The Future Gift

My to-do list has become a virus. It has split itself at the cellular level and sprouted new versions that have taken root in notebooks, in my Blackberry memo pad, in my computer sticky-note application, and in that part of my brain that wants to think about other things, namely iTunes playlists.

So far, iTunes seems to be winning. After spending two hours this morning trying to deal with financial fallout caused by me mistakenly thinking four jobs would be enough to pay my bills, this viral to-do list has short-circuited everything I need to be productive.

Actually, I think the real virus I have has done that. (The one that gave me a 101 degree fever on Christmas. The one I get EVERY YEAR on Christmas. My immune system has impeccable timing.) The to-do list just makes everything seem harder and more depressing. Which is annoying because I usually greatly enjoy a well-made list, as evidenced here on this blog, in my enumerated conversations and even on my water bottle. But here's a glance at what I have facing me today:

1. Find a viable credit card.
2. Pay cell phone bill, car payment, car insurance (all late)
3. Call RCN about phantom bill that I DON'T OWE
4. Call City of Chicago about parking tickets that I DON'T OWE
5. Call hospital about charity care letter that I haven't received yet
6. Fax charity care letter to four separate places to take care of bills that I DON'T OWE

Here's what I got done today:

1. Found two credit cards that I hid from myself.
2. Activated one and destroyed the other.
3. Tried to pay one bill with new card.
4. Failed to pay one bill with new card.

That's it. And this took all day. And now I have no brain power left to do much of my actual work. So I'm writing here. Because I'm annoyed and when I'm annoyed I have to put words on a page in order to feel better. Much like making lists, actually. But my annoyance really comes down to one major issue:

I hate New Year's.

There. I said it. Deal with it.

New Year's is an arbitrary holiday meant for us to take stock of things we should have already been looking at in a contrived period of time that means nothing other than a way to sell calendars. It involves an intense amount of pressure to have plans and do something important in a week when we've eaten too much to dress up well, the weather is too bad to look nice anyway and there are no cabs to be found.

I'm on to you, New Year's. I'm so on to you that I made my goals last month. Ha.

These are not resolutions. I do not resolve to do anything because that sounds like settling. Also, January is not a good time for me to pretend to be new. Nothing starts new for me in January. November is clearly when things change for me. Plus two of my jobs have required me to do a lot of intense goal setting. (Like, five- and ten-year plans. Scary, y'all.)

In setting all these goals, I have been able to practice making important decisions. For me and only me. These decisions have come down to four main focal points. Which brings me to my water bottle.

I bought myself a new water bottle. Not because I necessarily feel the need to drink more water, but I needed a brand-appropriate water bottle for two of my new jobs and have been wasting too much plastic. It took me exactly twenty minutes to decide which water bottle to buy. But in the spirit of all my goal-setting, this one was too perfect:

Note the Starbucks cup - clearly none of my goals include drinking less coffee.

Then I realized I had to actually write my goals on the bottle. Which is what took the twenty minutes of deliberation. Did I really want everyone to see these? What if they look stupid or trite or daunting? What if I change my mind?

And then in minute 19: Fuck it. They are MY goals. And I can't achieve them if I can't even admit that I have them. So here they are:

Look at all this potential blog fodder! (Possible goal to consider: learn how to space words correctly. )

What was I scared of?

That you'd laugh at my future?

Or that I wouldn't get there?

Maybe. And maybe you will laugh. And maybe I won't get there. But it's my water bottle. My list of decisions. And you can't have it.

The Birthday Gift

Happy Birthday, Blog!

(For the record, the word "blog" makes me think of Muppets. And this is why: there is a Muppet song, which is probably also a real song, called "I'm in Love with a Big Blue Frog." Blog is like Blue and Frog combined. Hence, I get this song stuck in my head every time I write here. Every time.)

I started Gift Well exactly one year ago today. In writing a Birthday post, I could go over all of the things that have changed in my blog-based year. I won't. Most of them are pretty well covered throughout the blog itself.

Instead I'll tell you a story I was saving for a special occasion. I was saving it for when I started having a lot of readers because I wanted people to know about it. I was saving it for a holiday it would tie in with, but then I couldn't figure out where it fit. I was saving it for a day to make people happy, but then I got confused, and then angry and then sad. But today is my blog's birthday. And my blog deserves a really nice present.

