Grateful

Wow.

This week kicked me in the ass.

You've probably had a week like it. You know, when you've been maintaining your edge of uprightness and balance trying to fulfill the daily list of desires and responsibilities. And you've maintained for a while. And all at once, your body, mind, sanity don't want to work so hard any more.

Enough.

Suddenly, late for every rehearsal. Crabby for every rehearsal. More crabby at friends who have the audacity to be cheerful. Sick and at the doctor's office buying antibiotics for preventable infections. Late paying bills. Late for work. Wearing unbearable clothes combinations. Losing $7M clients. Aggravating the marketing staff via bad attitude. Sending an e-mail with a typo to the wrong person, triggering a 30-email chaos chain to clear it up. Not sleeping, of course.

Today, luckily, brought turnaround. I don't know why; it's not as if I slept enough last night or I feel any more relaxed. But it IS Friday. Maybe that's all it takes sometimes, to get to 5 p.m. on the final work day and be able to view the weekend with some hope.

Or. Maybe it was at about 4:30, actually, as I attached quarterly reports and letters to e-mails and checked off the sent ones, when my favorite music radio station (WERS 88.9 FM), brought one of my favorite singer/songwriters (Ellis Paul) into their Tremont Street studio as part of their fall fundraising drive (Live Music Week) and let him wail on the Steinway and sing, and then talk about how much he liked to wail on that Steinway and sing, and how grateful he was that WERS kept asking him back to do so.

See, tomorrow at 1 p.m. .... I, too, get to wail on that same f*#&ing Steinway in the Tremont Street studio while the cast of my show does the singing. See, we were invited, just like Ellis, as part of Live Music Week, in our case to perform numbers from "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" for WERS' weekend musical theater show "Standing Room Only." (Hint: WERS streams live online. You can listen if you want.)

How grateful am I for that? Like Ellis, to want to play and be able to play and be allowed to play and to perform on the radio with my friends.

Gratefulness must breed hope, eh?

Thank God. I think it has redeemed my week

Caption Contest

When I got to church choir last night, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the absurdity of my outfit. Each piece in and of itself was acceptable for a cold & rainy night. It was the sheer combination of styles & materials & colors, plus the rain-soaked hairdo, that defied rational explanation.

I asked my friend Mitch to take a picture to prove it.

Contenders for potential captions:

1) Purple paisley & green plaid & brown stripes & periwinkle nylon .... who knew?

2) What all the fashionable finance girls are wearing this fall.

3) Having trouble finding a boyfriend, eh? With that sense of style? Bollocks!

Feel free to add your own.

Early holiday

Late-night rehearsal plus bacterial infection that inhibited serious sleep plus early-morning doctor visit plus a pile'o paperwork that threatens to topple plus noting that the most recent OKC inbox message was from a 54-y-old and we've all already been-there-done-that, I think this morning is better served by the image of a toddler in dragon-drag with fire-breathing toes.

Henry -- 14 months

This Week's Sign that The Apocalypse is Upon Us

Perhaps .... that I unexpectedly and entirely whole-heartedly cried this morning when leaving my final physical therapy appointment with Ian?

Either I'm taking this supposed autumnal loneliness factor too seriously or I'm just really, really, really already nostalgic for those 6 months of weekly hip massages and manual groin stretches.

**with props to old school Sports Illustrated.

The need to need

About 4:30 on Saturday my good friend B treated me (thank you very much) to Thai Basil on Newbury, where we downed a couple beers and he ordered the crispy duck and I the pad thai, and I told him I just might be going out on Date #2 with Friday-night man, and B rolled his eyes and told me to not stay up all night again (since I had, naturally, shared with him details of Date #1) because I had to be fresh for the concert we were both in on Sunday afternoon....

... and one would think I should listen to B because he's become very sage since having a girlfriend and he thinks all I do is date (ha!) and he furthermore doesn't think many of these dates have been very good for me and then insinuated, because it's October and the seasons are changing and it's a time that people might become more lonely than usual and crave companionship more than usual, that just perhaps that was the reason I was going out on Date #2 even though I had already commented that I wasn't sure of the long-term potential of this situation, and that maybe it would be better if I just went home and got some sleep instead.

I must have had the need to need someone because I didn't listen to B, but did instead go out Date #2 with my younger man who needed more time to freshen up when I arrived to get him so we missed the early movie and and only as we were walking in at 9 p.m. did he mention he was starving so we instead went to get him supper and then hit the 10:15 show, which meant that by the time we walked back across the Boston Common in a downpour sharing one umbrella and I dropped him off and re-parked the car and ate my leftover pad thai and climbed into my bed it was 2 a.m. and I'd have to confess that it was not a bad date but was rather just an OK date and, because I haven't yet decided if my need was worth the resulting fatigue I'll now know for the rest of this week, I'd furthermore admit that B, as usual, was probably on to something.

Dateline 10/22/09: On the Charles

Crossing to Cambridge via the Harvard Bridge, 6:28 p.m.

Catching up (with little success)

So the move to being "more serious" on OKC, admittedly an oxymoron if there ever were, is coinciding with a week where all responsibility in my life decided to get really, really busy.

