarkably helpful. I found myself feeling angry and protective of the marginalized, silenced, “unacceptable” little girl who was supposed to “be good” at all times and not upset anyone. In my mind’s eye, I picked her up and told her she was just as important as everybody else. I told her I recognized and valued everything she was, whether or not my mother or anyone else judged it to be “good.” I told her to express whatever the fuck she wanted. And I told her I wasn’t going to let my mother talk to her like that anymore.

**

The next day I wrote my response.

The fact that I have no idea which comment you’re talking about only serves to demonstrate that I am finally letting my hair down around here. I’m sure whatever it was could have been a lot worse in your book — I’ve been using language you’d probably call crude since I was a teenager. At forty-two I’m just getting over things like walking on eggshells and self-censoring to the point of nonexistence. I don’t want every part of me that isn’t inoffensive to someone to be invisible…

I can only marvel at the hubris when any human being thinks that they can read the mind of God and outright tell me I am NOT following His wonderful Plan for my life in my own damn time and way. (Oops, guess I cussed again. Somehow, I think God is bothered more by the behavior of the Enron Corporations of the world than by my saying “damn.”) Look, I know it’s just your way of trying to communicate love and concern, but doing it that way is neither welcome nor necessary. Why not just trust that God knows what He’s doing with me? It seems like a lot of hurt, tension, and resentment could be avoided here.

Defensive, my mother backed off somewhat, thanking me for being honest, but she still couldn’t resist throwing out the classic fundamentalist argument:

I don’t pretend to ‘read the mind of God’ other than reading what He says pretty clearly in His Word. I know you feel that Jesus’ words about being The Way, The Truth and The Life sound pretty exclusive — I didn’t say it; He did! I have chosen to believe Him as I would if a doctor told me ‘This is the ONLY medicine which can cure your disease!’ It is not a matter of opinion; either it is the truth or it is not. (Pascal) was willing to trust it as the truth — what was there to lose?

This “because he said so” tautology used to work on the child. C.S. Lewis made something like this argument too, saying that Jesus had to either be the Messiah or akin to the madman who claims he’s a poached egg. (What Lewis et. al. fail to consider, even within their dubious closed arguments, is that we can never know how much the canonized New Testament writings reflect what Jesus, if he really existed, actually said, written as they were after decades of oral tradition within a revisionist religious movement. To say nothing of those heretic Gnostics who didn’t even make the cut!) I replied:

There’s a couple of places we diverge that are irreconcilable, I guess. I don’t believe that I need to be cured, or that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, although I do believe that someone in the first few centuries wrote that a guy named Jesus said the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” thing…

You may or may not remember this, but I took a preceptorial (elective seminar) and wrote a paper on the Pensées at (college). (Pascal) was a fascinating character, but I agree with Franky Schaeffer’s assessment of his famous wager: “Pascal’s wager, wherein one bets in favor of God rather than risking damnation, is one of the stupidest ideas ever articulated. If there is a God, He knows you were just a good betting man splitting the odds – insincere but scared.” There are better reasons than fear to believe in some kind of Divine. On that perhaps we agree.

After that she pretty much shut up about the whole business, and since has stuck to subjects like how the campaign is doing, what’s happening with people we know, and the news.

It felt like some kind of watershed moment.

**

Just as Jeannie taught me what it was like to be on the receiving end of the “bossing” I gave Sam, my mother’s letter taught me something else about myself. Something uncomfortable to look at.

I realized that my mother was trying, time and time again, to persuade me with impassioned and sometimes manipulative pleas to take on her emotional experience when it was definitely not mine.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: no wonder my carefully-crafted, effusive love letters to nearly a dozen indifferent or ambivalent men over the past twenty years never won them over. I could no more “convert” these guys to my subjective and unshared emotional experience than my mother could convert me to hers. They were probably even less into me than I’m into Jesus…and I wouldn’t or couldn’t accept that.

I flushed, thinking how cloying and annoying my attempts must have seemed. Perhaps as annoying as a subway evangelist handing out tracts.

I guess it’s a hard habit to break.

**

But about that “magnetism”…

I should mention that Ted has been working a few hours a week for the campaign, and that Padraic came over after he found out I was working there. (Ted has since quit the call center, and may be going more full-time until he passes his pharmacy exam.) I must admit, I never fully got over my crush on Ted, that nondescript but intelligent liberal Texan of my own generation. When I met him, he reminded me of a forty-plus version of Sam — hence the attraction. But I gave up on Ted months ago. I really don’t want to suffer over any more men who’ll play with me when I’m the only game around, but run around after other, younger women when I’m not. He still kids around with me, and seems genuinely glad to see me when I’m there…clearly he has a friendly affection for me. So I take our relationship for what it is, no more and no less.