I grew up in a house that celebrated birthdays as if every year were a lifetime achievement. Which is accurate, really. Balloons, streamers, cakes decorated by my mom's hand to reflect your favorite item of the moment in a fairytale of frosting. One year Rose Petal, of Rose Petal Place fame, graced the top of my cake true to form in her layered pink dress, an icing rose delicately draped on the side of her head. I believe this was also the year I got Rose Petal's doll-sized, rose-pink Cadillac with the gold steering wheel as a present. Birthdays are special in my family. I intend to carry this tradition on as long as I have a birthday coming to me. Because it is a lifetime achievement. Your whole life in one day, every year. And that deserves a really nice present.

So last summer, M turned 30. He saw it as a marker of achievements he had yet to accomplish. A milestone that tells us to take stock of where we are and where we go from here. I saw it as a chance to win him over to the land of Rose Petal birthdays - with streamers and balloons and a week-long excuse to do whatever you want.

I started by blocking out 24 hrs. - I told him not to plan anything for one whole day, but I wouldn't tell him anything else. I told him to pack a bag of clothes that included a nice outfit for going out to dinner, some pyjamas and a change of clothes for the next day. I told him I would pick up the bag from him at 2pm that day, and from there the 24 hrs. would start.

I picked up M's bag of clothes at 3pm and handed him a set of envelopes with times written on the outside. He was to open each envelope at its appointed time.

"I'll see you later," I shouted as I drove off. I'm pretty sure he was thoroughly confused. But he opened the cards:

3pm: Make your way to the Borders at Water Tower Place. Open the next card when you get there.

3:30pm: Go to the checkout counter and tell them your name. They should have something for you. When you get it, open the next card.

I had bought a New York Times newspaper and a pen and left it with the cashier at Border with M's name. He loves crosswords.

3:45pm: Take your new crossword and pen and make your way to the Starbucks at Wabash and Chicago. Feel free to wander through your favorite neighborhood near Loyola. Open the next card when you get to Starbucks.

4:00pm: Use this (I inlcuded a $5 bill) to buy yourself some coffee. You have one hour here to do crosswords and drink coffee.

5:00pm: Make your way to Trump Tower. Open the next card when you get there.

5:15pm: Go to the desk. Tell them your name. They should have something for you.

The desk had the final envelope. Inside was a room key. I wrote the room number for our Trump Hotel room on the card and told him to call me on his way up. I met him at the door with chilled Prosecco. Inside the room, I put up streamers and balloons. I made cookies and snacks and put those out along with a few presents. Also I looked really pretty.

We went to a fancy dinner near the hotel, but mostly just enjoyed the view of Chicago from our ridiculously fancy hotel room. This was the ultimate rose-pink Cadillac of birthdays. And not because of cost. (I found online deals for a lot of the cost.) The Rose Petal quality of this gift was how it was tailored to what M likes and values. His concerns about turning 30 were wrapped up in the measure of his success and not being able to enjoy the city as much as he wanted. My gift to him was to show him how much he had already succeeded, how we could enjoy the city here and now even while looking forward. All wrapped up in a birthday surprise scavenger hunt.

Your whole life in one day. What a great day.

For my blog, this story wraps up a whole year. This gift was the impetus for writing Gift Well to begin with. A blog life in one post. Little blog, you have already succeeded. I enjoy writing here and now, in the present, every time. I AM in love with a big, blue frog. Named Blog.

The Waiting Gift

Waiting in line is a constant game of risk vs. reward. As in:

Do I need $57 worth of makeup and workout pants at Target enough to watch the cashier move through slow-drying cement?

Or:

How many overdue bills make it worth a trip to the bank, just before closing, for a deposit?

I am impatient. I know this. I haven't always been this way. But I am now and it makes ordinary tasks like going to the grocery store interminable when too many other people are there. It also makes book signings a special kind of torture.

I've been to two different book signings in the past year. At the first, I was extremely patient and it was rewarding and excellent. A week or two after I was fired, I bought a copy of Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball and stood in line at ESPNZone for two hours to meet the author. The line wrapped around an entire block and I was ten people from the end. Outside. In November. By the time I reached the table, Simmons looked like he was minutes from death and I was so frozen my smile looked less like happiness and more like I had just sat on something sharp. But I was wearing my Red Sox hat and a green coat, and Bill Simmons took one look at me and said, "Boston!"

He signed my book "Go Sox!" I was ecstatic.

