From Wikipedia:

Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

That’s TOTALLY ME! Except the brilliant poet for all time part. But seriously, she is one I look to in moments of despair about my life. And though only wore white in high school, I have a “thing” for white t-shirts. Surely that counts.

It hit me today that being an unmarried woman of 46 years old was somehow a very bad thing. Most of the women I know who are my age were married at least once in their life. Not being married makes me feel, all of a sudden, like a societal misfit, a freak. Oh god.

Does marriage make you happier, as studies suggest? Does it trap you in a lifetime’s worth of misery? Is it the best thing ever, especially as you near the end? Or is it a little bit of all of that? And what is wrong with me that I never did it? It was partly that when I came of age women in my social circles weren’t really the marrying kind. We were just coming out of the 1970s and women empowerment and all of that.

I think the idea was, you go have a career, live your life a little and then get married and have kids. Recently, Jonathan Franzen gave a talk to a group of students where he mentioned the power of, and the necessary piece to life’s puzzle being love. When he spoke to the students, he very candidly mentioned his marriage breaking up. “We were married too young,” he said. He made it sound as though they gave it their all to try and fix it. But it just fell apart anyway. I suspect that is what his novel Freedom is going to be about. I can’t know because I’ve only finished the first part and have stalled reading the rest. This article talks about what Franzen left out when he redid the speech for the New York Times.

Franzen is on to the something. Love, as it turns out, IS the juice of life. The kind of love one gets, from what I observe, from a long marriage is the kind you want to take with you into your old age. The question then becomes not “Do I love this person” but “can I tolerate this person”? Can you tolerate them, forsake all others for them?

Half of me feels panicky, like I’d better get married like tomorrow – just so that I won’t seem so different from anyone else. The other half says, fuck it. Why should I?

I would have a father figure for my daughter (a good reason)
I would have someone to be with every night (but I like my freedom)
I would have a partner in old age and finance (but I like my freedom)
I would be participating in a cultural ritual that bonds me with my fellow citizens (does being on Facebook count?) and removes the “freak” stigma (like I really need another one)
Sex (doesn’t getting married guarantee you have sex with yourself for the rest of your life?)
Someone to cook for (that would be fun)
Someone to love (love…it always gets back to that)

In the end, I can no more conform to a ritual that, like the priesthood, seems to encourage torture to the male and female. On the other hand, a basic tenant of being a human dictates that we try to fit in with everyone else. This is really what advertising is about, the old “if you don’t have an iPhone, you don’t have iPhone” thing? It’s all about trying to take away the ache of being different.

I know single people, even single people older than me. We drift around in this world untied to anyone (except children of course). What do married people think about us, I wonder? Do they feel pity? Do they feel a wee bit of envy? Or do they just wonder what is wrong with us.

I don’t know, peeps. I’m making this life thing up as I go along. I’ll keep you posted.

There are people out there who lend their voices to our collective. They are truth seekers and independent thinkers. They do not reside inside any box. Henry Rollins one of those: a punk rocker with Black Flag turned spoken word genius turned DJ turned philosopher. And playwright/newly minted conservative David Mamet is another.

This is the reason I love Henry Rollins. He wrote this song – which helped me through a terrible phase in my life:

And David Mamet, writer of Glengarry Glen Ross, has decided to “come out” as a conservative. While I think this shows less intelligence on his part, and perhaps a late-age fear of losing all of his money to taxes, you have to admire someone who is risking so much by speaking his mind.

Free thinking. Why not.

Weirdly enough, two things happened at once that thrust me backwards in time. The first was that a long lost friend/unrequited love turned up on Facebook. This is a guy that I thought, at the time, I had no desire to date. But when I remembered it back after all of these years what I see more than that is how afraid I was of someone with strong, sincere feelings like that. But boy, did he kind of stick with me over the years in an odd way. So now he’s on Facebook. That is the strangest thing about Facebook, well — maybe it’s number 515 when it comes to weird things about Facebook.

The second thing that happened was an encounter at the Federal building with a total stranger also made me think of this person. We exchanged smiles briefly. He stood behind me and said my last name was the same as his mother’s maiden name. But, though I thought he was cute and all, something stopped me from engaging in conversation with him. What was it? Fear? Lack of interest in jumping on that roller coaster ride of a relationship? Whatever it was it was a strange, unsettling encounter with someone who seemed very familiar to me. Since I spend so much time online now I forget that there are other ways of meeting people.

And finally, on a nightly jog, this haunting song came over my headphones and it once again thrust me back. I think we’ve all been the girl in this song one time or another. I dare say we’ve also been the guy. When I’ve been the guy, it hurts like hell. When I’ve been the girl I often look back with a fair amount of regret. It’s like a mournful puzzle that never gets put together. A maybe beautiful one, in its perfection and impossibility.

When I hear this song it floods my brain with my recorded memories of being a much younger woman. It recalls lazy summer afternoons spent up at the creek smoking pot and skinny dipping. It recalls occasional trips to Dodgers Stadium, too few and far between, and all of the romance that goes with boys and baseball, or baseball at all.

And as my daughter and I get ready to flee this city and head for the South of France, to Cannes, this is probably the song that remind me of today. Right here, right now.

I was eating a banana the other day and it reminded me that it’s been a long time since I’ve interacted with a male organ. (Oh no she didn’t!) I’m sorry to have to be so blunt about it but it is a fact of my life: I have given it up, at least for now. Why? Because I’ve wasted way too much time interacting with it. It might be true that cock has attempted to ruin my life. Sure, maybe it was the great conversation, the memorable moments in movie theaters, the restaurants, the running on the beach in the rain, the champagne, the flowers, the hugs, the laughter, or maybe, you know, it was the cock.

It wasn’t really until I saw the Eat, Pray, Love trailer that these thoughts began to circulate and form a conclusion – maybe a conclusion I don’t really want to reach.

I never read the book because I don’t like being an Oprah demographic. It isn’t that I have anything against Oprah – I love Oprah. I am just a rigid skeptic. I don’t go in for religious or “spiritual” stuff. I’m a science gal through and through. But you know what? What’s so bad about this sort of thing? When she says “Since I was fifteen I was either been with a guy or breaking up with a guy” and I have to say – yeah, me too. What’s with all of the cockcentric living?

And so I’ve given up the cock. At least for now. And it’s shown me a lot of great things – like I can be a full time mom, like I can work hard every day and not feel guilty for being successful. Maybe my life doesn’t have any room for a big old cock. Big sigh.

The last serious relationship I had broke my heart so completely that it made me think that I would never be able to believe in love again. And it’s true. In many respects, a door has closed. Trust was a hard fought thing for me to begin with, but this dude was leading a double life and sleeping with all of his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends the whole time. I didn’t find out about it until much, much later. It was the second of two heartbreaks; at least the first one was kind of normal by comparison. I wanted someone I couldn’t have. That’s really the long and short of it. Insert deep and meaningful psychological explanation here.

And so, after the tears and the “healing” I had to wonder, was it the guy or was it that stiffy? I don’t have the answer, I really don’t. I just wonder about it now. How much of our love and desire is wrapped up in our bodily organs?

Food for thought, so to speak. And by the way, I do miss the conversation and the laughter and the running on the beach in the rain and the bookstores and the movie theaters and all of it. I even miss the cock when you get right down to it. But hey, it’s time to eat, pray, and love – and forget the manufactured happy ending I’m never ever going to get.

p.s. I don’t think, you know, for the record that I ever really did run on the beach in the rain. Something for the bucket list.

Pioneer Woman show her readership how much she loves us by posting the cowboy in chaps from behind. What it is about that? There’s just something about that.

PW