Padraic I take with a grain of salt. I figured him out after a while: if I take a step toward him, he takes a step backward. This dance is time-tested and guaranteed. When he complained that his young ex-girlfriend was “too into” him and wanted to get serious (which is why they broke up) I realized I was being presented with yet another opportunity to play chase-the-carrot. Wisely, I declined. Padraic really does remind me of my brother John. I could have broken my own heart again and run after John one more time…but I wouldn’t have caught him this time, either.

No, I’ve had it with the terminal ambivalence and mixed messages. I deserve better than that.

**

One thing worthy of note, however, is how one of the Big Fish at my new position reacted to me. It caught me completely off guard. This is a national campaign, so it’s populated by local political luminaries who are Big Fish in our small pond.

During my first few days there, I came into contact with one of them repeatedly. A handsome, charismatic figure who knows how to work a room, Matt shook my hand with an oddly dazed look and seemed at a loss for words. I just smiled and nodded. I didn’t burble or effervesce the way most women do in his presence. Mind you, this is a guy at whom multiple eyelids flutter whenever he enters the field office, who gets to rub elbows with impeccably groomed Abercrombie & Fitch princesses at events.

Yet every time he’s had contact with this low-rent, un-svelte, T-shirted fortysomething in chipped librarian frames and holey sneakers, he looks like nothing so much as a dumbfounded adolescent boy alone with the prom queen. I’m tickled to death by this. I know I didn’t put the energy out there, but I feel it in the space between us.

I haven’t told anyone but Beth about this. And now you. No one around here, at least no one who knows local politics, would believe me if I told them. Beth, of course, says it’s a sign that I’m becoming more “magnetic.”

Even Ted, the other day, surprised me: I was standing outside with him and one of the other fundraisers, an ex-Marine in his fifties who had come down to work at our office location “just to see you,” he told me with bald flirtatiousness. Suddenly I felt Ted’s hand resting on my shoulder as he talked to the Marine. It felt weirdly territorial. Then Ted made a humorous remark, and shook the other man’s hand in a conciliatory fashion. The body language honestly seemed like something dogs might do if they were bipeds. Again, I was tickled, especially as it was Ted. At least he didn’t pee on me.

**

There’s really something to this whole let-them-come-to-me business. The best example of all happened when I went down to the call center to pick up my last check.

I would never have expected it to be so effortless, to get what I had been hoping for for weeks. I had by this point pretty much resigned myself to never making significant contact with either of the beautiful newbies mentioned in my last post, as I was (at long last) leaving The Job.

Stopping by various cubicles to bid my farewells, I didn’t see the half-Asian Adonis anywhere. The raven-haired Sir Lancelot, however, was sitting just a few seats down from my friend Jane. Standing there beside her, telling her about the campaign, I noticed he and I were still just missing each other’s glances. Before long, he stood up from his seat and logged out for a break.

As he came toward us, both Jane and the supervisor coming down the row read his subversive T-shirt slogan aloud. Lancelot laughed, stopped, and explained it to us, introducing himself with a firm handshake. His name was Tanner. Actually, Tanner was his surname; Jim was “everybody’s name,” so he went by his last. Close up he was even handsomer, his dark-lashed brown eyes larger and warmer. He had a sexy voice and an easy affability, and I wondered why on earth we hadn’t managed to introduce ourselves earlier.

After a minute of chatting he left us to go outside. I followed suit not long thereafter, not expecting to see him unless I deliberately went up the alley. The designated smoking area was on the other side of the building. I was contemplating whether or not to go that way, and how I might contrive to speak to him again, when the elevator doors opened.

To my surprise, Tanner was sitting right outside the front door. He held it open as I wheeled my bike out. I stopped to chat with him for a few minutes more (and to tell him that this was my last visit to the call center). I found out a bit more about him: he was twenty-seven, currently in his last year of school at the Art Institute, and had been a new recruit in the military — dispatched to the Pentagon — during 9/11. After witnessing censorship and the suppression of information at the site in the immediate aftermath of the attack, his politics did a U-turn and he became something of a 9/11 “truther.”

I tried not to stare as he spoke but couldn’t help myself. Sweet Jesus, what a delectable young radical was he. I wished I could eat him with my eyes. (And so friendly! Who knew!) When at last he turned to go back inside, he wished me luck with the campaign and said he was glad to have met me.

“I’m glad to finally know your name,” I said, starting to wheel my bike away as he pulled the door open. “Now you’re not just the tall handsome one with the tattoos.”

He paused, grinned, and laughed: a pleased laugh, a very sexy laugh. “Thank you!” he purred, with that sultry voice of his. “See you around…”

Oh, I wish, honey.

Nevertheless I couldn’t believe how easy that was.

Maybe he’ll turn up at a rally somewhere.

