Paint

Anyone who’s ever laid awake at night knows what it means to memorize your walls.

When I was a little girl I lived in a room with pink walls and blue trim. Around our beds were greasy handprint stains and crayon markings and tape residue from pictures we weren’t allowed to hang.

When I was a teenager, I slept in a nursery. The walls were hastily painted blue, all but covering faded outlines of the plastic adhesive heroes on now-grown children. Dinosaurs and reptiles and spaceships peeled away to make room. I laid awake thinking about what the walls of a planned-child’s room would look like. How it might not include a twin bed for mom. How an eager father-to-be night have time for an extra coat of paint.

When we painted the walks in my new house, I knew I’d spend a lot of time laying awake. Over kindergarten and car payments and how many letters I could get after my name.

I am not strong enough to do it by myself. Paint rollers are heavy. Loving and raising and changing lightbulbs and sheets and deciphering the tire warranty and what the clanking sound might mean for the dryer. I needed help.

When you painted my bedroom for me, I trusted you’d imagine laying awake and memorizing these walls with me.

Now, I look at the drips that have been dry for 12 months. The places where the tape didn’t fully adhere to the wall. The brush marks.

I look up at my walls and worry alone.

How to date a boy in APA format:

Abstract: Present your participants, proposed methods. (Aka you, me, dinner, that new Wes Anderson film)

Introduction: present a well researched argument for your compatibility. Cite common interests. Do not cite previous relationships. Previous relationships are never peer reviewed.

Methods: Muddle through where to sit in the theater, what restaurant to eat at. Awkwardly touch elbows at least twice. Three is plenty.

Results: Hope for the best. Also there should be graphs.

Discussion: oh my God thank god he got all my jokes phew I was totally right up there in that introduction phew. (Alternately: pretend this never happened.)

Conclusion: you know, I wonder if he sucks as bowling as much as I suck at bowling. (Alternately: see discussion.)

References: the last three people in your cell phone history. Last name, first name.

Because I Said So

“Because I said so” – the last thing you want to hear from your mother.

 

Why can’t I stay out until midnight? Why can’t I have a motorola Razr phone? Why can’t I wear this denim miniskirt to school?

 

My mother was fed up with my stubbornness and these words were her hail Mary.

 

“Because I said so” scrambled around my adolescent ego. To me it was grounds for emancipation. She does not respect my individuality. She does not trust my judgment. She does not love me.

 

When I was 16, I got pregnant.

My mother took me to confession and I did not ask why.

I needed to take vitamins and I needed to quit coffee and I needed to sleep more. Because she said so. I listened these times. I still heard “because I’m smarter than you”, but this time she was.

 

So I promised myself I’d never be an irrational parent. I’d always explain. I’d always be clear.

 

Because diabates.

Because skin cancer.

Because vitamin B-12.

 

Because when a mommy and a daddy… Oh.

Because he couldn’t-

because he doesn’t-

because we were-

 

I didn’t count on this many unanswerable questions. I didn’t count on heartbreak in my child’s voice.

Neither did she.

 

Now, I’m older. Jacob is 5 and as strong-willed as I had ever been. When he asks me, “Mom, why can’t I eat this entire package of twizzlers right before bed?” I take a deep breath.

 

I think back to my mother in 2008. When the extended family and the PTA and the coworkers and the neighbors and the boyscouts and the mailman all asked her “why won’t you kick her out?”

 

My tiny, quiet, well-mannered mother told them:

 

“Because I said so.”

 

On getting over you

When I was in college I had an orange cardigan sweater.  I wore this sweater almost every day.  I felt so much like myself in it that I could not bear to go out without it.  It was comfortable, phyisically and emotionally.  I wore it until it became a part of my background.  I normalized the feelings the sweater gave me, and it didn’t affect me anymore. 

I do the same thing with music.  When I hear a song that really makes me feel something, I latch onto it. I want my feelings to feel justified, like I’m a part of something universal. I’ve been in love with my best friend too, Mirah. I have crippling anxiety too, Rilo Kiley. I fall in love when I know it’s a bad idea too, The Format.  I listened until they lost their meaning,

But I’m not patient about feelings. With the sweater, it was an every-day-or-I-can’t-function situation. With the songs, I listened over and over on repeat, feeling everything every time.

When I fell in love with you, I put you on with no intention of taking you off. I put you in my stereo and pressed repeat. You didn’t get old, but you still ended.

