Ridin Solo -- Thank you, Jason Derulo

I "ride solo" to McDonalds at 10:30pm with my laptop in the passenger seat. Oh look, my new best friend! Trusty ole laptop. Down to ride or electronically die.

I scope the people in the extraordinarily long line in front of me. Arab guys in a charger. 20-something and his wife in the Explorer in front of me. They're high on life and bounce around making the suv wag its butt in my face. Behind me a skinny blonde with a medium face wearing scrubs in a silver 90's-esque sports car. The car says, don't hate, I'm a single mom still holding on to my pre-kid coolness. She prolly just came from work. Getting food before she picks up the kid from her mom's house. She flicks some hair out of her face and taps a manicured nail against the side of her car. Maybe she still lives with her mom. 

I get to the window, pay the teen white girl with chipped hot pink nail polish. I get to the food window, make sure my Aventura is playing low enough but not too low. I make eyes at the latino mixing my latte. He's probably the same height as me, bordering on the genetically defective. But his skin is just the right shade of warm, and his smile is shy. I know he speaks English. He always works late like this. Honduras, maybe? No, probably just Mexico. At the last minute he laughs at something behind him and puts my drink on the ledge. The tall latina girl with big dangly earrings picks it up and I scowl as she pulls a straw and hands it to me out the window. 

When I park on the other side of the barrier of shrubbery and open my laptop, I turn off the reggaeton and listen to La Fouine rap about things I don't understand in French. 

Part of me thinks I like it this way, always peering in to what I could be doing otherwise. But the thing is, I've probably already done most of what they're doing and I didn't feel any more connected to other people. I could go out and have drinks like the Arabs were doing. I could have played around in the car like a little kid with a guy I liked. But I still feel so... outside.

I've always been a weird kid, okay. But I kinda thought some day I could let go and allow my quirks to flourish under the stewardship of what Anne of Green Gables would have called a kindred spirit. I think I've been hiding myself in actions that I think would appear more natural than the ones I actually want to make. So I'm dropping it. 

If I want to sneak around for no reason, I can sneak around. 

If I want to tell you the truth instead of what you want to hear, I should.

If I don't want to settle for anything less than what I know I deserve, I shouldn't have to.

And if I really want to go to New York and see what happens, I can.

Oh Jason Derulo, don't put on your shades to cover up your eyes. You're headed to the club, hun. Its dark outside. And you might wreck your pretty car.

I ride solo back to the house with my half drunk latte and a hand cramp.

In Short

In short, I'm not getting married.

I'm not killing this blog no matter how bad it might make me look.

I'm not going to stop writing.

I'm disappointed in myself.

I want cozy. I want safe. I want home.
So that's where I've moved!

I'd say that about sums it up.

Vanishing Act

If you haven't noticed this before, I'm telling you now. 

I like to be able to disappear at a moments notice. 

Years ago this affinity for vanishing acts might only have arisen in the form of a swapped phone number or a new privacy setting on a peer-to-peer network. Lately, however, its taken more drastic actions. 

I completely erased all involvement in peer-to-peer networking. I not only switched numbers with my mother, but changed it completely. I ignored emails from various concerned acquaintances. I refused to reply even when my fingers itched to either confirm that I was alive, or give them a piece of my mind. 

In a way its as if I'm running from myself. Well, not myself really, but a former self. Unlike people who think they can change and get away with having all the friends they did in their former lives, I flush my entire system. I buy new clothes. I throw out things I used before. I dye my hair. I gain or lose weight, though its not my choice exactly. 

I feel in control when I do this. And honestly, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Aside from being a terrible friend to nearly every almost-friendship I've ventured, I think its perfectly acceptable to go underground when I feel like it. 

Its just so bizarre, really! I keep everyone at arms length. I haven't had a friend that I didn't feel awkward around since I was eight years old. 

Her name was Candice Cook and I adored her. A few years ago I saw her at a drug and alcohol saturated college party. She was sitting in some guy's lap on a lawn chair and when we recognized each other it was as if we were looking in a mirror and finding ourselves oddly embarrassed. She informed me that she had been kicked off of the university cheerleading squad and I remarked that I had similarly been kicked out of a private university. We smiled at each other, but there was a wall of about fifteen years between us that neither of us was willing to scale.

Who am I protecting? Is it myself, or other people? 

I think there's something about creative flair that forces one into silent introspection. I have literally broken up with guys before because I wanted nothing more than to sit on my patio or an overlook out in the country and read read read. I wanted to lose myself and then rebuild. 

Its kind of like spending hours and hours meticulously building an entire city out of legos and then becoming overly excited by the idea of disassembling it in a crash of your fists for a whole new creation. 

I find it hard to connect with people. I love writing and correspondence. I could probably email myself into a romantic fantasy if I wanted. I've written before about a boy I met in a chatroom when I was 14 years old. I was completely in love with the idea of him, and the whole thing reincarnated itself when I started writing to a particularly insecure debate student from Alabama a couple years back. 

Real life is never as amazing as the things my creative mind dreams up. 

If I could only be satisfied by it. 

In any case, I suppose I'm writing really to apologize for all this vanishing. 

Per the above statements, you may gather that the only place I really feel like myself is here. In black and white. Rarely do I regret the words that I write. Yet I frequently regret things I do or say. 

And if you were to ask me if I was sorry for dredging up the past in my earlier numbered entries, the answer is NO. Because I feel that I made something terribly ugly and troubling beautiful. And when I do that I don't feel so bad about it anymore. Its like, okay, so that was supposed to happen. I have a place to put it now. 

I can't vanish from this writing arena any more. 

I can't.

And as a friend told me a while back: all I need to do is finish something, and I can finally let go and try to get it out there and published. 

Which, according to the poorly written YA novels I'm devouring lately, should not be that difficult. 

Please accept my apology, that is, if you're still listening.