I’ll share a favorite scene from Chapter One, set during the Becker family’s first summer vacation dinner at the pensione (inexpensive rooming house) in Paraggi, Italy. Mom is in the middle of saying a typical (i.e. very long) grace.

**

In my heart I said, “Please, oh please, don’t let Lucrezia come to our table to ask if we want wine with dinner while Mom is praying!”

Lucrezia was the owner’s daughter. When she cleaned the rooms with her mother they both wore blue housecoats over their day clothes. At night she was the pensione’s waitress. She wore a white apron over her black pleated skirt. Her starched apron strings hung down to the hemline behind. Lucrezia wore her silver crucifix outside of her white blouse when she served us our dinner. It made her look very Roman Catholic.

Lucrezia was standing at our table. “Vino? Rosso–? Bianco–?” she said.

“Please, Lord!” I prayed.

Mom kept right on praying.

“Vino?”

Couldn’t she see we were praying? Would Mom interrupt the prayer and look up?

“We thank Thee for this food and we pray for those who live and work in this pensione that they might come to know Thee as their personal Savior…”

“Vino?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked up sorrowfully, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light, then smiled ruefully at Lucrezia. Poor girl, she didn’t know the Lord. In fact, here we were praying, and she didn’t even wait until we were done. Probably she didn’t even notice. I guess she thought we were staring at our food while Mom talked to herself with her eyes shut. We had pity for Lucrezia and all the unsaved Italians. Roman Catholics thought they knew the Lord, but they worshipped Mary, not Jesus; they did not trust Him as their personal Savior but tried to merit salvation by works. I knew they were lost, but, just the same, I wished we didn’t have to pray in front of them.

“Vino?” Lucrezia was starting to really wonder what was going on. She tried English. “Wine? Red…White…Yes?” She smiled. Mom smiled too. Mom’s smile was full of compassion.

“No, Lucrezia, no, we won’t be having any alcohol to drink.”

“No wine.”

“No, thank you, we’re Christians, just some water please.”

“Acqua minerale?”

“No, just natural water…acqua naturale.”

It was Lucrezia’s turn to look sorrowful and to smile wistfully. Mom took her smile to be an expression of longing to know the Truth. I knew Lucrezia just felt sorry for people who drank tepid tap water at dinner when a hundred and fifty lira would buy a bottle of Chianti or Orvieto.

When Lucrezia walked away, we bowed our heads to finish our interrupted prayer. “And, Lord, we pray for dear little Lucrezia. We pray that You will give one of us an opportunity to share Your love with her and an opportunity to witness to her. In Jesus’ precious name we pray. Amen.”

I love how Calvin’s mother says “we’re Christians,” in characteristic evangelical insider way, like they and only they own the word — as if “you unsaved pagan Catholics obviously don’t know anything about it.” Schaeffer nails it.

**

I may never accept Jesus as my personal Savior, but I’ve found a Salvador.

Well, Salvador is his name, anyway…a sweet, round, 37-year-old Mexicano divorced father of two who works for a Spanish language network and broadcasts our baseball games on the radio en Español. We met via a free online dating site. I’m not at all sure he’s The One — I’m kind of disinclined to think so — but he possesses just the sort of crazy creative and risk-taking mindset that’s generally been missing among my circle of close friends and associates. Only Meg Ferris, that globetrotting writing coach who showed up at my yard sale last year, hatches anything like the sort of “harebrained” schemes Salvador comes up with — and makes work. This is a man who got himself an interview with George Lucas’s creative team in Los Angeles simply by setting up an attention-grabbing Web site.

He claims to have no expectations about us, and I believe he’s sincere. “Perhaps I am here to help you now,” he said at our lunch meeting, “and then, someday, you will have an answer I need.” Salvador was raised Catholic but has become enamored of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He teaches martial arts to kids in his spare time. (I can almost imagine him punctuating his sage observations with “young grasshopper.”)

I’m glad, at any rate, to have found a new friend with his breed of unrepentant cojones. Wasn’t I just saying I had no idea how to break out of the box?

**

A separate foray into the online dating world, this time for a Match.com free trial, has yielded equally interesting results. A gentleman my age, whose photo and profile I had skipped right over while perusing my daily matches, sent me a message. It was so warm, witty, and complimentary, I felt compelled to respond. But first I clicked on his profile to get a better look.

What I read there got me a little scared.

Not creepy scared, but scared in a way that Jason’s and Salvador’s and some of the other guys’ profiles hadn’t, because they essentially gave me a list of interests and what-I’m-looking-fors that more or less fit me or didn’t. (Online dating thus far has been like looking through a catalog and picking out the style and color that suits me best. The list approach, again.)