Now, I see you doing things in moderation. You met a new girl. You see her once a week. You don’t jump into life with both feel like I do.

I over-wear my sadness. I over-play the idea that you are happier without me. I look at your smiling couples’ selfies on social media, refueling my anger and jealousy and sadness.

But, that sweater is hanging in my closet right now; I haven’t needed it in years. I can listen to “A Better Son/Daughter” without tearing up. And soon I will look at your pictures together and not feel anything. Because I don’t need a sweater to look like myself, and I don’t need a song to feel my feelings, and I don’t need you.

At all.

The Year of the Leper

On May 16, the day before my college graduation, I woke up with a fever of 103 degrees. It was a crappy hot day and I was seriously reconsidering how symbolic and important it was for me to wear a black polyester tent to walk across a stage and receive a diploma holder and sit through hours of “look how far you’ve come” speeches.  Our guest speaker was Shawn T.  It was going to be okay if I missed it.

But I had to go.  I had that sort of guilt you feel on Christmas when you’re not enjoying Christmas.  So I put on a lot of sweatshirts and stumbled into the car and my mom took me to the CVS minute clinic. We had a weird childhood/adulthood crossroads situation wherein the doctor would ask questions and we would both respond, unsure of who was responsible for handling the situation. I was kind of incoherent, so I let her have this last hurrah of confirming my birthday and that I was not allergic to anything. What I thought was a bad cold was a bad case of Strep throat.  I got some antibiotics and this sort of paste to numb my throat. So I was set to graduate.

The next day I woke up with a less terrifying fever.  I graduated. My memory of it is kind of a foggy journey from bench to bench between the general graduation on one side of campus and the College of Math and Science graduation in the field on the complete opposite side. I got a little sunburn on my neck from not zipping my thing up all the way (rebel).

can it be over

I went home relieved that it was over, ready to get some sleep and get over this illness.  A week went by and I finished my antibiotics.  I looked forward to my birthday on May 31^st and moving into my new house on June 1^st. I felt mostly better, until one night that sunburn started itching like crazy.  I figured it was just your regular sunburn antics, but when I got up I had this crazy rash where the sunburn had been.  I was convinced it was just the sunburn, maybe I had gotten burnt worse than I thought.  But the next day it got worse, and worse throughout the day.  I suddenly found myself covered in spots from head to toe. Not just spots, crazy painful itchy oozy death spots.  They were everything you don’t want in a spot.  I was itchy in every place.  I was itchy in places I didn’t know could get itchy. I called the doctor and got “what do you mean you’re covered in spots and can’t swallow or breathe or move? Come over.”   

I started taking pictures to document my illness so they could use them in medical textbooks or whatever. This was the beginning-ish.  

So it’s May 29^th.  I go in to the doctor, internal monologue listing illnesses I could have.  “I have chicken pox.  I have smallpox. I have leprosy. Do people still get leprosy? Will something be amputated? I have a new disease no one had ever heard of yet and they’re going to name it after me.  I’m going to go down in history as a spotted person.” I had googled pictures of the rashes associated with all these things and found no match. It is important to note at this point that I have a history of panic attacks and in general I do not do well with any situation at all. Oh, also, we decided it would be best for no one to touch me or touch anything I touched in case it was the plague or something. So no physical human contact in a couple days, I’m bundled up in the waiting room of my actual doctor fearing for my life and contemplating my legacy, seeing my name in medical textbooks.   They call me back to the exam room and I sit on the table thing. 

Time goes by.  More time goes by.  I’m kind of vague the details here because I was never completely lucid during this ordeal.  I hear voices.  Am I hearing voices? No, that’s my doctor.  I hear “I’m not going in there!” So if there was any part of me left at this point that was not scared, it has died and been replaced by a child who has just accidentally watched The Grudge. A million hours go by.  I set up camp in the exam room.  We set the clocks back for daylight savings.  We got another pope. Ice caps melted. I watched my life flash before my eyes. The nurse-person (vague person who answers the phone and schedules appointments but also is somewhat involved in exams but is not wearing scrubs and does not seem to have medical knowledge or a nametag, idk) comes in and stands at the opposite end of the room from me, takes my picture, and leaves.  Some more time goes by.  Finally the doctor comes in. Apparently she has never had chicken pox before and didn’t want to catch it from me if that’s what it was. (This would have been helpful info to have before I started chiseling my own gravestone, but okay.) What happened was that when they thought I had Strep throat, I really had Mono AND Strep throat. AAAND apparently when you give someone with Mono the standard antibiotics for Strep, their body goes insane.  So my strep had progressed to become Scarlet Fever, like the little boy in the Velveteen Rabbit.  Except we didn’t have to burn all my stuffed animals so none of them came to life (sad part). I got about 7 different medications and missed my 22^nd birthday due to being a leprosy zombie. (still ate cake though, please.) It took several days for my throat to be not swollen and to be able to walk around and have the energy to do things like sit and for my skin to not feel like it was falling off.