At the other, I was miserably intolerant and ditched out early. On Tuesday, David Sedaris stopped by Borders. I have been coveting his new book, "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" and figured this was as good an excuse a chance as any to buy it. Dumbly, I assumed this would be the same setup as the Simmons signing, so I cruised the scene before parking. I didn't see a line at all, not even inside. After buying the book, a red polo-ed employee tagged my wrist with a silver band. He told me to head upstairs. This was a mean trick. Apparently Borders has a secret room where they keep authors. A small room with two sets of doors. Two lines grew from each set of doors, spreading like a wet spot on a carpet into the maze of shelves. I pushed my way to the front of the second set of doors, feeling like a car that drives for too long in the imminently-ending lane. The car that everyone hates.

Another red polo-ed employee began handing out post-its so we could each write our own name on the inside cover of the book. This would streamline the process for Sedaris, who would now be writing out names for all of eternity inside Borders. Being a good foot shorter than the person directly in front of me, I raised my hand and asked for a post-it, thinking that since they were being offered, this would ensure I would receive a post-it. Not so.

"I will GET to you," Red Polo shouted. My coat warmed itself and I began sweating. Suddenly I was seven, waiting for Santa and being yelled at by an elf. An elf with the power to deny me access to my wishes. I shut my mouth. And I never got a post-it.

I did, however, wriggle myself far enough into the secret room to see Sedaris as he read from his new book. He was engaging and genuine and did not pretend to be anything other than his own voice.

I was happy.

Then the elves descended and told us to line up by wristband color. We were to wait in our separate lines, to then be called into the secret room and wait for Sedaris to sign our books. I shuttled into formation along with the other silver bracelets. Behind a man who had pulled his clothes out of the bottom of a Guiness Records-worthy pile of dirty laundry. In front of a screaming child. Between shelves of mass-marketed children's games that had all been placed upside down. I waited for thirty minutes, attempting to shut out all my senses except the one that was internally keeping track of my rapidly expiring meter time. I gave up. Not even the promise of Sedaris laughing at my obviously hilarious jokes could keep me in that cage. The reward did not outweigh the risk of insanity.

So what happened to me? Last year I was perfectly content to listen to pretentious posturing at the back of a line with nothing to read and nothing to do. This year I was gasping for air inside a store I could spend hours in on any other day. The main difference is that last year I literally had NOTHING ELSE TO DO. I had just been fired and was searching for things to keep me occupied and buoyant. This year, I was running to get to Borders after working no less than two of my three and a half jobs. My brain is starting to feel like a little rubber ball bouncing around my head. It does not need any more ricochet-able surfaces.

The other difference is that the Sedaris signing was not a gift. The Simmons signing was for me, but I also had him sign it to M, because he wanted to read it too. M was the first person who told me to read Simmons' online column and I've been hooked ever since. I bought the Sedaris book just for me and do not plan to give it away. There was nothing keeping me in that line except my ego. And my ego HATES crowds.

The only other time I have waited in a line like that was for the second Harry Potter book. My brother was 12 and he wanted that book BAD. I was home from college and it was released at midnight. So I drove my brother and I to Barnes and Noble at 11pm. We snaked our way around the children's section, alternating between standing and sitting and talking and dozing. I honestly don't remember much of the waiting part. Partly because we had each other to keep company. But also because I saw people I knew from far away and spent much of the time wondering if they saw me. (They did. It was fine. I immediately realized Harry Potter had become something a lot cooler than I had originally thought.)

My brother had saved up money to buy this book himself. Granted, it was money from my parents for doing things like cleaning his room which he had debatably completed, but my brother does not spend money easily. I have seen him waffle over a pair of $5 sunglasses for days. So when we finally got to the front of the line, I bought the book for him as an early birthday present.

Any risk involved in this line was catapulted out of contention by my brother's lightning-bolt-tattooed, 12-yr old face.

The Okay Gift

Happy Anni-fire-sary to me! 

One year ago Thursday I was fired from the bar. I have made it through exactly one year of embarrassing unemployment checks, excellent barely-working schedules and excruciating changes. 

And today, it's okay. 

Sometimes there's a minute, a gasp of a moment, where all the stuff you're confused about clears for a full second and that pregnant pause allows a gust of emotion to blast you in the face. It is so pure and pungent it becomes impossible not to react. Over the summer, I was so stressed out and confused and sad that during yoga, every time I got into half-pigeon all those feelings trapped in my hips would release and I would just start bawling in the middle of the studio. I went to yoga every day this summer. 