William’s profile struck a different chord. And not because of his vocabulary or his writing skills, which were excellent. Not because he was a law student focusing on international human rights law. Not because he was nice-looking in a supporting-actor kind of way, or because he’d rather watch a foreign film than climb a fourteener. What came through his carefully chosen words was a good-humored generosity, authenticity, and lack of ego. Here was an educated man who didn’t take himself so deadly seriously, who admitted to not having all the answers or all the confidence in the world, and who felt a strong sense of responsibility toward (and interconnectedness with) other human beings. His sense of humor was not unlike my own. (My best friend of twenty-three years, listening to me read his “In My Own Words” section, exclaimed, “But that’s you!”) I wish I could paraphrase a sentence or two for you here, but he took down his profile when his paid month expired.

After several rounds of increasingly personal email exchanges, William and I chatted amiably on the phone for over an hour. We have yet to meet. He’s leaving for Nigeria on a school-related mission next week and will be gone for three weeks.

I’m almost too freaked out to meet him, to tell you the truth.

Like me, he has deeply conservative parents, who hail from the same state as my mom. And Sam. His trip has become somewhat controversial: the faculty advisor who backed him for this Nigeria project just got fired. (Apparently the University doesn’t want its law students inserting themselves into the affairs of third world countries.) I’m inspired and humbled by his humanitarian passion and commitment, which goes way beyond the often ineffectual rallying and canvassing that wonky political progressives like Eli and I do on weekends, however well-intentioned. Talk about walking the talk.

I think: could he be…? Do I deserve…? I don’t dare finish the sentence.

Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m ready for prime time.

**

On the same day that I read William’s first, flirty message, a yoga friend posts a call on Facebook for interested parties who might like to get coached for free in the “Calling In The One” process. Rebecca has just finished Katherine Woodward Thomas’s relationship-coach training, and some of her friends in the program need “practicum” guinea pigs with whom to complete their certification.

Within 24 hours of responding to Rebecca, I am talking with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in California. Just like that. And for free.

You tell me that’s not one hell of a coincidence, amigos.

After our introductory phone session, however, I find myself awash in ambivalence.

**

At work, a tall, slim young trainee with jet-black hair and tattoo “sleeves” is looking at me. I noticed him his very first day: he resembles a young “Camelot”-era Robert Goulet, at his peak of tastiness, when they were saying he might be the next Elvis, before the cheeseball ’70s moustache and the Greatest Hits 8-tracks. I meet his gaze; he holds it for a provocative moment with his deep-set brown eyes, then looks away. I flush. We exchange furtive glances throughout the shift. One of us seems always to be sneaking a peek at the other through the cheerful, hefty matron sitting between us.

Suddenly the call center seems full of delectable young men again. A lean but muscular half-Asian with creme-caramel skin and huge hazel eyes whose name is really Sam (honestly!) makes me forget to breathe when he goes out of his way to introduce himself in the parking lot. He’s no taller than I am, but he has the torso of Apollo and the face of a Filipino matinee idol. Mama Maria.

I suppose there have been a few lovelies around in the past few months, but these latest afternoon delights are actually giving an eye to this tired old broad. Why, I have no idea. I think I look kind of fat and mousy at the moment. Go figure.

But it all comes surging back, all the forgotten intoxication and hunger. In between calls, somewhere in my graphic imagination, I’m nuzzling the tender brown nape of Apollo’s neck and running my fingers all over his taut, smooth, inconspicuously magnificent body. I’m pulling Young Robert down the stairwell to G3, the parking level where no one ever goes on foot, and pushing him up against the wall, thrusting my tongue between his lips, pressing into him. I get lightheaded with lust; my knees weaken. Not enough blood is getting to my brain or my feet, and…hello, may I please speak with Jane Smith?

**

I talk things out with Jeannie, my closest girlfriend in town. I’m beating myself up and working myself into a state of despair for being “superficial” and apparently losing my newly acquired, less visually-oriented perspective. I don’t have any impulse whatsoever to drag sweet, eager, decidedly stout Salvador, reeking of cologne (I hate cologne), down a stairwell, as swell as he is and as much as he seems to dig me.

I tell Jeannie that I don’t expect the guys who inspire lust in me to be the same ones who are good for me. Probably quite the opposite. But now I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to give up the hunger.

Jeannie, a counselor by trade, gently suggests that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. If I’m not turned on by someone, I shouldn’t force myself just on principle. Sam #1 didn’t elicit from me the same Greek-god comparisons as Sam #2, but we still had an intense, undeniable, potently pheremonal chemistry that made me want to eat him alive. With a spoon. Every day, if possible.

Who says you can’t love the right guy AND feel “the hunger?” she muses.

I start to feel a little more hopeful.

I think it’s great that you’re so sexual, adds Jeannie. I love that about you. Maybe what you need right now is to have a fling. Maybe you want to have a little sumpin’-sumpin’ with one of these youngsters before you get serious and look for something real. Have you talked to Beth about these feelings?

