I turn on my computer. I wait patiently as it connects. I go online. My breath catches in my chest until I hear 3 little words, "You've got mail."

(Meg Ryan in the 1998 film, You've Got Mail.)

I've been involved in an email relationship since the early part of August. It's not quite like the movie You've Got Mail, because I know the guy's name, what he looks like (cute) and I've actually been out in fresh air with him twice. (Also, we do not work in sparring bookstores.) But most of our interaction is via email.

How did I meet this guy, you ask? Through an online dating service. Yes, I went on a second date with a guy with whom I had zero chemistry and thought, well, maybe he's a "nice guy," I hear that happens sometimes. (I know of at least two women who slogged through at least 3 bad dates with the men they ended up marrying.) So I Googled "dating a nice guy" and a quiz came up, "Could you date a nice guy?" Well, yes, it turned out that I could, but in order to find that out, I had to join the dating service that sponsored the quiz. I created a user name and a password and I got my results. I was a "sweetheart" and compatible with "nice guys."

And a few days later, I got an automated email from one of the founders saying you should add a picture, answer some questions. It was a boring Sunday afternoon, so I uploaded the picture of me next to the Stanley Cup and answered some questions. I even looked at the profiles of some guys that the site thought I might match up with.

And a few days after that, I got matched with Xander (not his real name.) We emailed for about a week and then he asked me out for coffee. We share an interest in the author Malcolm Gladwell, the Harry Potter books, and movies. Finally, I have found someone who watches the movie before reading the book.

It's kind of fun and kind of scary. I do not have a lot of great dating experience under my belt, so my neurotic side comes out to taunt me a lot. Fortunately, I have amazing friends who remind me that I'm not dating those men right now, I'm dating THIS one. Who seems incredibly laid back, nice, respectful.

(I probably will not be blogging too much about this because of respect, privacy, and boundaries.)

What I'm discovering is that my encyclopedic knowledge of SATC comes in handy. Anything that could ever happen to me has happened either to one of the girls (Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, or Miranda) or one of the writers. I'm not alone, this is not new, this has happened to someone else!!

So that's what's new in the life of Sarah Louise. What's new for you?

the one where Sarah Louise goes to Goodwill...

It is a truth universally accepted that if one increases eating and reduces exercise, one will no longer fit in one's favorite clothes.

(It could happen to you...) Yes, it happened to me. I gained approximately 30 lbs this year. It crept up on me, as I wear a lot of dresses (no waist) low cut jeans (doesn't hit the waist) and don't have a reliable full length mirror.

But with summer on the scene, and no shorts that fit, and both jeans that do fit are in dire need of laundering (and I don't really like the one pair that fits) I decided a trip to Goodwill was in order.

It took me three trips to the dressing room, but I came home with some clothes that look nice on me and make me feel pretty. I know I will lose the weight as I get back into my walking routine, but for now, to have something that fits who I am this moment, well, I feel pretty.

What I got:

• a green plastic bowl to replace the blue plastic bowl I broke trying to break an ice chunk earlier this summer, 99 cents.
• a diorama of sorts with two blue roses, just pretty, a dollar fifty.
• a jewelery box, to replace the one I re-purposed when I re-did my bathroom, leaving some of my jewelery in decorative stationery boxes, two dollars.
• a Melodie Beattie book, two dollars
• Two pairs of shorts, six dollars
• a pair of capris (a capri?), three dollars
• a Liz Claiborne golf shirt, four dollars
  
• a pair of jeans that doesn't make me look like a cow, six dollars
• a dress that made me take my hair down from my hair barrette and admire that girl in the mirror, priceless.

And knowing that I had the energy to work 5 hours and then shop for forty five minutes after driving for almost an hour (I prefer the Cheswick Goodwill), that was worth it, to know that I have energy. My schedule for working next week is more back to normal, but I'm trying to not over load my circuits, so to speak.

Wondering if I have any readers. I need to get a page counter again.

Tomorrow evening, it's off to a free concert with Roseanne Cash. I'm going with a guy from work...I think he's more excited about the prospect of going with me, whereas I'm excited to have someone to go with to the concert. I consulted my father and brother. My brother: you have nothing to worry about. My dad: laughed, knowingly. It was a good excuse to call my brother, though.