At the museum, we teach a workshop inspired by the book, "It's Okay to Be Different.", by Todd Parr. I got a chance to watch it for the first time last week, and the entire book is like an extended half-pigeon pose. It IS okay to ask for help. It IS okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub. It IS okay to have been fired from a bar. (Obviously that one is not actually in the book but that doesn't make it any less true.)

At the end of the workshop, the students get to write their own page, prompted with, "It's okay to..." One of the Pre-Kindergarten girls I met last week drew a large, lopsided heart on her page with a red pastel. She swathed over it in watercolor paint that spread in wide, wiping arcs across the page. In marker, she scrawled, "It's okay to be alone." Her symbol of love expanded, bright and wet; her heart enveloped the meaning of her words and flipped them from lonely to lovely in the gust of one pure emotion. 

I'm a little slow at life sometimes. I didn't want boobs. I bought my first pair of skinny jeans yesterday. And it took me three tries to realize I'm not cut out for a 9 to 5 job. So October 29, 2009 probably saved me some of the awkward growing pains all of those other slow adjustments took me through. I'm not ready to thank anyone for this just yet, but I am better for this past year.

Last October 29 was awful. It made me question everything I knew to be true about myself. It shredded a lot of what I had built around myself as confidence. It was the second-to-most-recent awful thing that happened in a really terrible two-year span that included a lot of endings, death and sickness. I was told I wasn't happy enough. Not excited enough to come to work. And that was true. I wasn't happy or excited enough to do a lot of things. This doesn't excuse anything and it doesn't make anything better. October 29 was handled badly and done with poor intent.

But.

I had been clinging to that job as the last semblance of a life I had intended to create for myself. A life that would include a non-traditional work schedule, a lot of true, unshakable confidence and a lot of true, unshakable friendships. I no longer enjoyed the reality of the job, but I wanted so much of what it represented. And it took losing the illusion to figure out how to build the real version. I would like to think I would have gotten there anyway. But that's not the point. I choose to see it as one in an inevitable chain of events that has brought me back to a happy place. I choose to see October 29 as a bonus. Like my slow self saved some time.

I didn't think I needed a book like "It's Okay to Be Different." As a teaching tool it's used as a springboard for conversations about race, disabilities and building friendships. It's a great gift for children. But for me, I'm already there. I like being different. I'm different in a lot of ways. But I'm impatient with myself sometimes. And the cool blast of emotion I felt in the middle of hearing that it's okay to have blue hair was the clarity of that impatience.

It's okay to be slow.

We can all use a half-pigeon to shake up those feelings we keep wound around our joints. They hide in the sockets, eyes squeezed shut, refusing to wiggle out even when we watch a sad Oprah show or listen to David Gray. They settle in, moved by nothing except a big, wetly painted heart that exclaims the virtues of everything they fear.

My friend C just made a scary decision. Her hidden feelings were shaken out, shouting "Me too! Me too! I'm unhappy too!" She listened. She changed something. And she's not sure how okay it is yet. I bought her this book today.

Because it's also okay to not be okay yet.  

The Routine Gift

"It's wonderfully strange and nobody'd look for it, but having our backs against the wall, our bones cracking for the marrow to come out (if we can hold on, survive it, keep our heads screwed on, our hearts clean of resentment) can be decisive, impelling us down a road we'd hardly have dared imagine or chosen."

This is the best and only way to say that change is hard but good. (This was part of an email I received a couple of weeks ago. I'm not kidding. Who writes like this in an e-mail? Honestly, I think we should all start to craft our online messages like this. It's gorgeous.)

I have never been one who does well with change. Even though I crave it. Even though I long for adventure and love to explore. Even though I repeatedly shove myself outside my comfort zone like my internal compass knows the only way to cure stage fright is to stand in the spotlight. So here I am, blinded to the audience and sweating.

There's the big stuff of change that has happened and will happen and impels me down this road I do not yet recognize.

Then there's the little stuff of change. This is where I really freeze up. Instead of worrying about not having a clear path in life, love or work, I am totally thrown off by:

• That when my battery died, I had to change the pre-set radio stations in my car

• That I can't park in the lot at the gym anymore

• That Starbucks remodeled and now all the tables are tall

I call this the science of M&Ms.

Even for people like me who actively resist traditional structure and feel suffocated by the idea of a regular schedule, humans need routines. I know this because I was a teacher. I know this because I still teach. And I know this because when I start to have all kinds of changes to my routine, I start buying lots of M&Ms.