Of course I haven’t. Not yet. It may have been our decision to work together, after all, and the renewed prospect of successfully “Calling In The One,” that triggered this little midlife crisis.

**.

I struggle to complete my “homework” — not for Beth, but for Salvador. His questions for me are: what, exactly, do I want to write? And where do I want to be?

Finally I email him an answer. I don’t know! Frank Schaeffer makes me want to write a novel. But I’m not even sure I can do it; I’ve never managed to write a sustained work of fiction. (Of course, at the time, neither had Schaeffer.) I know I can do something like a personal travelogue competently and love it, and I can meet deadlines when I’m doing expository-type writing, so there’s that…but do I want to live abroad, or just travel? Where on earth do I belong?

“Don’t worry, just be patient, even a tree can’t speed up to grow,” he writes back. “Step by step. You need to relax, be quiet so you can start listening.”

Probably excellent advice all around.

**

My assignment from Beth has me stymied as well. I’m supposed to set an “anchoring” intention for love, in my own words. And answer the question: who would I need to be, to call in the love I desire?

All that comes to mind now, for the latter question, is: Someone else!

Jeannie, who dearly loves me and always sees the absolute best in me (you’re brilliant, you’re beautiful, you’re hilarious, et cetera), genuinely believes that these mouth-watering boys are a viable, if temporary, option, but you and I know that I’m only a legend in my own mind. When it comes to initiating anything with anyone who inspires that kind of unbridled lust, I’ve historically managed to project all of the allure of a skunk at a picnic. Out of dozens of fantasy partners, I’ve managed to snag only two or three (Lord only knows how) and pull them over into the reality of my bedroom.

The clincher of course is that the fantasies — to be brutally honest now — have nearly always proven to be better than the reality. Not to diss anybody, but just because something looks like a Porsche doesn’t mean it drives like one. When your nose is pushed up against the glass like the Little Match Girl, however, whatever’s going on inside is an imagined paradise. In the mating dance I’ve generally been a wallflower with two left feet, so I’m prone to thinking I’m going to miss something somewhere (the greener-grass syndrome) no matter what.

But the fevered imaginations of those who, like me, live too much in their heads can really short-circuit actual experience. (Case in point: the strange phenomenon of fans wanting to literally check out of life on Earth and go live in James Cameron’s Avatar universe.) Not everything is what it appears to be. Jeannie, a fellow vegetarian who makes a lot more money than I do, likes to take us out to the kind of candlelit restaurants that have white tablecloths and $20 entrees, where we’re routinely disappointed by the risotto al funghi. Conversely, we’ll sometimes wind up at a tiny storefront with plastic flowers on the table in a dingy strip mall on one of the ugliest thoroughfares in town, and slurp the best coconut curry soup anyone has ever concocted for a mere $4.95.

If there have been any pleasant surprises along the road of amore, it’s how the physical intimacy with Sam just kept improving. I went from not being sure I wanted to get him naked to wanting to keep him that way all the time.

So maybe what I need to do first and foremost is to let go of the stubborn and thoroughly unfounded belief that I understand anything at all about how this mating business works, and embrace my own unknowing.

Maybe “who I need to be” is just someone with a beginner’s mind.

I’m starting to get nervous about my finances again — I keep telling myself “I’ll work more hours this week,” but when I do manage to drag myself to that circle of hell we refer to as a call center I can hardly wait for a four-hour shift to be over. Jobs that sound at least tolerable and that I’m somewhat qualified to do have been scarce, and the ones to which I’m applying aren’t calling me. I had hoped I’d have something better by now, so that I could re-hire Lisa Brown to help me with my nonexistent writing career. As it is, right now I’m operating at a deficit every month.

What I’ve been most diligent about has been following Katherine Thomas’s book to the very end, and exploring various relationship prospects. You may be surprised to learn that “David” is no longer in the running.

**

What happened was this: I had been so delighted that David was so radically different from my dad and the patronizing men I’ve usually attracted that I failed to notice the huge pursuit imbalance that had been forming. The truth was I was contacting him repeatedly in order to nail down a date. I had initially been the one to reach out to him, and then I had had to prod him several times to make that first date. After that, it took a month (and more than one try on my part) before he suggested a group outing with his friends. A group outing.

So I was beginning to suspect that maybe David just wasn’t all that interested in me. He has a lot of very cute female friends, after all, who are a lot younger than I am and could pass for Suicide Girls, and I had to wonder if he’d keep them waiting for weeks.

Nevertheless, when we finally made it to the bar, and were having a great time with his friends, he cozied up against me in the booth and kept putting a hand on my back. Flushed with alcohol, I had a stong desire (for the first time) to kiss him. I hadn’t felt any such impulse toward him before because his demeanor was so eccentric, but I liked his touch and was starting to find his mannerisms cute. Two of his close friends, a couple, gave us rides home. As we weren’t alone I simply hugged David goodbye. If we had been alone, I doubt I would have been so restrained. I’m glad now that I was.