Sounds like heat thunder outside my window. I'm getting hungry, time for the evening popcorn fix.

One of these days, I'm going to have to see if the bathing suit still fits...but not tonight.

What I'm learning these days about health...

This is from a book I've been devouring, All I did was ask, by the host of NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross. It's from Sonny Rollins.

Terry Gross: You're a virtuoso performer, but you're known for practicing nearly every day.

Sonny Rollins: Monk said to me one time that if it wasn't for music, life wouldn't be worth living. You know, if I don't play my horn for a while, I actually get sick. I wonder, "Well, gee, what's the matter with me?" And I realize that I haven't played my horn for a few days.

I haven't been blogging so much, so you don't know that I have been catching every kind of infection known to man (or woman.) I will not bore (or gross you out) with the details, but I spend a lot of time on the internet looking for home remedies, or talking to friends, or actually at the doctor or pharmacy. Right now I have a nasty cold. It's Day-Quil resistant. I mean I'm taking Day-Quil, but whereas that usually takes care of the symptoms, I still have them. They're just WORSE when the four hours is up. Yesterday I was supposed to doctor up at 4:30 and at 5:30 I had the worse sneeze attack.

But here's the thing: in the past year (or two) I have not been walking daily, or taking pictures daily, or blogging daily. And my health has suffered.

I've never read Dr. Zviago, because those Russian novels, I cannot keep track of all the characters with all the nicknames...I wonder if it's on audio!! But somewhere along the road, I found a quote that was attributed to that book (or the movie). If you wake up every morning and go to a job you hate, you will get sick.

Well, I don't hate my job. But there are difficult people that I have to deal with (yes, bullies) on a fairly daily basis, and for a lot of reasons it is time to move on.

More later. I'm hitting publish even though this isn't nearly done because blogging is a time-driven medium. We'll come back to it.

So get used to it--your RSS feeds are going to be getting more from Sarah Louise on a more daily basis.

Mwah!

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead: SL ponders online presense.

(quote from Ben Franklin. Here are some other quotes on secrets.)

I saw my psychiatrists this week. They are both European, and lovely people. Dr. Northern Italian said, "Glad you're back." These are people trained in nuance. Yes, I'm back. And though I will have other dark periods, other "dark nights of the soul," other depressive episodes, for the time being, I'm in my regular skin, and happy to be here.

And that was a huge pause.

Here's the thing. As I think about my online presence, as I think about my life, played out online and off-line, I think about myself, the whole person. But online, I am fractured, sometimes Sarah Louise, sometimes ****. And a huge part of the reason I'm Sarah Louise online is because as a single (read: sometimes dating) woman who is sometimes job hunting, I do not want people to be able to google **** and find me here. One of the gifts I have is transparency in writing. I'm able to get pretty vulnerable and personal. One of the broken parts of me is called "bipolar disorder."

There's a t-shirt out there that says "I'm not reading your blog." And I know, a lot of people aren't. My mother isn't, generally, though she does have this address. My father isn't, generally, ditto. My sister sometimes drops by. My cousin also has a blog (Hi, Kiki!) and we feed off each other, in a good way. This blog is posted, as Sarah Louise, to my church's website.

I'm realizing, as I spend more time online, that the real stuff is what happens when my computer is off. When I'm sitting in a room, listening to Michael Stephens exhort me to bring my heart to work. When I'm having lunch at Mad Mex last Thursday with my separated at birth friend, Carrie. When Danielle is making dinner in her kitchen and I'm keeping her company until the food is ready.

What are reasons people stay anonymous online? They don't want their husband, boyfriend, children, mother to read what they've written. They don't want their students to know about their private life. They've been taking pills all their life and they just found out why. World AIDS day was just a few days ago, and darn if I can find the article I read (I think in the Washington Post) about kids with HIV. The secrecy they have to keep up is amazing.

Last night I watched the Friends episode where Chandler tells the adopted kid he's adopted. "What if someone else told the triplets they came out of you?" he says to Phoebe as the triplets go silent. "I'm going to go tell Emma she was a mistake," he says as he walks out of Central Perk.

