Glug.
It is raining hard this morning. Days like this are when I’m glad I have my kooky beginning-work-before-the-crack-of-dawn schedule. Why is it that storms like this always arrive during rush-hour?

I haven’t had coffee to wake myself up in the morning for a while now, and I’ll admit I’m feeling pretty smug about it. But then I go and have 4 to 5 cups of green tea within a two-hour period. Because, you know, the antioxidants.

Mystery Billboard
There’s a mystery billboard on a road near our house. It depicts a big bed with a white bedspread beside a table with what looks like two dozen cone-shaped water cooler cups on it. Or something. Because I always drive by it before I can figure out what the hell it is, exactly. There’s also some tag line that I can’t even remember because it makes no sense to me.

Actually, the sign’s been up for a couple of months now, and early on, I not only gave up trying to figure out what it was pushing, I decided I didn’t want to know. I hate billboards but kinda like the idea of giant public photos of indistinct meaning. I avert my eyes now as I drive past. I still see that fuzzy mass of white out of the corner of my right eye, but instead of causing me to feel all harried and advertised-to, I think of downy pillows on a cloudy day. I relax.

Old and undignified.
Okay, so let’s just say there’s a woman who’s really closer to 30 than to 20, now. (Not me.) She has been closer to 30 for a year and some change already, but now it can no longer be denied. She has a few grey hairs. Just a few, but there they are. This does not bother said-woman in the day-to-day. She’s looking forward to her thirties, when she imagines life will feel a little more settled.

But sometimes....
Sometimes, she goes out to dance to punk and new wave music with two friends who are much closer to 20 than to 30. Let’s call them Audrey and Marlys. The friends, that is. They are wind-up toys of whirling energy. One particular Friday night, going out with said-friends feels especially right. Nearing-Thirty Gal has gone through a major break-up several months prior, you see, and being around Audrey and Marlys makes her forget she’s spent the last six years of her life trying to be in grown-up relationships. And on warm spring nights like Friday, when she looks back, all that time has the look of youth wasted.

So they go out and dance and NT Gal drinks cheap Pabst after Pabst but before that, one of the first things she notices upon arrival at divey bar is one very attractive young man there. After a few hours, she finds said young man tends to be standing near wherever she is as she moves throughout the bar, so she strikes up a conversation. They chat for a good little while, although if pressed now, NT Gal wouldn’t be able to tell you what they actually discussed, since she forgot on said-night that: While it tastes like water and quenches sweaty-dancing-thirst like water, Pabst Blue Ribbon is not actually water.

After a while, NT Gal looks around the bar and waxes profound to the striking feller, holding her silver can aloft, perhaps teetering a bit, "Gaaaaawd, I feel so old whenever I come here. I mean, everyone’s like, totally young." And striking feller replies,
"You can’t be that old! How old are you?" NT Gal. feels herself grin because it seems as though they’ve reached that co-conspiratorial, us-againste-everyone else point in their conversation. And he actually seems much older than the 20-year old art students scurrying to and fro all around them.
"I’m 27."
A beat. Then he says, "Oh."
"Why? How old are you?"
"I’m 22."
"Oh." Shit. Because as I know and as NT Gal knows and as I’m certain you know too, dear reader, 22 is the equivalent of 12 in boy-years. But the thing is that NT Gal quickly brushed this fact aside because two-something in the a.m. on a smokey Friday night has a way of altering things--and 22 wasn’t exactly you know, statutory. Not quite.

However, also just then, at two-something in the a.m. on Friday night, as we’ve mentioned, NT Gal was also several cheap beers to the wind and so when that Pixies song "Debaser" came on, she had to go join her friends who were beckoning her to dance, sure as birds gotta swim. So she did, and when she got back to where she and striking young man had been talking, he was, yes, gone, so very gone across the bar talking to another gal, where he would remain the rest of the night.

And she thought, "So this is how it begins."

the next morning

the next morning
Originally uploaded by alice deaver.

We had a Mexican fiesta for my birthday.

On Saint Patricks' Eve
Here in the U.S., across the sea from much of what takes place in the world, one of our principle cultural assumptions is that of the melting-pot, (at least among white people.)

Three generations ago, our Italian ancestors were reviled, and another few back, it was the Irish; these people with their strange smells and strange cookingand crime (automatically theirs, as a group.) Move up just one generation, and these things had become mainly jokes and loose stereotypes, and even these faded by the time we came around. Now, our cultural origins are reduced to anecdotal fodder at bars:
-Oh, you're German? I'm a quarter-German.
-My middle name is Dutch, so I think there's some of that back there, too.
-Anyway, want another Bass?

And we go to Europe. We ride the trains which pass so easily from nation to nation there, and we are surprised that there could still be any great difference at all, between these white people over here, and these ones, nine hours away. After all, everyone's the same and everybody's equal, as we like to say, and will say, automatically if roused from a deep sleep and asked. We view their differences as
antiquated curiosity.

-Look, we say, reading from Lonely Planet. -Over here, they make these funny clocks. And over here, they make this dish with sausage.
(It's actually a dish your great-grandmother would recall with pleasure: the way the fennugreek would burn the nostrils, the way the sausage's thin skin would burst
between the incisors when her mother made it every week.)
-We must buy one of those clocks, says your companion.
But you wrinkle your nose at the sausage-thing followed by eight more hours on the train. You'll grab a sandwich. They have those, right?

Alpha.
I used to feel bad for Danger Cat, because Otis, the dog I shared with my ex, basically wanted to eat him. It was tough trying to keep them separated all the time. As a puppy, Otis had once been beaten up by a different cat, so he had a certain respect initially (read: fear) of Buddy Holly.
But then something changed.
I don’t know what happened. Otis got ahold of this website or something, because two years down the road, he was lunging and barking at our cat like he, Otis, was A-number one alpha king. And Buddy Holly stopped standing his ground, and just ran like hell under the nearest piece of furniture. This led me to think of how there are no absolutes in the pet world: Whereas once I felt sorry for Otis, my sympathy now lay with Buddy Holly, who, like those old Warner Brothers cartoons, seemed to lose one life every time the dog rushed him.

Last night, I was watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force with a friend, and I let out an “Aww,” when this constantly trod-upon character, Meatwad, got tortured yet again, by another character, Shake. “Don’t feel sorry for Meatwad!” said my friend. “He would be just as mean if he were smarter!”

All of this keeps resonating with things I’ve been observing lately as I’ve stuck my big toe tentatively back into that crazy crazy world of, yes, dating. It just makes me wonder about the whole confidence-thing. I’m convinced that feeling confident is the only thing that matters as far as how satisfied you end up in life, in the end.

What I’m wondering about lately, though, is how the hell confidence is doled out in the scheme of things, and by what cackling demon. How come I’ve (semi- pseudo-) dated some people who just dazzle me at the outset with their amazing self-confidence, only later to realize that it’s all bullshit bravado and there ain’t no there, there? How come the people with zero substance seem to be the most proud of themselves? And then of course, how many people have I known who are just fabulously witty and kind and smart and physically attractive, but just convinced they’re losers? The self-fulfilling prophecy-ness of it. You become who you think you are. Not to say that you can’t change it, but really--only you can change it. I don’t know how. Go ask my dog.