ohmigosh how did it get to be ten o'clock?

GAH! Well, I fell asleep on the twin in the back room after watching three episodes of SATC (I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that while I'm standing at church I'm thinking I'd rather be at home with my girls.)

Then I tossed and turned for about an hour at 2 a.m. when I went to the bed in the front room. Then I woke up at about eight a.m., wrote an email to a college roommate via Facebook, accepted a friend request from the pastor of the church down the street that I sometimes attend Sunday mornings, wrote about the bizarre dreams I had on my "health/women's stuff" blog, formatted the long paragraph from the email I wrote to my friend about the third blog I've started...and that brings us to now, and it is 10:05. I better eat something. I have to be at work at noon, Marian and I are doing a "Monthly Forum" on "Things that make libraries look stupid" (i.e. do you know how one goes about becoming a board member, etc.)

(off to eat something.)

I'm back. I bought a slew of vanilla yogurt yesterday when I was at Giant Eagle, so I'm eating and writing. I'm not sure that's entirely healthy either.

So why a new blog, SL?

Well, I am very aware of what I write about and how this blog is really about me being a girl/woman, my daily life, my love for SATC, etc. It can be at once very surface and very deep. But I have a sense (and it's not based on recent comments, hint hint) (since I haven't been getting many, hint hint) (but thanks for the ones I have been getting!) that the readership of this blog transcends politics. The health blog is where I let it rip about being a woman and sometimes being a woman with a mental oh, I hate those words--disorder? illness? The third blog, which I've entitled "Stuff n'at" is where I want to let it rip about politics and how I see my development in that arena in the past coupla years.

I keep coming back to a line from the season five finale (of SATC, is there any other show?) where in the commentary, director and writer Michael Patrick King says, "Carrie should never be pregnant." It wasn't so much that she didn't have the capability, but that Carrie was the odd one, (square peg makes me giggle) the one that didn't fit the societal expectations of women: getting married, having children, joining the PTA. So in the way that MPK wants to protect Carrie (by making sure that Sarah Jessica Parker's baby bump is hidden, at all cost) I want to protect this blog. This is not a blog about mental health, women's health, or politics. But I am a woman, I am a person politic, and I do have issues with mental health. From time to time, the lines will blur--I don't want to be completely compartmentalized, but I do want this blog to be the fun one. And yet, I want a separate place where I can write about politics and know that if the readers of this blog choose to hop over, they will, but if not, they can skip it and stay right here.

I also see it as if they were separate books. If I were writing a book about me, and myself as a girl/woman, I might not talk about politics. But if I were writing about politics, I might not write about me and my girl/woman life.

About the other stuff. I'm tired of surface relationships in my off-line life. This summer I had a glimmer of what real relationships with people at my church could look like. And pfft, it's fall, everyone is back to school, back to life, meetings, PTA, homework. So here I am, no PTA meetings, no homework, and surface relationships again. It's so frustrating!! I know it's not necessarily "the world's" fault; I have retreated, hibernated, and yes, there have been some shifts. But I see the world coupling up and I get scared. Mother to son, husband to wife, girlfriend to boyfriend. And all these pregnant women. Where do I fit in? So maybe there's a reason that I cling to my "girls." Because I don't know anyone in my life, people that I talk to, that are talking about these things. When I talk to my friends, we don't talk about how everyone's pregnant all of a sudden. We talk about other things. But I need to. I need to talk about how everyone's pregnant. I need to talk about how it feels like I'm getting left behind. (And of course, there is the flip side--the women that have kids, have husbands, feel that they are losing their friendships.)

I'm a fan right now of a bunch of Christian fiction books, the Sisterchicks. Mostly, the books are about women who are midlife and have a chance to fulfill a childhood dream of traveling to Paris, or Finland. The thing I love about these books is that the women who are in them, if they are married, they stay married. If they are single, they stay single. The books are about women, but they are not about romance, and any romance that is in them is with the geography, or their amazing Creator, or trying to figure out how they are still stuck on the memory of a summer love in Paris from twenty years ago. Also, the women may be married, three car garage, but for the time being, the book is about them in Venice, with their girlfriend. A book that is not in that series but in my mind that genre, which I call, um, let's see, Christian travel fiction, is Daring Chloe, which was a freebie from my dear friend Suzanne Beecher at DearReader.com. I belong to the Zondervan Breakfast Club and so every week I get excerpts from new books from Zondervan, be they "Chick Lit," non-fiction, biography...her tag line is "It's so good to read with friends" and that is what I feel about you, dear readers of this blog. The thing that I love about Daring Chloe is that not all her friends are Christian, her roommate doesn't understand why one would go to church, and while there is a guy who could be a love interest, he is not the focus, and does not become a love interest by the end of this book. So Chloe who starts the book by being jilted at the alter, remains single throughout the book.

Is it painfully clear that this is me just writing, not really going for a thread that make sense, not saving a single solitary thought for another post?

Twenty years is a theme for me--it keeps coming up as I watch SATC. "I've been dating for fifteen years" Charlotte moans in the early seasons. But in the later seasons, Miranda says, "I've been dating for twenty years." As I think about the fact that in a few weeks I'll be 37, well, it will be 20 years of dating, as my first mis-guided relationship was when I was a girl of 17.

We each have our journeys. And we each have our time tables. And they are not all the same journeys, or the same timetables. But they intersect, every once in a while, and that is worth all the traveling in between.

Thank you, my darlings, for reading.