M&Ms provide me with a lot of control over a practiced routine. I do not eat them like a normal person. I do not grasp a handful of random pieces and toss them into my mouth like a carefree monkey. (Although, are there monkeys who are full of worry and anxiety? Rocking back and forth in their corner of the zoo, hoping for a Xanax-laced banana?) Instead, I pull out a carefully measured palm-full. I place this mound in front of wherever I sit and I put the pieces in color order. Then I take them two at a time, but only within their color group, and I suck on them until they melt into a smooth, chocolate slide.

The order with which I construct my M&M path is determined by the meaning I place to each color. This was not entirely my own imagination here - I did this with my friend, J, back in elementary school. We decided it would go as follows:

Tan*: Boredom
Green: Envy
Orange: Hunger
Brown: Intelligence
Blue*: Adventure
Yellow: Happiness
Red: Love

*Tan was replaced with Blue after we made this up, so this I adjusted on my own.

This is the order. You eat the negative associations first and save the best for last. Why is love better than happiness? How are they not one and the same? I have no answers. This is just the way it is. This was also created back when I insisted I could taste the difference between the colors without looking. I did have an uncannily correct percentage. But also J and I watched Empire Records 194,000 times in one year and Gina claims to be able to do this too.

For J's birthday that year I bought her a VHS copy of Empire Records. Not that either of us needed it. I can still recite it by memory and I haven't seen it in years. But it was a routine. It was a piece of familiarity, of structure, of a path that we could stay on for about two hours.

I do not want to work in a cubicle. I do not want the same routine all day every day. The bones are cracking and the marrow will be decisive. But the little routines give us something to recognize of ourselves. This is why I save the red ones for last.

"It was perfect. Well, not exactly perfect." -- Lucas, Empire Records

The Words Gift

I am teaching myself Russian. Because, as with poker, I have tried to learn it about seven separate times and have stopped paying attention halfway into the alphabet. Because I learned French and can therefore figure out Spanish and Italian and I want a real, cry-yourself-to-sleep-in-a-physics-book challenge. Because my dad knows it and I feel left out.

But the real reason is because I want to and I can. I know I can because it's words. And I like words.

I like words the way other people like bendy straws or porcelain gnomes. I have notebooks full of quotes from books, movies and song lyrics. A collection dedicated to the science of the turn of a phrase. These notebooks are currently in storage, as part of the streamlining process I will share with you all soon. But the lifeblood of those sentences was too much a part of my consciousness to throw out.

This collection dates back to high school, when I started my first notebook of quotes. They track from the lamely familiar to the embarrassingly angst-riddled. They morph from novel excerpts to Nike advertisements to dialog from Friends episodes. And somewhere along the line they informed an entirely new subset of language created by my best friend, K, and I. Not that we spoke with words unintelligible to the entire public, but we had a set of words to describe people and things the full meaning of which was entirely un-discernible.

For Christmas one year in high school, I made a photo collage of the two of us. This is a highly non-original gift idea for a high schooler. (Let's be honest - high school students will turn anything into a collage. One time I even collage-d a trash can. But that is a gift for another time.) For this collage, I bought a frame that had a wide mat. Using a purple, glitter, gel pen (give me a break, I was 15,) I wrote all over the mat:

psycho
-ness
sweets
seriously
and...
random
please

Just words. But to the two of us, they are how we communicated, how we connected, how we made sense of being 15. They are the basis for the language of friendship. Of best friendship. And for whatever reason, we still both talk like this to each other. Seriously.

In the past few months of upheaval, the language of friendship has become paramount for me. I am extraordinarily lucky to have not only purely lovely friends, but ones who are eloquent on top of their awesomeness. I'm going to feature a sampling of these here in the next few posts. Just know that they are each written by someone I know and hold dear which makes each golden drop of thought that much more brilliant. Like an enormous vat of glittery purple ink.

But in the meantime, I am teaching myself Russian.

I am two hours in to my self-study. I am at Borders, accompanied by a latte and a soft-cover book. I am sounding out the letters and can now successfully read celebrity names written in Cyrillic characters. I am, however, doing this aloud for no particular reason other than I want to feel the sounds in my throat.

"Sh...sheks...shekspuh...shekspehreh..."

I look up to see the 300 pound man behind me staring with his mouth open. He has at least thirty cookbooks spread over his table like a fort of yummy pictures. Some of them have papers sticking out and others are waiting for their turn to dive off of a column and into the wreckage of the middle of the table. I wonder if he is a chef. And then I wonder if you are allowed to take recipes out of books if you are a chef. And then I realize that I am staring back.