This is the story of how I didn’t have to carry anything into my house on move-in day.

Thanks friends/family!

Happy New Year!

Risk!

I just heard back from the phenomenal Kevin Allison about one of my stories. He wants to record it for the RISK! podcast in January! I am super excited! Sorry for the lack of comedy!

Welcome to Genuardi’s

I worked at a grocery store called Genuardi’s for three years.  During that time I worked in lots of departments, but for the most part I worked in the front end.  The front end is there the cashiers are, where the customer service desk is, and where all the store management is.  I floated around there, working in lower management type positions like pricing and the cash office, but I went wherever I was needed (everywhere).

So not everyone goes to the meat department.  Not everyone gets a pizza or a bouquet of flowers.  But EVERYONE has to check out.  Everyone who came in the store had to go through checkout. So I met a lot of people.  One of the first rules I learned was to not date anyone you met while cashiering.  I don’t know if this is common sense or not. Live and learn.

Cashiering is a lot like speed dating in that you should not do it.

No, I mean if someone asks you out based on a 30-second scripted interaction featuring the key points “it’s been so hot/cold/nice out recently” “is there anything on the bottom of your basket?” and “would you like to round up your total to the nearest dollar for a charity?” they are probably not your soul mate or even really a person with good judgment.  I made this mistake not once but twice, both with boys who “liked my gauged ears”.  Mmhm.

In addition to those fun comments I got to make, we were also encouraged to make welcoming small talk with the customers.  There was one woman who was an English teacher who would come in and ask how I was doing at Rowan every week, and that was pretty nice.  There was a guy who would mumble jokes to me that he found hilarious, and I would politely laugh even though I couldn’t hear him half the time.  That was okay. I got used to people asking me questions like “are you in college?” and “are you married?” and “do you like it here?”

And that’s exactly what he asked me.  He was a tall guy with very dark skin.  He wore thick glasses that had one of those flip-up sunglasses attachments, a cabbie hat, and a trench coat.  He spoke with a Jamaican accent and paid with $1 coins.  He was polite, like most other customers.  He told me to have a nice day and left.

Or I thought he left.   Later I got called to the in-store Starbucks to resolve a pricing issue.   The Starbucks kiosk was right next to the food court, where I notice the guy was sitting and eating a pizza several hours after he purchased it.

Weirder things have happened, like, one time there was semen all over the men’s bathroom (like, an impressive amount) and one time we thought there were dead people in a car outside and one time a lady had a seizure in the yogurt section and one time a woman basically lived in the store. So I wasn’t alarmed.

But then he waved me over.  He put his hand out to shake my hand.  I hesitated, but shook his and.  Not because I was afraid or anything, just because like, why are you shaking my hand.  But then he put his other hand over top of my hand.  Now he had both my hands and I was not going anywhere.  He said “what time does your shift end?” I said “I don’t know.”  I really didn’t, I was panicking.  He said “come with me.”

So at this point I didn’t know what to say.  Do you mean right now? Do you mean at the unspecified end of shift time? Is this what the beginning of a kidnapping looks like?

I said “I have to go home to my family” by which I meant “if you murder me, someone will find out.”

Luckily, the Starbucks manager saw what was going down.  The Starbucks manager was one of my biggest allies at Genuardis.  He was just generally a really nice guy and he was not creepy and we had really good conversations.  And also he was a tall intimidating guy.  So he walked over and said “Sir, is there a problem?”

The guy let go of my hand and I just bolted across the store into pricing office, and dialed the number for the manager’s office.  I told him (another tall intimidating man) what had happened. By the time he got over there, the guy was gone.

So around Valentine’s day I was working in the floral department, making 100 identical red-rose bouquets.  My eyes were glued to my hands, which were dry and torn up from the thorns.  I was in the zone.  So when someone approached the counter and handed me a rose, I didn’t really notice them until the rose was in my face.

It was the guy.

