May 16, 2008 | Filed under: Is She Still Talking?

Whenever Lori posts one of her Friday Love Lists, I think to myself, “I should do that!” because I am a big fat copycat recognize good ideas when I see them, and a dedicated time to express happy thoughts is a damn good idea.

Um, yeah. You’ve seen how many of those lists here? Yes, I believe zero is the correct answer. But! Today that changes! (In all fairness, I was posting happy Love Thursday thoughts for a while, but that habit died a quiet death. Think of the Friday Love List as Love Thursday’s reincarnation.)

So, I now present Things That Are Making Me Exceedingly Happy Today:

• Being back in Northern California.
• Where it is 100 degrees out.
• The fact that my Big Important Meeting is over.
• And that it went well.
• Mentioning all week that I’m visiting friends this weekend.
• The realization that I’M VISITING FRIENDS THIS WEEKEND.
• And there will probably be wine. A lot of it.
• Knowing that three years of bi-coastal existence was worth it. Oh, so worth it.

May 13, 2008 | Filed under: I Write About My Feelings

There is nothing that makes me so acutely aware of my singleton status as getting on an airplane.  It’s not the ridiculous amount of extraneous space in the hotel’s king-sized bed, it’s not attending a yet another damn wedding alone, it’s not spending Friday nights with Stacy and Clinton or Kyle Chandler.  Nope, it’s sitting at the airport knowing that I don’t need to call anyone before I board my flight to remind them to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost tell them I love them. Knowing that I don’t have anyone to check in with tonight, to tell about my day’s adventures. Knowing there will be no one counting down the minutes or waiting for me at the airport upon my return.

(Let’s be clear, here – I haven’t had any of those things even while dating someone. Which may explain, in part, why we’re no longer dating.)

This is not helped by the airlines’ insistence upon showing romantic comedies on my long-distance flights. Please, please, I’ll take a seventeenth viewing of Transformers over Music and Lyrics or 27 Dresses or Once or Away From Her. Even stupid Alvin and the Chipmunks had a solid guy-tries-to-win-girl storyline.  I cannot think of anything more distracting than looking up from my laptop, where I’m supposed to be putting together a PowerPoint presentation, and catching glimpes of a movie that remind me, P.S. Nobody Loves You.

(Incidentally, does anyone know how I can look more like Hilary Swank? That might alleviate the problem.)

This is a challenging piece to write, because there’s no pivot point in here, no moment I can point to and say, “that was then, but look how wonderful life is now,” so if you’re looking for a Hollywood ending, look elsewhere. In real life, things are much more complicated. Most of the time — the vast majority of the time — I’m happy to be single. I’ve long said I’d rather be single than wasting time with the wrong person, and I really, truly, feel that way — when a long-overdue relationship ends, when I meet someone new who just doesn’t quite fit, when I wonder if I should be spending more time on cultivating a personal life. I like being single, and there’s no reason to force anything else. But, if we’re being brutally honest, I have to admit that there are moments when it really sucks.