Managing a half-smile, I turn around and continue to practice being a three-year-old Russian child.

"Shakespeare!"

The illegal chef surely heard this. Maybe he wouldn't understand. Maybe he doesn't know that instead of being a mildly illiterate psycho, I actually just read Shakespeare in Russian. And Shakespeare loves words too.

The Rule of Three Gift

The number three has symbolic importance across several categories. It is religiously significant, architecturally important and aesthetically balanced. I use the Rule of Three in gifts - every Christmas and birthday present for M included three separate parts. But my favorite part of the Rule of Three is its use as a literary device. It is employed to emphasize comedic timing, to give weight to a theory and to balance the plot of a story. I use it a lot here. Like now, when I tell you about three reasons why I do not like the idea of dating.

Let's be clear - I am not dating right now. I am however going out with lots and lots of friends. And instead of being able to say, "Oh I have a boyfriend," to unwanted suitors like I have been used to doing for four years, I feel the need to be painfully honest. And out tumbles, "Sure you can have my actual phone number for no apparent reason." Life would be a lot easier if I learned how to lie. Otherwise this will keep happening:

1. Unwanted Technological Contact

Background: The only contact info I offered was my email written on a business card.

1:30 pm: Facebook Friend Request. His profile picture is him standing in front of a boat. He's a member of the yacht club, lists his fancy private high school in his educational background and wears a sweater tied around his shoulders. In no world would we be friends based on this profile. We also would not be friends because when I talked to him at the bar he backed me into a corner with his close talking and referenced all the salsa dance classes he takes.

1:31 pm: I ignore this request.

1:35 pm: Email from SAME yacht enthusiast. His message includes the phrase: "There's a great wine bar in my neighborhood of Lincoln Park." There's also a lot of douchebags in MY neighborhood of Lincoln Park.

1:36 pm: I ignore this email.

2:00 pm: Twitter message from SAME yachter. "Dorkwad97 is now following you on Twitter!" He is listed as following 24 people. He has exactly 0 followers.

2:01 pm: I delete his profile and block him from following me.

There should be rules here. And I don't mean social rules. I mean like actual punishable rules. This is tech assault. I have been violated via social media. And I'm not even easy to find. If you Google my whole name, nothing about my actual self comes up until page three. That's how hard it is to find me on the interwebs. And that's how much of a hardcore stalker Mr. Salsa Class is.

2. Idiot Text Messaging

Background: Phone numbers were exchanged.

Text #1: "I wood luv 2 c u & take u out sumtime"

I get text speak. I even use it occasionally. (Although writing LOL makes me want to gag a little. Mostly because if you sound it out it sounds like gagging.) But this is a little too much for me. You are not saving characters here. "Sometime" is exactly one letter longer. So is "would." You sound like a moron.

Other texts in this sequence included the following: "gr8t" "pik" and "mite" and nowhere in the conversation were we discussing lice.

Just to be clear, I'm not a huge grammar Nazi and I certainly do not have any kind of educational bias. But this is just lazy. Even a basic phone has auto-correct that catches all of these.

3. Social ADD

Background: At a new-ish bar in my neighborhood where every person there insisted they hated the place and had never been there before. Is this a thing? Pretending you don't like the place because you don't want to associate yourself with the crowd that you secretly want to be? This is weird. But I really had never been there before.

Guy: "So what do you do?"

Me: "I teach..."

Guy: "Oh, I love this song! Sorry. What do you do?"

Me: "Um, I tea..."

Guy: (Singing along to song) "Wait, what?"

Me: "Um, I..."

Guy: "I smell meat."

It was like talking to the dog from Up.

So this is why I have no interest in dating. In every form - online, phone and in person - it is weird and inappropriate. It's forced and uncomfortable. It causes me to envision a line of arms, fingers outstretched and grasping...pulling on my arms, my clothes, my public persona. Dating is grabby. And I do not want any part of being grabbed.

I miss being able to have an automatic, honest response to avoid the crush of desperation. I miss feeling like that desperation has nothing to do with me. And I miss giving a trifecta of presents. The last gift I gave M was for his birthday, which fell during the month we spent apart before the breakup. I gave him a shirt he wanted and a Coffee Ice Cube tray (instead of water, you put coffee in, so when you have iced coffee it doesn't get watered down.) Only two parts. Not three.

That's the thing about the Rule of Three. It strikes a chord when you break it.