Today is my 32nd birthday.
I’m totally fine with that. I feel 32.
I don’t know exactly what that means.
When I first met my husband and we weren’t sure what was happening between us, I remember thinking that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t having that panicked feeling that I usually had. The “oh my gosh, do I really want to do this because something better might be right around the corner and I don’t think I want to settle for this” or the “he’ll realize how awesome I am and stop treating me like this if I just say the right thing this time” that I got with most of the guys I met in my late 20s. Which I suppose is why I dated the kind of guys I dated in my late 20s, unavailable ones who honestly kept surprising me with their unavailability. Looking back, it was the same mistake over and over. Until it wasn’t. And then it was amazing. And – here’s the key – it was easy.
Anyway, I remember thinking that if I had met this man at any other time in my life, any sooner, I don’t think I’d have been as confident about how I felt and where I wanted us to go. He showed up in my life at exactly the right time, and it all just made perfect sense. I never doubted it, even when I was trying to make myself doubt it because, you know, there was an ocean between us when we met and I thought I was crazy. But nothing could have stopped it. It just was.
I guess this is how I feel about my life at this point. Everything showed up at the right time and just fit in the way it was supposed to. I feel like I’ve accomplished everything I was meant to by this point in my life, which is I guess what feeling my age means. I’m 32. I just am.
Not too shabby at all.
Every once in awhile, I’ll come across a part of a book that will give me chills because I identify with it so much. Usually it’s a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. When I read Hating Olivia, I actually got nauseous because the entire book reminded me of how horrible a bad relationship can be. I identified with the whole idea of two people who seem bound to ruin one another, of a fast, intense and unhealthy period that consumes and destroys at least one of the people involved. I had one of those relationships and I was ruined for a long time until I wasn’t anymore and moved on, fell in love for real, and became happy, but Hating Olivia isn’t about that part of romance. Hating Olivia is about the horrible part.
This book follows the inception and destruction of a very intense relationship between Max and Olivia. It’s like every relationship that is horribly wrong, there’s an undeniable spark that keeps the couple holding on and moving closer and closer to destruction and, worse, knowing it and not bothering to stop it. The author does an amazing job of capturing the emotions that come out in a relationship like Max and Olivia’s – anger, lust, passion, hatred, apathy.
Some quotes:
“The night you vowed to yourself that one day, when you found the courage of the warrior in yourself, you would leave. How you could never find it. And you stayed.” page 135
“If only I were more docile… More this, more that. If only I were somebody else.” – page 140
“You never know when something is ending when it’s in the process. Maybe it’s the best way – the mind can only take so much.” – page 253
This book is essentially about all the wrong kinds of passion, love, and longing, the intense feelings we often have for someone else that make us believe that we love them, they love us, that it’s going to work out, that the bad is worth it because the good feels so right. It’s also about the point when we finally realize that we’re completely fooling ourselves because nothing is actually the way we want it to be, we’re actually not happy, and nothing is magically going to get better.
Come to think of it, I know a few people who really need to read this book.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a dark, brilliant, emotional read, I highly recommend this one. It’s by no means a feel good love story, but I think there’s enough of those. This is one of those books that doesn’t aim for a happily ever after, which in it’s own way makes it surprisingly refreshing.
One of my very favorite things to do these days is take long walks around the city and find random things that people would normally overlook. Here’s some of my favorite shots.
That owl sticker was on a phone booth on Ellsworth in Shadyside that they’ve since taken down. I loved that thing.
My new genre of choice is short stories. During my many trips to Borders last summer to indulge in their 80% off going out of business sale, I picked up a few collections from authors I love (Danzy Senna, Anton Chekhov, T.C. Boyle). I figured some short stories would break up the heavier reads I’d chosen and, well, after finishing War & Peace, my brain needed some short, quick, to the point words to read. War & Peace was anything but short, quick, and to the point.
I read a lot of these stories in college, most in a class I took called “Initiation & Alienation”, which was taught by my favorite professor and the one class that has remained burned into my brain. We read stories that were only about being accepted or rejected by a person or social group. This was the class that introduced me to “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov. Old Russian literature is one of my favorites, and that story hit me because I painted myself as the lonely younger woman who had an inappropriate and doomed love affair with a much older man.
Anyway, the very first short story in the book I’m currently reading is “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker. It’s essentially the interior monologue of an insecure woman trying to talk herself out of calling a man, and then rationalizing the decision to call him, and then talking herself out of it again.
I laughed while I was reading it because I recognized myself in the pathetic inner voice of the woman. If I were still a single girl, I probably wouldn’t have found it as amusing as I did, would have used it as a mirror into how ridiculous my brain behaved when it came to dating and tried unsuccessfully to change for a week or so before just giving up. Which is why it made me laugh because, well, when I found the right guy, I never had any of those crazy thoughts. I never had to. He called. But, man, before that happened… before that happened, I wasted so many hours trying to decipher what my life and my relationships meant that I really wish I could have slapped myself upside the head.
I wish that I could tell the girl I was then that everything is going to work out great for her. That she’ll meet the most amazing man who will sacrifice everything just to start a life with her, that it will be so easy that it almost happens without thinking about it, that all she has to do is learn patience – because ultimately, she’s going to need a lot of it. I wish I could tell her that she really will just know.
I could have written that story. It could have been an entry in my diary, or a blog post, or a rant to my best friend. Which I think is exactly why it’s an amazing piece of writing. It hit me. Hard.
There’s a little one I know who I read Garfield comics with pretty often. We read them books at a time and will sometimes cover 6 months worth of comics in a single night. Every once in awhile, we come across one that makes me laugh out loud really hard. This week, it was this one.
Well, friends, I have failed miserably at my mission to start blogging regularly as it’s been nearly a year since I’ve posted.
It’s been quite a year go.
To catch up: I’m married now. And so far, it’s been wonderful.
I’m (again) going to try to keep up with this. I do love the platform and I miss having a blog that people actually read. I can’t believe it was about 8 years ago that I started blogging. 7 years since I started nursing school, and 5 years as a pediatric nurse.
Time flies, but it’s been a pretty good ride so far.
Hopefully, I’ll be in touch again soon.