Does everything have to be out there, to be searched and tagged and recorded? (One of my mantras is you can't capture everything. Do I want to experience the moment, or take a picture of it and miss the experience?) (And I say this as a person who searches, tags, records, and really wishes she had tagged that article about children with HIV living in DC.)

I don't plan to have children. But if I did, would I blog about them? Would I use their names, or give them pseudonyms, like I give most of the people I write about when I mention friends on this blog? I don't even like seeing children's names on people's cars, saying that Ashley goes to Miss Twinkle Toes Dance School. I cringe. I read Katie.com while in library school. I read The Face on the Milk Carton and the other Janie books.

But I think about my future as a writer. This blog is my sandbox, as it were. I ramble on, I sometimes write five drafts, I sometimes hit publish after one take. I write about everything and nothing. But what happens when my first book hits the bookstands? Won't I want the readers here to celebrate with me? And if I do, that's a lot of people keeping a secret. And one, right here, who isn't sure she wants to keep that secret.

Do we take a page from Jane Pitt (PittGirl) who decided to stop blogging and pulled her entire blog, there aren't even archives. The day after she pulled it down, I was able to read some posts via cached Google pages. (I had not been a regular reader. I think I found her blog three years ago and didn't go back, just because it didn't speak to me at that moment in time.)

I'm not ready to link all my blogs together (I write five, if we count the three as SL and two others.) I'm not opposed to people putting the puzzle pieces together. Being bipolar, or single, or in the pursuit of a job are things that real people put their real face on a profile picture and blog about. On the other hand, I have friends whose Facebook profile is based on their anonymous blog name.

And just this week, one of my Twitter friends, who is a published author, locked her tweets, like a day after she started following me.

Whenever I watch SATC, I think about Carrie, and her columns. How do you write about relationships and still walk all over New York City? (Candace Bushnell's book is out as an audio on CD now, I think I might give it a listen.)

I come back to a passage from "Revelations of a Single Woman" by Connally Gilliam, in which she writes an email response to a guy who doesn't get why she's pulled away a little bit.

It's a much longer passage than I want to type now, and no, I do not want to come back to this later today. So here's the metaphor she uses: a woman's heart is like a garden. There are public places for the kind random person. Then there is the center, saved for intimates. Then there is the in-between area, which is more fluid. (If you want to read it, it's on pages 28 & 29. I wish I could send a copy of this book to every single friend I have.)

Okay, I think I've written enough on this for a while. What are your thoughts? Do you tell people that you blog? Do you use a pseudonym? I promise I won't "out" you. And never, never apologize for writing comment novels. I like them. I do. But a simple "I'm here, I read this," works too.

There's some snow I gotta go walk in. And yes, I'll try to make my low batteries work. Because some things should be recorded.

"Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes)" (Walt Whitman)

TTYL, Sarah Louise

All this time...

...I've been wanting to be my mother. Married at 26, first child at 28. Or at least married by 28. (That was my original goal.)

Those anniversaries passed.

...so then I wanted to be my grandmother, married in Brazil, divorced and then married to my grandfather at 36, had my mother when she was 40 (And that was in the 1940s!).

I'll be 36 in less than six months...

...then I thought, I'll be Aunt Margaret, who eloped with Uncle Ed when she was 50 and after he died, she was a rich widow and endowed my mom and aunt with trips to summer camp, magazine subscriptions, and the like.

And I've resented my sister, who is shocked that at 25 she is not married. I think, she better not get married before me--the whole Rachel/Leah story, the "fairy tale" oldest daughter must marry first syndrome.

And I've made a game of counting: pregnant women, engaged women, newlywed women. They are all around.

But I forgot someone in this mix: Me.

What do I want? And what is life handing me? And what will I do with the mix? More importantly, how do I love where I am and love where they are at the same time?

Inevitably, I will turn the dial on the radio and catch the end of Rascal Flatts singing "God Bless the Broken Road (that led me straight to you.)"

Inevitably, I realize I am glad to be single in this moment. To be childless. To be Auntie Sarah Louise.