The next day (Friday) I called him to tell him what a great time I’d had. He suggested we get together again — maybe that weekend? He’d check his schedule and get back to me. I said: Are you sure? I knew he would be busy that week, helping organize a musical event at a local bar. But he said he’d call.

Except that he didn’t. Five days passed. No call, no messages, no nothing. Needless to say, by the following Wednesday I was feeling pretty disappointed, and realizing that I was on the same old merry-go-round I’d been on a million times with mixed-message men from León to Rick. Only this time I wasn’t going to focus on just one “message” (our seeming rapport at the bar) to the exclusion of all others (his repeatedly not calling). I deserved better than that, dammit. Not wanting to phone David yet again, I sent him a message, which I tried to make humorous and non-hostile in tone, but which in effect said: Hey, I’m getting the picture here from your actions that you’re just not that into me. And I don’t want to keep pursuing you if you’re not going to call when you say you will. I wouldn’t want to do that if you were a Nobel prizewinner or George Clooney. So if I’m correct about this, I think it would be best if I skip your upcoming event. I hope we can stay friends either way.

Notice that I left my surmisings open for him to contradict. I really thought he would contradict them. I thought I would at least hear something from him, if nothing more than sheepish agreement. But I heard nothing at all. Not the next day. Not the next week. Not since.

So so much for David.

**

Walking home through air heavy with the perfume of blooming lilacs and apple blossoms, I was reminded of how hung up on Rick I was last May, and how hopefully (and doggedly) I clung to every little bit of inconsistent attention he showed me. Given what happened after that with Sam, it seemed a bit like scavenging for potato chip crumbs from a discarded bag while the catered-banquet truck was coming down the block.

Now it occurred to me that for all I knew, something a million times better was coming down the block. Because I’d already tasted something a million times better than stale potato chip crumbs. And it changed me. Sam couldn’t stay, but he stayed just long enough to shift the entire ground beneath my feet.

I was able to laugh off my disappointment when I framed things thus: David had, after all, been dangerously close to getting the kind of action all boys like. A lot. If things had gone well, I could have been exhausting him the way I had managed to exhaust a 21-year-old. Your loss, kiddo!

**

I have since been asked out by two supervisors (who are now not supposed to date me, per company rules laid down after last summer’s scandal involving a director), one married man, and a slightly unhinged coworker who looks like Teddy Roosevelt and who may or may not be a pathological liar. Not exactly ideal pickin’s…but Ms. Thomas did say there would most likely be a number of “near misses” coming my way, that I might actually find myself challenged to make better choices for myself.

The only such choice that has been at all difficult has been the choice to lay it on the line with David. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, to decide I didn’t want to keep chasing yet another ambivalent guy. Typically I just try to convince myself that what little response I’m getting means a lot more than it does. To paraphrase Lisa Brown, the less love you’ve received in a relationship, the harder it is to let go. Which may explain why it took three years for me to let go of Sonny, and more like three months for me to start to let go of Sam. The mixed-message givers incite us to want to prove our worth to them, even as their behavior reinforces our doubts about it.

**

One night while reading Salon.com, I noticed one of their featured personals ads to the right of an article. I found myself wondering: would the Salon readership be a better pool to explore than the Yahoo one I had waded into a decade ago? My previous foray into online dating had proved inconclusive, but my hippie friend Diana was constantly singing its praises. I went ahead and did a quick search (which is all you can do without membership) of my age range and location.

The first person to come up in the list, a man my age, had a black-and-white photo that was a bit dark, but I swear made him look like Sam Rockwell in one of his mustache-and-soul-patch incarnations. As you might imagine, I stopped. Cold.

I tried to click on the man’s profile, but the site sent me to the signup page. I wound up building a rudimentary profile of my own just so that I could view his. (My introductory blurb was, I thought, funny and literate, if frank, and eschewed the standard shopping-list approach.) After I finished it, I was able to view the man’s full profile, and found his interests and answers to be intriguing and strikingly compatible with my own. To contact him, however, I was required to spend money, and I couldn’t afford to join the site, even for one month. Oh well, I shrugged. So much for that idea.

The next morning I had an email from the site: “Someone wants to see you.” Member X had requested my photo. Member X was the guy I had joined to investigate.

I literally shouted with laughter.

That same day I posted a photo, and filled out the rest of my profile. Then I went to look at the available payment options for sending messages. The cheapest option, hidden away from the membership options in the Help menu, was to buy 2000 credits (enough to send 10 messages) for $10. I decided to do it, and promptly sent the guy a message. “Hey man,” I wrote (literally quoting a Rockwell character), “sweet ‘stache.”