(Except for sleep, that is. I'm so jazzed at 1:30 a.m. when I finally lie down it takes another full hour to relax. This morning I checked in on a friend's blog -- a friend who has a 3-year old and 1-year old triplets, all of whom have been sick for several weeks -- to read about how she hasn't been sleeping more than 4 hours a night. It's sad that, when I have no right to, I felt I could relate. Even sadder: she's got a really good attitude about it, which thus gives me an inferiority complex ... but I digress.)

This is probably a good thing. It's been difficult enough to focus and complete tasks as it is without fielding a chat request from a philosophy grad student who claims his girlfriend really doesn't care if he's online at 12:45 a.m. with (his words) "hot women" and when questioned about the possible validity of this, claims that he even shares the chats and photos of "hot women" with said girlfriend.

Like I said, probably a good thing.

The downside of serious, as you might expect knowing 20- and 30- (and 40-) something men as you do, traffic to my profile has ground to a serious halt. Which while probably a good thing, too, does make me slightly nostalgic for the occasional "where might this go?" titillation. And does leave me with few people to start conversations.

With that in mind.

A couple nights ago a 33-y-old from Cambridge viewed my profile. He was notable-looking enough (dark-rimmed glasses, sidelong glance, funky-nerdy vibe) that I recognized him as repeat visitor. I also remembered him because on October 2, while I was at work, he had sent along an IM request that I never answered because (duh) I was at work. It was a better lead-in than most:

Glasses: I once happened upon an anonymous dating
blogger with whom I was about to have a date.

Glasses: One of my goals, though devious, was to make it on her blog

Hmm. That's certainly of higher quality than IM requests that start with "Hellllooooo!" And on first glance he's quite attractive. Nonetheless, I don't remember why I never circled back, other than I was probably just otherwise busy and preoccupied.

So with no randy requests to fend off, this man's profile was one of several old IM requesters that I dug down into .... just to see. Without divulging too much, he has a lot going for him. Including that he seems to be a trail runner and musician and works in financial services and writes like a smart-ass.

Worthy, IMO. Worthy of at least a response in its own right. Even worthier, because he checked out my profile again this week, so is obviously still a) on the prowl; b) interested in me on some level; and c) interesting, on some level, to me.

Thus:

Karin: So,

I've been out of the message-responding groove the last several weeks for several elaborate reasons. When you stalked by today (are you also disappointed that they've dispensed with that term?) I was reminded of my gaffe in not responding to say that I tend to have no shame about blogging about dates, especially first and second dates who earn their stories.

Do I get to hear if your devious goal was executed? And how?

Hmm. That was Tuesday night. He's been online since and re-viewed my profile, again, but has not explained his devious goal. Naturally, now, I'm dissecting this 20 ways to Friday as to how I mis-approached this. The super-casual sarcasm? The 18-day delay? Too obvious? A mistake to try to catch up on old hellos? That I've taken "strong hands" off my profile?

So much for seriousness. Randy requests require a lot less distracting thought .....

Need for Speed(o) II: Wherest Willpower?

Last night after work, I ran up and down Commonwealth Avenue for 3 miles.

Then, when I got to rehearsal, I ate a bag of Skittles for supper. Washed down with 5 Dunkin' Donuts munchkins covered in orange and yellow sprinkles.

Thus, the dichotomy of the challenge in trying to prepare for the Great Speedo Exposé in 52 short days. I have the willpower to work out. I have enough experience in eating to know that 300 calories of square meal does not go directly to one's gut like a sugar-infused 300 does.

Further, I know there will be a dozen photographers waiting to chronicle the event on boston.com, much like this:

Yet, there will always be too many convenience stores in this town that sell candy.

Help.

Seriousing up

Maybe it was the weekend with family, observing and rehashing details of the numerous long-lasting relationships all around.

Maybe it was my date last Wednesday with the big-handed man with the rock-climbing chest, from San Francisco, in town for a family wedding, intrigued at the idea of meeting an "elder" (his words!) woman. Which, even though I was prepared for a one-shot outing, nonetheless left my soul in a black-hole as it ended .... realizing, perhaps, that one-shot outings officially depress me.

Maybe, finally, it was the message at 1:48 a.m. on Monday, the sender (age 21) from East Weymouth, MA, whose photo looks vaguely like a senior picture, crew neck sweater and all, with no preamble or introduction:

"Would you have sex with me?"

Sigh.

And thus, yesterday, after 9 months on the OKC, I removed 2 items from my profile:

1) any reference to strong hands; and

2) as far as "what I'm looking for," my acquiescence for casual dating, replacing it with the scintillating

3) "I spend a lot of time thinking about: being 36 and unmarried and the delicious pros and occasional cons of such a status. "

Hopefully, insinuating some taste for wild streak in a man's character but removing any chance that I am advertising myself as a sex toy for college students.

Who knows. Maybe I'll still get hellos from those in the youth movement who appreciate girls with strong calves. Such inquiries have always amused me and, by toning things down, I must admit a twinge of sadness to becoming slightly more staid.

Oh well. It's only "slightly," right?

The Martha Chronicles (III): Par-tay

Some of the best times ever are found in church basements.

Cheers, Martha. And happy birthday very soon.