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.

Insomnia, thy name is PMS...

Today I gave up my Aunt Margaret's table. I lent it to a new friend who has just started renting a house and needed more furniture to fill it up. It was that or let my landlord use it to stack his golf clubs. (Well, we would have found a family member to house it, but new friend, let's see, we'll call her Margaret, for Margaret's table is now hers.)

My Aunt Margaret got married, eloped, when she was fifty. She married a judge from the office where she was a secretary. Their "meet cute" had something to do with baseball tickets. To the Mets, I thought, but someone said the Mets weren't around then. Aunt Margaret was a career girl in the twenties and thirties. I guess she got married in the late forties, as she was born in 1898. (You do the math, I'm too tired.) It is a family mystery as to why she married him. Maybe he made her laugh, muses my mother. All my mother remembers is that he was old. But he bought Aunt Margaret a pig, (she wanted one) and when she was widowed, Margaret made it possible for my mom to go to camp two weeks in a row one summer. She bought everyone magazine subscriptions, and took us to see "Hello Dolly" one summer, on Broadway. My grandmother, (not Margaret's sister in law, but my dad's mom, who was friends with Margaret through some club, not because my mom married my dad) bought me soundtracks to every play I'd seen. I still have all of them, even though I haven't played vinyl for years.

I love sitting here and discovering what will come out. It's like no other kind of writing. When I journal, it's generally because I have to work something out. When I write a letter, it's to a specific "Dear you." When I write a cover letter (let's not talk about it) I freeze until I get to the second draft that has been doctored by Kiki (dear dear Kiki). But when I come here, and I'm in the right place, the writing just comes.

Of course, as soon as I write a sentence like that, the flow stops. In the background, I'm listening to the commentary with version of the season finale of Season Five. So I stop every now and then to turn back to the TV behind me. What I love about the commentary for this particular episode is that Michael Patrick King doesn't talk over the dialogue, as he often does in other commentary episodes, especially one with Berger in Season Six. (But we won't get into that here.) I had lunch with a dear one this week, Kay. And she and I are the type of friends that will never run out of things to talk about. On Tuesday, at Mad Mex, we could not stop talking about SATC. We know all the episodes by heart and love them all--and agree that a good show is one that can be better by talking about it with friends.

Well, my neck is getting tired enough that maybe my body can be tired enough and I can sleep. Tomorrow--Sandcastle. It is my favorite day of every summer. My friend K. and I have been going for the past three years. I've gone for the past five. But I'm too tired to write more...maybe sleep will come...

My Sunday morning...

So, it's your favorite (or not so favorite) thirty-something moderately depressed blogger.

tap, tap, is this thing on?

I wake up, knowing it must be light outside because the covers are over my head and it's bright, even under the covers.

Knowing it's not the best route to better mental health, I come to check my email. Ah, Facebook has Valentine's Cards. You know, I knew that already. Oh, and my Verizon bill is online. Thanks. Isn't that more of a "Monday morning" email? This electronic life takes away "days of the week, time of day."

And that was over 2 hours ago.

Since then, I have visited Babs, who is still blogging with a bun in the oven (she's still the mother of 3+1), Daysgoby (who won an award, twice!), and Badger, whose daughter talks mile-a-minute when she's happy. I wasn't able to be chipper about this, since it reminded me of what I'm like when I'm manic. (I'm not saying she's manic.) (I am WAY too in my head these days. It creates problems.) I posted a comment in response to someone's comment and browsed old posts on my other blog and went over to Newlywifed, who promises this will be the last post about breastfeeding. I don't comment.

I decide it's about time to eat something, so I have a breakfast drink, and decide to find a movie to watch this afternoon. We're having a "community meeting about covenant membership" at the OD at 4, so I have to go an early show. Sis has been trying to get to Atonement and I thought, yes, that's what I'll go see. Until I read the review on Yahoo! Movies and a few user reviews. Plus, the movie is 2 hours long...so I moved on. There will be Blood, no. First Sunday, no. I must have gone through all the movies that are on tap at my favorite movie house (I've seen 3, 1 is horror, 1 is Rambo, No!, two are the ones I just vetoed...) So I move on.

Persepolis catches my eye. So I click on it, read the review, read some user reviews (wowsa, there are some angry folks!), go to CT Movies, go to Rotten Tomatoes. So At 12:35 I'll be at the Manor on Murray Ave. It's 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so I'll have to get there early enough to spend ten minutes getting my key out of the ignition since Squirrel Hill isn't too far away but too far to walk and Sunday buses are notoriously slow and infrequent. Hmm, maybe I'll get lunch at Gullifties and maybe I'll go to Fox Books...

So at 10:44, I think, hmm, I could take a shower and give myself a book budget and go browse in a bookstore. When was the last time I did THAT? (For a librarian, it's a bit of a busman's holiday.) And I could have lunch at Brueggers, which would be cheaper than Gullifties. Oooh, and I could go get Winter White Chocolate at 31 Flavas...

It's been awhile since I've gone on a date with me and my city. (Hopefully I'll do better than Carrie in Anchor's Away) Yesterday as we walked out of work (we all walk out together when the library closes at 5 on Saturdays), someone said, Spring is coming and I said, "there's no rush..." and so someone and I had a conversation about how I have no family ties in Pittsburgh, if I didn't like the weather, I could get a job somewhere warmer.

Because the weather is one of the things I like about this crazy town. I know. (I'm a winter girl--which makes me miss Max, who is too. He likes how you can see further in the winter because the leaves are gone.) (Um, Max is a winter boy.)

Lent starts on Wednesday--I can hardly believe it! Which means Easter is egad! In March! So I better start planning my trip to South Carolina...

And since now my brain is about to explode and the movie is about an hour and a half away, I think I'll go take that shower.

Thanks for tuning in. (Or not.)

Books I'm reading:

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell--for the library's book group Tuesday. It's a re-read for me. (It's NOT self help, even though the subtitle makes it sound like it is.)
• 3 Weddings and a Giggle (finished the first novella last night.) (Also a re-read)
• Prayer: does it make any difference? by Phillip Yancey. Phil is always so DOWN TO EARTH. I like that he's also a little grumpy.
  
• Getting Dumped...and getting over it. (this was a discard at our library and it caught my eye in the recycling bin. I read through it before bed and it was quite insightful. I underlined it like crazy, took quizzes and realized I'm NOT ready to talk to Max yet. I'll be re-reading this.)

Well, off to wash hair n'at.