He answered the next morning. “I thought you’d never notice!” he said. “So when am I taking you out for a drink? My treat!” He had changed his profile photo to one in color. When I saw it, I literally broke a sweat. In this one, he more closely resembled Edward Norton…only better.

I found myself head-over-heels in lust with a photograph.

Controlling myself, I insisted on exchanging more information before agreeing to meet, but my fantasies were already running wild. Could Jason be It? Jason was such a hot-guy name — befitting that photo — and he was sounding so cool. He was a sommelier who had worked for an organic-foods market for years and recently transferred here from Austin. He lived in my best friend’s eclectic neighborhood. He was politically liberal and generally non-religious, but took an interest in Buddhism. And he looked like that. I kept pinching myself, and going back to look longingly at his photo. I imagined meeting this attractive contemporary and having the sparks fly as we both realized we’d met The One. Which was something that had really happened for many of Thomas’s clients. Finally I couldn’t stand the wait any longer, and wrote: Okay, let’s meet!

His response was immediate: How about tomorrow night? Name the time and place. I did…and then proceeded to not sleep a wink from excitement. Clearly this man and I were supposed to find each other!

**

I glanced nervously around the bar. It was a place Rick had shown me, a lounge in an old Victorian owned by a Polish family that was long on atmosphere and had a wonderful upstairs patio. I didn’t see anyone who vaguely resembled those photos.

And then I spotted a man who vaguely resembled those photos.

Vaguely. Except that he looked quite a bit older and chunkier, with graying hair, a baggy flannel shirt and a round, avuncular face. He lit up when I introduced myself (in contrast, I tend to photograph poorly). I tried to stifle the disappointment of an addict denied a promised fix.* Understand, it’s not that Jason was unattractive — he actually had beautiful, warm eyes — it’s just that he wasn’t particularly hot, and I had been expecting Edward Norton. He looked his age, kind of like that favorite history teacher you had in high school who had teenagers of his own. I felt a momentary flash of resentment, as if I’d been a victim of false advertising. Those photos were apparently not recent.

I ordered a pineapple martini on his tab, and proceeded to get good and inebriated as we sat on the patio. I enjoyed talking to Jason; we have a lot in common. We talked politics and conscious consumerism and music and travel; he loves Italy, too, and has explored Ireland. He encouraged me, as my artist friend had, to “just go” to Europe and work there illegally if I had to. He loves to read, and I considered how much fun it might be to show him around the semi-famous bookstore where I used to work. He really did have nice eyes.

I thought of how I wasn’t infatuated with Sam until the third month of knowing him, and how madly in love I fell with him…how ravenously eager I became to have sex with him at every available opportunity. I thought of how I had had trouble getting past David’s oddness on the first date, but wanted to make out with him by the second. I knew I was experiencing a major letdown because I had giddily believed I had found that lust-at-first-sight fantasy man who could feed my chronic craving for eye candy. I had built Jason way up in my imagination. Granted, he hadn’t helped me any by posting an out-of-date photo. That was frankly unfair, and seemed somehow dishonest. But if I had met him another way, in his present form, I probably would have warmed up to him pretty quickly, and thought, “Gee, what nice eyes he has.” Maybe eventually I would have found myself wanting to ask him out, as with Ted.

**

Speaking of Ted, I mentioned in my comments thread a couple of posts ago that he had made it clear to a mutual work friend that he prefers younger women. So I had given up on him. One day, however, in the staff kitchen, I witnessed a particularly humiliating incident which Ted’s unfortunate preferences afforded him.

Two of our younger callers, a skinny skaterboy and a slender, platinum-blonde princess who would look completely at home on any given MTV show or spring break video (all eyeliner and spaghetti straps and miniskirts up to here) were conferring quietly in the lounge area. Ted was sitting near them on the other couch. I was eating my lunch at the kitchen table. MTV girl was telling skaterboy about some club or other where she had seen this “old guy” dancing and “totally making a fool of himself.”

Ted, undaunted by her obvious contempt for her elders, asked, “What club was that?”

Apparently he must have tried to chat her up before, because her withering reply to him implied as much. For Ted’s sake I won’t repeat it, but I’ve never heard another woman over the age of eighteen be so directly and unapologetically cruel. In movies, perhaps, or on featherweight TV dramas aimed at teenagers, but not in real life. Poor Ted, stammering and backpedaling, crimsoned from neck to ears. I felt myself blush in sympathy. When he spoke to me shortly thereafter, he had the look in his eye of a bleeding calf. I wanted to say, Look, honey, you can bother me anytime, but I didn’t want to embarrass him further in front of MTV bitch-goddess and her lackey.

Later that week Ted started to say something to me about how long it had been since he’d seen a show at a music venue I like, and I was about to say something, but we were interrupted. I was a little sorry about that, but I’m not at all convinced Ted wants a grown woman, or things to be easy.