Again he asked me what time I got off work.  I told him I didn’t know, which was sort of an awkward lie.    This time he said “I went to Rowan yesterday but I couldn’t find you.”

I felt like I got kicked in the stomach.  I went into the floral refrigeration room and didn’t come out until he left.  Then I ran to the manager’s office and cried for a while.

So then we filed a police report.  Technically, the guy didn’t do anything wrong besides be creepy and terrify me.  So we set up an in-store plan.  If I see him, I am to stop whatever I’m doing and go immediately to the office and lock myself in there, and the manager will escort the guy out.

This happened a few times.  One day I was chatting it up with the produce manager and I saw the guy. I dropped that avocado and booked it to the office.  Luckily there were departments with lockable offices all over the store and everyone sort of had an idea of what was going on.

I didn’t walk around rowan by myself, either.  I had a friend escort me to classes, and I had my cell phone in my hand at all times ready to dial 911.

I never saw the guy at Rowan.  Genuardi’s has since closed, and I’ve been working in a completely different field since then.  I look a lot different now too, I have short hair and glasses.  I wish I could say that was the end of it, but I saw him walking along the highway a few days ago.  Hopefully he never recognizes me.

What Am I Scared Of?

I really want to want to do live storytelling.  I imagine myself doing it.  I think about my elbows pointing down and my sweater hanging off them as I make some gesture that makes some point that everyone identifies with and laughs/sighs/reacts.  I think about the expressions people make between phrases when they tell stories, and how maybe doing that will make me feel less alone/insignificant/irrelevant.  

But I’m not there yet.  I don’t want to do it. I haven’t prepared a story for a live version.  I still write down everything I need to say before leaving a voicemail. And I mess up.

I think I’m really good at reading children’s books, though.  To children.  Mostly non-verbal autistic ones. I like to read Dr Seuss.  It’s very genuine, very relatable, very rhythmic.  My favorite is one of his lesser known stories.  It’s the last story featured in the “The Sneeches and Other Stories” collection, called “What Was I Scared Of?”  Here’s the cliff notes:

Guy says he’s not afraid of anything. Suddenly he’s alone in the woods at night and there is a pair of pale-green disembodied pants floating in the air. Guy takes back the first thing, he is terrified.  A week goes by, he’s out of town getting some spinach (?), and he runs into these pants again. This time the pants are riding a bicycle, what the hell how are they even doing that they don’t have feet.  He runs home terrified.  The next night he goes out again at night like an idiot, and he’s fishing alone on the lake. The pants are also fishing. This time he hides in a really uncomfortable bush for three days.  He has to leave the bush because he needs a really creepy item from a really creepy sticker bush I guess for some reason, so the fool goes out again at night (he’s maybe nocturnal?) The pants are also running that same errand, and they both get stuck in the sticker bush. But this time, the pants are just as terrified as him.  So he’s like oh ok, don’t be afraid of things just because they are different. They become friends. The end.

I mean I disagree, be afraid of things that defy physics and are stalking you and also any disembodied body parts, but the moral of the story is sound.

Now, I’m not going to say “Oh I shouldn’t be afraid of writing and performing just because its not part of my already established comfortable skill set” because that would be kind of a cheap conclusion. What I’m going to say is that I really like reading that story to kids and using scared voices and suspense and adding my own matter-of-fact tone to parts that might benefit from it. I really really enjoy it. I also enjoy making the cow sassy in “Are You My Mother?” I also enjoy drinking wine with my best friend and casually recounting for him the completely senseless things my mom does and that my ex says and that my sister eats (just low calorie popcorn, by the way), and I think maybe it might be possible that I am in phase one of my journey to actually someday maybe do live storytelling. Maybe.

(also heres the actual story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdNTtbmCMr8)

 

Sixteen and Pregnant

When you’re sixteen, typically you have no idea who you are.  Do I want to be a rock star? Should I study engineering? Is this really as tall as I’m going to get? Am I gay? What is happening.

When I was sixteen, there was one thing that was a fixed trait in my identity.  I was going to be a mother. Not in the “I really want to be a mother someday” sort of way.  I was literally going to be a mother. I was pregnant.

In January of junior year of high school I took a digital pregnancy test, and the words that lit up on the screen were “buy a maternity prom dress”.

Here are some other things that were going on junior year:

I was in my high school’s production of “Oliver” playing a role with lots of singing and zero dancing. I was in my high school’s marching band and I was super into it. I was in my church’s music ministry and I sang at 9:00am every Sunday.  I was a straight-A Honors student.