It feels good to be happy in my skin. And it feels good to stretch my legs and walk. It feels good to be ME.

When I was seventeen, it was a very bad year. When I was twenty four and twenty five, too. When I was twenty eight, I was learning how to live with psych meds and weekly therapy sessions. And then there was the drought. But now I'm thirty five. And I am glad to be alive. To have a job I love most days. To have a garret I adore. To have a trusty twelve year old car (that's paid for!).

And so I'm in no rush. Which feels absolutely wonderful (and absolutely foreign and scary, too.)

************

If you went to see Ratatoille (I cannot spell it, I refuse!) and are in the mood for another culinary delight, watch Mostly Martha (it's in German, so mind the subtitles.) The American remake is coming out this summer--I think it's called No Reservations with the chick that married Michael Douglas. (Catherine Zeta-Jones.) (Warning: it is a chick flick, and you will probably want your trusty Kleenex box nearby.) (But it's good crying.)

I'm tired. I'm going to bed. Perchance to dream, and SLEEP. And to wake up tomorrow. N'at.

Labels, neighbors, tomatoes, n'at (or SL rambles on and on and on and on...)

There are days where I am label conscious. (You too?)

I fret that Blogger X and Blogger Y don't have me on their blogroll (when there are tons of folks that are still not on mine).* Why isn't Blogger A and Blogger Z commenting? It's always great to discover I'm not the only one that has these thoughts...

I count pregnant women (today I discovered two more--so the count is up to 13!). It bothers me that I'm 35 and haven't started on my family. I hear stories about women who are "older" and so it's really important to get pregnant now and think, GAH, will I be like that too? I want three, but as I woke up this morning, I thought, I don't care if they each have purple, green and yellow hair. I do not want my biology to be my destiny. (Someone remind me of this every once and awhile, please!)

And then (sometimes the same day) I think, WHO CARES?? Our blood is all red. We all cry when we're sad, we all get rejected, we all laugh. We are all someone's daughter, someone's son. So what if I'm never a grandma (as the tear starts at the corner of my eye contemplating that...) There are kids that will always remember that I'm Sarah Louise and that I will read them books or take them for ice cream...

There are some women who will never know that I keep myself well-heeled in J. Jill and Ann Taylor Loft by shopping at Goodwill. There are some women who will never know I'm a half year from turning 36. (I love it when men think I'm under 28!)

Then there are the friends who squeal when I say, I got them at Goodwill...

While standing in line at Tazza, the woman ahead of me was wearing an eyelet blouse, white earrings, and Dolce & Gabana sunglasses. I often will compliment someone on their earrings to start a conversation while in line. But she was unapproachable.

Now, it is possible that she is the nicest person, she just puts on her New York face when she's out. (New Yorkers have a way of not looking at each other when they walk the sidewalks.)

I'm nowhere near to a three floor house, three bouncing boys, a ten year marriage. At 35, I'm still as free as the 25 year olds I often have coffee with.

Can you sense I'm trying to say something but I can't get it out?

Maybe I'm just trying to say (again and again, as I attempt to live every day) is that I'm glad.
Glad that I have an eye for fashion at $5. Glad that I can afford to eat out three times a week (even if it means picking something for lunch that will mete leftovers for dinner). Glad that I can go home and sleep forever. (Darn that sunshine that woke me up at 7 am, though!)

Last week I lived through a storm. It was a tempest in a teapot and mostly my own insecurities playing out on my own inner canvas. But it's Sunday again, my day for whatever, and as I sit here, my wet hair dripping down my neck, I think, I will live through worse. I have lived through worse.

So, I'm getting ready to assemble my ingredients for Sarah Louise's Strata, I think, ahhhh. It's the first day of a new week, and all my worries about my girlfriends and the men in (or out) of my life don't matter. Just keep the conversation going.

Over and out. I'll catch ya on the flip side. I have no predictions about blogging (or life) this week.

Except, remind me that I need to post about The Joy of Doing things Badly.

_______________________________________________________________
*and what's up with that anyway? Is the blogroll the new status symbol of "these are MY friends"?