**

I came home from my date with Jason (I left things at “Call me”) and upon hitting the pillow was comatose for the next nine hours. Toward the morning, I dreamt that I had locked myself out of a borrowed car, a light brown station wagon like the one my family had owned in the 1980s, and was trying to push it, but accidentally pushed it into a river. As it sank, so did my spirits. How could I have fucked up so badly, on two counts? Everything was ruined.

Suddenly Jason appeared, offering to buy me a meal and console me. Utterly defeated, but comforted by his kindness, I asked him to drive me home instead. He drove me to my parents’ house — the house I grew up in, not my home. Sitting in his car in my parents’ driveway while he chatted outside with my mother, I was overwhelmed with despair, and felt like breaking down and begging him to take me out after all, to take me the hell away from there. Then I woke up.

Maybe my unconscious was trying to warn me about seizing on anyone out of a sense of desperation or defeat. Maybe I’m afraid that saying yes to Jason means that the Prodigal child is at the end of her rope. I don’t know. What a loaded one, Dr. Freud.

**

On waking, I felt a wave of disappointment crest and crash over me, and wondered melancholically if I would ever be able to love another man the way I had loved Sam. This thought made me cry. Eventually I got up, fed myself, bathed and dressed and even put on a little makeup, determining to go to my favorite coffeehouse to write on my laptop and see if anyone interesting showed up. Irrationally, perhaps, I still half believe my Rockwell is out there somewhere, waiting to be found, ready to make up for the fact that I could never have my beautiful older brother. (“Mommy,” I asked my mother at a precocious three years old, “When I grow up, can I marry Johnny?”)

I scanned the whole place from my vantage point at a front table, my back to the open garage-door facade. No one in particular caught my eye. On some days the prospects are as thick as thieves — I’m tripping over men I‘d like to tackle — but not today. After a while I went to get more hot water for my tea. As I stood in line, absently gazing out the open garage door at the patio, I saw our old buddy Eli strolling by on the sidewalk. He glanced inside. I waved my arm. He stopped.

I chortled to myself. Well, there’s some candy for you, baby!

Eli came in to have a cup of coffee with me, since he had some time to kill. His “lady friend,” as he called her, was at the nearby medical clinic having some tests done on her eye. He explained to me that she was already blind in one eye (save for peripheral vision) and that she might be losing her vision in the good one. She had asked him to come with her today. That he had accompanied a brand new “lady friend” in such difficult personal circumstances struck me as unusually caring, and I suddenly remembered him telling me about how he did his best to look after his semi-disabled mother.

But let me just point out a major irony here for a moment. This is Eli we’re talking about here. Beautiful Eli. The young man who completely commanded my attention the very first time I laid eyes on him. Even with his shaggy unwashed hair in a bandanna and nerd-specs on and skin breaking out, he causes me to stare in a trance of near-intoxication. I have to remind myself to keep my head, to peel my eyes away from his intense gaze. You all know I’m well aware that there’s more to relationship compatibility than finding the other person visually compelling, and I had previously ruled him out as anything other than a friend, but Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that he’s an Equal Opportunity Boyfriend, this probably indicates that he’s a far finer person than I previously imagined, and I hope his “lady friend” doesn’t lose what’s left of her sight. But I could not get over the fact that Eli was seeing a woman who might lose her ability to see him.

I for one was damn glad I could see him. We talked for a good hour, catching up — I shared my latest job disappointments, he filled me in on his political organizing — and I kept up the appearance of detachment. But the junkie inside me was soaking up my drug like a thirsty sponge. After he departed to go get his girl, I sat there for some time, substantially cheered up but starting to second-guess myself.

Eli is ten years younger than me. I know he wants to put down roots here, while I want to go abroad. He’s an atheist and a loner and he doesn’t like people. He would probably detest half my friends. And yet…and yet…he’s extremely caring. He does like me. And he may not look like “Johnny,” but he does resemble that kid I had a crush on in my youth group for forever.

To supersitious types like me who can’t quite believe such encounters are only a coincidence, I can only say: what a time for Eli to reappear. Had I not gone for a refill when I did, we would have missed each other. He doesn’t even live within five miles of that coffeehouse. It’s not exactly his usual haunt.

Of course, he’s not currently available: beautiful Eli is dating a visually impaired woman. And I’m trying to talk myself into dating your old history teacher. Who may or may not call again. I opened Thomas’s book at random the other day to read: we must do our best to live 100 percent committed to whatever intentions we set, without being attached to the results we are getting.

Who really knows what’s around the corner?

I guess I’ll continue to wait on that catering truck, anyhow; you can keep your potato chip crumbs.

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*20/20 cited a scientific study that actually showed that the same area of the brain becomes active viewing beautiful people as becomes active when alcoholics are shown pictures of alcohol or compulsive gamblers are shown pictures of cash.