And I was completely knocked up.

I was not exactly the usual suspect for teen pregnancy, so nobody believed this at first.  Once, in history class, the kid who sat across from me said to the guy next to him “did you hear that girl Mary is pregnant?” and he was like “who?”

Uh, I was right there.  I had been in their class all year and they didn’t know who I was.  So yeah I was flying under the radar with this pregnancy until I started showing.

In sex education we had to do a project where we had to calculate how much it would cost to raise a baby.  This, I think, was a cruel and unusual assignment for me considering I was already doing that in my real life.   Let me just say though, I aced that fucker.

My first OBGYN appointment was kind of awkward.  The doctor had her hands all up in there and she was pushing on my stomach.  “Yes, you have a nice enlarged uterus.” I was new and I didn’t know the proper response, so I said “thank you”.  She finished up and ordered some tests.

One of my tests showed that I had elevated protein levels.  This could either mean nothing or that your baby will have six arms and no skull. They ordered more tests.

In sex ed they taught us how hard it would be financially, but they didn’t each us how much of a struggle we would face socially.  When I arrived at my first non-routine blood test, I was completely terrified.  I was having a baby and that baby might be in trouble.  The phlebotomist who was taking my blood had a skull tattoo covering most of his exposed forearm.  He was maybe early 30s, balding, dark skin.  He asked me if this was my first baby, and I said yes.  Then he asked how old I was. “Sixteen.”

“Oops.” He said.  He then proceeded to stab that needle into my arm so roughly that I developed a bruise on my forearm the size of the skull on his.

People in general in the world were not thrilled about this baby coming.  To this day I still feel weird congratulating expectant mothers.  What I want to say is “It’s going to be okay”, but really these women grew a baby inside them on purpose and everyone is thrilled that it’s there. This is so weird.

I thought I didn’t fit in as a teenager, but I didn’t know social isolation until I was a teenage mother, and then a young 20-something mother.  I was not accepted in the “mothers” social category.  All the moms in my son’s preschool class had at least 8 years on me, minimum.  They were also married to doctors and lawyers and headed to spin class after the 1:00pm drop off, while I was single and on my way to my undergrad classes.

I didn’t fit in in college either.  I didn’t live there, of course. I did spend time with friends, but their biggest problem was the extent to which their hangover had affected their morning.  People had problems, but if they were tired they took a nap.  If they needed something, they went to the store BY THEMSELVES.  They were in this world of independence that I never experienced.

I’m out of college now, but it’s still an issue.  Anytime I mention my son to a new person they almost invariably say “you look too young to have a son!” Like that’s going to be a compliment or something.   I generally just go with “that’s because I am!” but then I need to cleverly defend my whole life story in an upbeat and gracious way, and I’m really sick of justifying myself.  Sometimes I just pretend I’m older, divorced, and thrilled at the compliment.

Science vs. Romance

When I ended my relationship with my son’s father, I was nineteen years old.  I had spent the last five years of my life learning to be a “girlfriend” and not a “human” or a “functional part of society”.  Literally all of my teenage years were spent in this unhealthy, manipulative union with a guy who was not super concerned with things like monogamy or respect or like, the law, but super concerned with things like getting it in. SO, freshman year of college was not great.  I did a lot of soul searching, and by that I mean I wore a lot of black eyeliner.  Really though, I was itching to be in a relationship again, since that’s really all my post-pubescent identity had ever consisted of.

Even before my teenage years, my idea of a relationship was kind of skewed.  I got the progression of meet, fall in love, get married, have babies down pretty well, but I missed other vital stops along the way, like become friends, disagree about things, appreciate your differences, get a plant, maybe be old enough to have a drivers license before you do any of this, etc.  See, my parents met as kids.  My mom’s brother Bob was best friends with my dad, so Bob and Mike would work on cars together and my mom would bring them lemonade in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter and so they got married.  The end.  I’m sure a lot of other stuff happened, but I never heard about any of that.  My dad would call my mom on Wednesdays and they’d go out on Fridays.  They did this throughout high school and college and then got married immediately after and lived happily ever after and had a boatload of kids and never fought and really love each other a lot.   So I thought that was how it worked, and thirteen year old me decided I was ready to make that kind of decision, and so five years later I was like, wait, shit.

So here’s nineteen year old me.  Studying English in college, planning to be an English teacher because I decided I wasn’t good enough at music to be a music teacher.  Not a lot of direction.  Also a teenage mother, so not really doing great at things like relaxing and “going with the flow.”  Really I just wanted to find that person and get this show on the road so we could settle down.  Also, I spent the last five years not only learning to be a girlfriend but learning to be a girlfriend to specific person, so I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted, but you know, I was pretty flexible on that.  (spoiler alert, not recipe for good decision making)

So I get my first post-babydaddy boyfriend.  I told my mom I met him through a friend but really I met him on a dating website because I have no social skills or confidence. (Somebody I knew knew somebody he knew so this made it okay.)  I meet up with him IRL with a hoard of my friends.  He is accompanied by a hoard of his friends.  We merge friends, and I spend the next few months with this new ska-loving revolt-against-society lifestyle.  These things had been a small part of my identity before, but being with this boy magnified them in me.  I also decided that some other parts of my identity were less important, like maybe washing my hair and wanting a career.  These philosophies are by no means bad, but they were bad for me because they weren’t mine.  They were spoon-fed to me by well meaning friends and cute boys.

So that ends. I could not consistently act like a bad-ass for very long.  I wanted to wait until the man lit up on the sign before I crossed the street and I did not have the social or physical endurance required to go to Ska shows.  I broke up with him, and we were cool, and then he had a new girlfriend like three days later.  But whatever, I’m not bitter or anything.

So a bunch of time passed. I’m not going to pretend I remember how long because it was college and everything is a blur.  I hung out with my friends and had “crushes” on boys and started getting into some stuff I really liked like epistemology and behaviorism and beer.  I had a handful on crushes on boys from philosophy club because they were smart and outspoken and that was hot. (Right direction, yay!) But at this point, my logical thought patters started to govern every part of my life.  I was learning about different types of motivation, and that all behavior has motivation and that EVERYTHING IS SCIENCE. I also changed my major: Psychology with a specialization in Behavior Services and a minor in Philosophy.  I populated my schedule with classes entirely devoted to explaining why people do stuff.  So naturally, at this point I was totally making all these great well-calculated decisions.

Just kidding.  I was making shitty well-calculated decisions.

If you’ve ever learned about Utilitarianism, you probably know that the thing about making good decisions is that they should do more good than harm.  This makes sense except that it doesn’t.  If a decision about my life makes everyone I know happy except me, then it’s a bad decision.  But, ya know.  Who didn’t go through the strictly-adhering-to-my-favorite-philosopher’s-guidelines phase in college, am I right?

So utilitarianism.  I made up this list (lists!) for how I should choose someone to marry.  (Yes, marry. We play to win here.) On it were things like he should be studying psychology, he should have the you’re/your distinction down, he should be taller than me, he should be looking to move into suburban New Jersey get an advanced degree in psychology (PsyD ?) and have lots of babies and settle down and be Catholic so my parents will be cool with him and be nerdy like me and also be a really good kisser.  So every little girl’s dream.

I met this guy at open mic night.  He was not singing and neither was I (phew).  He was there with a friend of mine, and we talked about Star Trek, so I mean this was going to happen.  We dated for a couple awkward months.  See, he fit my criteria pretty well.  He was seven years older than me which I decided meant that he was more mature and closer to settling down.  He studied psychology and was super nerdy. Like, we spend a lot of time playing Magic the Gathering at game shops.   But apparently you can’t calculate love, and it got really awful really quick. So tears, lots of sitting in cars, lots of ice cream eaten about that.

After that, I still maintained by list, but I added to it that I had to feel good about the decision.  The thing about science is that you have to be super objective about stuff, and “feel good” is like, the most subjective thing ever.  So I decided that I felt good about whatever I decided I felt good about, because who knows anyway.  I met someone awesome.  He was studying Psychology and he talked to me about Psychology and pff, no brainer.  And he was really handsome, but PSYCHOLOGY SCIENCE OK. At first we dated a little and then we stopped dating and then we started dating again and then we had a history of friendship so it seemed to be going swimmingly.  My parents thought he was great, he fit in with my family great, he loved my son, everything was great.  But it was still calculated.  We dated for over a year.  I loved him very much, and I still do, but we wanted different things and we communicated terribly.  We stayed together even when it was glaringly obvious that we weren’t happy because it made so much sense to be together.

So here’s my point.  It doesn’t make sense. You can’t calculate it.   You can’t have criteria.  You can’t decide to be in love.  You can’t decide how you feel.  You can’t decide who you are.  You just have to live, and find out along the way.